Chapter 295: Warning

Shuiwei sat in a bend of the river with the green coming down to the roofs on three sides, forty houses and a mill, and it was the friendliest place Xuan had been since the boat, right up until he opened his mouth.

They fed the mules and sold Hao rice at a fair weight without weighing it twice. A woman shouted at Tianming for blocking her doorway and then handed him a bowl of something with fish in it, which the boy ate with the expression of a man who has decided to die happy.

Then Hao asked, in his easiest voice, who supplied medicine this far up the valley.

The woman went and found something to do at the back of the house.

“That’s the third one,” Hao said, dropping onto the step beside Xuan with his bowl. “Two shopkeepers and a miller. They don’t get annoyed and they don’t tell you to go away. They stop being in the conversation.”

“You’ve enjoyed that.”

“I’ve hated it, I do this for a living.” He turned the bowl in his hands. “You can buy your way past a rude man, and a frightened one you can usually pay. This lot are polite and they aren’t frightened. There’s no lever on that.”

At dusk the village showed him what it was instead.

It started with a boy running the lane and knocking twice on four doors, and after that it was baskets, carried up one at a time to a flat grey stone at the top of the village that a lot of years had worn into a table.

Root bundles wrapped in leaf, two crates, and a sealed jar an old man carried in both arms and set down like it mattered more than he did.

Nobody spoke while it happened, and that was the part that got into Xuan’s chest. Forty people in a village square at dusk, and the loudest thing there was the river.

Two riders came down out of the trees in green, unhurried, and did not dismount.

The village didn’t watch. Everybody had a fence to mend or a child to carry inside, and the riders loaded the stone table onto a pack animal, and one of them raised a hand at nobody in particular, and then they were gone up the road with all of it.

The lane filled with noise again as though a lid had come off.

“Neither side counted it,” Qingyue said. She’d watched the whole thing from the trough with her forearms on the rail. “No tally, no receipt, no argument about a short basket. There’s always an argument about a short basket.”

Wen Bao, who had spent the entire performance eating, wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist.

“There’s no argument because nobody’s asking,” he said. “Ask in there. Somebody in that room’s drunk enough tonight.”

The inn had six tables and a roof that leaked in two places, and the man at the corner table had green-black stains up both hands, stopping clean where a sleeve would end.

He was drinking alone with a jar and a dented cup, and he was the only person in Shuiwei who looked up when Xuan came in and kept looking.

“Northern,” he said. “All of you, and two in imperial grey, which is either very stupid or very expensive. Sit if you like. I’m the only one who’ll talk to you, and I’ll be the only one all night.”

Xuan sat. Hao put a fresh jar on the table before he did, which was Hao all over.

“Fang,” the man said. “Fang of the third bench, once. Eleven years in that house before they put me out, and before you ask, it was mine, I did it, and I’d do it again with better hands.”

“I wasn’t going to ask.”

“Everyone asks.” He poured. “Ask the other thing, then.”

“Why won’t this village say the name?”

“Because there’s nothing to say.” Fang turned the jar a quarter turn, the way a man does when he’s told a thing before and never to anybody who’d listen. “That’s what you northerners get wrong before you arrive. You saw the baskets, you’ve spent all evening deciding it’s a tribute, and now you’re wondering how bad they are.”

“It crossed my mind.”

“They never asked for a single basket, and they didn’t ask in my grandfather’s time either.” He drank. “This valley sends it because four winters back the black lung came through, and the House put two people on this road for eleven days and took nothing. They do that everywhere. My old bench made the salve that’s on the shelf of every house you passed today, priced at cost, because the Matriarch decided sixty years ago that a house making poison for a living had better be worth having on this coast.”

Lian had come to stand at Xuan’s shoulder. “Then why is everybody terrified?”

“Because nobody can pay them back.” Fang gave her the first proper attention he’d given anyone. “Hand a man a gift he can’t return, and after thirty years of it he doesn’t love you. He carries a basket up to a stone every month with his voice down, and he couldn’t tell you what he’s afraid of, because there’s no name for owing that much.”

Nobody at the table had a good answer to that.

“Now the useful part, since you bought the jar,” Fang said. “You won’t get in. The gate turns everyone away and it does it kindly, and that’s arithmetic rather than cruelty. There are three benches in that house where a stranger who leans on the wrong table dies in the yard, and they’d sooner insult you than bury you.”

“Somebody must let people through.”

“Three people can. The Matriarch, who you will not meet.” He counted them off against the cup. “Elder Yun, who hasn’t said yes to anybody in nine years and enjoys it. And the Young Mistress.”

The room’s noise did the thing Xuan was starting to recognize, where it didn’t stop and everyone in it got quieter anyway.

“Tell me about her.”

“She’s the best of them and she’s the one to be careful of, and those are the same fact, so don’t write down half of it.” Fang leaned back. “You’ll hear about the north road on your way up. Twenty men took a caravan, she came down that road alone, and all twenty are alive today.”

“That’s the version where she’s merciful.”

“That’s the version where she’s finished.” He said it without any relish at all. “One of them begs at the ford at Liangkou, and he can’t hold a cup. His hand’s whole and his eyes are whole. What she took is whatever it is that makes a hand close, and he’ll live to be eighty. She’ll tell you herself she doesn’t kill people, and she’ll be telling you the truth. Think about what that leaves her.”

Xuan turned his own cup a quarter turn.

“Anything else?”

“One thing, and it’s the only advice worth the jar.” Fang put both stained hands flat on the table. “If she takes an interest in you, she’ll look inside you, and she won’t ask first. Everyone on this coast will tell you that’s the worst thing one person can do to another, and they’re right, and she does it anyway, and the house lets her because she’s never once been wrong about what she found.” He shrugged. “So decide now what’s in you that you’d rather nobody saw.”

‘Mira.’

[ I heard him.] Flat, and careful. [ We’ll come back to that.]

The rain started outside, hard, all at once, the way it apparently did down here.

Xuan poured for him, because he had one more question and had been holding it since the first cup.

“I’m looking for someone. It has nothing to do with the House.” He kept it even and low. “White robe, red at the collar and the cuffs. White hair to his shoulders and he isn’t old. Red eyes. He carries a straight sword and never puts a hand near it.”

Fang had been mid-reach for the cup.

His hand stopped, and finished the motion anyway, and set the cup down full and untouched on the table.

Then he stood, put a coin down that was too much for what he’d drunk, and walked out of the inn into the rain without collecting the change, without his jar, and without looking at anyone in the room.

The door swung twice behind him and settled.

“He wasn’t afraid of you,” Qingyue said quietly, after a while. “He’d been sitting here for an hour telling a stranger exactly how a great sect works, and he stood up rather than say a word about a man in a coat.”

“That’s two,” Xuan said.

Nobody at the table asked what the first one had been.

Later he stood under the eaves with the rain coming off the roof in a sheet, looking up the valley where the road went into the trees and didn’t come back out.

[ Two people on two ends of this continent, both of whom talk for a living, and neither of them said no.] Mira had been quiet a long while before that. [ It isn’t fear of a swordsman. People are afraid of swordsmen and they gossip about them anyway.]

‘Then what is it?’

[ I don’t know yet. Keep describing him, and keep counting, and sooner or later somebody’s going to be too slow.]