Chapter 301: House of Green

The maid arrived with the breakfast trays on the second morning and did not stop talking until she left.

Her name was Ah-Ping, she was about seventeen, and she had been sent up from the Young Mistress’s household to look after the northerners. She put the trays down, opened the shutters, took one look at Tianming’s bandage and said it had been wrapped by somebody in a hurry.

"That was your mistress," Lian said.

"Then my mistress was in a hurry." Ah-Ping collected the water jug. "Oh, and before you ask, yes, I report on you. Where you go, what you ask for, who you talk to. Everyone knows I do it, so there’s no point trying to sneak around me."

"Who do you report to?"

"Young Mistress, mostly. Steward Mu if it’s about the rooms." She considered. "Elder Kang asked yesterday too. I told him I’d see what I remembered. That’s usually enough to make an elder understand I don’t plan on remembering much."

Xuan decided on the spot that he liked her. "And if we ask you things?"

"Ask away. If I’m allowed to answer, I will." She hooked the jug onto her hip. "If I’m not, I’ll tell you it’s bench business. You’ll hear that a lot around here."

They were not allowed to wander. Anywhere Xuan went, somebody in green went with him, and the somebody was always polite and never in a hurry to leave. He spent the day walking the terraces with an escort and learning the house the only way it would let him.

He found Lian in the long house on the fourth terrace, at the end of a bench, with her sleeves rolled and her jaw set. There were nine people working that bench and four of them were younger than Tianming. Nobody was talking. The room was warm, the light came down through the glass in long panels, and the only sounds were stone on stone and water moving in the channels under the floor.

"How bad is it?"

"Don’t."

He waited. She ground something, tipped it out, looked at it, and swept it into a waste dish with the side of her hand.

"That’s four failures." She nodded toward the girl beside her without looking over. "She’s done eleven. All eleven are better than mine."

"How old is she?"

"Fifteen. She’s been doing this since she was six." Lian picked the pestle back up. "Back home, people came to me because I was the best alchemist for a hundred miles. I spent eight years earning that. This morning a child showed me a better way to do something I came up with myself."

"Please tell me you used it."

Lian finally looked at him. "Obviously I used it. I’m offended, not stupid." She started grinding again, harder. "That’s where I’m at, Young Master. I’m an apprentice here. Fine. Then I’ll be an apprentice. They can throw me out when they’re tired of me."

Xuan let her work. On the way out he passed the girl on her left, who had her tongue between her teeth and eleven clean dishes in a row, and who didn’t look up at him either.

Hao he found on the second terrace, sitting on a crate with his hands between his knees. He was doing nothing at all, which was alarming.

"I can’t spend money here," Hao said.

"At all?"

"I tried. Hired a courier this morning. He looked at my silver like I’d handed him a dead rat." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Apparently he owes somebody on the third bench, who owes him because of a roof, and somehow that means my letter goes north for free. There was a ten-minute explanation. I understood maybe half of it."

"So it’s favours."

"It’s debt. Just without numbers." He looked genuinely offended by the concept. "Everybody knows who owes who, nobody writes any of it down, and somehow this place functions. I’ve traded for sixteen years, Xuan. I can put a price on almost anything. I have no idea what one repaired roof is worth."

"What did you do?"

"Stopped trying to pay them." Hao’s face cleared a little. "The Anhu shipping issue came up, so I fixed it. They’ve apparently been arguing over it for two years. Took me an hour."

"And now?"

"Now three people owe me something." He frowned. "I don’t know what. That’s the part driving me insane."

The disciples’ yard was on the fifth terrace, and Xuan heard it from two flights down. Twenty of them were up there and none of them sounded like they were training.

Tianming was in the middle of it with his sword out and four of them working him. It was a practice bout in name only. One kept drifting round behind him, and one wore a glove that was grey at the fingertips, and every time that glove came near Tianming’s face the boy blinked and lost half a second. Somebody had put a boot on his bandaged shoulder in a clinch, and the bandage had gone dark.

’Mira, the glove.’

[ Nothing serious. Makes the eyes sting and water. They use it on each other all the time. Think wooden sword, southern edition. ]

The one running it stood at the edge with his arms folded. Early twenties, clean green, the posture of somebody who had been told he was promising early enough to believe it. One of the others called him Ren Zhuo.

"He’s got the sword out again," Ren Zhuo said, to nobody. "Northerners really do love solving everything with the sword."

Tianming lasted longer than Xuan expected and lost anyway, on his back, with the grey glove flat on his forehead and the yard laughing.

Xuan stayed where he was until it was over. Then he waited by the steps while the boy came up them with his shirt stuck to his shoulder and his eyes streaming.

"Don’t."

"I haven’t said anything."

"They cheat."

"They fight." Xuan looked back toward the yard. "You trained somewhere that stops the bout if a man throws dirt in your eyes. They clearly didn’t."

Tianming wiped his face with his good hand. "Then teach me their tricks."

"No."

"Why?"

"Because you’ve seen them do it for one afternoon and they’ve been doing it for years. You’ll try something clever, they’ll see it coming, and you’ll end up on your back again."

"So what am I supposed to do?"

"Stop giving them the same openings." Xuan started up the steps and the boy fell in beside him. "That one keeps circling behind you? Put your back against the wall. Make him come where you can see him."

"That’s it?"

"For tomorrow? Yeah. That’s enough. Fix one problem before you go collecting five more."

He did not see Qingyue once all day, which was itself information. She turned up in their rooms after dark, sat on the edge of the bed, and pulled the pins out of her hair one at a time before she said anything at all.

"I followed Qingluo."

"Qingyue."

"Relax. Badly, apparently. She caught me twice." She set the pins down in a row. "Both times she stopped and waited until I was close enough to know she’d seen me. I think she was making fun of me."

"And you kept following her."

"Obviously." She started on the next pin. "Do you want to know what I actually saw?"

"Please."

"People listen when she speaks. Even elders. But they don’t crowd her." Qingyue rubbed the back of her scalp. "It’s subtle. Nobody avoids her outright. They just leave her a little more room than everyone else."

"Because she’s the heir?"

"Maybe. That’s what I thought at first." Qingyue glanced at him. "But heirs usually have people around them. She ate alone on the wall again. Later she spoke to her grandmother at the top of the steps. I couldn’t hear them, but Qingluo came down looking angry."

"Could’ve been anything."

"Could’ve been." Qingyue nodded. "I’m not saying I know what they argued about. I’m saying she doesn’t look happy here."

Xuan sat down on the chest by the window. "And me?"

"She finds you interesting."

"That’s disappointingly vague."

"It’s the only part I can actually prove." Qingyue’s mouth moved, briefly. "And before your ego gets involved, I don’t think it’s your face. Every time I’ve seen her watching you, it’s after you’ve done something with your qi or after you’ve mentioned the rot."

"So I’m a medical problem."

"At the moment? Pretty much."

"That I can live with."

"I’m not finished." She turned around to face him properly. "I also think she’s curious about where we’re going."

"Based on?"

"She asked Ah-Ping where our ship came from. Asked one of the porters how long the northern crossing takes. Yesterday she spent ten minutes looking through the maps in the receiving hall after you left." Qingyue shrugged one shoulder. "Maybe she’s bored. Maybe she wants to travel. Maybe none of it means anything."

"But you don’t think it’s nothing."

"No. I think she wants something outside this valley. I don’t know if that means us yet."

Xuan leaned back against the wall. "That’s very different from saying she’s coming with us."

"Yes. Which is why I didn’t say she’s coming with us." Qingyue gave him a flat look. "If she asks, though, don’t answer immediately. Hear what she actually wants first."

"That’s unusually cautious."

"It’s normal caution. You just spend enough time with Mira that you’ve forgotten what it looks like."

He ignored that. "You’re very calm about Qingluo."

"I’m calm because so far she’s been useful, direct, and she hasn’t lied to me that I’ve caught." Qingyue looked down at the pins in her hand. "If any of those change, so will I."

"Fair."

"And one more thing." She looked up again. "She’s put something in your body twice now without telling you exactly what it would do first."

"She took it back out."

"I know. I’m not accusing her of poisoning you." Qingyue’s voice stayed level. "I’m saying watch what happens the next time she asks you to trust her. Maybe she’s just doing her work. Maybe she’s seeing how much freedom you’ll give her. I can’t tell yet."

Xuan sat with that for a moment, which was a longer moment than he was comfortable with.

"How do you even notice half of this in one day?"

"Because nobody cares what I’m doing while they’re busy watching you." Qingyue set the last pin beside the others. "You’re very distracting, husband. It’s useful."