The boy's eyes fixed on the water as Liang Xi turned toward him. A faint spark of awareness had returned to his otherwise hollow gaze. He tried to push himself up on his elbows, failed halfway, and sank back down, eyes shut, catching his breath.
Liang Xi grabbed him by the collar with one hand and hauled him upright. The boy shifted, settled himself on the ground, accepted the grilled fish, and ate without argument.
He hadn't eaten in days. His muscles had begun to give out, and he knew better than to rush, so he picked through the flesh carefully, pulling bones free with each small bite.
The carriage had supplies. Yan Heyi dug out some wound medicine, uncertain whether it was the right kind, and handed it over along with hot water.
Liang Xi returned to the fire and went back to grilling his own fish.
A short while later, whether from the medicine or from finally having food in him, the boy got to his feet. Unsteady, but upright. He didn't run. He walked to the riverbank, stripped off his shirt, and washed his wounds with cold water.
He shook the whole time. He was so thin it was painful to look at. Skin stretched tight over jutting bone, every joint visible when he moved, the skeleton beneath him pulling at each motion like something half-assembled.
Liang Xi walked over slowly and caught sight of the tattoo on the boy's back, spreading up across his shoulders and neck. Someone had cut through it, more than once, with something sharp. The scarring left ragged lines crossing the ink, and the remaining strokes were barely legible.
Liang Xi crouched beside him, entirely without the self-awareness that this might look strange, and studied it with open curiosity. "What does it say on your back?"
The boy's teeth were chattering. His whole body was shaking, wracked with cold and pain. His lips moved but made no sound.
Yan Heyi tugged at Liang Xi's sleeve, trying to pull her away from the obvious.
Liang Xi didn't move. She leaned closer. "Are you mute?"
Yan Heyi said flatly, "You really know how to ask questions. How is he supposed to answer you?"
"Song Huiya always talked like that," Liang Xi said, dismissive. "Direct. No filler. Only young people think flowery speech is a virtue."
Yan Heyi shot back without thinking, "Which is exactly why everyone wanted to hit her."
Liang Xi turned to look at him. The expression on her face was somewhere between threat and satisfaction. "I'll remember that. We'll talk about it later."
Yan Heyi sighed and gave up the argument. He told her the plain truth: "Some noble families tattoo their slaves to mark ownership. Like him."
"A house slave?" Something shifted in Liang Xi's face. She moved half a step closer, pulled up the thing inside her that knew how to sit with someone, and said with complete sincerity, eyes clear, "I was a house slave once. My household head was decent enough. Yours, from the look of it, maybe not."
"My living ancestor," Yan Heyi called out, pained, "go be a house slave somewhere else. Keep this up and Yanjiabao will have to change its name."
Wind came off the far bank. The sky broke apart in the surface of the river, white light scattering across the current. A few yellow leaves drifted on the water, moving toward them, then swinging away downstream, flickering in and out of sight.
The boy stared at the river. His lips pressed together. He whispered: "No."
Liang Xi had been muttering insults at Yan Heyi and missed it. "What? No what? So you're not mute?"
The boy opened his mouth. The sounds that came out were slightly off, rough and cracked, like a voice that hadn't been used in years. He forced out his meaning through it.
Liang Xi caught the thread of anger running beneath the hoarseness. She straightened up and said, solemn: "Not a house slave."
Yan Heyi had genuinely never seen anything like Liang Xi's ability to make people speak who had no intention of doing so.
It was only then that Liang Xi noticed his eyes. They were large eyes, buried under the tangled hair that had fallen across his forehead. When she first looked at him, she'd seen only the sickness and missed what was underneath: something sharp and watching and ready.
She knew that look. It was the look of someone who'd spent a long time on the edge of death and had made a decision about it. Always prepared to go down and take someone with them.
It was the same look she'd worn herself.
Liang Xi smiled. "You're interesting. What's your name?"
Wei Ling left the inn before her feet did, stepping out first into thought. The waiter came over and swapped the wine pot for a fresh one, chattering to Song Huiya about the interesting streets nearby, when the young man from the night before walked in again.
This time he was alone, carrying a finely made wooden box in both arms. He swept his eyes across the room and walked straight toward them.
The waiter didn't wait to hear a word. He gathered himself and left at speed.
The young man kept himself deferential. He stood at the table and bent slightly at the waist. "My lady. Could I have a moment of your time?"
Song Huiya was somewhere else entirely, turning over Wei Ling's business in her mind, irritated and preoccupied. She looked at him once, cold and dismissive, and looked away.
He didn't push it. He set the wooden box on the table, reached out, undid the latch, and lifted the lid just enough.
"My household head wishes to make your acquaintance."
The gold was stacked in neat rows on crimson silk.
Song Zhiqi went rigid. Her spine straightened like a wire pulled taut. Her toes touched the floor, her hands pressed into the table, and she looked ready to launch herself upright.
For a box like that, she thought, you could call him friend or father or whatever else you liked.
She looked at Song Huiya with barely contained desperation.
Song Huiya's expression did not shift. "I don't make friends easily."
Song Zhiqi and the young man both deflated at the same moment.
Song Zhiqi looked like a mourner.
The young man looked like he was walking on ice.
He chose his next words carefully. "Please don't misunderstand, senior. My household head means no disrespect. He's well aware that gold is a crude thing to bring before someone of your standing. But circumstances didn't allow for proper preparation, so this was the only way to express his sincerity."
Song Zhiqi swallowed. Her eyes hadn't moved from the box. She nodded along as if agreeing on Song Huiya's behalf.
Song Huiya placed one hand on the lid and rubbed the corner of it lightly, as if feeling the grain of the wood. She smiled, and there was nothing warm in it. "The whole world talks about unrest and failing harvests, yet your household head has gold like this to spare. Very generous, for a stranger. Even people sitting on gold mountains don't spend at this rate without reason. I'm a small fish in a small pond, as you can see. This is too much."
"Senior is too modest." The young man pressed ahead, reciting what he'd prepared. "I'm here about yesterday's fugitive slave. I don't know what he told you, but I'm concerned a villain may have fed you lies, so I wanted to give you the truth of it."
He paused for effect. "That creature is a genuine menace."
He watched her face. Nothing. He kept going. "His start was tragic, I'll grant him that. Both parents dead young, nearly starved in the streets. A retainer in our household took pity on him and brought him in. Treated him generously. Fed him, clothed him, never asked for more than honest service. He was raised like family." He let the pause do work. "And what did he do? He betrayed his master, killed his adoptive father with his own hands, and ran off with stolen property."
"Oh?" Song Huiya's voice was light, amused. "And then?"
The young man exhaled with manufactured regret. "My household head was willing to forgive the theft. But a good brother died because of this boy's treachery, a man who'd shown him nothing but kindness. That's not something you let go of. The boy spent years hiding outside Panping and then, recently, had the nerve to sneak back in. Someone recognized him and reported it. My household head sent us to find him and settle the blood debt. Who could swallow that kind of grievance and do nothing? Don't you think, senior, that's reasonable?"
Song Huiya drew out a long, considering note. "Reasonable."
Song Zhiqi had been with her long enough to know the rhythm. She spoke up immediately: "When my master says something is reasonable, she means she thinks you're full of air."
Song Huiya's eyes went wide.
Song Zhiqi covered her mouth, corrected herself with a smile: "She means she's not interested in dealing with you."
Song Huiya said, "I'm not so far gone that I'd let a boy still damp behind the ears spin me a sob story and walk away convinced. If things are exactly as you say, your household head can rest easy. I may or may not drag the boy back on a whim. That's not a promise."
The young man tested carefully: "Yesterday, several of my brothers disappeared without a trace..."
Song Huiya sipped her wine at leisure. "Nothing to do with me. I helped the kid and left. Whatever your brothers stirred up out there is their own business."
He pressed: "Keeping that boy is a liability. If you could tell me where he's headed..."
Song Huiya set her cup down hard on the table. The sound of it shut his mouth.
She smiled with her face and nothing else. "You've heard the saying that too many words invite trouble? Walk down any street and stop someone at random and they'll have half a night's worth of grievances for you. Everyone is carrying something. But the more you talk about how terrible this boy is, the more curious I get about what exactly he did to people like you."
The young man looked down at his shoes.
"Still here?" Song Huiya said.
He clasped his fists, bowed properly, and left.
He was two steps gone when Song Huiya knocked the back of her hand against the lid of the wooden box.
He turned back. Saw her expression. Picked up the gold without argument, bowed again, and walked out.
He was gone into the street before Song Zhiqi's eyes finally gave up tracking him. The feeling was like watching part of her collapse inward.
"Being a hero," she said, rim of her cup balanced on her forehead, sitting still as a carved figure, eyes closed, "is genuinely very hard work."
Having to treat money like dirt, specifically.
She might as well go pick up after horses.
Song Huiya said, with complete honesty and no apology: "Your education is incomplete. Don't think that because your master is occasionally short of funds she was always this way. I've moved through great scenes in my time. Once I've taken you through a few of them, a small box of gold won't register as anything worth noting."
Song Zhiqi heard this and felt the ground shift under her. The thought arrived immediately: the money her uncle gave them would not last. Song Huiya would throw it into the wind within days, and then the two of them would be living like stray cats with no prospect of retirement.
She pressed her fingers to her temple and closed her eyes.
"Alas."
Then, heavier: "Alas."
"I sort of understand what talking past each other means now," Liang Xi said, rubbing her temples, head aching. "I still don't understand what he said."
The boy's speech was thick with accent and worn down at the edges. Liang Xi had spent a long time puzzling through it and still had only a rough picture.
From the driver's seat, Yan Heyi said with some satisfaction, "I could follow it."
"Can you read?" Liang Xi asked the boy.
He shook his head, wrapped in his coat.
Liang Xi waved a hand. "It's fine. I don't know many big characters either."
The boy said, "I know a few."
He leaned against the side of the carriage and felt the wheels find every rock on the road, the whole frame jolting with each one. His eyelids felt weighted. He let them fall, forced them back open.
The brief dark was like the shape of his life until now.
His parents had run a small pharmacy in the city. Ordinary people. A medicine pot hung from the rafters over the sleeping platform, and when they weren't watching, he used to climb up on a stool and slap at it.
He'd only known them a few months before everything changed. He'd grown up out in the countryside, and only came to live with them in the city after his grandparents died one after the other.
They were too busy keeping the shop afloat to give him much attention. They bought him brushes, ink, paper, and a stone and sent him to school early.
On his first day, the teacher read aloud from dense and knotted scripture while the children around him swayed in their seats and repeated the words back. He sat there as if he'd been dropped into a foreign country, gripping his brush, and copied his name onto the paper very carefully.
His real name was Ji Pingxuan.
After a full day of listening, the only sentence that lodged itself in his memory was: The sky and earth are dark and yellow, and the universe is vast.
He still didn't know what it meant.
He had carried that confusion all his life. Looking back, he could see where it had started. The first time he failed to pay attention, he set himself on a road he never found a way off of.
"I learned a few characters," Ji Pingxuan said. "And then they all died."
It was evening when he swung his bag and ran home, already planning what he'd ask for at dinner. He wanted fish. But when he got to the door, no one was there.
The pharmacy was sealed. He circled the building, but no one would speak to him. He sat down alone on the stone steps.
The sun was going down like a fire consuming the sky, burning half the horizon orange, then dying away until the world went black.
Autumn cold. He curled in on himself and shivered. The middle of the night became unbearable. He crept to the side wall and started to climb up to reach the window.
Halfway up, someone caught him.
A hand grabbed his pants leg and pulled him down.
Ji Pingxuan hit the ground hard, the kind of pain that makes you want to scream. He couldn't see the man's face in the dark. Something animal in him was afraid. He sniffled, swallowed the sound, held the cry inside, and didn't make a noise.
The man stood above him, motionless, looking at him for a long moment. Then, without a word, he reached down, pulled the boy up, and dragged him away.
"How did your parents die?" Liang Xi asked.
The carriage hit a rutted section of path, the rear wheel sinking deep into soft wet earth. The horses cried out and the whole frame lurched forward.
Ji Pingxuan's breath caught, his heart slamming against his ribs.
"He never told me," Ji Pingxuan said, voice barely there. "But I found out later."
He went on: "The county magistrate of the city had died. Nothing serious, on the surface. He'd sent someone to the shop with a prescription, a few doses of medicine. Two days later he was dead. Bleeding from every opening. Poisoned, they said. My parents were arrested that same night. They couldn't hold up under pressure. They confessed. Then they took poison they'd hidden inside their sleeves, the same compound that had killed the magistrate, and they were dead before morning."
"The county magistrate died under suspicious circumstances and your parents were sentenced the same night?" Yan Heyi lifted the curtain and twisted around. "Who had the authority to do that? To rush a case like that through in one night? Doesn't the law have anything to say about it?"
Ji Pingxuan said, "The clan elders. Most of the city lives by their say-so."
They were outsiders, and he knew it, so he went back further and explained how it came to be.
"This was a long time ago. I only know what others told me. After the first county magistrate of Panping died in suspicious circumstances, no one from the court wanted the post. It took a year or two before a replacement came. In that gap, a few wealthy households stepped in and took over settling disputes and keeping order."
He spoke slowly. After a while his breathing became harder to manage.
"They were deeply rooted, local powers the government couldn't uproot. Eventually the government stopped trying and fell in line with them. Somewhere along the way they built connections, and trade from several surrounding towns began flowing through Panping. Goods moved through in volume, and the families recruited local people to help sort and transport it."
"In the years that followed, natural disasters and Hu raids left the fields abandoned. The large households bought up the land cheaply. When conditions improved, they leased it back to farmers at inflated prices. Grain prices climbed. Their wealth multiplied."
"The people had nowhere else to go, so they worked for wages cut to half what nearby towns paid. Every craft, every trade, every skill had become nearly worthless. A family working all year could just barely feed themselves and put nothing aside."
"Small shops couldn't survive and changed hands. The people had little, but they ate regularly, which was more than could be said for war-torn places elsewhere. So the years passed."
He watched those few families grow, from merchants to untouchable powers, accumulating wealth no single life should be able to hold.
And the people beneath them worked until they couldn't stand up, running harder every year only to fall further behind. Like ants pressed to the roots of trees that kept growing larger. Grateful just to stay close. Grateful just to survive.
He had never studied much. He didn't have words for what it was. He only knew it was a kind of misery too deep to describe properly. Bent backs. Heads that couldn't rise. Like willow threads, dying and reviving through each winter and spring without ever noticing the difference.
Could this be called living?
Was this all the people of Daliang could expect from their lives?
Liang Xi didn't have an answer. She'd listened to all of it and was still trying to place herself in it. She steered back toward the part she could grip. "So you came back to get revenge on them, and that's how you ended up beaten like this?"
Ji Pingxuan paused for a long time. "Revenge?"
He asked it in complete sincerity: "How would I do that?"
Liang Xi, stumped, called over to the front: "How does someone get revenge in that kind of situation?"
Yan Heyi almost said something, then stopped. He said finally, "Don't bother. Even if I explained it you wouldn't follow."
Ji Pingxuan wished bitterly that his head were actually made of elm wood. Then at least he'd have an excuse for not knowing.
"I grew up in Panping," he said. "The man who raised me worked as a thug for one of the clan families."
His lips moved without sound. He said it only to himself: But he died too. And even at the end, I couldn't bring myself to ask whether he was the one who killed my father and mother.
The man hadn't been kind, exactly. No warm words. But he hadn't been cruel either. He taught the boy to fight. He kept him fed and clothed. He hid his identity and helped him take a new name. When Ji Pingxuan asked about his past, the man would go quiet and change the subject.
What was he feeling, all those times?
The boy's eyes went red at the edges. He pulled himself away from the thought, but his whole body trembled.
He would have preferred to freeze to death on the pharmacy steps than to drown, unresolved, in a grief this muddy and without edges.
Yan Heyi listened to the long silence that had settled over the carriage. He couldn't watch the boy cry without making a sound. He asked, "What are you trying to do by going back into the city?"
The boy was still deep inside the memory and couldn't surface quickly. When the question reached him, the one he'd been asking himself for years, he repeated it in a murmur: "What should I do?"
It was as if the nightmare had started again from the beginning.
After escaping Panping, there had been pursuit every step of the way. Blood on his hands he hadn't wanted. He drifted like a dust particle with no place to land. In front of him were mountains without end, dead ends without end, and one thin thread of intention that kept him walking: finishing what his adoptive father had told him to do before he died.
The wish to die rose and fell in him like tide. He didn't know what would finally break him. Maybe just a heavy enough rain, coming down on him in the mud until there was nothing left.
He wandered without direction for years. Until he was resting in a teahouse and caught a fragment of a passing swordsman's conversation, a man whose face he couldn't even recall afterward:
"I met someone reasonable."
"If in this world, everyone is too afraid to speak under power, there will still always be someone who stands up and argues for what's right."
He went very still inside. He cleared out everything else and held onto the name.
Her name is Song Huiya.
Her name is Song Huiya.
He dug his fingers into his wound, hard. The pain snapped him back. He grabbed onto the side of the carriage and choked out: "I want to see Song Huiya."
Blood seeped from between his fingers. He loosened his grip. His voice was almost gone. He said, broken: "But Song Huiya is already dead. Dead somewhere no one knows."
He said the name again, barely audible, over and over, not fully aware he was doing it: "Song Huiya..."
"What would you want from her anyway?" Liang Xi said, jealous and unrepentant. "She was only slightly cleverer than me, and far less patient, and she probably wouldn't have bothered with your problems."
Yan Heyi said, "Him."
Liang Xi turned sharply. "What are you laughing at?"
The boy had tilted sideways. He was making small, indistinct sounds.
Liang Xi leaned close. He'd passed out again. She pressed her hand to his forehead and recoiled. Burning. "Stop the carriage," she called. "Stay here. I'm going to get Song Huiya."
Yan Heyi's worry was visible in the cracks forming at the corners of his mouth. He stopped the carriage and caught her before she went anywhere. "Honestly, there's no point in calling Song Huiya over this. This boy didn't understand what he was walking into. He came back sick, running on nothing but determination. Panping isn't like Duanyan. Duanyan was a mountain operation. The court knew the shape of it and cleaned it up without much ripple. But what's in Panping? Clan powers and established merchants, doing everything in the open, by their own rules. You can't dismantle that by killing one or two people. Pull those roots and you drag up the whole city with them. And who knows which official pockets their gold has already filled, or what price is already on every magistrate's head. This is court business, not something for the underworld to sort out. Counting on Song Huiya to turn it around is like asking her to truss up a doctor instead."
Liang Xi listened to all of it carefully. She extended one finger and began counting. "Truss up Song Huiya, find a doctor. Is there anything else?"
Yan Heyi pointed at her. "Get out of here. I give up."