Chapter 6: Cold Hands

He spent two days in the new cell, on a real bed, with a real door, and he hated both.

The cell had a candle, a shelf of the Hall's books that he could not yet read, and a window onto the courtyard.

His left lung caught on every breath, just short of the bottom.

He stared at the ceiling and thought about the willow water.

If the Elder wanted him dead, he had only to stop the pill.

If the Elder wanted him alive, he had no reason to feed a moth willow.

None of it fit, and Cen Yu was too frightened of the answer to put the pieces next to each other.

On the second night, someone knocked twice and came in without waiting.

Pei Ruo carried a steaming bowl in both hands and a folded blanket under her arm.

"Broth," she said. "Ginger, red date, and the root the brothers boil for everything. You will not taste it. Drink it anyway."

She set the bowl in his hands, and he drank it, and she was right.

It was hot and it was nothing.

"Your hands," she said.

He looked down at them on the bowl.

They were still white to the second knuckle, and the bowl was hot, and he could feel nothing of it.

"They won't come back?"

"Not the heat. The Frost Bell took that." She sat on the stool by the bed. "The feeling will come back, if someone keeps the blood moving."

"Who?"

She said nothing. She held out both of her own hands, palms up, and waited.

He put the bowl on the floor.

He laid his hands in hers, and her fingers closed around them.

Her palms were rough, scarred over from the Insect House burns, and so warm that at first he wanted to pull away.

Then the feeling came back into his fingers, all at once, and it hurt.

His breath caught, and he bit it back.

"It's the blood," he said. "It's coming back into them."

"Yes," Pei Ruo said, and kept hold of him.

They sat in the candlelight and neither of them looked at the hands.

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