"You said many things." Her voice was calm. Terrifyingly calm. The calm of a woman whose storm had not gone away but had merely been given a place to live. "You also said you would be gone two days. You have been gone three."
"You counted."
"I counted."
He crossed the chamber and sat beside her at the pool's edge. The steam curled between them. She did not move away. She did not move closer. She watched him with eyes that had once been knives and were now something more complicated and much more dangerous.
"How is the seal?" he asked.
"Broken past mending. You saw to that." She turned her palm up and let a bead of her qi rise from it, water-clear shot through with veins of gold. "Do you see what you have done to my winter? It flows now. It has never flowed. A thousand years I lay under these swords refining stillness, and you came in like a rock thrown into a pond, and now the pond will not still."
"You're welcome."
"I did not thank you."
