Cai Zhao was small. Qian Xueshen was lean. Together they fit easily on the back of the golden-feathered roc.
The air grew colder the further north they flew. The roc's wings cut through grit and cloud without slowing. Before the third sunset, they landed at the town crouched at the foot of the snow mountains.
In the far north, days shrink and nights stretch. The sky sat low and colorless, the color of old lead. Across the grey-white expanse, a few dark figures moved without sound or hurry.
Xueshan Town was small. One inn. It sat at the center of town and bore the unremarkable name Xueshan Inn.
Two heavy wool-felt curtains blocked the doorway against the wind. Both were stiff with old grease, their original color long gone. Cai Zhao lifted the curtain, met a wall of stale air thick with smoke, liquor, and the particular sourness of men who had not bathed in weeks. She frowned, breathed through it, and stepped inside.
A slender girl and a fine-featured young man appearing in the doorway brought the noisy lobby to a brief silence. Then the chatter picked back up.
A shop assistant hustled forward and steered them toward an empty table in the center of the room.
Cai Zhao shook her head and walked to a corner table against the wall.
Behind the counter, the innkeeper watched where she chose to sit. His eyes sharpened slightly.
Cai Zhao sat and read the room.
One innkeeper, forehead sloped slightly forward. Five staff moving between tables with food and wine. A sallow-faced woman in her twenties scrubbing a wine jar in the far corner without looking up. A large iron stove dominated the center of the lobby, a heavy kettle hanging over it. Ten or so tables. Seven or eight guests. Three sat against the walls the same way Cai Zhao did, the stillness of the underworld about them. The rest were loud, local, and comfortable.
The innkeeper brought two wide earthenware bowls, filled them from the kettle, and set them down.
Cai Zhao looked at the fingerprints ringing the rim of her bowl. Her brow twitched.
She ordered wine, meat, and steamed buns. She had learned by now that not every inn was the kind with eight cold dishes and ten warm ones. Out here, hot soup and plain rice counted as good fortune.
Two men from one of the center tables had been watching since they arrived. They pushed back their stools and came over without invitation.
One wore his chest half open and had a slow, muddy look in his eyes. He rubbed a hand against his skin in a way that made the gesture plain. "Where'd this little girl come from? It's rough country out here. Want us brothers to keep you company?"
Qian Xueshen's face curdled with disgust. "No. Go away."
"Ha. Rabbit's got a temper." The open-chested man grinned. "Get out of here, kid, unless you want trouble. We'll take the girl somewhere fun."
Cai Zhao did not look at them. She turned to Qian Xueshen. "What's the right move here? I should ask someone with experience."
Qian Xueshen looked ready to combust. "In a lawless place like this you cannot show weakness. Make an example. Put them down fast and make it count."
"Mm." Cai Zhao said nothing else.
Their exchange had already caught the attention of the room.
Under ordinary circumstances a young woman traveling with a young man would lean on him for protection. This conversation ran the other direction entirely. The lobby was still trying to work out what that meant when two short cries cut through the noise and the two men hit the floorboards.
The open-chested man now had two deep cross-cuts on his chest, the wounds clean and precise, the flesh parted wide. The gloomy-faced one had lost his left hand at the wrist. Blood ran freely. He was rolling on the ground screaming.
The lobby went rigid.
Qian Xueshen stared at the man with the severed wrist, his tongue temporarily out of service. "I... I only said show them something. Not cut someone's hand off. The inn two days ago, you weren't this severe."
Cai Zhao set a short blade on the table. It was the blade that had found the open-chested man's ribs at close range. She had drawn it, scored his chest, severed the other man's wrist, and knocked both men back with a palm strike in a single unbroken motion.
No ordinary technique. Something deep and refined, from a lineage with real roots.
The three men who had been sitting with the troublemakers recognized what they were looking at. They stood to leave without touching the men on the ground.
Cai Zhao reached into the chopstick holder on the table, pulled out four or five chopsticks, turned her palm over, and threw. Four clean strikes. One chopstick in the back of the first man's neck, two in each of the other men's backs. All three went down gasping and crawled their way out the door.
Cai Zhao lifted her bowl of hot water and held it out toward Qian Xueshen. "Do you know what's in this?"
Qian Xueshen did not. Was something in the water?
"Knockout powder," she said. "Low grade. The kind that wakes you up vomiting with a splitting head." She slid the second bowl across. "This one?"
Qian Xueshen shook his head.
"Spring medicine. Also low grade, but potent. Whoever drinks it loses their mind for hours. When it wears off the damage is internal." Cai Zhao set both bowls in the space between them. "Neither ending was good for us."
Qian Xueshen went cold.
The shop assistant who had poured their water looked up to find Cai Zhao's gaze resting on him. "Not me," he blurted. "I didn't do it, I swear."
"I know," Cai Zhao said. She glanced at the man still howling on the floor. "He did it. One of them distracts, the other poisons."
She pushed the two bowls toward Qian Xueshen. "Give it back to them."
Qian Xueshen pressed his teeth together, picked up both bowls, and walked over. The men on the ground knew what was coming and tried to drag themselves toward the door. It didn't help. Qian Xueshen planted a foot on each of their necks in turn and poured.
Cai Zhao dropped a piece of silver on the table. "Get someone to throw them out."
The staff, still shaken from watching her work, did not wait to be told twice. They hauled both men out in a cluster without once looking at the innkeeper for permission.
What would happen to those two men next, everyone in the room understood. No one said it aloud.
The quiet that followed had a different texture than before. The contempt that had greeted Cai Zhao and Qian Xueshen at the door was gone.
The innkeeper turned and called through the kitchen curtain: "Best wine for our guests. Bring up the roast chicken and duck."
The remaining shop assistant snapped out of his daze and brought clean tea. The bowls were spotless this time.
Qian Xueshen stood where he was for a moment.
He understood what the girl had been doing. This was not one of the inns they had passed through on the road, where a meal and a few questions were all they needed before moving on. They would sleep here tonight. Possibly more than one night. If she hadn't closed off every opening at the start, the problems would have kept coming.
Cai Zhao paid no attention to the stares. She pulled a rolled notebook from her pack and tilted it toward the dim lamplight.
What she found inside defied what she had expected.
The snow mountains above them looked as remote as frozen Yun Palace, but the town at the base was no colder than the northern villages they had passed earlier in the journey. The land around it could even support crops for part of the year.
But that was only the foot of the mountain.
The Great Snow Mountain divided roughly into three zones, each with its own climate.
The lower slopes were dense with forest and gullies. Wind and snow were manageable. Rare animals and quality medicinal herbs grew there. Hunters and herb pickers traded their goods at southern towns for salt and cloth.
Because the terrain was so elevated, even the foot of the mountain sat higher than the midpoint of an ordinary range. The cold produced especially dense animal fur. Snow ginseng, a local specialty, moved faster among merchants than old-growth mountain ginseng from anywhere else.
But all of this activity stayed at the base. Past the midslope, fewer than half of those who went up came back down. The summit had no returners at all.
She had gathered this from shop assistants and residents along the way, cross-checking at every stop.
"Another Chatian Peak." Cai Zhao closed the notebook.
Though Chatian Peak had been silent in its killing. Here, herb pickers and hunters sometimes caught something else on the wind, rising from far above: the roar of animals tangled with the screaming of the storm, coming down from the heights.
She could not send the golden-feathered roc into that.
Qian Xueshen watched the girl frown over her thoughts and felt his own drift.
He had assumed, at first, that Cai Zhao's decision to come to the snow mountains was an impulse born of stubbornness, and that she would turn back once reality set in. Instead, she had been practical from the first hour. Thick winter clothes. Fur boots. Face cream to stop the skin cracking in the cold. Aged wine for warmth. A small padded case to keep the wine jars from losing heat. A long strap lashing both of them to the roc's back so neither would fall while asleep in flight. Every detail handled.
She had even listed things in her notebook that Qian Xueshen hadn't thought of himself.
Every half day in the air they had landed to buy water and ask locals about the mountains to the north. How many rivers, how many ranges. Each river or mountain they spotted from the air was noted. They asked again at the next stop to confirm. They hadn't lost the route once.
She had also given them both false names before leaving. "The Qingque Sect's story hasn't spread this far north yet, and news moves slowly at the border. False names keep us invisible."
Her own alias was Feng Xiaoyao. One character from her mother's name, one from her brother's. Qian Xueshen's surname became Wan.
Qian Xueshen objected immediately. "Every family has a Wan. It's the most common name there is. You might as well stamp 'nouveau riche' on my forehead."
"Qianmianmen has a Qian too," Cai Zhao said. "And all that's left of them is you, a disgrace. My surname isn't from Qingqi. It's from Xiqi."
Qian Xueshen had nothing to say to that.
Several times during the flight Qian Xueshen had noticed Cai Zhao tilting dangerously with fatigue and offered to take the reins so she could sleep. She had refused each time.
"You think I'm riding next to you because I'm worried about your comfort? Wake up, Mr. Qian. I'm here because I don't trust you not to fly somewhere else the moment I close my eyes. If Mu Shifu hadn't lent me this roc I would have broken one of your legs and tied you to the saddle. Eyes forward. No more talking."
Qian Xueshen held his ground. "I didn't cause your father's disappearance. I'm a victim in this too. You're skilled. I'm not. You'd move faster alone. I'm only slowing you down."
"You're useful to me." Cai Zhao's voice was flat. "When I get the Snow-Scaled Dragon Beast's saliva, I need you there to verify it immediately. If it can break the transformation method, I'll release you. If not..."
The rest didn't need saying.
Qian Xueshen let out a long breath and sat down beside her.
The roast chicken and duck arrived fragrant and steaming. The innkeeper carried out a small, well-made wine jar himself, poured for both of them with care, and settled the cups. "Might I ask the names of our honored guests?"
Cai Zhao smiled cleanly. "I'm Feng Xiaoyao. This is my intended husband. We haven't exchanged vows yet but the decision is made."
Qian Xueshen lifted his eyes to the ceiling rafters and stayed there.
He had asked this before. "Why a betrothed couple? We could be siblings. Or I could be your attendant."
"I need to stay close to you and share a room at night," Cai Zhao had said. "Betrothed is the cleanest story for that. Unless you prefer we just say we're married."
"...Betrothed is fine."
The innkeeper smiled with genuine warmth. "And your husband's name?"
Cai Zhao spoke before Qian Xueshen could open his mouth. "Wan Daqiang."
The innkeeper pressed his hands together with great feeling. "Mr. Wan! What fortune, to meet such a pair. I am blessed for the next three lifetimes."
Qian Xueshen slumped against the table.
"Why Wan Daqiang? It's terrible."
"Wan Ersha is also available. Your choice."
"...Wan Daqiang is fine."
The innkeeper refilled their cups and lowered his voice with a sigh. "You saw for yourselves just now. This town is not a peaceful one. Out here in the far north, far from any seat of power, it draws the ones who have run out of places to go. Criminals, killers, and a great many people whose origins don't bear examination."
He paused. "When you first walked in, I wondered whether you were young people who had come for the mountain scenery without understanding where you'd arrived. Now I see I was looking at gold and calling it plain metal. Knowing you two are here, I can breathe easily." He leaned forward. "If I may ask, what brings the two of you to Xueshan Town?"
Cai Zhao said, "We came to see the mountains."
The innkeeper went quiet for a moment.
He smiled carefully. "With your skills, any view in the world is open to you. But the snow mountains are genuinely dangerous. Why would someone of your standing choose to suffer like this?"
Cai Zhao looked serious. "My aunt says marriage is too important to rush. Better to find out before the vows than after. The best way to know if two people suit each other is to travel together. Difficult roads, open skies, shared hardship. By the end, you know."
The innkeeper and Qian Xueshen both turned to look at the thin young man.
He sat slumped at the table, damp and deflated, like a quail caught in the rain.
"Does the shopkeeper think my aunt's advice is sound?" Cai Zhao asked.
The innkeeper said, with complete sincerity: "I have never in my life heard wiser."
Cai Zhao smiled. "If things go well between us, we'll marry after..."
The wool-felt curtain snapped open.
Cold air rushed in carrying ice particles. When the curtain dropped again and cut it off, everyone looked toward the door.
A tall young man stood at the entrance in light fur. His face was tired and cold, but his features were sharp and clean, beautiful in the way of a far peak lit by snow.
He said, without much interest: "I want no part in anyone's domestic affairs."