Kong Wen’s pavilion stood a little apart from the rest of Capital Peak, on a shelf of the mountain above the Hall of Magic Herbs, behind a wall of grey stone and a gate that was never shut. I’d walked past it a dozen times. I’d never been through it.

The messenger left me at the gate. Inside was a courtyard, and in the courtyard were herbs.

Not the terraces of the level-one garden, with their drifts of purple and blue. These grew in small square plots edged with stone, a few plants to each, spaced as carefully as jewels in a case. I didn’t recognise most of them. I’d read a little about some of them, enough to know that none were below level six. And every single one of them was wrapped in white mist.

Thin mist, on most. Thicker on a few. On one squat, dark-leaved seedling in the corner, so faint I had to look twice. I looked away from that one quickly and kept my face still. Whatever I could see, I wasn’t supposed to be able to see it.

Fang ChenYue came out of the pavilion’s side door with a teapot in one hand and a cloth over his arm. He saw me, smiled, and lifted the teapot in a sort of salute. As he passed me on the path he leaned down and said quietly, “Congratulations, Xiao Shimei.” Then he was gone round the corner of the building before I could ask him what for.

Xiao Shimei. That was Tang YunQi’s title on Heaven Peak. Here, in this courtyard, it seemed it was about to be mine.

“You XiaoMo.”

The voice came from behind a row of plots at the back of the courtyard. A man in a blue robe was crouched there with his sleeves pushed up, pressing the soil round the stem of a plant with two fingers. He didn’t get up. He didn’t look round.

I went over and bowed. “Shifu.”

Kong Wen was much as I remembered him from the Hall of Mages: middle-aged, heavy-browed, his mouth turned down at the corners as if it had tasted something sour years ago and never got rid of it. A white jade pin held his hair. There was earth under his nails.

“What is this?” He tipped his head at the plant he’d been tending.

It was a slender thing, waist-high, every leaf and every stem the colour of beaten gold. The last of the evening sun was coming in low over the wall. Where it touched the leaves they flashed so brightly that I had to narrow my eyes. I knew it. Not from the garden, because there was nothing like it in the garden. From the back of the herbal I’d borrowed in my first week, where someone had copied out, in tiny cramped characters and without any pictures at all, a list of the herbs above level six, with a line or two about each.

Goldthorn. Level seven. Gold in leaf and stem. Best known in full sun, when it cannot be looked at.

“Goldthorn Herb, Shifu,” I said. “Level seven.”

He looked up at me for the first time. He had small, pale, clever eyes under those heavy brows. They went over me once from head to foot, lingered for the length of a breath on my throat, and came back to my face.

“Not bad,” he said. “You’ve been here less than a month and you know a level-seven herb by sight. That’s not common.” He wiped his fingers on a cloth and got to his feet, slowly, a hand on his knee. “Zhao-shishu tells me you’re diligent. Ninety pills for ninety on your second day, and near that every day since. More herbs than anyone in your intake, and not a single pill wasted.” He paused. “He also tells me your aura is green.”

“Yes, Shifu.”

“Talent,” said Kong Wen, “is what you’re given. Diligence is what you do with it. I’ve had disciples with blue auras who never once did ninety for ninety.” His mouth twisted slightly, as if the memory still tasted sour. “So. I’m taking you as a formal disciple. My seventh. From today you’ll call me Shifu and mean it.”

I’d known it was coming from the moment Fang ChenYue said congratulations. It still went through me like a draught of cold water. A formal disciple of one of the three mages in the sect who could refine level-nine pills. Not a probationer. Not a nobody with a borrowed cauldron. Somebody’s.

I knelt on the flagstones and touched my forehead to them three times, as I’d seen it done in a hundred historical dramas on the television in my mother’s front room, and stayed down until he told me to get up.

When I was on my feet again, I folded my hands in front of me and said, in my most respectful voice, “Shifu, may I ask a question?”

“Ask.”

“What does a seventh disciple get?”

There was a short silence in the courtyard. Somewhere behind the pavilion, Fang ChenYue dropped a lid with a clatter.

Kong Wen’s heavy brows rose slowly, all the way up, and stayed there.

“Get,” he repeated.

“I want to know what to plan for, Shifu. Herbs, books, a cauldron. I don’t want to ask for anything I’m not entitled to.” I paused. “Or fail to ask for anything I am.”

For a moment I thought I’d gone too far. Then one corner of that sour mouth moved. It wasn’t a smile. It was the shape a smile might have been, a long time ago, before it went bad.

“Most of them,” said Kong Wen, “ask what they’ll owe me.”

“I’d like to know that too, Shifu.”

“You’ll owe me results.” He folded the cloth and put it in his sleeve. “As for what you get. A double allowance of level-one herbs, and level two at the disciples’ rate once you can refine them. Leave to use the second floor of the library. A seat at the front of my lectures, which you’ll attend. A better cauldron when you’ve earned one, which you haven’t. And my name, which is worth more on this mountain than you know.” He looked at me for a long moment. “Fang ChenYue will introduce you to your seniors. Go away now, and refine something.”

“Yes, Shifu. Thank you, Shifu.”

I went. Behind me, as I reached the gate, I heard him say to nobody, clearly, “Get,” and a sound that might, in another man, have been a laugh.

Fang ChenYue walked me back down the hill in the dusk, with his hands tucked into his sleeves and a smile he couldn’t get off his face.

“I’ve never heard anyone ask him that,” he said. “Not once. In nine years.”

“Was it rude?”

“Very.” He seemed delighted. “He liked it.”

He told me the names of my new seniors as we walked, counting them off on his fingers. Second Shixiong, Fu ZiLin, a genius, who was away looking for an herb and wouldn’t talk to me when he came back, because he didn’t talk to anyone except Fang ChenYue. Third Shixiong, Wu Yan.

“Wu-shixiong?” I stopped on the path. “From the stone room?”

“The same. Shifu set him to watch the five of you.” Fang ChenYue’s eyes creased. “He told Shifu about your second try, by the way. And your six bundles.”

So that was who had been counting. Not only Zhao-shishu with his ledger. Wu, on his stool by the door, with his arms folded.

Fourth Shijie, NanGong Ying, who was kind but terrifying. Sixth Shixiong, Mao Can, who was neither. And Fifth Shixiong, Zhao DaZhou.

“The stocky one with the blue aura?” I said. “Who told us we’d never see level four?”

“That’s him.” Fang ChenYue’s mouth twitched. “He’s Zhao-shishu’s son. You’ll find he mentions it less than his aura, but not by much.”

I walked the rest of the way to my room working that through. Zhao-shishu’s son. The ledger, the herbs, the mild eyes that never seemed to look up from the page; and every evening, presumably, a family supper where my name came up.

Half of Capital Peak was called Zhao, I’d thought once. I’d been wrong. It was only the half that mattered.

Ling Xiao didn’t come back that night; I made the next day’s thirty anyway, and the day after’s too. I lined both bottles up on the windowsill like a shopkeeper with stock on the shelf. Nobody knocked. The bolt stayed across.

In the morning, at the canteen, I learned from the gossip at the next table that the Da Shixiong of the Warrior Division had gone down the mountain at first light, alone, on business of his own.

I have ways of getting things.

I told myself it had nothing to do with me. I told myself that all through two days of refining, and nearly believed it.

He came back on the evening of the second day.

I’d heard nothing on the walkway. I looked up from the cauldron and he was standing beside my table in his white robe with the dust of the road on its hem. He dropped a parcel in front of me without a word.

It was a book. Not new, but carefully kept: bound in dark cloth, its corners square, its spine unbroken. The title on the cover was three characters I could read. Heavenly Soul Scripture.

I put down my cauldron lid without touching the book, and looked from it to him.

“Is this what I think it is?”

“Open it and see.”

I opened it.

The first page was covered from edge to edge in characters, written in a fine, dense, ancient hand. I couldn’t read a single one of them. Not one. They weren’t the characters of the library books. They weren’t anything like the characters of the library books. They looked like the oldest writing in my old world in photographs: marks scratched on bone and shell three thousand years ago, ancestors of the words I knew, so far back up the line that you couldn’t see the family resemblance.

I turned the page. The next was the same. And the next.

“I can’t read it,” I said.

“No,” he agreed. “Hardly anyone can. That’s rather the point of hiding a soul technique in it.” He pulled out my other stool with one foot and sat down on it, uninvited, stretching his legs out under my table. “The script is very old. Older than the sect. Older than the continent’s memory of itself.”

“Can you read it?”

He smiled.

Of course he could. Of course he’d gone and got me the one thing in the world that I wanted and couldn’t use without him. I sat looking at the closed book under my hand and felt the trap close round me as neatly as a well-made drawer.

“All right,” I said. “What does it cost?”

“How sensible you are.” He folded his hands across his stomach. “Two things. The first: once your soul force breaks through on this, and you can make those five-pass pills without falling off a stool, I want ten of them.”

Ten five-pass pills. I’d barely survived one. But one was all I could make now; with this book, I’d be able to make more. And ten was a number. A number had an end.

“Agreed,” I said. “And the second?”

“The second is for the translation.” He tilted his head, considering me. “It’s about ten pages. I’ll read it to you, a little at a time, and explain what you don’t understand, which will be most of it. For each page,” said Ling Xiao, pleasantly, “a kiss.”

I didn’t move. I didn’t let my face move.

Ten pages. Ten kisses. He’d said it in exactly the same tone he’d used for the pills.

“No,” I said.

“Then you can’t read it.” He gave the smallest shrug. “Keep it as a curiosity. It has a nice cover.”

I looked at him. He looked back, perfectly at ease, his eyes bright and patient. He was enjoying this. He’d enjoyed the Najia and the outpost and my invoice. He was going to enjoy this, and if I lost my temper he’d enjoy that most of all.

So I didn’t. I thought about it instead, as I’d have thought about a supplier’s terms.

What did he actually want? Not the kisses, or not only. If he’d wanted to kiss me, he’d had me flat on my own bed two nights ago with his mouth already on mine; he hadn’t needed a book to arrange it. He wanted the game. He wanted to see what I’d do. And before that he’d wanted the outpost, and the seat, and the whole of Heaven Peak watching him smile at a nobody. He liked an audience. He liked me in front of one.

“I’ll make you a counter-offer,” I said.

His eyebrows went up. “Go on.”

“Dinner. In the Capital Peak canteen, every night, for a month. Together. At the same table, where everyone can see.” I folded my hands on the book. “You can watch me be embarrassed in front of my whole peak, thirty nights running. That’s worth more to you than ten kisses, and you know it.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he started to laugh, low in his throat.

“Thirty dinners,” he said, “for ten kisses.”

“Thirty dinners for none.”

“Thirty dinners,” said Ling Xiao, “for none. And I choose what you eat.”

“Done,” I said, before he could think of anything worse.

He held out his hand across the table, palm up, as Madam Su had done to close our bargain in He Ping. I looked at it for a moment. Then I put my hand in it.

His was warm and dry and much larger than mine. He didn’t shake it. He just held it for a moment, as though weighing it, and then let go.

“Tonight, then,” he said, and stood up. “Come along, XiaoMo-shimei. You’ll want to get there before the good tables go.”

I’d thought, when I made the offer, that I’d have a day to get used to the idea. I had just long enough to put the book in my magic bag and tie the bag under my robe.

The Capital Peak canteen at the evening meal was the fullest I’d ever seen it, every bench along every table packed, the steam rising from the pots in clouds and a roar of talk under the low roof like surf. We walked in through the door together. He was half a pace behind me, as usual.

The roar didn’t stop. It went out, from the door inwards, in a wave, as table after table looked up and saw who had come in with me. When it reached the far wall, the canteen was silent. In the silence, somewhere near the window, a boy who’d been lifting a bowl of soup to his mouth let it tip, slowly, into his own lap.

“Go and fill a tray,” Ling Xiao told me, in a voice pitched to carry. “I’ll find us a seat.”

“You said you’d choose what I eat.”

“So I did.” He looked along the pots at the counter, considering, while a hundred and fifty people watched him consider. “Bitter melon.”

I hated bitter melon. I’d hated it since I was four. I had no idea how he knew. I didn’t believe for a moment that he’d guessed.

I filled a tray. Rice. Fish. Greens. A heaped dish of bitter melon. A little of everything else, because I didn’t know what he liked, and wasn’t going to ask. When I turned round with it, the canteen was talking again, but in a low, avid murmur. Every face in the room was angled the same way. I followed the angle.

He’d found a table. It hadn’t been empty when he found it, and it wasn’t empty now. Every seat round it was full, with more people standing behind the seats, nearly all of them girls. Seniors from the high terraces with their hair pinned up in jade. Probationers from my own intake, pink to the ears. The plump girl who’d joked about carrying Jiang Liu’s bags in the probationers’ courtyard, who’d apparently been picked by someone after all, and who was gazing at him with her mouth a little open. He was sitting in the middle of them all, smiling, answering their questions in a warm, low voice, and looking perfectly at home.

He looked up as I came near and murmured a word to the senior beside him. She went red to the hairline, got up and gave me her seat.

I sat. I put the tray down between us. He leaned over to look at it and said, too quietly for anyone else to hear, “What took you so long?”

“There was a queue.”

“There’s always a queue. You were standing at the counter wondering how I knew about the bitter melon.” He picked up my chopsticks before I could, took a slice of it off the dish, and put it in my bowl. “Eat.”

Thirty nights. This was the first.

I ate. It was as bitter as I remembered. Around us, the girls drifted away in twos and threes, looking back over their shoulders. The boys at the next table stopped pretending to talk about anything but us. I could hear them perfectly well. That was the trouble with the canteen; the roof was low, and voices carried.

“It’s true, then. Lin Xiao and the green-aura girl. Everyone said, and I didn’t believe them.”

“She’s Kong-shifu’s disciple now, you know. Made her seventh, the day before yesterday. Out of nowhere.”

“Well, that explains it. Who’d say no to the Grand Master’s favourite?”

I kept my eyes on my bowl and ate another slice of bitter melon.

“Never mind that. Did you hear the news from He Ping?” This was a different voice, older, lower, with the pleasure of a man who knows something the table doesn’t. “My cousin came up from the town this afternoon. They’re saying Qiu Ran’s been robbed.”

“Qiu Ran? The Qiu Ran?”

“Is there another? Someone got into his house and took a book. Some old manual he’d had for a hundred years. A soul technique, my cousin says. He’s put out a reward for whoever did it.” The man paused for effect. “Ten level-nine pills. And three level-ten.”

There was a silence at the next table.

“Level ten?”

“Three of them.”

“Heavens. For a book? There aren’t five level-ten pills on this whole continent outside his own house.”

“Well, there’s three, now, waiting for whoever brings him the thief.”

I’d stopped eating.

I hadn’t meant to. My chopsticks had simply stopped halfway to my mouth, with a slice of bitter melon dripping between them. I made them start again, slowly, and put the slice in my mouth, and chewed it.

Two days ago, he’d told me there were perhaps ten soul techniques in the whole continent. He’d told me the great sects guarded theirs like their own daughters. He’d told me he had ways of getting things.

The next morning, he’d gone down the mountain alone.

This evening, he’d come back with the dust of the road on his hem and thrown a book on my table: an old book, carefully kept, a soul technique in a script nobody alive could read.

I swallowed the bitter melon. I didn’t look at him.

Beside me, Ling Xiao was eating his rice with every appearance of contentment. He hadn’t turned his head towards the next table. But a man who could smell Life Root through a robe and trip a boy at ten paces could certainly hear four disciples talking a yard behind him, and I knew, without looking, that he’d heard every word.

He reached across, took another slice of bitter melon off the dish and put it in my bowl.

“Eat up, XiaoMo-shimei,” he said gently. “You’ve gone pale.”

The book was in my magic bag, tied under my robe, a hand’s breadth from my ribs. Three level-ten pills. Ten level-nine. If I walked down the mountain tomorrow and told Qiu Ran’s people where to find it, I would be richer than anyone I’d ever met, in either world. I’d also have to explain how I’d known.

And somewhere between the Najia and this table, the man beside me had stopped being only a danger to me. He’d become a danger I was in with. Whatever he’d done to get that book, I’d taken it from him with my own hands and shaken on the price.

I looked down at my bowl. Then I picked up my chopsticks and ate the bitter melon. Of everything on the table, it was the least bitter thing I’d swallowed all evening.