Chapter 6: What the Boy Knows

Duan Linxiao had known the cup was marked from the moment he smelled lamp oil on the dais.

He had also known he would drink it.

Dew of Nine Roots waited in his left sleeve.

A day in bed would have shown him which elders came to look and which came to mourn.

It was a sound plan, and a third guard had knocked it out of his hand.

Now the third guard knelt on the floor of the inner room with his hands between his knees.

He said nothing, because the Lord had not told him to.

The Lord sat on the edge of the bed and found, with some irritation, that he was still holding the front of the boy's cloak.

He let go.

The hand he had gripped it with was warm when he took it away.

It had been a very long time since any part of him was warm.

"Speak," he said.

"It's a strange story, Sect Lord."

"I have three hundred years of strange stories. Yours will have to compete."

The boy took a breath.

"I'm not from here," he said. "Where I come from, this valley is a book."

Duan did not move.

"A novel," said the boy. "Someone wrote it, a long time after your time."

"A lot of people read it. I read it a dozen times. It's called Dawnbreak."

"And I am in it," said Duan.

"You're the villain."

"Naturally," said Duan.

"You're the best part," said the boy, and then went red to the ears. "I mean. The part I liked."

Duan looked at the lamp for a while.

He had a rule for strange news, and the rule was to feel nothing until the news had finished.

"Go on."

"The banquet is Chapter Thirty-Eight," said the boy. "You drink the cup. Han Zhuo declares you unfit."

"My body, the one I woke up in, is killed with eleven others by the dais. That's what the author does with extras."

He rubbed his palm on his knee.

"That was last night. I changed it. I don't know what happens now."

"What does the book do with me?"

The boy looked up.

His eyes were dark and quick, with a small mole under the right one.

It was an honest face, and badly made for lying.

"You die," he said. "On the Sword Terrace, in the last third."

"A man named Qi Yunchuan, the Young Sword of Azure Peak, stabs you in the heart. His sword is called Dawnbreak."

"Light comes out of you, and he ascends."

The seal under Duan's ribs went tight.

It was a small tightening, no worse than a change in the weather, and he sat through it without moving a muscle.

The name of the sword had not been spoken in the Moonless Valley for forty years.

So the boy knew the ending and not the reason.

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