Chapter 4: The Bath House

The Iron Crane bath house stood at the back of the sect, behind the herb garden.

At night nobody went near it.

That was why Woo-jin took Mu-yeol there.

It was a stone room with a sunken tub as big as a boat.

A spring ran hot into it from the mountain.

Woo-jin lit one lantern and hung it from a hook, and the steam turned the light the color of honey.

Mu-yeol stood in the doorway with his robe over his arm and looked at the water.

"I haven't been in warm water since the temple," he said.

"It won't bite."

"The temple baths did."

Woo-jin got in first, to show him.

The heat went up his legs and into his spine, and he groaned before he could stop himself.

Mu-yeol took his time.

He undid the beads at his wrist and laid them on the stone.

He stepped out of his trousers without any ceremony at all.

Woo-jin had been looking at him through half-closed eyes for two days, but he had never seen all of him in the light.

Mu-yeol was a wall of muscle, broad in the shoulder and heavy in the thigh.

The ink on his arms ended in a crooked line at the elbow.

The burn scar on his neck went further than Woo-jin had guessed.

It ran down to his collarbone and spread across his shoulder.

"Does it hurt?" Woo-jin asked.

"It did."

Mu-yeol lowered himself in across from him, and the water climbed his ribs.

Neither of them spoke for a minute.

"Tell me about the river road," Mu-yeol said.

Woo-jin had been dreading it.

He laced his fingers together under the water so Mu-yeol couldn't see them.

"The Hall's party leaves on the fifteenth day at dawn," Woo-jin said.

"Your brother leads eighteen people, sixteen wounded and two healers, with a cart."

"They take the river road for three days."

"On the night of the seventeenth they camp at the Fork."

"I know that part," Mu-yeol said.

"The killers came from the north bank. They knew your brother's patrol passwords. They killed everyone and took the medicine chest."

Mu-yeol closed his eyes.

"I got there on the morning of the twentieth," he said. "I counted the dead. Nineteen."

"The Alliance reached the Fork on the nineteenth, a day before you."

"The Deputy Chief led them."

"Yes."

"She wept," Mu-yeol said. "She put her hand on my arm and said she had come as soon as she heard."

The steam moved around them.

Woo-jin looked at the water.

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