Chapter 202

The door opens before I have finished opening my eyes, and I look, my eyes still drowsy, to see Xia walk in, carrying a plate of steamed buns and wearing the face of someone who has been up since well before the sun.

“Happy birthday!” she tells me.

I prop myself up on my elbows to see her a little more comfortably.

“Thank you”, I tell her. “Since when have you been in the kitchen?”

“Since early”, she replies.

Which, from Xia’s lips, means nothing good.

Lianhua comes in behind her with my clothes folded over one arm, sets them at the foot of the bed and bows.

“Happy birthday, Xiaojie”, she tells me.

She says it in her usual voice, flat and polite, but she takes half a heartbeat longer than normal to straighten up.

Then she starts dressing me while Xia puts a bun in my hand so it won’t get cold.

Fourteen years old, and it is the first birthday of this life with no guests, if we don’t count the one that happened right in the middle of an imperial funeral.

At the Palace, a birthday was a political summit with paper lanterns, Tiàoyuè and Fǎnzhuǎn tables, pizzas and hamburgers, and a guest list that worked exactly like a thermometer, because the number of people who came told you how much favor my mother had left at court.

My brothers never came, even though I never stopped inviting them, so two people and a plate of buns strike me as considerably better company.

Lianhua moves me into the chair, arranges my legs and smooths my skirt over my knees.

“So what do you want to do today?” Xia asks me.

I open my mouth to answer her and nothing comes out, because the answer I have is the everyday one, which is the desk in my study, Master Mu’s stack of books and making talismans until the ink runs out.

So I go back over the days I have spent in this city, and where I have spent them.

The inn, the Tower of the Five Dragons, the Pavilion of a Thousand Strokes. And the rest of the time, in this house.

At the Palace I lived the same way. I once thought it was like living in the Vatican and knowing only the Sistine Chapel and the nearest bathroom, but back then I had the excuse that I wasn’t allowed out.

Here I don’t have that excuse, because the only person who can forbid me to leave this house is me.

And I didn’t slip out of the Empire in secret just to go from being locked up in one room to being locked up in another, because on top of everything, this one I have to pay rent for.

“Today we are going to go see the city”, I tell her. “The three of us.”

Xia goes still for a moment, and then her face lights up.

“See the city?” she asks me. “What for?”

“For nothing in particular”, I reply. “Just to see it.”

And judging by the way she looks at me after those words, I suppose it is the strangest thing she has heard me say in years.

Lianhua asks nothing. She simply looks out the window, checks the sky and nods just once.

“I will get the boat ready, Xiaojie”, she tells me.

“And where are we going first?” Xia asks me.

That one I don’t have to think about.

“To the Hundred Furnaces Quarter”, I tell her.

Because in this life I have seen a Feng the size of a house, but I have yet to see a single alchemist at work. I make my own ink, in the cauldron on the other side of the courtyard, and that resembles alchemy about as much as making soup resembles the deconstruction of whatever it is Michelin Guide chefs deconstruct.

Although, with all the preparations, we don’t leave the island’s dock until well into the morning.

I travel secured in the spot I have finally had them add to our boat, although, just in case, Xia’s hand holds on to the armrest.

At the city dock they take me up the ramp, and as they do, the looks begin, which is how it always starts whenever I decide to go into the city.

You reach the Hundred Furnaces Quarter by nose before you reach it by knowing the way, because I smell it two streets before I see it: a bitter, hot smell of boiled root and of something mineral that clings to the back of my throat.

Hou Deming didn’t exaggerate in the slightest. The streets are wide, and the ground is so flat that, for the first time since I arrived in this city, the chair rolls with barely a rattle. The houses are low, nearly all of them have their doors open, and above the rooftops sits a layer of gray smoke that doesn’t move.

There are herbalists with roots hanging in bunches from the ceiling, drying sheds with herbs spread out in the sun and apprentices everywhere, going in and out of the houses with sacks and baskets without looking at anyone, although I notice that some of them are wearing a backpack.

And on the third street the real alchemists start to appear.

Although, to my disappointment, there is no white-bearded old man stirring a cauldron amid colored clouds, just workshops.

Most of them are shop-style, and all closed, but here and there you can see a few with a more open layout, each with its alchemy furnace, and in front of each furnace someone sitting on a low stool, red-faced, watching the fire like someone keeping an eye on the bread so it won’t burn.

In my other life, a neighborhood like this would have been called an industrial park, and since my curiosity gets the better of me, I ask Lianhua to stop in front of one of the open-style workshops.

Inside, a woman with the emblem of the Jade Dew embroidered on her chest holds both hands out toward the mouth of the furnace without quite touching it, and the fire rises and falls to the rhythm of her fingers.

I activate Sensing the Qi for just an instant, and inside that furnace the fire Qi moves to the rhythm of those fingers just like the water in a bucket when someone stirs it.

In some of the workshops we pass, there are counters at the door, with jars of pills and tablets showing the prices, and Xia stops in front of every one of them and lets out a soft little whistle each time.

We don’t buy anything.

Between the Qi-gathering formation I carved into the floor at home and the spirit food Xia makes for us, which isn’t much, because without the Earth Gate my body can’t handle more, we have more than enough to cultivate with. And as for pills, I know they leave impurities behind, and that this is why, in the end, they stop working.

So I look, which is free, but Xia isn’t satisfied with just looking.

In front of the fourth or fifth counter, with a jar of golden pills a handspan from her nose, she turns toward me, and it doesn’t occur to her to lower her voice.

“Well, once I’m a spirit chef, we won’t need any of this”, she tells me. “We’ll have all the good parts of pills and none of the bad ones.”

I don’t correct her, although I know it isn’t entirely true, because she herself was the one who told me that those dishes give considerably less Qi than pills.

But that isn’t the problem. The problem is that she has said it in the middle of the Jade Dew’s quarter and four paces from three Jade Dew disciples who were chatting by the next door down.

I notice they have stopped talking, which reminds me of Lin Quingyu, sitting behind her desk and telling us that when we spoke with disciples of the Jade Dew we should be polite, not argue about alchemy and never correct them in public.

And Xia, in a single sentence, has just publicly corrected an entire neighborhood full of them.

Two of the disciples settle for glaring at us. The third, the youngest and the one with the cleanest robe, pushes away from the wall and plants himself in front of Xia, so close that, from my chair, what I mostly see of him is the emblem on his chest.

“Spirit chef?” he asks her.

“That’s what I said”, Xia replies.

“A dish doesn’t come anywhere close to what a pill gives you”, he tells her. “Spirit chefs are cooks with pretensions who have decided to call a stew alchemy.”

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“But it doesn’t leave impurities”, Xia replies.

“Impurities are a problem for those who don’t know how to take them”, he tells her.

“Then it’s a problem for almost everyone”, Xia replies.

And that is when the disciple raises his voice.

He starts explaining to a little girl, with his hands and in tremendous detail, why alchemy is better than spirit cooking, and Xia answers him point by point with what she heard in the kitchens of the inn, without retreating a single step.

I open my mouth to stop them, but Lianhua has already moved half a step, just enough to end up beside Xia with her hands folded in front of her.

“Excuse me”, she tells the disciple.

He falls silent and looks at her, more out of surprise than good manners.

“You are arguing with a twelve-year-old girl”, Lianhua tells him.

She says nothing more, although what she has just said, she said in her usual flat, polite voice.

The disciple opens his mouth to reply, but nothing comes out, and then he does what he hasn’t done in all this time, which is look around, because a small crowd has gathered around us.

Apprentices standing still with all sorts of goods in their hands, an herbalist in her doorway and his two companions, who are suddenly very interested in the ground. No one says anything, but several of them cover their mouths with their sleeves so their laughter won’t show, and they don’t quite manage it.

I see the disciple’s face go red as he realizes this, but he simply smooths his robe with a brief gesture, turns around and walks off up the street, unhurried and without a word.

But before turning a corner he looks back just once and looks at the three of us, one at a time, like someone memorizing a face for when it is needed again, and then he disappears, with his companions trailing after him.

In my other life, that look would have meant an unpleasant meeting the next time we ran into each other in the elevator, but here, in his neighborhood, I have no idea what it means, and I don’t feel like finding out today.

“We’re leaving”, I say.

“But we haven’t even seen the last street yet”, Xia tells me.

“That’s why”, I reply. “If he comes back, he certainly won’t come back alone, and I’d rather not be here to count how many there are.”

Lianhua is already behind the chair before I finish the sentence, and we leave the quarter the way we came in, with the smell of medicine clinging to our clothes.

Xia walks two streets beside me without saying a single word, although after a while she asks me in a low voice whether she went too far.

“A little”, I tell her.

“But was I right or not?” she asks me.

“About the impurities, yes”, I reply. “About all the good parts, no. But you already knew that.”

Xia thinks it over for a moment.

“I’m sorry, I got carried away”, she tells me, looking remorseful.

And right after that, as if nothing had happened, she asks me what we are doing next.

What I have in mind is that, according to the Tower of the Five Dragons’ guide, there is a small area of shops and entertainment not far away, and it is a good place to finish off the morning and get rid of the bad taste the argument has left in our mouths.

When we arrive, I see that it is a handful of narrow streets, with colored awnings that tint the light depending on which one you pass under, cloth shops, fan stalls and a woman with honey sweets stacked in pyramids. And on a corner, standing on a stool, a storyteller is telling a ring of children how a monkey with a magic staff takes on a gang of bandits.

That surprises me, because the monkey in the story he is telling is clearly Sun Wukong, but that fight against bandits doesn’t appear anywhere in the novel.

I put the matter out of my head, though I am still wondering how on earth my story got to this city, when Xia asks the sweets woman how she keeps the honey from running, and the woman, instead of answering her, gives her one to try along with a smile, which Xia considers a perfectly valid answer.

And halfway down the second street, I find a bookshop.

It is small, with shelves up to the ceiling and an aisle the chair only just fits down, the armrests brushing against the spines. The bookseller, an elderly man with ink-stained fingers, looks at my chair, looks at me and goes back to his book, which is exactly what a bookseller ought to do.

And as Lianhua slowly steers me down the aisle, I realize that I haven’t read anything for pleasure since I left the Empire, and that everything I have read has been work, so I decide that today I am looking for the opposite.

In the end I find more than I expected. The story of a general lost in the desert, another about two merchant families who have spent a hundred years ruining each other, ghost stories, legends about river spirits and a romance novel with a cover that makes Xia turn red the instant she sees it.

I could have taken many more, but this is where I rein myself in.

At the Palace I would have carried off half the bookshop without thinking, but here I have what we earn from my talismans, so each of those books is worth a few sheets of talisman paper I won’t be able to buy later.

The bookseller wraps it all in paper tied with string, and I set it in my lap with both hands on top, although I glance with a smile at Xia, who has refused to look at the romance novel ever since I added it to the pile.

After leaving the bookshop I feel a little hungry, so we politely ask a passerby for the best restaurant in the area, and our passerby doesn’t need to think about it for an instant, pointing us at once to one at the end of the street, with two red lanterns at the door and an embroidered cloth curtain over the entrance.

When we get there, I see that in front of the curtain stands a man in a gray silk robe, with his hands behind his back and the face of someone whose only job is to decide who goes through that curtain and who doesn’t.

Lianhua pushes me up to him and stops, because the man is looking down at me. Then he looks at the chair, slowly, his eyes lingering on the wheels. And then he looks at our clothes, which are of good fabric and well made, but have nothing about them that screams money.

“I’m sorry”, he tells us. “We have no room today.”

While he is saying it, two men in silks embroidered with gold thread arrive behind us, and the man at the door steps aside to let them through with a bow. One of them looks at me as he passes, looks at the chair and says something to the other that I don’t quite catch, but that makes the other one snort a laugh. Behind them goes a woman weighed down with hairpins, who walks past me with her chin a little higher than necessary.

The curtain falls closed behind them.

“And they get in?” Xia asks him.

“They have a table”, the man replies.

“But they just got here!” Xia tells him.

The man doesn’t reply, but he looks at us again, and this time he is clearer when he speaks.

“Besides, this establishment is not equipped for…”, he tells us, and makes a vague gesture with his hand toward my wheels. “For that.”

“Repeat that, please”, Lianhua tells him.

She says it in the most polite voice in the world, even flatter than usual, without a single edge.

But I recognize that tone immediately, because I have heard that voice from her only a few times, and it has almost never ended well for whoever was in front of her.

Chen Mo already warned me that I would come across innkeepers who would charge me triple after seeing me, and things considerably worse. A doorman who won’t let me in doesn’t even make it onto the list of the worst I can imagine, and I have no intention of letting whatever might happen next ruin my day.

“Lianhua”, I tell her. “We’re leaving.”

“But, Wen…”, Xia tells me, and she doesn’t seem pleased with the treatment I have received either.

“I’m not going to pay to eat in a place where I’m not wanted”, I reply. “And I’m not going to argue so they’ll let me pay them, either.”

Because I once told Lianhua that I didn’t want to see her hurt defending a pride that doesn’t matter to me, and what does matter to me isn’t behind that curtain; it is out here, on either side of my chair.

The man at the door inclines his head a finger’s breadth, with the quiet satisfaction of someone who has done his job well, although I have to give him this much: at least he doesn’t gloat over having won, as others would have.

Lianhua looks at him a moment longer than necessary, but then she takes her place behind my chair, turns it, and we head off down the street, with smoke all but literally pouring out of Xia’s ears.

Two streets away there is a park with willows, and in one corner, under an awning, a food stall with two enormous pots and half a dozen wooden tables set out in the open air, beneath the trees.

It smells of broth, ginger and something fried.

The owner, a strong-armed woman in an apron that has seen better days, sees us coming, looks at the chair and, without a word, pulls the bench away from the head of an empty table so the chair will fit.

“What’ll it be?” she asks us, kindly and without any of the awkward questions that would have been out of place.

We order noodles in broth and some fried morsels that Xia identifies at the first bite, and the three of us sit at the same table, and as I slurp the first noodle, I remember Xi’An.

The first time I went out into the streets of that city, before I met Xia, when I was eight and ate at a place very much like this one, in the open air, with wooden tables and a pot over the fire. Only that day there were no free tables when we arrived, so they had a customer give up their table for me, and then they served us before anyone else.

I realized right then and there that I hadn’t done anything to deserve it, other than being my father’s daughter.

In Xi’An they handed me a table for being who I was, and today they have refused me one because of my condition and the clothes I am wearing.

And these noodles, served to me by a woman who was kind enough to make room for me, taste considerably better than anything that might be behind that curtain.

In the afternoon we keep wandering aimlessly, which is a luxury I have almost never been able to afford in this life.

Lianhua chooses the streets. At every intersection she stands still for a couple of heartbeats, her gaze far away, and I know she is looking down from above with the Vision of Horus to see where each one goes before she decides.

And Sanjiang, seen this way, unhurried and without a fixed destination, is exactly the city full of people with powers that I never got to see from an imperial carriage.

A man carries on his back a load of firewood that in my world would have needed a mule, and he whistles as he carries it. A few boys drag swords that reach almost to the ground and argue at the top of their lungs about who would have won a fight that hasn’t happened yet. Some wandering cultivators sell beast pelts laid out on blankets, and on one wall there is a commission board that, from the little I can make out from my height, is asking for wolf pelts, herbs and escorts.

But something is missing, because no one flies, no one leaps from rooftop to rooftop or walks across the river, which takes a little of the charm out of being in a city full of people with powers.

Throughout the whole outing, the looks at my chair are still there, as always, and as always I let them be, since they go no further than that, looks.

When the sky begins to turn orange above the rooftops and the first lanterns are lit in the doorways, Lianhua turns toward the river.

Halfway to the dock, on a street that runs downhill, we find a small restaurant, just one room, with the door flung wide open and a smell of roast pork reaching all the way out into the street.

The owner, a short man with a rag over his shoulder, sees us at the door, looks at the chair and scratches the back of his neck, but then he opens the other leaf of the door, which was closed, so the wheels can get in without scraping the frame.

“There’s a table at the back, by the window”, he tells us. “You can see the river from there.”

The menu isn’t very long, but we order a bit of everything, especially Xia, and in the end, as we are paying, she even asks him for the recipe for one of the dishes, which she praises so much that the owner, embarrassed, actually gives it to her.

At the dock it is almost night already, but that is no problem at all for Lianhua, who carefully takes me down the ramp and anchors my chair, which Xia, as always, holds on to just in case as she sits down beside it.

Lianhua pushes the boat away from the dock with one foot and begins to row, and behind us Sanjiang stays lit by the glow of its lanterns.

Xia manages to stay awake until the second islet, and after that her head drops against the back of my chair, although even asleep she doesn’t let go of the armrest.

And I sit watching the water, with the books in my lap and the city lights trembling on the river, while I think that if I had stayed in the Empire, today I would have reached the age of majority.

Tomorrow, in some office in the Palace, someone from the court would have officially asked me what I wished to devote myself to beyond my rank. I would have answered with what was already expected of me, in the measured voice of a Zhāohuán, and then others would have been the ones to decide what I was actually going to do.

Here, no one is going to ask me officially, but this morning Xia asked me, with a plate of buns in her hands, and the answer was whatever I felt like at that moment.

Lianhua rows without a word, the boat slips between the islands of the Rong on the way home, and I, for the first time, feel that my future is mine to decide.