The next day, they walked until they could make out the outskirts of a town. Joshi left Chang-li and Min to wait on a hill overlooking the town while he prepared to go buy horses. He dressed himself in simple trousers and a long gray tunic, abandoning his cultivator robes and leaving his forged license behind.

"I shall go as a down-on-my-luck merchant who needs to get fresh horses in order to rescue my stranded caravan," he told them. "You two stay here."

After the terrible night they'd spent, Chang-li didn't protest, but sank down beneath a cluster of beech trees by a spring while Joshi headed off toward the town. Min found some dried fruits in their packs and handed some to him. They ate quietly.

"Do you think that teaching a bunch of Darwur to become cultivators is a good idea?" Min asked after a while.

Chang-li chewed on his food. His thoughts had been following the same paths.

"I don't see any reason why they won't take to it as easily as your Brotherhood did," he said after a while, even though he knew that wasn't what Min meant.

"But I mean…" She pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them, staring off into the distance. "They're enemies of the Emperor, aren't they? Our army is pacifying them even now. Giving them the ability to continue fighting, or worse, to beat back the army, that might be, well, treason."

Chang-li cleared his head. "It's a potential violation of the Statutes of Cultivation Management for anyone to give lessons to those without even a provisional cultivation license," he said. "However, there's not actually anything in those statutes about teaching enemies of the Empire, I think because whoever wrote them couldn't really imagine anyone would want to. So, we're just looking at a third-tier offense. It will result in sanctions against one's sect, fines, potentially penal labor for the Empire."

"You don't think the Inquisitor could spin that up into something worthy of death?" Min asked skeptically.

He met her gaze. "I think that I'm more worried about what Noren said. About what the artifact is doing to me."

At once, she looked concerned. She leaned over toward him, placing her hand on his chest. "Are you all right? What's it doing?"

He shook his head. "I don't know." Min's touch was warm against his thin tunic. He forced a smile, hoping to relieve her worried look, but her brow furrowed even deeper. "I can feel it," he admitted. "It's there, in my core. I'm trying not to cycle, but I don't know what it is."

Min nodded. "Noren could have given us a little more to go on."

They sat quietly for a while. Then, abruptly, Min clapped her hands. "Oh! Perhaps the monks of Harupa would be able to help us decide the best way to proceed with your core. Joshi says that they aren't so much cultivators themselves as students of cultivation."

Chang-li wasn't so sure about that. But he suspected that fifty miles from now, he might be willing to take a few risks.

"I suppose it wouldn't hurt to ask them," he agreed.

Min nodded. "All right, that's settled then. And we're going to teach cultivating to a bunch of barbarians, if they are even capable of really learning it."

"I think a lot of cultivators would say the same thing about common Brotherhood folk or scribes learning to cultivate," Chang-li said mildly.

"That's not what I meant," Min insisted. She took a deep breath, frowning. "That is, well, we don't even know if they can read."

Chang-li laughed. "That is no impediment. Many of your Brotherhood can't read either, not well enough to make sense of cultivation scrolls. Or you can read their lessons aloud to them if you prefer."

Min looked startled. "Me?"

He shrugged. "Well, if we get to this Heart of Ice, it sounds like Joshi and I are going to try to figure out what's wrong with me as fast as we can. That'll leave you with our newest disciples."

A series of looks flashed across Min's face: dismay, disbelief, and then determination.

She nodded. "All right, so long as you leave me your journals. But in that case, we need to work on my own skills as well. I'm almost out of lux here. So what can we be working on while Joshi is gone?"

Chang-li had been just about to suggest something that they could do that wouldn't take any lux at all, but the look on Min's face changed his mind. "Very well," he said quietly. "Your next step is piercing the first veil. When you begin working with larger and larger quantities of lux, as you will from this point onward, you must learn to control its influence over your body and your senses. The first veil is the obscuring effect lux can have on your vision, especially in a tower or other location dense with lux. You might not be able to practice this until we get to a tower again, but we can work on the theory."

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He went to his pack and pulled out the relevant notebook. Min knelt in front of him, face intent, as he began explaining.

Time flew past, and before they knew it, Joshi was returning, leading a string of what looked to Chang-li's inexpert eyes like ridiculously large horses, six of them.

"You didn't need to buy every horse in the town," Min complained as she studied the beasts. "How many can we ride at once?"

"I would have bought twice as many if they'd had them," Joshi said. "You cannot just ride a horse all day long, it's not like that Flying Cloud that could go for as long as it had lux. Horses are living creatures."

He stroked the neck of the brown one at the head of the string.

"Which of them is mine?" Min asked.

"You have the roan and the bay."

Min and Chang-li exchanged a glance. "I see five brown and one mostly white horse here," Min said. "Which two are roan and bay, exactly?"

Joshi sighed. He pointed out two whose shades of brown barely differed as far as Chang-li was concerned. "The bay mare and the chestnut gelding are mine," he said. "Chang-li, you have the white and the chestnut mares. Both of yours, Min, are geldings."

"What's a gelding?" Min asked.

At least Chang-li knew that term, he'd spent two weeks of his scribe training learning all of the different agricultural terms a scribe might need to know.

"Castrated male," he said promptly. "The mare is female, and stallions are uncut males."

Min gaped. "There are eunuch horses?"

"You really are a city girl." Chang-li smirked as he wasn't city-bred himself.

"Enough chatter," Joshi said. "Time to teach you both to ride."

That evening, they made camp, Min and Chang-li moving very cautiously and with great soreness. They had ridden only a few miles that day, as he and Min struggled to get the hang of horse riding.

Joshi was very patient, though clearly, he did not understand how it was possible for someone to be as bad at horse riding as they were. Still, by the end of the day, Chang-li had felt confident in holding on to his own reins. Perhaps tomorrow they would make better time.

No sooner had they stopped to make camp, than Joshi forced him and Min to groom the horses after stripping their saddles and tack and stowing them in neat piles. They rubbed the horses all over with clumps of grass and saw that they had water and grazing available to them. Joshi ran a line just beyond where they had chosen to camp and fastened the horses to it. He also tied short strips of leather between the horses' front feet.

Min watched with fascination as they took tiny steps. "That looks cruel. Why do you do that?"

"Hobbling is not cruel," Joshi said. "This allows them to graze and be comfortable all night without running off. It is better than having to search the countryside for your horses in the morning."

Chang-li decided to defer to Joshi's expertise. Min merely turned back to the cooking. Occasionally, when she thought Chang-li or Joshi weren't watching, she'd rub her rear. Chang-li sympathized. He had never realized what hard work it could be to sit.

"Explain the difference between this monastery of Harupa and a sect," Min said.

Joshi pursed his lips. "Remember, I studied with the monks of Harupa from a young age. At the time, I didn't know anything beyond my own clan, and so I didn't realize how extraordinary the Harupa Monastery is. I believed a lux well to be the primary way all cultivators gained lux. It's only since leaving Harupa and living through my experiences that I've realized that's not the case."

He frowned into the fire as Min handed round bowls of rice porridge.

"The monks of Harupa have taken vows to leave their monastery only when called upon by the emperor or his designated officials. They also have willingly capped their own advancement at the Peak of Spiritual Refinement. To a monk of Harupa, his true goal is not in personal progression and advancement, but in deepening the understanding of lux and what cultivation is all about. I believe there are other similar organizations scattered across the empire, and that is where many advances in lux technology and in the harvesting of lux and storing it in crystals has come from."

Chang-li nodded. That matched his own understanding. "Does it have to be one or the other?" he asked. "Surely you can practice personal advancement and study the true meanings of the universe at the same time."

Joshi shrugged. "I wouldn't know," he said. "Nevertheless, the monks of Harupa focus on learning the secrets of lux. But for all that, they are willing and, no, eager, to train potential future cultivators. I think that young cultivators served them as…" He frowned, clearly looking for a way to name a concept. "I don't know how to say it in your word. What do you call the one you feed a newly found plant to, and if they don't die, you know it's safe to eat?"

Chang-li snorted. "I think that's junior-most scribe," he said, but Min was nodding.

"So, they taught you and their other students different cultivating patterns and waited to see which worked the best?"

Joshi hesitated. "I don't want to make it sound like they neglected my training. You know how many patterns they taught me. Well," he looked a bit embarrassed, "actually, I went to them and demanded to be taught each of their patterns. They were unwilling at first, but I reminded them of the terms of my father's enrollment. He wanted me able to return to my people and teach them to cultivate. For that, I needed all of the cycling patterns that Harupa knew. Eventually, they gave in."

"What was the deal your father made?" Min asked, sounding interested. "What does a Darwur warlord have to offer a monastery?"

"He promised not to burn them down and sell their students into slavery," Joshi said grimly. Then he paused. "I… only just realized that most of my teachers were at the Peak of Mental Refinement, and there was a lux well on the grounds. I suspect a handful of the monks could have held off my father and the eight allied clans fairly easily." He looked deeply unsettled.

Chang-li guessed what was in his mind. It sounded like the monks of Harupa had their own reasons for accepting the son of the Darwur warlord as a student.

"Never mind," he said quietly. "Will they aid us?"

"Yes, I believe they will. For one thing, as I've said, they're interested in the nature of lux. If you show them your problem, I think they'll be fascinated with it for its own sake. But we will have to be wary. Once a month, imperial officials come to collect filled lux crystals and deposit empty ones. They take a tithe of the lux well in exchange for allowing Harupa to occupy the monastery. That lux helps supply the frontier cities and the army."

"The same army that has been fighting your fathers and your people for decades now?" Chang-li asked.

"Yes."

"And nobody in the army minded you being there?"

"Why should they?" Joshi asked. "Harupa takes what students it will."

Chang-li still wasn't certain about that, but he let it pass.

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