Chapter 32: Wrong Person Entirely

Song Huiya drank a few sips of water, gathered what she had, and pushed herself upright.

The worst of the bruising on her hands had faded, but the wounds were still raw and swollen and hadn't begun to close properly. She asked Song Zhiqie to bring hot water, cleaned the damaged tissue herself, and changed out of her fouled clothes with the methodical focus of someone who refuses to make suffering into a performance.

Song Zhiqie had stationed herself just outside the door, tending a fire, two handfuls of rice already in the pot and being stirred with a stick. Her eyes kept moving to the gap in the doorway. When she heard Song Huiya cough, she had the kettle in hand and one leg through the door before the sound had finished.

Even that minimal effort had cost more than it should have. Song Huiya was damp with sweat by the end of it, back against the wall, breathing carefully. Song Zhiqie helped her lie down and pulled the blanket up and held it there a moment. Then she stood at the bedside and, very slowly, reached out a hand toward Song Huiya's face.

Song Huiya, somewhere between amused and worn out, said, "What exactly are you checking for?"

"Master, I saw the old man today." Song Zhiqie's eyes had gone red at the edges. "He was in a coffin. Will you end up in one too?"

"I'm not some exception to the general rule," Song Huiya said plainly. "Of course I will."

Song Zhiqie set her chin on the edge of the bed and looked at her with the specific grief of someone who has not yet learned to keep it to themselves. "But I don't want you to."

Song Huiya almost laughed. "Master doesn't want to be poor either. I haven't noticed silver falling from the sky to fix that."

Song Zhiqie stared at her.

She had been ready to cry. The tears, confronted with this response, apparently decided against it. She was left only with the mournful expression, which she directed at Song Huiya for an extended moment.

Song Huiya squeezed her hand once, briefly. "I'll sleep a little longer," she said, and closed her eyes.

---

When she woke again, the sky had gone orange and the light inside the room had turned the color of embers. Song Zhiqie heated porridge, pressed the bowl into her hands, and watched her drink it with the vigilance of someone assigned to this task and taking it seriously.

As the color came back into Song Huiya's face, some of the tautness that had been keeping Song Zhiqie upright for two days quietly released itself. She looked down at the shadow she cast across the blanket, picked absently at a hole in the fabric—

A voice came through the window. A woman's, easy and unhurried: "You're awake."

Song Zhiqie came off the floor with a broken stick in her hand before she'd fully processed the sound.

The woman in the window looked regretful. "I came quickly hoping to find you still in a pathetic condition, and I've missed it by hours."

Song Huiya set down her bowl and studied the figure in the shadows. The voice was familiar in some distant, half-assembled way. She said, "The dew was heavy last night. Were you cold?"

The woman was about to answer when another hand appeared at the window frame and patted her shoulder. "Excuse me. Let me go first."

Liang Xi dropped into the room, leaned her blade against the wall with the ease of someone who has entered through worse, and looked around. A young scholar had followed her to the window but noticed, upon climbing halfway through, that there was a perfectly functional door on the other side. He withdrew.

Several measured knocks came at the main door. Song Zhiqie, still holding the stick, went to open it.

A man stood in the doorway — well-featured, unhurried, fanning himself with a folding fan in a manner that suggested he had given some thought to how this entrance would read. He closed his fist in greeting and said, "Good day to you, young man," and walked in at the pace of someone who has nowhere to be and knows it.

Song Zhiqie was already forming an opinion of him when he produced a string of copper coins bound with red cord and held them out to her with a warm smile.

"For the inconvenience."

Song Zhiqie accepted them with both hands, her assessment revising immediately. "Thank you, young master. I've never seen a scholar as handsome as you."

The man waved this off with becoming modesty. "Please, just call me Brother Yan."

Liang Xi was already moving around the room. Her eyes stopped on two weapons standing in the corner. She leaned in.

"The Northern Butcher's sword?"

Song Zhiqie, coins still in hand and in excellent spirits, had followed Liang Xi's gaze and read her expression accurately. "Master, that one's for me, isn't it?"

"It's nearly your height," Song Huiya said. "What would you do with it — hold it over your head when it rains?"

Liang Xi stepped closer with predictable direction. "Then give it to me."

"One million taels."

Liang Xi considered this for a genuinely earnest moment, then turned her face aside. "Return it to Bei Tu as a burial offering, then. I'll absorb the bad karma and steal it afterward."

Song Huiya pressed two fingers to her forehead.

Song Zhiqie voiced what the room was thinking: "Master, what kind of friends did you make before?"

Liang Xi, having accepted that the sword wasn't going anywhere, moved her attention elsewhere.

The scholar had been occupying himself across the room, spreading a brocade cloth across a nearby table, producing a bundle from somewhere on his person, and arranging a small number of candles with the focused attention of a man with a specific errand. No one was watching him.

Song Huiya asked, "Where is Bei Tu?"

Liang Xi leaned against the wall. "Laid to rest while you were asleep. I went. Burned paper money. There were a great many people — sutras being chanted in half the alleys in the neighborhood. A man who carried that much weight won't be bothered in whatever comes next." She paused. "It's a pity. I'd heard so much about him and never had the chance to learn anything."

Song Huiya nodded slowly. "Is that so."

Liang Xi observed her face with something approaching entertainment. "I rarely see that look on you. Could this actually be regret?"

Song Huiya didn't answer. She turned toward the scholar, who had finished lighting the candles and was now producing a memorial tablet, holding incense to it with the measured solemnity of genuine reverence.

"What was his connection to Bei Tu?"

"None whatsoever," Liang Xi said, her mouth curving slightly. "Complete strangers. And he isn't worshipping the Northern Butcher." She was watching Song Huiya the way someone watches a door they know is about to open. "It's someone you know."

"Someone I know."

Something in Liang Xi's expression was waiting for her to catch up. Song Huiya looked.

Song Zhiqie had crept forward and was standing on her toes, squinting at the wooden tablet. She didn't know many characters, but she knew these three down to the grain of the wood they might have been carved in. She spun around, eyes enormous, and pointed directly at the scholar.

Song Huiya understood.

The scholar sighed with appropriate gravity, set his incense in the bronze censer, pressed his palms together, and bowed. Song Huiya sat with whatever she was going to say to him held in her throat, not quite ready to be either swallowed or released.

Liang Xi was having the finest moment she'd had in some time. Her smile had reached a width that seemed anatomically ambitious. "It's rare to find him this presentable. All this filial devotion — it's almost touching."

The scholar turned on her, indignant. "You claim to have known Song Huiya well, and yet I see no grief from you — not even a stick of incense offered on her behalf. None. And people wonder why they say friendship in this world is as thin as autumn clouds."

Liang Xi nodded along agreeably. "To be fair, I never claimed our friendship was genuine."

Song Huiya, genuinely curious now, asked, "Who is he?"

"My disciple," Liang Xi said. "Wealthy. Extremely inconvenient."

The scholar compressed his mouth, stepped past her, shook his sleeves into order with dignity, and introduced himself with a bow that had clearly been practiced. "My surname is Yan. Yan Heyi."

He waited, smiling, for the recognition to arrive.

Song Huiya was quiet for a moment. "How did she end up with a disciple like you?"

Liang Xi: "He's rich."

A beat.

"Extremely rich."

Yan Heyi looked at the ceiling with the expression of a man who has made poor choices and lives with their consequences daily. "I didn't choose this arrangement either. She stole the Yan family sword and needed the family's backing to secure her position, so she took me on as a convenient tool. I am, in her words, the emperor whose authority she borrows to command her princes."

Song Huiya looked at him carefully. Several times. "He doesn't seem like it."

He didn't have that quality. Not even approximately.

Liang Xi snorted. "She means you look like a useless ornament."

"Has anyone ever seen such a refined, impeccably-dressed ornament?!" Yan Heyi's composure cracked briefly. "If I'm such a waste of space, perhaps you'd like to stop spending my money!"

Liang Xi did not appear to hear this.

Song Zhiqie's expression communicated a considered verdict on the entire exchange. Yan Heyi noticed that of everyone in the room she was the only one who had responded to him in a way that indicated basic social function. He addressed her with the careful courtesy of a man adjusting his expectations. "Do you have any questions?"

"No," Song Zhiqie said. "I can't read. What you're saying is too elevated for me."

Yan Heyi absorbed this. He seemed to be revising his picture of the household — the reclusive and apparently formidable swordsman, the child disciple who had received no schooling whatsoever. He rallied. "That's perfectly alright. Brother Yan will teach you from the beginning."

He turned back to the room, sighed with feeling, and clasped his hands. "With Song Huiya gone, truly there are few enough heroes left worth the name. Nameless Cliff, Nameless Cliff — what has it buried but bones and daylight? The sun sets and takes everything down with it."

Silence settled over the room. No one was sure what to offer it.

Yan Heyi sat with the quiet for a moment, attributed it to the reserved grief of martial people — a sadness too deep to be spoken — and felt it only appropriate that he, too, should feel it on Song Huiya's behalf. He composed himself, remembered he hadn't yet asked the name of his host, and turned to her with polite inquiry.

"Hero, if I may — your name?"

Song Huiya touched her brow. For the first time in recent memory, the answer felt strangely difficult to produce. She said, "Someone who can't seem to manage to die. What would you call that?"

Yan Heyi thought it over with apparent sincerity. "A centipede, perhaps. Even dead, they don't fall."

"My surname is Song," Song Huiya said.

Liang Xi, who had been working through this at her own speed, arrived at understanding and laughed. "You're too generous with him, Hero Centipede."

Yan Heyi was a person of reasonable social intuition and did not press where he could see she was avoiding. Instead he bent down, extracted a cloth bag from his bundle, and held it out toward Song Zhiqie.

"This was left for you. By your junior brother."

Song Zhiqie touched the outside of the fabric. Something cold. Hard. Her mind went to a place it felt presumptuous to go, and she didn't let herself think the words. Song Huiya opened it.

Gold.

Song Zhiqie's voice cracked at the quantity of it. "So much—"

Song Huiya turned one of the pieces in her hand, feeling its weight, feeling something shift in her chest. "Which junior brother?"

Liang Xi considered this. "Did I ask?"

Yan Heyi: "You didn't."

"Someone who didn't want to show his face," Liang Xi said. "How many junior brothers do you have?"

The master and disciple were already bent over the bag together, counting.

Liang Xi found a chair. "How many days until you can move? When do we leave?"

Song Huiya didn't look up. "Leave for where?"

"To kill someone. Unless you'd prefer a spring outing."

She seemed to remember something, dug into her waist, and tossed an object across the room.

"Here."

Song Huiya caught it. She turned it over in her hands and recognized the engravings before she fully registered what she was holding. The jade pendant. Song Xiwei's jade pendant. She sat straighter.

"Why is this in your hands?"

Liang Xi blinked. She ran back through her own recent history, checking for theft. "Didn't you give it to me? You asked me to bring it to Jin Dao Wang for repairs." She frowned. "What do you mean, why?"

Song Huiya held it up to the orange light from the window. Fine cracks ran through the middle, more than one, branching like frost on glass. She said, quietly, "Oh."

Song Zhiqie had been watching her face. "How did it crack?"

Song Huiya looked at Liang Xi.

Liang Xi turned to look behind herself, slowly, making absolutely certain no one was standing there. Then she pointed at her own chest.

"You're asking me?"

Yan Heyi had been watching the exchange and was now watching it more carefully. He looked between the two women and said, with growing uncertainty, "You're not — is this the friend you came to find?"

Liang Xi was quiet. Her posture, subtly, changed — the looseness going out of it.

Song Huiya considered how to say it. "To be honest, I—"

Yan Heyi interrupted, "You owe her five hundred taels."

Song Huiya finished her sentence.

"She's not the person you're looking for."