Chapter 298: Girl with the Melon

The east rooms sat at the top of the third terrace behind a low wall, and the girl was sitting on the wall with her legs hanging over a forty foot drop. Bare feet, sleeves shoved past the elbow, and a wedge of melon she was getting through with no dignity whatsoever. She spat the seeds over the edge one at a time, aiming at something down below. She stopped chewing when Xuan came up the last of the steps.

"Young Mistress," Steward Mu said, without breaking stride.

"Steward," the girl said around the melon, and went back to it.

Xuan got two paces past her before she spoke again. "You walk fine."

He turned, and found she wasn’t looking at his face at all. She was working up him from the knees, to the hips, to somewhere around the middle of his back, the way a farrier looks at a horse that’s been sold to him as sound.

"Do that again," she said. "Three steps, straight line, and don’t perform."

"Who are you?"

"Three steps and I’ll tell you."

He should have kept walking. He did the three steps instead, because he was plainly in a conversation whose rules he hadn’t been handed, and the quickest way to learn a game is to play a round of it.

She watched him do it and set the melon down on the stone beside her. "Nothing. You should have a limp, a compensation, a short stride on the left and a cane to lean the whole business on, and there’s none of it. Not a thread."

"People keep telling me I’m healthy. It’s becoming a theme."

"Your father hired me," she said.

Xuan stopped where he was. Behind him, at the door of the east rooms, Qingyue had gone still with her hand on the frame.

"Lin Zhen of the Skyedge Sword Sect." She said the name carefully, like a woman quoting a document she’d read more times than she meant to. "He wrote to my house about his son’s meridians and he paid for it, somebody had to sign the paper, and that somebody turned out to be me. So I crossed."

[ Xuan.] Mira came in fast and low. [ The tournament. West stand, third pillar from the aisle stair, second morning. Girl up on the rail with a melon, watching your bracket while three hundred people watched the main floor. I told you to look at her and you were busy bleeding into your own boot.]

It arrived all at once, the way a name does when somebody finally puts a face in front of it. "You’re the melon girl," Xuan said.

She put both hands flat on the wall. "I’m sorry?"

"In Yuncheng." He could see it now, clear as a lamp, a small figure with her feet on the rail and her chin on her knees while the rest of the row craned at the main floor. "You had your feet up and you were eating a melon and you weren’t watching the fight everybody else had paid to watch."

"That is the least flattering way anybody has ever recognised me," she said, "and I’m going to be annoyed about it later. You didn’t look twice."

"I looked once. Then a man from the eastern bracket tried to take my head off, and the question went out of my mind for four years."

"That’s honest, at least." She wiped her palms on her knees." I went to Yuncheng because that’s where the patient was supposed to be, and I’d been on the road a long time by then. Carts, two boats, a port town where I waited on weather until I could recite the harbour master’s opinions from memory. I walked into that city still smelling of the last boat."

"And went to the arena."

"I went to the arena to ask after a sick boy, and the sick boy was on the sand throwing a grown man into a wall." She picked the melon back up and turned it in her fingers. "That was the job finished. Nothing to treat, nobody to treat it for. I sat down in the cheap end of the stand and watched the whole bracket, and then I went and found a boat going the other way."

"You never came and said anything."

"What would I have said? Congratulations on not dying, here’s my bill?" She snorted. "You didn’t know me from a post in the ground. I knew you, mind."

"You’d never met me."

"I’d read you." She said it as though that were plainly the more reliable of the two. "Name, age, sect, what was in your meridians and how far along it had got, and months on a road with nothing to do but go over it. I could have told you which side of your body would fail first. I knew that boy better than his friends did, and then I turned up and he was winning."

Xuan let that sit against his ribs a moment. His father had never once mentioned it, and Lin Zhen had never had money in his life that wasn’t already promised elsewhere. He put it away to take out later, somewhere with a wall to lean on.

"So that’s what you are to me," she went on. "A job that never happened. Time ago I’ve had you filed under waste of a season, and I’d have left you there quite happily, except for one thing that keeps getting in my way."

"Go on."

"Do you know what was in you?"

"I know what it did to me."

"That’s the patient’s answer, and I’d expect nothing else. Here’s mine." She swung a leg up onto the wall to sit sideways, and it was the first time since he’d come up the steps that she looked at his face. "Third-level meridian rot. That’s what my house calls it, and there are only three levels, because a fourth would just be an execution with extra steps. First level we wash out. It’s expensive and it’s ugly and you keep your legs. Second takes a year, half your cultivation, and you spend the rest of your life knowing when it’s going to rain."

"And the third."

"The third doesn’t come out. There’s no method for it and no medicine, and nobody on any continent I know of has ever taken one out of a living body. That includes my grandmother, and she’d tell you so herself and be irritated about it." Her heel knocked once against the stone. "What my house sells for a third-level is time. We slow it down, we keep the pain civil, we keep the patient useful for as long as he’s got. Every one of those contracts ends the same way, and your father’s paper said third level, because I read it until the ink wore thin."

Down the terrace the mist kept rolling off the long houses and the water went on chuckling downhill, and nobody in green so much as glanced at the pair of them.

"So here’s the question that’s been stuck in my teeth for four years," Qingluo said. "A thing that nothing on this earth takes out of a body came out of yours before you were sixteen. It wasn’t slowed and it wasn’t managed. It went. So who took it out, and what did they use?"

’She isn’t going to let this go.’

[ Not in this life.] Mira sounded delighted, and under the delight there was something a great deal more careful. [ Don’t lie to her. She’ll catch it, and then you’re having a different conversation with a different woman.]

"I don’t have an answer you’d accept," Xuan said.

"That’s not the same as not having one."

"It’s the version you’re getting today."

She thought about that, and then did the one thing he had no answer prepared for. She took a small knife out of her sleeve, cut a slice off the melon, and held it out to him over a forty foot drop with her wrist perfectly relaxed. He took it and ate it.

[ Bold.]

’It’s melon.’

[ On this continent it’s a document, and you’ve just put your name on it.]

Something in her face moved by about a hair’s width. She wiped the knife on her sleeve and put it away, and when she spoke again there was a little less armour in it. "Shen Qingluo. Since you asked earlier, and since you ate that without asking what was in it, which everybody asks."

At the foot of the steps Steward Mu waited with her ledger, in the manner of a woman told to escort somebody who now finds herself in the middle of other people’s business.

Qingluo swung her legs back over the inside of the wall and dropped down onto the terrace. She came up a full head shorter than him, and it made no difference at all to the way the air sat between them.

"You were wearing that sword before you knew our gate would open," she said. "Bring it tomorrow, early, before the benches start. There’s a yard on the fourth terrace that nobody uses."

"You want to fight me?"

"I want to measure you." She lobbed the rind over the wall and dusted off her hands. "You’ve walked around four years with somebody’s impossible work inside you. It’s the only copy in the world, nobody has ever looked at it properly, and I’ve waited long enough."