Apo

by hea25

123

33. Chapter 33

Chapter 11: The Feitouman (Part 1)

The feitouman, the flying head, had first appeared about two months ago. The first person to witness it was a manservant. He'd finished his work and was ambling under the moonlight when he saw something pale float into view. He looked closer and discovered it was a white mask.

The man assumed it was someone playing a trick, but he was too tired for pranks just then. He was about to just walk by— when the mask turned and looked at him. Startled, then terrified, the man ran away.

The next morning, when he was feeling calmer, the man realized he must have just been seeing things. But when he went to where he'd seen the mask the night before, he found no trace of anything.

After that, other people started reporting the mysterious mask too. Some said they'd turned toward a strange noise to find the mask grinning at them; others, that it had been floating through the air.

Finally, more recently, stories started circulating of a woman's disembodied head flying through the mansion—which inspired some to say that it must be a feitouman.

"So you saw it too, little lady?" Lihaku asked around a mouthful of congee.

Maomao was at the medical office eating with the others, and over breakfast she'd told them what she had seen the night before.

"Huh! What were you doing wandering around the house in the middle of the night, Niangniang?" Leave it to Tianyu to spoil a perfectly good conversation. His meal consisted entirely of some juice; it seemed he was not a morning person.

"Yes! Who knows what might be lurking out there at night? If

you can't sleep, you should at least stay in your room," said the quack doctor, who'd prepared himself a hearty breakfast of congee, goat's milk, and fried bread.

"Sorry. It was sort of...spur of the moment. Miss Chue invited me."

Maomao's apology didn't sound especially apologetic. She was still tired from traveling, and on top of that she'd gotten back late from her evening excursion and then witnessed this "flying head." In the end she'd hardly gotten any sleep at all. She didn't have much appetite and would have been happy with a breakfast of juice just like Tianyu, but the quack insisted she have at least a little congee, so she was trying to force some down. What was he, her mother?

"By the way, Master Lihaku, what do you mean, me 'too'?"

"Oh, someone came to me asking about the feitouman."

"Eek! No one mentioned it to me!" The quack quaked. If he'd still had his mustache, it would have been quivering like a loach's whiskers.

"I thought it might be best not to tell you. Ghosts aren't your favorite topic, right?" Lihaku said. He knew the quack well.

"Who was it who asked you about it?" Now Maomao was curious. The whole thing had happened so late the night before that she'd resolved to worry about it the next day and had quickly said her goodbyes to Chue.

"One of the servant kids. I gave 'em some candy and now we're friends."

He makes them sound like a dog or a cat!

Lihaku's repeated visits to the Verdigris House had taught him how to get on kids' good side. If the apprentices don't like him,

they'll never take his messages to Pairin, after all.

Why bother demonstrating his new talent all the way out here in the western capital? That's what Maomao wanted to know. Maybe hanging around with the quack just left him with that much time to kill.

"I'm not saying I believe in spirits or whatever," Lihaku added. "When I asked if you'd seen it, I didn't mean... Well, I know you never take that sort of thing seriously."

"Now that I have seen it, I'm keen to pin down what it really

is."

"I'd be happy to help," Lihaku said. "I'm off for today, though. If anything happens, wake me up." He cleaned his bowl and went to his room on the first floor to sleep. Even men of seemingly endless endurance had to get their rest. Getting a good sleep after a night on watch was part of Lihaku's job. A relief guard stood outside the medical office.

As Lihaku was leaving, a small child came up to the room.

"Where's Mister Soljer?" she asked, looking around, her face bloodless. Apparently the military man standing guard at the door didn't count.

Maomao quickly realized what she meant. "If you're looking for Master Lihaku, he's off duty," she said. This girl must be the servant Lihaku had mentioned. She looked to be about ten years old.

"O-Oh..." The girl looked disappointed and refused to meet Maomao's eyes.

Maomao glanced at Tianyu and the quack. "Would you like me to call for him?" she asked.

"You'd bother an off-duty soldier?" Tianyu burst out. He was annoying, but right. It wouldn't be pretty if their guard was sleepdeprived when something happened—but Lihaku had told them to wake him up if there was any need.

Lihaku was awake, and must have heard the noisy conversation, because he came right out of his room.

"Hey there!" he said.

"Mister Soljer!" The girl went right over to him. "We saw it again!"

"Oh you did? What did you see?"

"A head! A woman's head!"

Somehow, everything kept coming back to this ghost story.

"Where did you see it?" Lihaku asked.

"Outside! The groundskeeper, he could barely stand up, he was so scared!"

"All right, I hear you. Where's the groundskeeper now?"

"He's out working in the garden. But he's white as a sheet!" "Good to know. Here, here's some candy for you."

"Yippee!" The girl skipped out of the medical office.

Maomao looked at Lihaku. "May I ask you something, Master

Lihaku?"

"Yeah? What's that?"

"You're not doing this out of personal curiosity, are you? This is an official investigation."

"I knew you were a sharp one."

Lihaku didn't make any effort to hide it. He believed there was a chance this "flying head" was really someone who might mean harm. If he was investigating, moreover, it was presumably on someone else's orders.

"That Tianyu, he's a heap of trouble," Lihaku muttered to Maomao. It was rare for the sunny, cheerful soldier to complain like that.

The quack was humming a tune as he washed the dishes. Tianyu had finished his breakfast and was off brushing his teeth— an upper physician had ordered that the medical staff should not have rotting teeth; it wouldn't look good. That physician being, not incidentally, Dr. Liu.

Sounds like Lihaku and Tianyu don't get along. Maomao had sort of suspected as much.

"The two of you don't click?" she asked.

"I guess. Tianyu and I...we're just cut from different cloth, maybe. It's not like we're going to get into a fight, but I'm not sure how to talk to him. You know what I mean?"

Maomao did, indeed, know what he meant. Usually one could solve those problems by keeping one's distance from the person in question, but that wasn't an option here.

"You're saying it wouldn't normally be a problem, but we're in such close quarters here that it makes things hard. And it might not be so bad if this was someone with whom you could settle things with a fight, but Tianyu is obviously not that kind of person. Am I right?"

"I knew you were a sharp one! It's not that I can't handle him, but...I don't know what's at his core. It's like I can see the branches, but not the trunk."

Lihaku seemed to have Tianyu pinned down by sheer instinct.

"Whereas you, young lady, there's a logic to how you behave.

Whatever you do, you can bet there's either poison or drugs at

the bottom of it."

"You could at least say 'drugs or poison,' please," Maomao replied. "As far as Tianyu is concerned, you're right that his personality has a few wrinkles, but I don't think it's anything to be too concerned about." He had managed to become a physician, after all, and shorthanded or not, they would never have brought him to the western capital if they hadn't thoroughly investigated his background.

"Sure, I understand. Sorry. I'm a soldier—I guess I'm always thinking in terms of battle."

"Battle? How do you mean?"

"The only thing I know for sure is that I could never trust him to have my back."

Sheer instinct. There was nothing Maomao could say to that.

She decided to put the topic of Tianyu aside. "In any case, may I ask: Did the orders to investigate the feitouman come from the Moon Prince?"

"Yeah, that's right. Master Jinshi told me to."

There was a name Maomao didn't hear much from other people these days. Wish he'd said something to me. Then again, Maomao did prefer to do things with the absolute minimum of conversation.

"Sorry, should I have told you? I know you—if something gets your interest, you work on it so hard you forget to eat or sleep. And my orders include not letting you run yourself into the ground."

Maomao had thought she was keeping her monologue internal but apparently the words had come out of her mouth, and now Lihaku was apologizing on Jinshi's behalf.

Not let me run myself into the ground, huh?

In that case, she could wish that he wouldn't summon her to his room. For someone who never stopped piling fresh demands on her, Jinshi sometimes tried to be considerate in the strangest ways.

And now there's a floating head involved.

He was always coming to her with problems that seemed right out of a ghost story.

"It's strange, though," Lihaku said.

"What's strange?" Maomao asked. "Other than the flying head,

I mean."

"That's exactly it. When I first heard the story, people talked about a floating mask. But over the last twenty days or so, a lot of people seem to be reporting a flying head."

"Interesting point. What I saw looked more like a mask than a head." She'd only glimpsed it, so she couldn't be sure, but that was her initial impression.

"This is that thing we were talking about at breakfast? Hard to ignore, huh?"

Maomao spun at the voice behind them. It was Tianyu, back from brushing his teeth. He was grinning.

Lihaku didn't look very surprised—he seemed to have guessed Tianyu was there. "Eavesdropping is bad manners, you know," he said.

"Eavesdropping? Me? No, no. I was just curious how long the two of you would keep chattering together. An unmarried man and woman!"

"Believe us, it's nothing like that!" Maomao and Lihaku replied in unison.

"Believe me, I don't think it is." How much had Tianyu heard?

"So, that flying head. Some story, huh? Whaddaya say? Wanna let me in on it?"

"Absolutely not," Maomao shot back.

Tianyu's face fell. "Aw, why not?"

"Because you'll tell."

"I will not."

"Because you'll get bored in the middle of it and give up."

"That I might do."

Lihaku stayed quiet, letting Maomao handle Tianyu. He really didn't like dealing with the guy.

"I can be useful!" Tianyu said. "If you don't think I can be, or if you think I'm a risk or whatever, it's just because you don't know how to use me. Do you also refuse to use scissors because you could cut yourself with them?"

Maomao looked at Lihaku. He looked back as if to say it was up to her.

After a long moment, Maomao said, "Just don't get in our way." "Yeah!" There was the faintest gleam in Tianyu's eyes.

Maomao and Tianyu started by going out into the courtyard where Maomao had seen the feitouman the night before.

"So! What happens now?" Tianyu asked, although he sounded like he didn't much care.

"What happens now is you show us just how useful you can be, Mister Scissors," Maomao said, looking around the courtyard. She'd told Lihaku to get some sleep since he'd been on duty the previous night, but had convinced him to leave his map of the mansion with her.

Meanwhile, they'd told the quack they were just going to run a little errand, so their investigation had to be quick.

"You have to tell scissors which paper you want them to cut.

Although you can stab any old thing from behind with them."

Maomao didn't respond to that. It sounded like Tianyu was miffed that she and Lihaku didn't trust him.

He is who he is, though. His commitment to ethics seemed, well, less than enthusiastic.

"How about we start by looking around all the areas the spirit is supposed to have appeared?" Maomao suggested.

"Yeah, sure."

The courtyard was where the mysterious mask was most often sighted. "Most of the reports place it by that tree or on top of that building," Maomao said, looking at her blueprints. For an "annex," this place was pretty big.

"Hoh!" Tianyu said, looking from the tree to the building and back. This was the same tree Chue had been dangling from last night. There were still a bunch of leaves under it, suggesting the groundskeeper hadn't cleaned up yet.

"Anything catch your eye?" Maomao asked.

"Nah. What about you, Niangniang?" That was what he always called her. She'd given up trying to correct him, but these days even the other doctors were starting to do it. It was very frustrating.

"A couple of things." First she looked at the tree. "This tree isn't quite like the others I've seen growing in the western capital.

It's bigger and taller."

"Yeah? So what?"

"Doesn't it make you curious? Different kinds of plants means different possible medicines you can make from them! We need to get a little closer to be certain what we're dealing with, though."

"Okay. And that has what to do with why we're here?"

That Tianyu—if he wasn't specifically interested in something, you couldn't get him to lift a finger for it. He was no fun, Maomao concluded, giving him a sour look.

"What's the other thing?" Tianyu asked.

"The other thing is that the feitouman reported inside the house seems to take the form of either a mask or a face. Outside, however, people claim to see a head."

"I'm sorry, how are a head and a face different? What did you see, anyway, Niangniang?"

"A mask, I'd say. I spotted it just as it disappeared around the corner of that hallway toward this courtyard." She pointed to the place.

"A mask... So it didn't look like a head to you?"

"No, definitely a mask or a face. But some of the reports describe it as a head." The discrepancy nettled Maomao.

"A head is basically the three-dimensional version of a mask, right?" Tianyu said. He was clever, and he'd immediately put his finger on something key.

"I'm not completely sure we can put it that way, but I couldn't help wondering. I was thinking I'd investigate that tree."

"Go right ahead. Need anything from me?" The dull scissors had finally decided to sharpen up.

"If you'd be so kind, then." Maomao took a handkerchief from the folds of her robe and wrapped it around a rock she found on the ground. "Toss this into the branches for me."

"Yeah, sure. You make it sound so easy." Despite his grumbling, Tianyu tossed the rock beautifully, catching the cloth on a branch. It wasn't exactly proper etiquette for a court lady to be climbing a tree. A handkerchief that had been blown away would provide a convenient excuse.

Maomao trotted up to the trunk of the tree. The plant was a broad-leaved thing almost six meters tall.

"Osmanthus," she observed. A tree that produced a profusion of small, strong-smelling blossoms that could be used for making osmanthus wine or floral tea.

Maomao grabbed onto the trunk and had just gotten off the ground when she exclaimed, "Yuck!" Her hand was covered in half-dried bird doo-doo. The stuff was all over the tree.

"Gross," Tianyu offered.

"Keep it to yourself, please," said Maomao. She studied the gunk on her hand, then gave it a vigorous sniff.

"Are you, uh, smelling that?" Tianyu asked, unable to ignore what he was seeing.

Maomao, however, just stared at the ground, then poked something she saw there with a stick.

"Hey, what are you up to?" Tianyu asked, more confused than ever.

Maomao picked up two small twigs and held them like chopsticks.

"Huh? You're picking it up? You're...picking something out of poop, using chopsticks." He backed up a step, giving her a profoundly suspicious look.

Maomao wasn't exactly thrilled to be doing this, but there was a lot you could learn from animal dung. In addition to the notquite-dry bird droppings, the space under the tree was home to something that looked like hairballs. They came from specific kinds of birds—some of them would spit up things they couldn't digest.

"This bird appears to eat mainly bugs," Maomao said, dissecting the hairball with a stick. Inside, she discovered insect wings and legs.

"Well, yeah. Birds usually do, right?"

"There's some fur in here too. Probably from a mouse or something." She also spotted some bones alongside the fur and insect bits.

"So it eats mice? Probably from a hawk or some other bird of prey, then."

Bugs were one thing, but if this bird was eating mice, then it had to be of a certain size.

"Yes. However..." Maomao looked around. The wealth of water and greenery in this house attracted a fair number of birds, but she didn't see anything that looked big enough to eat mice, at least not at the moment. A bird like that would have scared off its smaller cousins, anyway.

Maomao gave it another moment's thought, then looked at the building.

"It's not possible to get up on that roof, is it?" she said.

"I dunno. Want me to throw another handkerchief up there?"

"Think you could get it that far?"

"Doubt it."

This didn't seem to be getting them anywhere. Maomao was just thinking it was time to go back when something moved at the edge of her vision. She looked toward it and saw some latticework decoration under the eaves.

"I changed my mind. I do want to climb up to the roof."

"What? But there's no way up!"

"There's got to be something. Let's find a ladder."

"Easy for you to say. We probably have to ask the groundskeeper..." Which Tianyu didn't look about to do. His interest seemed to be flagging.

The groundskeeper? That was the old man who'd said he'd seen the head yesterday, wasn't it?

Maomao headed for where the groundskeeper was cleaning up. "Excuse me! Could we possibly borrow a ladder?"

"What? You think you can just march up and demand something like that?" The groundskeeper was looking very putupon. He seemed all-around gloomy, maybe on account of his strange encounter the day before. "They told us to be polite to the visitors, but they never said we had to help you climb up and mess around on the roofs!"

"And right they were too," Tianyu said.

Whose side is he on?!

Tianyu was obviously not going to be any help. Maomao would have to persuade this man on her own.

"I think there's a bird nesting under the roof," she said.

"Nesting? You know, now that you mention it, there have been a lot of droppings around lately."

"Yes, sir. Having bird nests around can only mean more work, so I thought maybe I'd clean it up. I would be perfectly happy if I could just keep any eggs I happened to find—they're a medicinal ingredient, you know."

"Medicinal? You don't even know what kind of bird it is up there."

"True, sir, but most eggs are very nutritious, regardless of species."

Maomao was sort of making things up as she went. Most eggs were edible, at least, if you cooked them.

Then she added one last, little push. "I think I might know what's behind the ghost that's been terrorizing everyone lately." "Y-You do?! Really?!" the groundskeeper said.

"Yes, sir," she replied, confident she could solve at least half the riddle.

The groundskeeper found a ladder for them in short order, but it was old and rickety and wobbled when they placed it on the ground.

"Let me guess. You want me to climb up on the roof?" Tianyu said.

"You say that almost as if you didn't want to."

"I don't."

Even Maomao didn't think she could impose on the old groundskeeper to climb up to the roof, so she resolved to do it herself. The only problem was the gaggle of servants and bureaucrats that had begun to form once the big ladder was put out in the courtyard. (Didn't they have anything better to do?)

Sadly, none of them volunteered to climb in Maomao's place; they just stood and stared. One of them, incidentally, was the

original official with too much time on his hands: Jinshi was there.

Everyone else took a few steps back at the arrival of this VIP.

Jinshi looked at what was going on, aghast, then said something to Basen. Basen nodded and came over to Maomao, his duck following him politely.

"It looks like you're going to climb that ladder. Let me do it.

What do you need up there?"

"You'll climb up there for me, Master Basen?"

Frankly, if that was the choice, Maomao would rather go herself. Basen's athletic prowess wasn't in question, but she worried that he might not...improvise quickly enough.

Besides, who knows what he might do with his outrageous strength?

The duck gave a flap of its wings as if to cheer him on.

Maomao's disquiet only increased.

"You needn't trouble yourself. I can do it," she said firmly, but Basen would not be deterred.

"I told you, I'll go up there. What do you need me to do?"

Basen was clearly here on the presumption that he was going to handle this task. Maomao would have to bend.

"I think—I think, now—that a bird has made a nest in the rafters of the roof. If you find it, do you think you could catch the bird for me?"

"A bird? Ah, birds, I know how to handle," he said with a glance back at his duck. Domestic ducks, however, did not fly.

"I suspect this bird is nocturnal, so it's probably asleep right now. If you could sneak up there very quietly, so it doesn't wake up, please. If you can reach it, grab it."

"Understood." Basen was raring to go. Maomao felt less and less sure about this.

"Master Basen, one cannot get into Paradise if one takes a life unnecessarily, remember. Try not to strangle the poor thing."

"Try not to strangle it..." Basen immediately sounded, well, smaller.

This is bad, bad, bad.

She definitely felt an ominous ripple of foreshadowing. She seriously considered waking Lihaku and asking him to handle this, but then she looked up at the rafters again. He would never be able to fit between them.

"You know, considering the size of the space up there, I definitely think I should do this," she said.

"N-No, no, I'll go. You can count on me!" Basen responded.

Then he set off up the ladder, Maomao's anxiety mounting with every step. If there was a silver lining here, it would be that Basen was so sturdy that he wouldn't hurt himself if he fell.

Basen made the top of the ladder, then peered in through the latticework along the roofline. He shot Maomao an all-good gesture.

Guess that means there's a nest up there.

The latticework was designed to be removable, and Basen pried it away. He ran a rope through it and lowered it to the ground, then wedged himself into the roof space.

The entire assembled crowd, Maomao included, swallowed hard. Everyone seemed strangely silent—then Maomao realized that Chue had wandered up at some point and was holding a board on which she'd written Quiet Please.

For a long moment, nothing happened, and then there was a loud crash.

"Shoot! It got away!" Basen exclaimed.

Oh, come on!

Maomao was beside herself—but Chue put down her board and scrambled up the ladder. What was she doing? She took up a position in front of the open roof space, and as a small object came flashing out she caught it in a net.

Everyone, once again including Maomao, was stunned into silence at Chue's display of dexterity.

Where'd she get that net from? Maomao wondered.

"Gotcha!" Chue cried and held the net aloft. She looked so thoroughly proud of herself that it was hard not to be a little annoyed.

She always did love to be the center of attention, and she'd found a perfect opportunity.

A hubbub spread throughout the courtyard, but when Jinshi, the most important person there, told everyone to get back to work, they obligingly scattered. Once the gawkers had moved on, the rest of them could see exactly what was in Chue's net.

"What in the world is this?" Jinshi asked. He and Basen looked equally astonished. Judging from Basen's reaction, the bird had gotten away from him before he'd seen exactly what it looked like.

Chue had captured an owl, about thirty centimeters in size. It didn't look like a normal owl, though—the most striking thing about it was its face, which was eerie and strange, round and white. The feathers ringing its face were black, and if it were somewhere dark and the owl had its wings tucked in, it might well look like a white mask.

However...

"Isn't it kind of small?" Tianyu asked, unimpressed. He didn't hesitate to throw himself into the conversation in spite of Jinshi's presence—the Moon Prince himself. Maomao jabbed him with her elbow. "Oops! Moon Prince, sir. I didn't realize you were here.

Very sorry."

Maomao was coming to think that Tianyu was not very concerned with etiquette. Not that she was in any position to judge.

Jinshi's expression was somewhat hard, but superficially, he wore a smile befitting one who "lived above the clouds," a nobleman. "Considering the commotion, it would have been difficult not to notice. But what exactly were you doing?" he asked.

Playing innocent, are we? Maomao thought. Here he'd even sent Basen to do the dirty work.

Maomao, worried what Tianyu would say if left to his own devices, stepped forward before he could speak. "Sir. Rumor has it that an apparition has been spotted in and around this house of late. The soldier attached to the physicians told me that he'd heard about it from a servant, and he's been investigating it on his patrols of the mansion. The same servant came to him again this very morning, but as our soldier was on guard duty last night,

I hesitated to make him deal with it himself."

Maomao assumed Chue would have filled Jinshi in on their experiences of the night before.

"As a matter of fact, I myself encountered what I take to be that spirit just last night, so I wanted to help find out what was going on."

"Mm. And what about this physician with you? Presumably he has medical duties to attend to." Jinshi looked at Tianyu coldly.

Damn. She knew it hadn't been a good idea to let Tianyu get involved. She glowered at him. He, however, stepped forward with an innocent look. "My humble apologies," he said as elaborately as possible. "I begged her to let me accompany her. Maomao here is far more accomplished in the mixing of medicines than my inadequate self, and has been graciously teaching me a great deal. When she said that she wished to examine the courtyard, I simply assumed she meant she was going to hunt for herbs and

other ingredients, and followed along." Why, you little...

He was acting exceptionally polite and wasn't even getting her name wrong!

Maomao thought Jinshi's eyes glinted even more brightly. "Hoh, I see. I think I understand what's going on here. You believe this bird is the alleged spirit?"

"Yes, sir. Anyway, that's half the answer." Maomao looked at the owl.

"This place is too public," Jinshi said. "Perhaps I could ask you a few more questions somewhere else."

"Certainly, sir," Maomao said, and off they went.

Chapter 12: The Feitouman (Part 2)

Jinshi studied the animal in the cage. "I've never seen a bird with a face quite like this before. I never imagined."

They had moved to Jinshi's chambers, where he sat in the place of honor, with Suiren, Taomei, and Chue around him, as well as Basen for his bodyguard. Maomao suspected Basen's older brother Baryou was nearby as well, but she didn't expect to actually see him at any point. Gaoshun was absent; whether he was off duty or on some other errand, she didn't know. For some reason, Tianyu was there too, smiling away.

Pretend you have work or something and get out of here! Maomao thought at him, but if it seemed like something interesting was going on, Tianyu would make it his business to be a part of it.

"What made you think a bird like this might be the true identity of our feitouman?" Jinshi asked.

Maomao closed her eyes. She would have to be careful not to give Tianyu any information that might tip him off.

"Sir. The first thing that struck me as odd was the word 'mask.' People said they had seen it by the tree or on the roof of the building, so my first thought was to look near the tree. My encounter with the alleged spirit also took the form of a mask."

Chue had noticed the tree as well. Maomao's investigation had turned up bird droppings—and not those of a small bird, but rather a fairly large, carnivorous one.

"I've seen small birds flying through the house during the day, so it occurred to me that if there was a predator around, they might well be nocturnal."

"Mm. So that was when you realized there was a bird behind these apparitions. How did you prove it?"

"Once I knew about this bird, sir, it was a fairly simple guess.

I'd never seen one myself, but I had heard of birds with faces that look like masks. There was a picture of one in the encyclopedia of animals that I got at the apothecary's shop where I used to work.

Although I admit I didn't pay it much mind the first time I saw it."

She trusted Jinshi would know which encyclopedia she was referring to—one of the books brought out of the Shi clan fortress. It was in Jinshi's keeping at the moment; if he'd brought it to the western capital, he might be able to look at it.

"An encyclopedia?" Jinshi said with a glance at Taomei. She brought out an armload of books, Chue helping to carry those she couldn't fit in her arms. The books included the encyclopedia of medicinal herbs, along with those about insects and animals. Those were Shi clan books, but there were several others Maomao had never seen.

Guess he didn't waste any time digging them out after yesterday.

She was impressed by how quickly he worked.

"This is what we would call, appropriately enough, a masked owl," she said. "No normal owl would give the impression of a flying mask—and this one has an unusual coloration." This owl boasted feathers so dark they were almost black. Usually, even birds with dark-colored bodies had white feathers on their bellies, but other than its face, this one was a uniform dark brown. It would be easy to miss it in the night.

"A masked owl? That's this, isn't it?" Jinshi asked, opening to the relevant page of the Shi clan encyclopedia. Coloring aside, the unsettling, masklike face certainly matched the bird in the cage.

Tianyu raised his hand. "May I ask something?"

"Go ahead." Jinshi sounded somewhat more commanding than usual.

"I agree it looks like it's wearing a mask, but doesn't it seem a bit small? It's a little undersized to be a person's face."

Tianyu peered into the cage at the bird. The animal wasn't fighting; in fact, it looked sleepy. If they put some nesting material in with it, maybe it would doze off.

"The human eye is unreliable," Maomao replied. "It might be only the white part you'd see floating in midair, but I think it would look bigger than it is." Then Maomao took a piece of paper from the folds of her robe. She was just looking for writing utensils when Chue took some out and offered them to her. She was nimble, that was for sure. Incidentally, she hadn't spared the annoyed looks at Basen, who had almost let the bird escape.

Maomao made four dots on the paper, right where a person's eyes, mouth, and nose would be, and held it up for Jinshi and Tianyu. "People will perceive anything as a human face as long as the dots are in the right place. It's like how we sometimes see faces in the knots of wooden pillars."

"So now we know what the mysterious mask was," Tianyu said. He reached into the cage and poked the owl, which didn't particularly react.

Taomei appeared carrying a small dish of raw chicken meat. It seemed she was more generous with owls than with ducks.

Maybe two predators knew each other.

So the bird gets meat?

Taomei picked up a piece of chicken with a pair of chopsticks and held it out; the owl promptly took it. It showed no aversion to food offered by humans.

"What about the head, though? You said you'd solved half the riddle. Does that mean you think the head is something else?" Tianyu was no fool; he remembered exactly what Maomao had said.

"A mask and a head? What does that mean?" Jinshi asked.

Maomao began to explain, taking the chance to review everything she knew. "Witnesses began reporting it about two months ago. At the time, some people reported a mask and some said they saw a head, but in the last twenty days or so, most witnesses have reported a head. What's more, they report it outside the mansion. In my case, I saw the mask, but no head."

"So you think the mask and the head are different things. If this bird accounts for the mask, then what's the head?" Jinshi asked.

"About that..." Maomao glanced at Chue.

"Yes? Whatever do you need? Is there something you want from Miss Chue?"

"It's not you, is it, Miss Chue?"

Maomao considered the timeline. The head had been witnessed starting about twenty days earlier, or in other words, right about the time Maomao and the others had arrived in the western capital. And there was one member of their party who seemed especially prone to doing unusual things.

"How could you, Miss Maomao? Hasn't Miss Chue been with you the last several days?"

Maomao had to admit that was true. They'd been working in the fields together.

"It was just a hypothesis," she said. "But I feel like this owl has given me a big piece of the puzzle." As the owl ate its chicken, she looked at its leg. There, she spotted a small, well-crafted metal ring. "I don't think it will take us long at all to find out the truth about the head. We just have to set a little trap."

She smiled at the owl with the unsettling face and gave it a pat on the head.

The next day, Chue appeared at the medical office. Maomao had cleaned up from breakfast and was helping the quack make some medicines. A look at Jinshi's encyclopedia of herbs had given her some idea as to which of the specimens she'd collected might be useful, and they were experimenting.

"Are you a prophet, Miss Maomao?" Chue asked, blinking.

"I take it you caught the culprit. You weren't too rough with them, were you?"

"What in the world are you two talking about? I'm so confused," said the quack, who was in no way part of this conversation. It seemed like a lot of work to explain things to him, so Maomao decided to just have him keep working on the medicines. When he was done with that, she suspected he would make them tea.

Chue needed no invitation to make herself at home; she sat in a chair and waited for the quack to bring her some sweets. The conversation with Maomao almost seemed ancillary to her goal of treats.

"Don't worry. It was just like you said, Miss Maomao. We watched the owl's cage all night long, and when the bird suddenly started making a ruckus, we searched the premises. It was the strangest thing! We found a woman dressed all in black and wearing a bizarre mask."

Chue related all this with great good cheer, while also grabbing a sip of the tea the quack doctor politely produced. The accompanying snacks were dried fruit, a very westerncapitalesque treat.

"Really? Wow, who knew?" Maomao said, a bit taken aback herself to find that her prediction had been so on the mark. "So, was this the person who was keeping the owl?"

"Bingo!" Chue formed a large circle with both arms, a gesture of confirmation.

Maomao thought about the owl they'd caught. "It was pretty obvious it was a domestic bird. The way it had something on its leg, and wasn't worried about being in a cage or eating chicken that had already been cut up for it. I don't think this is an animal she was just keeping temporarily. She's had it a long time." "Hoh, hoh."

"Plus, there's something that's been bothering me about the witness testimony."

Specifically, a commonality between the reports of the mask, which had started two months earlier, and the reports of the head, which dated from twenty days ago.

"Two months ago... Wouldn't that be just about the time Empress Gyokuyou's infamous niece was about to leave for the capital?"

"Oh!" Chue said, evidently catching Maomao's drift.

"Suppose the owl was intended to be one of the offerings to be taken to the Imperial city, but it somehow got away," Maomao said.

"Hoh, hoh! You mean, maybe she was trying to catch it so she could have another chance to offer it to the Imperial family now that a member has come all the way here? All right, but why the mask? Trying to hide her identity?"

Maomao had an idea about that, although it wasn't a clear or certain answer—just one of her guesses.

"Miss Maomao," Chue said. "Miss Chue may act silly, but she's nobody's fool. She would understand that your opinion was just one possibility, and would never accept it uncritically."

It was Chue's roundabout way of saying Spit it out already.

Maomao saw little choice but to oblige.

"I suspect the mask and the black outfit are to make this person look more like the owl's mother." Chue cocked her head at that.

"Are you familiar with imprinting?" Maomao asked.

"Oh yes, Miss Chue knows all about that. It means that when a bird hatches from its egg, it thinks the first thing it sees is its mother. The same way that duck feels about my little brother-inlaw."

"Yes, exactly. I think maybe whoever raised the owl intended to return it to the wild, and wanted to make sure it didn't imprint on a human face."

"Hoh..."

Judging by the owl's droppings, it was catching its own food, which meant it knew how to hunt.

"However, it can and will accept meat from a human hand," Maomao said. "Domesticate an interesting-looking bird like that, and a rich person might buy it as a curiosity, or it could be given as an offering to the nobility."

"But its keeper didn't want it to end up that way, so she let it go—or maybe it escaped?"

"This is only a hypothesis, remember." Maomao refused to speak with certainty.

"It was her bad luck, though, that the owl took up residence right in Master Gyoku-ou's annex! And when a member of the

Imperial family arrived to stay there—well, how terrible!" "Hypothesis!" Maomao repeated.

"She realized the owl would be quicker to come to her if she dressed the way she had while she was raising it. Then, when she caught it, she planned to release it somewhere far away, somewhere people would never find it."

"Hypothe...sigh."

"Don't worry, I know!"

Perhaps the keeper had used some kind of bird whistle. The owl had responded, but hadn't come outside.

Regardless of whether Maomao's guess was accurate, it did gain them one thing.

"The person in black is the owl's keeper, right?" Maomao asked.

"Yes indeed!" Chue chirped.

They grinned at each other. The quack, still out of the loop, was visibly intimidated by two people who looked to him like they were up to no good.

If Maomao was right that this person had raised the bird from a fledgling, it would bring them close to solving one particular problem. Nianzhen, the former serf, had spoken of the

Windreader tribe, and how the Yi clan had granted the tribe their protection.

But I'm betting they didn't earn the protection of a major clan by just ritually scratching in the dirt.

There was also the question of how they had actually gotten rid of the insects they found. Maomao felt herself being led to one conclusion: the Windreaders had kept birds. As she'd suggested to Jinshi, they might well have used the creatures to communicate. A fast, reliable means of carrying messages would have been very valuable.

For starters, Maomao decided she wanted to meet this masked stranger.

Chapter 13: The Windreader Tribe

Chue led Maomao to where the suspect was being kept. Maomao could hear someone shouting, "I told you already! This is all a big misunderstanding!" The voice seemed a bit too strident to be a woman's, but when Maomao saw the suspect, she understood.

"It's some kid," she said.

The child was perhaps ten years old, with narrow eyes and lighter skin more characteristic of a resident of Kaou Province than someone from the western capital. And although her features looked boyish, the long hair tied back behind her head suggested that this person was indeed a girl. In general, men of the western capital, even young boys, wore head scarfs, or otherwise had their hair back in long braids. It was probably the mask and the long hair that had caused her to be mistaken for a grown woman.

"I'm not just some kid!" she said, puffing out her cheeks, which did not help her case.

There in the room with the suspicious child were Gaoshun, Taomei, Basen, and another guard Maomao saw frequently but whose name she didn't know.

"Maomao," Taomei called to her, narrowing her differently colored eyes.

"Lady Taomei? Why are you here?" Maomao asked. She didn't seem like the kind of person who would normally be present at an interrogation—which wasn't to say she didn't seem like she would be very good at it.

"First they thought she was a woman, then they decided she was a little boy, whereupon my second son announced that he would conduct the interrogation. Imagine what happened when

he realized he was dealing with a girl child."

"Ah," said Maomao. She could imagine. "Why is Master Gaoshun here, then?"

Basen wasn't very good at dealing with women. How bad was he? Bad enough that there were fears that he would never succeed in leaving children for posterity.

"If you aren't concerned to be alone with Taomei and Basen, Xiaomao, I can leave," Gaoshun said, although the furrow in his brow was deeper than usual. Maomao decided to roll with it.

"Mother..." Basen groaned. Here he was performing an interrogation under the watchful eye of his parents. Talk about overprotective.

The girl was just a child. Was that still too much for Basen to handle?

He seems to cope with me and Miss Chue all right. She could understand when it came to Chue; she was something of a rare beast. Maybe Basen viewed Maomao as falling into the same category. It made her frown a little.

"Isn't the questioning going well? Want Miss Chue to handle things?" Chue asked, approaching with a bright smile.

"No, Miss Chue, your help won't be necessary," said Taomei.

"Aww. But I'm so good with kids." Chue unspooled a string of flags from her sleeve.

"I'm sorry, but if I may ask, how far has the questioning gotten?" Maomao said, breaking in between the daughter-in-law and the mother-in-law. The members of the Ma clan were all very characterful, and Maomao feared getting left behind if she didn't take the initiative to insert herself into the conversation. Basen's duck could be seen sticking her bill into the room to get a look at what was going on, but she didn't actually come in. She was scared of Taomei.

"Pardon me. At the moment, this child—her name is Kulumu."

"Ku...Kulumu?"

"It's written like this," Taomei said, sketching the characters on the table.

"I see, thank you," Maomao said. The name didn't sound much like something from the area of the Imperial capital. If anything, it had the ring of something from Shaoh, or even farther west.

"Tell her! Tell her I'm just a beautiful young lady whose only crime was trying to get back the bird I raised!"

Beautiful young lady? Everyone looked at Kulumu. Whatever

else, she certainly had a high opinion of herself. At the moment, however, saying so only seemed likely to get them further off track.

"She maintains that the only thing she wants is her bird back and that she has no malicious intent of any kind, and she has informed us in no uncertain terms that as such, we should return the animal to her and let her go," Taomei explained.

"Quite a demanding little so-and-so," Chue said. Maomao's thoughts exactly.

"Who cares?! I raised that bird! Here, look at this! You can see it likes me!"

"I'm not sure I can."

The bird refused to look at Kulumu. Even at such close range, the creature appeared to be wearing a strange mask.

"I told you, I need this!" Kulumu put on a mask to complement her black outfit. Finally, the owl turned in her direction. "Heh, see? I raised it from an egg. And I was dressed like this the whole time."

"Meaning it would respond to anybody dressed like that. Not just you," Maomao observed.

Kulumu's jaw practically hit the floor. "No, it's true! You've got to believe me! How can you not trust such a sweet, innocent child?!" She looked like she might burst into tears. "I even know its favorite food!"

"My, but you are cute. It's chicken," Taomei said, taking a piece of meat in her chopsticks and holding it out to the owl, who hopped over and greedily pecked it up.

Kulumu looked even more scandalized.

"It turns out you don't need black pajamas as long as you have food."

Behind her mask, Kulumu let out what sounded like a choked sob.

Basen, meanwhile, was just standing there, not saying a word. His mother was on top of things. In fact, he looked an awful lot like Gaoshun, who stood beside him obviously praying that nothing would happen.

"N-No... I... I raised it! It's mine!" Kulumu insisted.

"And can you prove that to us?" Maomao asked.

"I w-w-wish I could..."

"Gosh, Miss Maomao, you're as ruthless with children as you are with everyone else," Chue said, pure peanut gallery at this point, while Taomei held out more chicken. Chue, it seemed, was being deferential toward her mother-in-law, despite the liberties she appeared to take with her father-in-law and brother-in-law.

"It's easy to be critical, but even children can start a proverbial fire. When you're sneaking around a powerful person's house, you're going to get in trouble for it, even if you're a kid, right?" Maomao said.

"Fair enough." Chue took the chicken and was about to pop it into her own mouth.

"Oh, Miss Chue, raw chicken is dangerous. Cook it first if you're going to eat it."

"Oops! My mistake."

Chue might have been a gourmand with an iron stomach, but even she should probably steer clear of raw pork and chicken.

"I m-mean it... I raised it! I h-hatched the egg myself," Kulumu said.

"Is that so? And where did you get the egg? How did you hatch it? And how did the owl escape? Tell us that?" Maomao asked.

Kulumu took another great sniff, then started to talk. "The eegg, I... I got it from someone. This hunter who was friends with my dad. He said he didn't need it, but my dad didn't want to buy it."

"A hunter?"

"Yeah. He was out hawking, and he found it in this nest, so he brought it back with him. He thought my dad could hatch it and raise it to sell to some rich guy." "Ah..."

And this bird had been what emerged.

"How did you hatch the egg, then?"

"D-Dad always keeps the room nice and warm. He uses plenty of fuel, and if it gets too hot, we open the window, and about five times a day he flips the eggs. I couldn't use any fuel, though, so I kept it tucked close to me. You know, like the way a mother bird might. It hatched after about five days."

"Hmm..."

"I'm sure she's right. Duck eggs are hatched the same way," Basen volunteered. He ought to know; he'd looked after those ducks for long enough. Maomao was only vaguely familiar with methods of hatching eggs, but it sounded about right.

This time Basen turned to Maomao. "Well? What do you think?"

"I think it sounds plausible. Too detailed to be a story she concocted on the spot."

"Agreed. Interesting, to find out ducks and owls are hatched the same way."

Interesting, but, unfortunately for Basen, irrelevant. Why was he so infatuated with ducks these days, anyway?

Yes, it's all basically plausible...

But something still nagged at her. "So you raised this owl with the intention to sell it?"

"N-No, I didn't!"

"Thought not." Maomao plucked a handful of Kulumu's black outfit. "You were hoping to return it to the wild, weren't you?"

After a second, Kulumu replied, "Yeah... I even taught it how to catch mice and bugs so it could hunt for itself."

"But then it was sold out from under you."

"Yeah! By my stupid dad!" She clenched her fists. "When he saw its unusual face and funny color, he waited until I was out somewhere and he sold it. He never even asked me! I didn't have a mate for it, so I was gonna let it go back to the woods. That was the whole point of this suffocating costume!"

Kulumu was obviously furious, but it was hardly an unusual story. In Li, the head of the household was generally entitled to do as he wished with the possessions of the women and children.

I guess maybe it would be more surprising if you lived somewhere women were in a stronger position, Maomao thought. Daughters were commonly treated as tools to be used in political marriages, or as a way to gain a dowry. Selling a girl to the pleasure quarter was, in essence, much the same thing.

"I understand. Perhaps I could ask you a few questions while I get my thoughts in order? These questions are based entirely on my assumptions, so please correct me if I'm wrong."

"Okay." Kulumu sniffed and nodded.

"Your father isn't a falconer himself, but makes his money domesticating hawks and other unusual birds and selling them to wealthy people, is that right?"

Kulumu nodded. "He hunts too. But pets sell for more."

"And whom did he sell the owl to? Was it the daughter of

Master Gyoku-ou, the owner of this house?"

"No! She's his adopted daughter. The Nightingale King doesn't have a real daughter that age." Kulumu had stopped sniffling; she sounded strikingly clear and forceful.

"The Nightingale King?" Maomao asked. She'd never heard that expression before. Adopted daughters were hardly unusual, anyway. She hadn't expected that to be the point to make Kulumu bristle.

"It's the name of the main character in this play. He solves the hardest problems with speed and grace! The story is modeled on some old duke. Someone stuck Gyoku-ou with the nickname

'cause his name means Jade Nightingale."

Kulumu might have looked young, but Maomao was starting to appreciate that she was a pretty sharp kid, with a highly developed vocabulary for someone her age.

"Master Gyoku-ou certainly seems popular in the western capital."

"I guess. It helps that he's the oldest son of Master Gyokuen, who made this city what it is, but he's real friendly. He'll even talk to commoners."

"Is that right?" Maomao found that this man, Gyoku-ou, didn't quite make sense to her. Right now, though, there were more important questions to ask. "So your owl was sold to Master Gyoku-ou's daughter, but then it escaped and started living here in this house, right?"

"Pretty much."

"How did you learn the owl had gotten out?"

"Oh, well, the culprit came to me and apologized."

"The culprit?" Maomao glanced at Chue. Taomei and Basen looked equally surprised.

"I might not look like much, but I've got connections with the Gyoku household. They even taught me to write."

"Wow! And here you just look like a filthy little kid," Chue muttered.

"Who're you callin' filthy?! I'm a gorgeous woman, just like I said!" Kulumu snapped. Apparently she was over her crying fit.

"I'd be very interested if you could explain. If I may say so, you don't look like someone whose station would normally allow access to this mansion." Taomei had put it a different way, but she was essentially saying the same thing as Chue. Gaoshun could only look pleadingly at his wife and daughter-in-law, silently begging them not to be quite so rude.

"I was real close with Gyoku-ou's mom, Master Gyokuen's wife. She's a relative of my dad's. That's the way we got into selling birds to rich folk. I actually saw Gyoku-ou's daughter or whoever when we handed the bird over. I tried to ask her to give it back, but it was like she didn't know what to do. Guess she can't just

give away something she got from my dad."

"So it was the daughter who let the bird go," Maomao suggested. She had to admit she didn't have the most favorable feelings toward the young woman, who had been sent to the Imperial capital as part of a political ploy, but it wasn't the girl's fault. Indeed, she didn't seem like a bad person as such.

"Couldn't tell you. All I got was a message: It got away. Sorry. I knew what they meant was they wanted me to catch it. Like I said. Innocent."

"I don't know about that. You gave the residents of this house an awful fright," said Maomao.

"Grr," Kulumu growled, sounding like a wild dog.

"I think we've got the idea now, Miss Maomao," said Chue.

"Yes. As far as it goes..."

"But that's not far enough for you, is it, Miss Maomao? There's something else you want to ask about."

Chue was right. Maomao wasn't primarily interested in why Kulumu had been lurking around the mansion.

"All right. Maybe you can compensate us for the trouble you've caused by answering a few questions."

"Yes, I think that's a fine idea," said not Kulumu, but Taomei.

Maomao kept one eye on Taomei as she said, "Your family raises birds. Do you ever use them as a means of communication?"

"Not these days. I guess we used to, back in the day, and we know these people who raise pigeons."

Maomao crossed her arms thoughtfully. "Did you ever practice falconry, then?"

"Yeah, we did. Dad just gave it up 'cause he thought he'd make more selling stuff to rich people. We used to hunt rabbits, even foxes sometimes. That's the whole reason he didn't want this egg—you need falcons or hawks to hunt big enough game to make it worth it. What's better to have around, right? A pet, or something that can hunt? Pets're easier to raise, though."

She was right; an owl would only be able to hunt mice, or small rabbits at best.

"In that case, could you train the birds you raised to hunt only specific animals?"

Kulumu frowned at that. "We never did, but I guess it's not impossible. Sometimes people feed birds one specific thing from the day they hatch, to influence their diets that way. Or you can give them specific rewards based on what they hunt for you. See, in falconry, when the bird brings a kill back, you trade it for food. They could learn what gets them their favorite treats, and then they might start looking more for those things."

Yes, Kulumu was a sharp one, all right. Notwithstanding her shrill voice, she was far more grown-up than her contemporary Chou-u.

"That means maybe you could teach birds to target grasshoppers," Maomao mused.

"Grasshoppers?" Basen said immediately. Whatever he thought was going on, it made him turn toward the duck, whose bill was still peeking through the crack in the door.

"Grasshoppers?" Kulumu echoed. "You'd need a bird that wasn't very big, like this guy. And they like meat better, so it'd be more practical to teach them to trade grasshoppers for food."

"I see. One more question, then," Maomao said. She took in a deep breath, then let the words out all at once. "Are you a

member of the Windreader tribe?"

That set Kulumu back on her heels for a moment. "How do you know that name?"

Maomao clenched her fist. "So you know about them!"

Kulumu, the self-proclaimed beautiful woman, crossed her arms and went, "Hrm..." Then she said, "I'm not sure I'd go that far. I've heard my great-grandpa used to go by that name back when everyone was still living on the plains. My grandma mentioned it to me a few times, but I wouldn't say I know much about them."

"Would you tell us what you do know?"

"Hmm. I dunno..." Kulumu was very pleased to discover she had something Maomao wanted. "Can't tell ya for free..." She smirked. She wanted money!

A predatory pair of eyes glinted behind her. "Speaking of free, perhaps you'd prefer to be handed over to the authorities?" Taomei was smiling. For some reason Basen, who wasn't even involved here, shrank back, and even the owl fluttered its wings and quivered. Gaoshun wore the impassive expression of a monk contemplating Emptiness, while Chue appeared to be pretending to be a tree.

Kulumu grimaced. No wonder even Gaoshun lived in awe of his wife.

Maomao coughed pointedly. "The negotiating is already over.

You answer our questions, and we don't give you to the law.

There's also the matter of certain future treatment..."

"Yes, for example, we're still considering what will happen to this owl," Taomei said, picking up the theme.

"Fine, I get it... My grandma told me that way back in the old days, one of the nomadic tribes was attacked, and most of them were killed. She said the women were taken as brides and the kids were sold as slaves."

That accorded with what Maomao had learned. But something bothered her.

"I heard the Windreaders used birds. Would this mean that their method of hatching and raising those animals didn't die with them?"

"Sorry, I don't think I put it quite the right way. The

Windreaders were wiped out. At least, that half of them were."

"Th-That half?" Maomao and the others stared at Kulumu, open-mouthed.

"Yeah, sure. The Windreaders were always wandering the plains, doing some sort of ritual or whatever. So why would they all go everywhere together, in a big clump? It's better to split up, right? Especially since they could use birds to talk to each other and stuff. Okay, so I don't know for sure if it was exactly half. Maybe it was a third, even a quarter. My great-grandpa was with one of them."

"What happened to the rest of them?" Maomao asked. "Everyone treats the Windreaders as if they were gone. And the ritual wasn't able to continue, was it?"

"Hrm... Gotta say, I don't really know. My great-grandpa was from the part of the tribe that survived, I guess, but he died when my grandma was about ten. She said he taught her a bunch of stuff about birds, but that by that time they weren't nomads anymore. He was already living in town. She said they never had to worry about food, though, 'cause he had a regular customer who bought the pigeons he raised."

"A regular customer?"

"I guess. Probably some VIP from somewhere, she said, but that was all she told me. I don't think she knew much about it herself."

Everyone fell absolutely silent.

"Huh? Hey, uh... Did I say something wrong?"

"No," Maomao said slowly. "No, in fact, thank you very much." For the first time, she truly appreciated what was meant by "a bolt from the blue." No, that wasn't quite true—she'd thought Kulumu might have been somehow tangentially connected to the Windreader tribe, but she had never expected to come so close to the heart of the matter.

"So, can I take my friend here home or what? I've found the perfect place to let it go."

"You've finally got it back, and you're going to release it?" Maomao asked.

"That was always the plan. It's what my grandma taught me."

Maomao caught Taomei's eye. She gave a single nod, and Maomao handed the caged bird to Kulumu, who broke into a big smile.

"Perhaps you'd answer one final question for me?"

"Yeah? What?" Kulumu was in high spirits now that she had her owl back; Maomao could see her front teeth as she spoke.

"You said your father was a relative of Master Gyoku-ou's mother. Can I assume that his mother was also a member of the

Windreader tribe?"

"Couldn't say for sure about that. She seemed to like birds a lot, though, and definitely knew how to handle them."

If Gyoku-ou's mother was a Windreader, a great many pieces of this puzzle would start to fall into place.

This is some valuable information... But if Maomao believed what Kulumu had told her, it would also produce several contradictions. For example, if the Windreader tribe wasn't

completely annihilated, why didn't they continue the ritual after the attack?

It would call into question the point of what Nianzhen the serf had been doing.

Then there was the question of why the surviving Windreaders had disappeared.

Yes, a great many questions.

I can think of a possibility.

Suppose someone let people think the Windreaders had been destroyed, and then put their talents to other uses.

People who could communicate information quickly would have a tactical advantage.

If you could corral a people who had been "wiped out" and keep them in one place, there would be any number of uses for them. It made sense when Maomao thought about Kulumu's great-grandfather, who had already been living in town. It would also explain his rather untimely demise.

Once the necessary knowledge had been passed along, people who remembered the past would only be a hindrance.

"Hey! Heeey! Miss? Can I go home now?"

Maomao snapped out of her reverie when Kulumu poked her. She must have gotten lost in thought. "Sorry about that. Could you tell us how to contact you? I might be able to introduce you to a client who'd be very interested in your birds."

"Yikes... Why do you look so scary?"

Apparently Kulumu wasn't being taken in by Maomao's attempt

at a smile. She was trying to look friendly, but instead her face conveyed: I'll be damned if I let this precious source of

information slip through my fingers.

"Ho ho. Don't worry, we would never mistreat a child. Come, now, won't you introduce us to your daddy?" Taomei asked, eyes bright. Kulumu twitched, then nodded.

Taomei is too strong, Maomao thought. She was a masterpiece of a woman, in a way distinct from either Suiren or the madam.

It's gotten awfully quiet.

Chue was restraining herself, and Basen had adopted his father's studiously contemplative expression. Maomao wondered if this was how Gaoshun had been fashioned into the man he was today. Presently he stood there, doing what appeared to be his best impression of a wall.

They sent Kulumu home with one of the menservants, then Taomei summoned Maomao.

"Would there happen to be anything you're still not telling us?" she asked. Her tone was polite, but the message was unmistakable: If you know something, spit it out.

"I have my suspicions, ma'am, but they're nothing more than that. Guesses, full of absurd conjecture. I hesitate even to give voice to them."

Luomen had taught Maomao that she had to take responsibility for her words. She wasn't about to draw concrete conclusions on nothing but the strength of unproven assumptions.

"Perhaps, but my—our—master isn't looking for crystal clear conclusions. It's in his nature to take in everything that he can. Perhaps you could share your thoughts with us in order to help him consider how to prepare for what's going to happen." She turned those predator's eyes on Maomao. Out with it! they said.

"Very well, ma'am." She knew Taomei would take whatever she said to "their master," Jinshi.

"Don't tell me. I think you should speak to him directly."

"I really don't think it would be a problem for us to simply talk here." She was confident Taomei wouldn't twist her words when telling Jinshi about them.

"By no means. My husband was just saying that the Moon

Prince could use a chance to relax a little."

"Excuse me?"

Taomei's smile was almost mischievous. Maomao glowered at her, but she could do no more than that.

Chapter 14: The Past and the Possible

The beautiful room was suffused with the rich aroma of tea. The tea, which was served (ploop-ploop-ploop) out of a foreignstyle teapot, was red as a rose. This was dark tea in the most literal sense, Maomao observed as she savored the smell. People sometimes took this kind of tea with sugar or cow's milk, but Maomao declined them—she couldn't abide sweetened tea.

"So, what's your take on the matter?" asked Jinshi, who managed to look elegant just stirring some milk into his drink with a spoon. That was the right way to do it to avoid making himself sick to his stomach. Suiren had heated the milk to make it easier on his digestive system.

Maomao sat across the table from him and sipped her own tea. Are we sure about this? Is this the right setting for this conversation?

Taomei had led Maomao directly to Jinshi's chambers, but no matter how you sliced it, she found herself at a tea party. Suiren didn't appear to object, meaning they had her tacit approval, but Maomao couldn't help wondering.

"Here, for you," the old lady had said with a smile as she pushed tea toward Maomao. She'd felt she couldn't refuse, so decided to enjoy just a sip while she spoke with Jinshi.

"I must warn you, sir, my opinion—"

"—is merely speculation, and might not fully accord with the true facts. Yes, yes. I assure you, I'll take an objective view of things and not accept all you say uncritically. Does that make you feel better?"

"Yes, sir," Maomao said. It was all she could say. Jinshi glanced at Taomei. Was his diligently official tone in deference to her presence? "Where would you like me to start?"

"With the Windreader tribe. Put it all together for me, even the things I've heard before."

"Very well, sir." That at least made things easier—she would be spared the effort of trying not to repeat herself. "We first heard about the Windreaders from Nianzhen, the former serf at the farming village we visited. He said the tribe had been destroyed in an attack meant to gain his people wives and slaves. The Windreader tribe was responsible for a ritual of some kind and, according to Nianzhen, was under the protection of the Yi clan."

This much she had already told Jinshi, so he continued to sip his tea and munch on a snack as he listened. The snack, incidentally, was a foreign-style cookie well matched to the exotic tea.

"We can speculate that whatever the ritual was, it somehow helped stop plagues of insects before they happened. It might have been a practice called fall plowing, which involves turning over the earth to not only improve soil quality, but destroy the eggs of pest insects. I think Lahan's older brother would know the specifics."

"You mean Lahan's Brother. The La clan is full of highly accomplished individuals, isn't it? To think, they have two virtually professional farmers."

So it had come to this: even Jinshi called him Lahan's Brother.

I get the impression Lahan's Brother learned farming under duress, though.

With his distinctive diligent streak, she knew he must have dedicated himself to learning the ways of the soil. If he'd been born into an ordinary family, he might have become a more ordinary overachiever.

"Where is Lahan's Brother?" Jinshi asked.

"We received a message that he should be returning to the western capital tomorrow. He's mostly finished teaching the villagers how to farm," Basen reported.

Oh, yeah. We left him there, didn't we? Maomao thought. She wondered if he'd been successful in teaching them how to cultivate potatoes.

"When he gets back, tell him to come talk to me."

"Yes, sir."

Basen withdrew. There was a stray duck feather on his back.

Maomao looked at Jinshi to see if it was okay to continue.

"Go ahead," he said.

"Yes, sir. The Windreader tribe used birds in some capacity, but the former serf didn't know exactly how. The suspicious character we caught today—Kulumu—however, claims that the Windreaders were not wiped out, and that they passed on the secret of their birds, which is how their descendants now make their living. As you suspected, they appear to raise messenger pigeons. They might also have raised other kinds of birds."

Kulumu had seemed to believe that the knack for raising birds was primarily about cultivating pets to sell to rich people, but that wasn't true.

"Depending on how the birds are raised, I believe they could be used to help find insects. But I do think that messenger birds are the clan's stock-in-trade."

This was simply the answer Jinshi had already arrived at.

"I think the Windreaders' greatest strength was their ability to use birds to communicate. Although I must emphasize that this is only my guess, I wouldn't be surprised if they were serving as an information network."

Jinshi didn't so much as flinch. "What of the tribe's survivors, then?"

"Again, this is only speculation—but I think they might have been protected by those who saw value in their abilities." Maomao spoke slowly, choosing her words carefully.

"And who do you think protected them?"

After a moment she said, "I'm not sure. The Yi clan, perhaps, or maybe some other power."

"Why would the Yi do that?"

Maomao knew as well as Jinshi that her answer created some inconsistencies. If the Yi had been seriously protecting the Windreaders, the tragedy of fifty years before would never have occurred.

"I make bold to refer to the former emperor's mother, the empress regnant, sir."

"You have my permission."

"It's because she destroyed the Yi clan."

"Hmm."

Maomao could see that it made sense to Jinshi. The empress regnant had ruled the country by proxy, controlling her son like a marionette. She seemed to have been a thoughtful and logical person; there had been obvious reasons for her to expand the rear palace and forbid logging in the forests. But when it came to the annihilation of the Yi clan, there was much that remained unclear.

"You're suggesting that the Yi clan tried to keep the Windreaders to themselves, not letting the Imperial family know about them, and when it transpired that they were in effect a private spy network, the clan was punished for it."

"I think it's a possibility, sir."

It was only Maomao's hypothesis. She offered it to Jinshi merely as something to consider in making his judgments.

"Understood. What about the possibility that someone other than the Yi clan was harboring this tribe, then?"

"I remembered that the White Lady used pigeons to communicate. She might have learned to do that in Shaoh—and it's not impossible that it reached her, or Shaoh, from the

Windreaders."

"So the Windreaders' art found a home in Shaoh. Which leaves us with the question, did it get there before the tribe was destroyed, or after?"

Now, that wasn't a very nice question.

"In my view, it would have to have been before their destruction," Maomao said.

"So it was treachery?"

"Yes, sir. They committed subterfuge."

Maomao thought once more about the reason the Windreaders had been destroyed. The tribe had been priests of some kind, yes, but suppose they had also been spies serving the Yi clan. If the Windreaders had betrayed their masters, then it would make sense that the Yi would choose to simply stand by as another tribe massacred them.

Then they collected the last of the Windreaders in the cities, where they could keep an eye on them, and made sure their arts were passed down to the next generation—then eliminated them.

Kulumu's responses had put the idea in Maomao's head and she couldn't get it out again. It would be easy to justify moving the Windreaders into town: the Yi simply wanted to protect them.

When, in fact, they wanted to keep them close.

Jinshi seemed to agree with her; he was nodding along and sipping his tea. Maomao took a drink herself; her throat was parched.

"So the Yi are involved, and Shaoh. Is that all?" Jinshi asked.

"No—there's one more group." Kulumu had said something else that had gotten Maomao's attention. "Kulumu said something that implied that Master Gyokuen's wife, Master Gyoku-ou's mother,

was of Windreader origin herself." Jinshi didn't mince words. "That's right." So he's already looked into it.

Why even bother asking about her speculation, then? Behind Jinshi, Chue held up two fingers and grinned. She must have been the one to get the info.

"It seems Sir Gyokuen's wife played a substantial role in helping his business prosper. Information is as good as gold in business dealings, after all. For him to have amassed as many resources as he has over the course of these several decades, he must possess a power others don't."

And now his grandchild stood next in line for the Imperial throne. If Gyokuen was a self-made man, he had made himself better than any other man in the nation.

"No one has a bad word to say about this wife of his. They all say she was intelligent and warm." That made sense; Kulumu had said she was kind as well. Funny, considering she had something of a shady son.

That was about as far as Maomao needed to delve into this, in her own opinion—but there was one other thing she had to ask.

"May I bring up something slightly off the subject of the

Windreader tribe?"

"What is it?"

"It's about the farming village we visited. Master Rikuson was there just before we were."

"Ah, that." Jinshi looked away from her for a moment, apparently thinking. "I had Rikuson investigated as well. I know he went to inspect the local agriculture. Even though it seems to have been quite difficult for him—he's been very busy here in the western capital. The visit, though, was about confirming something we'd suspected since his days in the central region."

"All the way back then, sir?"

"Yes. The reports from I-sei Province didn't show any major damage to the harvest last year, but it was hard to be sure without seeing for ourselves. So Rikuson found the problem on his desk. Or rather, I put it there."

"You did, sir?"

"You doubt me?"

"Not exactly. Just curious."

Rikuson hadn't been looking his best when they had first arrived at the western capital. It was hard for Maomao not to wonder what he'd been up to. Maybe she was just paranoid?

"Allow Miss Chue to explain why he wasn't looking his best!"

Chue said, stepping forward with an enthusiastic snort. Apparently "Miss Chue" served as her first-person pronoun even in Jinshi's presence.

"Chue," said Taomei, a bird of prey eying a presumptuous sparrow.

Geez, Taomei is scary...

"It's all right. Let her speak," said Jinshi.

With his permission safely gained, Chue let out a big breath. "Miss Chue already looked into it. On his way home from the village, Mister Rikuson was set upon by bandits! You know the ones, Miss Maomao. Those poor guys who got their arms broken by Mister Basen."

"Yes, I remember, thank you."

I remember that "Miss Chue" used me as bait!

"Of course you do. Well, you also remember that the bandits who attacked Miss Chue and her friends were arrested and taken to prison. Later, the bandits' leaders were apprehended too—one of our informants kindly told us what we wanted to know. We also learned that one of our guides had taken Mister Rikuson to the farming village a few days earlier."

So, in sum, the guide passed information about his clients to the bandits, who attacked people unused to traveling the plains. The same guide had been responsible for the attacks on both

Maomao and Rikuson. Chue, anticipating the bandit connection, had put on a little show for him.

"It really was complete coincidence that Miss Chue and her friends were attacked—" Hey, don't lie to us!

Maomao had to pinch her lips tight together to make sure this rejoinder didn't come out of her mouth.

"—but in Mister Rikuson's case, it seems there was someone besides the guide pulling the strings."

"Someone who wanted to interfere with his visit to the village?" Jinshi asked.

"It's possible. Or it might just have been regular old intimidation. The other possibility Miss Chue can think of is that it goes the other way, and Mister Rikuson wanted to look like a victim. Then again, of course, maybe it really was just a regular bandit attack. If you'd prefer."

Chue had a surprising talent for drawing lines by implication.

She spoke only of facts, without mixing in her own opinion.

Even if she does use me as bait.

Did Maomao bear her a grudge for that? Maybe a little one.

"Understood," Jinshi said, and gestured to Chue to step back.

She straightened up and gave him a perfect bow.

From what I've just seen, it almost looks like...

It almost looked like Jinshi himself wasn't completely sure who Rikuson really was. Everything Maomao had heard, though, made her think he was at least a man loyal to his work.

Jinshi took a sip of his tea, contemplating all he'd just heard.

Maomao likewise took a drink, although her tea was cold by now.

This tea's flavor should make me want something sweet, but... What she really wanted was something salty. No sooner had the thought crossed her mind than a tray of snacks appeared in front of her, delivered by Suiren, who caught Maomao's eye as she set it down. It bore a pile of plain rice crackers.

"Join me," Jinshi said, picking up one of the crackers. "It wouldn't be seemly for me to eat all these by myself."

"If you don't mind, then," Maomao said, one of the crackers practically already in her mouth. There was a noisy crunch as she bit into it. It didn't seem like particularly fine etiquette, but the salty cracker was so good.

I'll be able to take some of these with me, right? she thought. Some cookies to take as souvenirs for the quack doctor would be nice too. Ahh, but then there's Tianyu to worry about.

She could throw the quack off the scent easily, but pulling the wool over Tianyu's eyes would be harder. Better make sure first.

"Moon Prince. May I ask you a question?"

"Yes? What is it?" Jinshi raised an eyebrow. She had used the name "Moon Prince" because Taomei and the others were there, but he didn't seem to like it much.

"What shall I do about my position when it comes to one of the new physicians, Tianyu? Unlike the qu—I mean, the master physician, if I come here too often, it will be difficult to keep him from connecting the dots."

"That's a good point. Let's see," Jinshi said, but then he paused.

It was Suiren who continued, with a smile. "He's been informed that you've known the Moon Prince for some time, since you were training in etiquette in his chambers. Put your mind at ease."

"Training in etiquette?"

"Yes. It's not untrue as such."

"I suppose not..."

The description, frankly, made Maomao feel a little ill. To "train in etiquette" by serving a man of elegance typically meant to prepare to be his wife.

"It's not untrue," Suiren reiterated, still smiling.

Maomao took another bite of rice cracker, feeling not the least bit reassured by Suiren's explanation.

Jinshi appeared to be thinking about something as he ate.

"Perhaps we should proceed faster," he mused.

Inquiring about what he felt should be hastened seemed likely to invite a very long conversation, so Maomao decided not to ask.

Chapter 15: The Short Straw

Lahan's Brother soon returned to the annex, just as Basen had reported he would.

"Hoo! That was not an easy trip!" he said as he set down his tools outside the medical office. He had a lot of stuff—potatoes and farming implements and who knew what else—so he was using a storehouse behind the medical office. He'd arrived yesterday but had immediately collapsed into bed, and was only just now getting around to cleaning up his tools.

"I'm sorry to hear that," Maomao said. Since there were no patients to speak of, she was there to greet him. For some reason, so was the quack—maybe he had time on his hands. Tianyu was allegedly watching the office, but it was really just an excuse for an afternoon nap. Lahan's Brother was probably too ordinary to attract Tianyu's attention.

"Yes, it must have been so hard for you. Look, you're positively tanned!" said the quack, sounding like a solicitous uncle or something. He looked like at any moment he might decide to invite Lahan's Brother to snack time.

"You're telling me. There's damn near no rain, it's just beating sunshine all the time. At least it's not humid." Lahan's Brother leaned a hoe against the wall.

"Ah, yes, of course. Would you like some nice, cold juice? We use water specially stored underground. Oh, it's wonderful!"

Isn't that water, uh, valuable? Maomao wasn't sure the quack was supposed to be helping himself. Just like that, though, Lahan's Brother had been asked to tea.

"I would love to—" Lahan's Brother said, but then he stopped.

Or more appropriately, froze.

Maomao gave him a nudge, wondering what was wrong. From up close, she could see Lahan's Brother trembling. She followed his gaze to discover a gorgeous and most noble nobleman.

"Eep! Moon P-P-P—" the quack yelped.

Jinshi was standing there, smiling as if rose petals should be scattering behind him. "Would you, good sir, be the brother of

Lahan?"

Even scarred jade was still jade. Jinshi approached Lahan's Brother, his lustrous hair rippling like silk.

"Er, um, yes. Yes, I am," Lahan's Brother said, obviously struggling to respond. He didn't look like he was going to be answering any questions more complicated than that.

Oh yeah. I guess that is the normal reaction.

Maomao had rather forgotten how inhumanly beautiful Jinshi was. He was possessed of a loveliness like that of a female immortal, the sort of thing that could capture the hearts of the serving women in the rear palace and make its eunuchs go weak at the knees. His very presence would naturally prove intoxicating to an ordinary person like Lahan's Brother.

"I must apologize to you," Jinshi said. "Here I've obliged you to accompany us on this journey, yet I haven't properly introduced myself. Perhaps you would recognize me as the Imperial younger brother? People call me the Moon Prince or the Prince of the

Night."

Only a very few people, principally the Emperor, could call Jinshi by his personal name. As such, Maomao had discovered, he didn't use it even when introducing himself. That was a kindness in itself: if he gave someone his name and they inadvertently used it, they might well be punished for disrespect.

I guess it's not easy being in the Imperial family, she thought, and she really meant it.

"O-O-Of course. It's an h-honor to accompany you on this...this trip, sir..."

Funny. Just the other day he was complaining he'd been tricked into it.

Lahan's Brother, certified Ordinary Person, was as nervous as the next guy in Jinshi's presence. Incidentally, the quack hadn't taken his eyes off Jinshi. Said eyes sparkled brightly. Rose petals drifted behind him.

Jinshi said, "Lahan has told me a lot about you. He says that his biological father, being a member of the La clan, has no small talent for farming, and that as his father's assistant, his older brother possesses a knowledge of agriculture unrivaled by any average farmer."

In other words, he's a professional.

Lahan's Brother looked very, very conflicted, distinctly unhappy despite Jinshi's heaps of praise. No ordinary person, however, could resist Jinshi's shimmery aura.

In other words, Lahan's Brother was swept right along. Jinshi had him in the palm of his hand.

Ah, now this is worth seeing, Maomao thought as she observed the spectacle of Jinshi wielding his sparkliness like an expert swordsman against a person who, through sheer ordinariness, simply couldn't resist.

"You've been doing something called fall plowing to reduce the number of pest insects, isn't that right? I'd never heard of it before. I had one of my subordinates look into it, and learned that sometime in the past, the rulers of this area ensured the farmers performed this task. Unfortunately, people now see fattening up livestock as more important than turning over the earth in the autumn, and the practice has disappeared. Politics is indeed a difficult business."

"Y-Yes, sir."

"I'm also given to understand that you're as versed in the cultivation of wheat as you are in the raising of potatoes. Who would have imagined that stepping on the wheat makes it stronger? Another fact that was new to me. Indeed, every day I'm reminded of how much I do not know. It's my sincere hope that you will continue to help me redress my ignorance."

"O-Only by your gracious leave, sir," said Lahan's Brother, who was by turns flushing red and going pale. The quack, meanwhile, still looked fluttery, and regarded Lahan's Brother, with whom Jinshi had conversed exclusively thus far, with some envy. In fact, he appeared to have surpassed envy and gone directly to jealousy.

"Much as it pains me, there's something I wish to ask you about right away. If I might?" Jinshi said, expertly mixing the slightest touch of grief into his expression.

Lahan's Brother's cheeks went bright red, and even the quack was bowled over—collateral damage. In fact, he literally swooned, and Maomao caught him, setting him gently on the ground.

Yikes! Noting that Jinshi was as brutal as ever, Maomao nonetheless kept her eyes locked on the scene. She took the rest of the farming implements Lahan's Brother hadn't finished putting away and leaned them against the wall for him.

"If—I mean, if I might, sir. If there's anything I can do for you, just ask."

"Wonderful!" Jinshi absolutely beamed at that, and even the quack doctor, supposedly not involved in this discussion, sat there with his mouth working open and shut like a carp on a cutting board. "Perhaps we can go inside, then. I'll explain everything," Jinshi said. He snapped his fingers, and immediately Basen and Chue appeared, the former carrying a large roll of paper.

Those two actually get along pretty well, don't they? Behind the pair stood Gaoshun, who obviously knew what was going to happen. His hands were pressed together and he wore an expression like a bodhisattva.

Jinshi walked into the medical office like he owned the place. As he entered, Tianyu sat up groggily from where he had been napping on the couch. Lihaku, standing guard, shot Maomao a What's this? look.

"Whaz goin' on?" Tianyu asked.

"Oh, you know. Stuff," said Maomao, who thought it would be too much work to explain.

"Huh," was all Tianyu said, although he sounded interested.

The roll of paper Basen carried turned out to be a map, which he unrolled on the office table. "This is a map of I-sei Province," he said. It contained plains and mountains and desert. It looked rather empty compared to Kaou Province, but there was a road that cut clear through the middle of it, a trade route connecting east and west.

"It's got a bunch of circles on it," observed Tianyu, inserting himself into the conversation as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The quack had managed to get to his feet and was preparing tea. Basen, meanwhile, looked distinctly displeased. If Jinshi hadn't stopped him, he might have chased Tianyu right out of the room.

We're standing awfully close. Awfully close to a member of the Imperial family. Was that even allowed? Maybe during his time as a "eunuch," but what about now? Maomao was worried. She suspected, however, that this was all part of Jinshi's calculations.

"Lahan's Brother," Jinshi said.

The other man snapped to attention. "Yes, sir!" No objections about his name this time?

"The circles mark areas with farming villages. I fondly hope that you might help instruct them in the ways of fall plowing and cultivating potatoes." Jinshi wore a smile that could kill a man.

"I... What?"

Lahan's Brother had only just gotten back from a farming village. He hadn't even put his tools away!

"Yes, as soon as possible. Perhaps you could leave tomorrow."

Lahan's Brother closed his eyes, as if Jinshi's smile was too blinding to look at. There was nothing he could say in response. Now I get it.

"Perhaps we should proceed faster," Jinshi had said. Now she knew what he meant. She was the one who had told him to use those he could use, but she couldn't help feeling a pang of pity for those who became tools in Jinshi's hands. It was a very large map and depicted a substantial amount of territory.

"How far is it to the village that's farthest from the western capital on this map?" she asked Chue, who seemed to have nothing special to do. Maybe she'd just come along for fun today. She didn't seem to be needed here, but she was probably looking for an excuse to get away from her predator of a mother-in-law.

"Oh, about four hundred kilometers, I'd say," she replied.

"Four hundred..." Lahan's Brother was white as a sheet.

"I'd like you to start with the nearest village, then go to the next nearest one. If you're uncomfortable riding that far, I can have a good, comfortable carriage prepared for you." Jinshi took Lahan's Brother's acquiescence as a given. "If at all possible, I'd like you to finish teaching all of the villages about fall plowing within the next two months. The sooner, the better. Potatoes can come after that, in good time."

This was, in fact, less about agricultural practice and more about preventing insect plague. Since they couldn't know what would be most effective, they had to do everything they could— and Jinshi intended to use everything and everyone he could. Maomao felt bad for Lahan's Brother, but he would just have to take this one for the team. As for what she could do...

Maomao went over to the medicine cabinet and took out some herbs, which she mixed with honey. She cut the mixture with water and put it in a glass drinking vessel, which she offered to Lahan's Brother along with the quack's tea. "For you," she said. "What's this?"

"A stamina drink. I'll prepare a solution that should keep for quite a while, so take some whenever you feel too tired on the road."

"Why are you assuming I'm going to go do this?!" "Can you say no?" Maomao asked.

"Do you believe you can say no?" Jinshi asked at almost the same moment.

Maomao certainly didn't believe he could—that's why she'd made the drink. She would also prepare some poultices to relieve sore muscles.

Lahan's Brother, ordinary person extraordinaire, found himself confronted at point-blank range with a request from a man whose beauty could have brought a country to its knees. He couldn't possibly have it in him to refuse. Jinshi had been counting on it.

Gross, Maomao thought.

Lahan's Brother might have been ordinary, but as far as ordinary people went, he was very good at it.

"Won't you, please? For me?" Jinshi smiled as if to say how much help this would be to him. Lahan's Brother could only droop, defeated.

Tianyu, who had no stake here, found he had the freedom to chuckle to himself at this other person's unhappiness, so Maomao gave him a kick in the heel. Lahan's Brother was so pitiful, even she had to sympathize with him. In politics, however, to lose the initiative was to lose all. A leader had to stay ahead of what was happening in his country, and eliminate all possible sources of trouble. If he failed to do so, the blame would fall on him—and if he succeeded, so would the indifference, for people would simply assume it was his job.

It's not easy, huh?

Much as she felt for Lahan's Brother, Maomao knew Jinshi wasn't wrong to do what he did.

Chapter 16: A Moment's Peace

For a little while after that, Maomao's days were peaceful.

That's not to say there was no work. The medicines in the medical office had to be restocked using ingredients that could be found in the western capital, and she had to make sure they worked as intended. She also tried to gather some medical instruments to make up for the shortfall in what they had.

The freak strategist showed up at the annex more than once, as well. Maomao had been trying to avoid him and the trouble he would cause, but before she knew what was happening, the quack was showing him in and inviting him to tea. She could only put her head in her hands.

About the only other notable event was that Basen's duck started laying eggs. He got very upset at Maomao when she tried to eat one—he insisted that he would raise the chick, but as it was an unfertilized egg, no chick would be forthcoming. When Maomao told him as much (shades of her lectures at the rear palace), he'd gone bright red. And this was a full-grown adult male? Oof.

She'd had a bit of a fright when she spotted Gaoshun and Taomei walking arm in arm in the courtyard. She'd let her gaze linger a moment too long, surprised and wondering if they got along better than she had realized, when the predator's eyes flashed. Gaoshun was abruptly shoved away by his wife, who continued to walk along as if nothing had happened. Being shy was one thing, but the younger husband ended up propelled into a pool. A tragedy.

Days turned into weeks, and soon it had been an entire month since Lahan's Brother had left on his journey. Maomao continued to inspect Jinshi's burn, but she found it increasingly hard to ignore the desire to take some skin from his backside.

"It sounds like things are going well enough," Jinshi said one day. He held a crumpled letter which, when he showed it to her, contained a detailed report about the state of some farmland.

"With Lahan's Brother, you mean?" Maomao asked, inspecting the handwriting, which was neat and careful, although it tended to lean to the right a bit. The letter had to be able to travel by pigeon, so unfortunately, reporting on the current situation consumed all the meager available space. Lahan's Brother didn't even have room to sign his name. The letter concluded with the name of the village he'd been in when he wrote it, and that was all.

It's a real shame, him not having room to sign it, Maomao thought. She could just picture him on some far-flung plain, teeth clenched around a handkerchief as he tried to endure the agony. Would that day ever come when they might discover what he was truly called? No one knew. No one knew.

"Yes, that's right. I knew this would be useful." Jinshi looked into the birdcage and smiled. The pigeon cooed. "They may only work in one direction, but being able to communicate information so quickly is a boon."

He used them in his communications with Empress Gyokuyou as well. Given that he hadn't raised the subject of her niece lately, Maomao assumed the Empress had the matter in hand.

She looked at the pigeon, which pecked at some millet and burbled again. "So you sent some of these birds with Lahan's

Brother?"

"Yes. I was able to borrow several through that girl—Kulumu, was that her name?"

"How many did you send with him?" Maomao asked offhandedly.

"Three. He seemed capable enough of taking care of them. We can supply him with more by sending a fast rider to his last location."

Jinshi opened a map of I-sei Province. Suiren appeared and drew circles around the villages from which letters had been received.

Lahan's Brother's really been hard at work, Maomao thought. Jinshi had given him the seemingly impossible task of reaching all the villages in two months, but Lahan's Brother was almost on the return leg of the trip. That guy sure knows how to get a job done.

He also, she suspected, didn't realize that it was precisely his ability to get a job done that caused people to foist so many on him. If he were clever, he'd have dialed it back by twenty percent or so, instead of going all out every single time.

"Maomao."

"Yes, sir?"

Jinshi seemed to have grown accustomed to using her name. She remembered how for a long time he'd addressed her merely as "you."

"I... Hrm. It seems your workload has dropped off recently."

"Yes, I'd say so." The most urgent tasks had been taken care of. They'd made enough medicine to hold them for a while, and had even gotten the tools they needed.

"Perhaps you might turn your hand to other things."

"Oh!" Maomao clapped her hands, remembering. "The wheat harvest is coming up soon. Do you think I could go help with that, sir?"

This didn't seem to be what Jinshi had been expecting. "The wheat harvest? Why?"

"Sir! I'm very curious if any ergot has grown."

"Ergot?" It sounded like he didn't recognize the word.

"It's a kind of sickness where the wheat becomes black. In simple terms, it's toxic to eat."

"Yes, that does sound quite simple."

"By the time the wheat is ground it'll be too late to tell, so I'd like to look now."

Ergot could be used to induce abortions, and there was commonly a good deal of it in poor-quality flour, so it was best to be sure. She could see exactly how large the harvest was at the same time.

"I see. Very well. I'll prepare a carriage for you."

"That won't be necessary, sir. A little bird told me that Master Rikuson will be going for an inspection soon, and I thought I might be able to travel with him."

The specific species of little bird? The quack doctor, who'd happened to overhear it from somewhere. Maomao had confirmed the validity of the rumor with Chue. "Rikuson..."

"Yes, sir. There's a great deal I'd like to talk with him about. I thought it might be a good opportunity."

She'd ended up not seeing Rikuson again after that first day in the western capital. She needed to talk to him personally.

Jinshi looked briefly conflicted, but then he said, "All right. I'll inform Rikuson that you'll be coming."

"Thank you very much, sir."

There was one other thing she wanted to do on this trip— gather medicinal herbs from the plains on the way. Some of her specimens from the previous trip had yielded promising results.

She'd better hurry and go get a basket to put them in.

"If you don't mind, then, Master Jinshi, I've got to be going!" "Hey!"

Jinshi looked like there was something else he wanted to say, but Maomao ignored him. She trotted off, practically skipping away to get everything ready.

A few days later, Maomao left for the farming village.

"My, what wonderful weather we're having," Chue said with a big stretch. These days it seemed that Chue tagged along wherever Maomao went. "Guess I didn't have to worry about rain after all!" She leaned out of the carriage for a good look: the weather was indeed lovely.

Maomao caught the scent of grass on the breeze as she let the rattling carriage carry her along.

"The weather should be clear for a while yet. Outside of the rainy season, I-sei Province doesn't get any precipitation worth mentioning," said Rikuson, who sat in the seat across from them. He wore an outfit that would be easy to move in, appropriate for visiting a farming village.

"Sounds perfect for a wheat harvest," Chue said. If rain fell during the harvest, the wheat could start to sprout, which would make it lower quality. And if it couldn't be properly dried, it might simply rot.

"It is. The weather can be fickle, though. I've even heard of hailstorms occurring around harvesttime."

"Hail can be awfully difficult to predict, can't it?" Maomao said.

She was no farming expert; such sympathetic but innocuous interjections were the most she could hope to offer. If Lahan's Brother had been here, he would probably have been clenching his fist and expounding on the manifold labors of the harvest season.

Maomao glanced toward the driver's bench: Basen was holding the reins. Lihaku would have been just as good for a guard, but since Basen had accompanied them last time, he did so again now. His duck was there too. She was practically their mascot at this point.

Maomao looked at Rikuson. "What caused you to want to survey the farming villages, Rikuson?" she asked. This was the question she'd wanted to address to him personally. She suspected Jinshi had already given her the answer indirectly, but she wanted to hear it from Rikuson's own mouth.

Rikuson glanced around, with what seemed to Maomao a particularly long look at his subordinates following behind the carriage. Then he said, "There are several reasons. Which would you like to hear, Maomao?"

As she had requested, he addressed her with no honorific or title—in the past, he'd been altogether too respectful toward her. Chue seemed intrigued, though, that they spoke in such familiar terms.

"All of them," she said firmly.

"Very well. The first has to do with insect plagues. I happen to be in contact with Sir Lahan, and I frequently lean on his knowledge and expertise. He warned me that if there were to be a plague in Li, it would be likely to come either from the north or from the breadbasket to the west."

Indeed, a small-scale plague of locusts had broken out in the fertile regions to the northwest the year before. The terrifying thing about these insects was that, left alone, they would wreak ever more destruction.

"For reasons I won't pretend to know, I was given the honor of being posted here to the western capital, where I'm treated essentially as a bureaucrat. The polite term for what I do might be secretarial work, but less favorably, I could be called an errand boy. Some of the paperwork I deal with just happens to be about harvests, so I took an incidental interest in the availability of stores and provisions."

"Do you really need to go visit in person, though?"

"That's the second reason." Rikuson held up two fingers.

Maomao's eyes widened. She wasn't sure what he could mean.

Rikuson smiled, almost apologetically. "I think you may be aware of this already—that the numbers in the reports regularly fail to line up with the actual amounts?"

Was he talking about the attempts to fudge the production quantities? Such things did indeed seem to be going on in the farming villages.

"What's the third reason, then?" Rikuson had said he had several reasons, and Maomao didn't think just two would qualify as several.

"The third reason?" His mouth sat open for just a beat. Then he said, "A long time ago, I heard that there was a special form of cultivation. Something that would decrease the number of pest insects."

"You mean fall plowing. So that's why you spoke to Nianzhen." "That's right. Do you see now?" Rikuson's smile was gentle. Maomao thought he looked thinner than the last time she'd seen him.

"Who told you about fall plowing?" Maomao asked.

"My mother and my older sister. My mother was a merchant who engaged in trade far and wide, and my sister helped her. I learned quite a bit from them in my younger days." Rikuson looked out the window of the carriage, but he didn't seem to be taking in the scenery.

"That makes sense," said Maomao.

What else do I need to ask?

She spent long enough thinking about it that they arrived at the village, the carriage rattling as it slowed. Maomao stuck her head out the window. Wheat shimmered golden in the fields—it looked like a rich harvest. She saw green leaves too, suggesting the villagers had planted potatoes.

All right. Shall we dedicate ourselves to farmwork for a while? Herb collecting could come on the way home. Maomao had just hopped out of the carriage, sprightly and ready to go, when she saw a fast rider coming up behind. That wasn't so remarkable in itself—but from the man's look, something was clearly wrong.

Maybe he was attacked by bandits?

No, that wasn't it.

The horse stopped in front of Maomao and her party, its tongue lolling from its mouth as it listed to one side. Its rider wore the uniform of a soldier.

I think I recognize him. He was one of the guards who frequently attended Jinshi. That would suggest he was of a fair rank—so what was he doing running himself ragged catching up with them?

"What's going on?" Maomao asked. She held out water, but the man shook his head. His mouth worked open and shut; he didn't say a word, but gave her a piece of paper.

The heck?

The paper, folded as small as possible, seemed to be a letter from Lahan's Brother.

"The Moon...Prince... He said if you saw this...you would understand..."

Understand what? Maomao wondered. Perplexed, she opened the letter.

A single line ran down the page. It wasn't even drawn with a brush; it looked messy, like Lahan's Brother had used a piece of charcoal as an improvised writing instrument. But that wasn't all— the line had been violently scratched out again. The letter didn't even say where it was from, but there was no mistaking who had sent it.

Lahan's Brother had needed to tell them something so badly that he had found time in the midst of some sort of chaos to send a pigeon with this message.

I know what this is, Maomao thought. She realized she recognized the dark scribbles. They resembled the picture that the girl Jazgul had given her the year before, after the visit of the Shaohnese shrine maiden.

Maomao hadn't understood what it meant then.

But I do now.

The line was the horizon that spread out before her. And the blot was a dark cloud.

She looked at the sky, still clear and blue, and said, "They're coming."

Chapter 17: Disaster (Part 1)

"What? A plague of insects?" a villager said, sounding exasperated.

Maomao had immediately requested the headman to gather the farmers. There were so many people packed in the place where they were meeting that it was almost hard to breathe.

"Yes! It will be here soon—within days!" Maomao said, desperate.

The villagers only laughed. "Yeah, okay, there were some bugs last year, but look at the windfall this year! Everything's fine!"

"He's right. The weather will be fine for a while yet. No need to trip all over ourselves getting the harvest in," said someone else.

Then, however, someone in the group growled, "Ya lazy bastards! We'll never make it in time with that attitude!" "Nianzhen..." Maomao said.

It was the old one-eyed man who had lived through a plague of insects so terrible that people had resorted to cannibalism. He made no attempt to hide his anger with the villagers and their blasé attitude. He slammed the table with his right hand, the one that lacked a pointer finger.

"You lot wouldn't know, because you won't listen! Nothing can save you now. Me, I'm going out there and I'm going to start harvesting this minute."

"Is't really as important as all that, Nianzhen?" the headman asked. In a village full of very newly minted farmers, the former serf was the oldest and most experienced of all. Even the headman couldn't dismiss him out of hand.

"I haven't had my lunch yet, headman. Think I could go grab a bite?" asked one of the villagers, sounding entirely unconcerned.

Thank goodness Basen isn't here. They'd made him wait outside, knowing that anywhere that Basen went, his duck was sure to follow. A quick glance confirmed that the duck was there, playing with the local kids.

Maomao was convinced that talk was futile. They should be spending this time getting started on the harvest.

Just as she was really starting to fret about what to do, Rikuson stepped forward. "Perhaps you would help if you felt there was something in it for you?" He gave them that pretty-boy smile. "We'll buy your grain. At twice the market price."

There was a heavy, jangly thump as Rikuson dropped a bag onto the table. It was obviously stuffed with money, easily more than a farmer would make in a year.

The villagers were immediately riveted on it. "You... You mean it?"

"We're gonna hold you to that, you know." Their eyes were feral.

"Yes, but only whatever's in excess of your taxes. Furthermore, it only applies to whatever you can gather in the next three days." Rikuson's gentle tone never faltered, but what he was asking for was impossible. And yet, the fire that sparked in the villagers' eyes never went out.

That's the power of cold, hard cash, Maomao thought.

The villagers streamed out of the meeting place and got to work. They went back home and gave sickles to their wives, their children, their elderly family members.

Once they were alone in the hall, Maomao turned to Rikuson. "Are you sure about this? Are you even at liberty to make a promise like that?"

"If there is a plague of locusts, then grain will fetch far more than twice the average price, and we'll come out ahead. If there's no plague, well, I won't have any complaints about that. Is there a problem here?"

"No, none at all."

She should have expected him to be quick when it came to calculations like this. He'd said his mother was a merchant, and even more tellingly, he was on good terms with Lahan.

Chue, apparently inspired by what Rikuson had done, was looking highly motivated. "Are we going to work too? I think I'll help in Mister Nianzhen's field. What about you, Miss Maomao?"

"Me... I think I'll get ready to help make food. And I'll make pesticide too."

She flipped through the encyclopedia of herbs Jinshi had given her, looking for anything that might help kill bugs. She had some misgivings about producing pesticides right next to the food they were going to hand out for people to eat, but desperate times called for desperate measures. Maomao was virtually certain the plague would occur. The only question was when.

Where was Lahan's Brother last?

He'd been about to begin the return leg toward the western capital, but he was still deep in the western reaches of I-sei Province. He'd encountered a swarm of grasshoppers there, and had managed to dash off his message and get the pigeon in the air before the bugs were upon them.

But he didn't have time to find proper writing utensils. The situation had obviously been desperate. The grasshoppers were already starting to carve their swath of destruction. In all likelihood they would begin moving east, toward the western capital, eating everything in their path.

It's started now. There's no delaying it any longer. The only questions were how they could bring this to an end, and what that would entail.

First they had to save as much of the grain from the ravenous insects as they could—harvest it, get it inside, and make sure the storehouses were shut up so tight that not a single grasshopper could get in. Now the challenge began. She didn't have to find the best solution, she just had to keep looking for a better one.

The villagers were in the fields, harvesting grain as fast as they could.

I worry whether it's going to rot.

Normally, grain would be allowed to sit outside several days to dry—but what should they do here? More than anything, they needed places to store the harvest.

All right, enough. If I'm going to think, I need to work while I'm doing it.

Maomao borrowed a stove and began making a huge pot of soup. She wished she could make it with some nice, astringent soy paste—her personal preference—but she suspected it might not be to the villagers' tastes. Instead she fried up some vegetables in oil, put plenty of salt on them to give them some flavor, and then added them to a stew of milk and dried meat.

The ironic thing is, people from the central region would turn up their noses at too much milk.

She added some fragrant herbs to make it less pungent. A bit of flour to thicken it, and she started to think she might have a winner on her hands.

Wish I could do some dumplings, but I think we'd better not.

Instead she would get fried bread for the entrée.

Maomao poured the soup into bowls and put the bowls on a tray, then zipped around handing them out to the workers.

"Miss Maomao, Miss Maomao! One for Miss Chue, please!" Chue flounced up to her. She'd practically transformed herself into one of the villagers, carrying a knife in her right hand and a sack in her left. The sack was full of ears of grain.

Maomao gave Chue some stew. "You're only taking the ears of grain?" she asked.

"It was Mister Nianzhen's idea! He said if the harvest was the only important thing, it would be faster to collect just the ears."

Yes, that certainly would be faster than having to bend over and cut down every stalk.

Maomao and Chue sat down on a nearby fence to enjoy their meal. Maomao had already eaten her stew, so she munched on some bread.

"There won't be time to dry everything, and it won't fit inside if the stems are still on," Chue said.

"Good point."

Wheat straw was used as livestock feed and for daily necessities like reed mats. It was an important secondary product, but right now there were more important things to focus on.

"Oh me, oh my, but money is a powerful thing, isn't it? All we had to do was whisper in their ears 'The straw can come later,' and look!"

The villagers had immediately traded their sickles for small knives. The children went from field to house dragging bags full of ears of grain.

"Now they're drying them inside because the ears would fly away in the wind out here."

"You're quite good at getting your way, aren't you, Miss Chue?" "Oh, yes. You should see how I motivate my husband on nights when he's not in the mood!"

Maomao had a thought: perhaps her brothel humor, which so frequently fell flat, would land with Chue. Sadly, no really good jokes came to mind at that moment.

She finished the last of her modest meal, vowing to work up a routine she could share.

Rikuson had been exactly right to tell the people they had three days to collect the grain: with a firm deadline in place, everyone busied themselves thinking of ways to harvest more efficiently. By the second day, more than half the grain had been taken in.

Basen, with his immense strength, proved his worth now. He could carry a full bag of grain in each hand, doing what would otherwise require several full-grown adults.

However, more delicate work, as always, eluded him.

"Oh no! What are you doing? You are hopeless, little brotherin-law!" Chue cried. Basen, trying to repair a house, had only ended up doing more damage, making himself a target for more teasing from Chue.

We can't have the storehouses full of holes, Maomao thought. She was patching a house with mud and clay—wood was precious in this part of the country, so earth would have to do.

"I think we were just in time," Rikuson said, looking up at the sky. Maomao looked too, and saw a small black cloud beyond the hills.

"Isn't it a little early for the rainy season?" she asked.

"Yes... Yes, it is." Rikuson looked pained. "A cloud at this time of year is rather troubling."

That sounded very ominous and all, but Maomao wasn't sure exactly what he meant.

"What's that about the clouds?" Basen asked as he passed by, lugging a couple bulging sacks of grain as if they weighed nothing at all.

"I merely meant that it's not a good thing to see a rain cloud at this time of year," Rikuson said, pointing to the sky to the east.

"I hear you. There's another cloud over there. Is that a bad

sign too?"

"Over there?" Rikuson looked. Basen was pointing in the opposite direction. "I'm afraid I don't see anything."

"Hee hee! My little brother's eyes are hopelessly good," Chue broke in. "Regular folk might like to have a telescope on hand, though." Even Chue didn't appear to carry one of those, because she leaned forward and squinted.

Maomao joined her, narrowing her eyes and peering toward the western sky. "Clouds, clouds..."

She thought she heard a faint buzz. Then she saw some black specks that wavered in the air. They didn't look like any rain cloud she'd ever seen.

"Miss Maomao, Miss Maomao!"

"Miss Chue, Miss Chue!"

The two of them looked at each other and nodded.

Maomao grabbed the soup pot and a pestle lying nearby and banged them together. She raced through the village, crying,

"Grasshoppers! The bugs are on their way!"

Chue found some men sitting around drinking tea and gave them each a smart smack. "You heard her! Grasshoppers, incoming!"

They had to do anything they could to light a fire under these villagers. Panic would solve nothing, but at that moment, they needed everyone to give everything they had.

Chapter 18: Disaster (Part 2)

The first one came when about seventy percent of the harvest had been brought in. Darker than an ordinary grasshopper, with longer legs. Somebody crushed and killed it. Someone else shouted not to bother—that they had to keep harvesting.

Torches were lit. It would barely be a drop in this ocean, but it was something.

The women and children went into the houses and tried to cover any cracks with mud or cloth. The houses were dark inside, but they were sternly warned not to light any fires, and also to have food ready that could be eaten as is. They were ordered to kill any insects that got through the cracks.

At Nianzhen's house, there was too much to fit, so they started storing grain in the shrine. There, the cracks were so packed with earth that hardly any air got in.

Every house worthy of the name was sprinkled with pesticide, not that they knew whether it would do any good. The tents had too many openings to serve as storage areas. Instead, they would be temporary evacuation points for the villagers.

Basen carried a huge net. It might once have been for catching fish, but he swung it around over his head with tremendous speed, gathering up grasshoppers within it. Then he dumped them in a huge bucket of water, killing them.

Chue passed out leather pouches. Instead of food, they contained sweetened goat's milk. She was preparing for a long battle.

Nianzhen wore several overshirts, and the other villagers imitated him.

Rikuson was going from house to house, reassuring the villagers whose anxious voices he could hear through the air holes. Any time he found bugs entering through a gap, he would crush the insects and fill the gap. The duck pecked at the grasshoppers and then spit them out again. Inedible, perhaps.

Then the villagers started screaming.

Everything seemed to grow darker, passing from bright and clear to ash, and then a gray that reminded Maomao of a rat, until everything was practically black.

It was impossible to open one's eyes, never mind walk. Bugs bumped into people, bit and tore at them. People couldn't open their mouths; it was all they could do to cover them with rags. Their layered overshirts were ripped and torn, and the beating of wings drowned out every other sound. A droning noise overwhelmed everything, so that it was impossible to tell what someone else was saying. Soon, even the screams couldn't be heard anymore.

Maomao covered her face with her hands, then opened her eyes the slightest bit. She could see Basen, still swinging the net over his head. It filled almost instantly, whereupon he slammed it against the ground. The bucket had long ago overflowed with grasshoppers.

One man had gone mad from the bug bites. He howled at the top of his lungs and swung a torch in one hand and a scythe in the other. It did him no good; the grasshoppers survived his counterattack and continued to assault the villagers.

Chue crept up to the crazed man and swept his feet out from under him. The moment he was on the ground, she bound him with a rope.

Rikuson was still running from house to house, shouting. Some people were driven out of their minds by the disappearance of the light. Others were sane but simply couldn't hear him.

Fire burst from one of the houses, and an elderly woman and some children came rushing out of the otherwise sealed structure. One of the kids held a flint.

The freshly harvested wheat in the house was perfect fuel, and the fire burned readily. The parched air of the dry season made conditions even better for the flames.

Basen reacted immediately, giving one of the posts of the house a kick. The place was barely more than a shack to begin with, and it promptly collapsed.

Maomao could hear Basen shouting, although she couldn't

catch the words. Maybe he was saying that the water source was too far away to fight the flames and they needed to destroy the house. He was in his element in moments of crisis.

He had already practically knocked the place down on his own; now he rushed over with the bucket full of floating grasshoppers and emptied it over the house. Chue spirited away the snotty children and the old lady to the tent. It was crawling with grasshoppers, just like everywhere else, but it was better than being outside.

How much time had passed? Maomao didn't know. It might have been thirty minutes. It might have been hours.

Everyone in the village quaked at the bugs, the like of which they had never seen; they reviled the creatures, and—

"Maomao!"

She thought she felt someone tap her on the shoulder. She turned and found Rikuson. Grasshoppers were chewing on his hair, on his clothes. She reached up, thinking to brush them away. "Please, stop making pesticide. Your hand will be useless!" She looked at the hand she had raised; it was red and swollen.

Oh...

Her concoction couldn't provide any relief from this swarm. She'd been mixing up pesticide and spreading it around as fast as she could, putting it everywhere she could think of, but it was never enough; the grasshoppers just kept coming.

Why? Why didn't it work?

It did work. There were simply too many of them. The starving insects even ate the poisonous herbs. They bit people, chewed on clothing, and even tried to consume house posts. As if that weren't enough, the bugs that had fallen to the ground began eating each other. There were too many of them, and it had driven them into a frenzy.

Maomao was pretty far gone herself, desperately grabbing every herb that could help fight the insects and stewing them up. Grasshoppers floated in the huge pot. Maomao pulled up plants roots and all and threw them in. Was her hand swollen from tearing plants out of the ground barehanded, or from the toxic qualities of the pesticide?

Rikuson looked at the sky, still dark with the swarm. The insects were everywhere, but he seemed to be looking somewhere beyond them, above them.

"They say disaster drives out disaster... We should be so lucky."

Maomao didn't know what he meant, but she stared into the darkness herself.

"Ow!" she exclaimed. Something hard had smacked into her. She looked at the ground, wondering what it could have been, and found a lump of ice.

The pain came again, on her back this time, then on her shoulder.

Thock, thock, thock.

The air had gotten very cold.

"Hail?" she said.

Between the large chunks of ice and the freezing air, the grasshoppers began to move visibly slower.

"Disaster drives out disaster, huh?" Maomao said. No, this was no disaster. This was a gift from heaven—not a conclusion Maomao would normally reach. "Yes! Fall! Let it hail on us!"

Now her madness was speeding in another direction. She leaned forward, as the hail fell among the swarm. Not a rain dance, as it were, but a hail dance.

She didn't feel the pain of the bugs biting at her, nor of the hail striking her. She was too full of the wish, the hope, that something, anything, might happen to help them with this numberless swarm of insects.

Thock! She felt an especially heavy blow, right to her head this time.

"Maomao!"

She remembered Rikuson running over to her, but then everything went black.

Chapter 19: Scratches

Her vision came back, but it was hazy.

Huh? What was I doing, again?

Maomao sat up slowly; her body felt heavy.

"H'lo there! You awake?" said an upbeat voice. It was accompanied by a familiar face.

"M-Master Lihaku?"

It was the big, friendly mutt of a soldier. Maomao looked around, trying to make her brain work. She wasn't in a room, but a tent. To one side, she could see Chue stewing something in a pot.

That was all well and good—but then she saw an insect at the edge of her vision. She jumped to her feet. "Grasshopper!" she cried, immediately crushing it underfoot. Having only just woken up, however, the motion nearly made her fall down.

"Whoa! Hey, young lady. Killing one grasshopper won't make any difference, okay? And you've got to take it slow," Lihaku said.

"He's very right, Miss Maomao. Here, eat this." Chue sat her back down on the bed and offered her a bowl of something. She took it and ate a bite. It was a rice pudding, faintly salty.

Once Maomao had some warm food in her, the memories started to come back. There was a swarm of grasshoppers, and

then a hailstorm, and then...

"How long was I out?" she asked.

"One whole day," Chue replied. "You took a good whack on the head from a big piece of hail. I was afraid it would be dangerous to move you, so we put you here in this tent."

Maomao thought she had made the right choice. She also felt downright pathetic, falling unconscious right when they needed her most.

Sounds like I was in pretty bad shape.

Maomao was only human. No one would blame her if the unprecedented situation had pushed her over the edge. But it was still true that in succumbing she had made life harder for the others.

And to think, the taibon didn't bother me. The locked room full of snakes and venomous insects in the Shi clan fortress had been no problem at all.

"There's no need to feel down, Miss Maomao. You just got a little confused and took the bug-killing a bit too far. Your Catbrand pesticide is on the strong side. Might poison the earth, you know. But it worked! We've thinned it down and now they're using it to kill the rest of the bugs."

"The rest of them?"

"The short version is, we're on the other side of this. It helped a lot that the hail came and dropped the temperature. But some of those grasshoppers are hardy little stinkers, so they're out there dealing with them."

"I'm helping with that," Lihaku chimed in, raising his hand. Why was he here? "A swarm of grasshoppers showed up in the western capital too. Not as many as here, but it's been ugly. Our good buddy Jinshi is beside himself—he ordered me to go to the village you were at right away, little lady. I got here about half a day ago."

"Meanwhile, my silly little brother went back to attend the

Moon Prince. This has been your report on the situation!"

This was probably the most Jinshi could do. Basen, meanwhile, would presumably still be full of vim and vigor, even after a fast ride back.

"Boy, it was something!" Lihaku said. "Those guys in the western capital, it looked like they'd never seen an insect plague before. I mean, neither have I, right? But they warned us something was coming. They warned us over and over!"

Lihaku was, as his appearance suggested, stout of heart. He had been an excellent choice for this expedition.

"Oh, right!" he added. "The old fart was there too—he was all, 'Maomaoooo! Where's my Maomaaaoooo?!' Boy, did he go wild!

The poor old doctor was cowering in the medical office!"

"Ugh..." Maomao could imagine the freak strategist's reaction all too well.

"Our buddy Jinshi, he really thought on his feet I guess,

because he said not to worry, because he'd sent you somewhere there's no plague. Biggest lie I ever heard!"

"When I was literally on the front lines..." Granted, Maomao had volunteered for it, but the lie was convenient, no question.

"The old fart organized a grasshopper extermination squad. He helped control the chaos in the city too."

Maomao didn't respond immediately. It actually sounded like things were more or less under control in the western capital. It was the other farming villages that worried her.

Speaking of which...

"Lahan's Brother—is he okay?" she wondered aloud.

"Ohh, you mean Potato Guy?"

"If he hasn't sent any letters, that's probably good news, right?" Chue said.

"I don't know. The last thing he sent sounded pretty bad, and now here we are with grasshoppers everywhere..."

As ordinary farmers went, he was quite distinguished, but he'd been pressed into service on this expedition, then sent into the teeth of the oncoming swarm.

Thank you, Lahan's Brother... Maomao looked at the ceiling of the tent. She tried to picture Lahan's Brother's smiling face, but then she realized she wasn't sure she'd ever seen him smile. He was usually either angry, or at his wits' end, or quipping at somebody.

I wonder if he's even still alive. She knew he'd been sent with trustworthy bodyguards, so she wanted to believe he'd survived all this.

"You wouldn't happen to know the extent of the damage, would you?" she asked. The swarm had come and gone; that couldn't be changed now. The question was how they would respond.

"About eighty percent of the wheat harvest was in," Chue informed her. "The unharvested wheat was destroyed, but it was a bumper crop this year, bigger than average. Subtract the wheat from the one house that burned down, and the harvest comes out to about seventy percent of a normal year."

"Seventy percent?" Considering the scale of the destruction, that sounded almost miraculous to Maomao. Maybe Lahan's Brother really was that good a teacher and guide. They couldn't think exclusively in terms of wheat, though. "What about other damage?" she asked.

"Most of the straw was eaten, and so was most of the pasture grass for the animals. The potato fields have pretty much been reduced to stems, but we think they might grow back."

Chue made it sound so simple, but she must have been uncomfortable with the gravity of the situation, because flowers and flags kept popping in and out of her hands. Lihaku watched her raptly, never seeming to tire of the display.

"Let's be honest—the other farming villages are probably pretty much annihilated," said Chue.

"Good old Jinshi keeps sending post-horses to the nearest village every time he gets a letter from Lahan's Brother, but I'll bet most places weren't prepared as well as this one was," Lihaku added.

"Good point. Things didn't get too chaotic around here," Chue said.

So this was "not too chaotic," huh? Maomao had thought she was inured to a certain amount of pandemonium, but it seemed Chue was even more composed than she was.

And there was still the matter of the person who had done more than anyone on this occasion...

"Where's Rikuson?"

"Outside, I think. Wanna see him?" Chue asked.

In the midst of the turmoil, Rikuson had remained completely calm. In fact, he had looked downright used to it. He'd done more than simply keep his wits and kill grasshoppers—he'd seemed to understand on a deep level how people in a panic would act. What he'd done, running from one house to another and talking to the villagers, might not have looked like much, but without it, it was possible that much more grain would have burned.

Even after Maomao's stern warnings not to use fire, the villagers had still done so. Trapped in suffocating, lightless houses, with frenzied voices screaming outside, anyone would have been pushed to the edge. Maomao's saw now how important it was to have a level voice come from outside.

What's his story? she wondered as she left the tent. Chue followed, perhaps to keep an eye on her.

It was chilly outside, a lingering effect of the hailstorm. Grasshoppers still crawled along the ground, and a few people were trying to catch those that were still in the air. In the center of the village was a hideous black pile of what Maomao assumed were collected bugs. It seemed to be writhing ever so slightly, and she didn't want to get too close.

The villagers who had been shut up in their houses were filtering out into the streets, stunned. When they'd left the wheat fields, taking the ears into their homes, they had been full of stalks—but now they were devastated and worthless. Even though she had heard Chue's report on the damage, Maomao struggled to comprehend the reality in front of her eyes. She passed the potato fields, reduced to stems, and saw for herself the bald pastures.

The grass fields were less thoroughly destroyed than the wheat, but it was a matter of degree. The animals had been let out into the fields, but seemed restive and uneasy. Chickens pecked at the grasshoppers here and there on the ground.

Wonder if they taste good? Maomao had in fact tried some herself once, but she couldn't get over the way they looked—they just didn't appear tasty.

The duck was staring this way and that, surveying the area.

Looking for Basen, maybe.

"Aren't you curious how the grasshoppers taste, Miss

Maomao?"

"I'm sorry, Miss Chue?"

Maomao had a bad feeling about this.

"I whipped this up—just to see if it was edible!" She produced some sort of stir-fry. It was very Chue-esque, to pull it out of thin air like that, and she seemed to have read Maomao's mind.

Maomao didn't say anything.

"I got rid of the heads, carapaces, and legs—didn't seem good for the digestion. I threw out the innards too—never know what they've been eating."

We need hardly explain what this foodstuff was—although Chue had managed to completely disguise it.

"You made the right choice, taking out the guts. They ate poisonous grasses and even each other. But once you've taken all that out, I'm not sure what's left."

"You're so right—there's so little of them you can eat! Anyway, dig in!"

Maomao took an unenthusiastic bite.

"What do you think?"

"Hmm... Well, it's not physically inedible..."

"But given the amount of work that goes into preparing it, you'd suggest something else."

"Yes, I'd say so."

This was Chue's cooking, so it was bound to have some pretty nice seasonings. The fact that, in spite of that, it still only rose to the level of "not inedible" did not speak well for the merits of this dish. Nor were the people standing and staring vacantly at fields devastated by the grasshoppers likely to want to turn around and eat them. The nutrition they afforded would be small compensation for the damage they had done.

The rest of Chue's dish disappeared back into thin air, then she tugged on Maomao's sleeve as if she had noticed something.

"This way, please!" she said.

Maomao followed her along until they stopped in front of one of the savaged houses. She could hear voices inside. When she looked in, she found Rikuson talking with some villagers.

"I understand," he was saying. "We'll pretend this never happened."

"I'm very sorry. I hate to go back on a promise, even an informal one." Several villagers, along with the headman himself, bowed their heads to Rikuson.

"No, I understand. Considering the scale of the destruction, I can't blame you. In fact, I consider us fortunate that the damage wasn't any worse."

One look at the bag sitting on the table between the parties was enough to explain what they were talking about. It was the same one Rikuson had used to motivate the complacent villagers before the swarm arrived—the bag full of money. He'd promised to buy their wheat at double the market price.

This can't be the only village that's suffered this sort of destruction. And I guess they can't afford to sell their surplus.

"Good day, sir." Rikuson put the bag in the folds of his robe and left the house. As he came out, he saw Maomao. "Maomao, you're awake? Are you all right?"

She showed him her head and palms. Her head felt fine, but her hand still throbbed. Chue had tended to it while she was unconscious, though, applying a salve and bandaging it, so it was better than it could have been.

Chue gave Rikuson a nudge. "You've got some guts carrying that thing around, Mister Moneybags! You know there could be bandits around here, right?"

"Oh, heavens. I'm merely a middling bureaucrat. I don't have the money to buy an entire village's wheat supply." He stuck out his tongue playfully and then took out the bag. It was full of Go stones.

"Well, well!" Chue said.

"I carry them with me everywhere. A habit from my last position."

That, of course, would have been as aide to the freak strategist. Rikuson, Maomao thought, had proved himself to be a first-class con man.

"I'm sorry. Did you need something with me?" he asked.

Need something? Hmm.

She'd mostly just followed Chue. Chue and Lihaku between them had given her a pretty good idea of where things stood, so there was no real need to ask Rikuson about it. She did think, though, that Rikuson was probably the one who had been the most shocked when she was knocked unconscious. She felt she should apologize.

"I'm terribly sorry for getting knocked out like that. I was one more problem when you already had enough to deal with." She bowed to Chue too, just for good measure.

"Not at all. I'm just glad you're not seriously hurt."

"All right, then. See you."

"What? Is that all?"

"Is that all?" Well, there were other things she wanted to ask Rikuson, but there was no need to rush. There were still a lot of grasshoppers around, and she thought she should stay out of the way. Maybe Rikuson was tired of thinking about grasshoppers, and wanted a change of subject. Unfortunately, Maomao was in no better position than he was to come up with something distracting.

Instead she said, "You seem to have a very good idea what you're doing here, Rikuson. Do you have some sort of experience with this kind of thing?" The way he had kept his head the whole time—even being the former aide to the freak strategist wouldn't give you that kind of composure.

Rikuson gave her a gentle smile. "I learned it from my mother. You must never lose sight of yourself no matter what the situation, she said." Then, for a second, his expression faltered. "Her last words to me were 'When you most want to break down, that's when you must be most calm.'"

"Her last words?"

"Yes... Our house was attacked by brigands. My mother and older sister hid me where I wouldn't be found...and then they were killed before my eyes."

This conversation had abruptly turned much darker than Maomao had expected.

"If I made a sound, I would have been killed too. But I couldn't —couldn't cry out, couldn't yell. My mother, knowing very well that I would have screamed my rage and tried to jump on the killers, stuffed a gag in my mouth and bound me hand and foot. So it was that, unable to do anything, I watched my mother and sister die—but because of that, I survived."

That wasn't an easy story to respond to. Maomao replied in the only way she could think of. "Because you survived, so did this village."

Whatever had happened in the past was no concern of hers— but if, as a result of his experiences, Rikuson was able to save this village, then she had to be grateful for those experiences. And, too, she had to acknowledge his uncommon courage.

"I appreciate that, Maomao—that way of looking at it." "Oh?"

She wasn't Rikuson. She had no way of knowing how he would have reacted if she'd responded with an excess of emotion. He was a grown man, not some sullen teenage girl, so she'd figured there was no need to shower him with fulsome sympathy.

Rikuson smiled again. "I feel like you and I get along quite well, Maomao. Do you think I could seek your hand in marriage?"

"Surely you jest," she said. She wasn't about to take his polite banter seriously.

"Yes, of course. Surely," Rikuson said, and chuckled.

I'm not sure I realized he was the type to make that kind of joke, Maomao thought, surprised. Then again, he'd said something similar last year, the last time they'd been in the western capital. Maybe this was just another side of him.

Chue poked her head into the conversation. "Wow-ow! Are you going to leave Miss Chue out in the cold? Is there room for one more in your little relationship drama?"

"Miss Chue is a married woman," Rikuson said mildly.

"Yes! Married with child! But everyone says I don't look it.

How'd you know?" Chue gave him a puzzled cock of the head. She really doesn't look it. Chue was far, far removed from Maomao's idea of an ordinary housewife.

"Well, you see, the eldest son of the Ma clan is famous in certain circles."

"Oh, yes! My husband passed the civil service exam when he was in his teens—that's enough to make anyone famous. Sad to say, he quit pretty quick, though. Thanks to him, Miss Chue had to go right back to work after the birth!" She placed her hands together.

"And what's become of your child? It can't be very old yet, can it?" Rikuson asked.

"My sister-in-law is taking excellent care of it!"

Maomao had been aware of the existence of this child, in general terms, but now she found that Chue didn't seem to be remotely concerned about her offspring. Maomao realized that not only had she never heard the child's name, she didn't even know whether it was a boy or a girl. Even knowing that Chue's sister-inlaw, Maamei, would no doubt do an excellent job raising the child, her approach seemed laissez-faire in the extreme.

"All right, I have to get back to helping with the grasshoppers," Rikuson said with a polite bow of his head. "Okay. I'll—"

Just as Maomao was wondering what, in fact, she would do, a voice came from behind her.

"Heeey!" She turned to find Nianzhen waving at her. What did the one-eyed old man want? "Y'have any more of that poison?" "Poison?" Maomao gave him a questioning look.

"The one that kills bugs! The one you boiled up in that big pot. I'm gettin' nowhere crushing insects one at a time. I want to scatter that stuff on everything and wipe them out."

"Oh! You mean the pesticide." Maomao had a hazy memory of her desperate quest to make the stuff.

"Right! The poison!"

"Poison..."

Maomao wanted to point out that that wasn't exactly what it was, but Rikuson stopped as he was leaving to say, "Yes, that poison was astoundingly effective."

"All right, hold on..."

"Oh! It's the Poison Lady!" said one of the villagers who had spotted Maomao. "Think you could whip up some more poison for us?"

"Yes, I need some poison, please. The kind you have to thin out to keep it from killing anyone!" said another villager.

"That poison worked like nothing I've ever seen. What in the world was in it?"

The villagers crowded around her.

It's not p-p-p...

Before Maomao could get the words out, Chue clapped her on the shoulder. She gave her a knowing look and shook her head.

Maomao swallowed hard.

"Please, use it only as directed," she said.

And so Maomao found herself gathering toxic herbs once again.

About the time Maomao had made a generous quantity of pesticide, Lihaku called, "Heeey, little lady!"

"Yes? What's the matter?"

"Looks like you're all set making your poison. I thought maybe instead of sticking around here, we should head back to the western capital to report in. I can leave the soldiers who came out here with me to help clear away the rest of the bugs. Sound all right?"

"Yeah, might be a good idea... And by the way, this isn't poison, it's pesticide."

Maomao looked out at the village. She'd shown the farmers how to make the pesticide, and even written simple instructions for them.

"If we don't hurry back, that old fart's gonna figure out he's been had," Lihaku said.

"Oh, right. He was told I was somewhere there was no plague, wasn't he? I'm impressed he believed it."

However crazed he might have been, the freak strategist's inexplicable sixth sense always seemed to be up and running.

Strange to think someone had successfully lied to him.

"Our buddy Jinshi is no mean tactician himself. He used the ol' doctor."

The ol' doctor. In other words, the quack. Maomao knew Jinshi had been making nice with the physician recently. She wondered how he had used him.

"He explained to the ol' doctor what was going on with you, and let him let the old fart know. Y'know, he told him indirectly!"

Maomao went quiet: that really was a good idea. Also, the ol' doctor this and the old fart that seemed like it could get

confusing.

The quack doctor was a pudgy, middle-aged man, but in zoological terms he was sort of in the same category as mice or squirrels. He occupied roughly the same place in the hierarchy as Basen's duck.

"Once things have quieted down, we need to show up in a hurry or the old fart will start to smell something fishy."

Maomao looked at her palm. It was still visibly marred from making the pesticide. "What do we do about this?" she asked.

"I have a little change of clothes for you!" Chue said, promptly producing them.

"Just tell everyone something went a bit wrong, y'know? You've already got all that stuff on your left arm," Lihaku said, gesturing at the offending appendage, which was covered in scars from Maomao using herself as a test subject for her medicines.

She'd never specifically mentioned it, but apparently he had figured it out.

Come to think of it...

As overprotective as the freak strategist could seem, he'd never once objected to her being a food taster, checking for poison. He would instantly put the screws to anyone who threatened to harm Maomao in the slightest way—but maybe he chose not to interfere when it came to threats Maomao chose for herself.

She wondered if Lihaku had one of his instinctive reads on that aspect of the strategist.

"Good point," she said. She figured he was right: no one would question a minor injury to her hands at this point. "All right. Shall we go home?"

So she put the devastated village behind her.

Chapter 20: Confirmation

When she got back to the western capital, she found it in a bad state.

Things really were worse here, she thought. She surveyed the city with a sense of detachment. There were still grasshoppers on the roads and crawling along the walls of buildings. Sometimes she saw black clumps squirming, but she chose not to look too closely.

She suspected the actual number of grasshoppers was less than it had been in the village, but she could see chewed-up street stalls and gnawed fruit on the ground everywhere.

City folk don't cope well with insects.

The people here had probably reacted to the swarm very differently than the villagers. She saw hardly anyone outside. The farmers had their crops to think of, so they tried to exterminate the bugs to keep the plants safe, but simple fear ruled the inhabitants of the western capital.

"How bad was the chaos?" she asked Lihaku, who was sitting on the driver's bench. Rikuson had said he would stay in the village for a few more days. That was all well and good for the villagers, but Maomao was surprised that he didn't feel he should return to the western capital to deal with this emergency.

"It was bedlam. Rain and hail!"

"Didn't anyone warn them the swarm was coming?" If Jinshi had managed to send word even to her, he must have had some plan in place in the capital.

Lihaku, however, said, "This is the western capital. There's an order to things, y'know?"

"I see..."

Jinshi could hardly run through the streets shouting at the top of his lungs. Unlike Maomao, he had his position to think of. He could do nothing unless he did it through the officials here in the city.

"Looks like he did better than nothing, though," Lihaku said.

In a large town square, there was what appeared to be a food distribution taking place. Maomao was surprised—had the bugs really caused that much damage and exhaustion? It had been several days, though. Not every household was going to have extensive provisions on hand.

A lot of poor families are living hand to mouth to begin with. Often, it was the best they could do to earn a day's wage, then spend it at a stall for dinner that night. A handful of places to eat were still open, but in the chaos, distribution networks had dried up, and they didn't have much to serve.

Maomao could smell the congee being passed out even from where she was. The smell made her think: Lahan's Brother.

It was the smell of sweet potatoes, maybe from the huge supply that had come with her and the others on the ships. The potatoes were being cooked and served to fill the bellies of the starving townsfolk.

"So they're using up the potatoes on this distribution," Maomao observed.

"Oh, Lahan's Brother, we hardly knew ye... It hurts so much to lose him..." Chue's eyes brimmed with tears. She was treating him like he was dead?

"I'd say if they're coming in useful, that's fine, isn't it? I'm sure Potato Guy is out there somewhere, smiling," said Lihaku.

Out there? Where would that be? From the way Lihaku talked, it was hard to tell if he thought Lahan's Brother was alive or dead.

The carriage arrived at the annex. People gathered at the gate when they heard the whinnying of the horses. Specifically, the people were the quack and Tianyu.

"Young lady! You're back!" An exhausted-looking, haggard man raced up to Maomao. Lihaku grabbed him by the scruff of the neck before he could collide with her. The little guy struggled and flailed—it was the quack doctor.

"Master Physician, are you all right?" Maomao said with a bow.

Lihaku put the quack back on the ground.

"What about you, young lady? You're all right, aren't you? I know you were somewhere safe, but you must have been so scared! I certainly was! I would have sworn the world was coming to an end!"

"Yes, sir. I know you faint at the sight of a cockroach."

He'd come to her white as a sheet more than once after encountering a particularly vicious bug while cleaning. A swarm of grasshoppers must have been a living hell for him.

"It's not fair, Niangniang. Why did you get to evacuate? Man, it must be great having real connections!" Tianyu was as full of sarcasm as ever, although Maomao wasn't sure how far he actually believed what Jinshi had said.

"Are you sure it's all right to leave the medical office empty?" Maomao asked. That was, truly and sincerely, the first thing on her mind when she saw them.

"Ahh, we're not that busy," Tianyu said. "Maybe 'cause we're mostly supposed to take care of the Moon Prince. Dr. You and the others, now, they have a lot to do!"

The two of them have time on their hands because they're in charge of Jinshi? Something about that seemed strange.

"That reminds me, young lady! Master Lakan was so very worried about you!"

"Oh."

That was not especially useful information.

"He seems to have quite a sweet tooth. You should take some mashed sweet potato treats and go say hello to him. He was ravenous for them the other day!"

She wished she could ignore the good doctor's suggestion, but if she did, she suspected the other party would only come visit her instead. Anyway, she had a bigger problem: the quack was taking advantage of Lahan's Brother's absence to cook their seed potatoes.

"Gracious, young lady, you're hurt! What in the world happened to your hand?"

"Oh, it's nothing to worry about. I was making pesticide. It's from experiments with that."

"Experiments? You're not an insect, young lady!" The quack looked genuinely perplexed.

"If it can kill a cat, it'll work for sure on a bug," Tianyu interjected.

"All right, you two, that's enough chatter," Chue said as she

came into the room. "We have lots we want to tell you!" "Tell us?" the quack said.

"About this bug-killing concoction."

"Ahh, yes, of course. Sorry, sorry." The quack politely made way. Tianyu didn't look like he was going to be a problem—he'd only shown up to make smart remarks.

Many important people, not just Gyokuen, lived in excessively large houses, but Jinshi's chambers were located in the innermost sanctum of this one. That was all very respectful to him as a guest, but frankly, it was a real hike.

"All right, nobody's clothes are rumpled? Excellent," Chue said, inspecting Maomao's and Lihaku's outfits. Maomao saw a stray hair or two on Chue's head, so she patted it down.

"Excuse me, we're he—" Maomao said, but she was interrupted by a tremendous crash the moment they entered.

Jinshi was sitting in a somewhat less than formal posture.

Suiren and Taomei attended him as usual, while Gaoshun and Basen were there too, both looking a bit uncomfortable. "Quack!" quacked the duck next to them. Would it be better to say something quippy about the bird, or not?

Basen had left the duck behind, and she had returned with Maomao and the others. The way she'd gone straight back to Basen the moment they'd arrived at the annex—she was more like a dog than a duck.

Seems like Gaoshun's sort of thing, Maomao thought. Contrary to appearances, he had a soft spot for sweet treats and small animals. He probably found the duck's presence healing.

Okay, can't spend all my time looking at the duck.

She glanced at Lihaku to ask how they would handle the report. He took a half step back—apparently he wanted her to do the talking. Chue likewise retreated.

"We've just returned, sir," Maomao said, standing a little straighter and talking a little more properly because Taomei was there. If it were just Gaoshun or Suiren, that would be one

thing...

"Very good," Jinshi said with an air of detached authority. He seemed to feel the same way as Maomao, because his face wore his proverbial "Moon Prince" mask. Taomei had been one of Jinshi's nursemaids, Maomao gathered, but her...approach to child-rearing had been rather different from Suiren's.

"And how was it?" he asked.

A fair question, but about all Maomao could do was repeat what she had heard from Chue. "The harvest was severely impacted, but not annihilated. As far as the wheat goes, we think there's about seventy percent of a normal year's harvest left."

"Then Lahan's Brother's message reached you in time." He even calls him that in official meetings?

Maybe even Jinshi didn't know the man's name. If he never came back, Maomao wondered what they would put on his tombstone.

"We dispatched messengers to the other villages, but by all accounts, we saved less than half the harvest. And there are some places the messengers haven't come back from yet—I can only assume things are worse there."

As hard as he had worked, Lahan's Brother simply couldn't reach everyone in time. Worse, no matter how much he had endured for the sake of the villages he did reach, the rest would simply assume the higher-ups had ignored and abandoned them. Struggle as he might, Lahan's Brother was never going to reach the finish line.

"Lihaku. How many people do you think we need to send to each village?" Jinshi asked.

"I'd say at least ten, sir. We'll need some to take care of the bugs and some to help rebuild the houses, but the thing that worries me most is..."

"Violence? Or brigandage?"

"Both, really."

Natural disasters like this turned life upside down for people— and that tended to do the same to the human heart. A ravaged heart could soon turn to thievery or violence. Jinshi was already thinking about what came after the grasshoppers.

Poink! went Chue's unruly hair—she seemed to think Jinshi might ask her opinion, but she never got a turn to talk.

"Very well. You've done good work, Lihaku. You can return to your post," Jinshi said.

"Sir," Lihaku replied smartly, and left the room. The duck, for reasons unknown, followed him. Her rump quivered as she went— maybe she needed to poop.

Can ducks be housebroken?

Maomao would have assumed that was impossible, but then again, if the animal desecrated Jinshi's chambers, Taomei was apt to roast her on the spot. Maybe the duck, sensing mortal danger, had decided to go outside. If so, it was an impressive trick.

Maomao turned to follow them, but immediately found Suiren blocking her exit.

"Can I help you?" Maomao asked.

"Ho ho ho. Perhaps you'd spare us just a little more of your time."

When she put it that way, Maomao had no choice but to do an about-face.

Jinshi was no longer wearing his Moon Prince expression. "Is your head all right?" he asked. Basen must have told him about the wayward piece of hail and Maomao's subsequent bout of unconsciousness. When she looked closely, she could see dark bags under Jinshi's eyes, and his lips were dry.

"I'm not sure, sir. Sometimes a person drops dead out of the blue a few days after being hit on the head." Even if there were no external wounds, bleeding inside the head could, apparently, still cause death.

"Then you need to be lying down!"

"No, sir. My time will come when it comes, and about the only person who could do anything about it would be my father." Him, or perhaps Dr. Liu, but neither was here in the western capital.

"So I would prefer to do what I can, while I can."

"Explain that right hand, then." He seemed to have noticed Maomao's bandages.

"Scars from an experiment," she said slowly.

"I thought you didn't use your dominant hand for that." He gave her a long, hard look—the reverse of their usual positions. At length he said, "Hrm. Well, fine. More importantly...you're all right. That's what matters." Oh...

She saw how his hand clenched and unclenched, and realized the "Moon Prince" had reverted entirely to Jinshi. It was almost childlike—and indeed, distressingly human.

"You must be tired. You should return to your room and get some rest."

Now that, Maomao was grateful to hear. Chue threw her hands in the air in celebration, until she saw the look on her mother-inlaw's face and put them down again.

Maomao was eager to go back to her room, but there was one thing she needed to know. "Master Jinshi, are you not doing anything about the swarm yourself?"

It might not sound like a very respectful question—and it wouldn't help that she'd slipped back to calling him Jinshi instead of "Moon Prince." But after all his planning and preparation for how to deal with the plague of insects, surely he shouldn't be lounging in his guest suite right now. Maomao pressed the point: "In these unprecedented times, surely there's much that you could still be doing, sir?"

Her point seemed to get across.

"As you know, I am a guest here," Jinshi said, returning to his official tone. "What I can personally do on the ground is limited.

So I prepared a gift for those who can do whatever they wish."

Maomao recalled the sweet potato congee being distributed in the marketplace.

"I saw sweet potato congee being passed out," she said.

"Good to know they're using it as intended."

"Using it?"

Jinshi had already given the provisions to the western capital. It would be the capital's ruler who got the goodwill for handing them out. The townspeople's gratitude would be directed toward whoever had given them the food.

He's plucked this moment right out of Jinshi's hands! Jinshi had done all the work, but Gyoku-ou would get all the credit.

"It's also clear enough why they allowed me to send messengers to the villages at my will. If nothing happened, they would get to blame the Imperial younger brother for trying to stir the people up. And if something did happen, the western capital would still be seen to have sent word."

Jinshi was a far more straightforward person than he looked at first glance, and he put the nation first without regard for faction or alliance. He could be a terribly useful pawn if someone knew how to play him.

Then this convenient catastrophe had arrived.

"These westerners seem to have planned all along to use us central visitors as their errand boys and girls. We were at least saved from the worst of it in that the honored strategist took the fore."

"B-But..."

There were people who found this more painful than Maomao.

Basen remained resolutely expressionless, while Suiren and Taomei looked less than cheerful. Gaoshun, meanwhile, was nursing a very deep furrow in his brow.

"This seems to be the true reason I was summoned here—to serve as a convenient foil," Jinshi said.

Astoundingly, the interim ruler of the western capital, Gyokuou, was trying to use the Imperial younger brother as his own supporting actor. Is he trying to make himself the hero of this

story? Maomao clenched her fist as she realized what was going on.

They were going to be in the western capital for a while. Gyoku-ou might have been Empress Gyokuyou's brother, but even so, Maomao had the feeling she was never going to learn to like him very much. Meanwhile, Jinshi, who seemed to keep drawing the short straw, couldn't hide his mounting exhaustion from those closest to him.

He needs to get some sleep, and soon.

Maomao was just about to try to bring an end to the conversation when Suiren called, "Basen, your duck is making a racket outside!"

"Jofu? Is something wrong?"

"That masked owl is back. Maybe returning it to the wild wasn't so easy..."

"It's used to humans now," Taomei said, breaking into a smile at the mention of the owl. Maomao was sure now: Taomei appreciated the bird as a fellow predator.

"Do you think you could go take a look? You know how to handle that thing, don't you?" Suiren said.

"When you put it that way, I suppose..." Masterpiece of a

woman though she might have been, even Taomei had to give in the face of a veteran lady-in-waiting like Suiren. Basen, worried about his duck, hurried outside too. It was already dark, so Chue lit a lantern. The sweet smell of honey floated through the air.

"Miss Chue, perhaps you'd help me with dinner preparations?" Suiren said.

"Oh, yes, certainly!" Chue replied, somehow theatrically.

Suiren gave Maomao a wink.

I get it. Real nice.

Without prompting, Gaoshun trotted out after them. He would be nearby, so as to come quickly if he were needed.

Once the two of them were alone in the room, Maomao took a deep breath, then heaved a sigh. "Master Jinshi."

"Yes?"

"Don't you think you're pushing yourself too hard?"

The last vestiges of the Moon Prince vanished. "Is there ever a time when I'm not?"

From the moment he had been born a member of the Imperial family, freedom had not been a word in his vocabulary. Maomao realized she had simply asked the obvious.

"How much more 'too hard' can you push yourself, then?" There had to be a limit to how much Jinshi could take.

"You ask tough questions. We don't know where the limit is until we find it, do we?"

"Most people who ruin themselves beyond repair do it at work, while continually swearing they can keep going."

That left Jinshi quiet for a moment, but his face darkened.

"Isn't that what an apothecary is for? To make them better?" "Yes, sir. More or less. Shall I prepare an herbal bath for you?" "No..." Jinshi held out his hand.

Huh?

Maomao stared at it, trying to decide if it had some significance. His hand was large, the fingers long. The nails were neatly clipped and filed.

The large hand stretched a little farther and placed itself on Maomao's head.

Yikes!

He mussed her hair as if he were petting a dog. She tried to

slap him away, but he dodged her nimbly.

"What the hell, sir?" she asked, patting her disheveled hair back into place. She hadn't had a chance to bathe for several days, so it felt thick and greasy.

"I simply made myself better. So I wouldn't reach my limit so soon." Jinshi held his head high, as if to say he hadn't done anything wrong.

"There must be better ways to do that, sir." "Is that an invitation to utilize these...ways?" Neither of them said anything.

Maomao backed away a half step and crossed her arms in an X.

"Tell me about these 'better'—"

"Okay, I've reported everything I have to report! If you'll excuse me!" And then, with an artful dodge, Maomao ducked out of the room.

Outside, she let out a long breath. He's been so indirect lately that I'd forgotten.

Jinshi's true personality was to charge ahead. His methods could be brutal. If he had been showing restraint with Maomao, it was only because of the ridiculous way he'd decided to go about this.

Walking around in hopes of clearing her head, Maomao found an owl, a duck, Basen, and, for some reason, even a goat running around outside.

That goat belongs to Miss Chue.

They were turning this annex into a farm.

They have the freedom to do that.

The scene was simultaneously ridiculous and amusing. Maomao felt the edges of her mouth creep upward, and she clenched her fist, vowing to make more pesticide tomorrow.

She was going to be in the western capital for a while yet. If she was going to tell Jinshi not to push himself too hard, then she should take her own advice.

But still, she would do everything she could. She had to.

Epilogue

Aromatic tea and baked snacks with plenty of butter. A moderately stimulating incense that drew out the richest notes of the sweet smell.

Empress Gyokuyou hosted, and her guests came to be entertained.

She'd held many tea parties during her days in the rear palace, but fewer since she had gone from consort to Empress. She was confident, however, that her ability to coddle a visitor had not diminished.

"Thank you ever so much for inviting us," one of the women said. They were the wives of some of the most important people in Li. They were all older than Gyokuyou, with one exception—her niece, Yaqin.

"And who might this be?" a sharp-eyed guest asked upon spotting her.

"My niece," Gyokuyou replied with a smile. "She's joined us all the way from the western capital."

Yaqin had still not entered the rear palace, as not only Gyokuyou but Gyokuen had objected to her doing so. Gyokuyou's father and her brother wanted different things: this realization made her even less hesitant to act.

She had introduced the girl not as Gyoku-ou's daughter, but as her niece. Nobody would know Gyoku-ou as the governor of the far-off western reaches. He was known in the capital as Gyokuen's son, and little more.

Anyway, Yaqin resembled Gyokuyou more than she did Gyokuou. No doubt people would conclude that she was Gyokuyou's niece on her mother's side.

They talked about the most popular perfumes, imported velvet, the newest makeup—subjects that were a bit juvenile considering the age bracket of the attendees. Partly, Gyokuyou deliberately brought up these subjects so that Yaqin, who wasn't used to

these sorts of functions yet, would feel comfortable, but it also served to allow her to avoid political discussions.

The main objective today was not to strengthen her ties with these women. In fact, she had gone out of her way to invite wellheeled wives who didn't display too much ambition.

Over these past several months, Yaqin had begun to open up to Gyokuyou. As Gyokuyou had suspected, she was adopted, not her half-brother's blood child. He must have decided that the Emperor's choice of Gyokuyou as his empress showed that the ruler had a thing for "exotic"-looking women.

Gyokuyou could only laugh.

The Emperor was not a man who would choose his empress for her looks alone. They might have been a factor, of course, but not enough for him to fall madly in love. Gyokuyou might have the Imperial affection, but she was not the kind who could bring a country to its knees.

Her father Gyokuen understood His Majesty well. That was why he hadn't offered a young Gyokuyou to the previous emperor. He had waited, using the time until the throne changed hands to give Gyokuyou the education she would need to be Empress.

He was a merchant, Gyokuen. He would choose the path of greatest profit. He would not be distracted by avarice, though—he would look ten, twenty, fifty years into the future. Even beyond his own death. He would seek more than the modest glory of one clan, Gyokuyou knew.

Gyokuyou had faith that Gyokuen loved her. But his love was not unconditional. If she became a hindrance to his pursuit of gain, he would cut her loose. What Gyokuyou could do was raise her own value, make herself weigh heavier in Gyokuen's scales.

This tea party was one way she could do that.

The party concluded amid a convivial atmosphere. The wives showed great interest in the curious trade goods from the west.

Gyokuyou would have to make presents of them soon.

She ordered her ladies-in-waiting to clean up, then went back to her room, accompanied by Yaqin.

"You seem to be learning how to handle yourself at a tea party," Gyokuyou observed.

"Yes, ma'am. Only thanks to you."

"At first, you couldn't bring yourself to say a word!" She chuckled.

"Please, I beg you, don't remind me."

Yaqin was lovely, true enough, but she was ultimately still a "makeshift" daughter. She could make herself sound aristocratic for a few minutes of brief conversation, but much longer than that and her I-sei twang started to come out. Gyokuyou would probably still have the same problem if Hongniang hadn't corrected her every time her own accent had shown itself ever since she was young.

The accent made Yaqin less than suitable for tea parties. In the end, she had been offered up for one purpose: to gain the romantic interest of the nobility.

"Lady Gyokuyou, may I ask you something?" Yaqin said.

"Go ahead."

"How fares I-sei Province now?" The young woman couldn't hide her anxiety.

"Why do you ask? Does something there worry you?" Gyokuyou asked bluntly.

After a second Yaqin replied, "The bugs must be coming soon. I fear for the crop." She was a very direct young woman—kind at heart, and a quick study. Gyokuyou sympathized with her.

It had been ten days or so before that Yaqin had opened up to Gyokuyou about her real parents—a subject she had no doubt intended to keep strictly to herself.

This girl, so much like Gyokuyou, had a deep respect for Gyoku-ou. In her former life, her family had been nomads, but when her father grew ill, they settled in a farming village. Of course, that didn't immediately make them proficient farmers. They let the livestock pasture in a nearby field, and bit by bit they learned how to farm. She described with evident gratitude how the governor had supported them monetarily.

The governor—Gyoku-ou.

Gyoku-ou was not evil in Gyokuyou's eyes. He simply believed he was always right. Always just. That was why they didn't get along. She, favored by Gyokuen, contravened his justice. Of this she was well aware.

He was the eldest son, by Gyokuen's official wife. If he looked down on a girl born later to a concubine, well, that was hardly unique to I-Sei Province. Most men in Li would have done the same.

No, what bothered Gyokuyou was how Gyoku-ou denigrated her appearance. Not her face as such—this wasn't about whether she was beautiful or ugly. Instead he belittled her red hair, her green eyes. He was a merchant's son, the one who was supposed to help the western capital flourish as a nexus of trade in the future. Not the best vocation for a xenophobe.

Gyokuen's policy was in general to be a good neighbor to foreigners. Gyokuyou didn't understand how Gyoku-ou could respect their father so much while turning his back on one of his most important teachings.

This was the man Yaqin so deeply admired. Some years before, she had been forced to sell herself on account of a bad harvest. Selling a daughter was hardly unheard of—women were just another commodity in poor households. She'd begun to work as a prostitute.

This was the situation from which Gyoku-ou had plucked Yaqin, adopting her as his daughter. A beautiful story, Gyokuyou thought. She chose not to say what was behind it; she would not tell Yaqin the truth of the matter. She believed it was part of her strength that she did not undermine the girl.

"I certainly think we can expect to hear something from the western capital soon. I'll tell you the moment I learn anything," Gyokuyou said. Then she pulled a hair stick from Yaqin's hair. Feeling her head get lighter, Yaqin let out a breath. "Now get changed, and let's start on our studies. Learning—that's the most important thing you can do to be of help to my honored brother."

"Yes, ma'am."

Yaqin was obedient, a good girl. She respected Gyoku-ou and worried even for the family who had sold her. Even though they had no doubt received more than enough silver to live on from Gyoku-ou—to keep their mouths shut.

As Yaqin left the room to go change, Haku-u entered holding a crumpled piece of paper. "Lady Gyokuyou," she said.

She gave Gyokuyou the paper, which had been folded and twisted so it could travel by pigeon. This particular missive seemed to have been treated even more roughly than usual. Gyokuyou looked at the bird, wondering if it was the one the Moon Prince normally used, but no. This message had come from someone other than His Majesty's younger brother.

"Is this—?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Haku-u had read it already, it seemed. The message contained word that the western capital—in fact, all of I-Sei Province—was beset by a plague of insects. The messy handwriting bespoke the urgency with which it had been written.

Gyokuyou clenched her jaw. "Haku-u."

"I have one message prepared to go by land and another by sea. We have one messenger bird left, if you wish to use it. The western capital is still in confusion, however, and I question whether it would arrive safely."

Even so, it would be far faster than sending word by human hands.

"The bird, please," Gyokuyou said. Then she took out a piece of particularly sturdy paper. On it she wrote only a single sentence:

As you will.

Then she tucked the letter in some oil paper, attached it to the leg of the pigeon Haku-u had brought, and released the bird. The white creature looked perfect against the bright blue sky.

The sky was so blue here in the central region, in fact, that it was almost hard to imagine that far to the west, it was being blotted out by insects, the bugs ravaging the crop and supplies. Those who couldn't imagine it might sneer to themselves, What a bunch of crybabies, those westerners. "Ooh! The bugs are going to get me! Boo hoo hoo!"

Gyokuyou let out a great sigh. Why had she entered the rear palace? For what? Why had her father seen fit to send her here, to the country's central region?

Would Gyokuyou's father continue to love her long into the future?

"All right!" Gyokuyou almost gave herself a slap on the cheek for energy, but Haku-u stopped her.

"Your inner tomboy is showing, ma'am. Not on the face,

please."

"Yes, yes."

"And try to sound like you mean it when you answer." Haku-u, her friend from childhood, looked at her sternly.

Gyokuyou took out a new sheet of paper and began writing down what she could do for the western region.

Her fight was just beginning.