Chapter 9: The Silver Stream

The courier who had carried the letter to the coast was gone by morning.

Nobody on the mountain had seen him leave.

Master Feng and Mo Zhenhai spent the whole day in the Quiet Courtyard with the door shut, comparing seals.

Came out at dusk with grim faces and no answers.

"Someone wants us angry at each other," Mo Zhenhai said gruffly.

"I'd say it's working, but I'm too old to be angry at a man who coughs that much."

Master Feng laughed until he coughed.

The Salt Tide guard slept in the lower courtyards under strict orders to touch nothing.

At nightfall Linxia knocked on Zhaoxue's door.

"Come with me," she said. "I'm told there's a hot spring."

The Silver Stream rose from a crack in the rock above the sect, half a mile up the north path.

It filled a stone pool the size of a bedroom, ringed with pines.

The water ran steaming and clear over a floor of smooth white pebbles.

A little wooden hut stood at the edge, with a bench and a lamp.

There was no one else on the mountain who would come here this late, and Zhaoxue knew it.

She stood at the edge in her robe, looking at the water.

Linxia sat on the bench and unwound the bandage from her arm.

The cut had closed overnight, pink and tight.

"Your wound heals fast," Zhaoxue said.

"Salt Tide qi. We're hard to kill."

"That is not a thing to say to someone who's seen you bleed."

"Come here."

Zhaoxue went.

Linxia took her hands.

She turned them palm up and kissed the inside of each wrist, slowly, just where the blue vein ran.

"Tell me to stop," she said. "I will. It's a dare."