Skysong taught Su Xuan what it could, which was not small. He learned the sect's katas by morning and bled on their stones by noon. At night he sat with Ningxue and learned the silent places between breaths that swords live in. He brewed peppery medicines with Ziyu that smelled like rain and firewood and woke dragons in the blood. With Ruyan he learned to read the market, which is a second kind of battlefield, and how to hear when a rumor turns true.
He went quietly into the city once a week and paid off the debts the Su clan had written in his name. He did it without haggling. He did it with a very small smile. The steward began to sleep poorly.
Then one night, when the moon was a shaved coin, he followed a thread.
He had felt it since he touched the stone—something tugging at his ribs the way tide tugs at an anchored boat. Fate is a web and some of us wear it like a shawl; he had once woven it. Qinglian had woven pieces of it with him. He could feel where her skein had passed, long ago, near this little city, tangled in a place where law had been forgotten: the Court of Threads.
You did not knock at the Court. You found an alley that doubled back on itself three times without crossing and you walked into it backwards, humming a tune you did not think you knew. If, when you reached the end, you could exhale and watch your breath hang in the air like a silver string, the door would open.
It did. He stepped into a room like a spider had dreamt it. Strings hung from the ceiling by the thousands. Each one was a relationship: father to son, lover to lover, debtor to collector, student to master, enemy to enemy. Strings were tight or slack; they hummed when someone spoke the truth and went dull when someone lied. In the corner, a woman with hair the color of smoke and eyes like rain-stained parchment held a pair of scissors that had not yet decided which way they preferred to cut.
"Customer?" she asked.
"Petitioner," he said. "I want to see my debt."
"Everyone does," she said, amused. "What sort?"
"Karma."
She lifted a string with the flat of her finger, plucked it, and listened. "What will you trade for it?"
"Knowledge," he said. "Of a god who fell."
She blinked slowly, as if she had just noticed there was a storm outside. "Ah," she said. "The Ten Thousand Path Lord. The altar. The knife of a lotus. People still tell that story."
"They don't tell it here," he said. "Show me."
She let him see a single thread.
It was stained with tea. It smelled like plum blossoms. It ran from his chest into a room with a trembling lamp and a girl with blue-gray eyes who lifted the lamp and set it down, lifted it and set it down, as if by moving the light she could rearrange the shape of the world.
Qinglian sat in the dark with her hands folded in her lap and tears unshed. Across from her, a stranger, face veiled, voice not. The voice was the rustle of winter leaves, the rasp of a whetstone, the sigh of a blade. Heaven's Will does not usually speak; when it does, it borrows the mouth of a woman with a voice you trust.
"Cut him," the voice said, patient. "Open his heart. Drop him. You want your sect to live. Your brothers to live. Your name to live. I will do that for you if you pay me a god."
Qinglian shook. "We swore."
"You swore to climb," the voice said. "You swore to live. You did not swear to serve him."
Qinglian did not answer.
The string burned his palm. Su Xuan let it go before it cut. The woman with the scissors watched his face, saw what she needed to see, and did not smile.
"Debt is rarely single," she said. "You want revenge. Do you want justice?"
"What is the difference?"
"Revenge is a line," she said. "Justice is a wheel."
He left the Court with both hands empty and too many weights in his chest.