Chapter 293: Out of Anhu

Leaving Anhu turned out to cost more than arriving in it, and Xuan spent most of that morning in the yard behind the chandler’s holding a mule while Hao renegotiated the price of everything they owned.

The guide was a lean man called Wen Bao who had walked the ridge track since he was nine and said so twice. He offered, in the friendliest way imaginable, to weigh the silver himself.

"You’re kind," Hao said, and produced his own scale from his sleeve.

It was brass, it was new, and it was better than the one on Wen Bao’s belt. The man looked at it the way a carpenter looks at another carpenter’s plane, and something in his shoulders came down half an inch.

"Where’d you get that?"

"Second terrace. A woman with a stall the size of a door robbed me for it, and I’d buy another tomorrow."

They settled on a price in half the time after that, which was the part Xuan had stopped being surprised by. Hao didn’t win arguments. He removed the reasons to have them.

Lian came down with her cases roped in threes and supervised their loading like a woman watching strangers carry her children. Straw between the layers, wax over every stopper, and the mule that got them was the mule she had picked herself after walking around all four of them.

"You look better," Xuan said.

"I’m on land. Being on land agrees with me enormously." She checked a knot, disapproved of it, and redid it. "Ask me again when we’re three days up a hill."

The two men from the legation arrived exactly on time, which told him a good deal about Cao Zhen.

Grey robes, the seal in a lacquered case, boots polished for a road that would eat them by dusk. Pei Song came up the lane behind him with something long wrapped in cloth held across both arms like a delivery he was afraid of dropping.

"You bought a sword," Xuan said.

"The man at the stall swore it was a good one." The clerk’s chin went up half an inch, and he ruined it immediately by adjusting his grip twice.

"Do you know how to use it?"

"No, my lord."

"Then keep it in the sheath and it does exactly the job I need it to do." Xuan slapped the mule’s neck and turned to the yard. "All right. Everyone hears this once, so listen the first time."

They gathered without being told to, and he found he didn’t hate that.

"Lian talks at the gate. She’s the reason they open it, if they open it, and everything I say up there will be to keep their attention off her while she does it. Nobody interrupts her. If she says something that sounds insane, assume she means it."

"I usually do," Lian said.

"Hao pays. Anything that costs money on this road, from a stable to a bribe to a man’s silence, goes through him and nobody else haggles. Especially not me. I’m apparently very bad at it."

"You’re a catastrophe," Hao agreed.

"Tianming carries and watches. Your job is Lian’s cases, all the way up and all the way back, and you don’t draw on anybody no matter what gets said to you. Somebody up there will try you. Let them."

Tianming’s grip on the lead rope tightened. "And if they put hands on her?"

"Then you’re allowed to be rude." Xuan let that sit a second, then turned. "Envoy Cao and his man walk behind me in grey with the seal where it can be seen, and they say nothing to anyone, ever, about anything. Not the weather."

"We can manage silence," Cao Zhen said. "It’s most of the work."

That was the roster, and it was tidy, and Xuan got exactly as far as feeling pleased with himself before his wife spoke.

"You’ve placed everyone but me."

Qingyue was at the second mule with her sleeve pushed back, testing the girth strap with her thumb, and she hadn’t raised her voice at all.

"You stay with Lian."

"Why?"

"Because if that house decides to make an example of anybody, it’ll be the woman standing in their doorway telling them she recognized their work." He said it the way he’d worked it out at three in the morning, which had felt airtight at three in the morning. "You’re the only one of us who can get her out of a room."

"That’s a real answer. It’s still the wrong one." She dropped the strap and came around the animal’s head. "Where will you be?"

"At the gate."

"With your name in your mouth and both hands empty, in front of people whose entire art is what happens before anybody swings." Qingyue folded her sleeve back down. "If that goes badly, it goes badly in the first breath. Whoever moves in that breath decides how many of us ride home. I intend to be standing where I can be that person."

"Lian would be alone."

"Lian would be behind you, with a boy who’d bite through a man’s wrist for her and a wall of imperial grey between her and the road." A beat, and her tone came down. "You’ve been putting me somewhere safe since the ship. I’ve let it go twice."

He had, and he’d known it, and hearing it out loud in a yard full of mules was a particular flavour of unpleasant.

"You’re my wife."

"I’m that too. It isn’t a job." She said it plainly, with no heat in it at all. "I told you on that terrace what I was choosing, and you told me you understood what you were getting. I’m not here to be walked around a foreign continent and admired. I came as a sword. You have two blades on this road, and you’re about to leave one of them holding luggage."

Somewhere behind him, Hao had gone extremely busy with a strap that didn’t need attention.

"Say the rest of it," Xuan said.

"When something comes at me, don’t step in front of it." Her hand settled on the mule’s shoulder. "You’ll do it without thinking, because you always do, and you’ll be in my line and we’ll both be slow. I’d rather not die of your reflexes."

Mira, who had been silent the entire time, chose that moment to be helpful.

[ She’s right, she’s been right since the crossing, and I’ve been enjoying watching you find out.]

’You could have told me.’

[ You’d have argued with me. You can’t argue with her, she’s standing there.]

Xuan looked at his wife across the head of a mule in a yard that smelled of hot straw, and did the only sensible thing available.

"New arrangement," he said, loud enough for the whole yard. "Qingyue rides free. She isn’t tied to anybody and she doesn’t answer to me on the road, and if she says move, you move before you look at me. Lian goes behind me with Tianming and the grey. Nobody stands between my wife and open ground."

"Thank you," Qingyue said.

"Don’t thank me. You were right in front of witnesses, which is worse."

"For you." She swung up into the saddle without needing the stirrup, and settled her sheathed sword across her thighs where a hand could find it. "I’ll live with it."

They went out through the north gate an hour before noon, and Anhu let them go the way it had let them in, which was without noticing.

At the shrine the road forked, and Wen Bao slowed to see which way the northerners would be stupid.

"Ridge track," Xuan said.

The guide’s chin went sideways. "River road’s faster."

"River road’s under water and I’d rather not spend three days pulling frogs out of my boots."

Wen Bao laughed at that, all the way from his belly, and took the fork without another word. Beside him Hao made a small satisfied noise, the sound of a man watching a purchase pay for itself.

The track climbed for the rest of the afternoon. The city thinned into terraces, the terraces thinned into orchards, and by the time the light went long the orchards had given up entirely, and the country ahead of them lay under a green so thick it looked poured on.

Heat came up off it in a wall. Somewhere down in all that, insects were making a noise like a saw.

[ Seven of you.] Mira had been counting for a while. [ Two in imperial grey with a seal on display, an alchemist’s cases on a mule, a guide who talks in every village he stops in, all on a road that goes exactly one place.]

’Yes.’

[ By tomorrow night that house knows the shape of what’s walking at it.]

’That’s the idea. I’m not sneaking up on people who cure a continent. I’m arriving.’

[ Good. I only wanted it on the record that I saw it coming.] A pause. [ Also, for the record, your wife is riding on your right in exactly the spot she took for herself, and she hasn’t looked back at you once. I like her enormously.]

Xuan glanced over.

Qingyue had her sword across her knees and her attention out on the treeline where the light was already failing, reading the green ahead of them for whatever came out of it first.