Chapter 8: Who Leads

"Who has a pass seal like that?" Mu-yeol asked at supper.

"Dozens of people," Woo-jin said. "Every sect elder. Half the Alliance."

"Name them."

"I don't have the list in my head."

"You have everything in your head," Mu-yeol said, and lifted a dumpling with his chopsticks, and watched him.

Woo-jin ate his rice.

It tasted like paper.

Mu-yeol let it go, because he was kind, and because Woo-jin had made it clear he did not want to be asked.

That was the trouble.

After supper Mu-yeol got up and put on his sword.

"I'll go to the Alliance Chief tonight," he said. "You stay here."

"I'll go with you."

"No. If they're watching the annex, they're watching you. You shouldn't be out."

He was already at the door, with his hand on the frame, a vast calm shape in the lamplight.

He did not even turn round.

"Sit down, Woo-jin," he said, kindly, "and rest."

Woo-jin had been told what to do by his master for ten years.

Mu-yeol had lifted him out of the bath and carried him to a bench.

He had set Woo-jin on a stone edge and told him when to breathe.

It had all been lovely.

It had also been done to Woo-jin, every time, by a man twice his size who had decided what he could carry.

"No," Woo-jin said.

Mu-yeol stopped.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I'm not a child you look after."

Woo-jin's voice shook, and he let it.

"I'm not going to sit in the annex like a lady in a tower while you ask the Alliance about the one thing I'm afraid of."

He clapped his mouth shut.

That was too much.

Mu-yeol turned.

His face had gone very still, and he came across the room slowly, and Woo-jin did not move.

"What are you afraid of?" Mu-yeol said.

"Losing."

It was almost true.

Mu-yeol stood over him with his huge hands hanging open.

"Then fight me," he said.

Woo-jin walked out of the annex and across the yard to the practice hall, the one where he had woken.

Mu-yeol followed him in and slid the door shut.

Woo-jin hit him.

He hit him with an open palm across the chest, and it was like hitting a bell.

Mu-yeol did not move.

Woo-jin hit him again, caught his sleeve, and pulled.

Then he did the Cold Crane sweep, low, on the right leg.

He had never been fast enough to land it on Mu-yeol in the first life.

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