Chapter 11: The Chair

For three days Yuhang barely left his drawing table.

He sat bent over a pale slab of pine with a brush in his right hand and a pot of cinnabar ink at his elbow.

Wanqing brought him rice, and found it cold on the same tray at night.

"It needs to be a seventeen-stroke array," he muttered, the third evening.

"The old nine-stroke lift can't carry weight and turn at once. I've been trying to fix it since the Marsh."

"You couldn't draw it then."

"I couldn't power it then." He held up two fingers. A small gold spark danced between them. "Now I can."

He worked until the lamp ran low.

On the fourth evening, he rolled out into the courtyard of the Cold Lamp Court with a bundle under his arm.

He stopped on the flat stones and slid a new plate into the back of the chair.

Wanqing sat on the edge of the fish pond with her chin in her hands.

"Is it going to explode?" she asked.

"Probably not."

He pressed his palm to the plate.

Gold light ran up the back of the chair.

The wheels hummed.

Then the whole chair, with the heir of the Green Pine Sect in it, rose smoothly off the ground.

It stopped at the height of her knees and hung there, perfectly level.

Wanqing stopped breathing.

Yuhang looked down at the paving stones.

"Oh," he said, very quietly.

Then he began to laugh.

He turned the chair in a slow circle in the air.

He swung it left, and tipped it to the right with a flick of two fingers.

Wanqing was laughing too, standing with her hands over her mouth.

"You're flying!"

"I'm hovering. There's a difference. It lifts me for ten minutes, until my qi runs dry.

"Nine hundred steps will need a whole Core. But I haven't fallen on my face."

"I noted it."

He brought the chair across the courtyard in a long clean glide and stopped it in front of her, knees to knees.

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