It was midday when Kia Min and Jun returned to town. Their mother instantly pulled Jun by the ear and dragged him to their shop, and on the way Jun nodded towards the upstairs windows and mouthed, "Go." Kia Min sighed, but she did as her brother asked. No one ever told her why Uncle Jong just up and left one day without saying goodbye, but she did remember that that was the day Jun first started training her in the very same clearing they had their bout. A few months later, her mother sent her to Two Rivers.
This couldn't be good.
Kia Min knocked the door to her parents' bedroom, and within her father bid her to enter. She slid the door open and there he was in bed as always, now, with some scrolls and books in hand and a bored expression melting into an ecstatic one when he saw her.
"Min!" he exclaimed. "I was hoping you'd come by. Did you win?"
Kia Min smiled. "Of course I did. You didn't think you spent a fortune sending me to school for me to keep losing to him, did you?"
"Of course not," said her father with a laugh. "How much longer do you have to train, then? And surely you're not going to wait around for me to die to go back!"
She cringed. "Um, about that..." She sighed, and she took a seat at the bedside. "I need to tell you something. It's... it's not going to be easy to say, again, and you won't like hearing it, but... I have to say it. Jun said that I needed to tell you." And she repeated the story about the kidnapping of her master, the slaughter of the students and villagers, and the men who did it.
Her father kept a solemn face throughout the tale, his brow furrowed and his mouth pursed. As she finished, he nodded slowly, and said nothing. For a moment, there was an agonizing silence, and Kia Min gripped the fabric of her pants waiting for him to say something. She did not know what she expected or wanted to hear him say, but somehow, this was supposed to lead to a conversation about Uncle Jong.
"Lotus Assassins, you say," he said slowly, carefully.
Kia Min nodded. "Yes. I think so. I'm pretty sure." She paused, and she sighed. "I know they were. There was one of them at Hehua, and he had been at Two Rivers--"
"And that's the 'customer' you fought and killed." He hardly sounded surprised. Kia Min tried to hide her own at that.
"Yes."
"And you survived an entire onslaught of them when Two Rivers--"
"Yes, but to be fair, they came for our master and left. It was Gao's--" She nearly spat the name. "--men who 'took care' of the rest of us. And I'm the only one to have survived that. Other than Wu and Dawn Star."
"But you still fought a Lotus Assassin and lived to tell the tale. Twice."
Kia Min pursed her lips. "Yes."
Her father considered this for another long moment. "That's too coincidental to be mere luck, Min." He smiled wryly. "You must have been something exceptional, to have been the only one other than the two top students to have lived. You received the same training as everyone else, I assume? All three of you?"
"Well," she said as she squirmed in her seat, "Wu did get a lot of extra attention from Master Li. She has some destiny to fulfill, he always said. And in any case, both Wu and Dawn Star were not in town when the Lotus Assassins came through. Dawn Star had been kidnapped by Gao just before the attack, and Wu had gone after her. They came just in time to take care of Gao's men. I... just got lucky, really, with that Lotus Assassin."
"But not the one in Hehua."
Kia Min laughed nervously. "I don't remember much of that fight... but truth be told, I think I got lucky there, too."
He sighed. "Min, you don't get lucky against Lotus Assassins twice. Getting lucky once is nearly impossible by itself."
"I... guess," she conceded. And then, remembering why Jun sent her here, she said, "Father, Jun said I needed to tell you this, what happened to Two Rivers, and ask about Uncle Jong." Kia Min watched the expression on her father's face transform from hard contemplation to an uncomfortable bristle. No better way to get answers than to tackle the questions head-on, now. "Does Uncle Jong have anything to do with the Lotus Assassins?"
Silence. Her father stayed absolutely still, and Kia Min held her breath, not daring to even blink. She was going to get her answers, especially if...
"I was never on planning to tell you this," her father finally lamented. "But Jun has a point. Whatever you do from here, you need to know this about your uncle. And I'm not asking you to go after him; he's long lost to us, even if he does correspond with your mother once a year. He made his decision, and if he changed his mind, he'd be dead as soon as he says, 'I quit.'"
Kia Min smiled. "Is this a from the very beginning story?"
"Those are the best kind, aren't they?" said her father with a laugh. "But since you insist, when your uncle and I were kids, we were always competing with each other. If I did something exceptionally well, he would beat himself up to surpass me. He rarely did.
"Since I'm the older brother, I inherited our father's merchant stand. And I had a wife, and your brother was on the way, to boot. And that story... well, that's for another time, and another instance of competition."
Kia Min nearly laughed. "Don't tell me both of you were after Mother."
When her father didn't respond, Kia Min frowned. "... were you?"
"Another time," he said, "but it's all related anyway, in the end. So when your grandfather passed away, I took over his already lucrative business. I offered Jong a position here. A clerk, a traveling merchant like your friend Wayfarer Wei, whatever he wanted. Well, I had the job he wanted, and we both knew I wasn't about to give it up. So, he opened his own stand, his own business. Do you remember it?"
"Yes," said Kia Min, her mind flying back to her childhood days when she and Jun would frequent Jong's makeshift shop of goods traded by other merchants. His was not in a good of a shape as the Kia stand, and not nearly as organized, but there was some charm in the shop that attracted many of One Stone's children. He rarely had sweets, and never any toys, but his assortment of goods were exotic. Gems, from all across the Jade Empire, he boasted. No one else in One Stone had them, but no one in One Stone needed them for anything but ornamentation. "But it wasn't very successful."
Her father shrugged. "He made enough to live comfortably. He ate well and he never looked like he was struggling, in his attire and his modest living accommodations. That was, and still is, the Kia family trick, see. We don't spend money frivolously. Jong actually proved to be better at that than even me, but I suppose he didn't have a choice."
Kia Min frowned. "You don't think much of Uncle Jong, do you?"
"He's a good man who made some bad decisions," said her father. "And more than just..." He sighed. "Look, Min, my brother means a lot to me. He does. But he's a fool who thinks he's protecting us, but he's not."
"Protecting us?" Kia Min remembered Yao Hong's definition of protecting the people of Hehua and shudders ran down her spine. "What do you mean?"
Closing his eyes, he said, "A few years ago, a Lotus Assassin came through One Stone. None of us knew what he was at the time, much less why he was here, but we all had a very bad feeling about him. When he left, we knew that our troubles were just beginning.
"A few weeks later, that Assassin came back. Several merchants had been... inspected by him. Us included. You wouldn't remember; you had been off playing with the other children in the fields. Your mother made sure that you were out of the house and away from the shop when they came through. Fortunately, we were one of the last shops so we knew what was coming before it happened."
"Why were they inspecting the merchants?" asked Kia Min.
"We don't know. All I know is, the next day Jong told us he was leaving to join with the Lotus Assassins. That's when we found out what that man was. What Lotus Assassins were, and that they were not to be crossed. Jong told us everything. He had heard about them from the people he traded with, and he told us that anything could happen. Anything at all. And we may not be safe now that they've made two trips to One Stone, with many more possibly on the way.
"They offered him a job, he said. That the goods he had in stock were useful to them. That if he could stay on their good side, perhaps if anything ever did happen, we at least would be safe. After all he already told us about the Lotus Assassins, how could we think that this would do anything to protect us?"
Quietly, Kia Min realized, "The gems. They're more than just ornamentation?"
"Does it matter?" Her father sighed. "Jong left after that. We all agreed that the sooner he left with the Lotus Assassins, the better. At that point, if he declined, he would have died. If you ask me, he should have just given the Lotus Assassins his goods and come back to work for us, but..." He shook his head. "It was too late anyway. He had to go. But he insisted on keeping in touch with us."
This shocked Kia Min. "I never heard anything of that."
"No, you wouldn't have," said her father with a sigh. "We thought to protect you, if no one else. Jun had to know, just in case something happened, and your mother and I wouldn't be around to inform him of the details. But you... you have so many possibilities. But you needed to be able to protect yourself first." He smiled. "I didn't realize our decisions would be quite that effective."
Kia Min blushed and she turned away from her father. "I, um, thank you for that," she said. "Really, I truly do. But all this... because Uncle Jong joined the Lotus Assassins?" That by itself was too incredible to be true.
"He didn't join them. He works for them, but he is not a Lotus Assassin himself. He was quite clear about that, and so were they," said her father. "But we are not safe. He writes to us about once a year. He doesn't give us too many details. I don't even know where he is. And he's trying to be careful. The letter usually stops in several towns and villages before reaching One Stone, and passes many hands." He scowled. "Your mother responds, though. She's just as 'careful.' This is ridiculous."
Kia Min said nothing. Her uncle worked for the Lotus Assassins? And it was to protect herself from the Lotus Assassins that her brother first started training her, and that her parents sent her to Two Rivers? Lotus Assassins in One Stone, and at Two Rivers, and in Hehua...
Smiling Mountain always said that life was interconnected, that everyone must take special care to tend to all living creatures. His favoritism towards the Way of the Open Palm was obvious, and now Kia Min was starting to understand why.
"I have no hopes or expectations about your decisions from here on out, Min," said her father. "Your life is yours, now. Do what you will with it. You're more than prepared."
Kia Min shook her head. "But Father, I don't know what I want to do. Even now after knowing about what happened to Uncle Jong, why you sent me to Two Rivers. Everything is coming together and making sense, but I don't know what I can do with this information now."
He smiled. "Maybe this is your time to figure it out."