Chapter 305: The Road In

By noon on the first day Xuan had worked out exactly what was in his pack. Three of the heaviest things in it were melons, and he had carried them up two ridges before he’d found them.

"You brought fruit."

"I brought four days of water in a skin I don’t have to carry," Qingluo said, from about eight paces ahead of him. She had the hat, a small pack and the flat case across her back, and she was walking like a woman on her way to a wedding. "There’s no clean water past the ford. You’ll be glad of them on day three and you’ll apologise to me then."

"You could carry one."

"I could. It would upset the balance of my case." She tipped the hat back. "I’m the only person on this road who can do the thing we’re walking towards. You’re the one who can lift a mule. We’ve divided it honestly."

’She isn’t wrong.’

[ No, and she got all of it out without laughing, which took work.]

The cart track gave out at midday and became a foot track, and the bamboo came in close on both sides, and the cicadas started up and did not stop for the rest of the day.

She cut the first melon at the second rest, sitting on a stone with her boots off, and ate it in the way that had apparently offended him at Yuncheng four years ago.

"Ask me things," she said. "It’s two days, and I’d rather not walk them in silence being interesting at each other."

"Why does your grandmother never leave the mountain?"

"She left it twice and both times something in the house went wrong while she was gone, and now she’s decided the two facts are related. They aren’t." Qingluo spat a seed. "So the house doesn’t travel. Except for me."

"That seems backwards. You’re the heir."

"That’s exactly why. I’m the only one whose word is the house’s word, so when there’s a contract three months away, they send the girl who can sign." She turned the rind over. "I’ve been out more than anybody there. I’ve done deliveries nobody else would take. And the real reason I keep volunteering is one I’m not proud of."

Xuan sat down on the pack. It was a considerable relief and he chose not to say so out loud.

"On a road, nobody knows what I am," she said. "That’s it. That’s the whole of the shameful reason. In an inn two provinces from home I’m a short woman with a case and a bad hat, and the man pouring the wine doesn’t take the cup back off the table with a cloth over his hand when I’m done with it."

"Somebody did that?"

"A man in a teahouse in Anhu did it when I was fifteen, and he was polite about it, and he wasn’t even wrong. I’d been at a bench that morning." She shrugged. "What I remember is that he’d have done it whether I’d been at a bench or not."

They walked until the light went orange and stopped at a charcoal camp that had been empty for a long time, and Xuan built the fire while she went over the water in the stream with two tubes and a strip of cloth before she’d let him fill anything.

"That’s clean," she said. "It won’t be tomorrow."

He got the food out. She got the second melon out, cut it in half, and handed him a half without saying anything about it, which was the first time she’d given him a piece without watching what he did with it.

"You asked what I was doing in Yuncheng," she said.

"I asked whether you’d been there for the patient."

"Your sect was on my paper and your name was the reason I crossed, so that part’s true." She pulled a seed off her tongue. "What I haven’t said is that I’d been out a year and a half before that contract, and I’d been taking the jobs that went north on purpose. When they put an empire posting in front of me I had my hand up before anybody finished reading it out."

"So the contract was the ride."

"The ride, and a fee, and my grandmother deciding I’d volunteered out of duty. I let her decide it." Qingluo leaned back on her elbows. "That’s the piece I’d rather she never hears. She put me on a four-month road for a boy’s meridians, and I was already looking at that map for my own reasons."

"And you got nothing."

"I got an hour on a bench and a morning of a man’s back." She said it flatly. "Then I went home and got robbed on a road, and I came in through my own gate with no answer, no patient and a driver who wouldn’t look at me. It’s the worst year I’ve had and nobody in that house knows any of it went wrong."

’Mira, she’s giving me a great deal and I haven’t given her anything.’

[ She knows. She’s not doing it by accident.] A pause. [ Careful with the part of you that wants to even it up tonight. That’s exactly what it’s for.]

Xuan turned the melon rind over in his hands and thought about Qingyue on the chest by the window.

"What happens if you get one wrong?" he said. "In front of people, at a bench, with a name on it."

"Nothing happens to me. That’s the horrible part." She sat up. "If I dose a child wrong in a village, the child dies, the village buries it, and the next month they carry a basket up to a stone anyway, because where else are they going to go? Nobody would even shout at me."

"Somebody would."

"Nobody has. Not once, not ever, in my whole life, and I’ve been wrong." She said that without any self-pity in it at all. "Which means the only person keeping me careful is me, and I’m twenty-one, and that arrangement should frighten everybody more than it does."

"That’s why you go on the roads."

"Partly. Out here things go wrong at me properly. Carters shout. Innkeepers overcharge me. Bandits take the cart." She stopped, and then went on anyway. "It’s easier to know what you are when the world isn’t arranging itself around you."

"You’ll get the house in the end," Xuan said. "It’ll arrange itself twice as hard."

"I’ve thought about that more than anything else in my life." Qingluo put the last piece of melon in her mouth and threw the rind into the dark. "My grandmother is eighty-six and she’s the best alchemist alive and I’d say that even if I hated her. When she goes, the coast will need somebody to be that for them. What I actually want is about nine years of being nobody first, and I don’t get those, and there’s nobody to be annoyed at about it."

They let the fire do the talking after that. The cicadas had stopped and the frogs had taken over, and somewhere off in the dark something big moved in water and then didn’t move again.

"Your turn," Qingluo said. "How old were you when they made you the lord of that place?"

"Nineteen."

"How many people?"

"Two hundred and eleven, before the war."

"And after it?"

"Fewer." Xuan put another stick on the fire. "I know what you mean about nobody shouting. Mine stopped about a month after the war ended. There’s an elder at home who’s been at Skyedge sixty years, and he used to throw me out of the training hall for being lazy, and now he stands up when I come into a room and I’d give a lot to have the other version of him back."

"Does anybody there tell you when you’re wrong?"

"My wife."

"Then hold on to that one," Qingluo said, and lay down with her hat over her face, and was asleep before he’d finished the fire.

The second morning the road went down into wet ground and the bamboo thinned out, and by mid-morning there was standing water on both sides of the track with a skin on it.

She stopped at a leaning post at the edge of it and waited for him to catch up with both packs. There were notches cut into the wood at shoulder height, four of them, deep and old.

"One for every person of ours who’s gone past this post," she said. "My grandmother cuts them herself when they come back, and she cuts them the same when they don’t."

"There’s no fifth."

"There will be tonight. She’ll have done mine before we’ve made camp."

"From here you drink nothing I haven’t drunk first," she said. "You don’t put a hand in the water. If you cut yourself, you tell me the same minute, not at the next rest."

"How far is the sink?"

"Tomorrow, if we’re quick today." Qingluo pulled the hat down and stepped off the last of the dry ground. "And from about an hour from now, the air stops being free. Start counting what you breathe."