I dropped Lu Fang's body onto the ground.
I wiped the dagger on my trousers and turned and looked at the commons where the militia were disarming the surviving soldiers and Hao was pulling Shan to his feet with his hands bound by rope.
"Bind the survivors and treat the wounded. Treat ours first, then we treat theirs. Someone get Suyin to check Hao's arm."
People moved when I spoke. The village responded to my voice the way it usually responded to Hao's.
In the meantime I walked through the gate and past the road where Lu Fang's cart sat empty, and further beyond the tree line where the northern approach met the open fields.
I made it thirty meters into the trees before I vomited.
I braced myself against a birch trunk and emptied everything in my stomach onto the forest floor, heaving until there was nothing left, and then heaving again because my body hadn't caught up to what I had done. My hands gripped the bark hard enough to tear it.
When the nausea finally passed, I stood still and drew in deep restorative breaths with my forehead against the tree and the dagger still in my hand.
I cleaned the still bloody steel on a handful of leaves and sheathed it against my forearm and wiped my mouth with my sleeve.
Then I walked back to the village.
Administrator Wen conducted business while the blood on the ground was still drying.
Lu Fang's surviving soldiers sat in a line near the grain bins, hands bound, heads down. Seven of them. Five hadn't made it. Their bodies were being moved to the edge of the commons by militia volunteers who handled the dead with a soldier's respect. After all, they were just like them in a way, farmers and countrymen who were forced to fight in a battle that they had no chance of winning.
Hao approached me before I found him.
His knuckles were split and his left wrist was splinted, probably fractured from blocking the hill tribe cultivator's attack that was aimed directly at me. The splint appeared to have been Suyin's doing, no doubt done at the behest of Mother.
He looked at me and I saw the question form before he asked it.
"Are you hurt?"
I shook my head. "No."
"Your hands...."
I looked down and saw that my palms were raw and bleeding from the birch bark. I hadn't noticed.
"Not from the fight," I said hurriedly.
Hao studied my face. He had a way of looking at people that stripped the surface away, and he was doing it now, reading whatever was written underneath the composure I was holding together.
"I saw you kill him," Hao said.
It took all I could to not flinch at his words. "He was going to reach the road. If he made it back to Meishan, then the Prefect would've sent everything he had."
"I know why you did it." Hao's voice was quiet. "I'm just asking, are you okay?"
The question was so simple it almost broke me. Are you okay?
"I don't know yet," I replied. It was honest as I could be about it. The feelings were far too complicated and there was far more work to be done. "Ask me tomorrow."
He nodded. He didn't push. He just gave me a quick hug of relief and then turned to help the militia with the bodies.
That was Hao. He'd fought a cultivator hand to hand, taken damage, won, and his first priority walking out of the fight was checking whether his younger brother was okay.
I didn't deserve him.
I approached Administrator Wen in the commons and saw that he had set up a field desk on the same crate Hao used for village meetings. He addressed me without looking up.
"Seven taken prisoner with five soldiers dead. One cultivator detained, and one tax collector killed." He said each item like a line on an inventory sheet. "The imprisoned soldiers and the cultivator will be offered terms. Those who accept service under the Western Reaches will be reassigned. Those who refuse will be released at the border."
I raised a brow at his words. "Released?"
"The Lord of the Western Reaches doesn't execute prisoners of war who surrender voluntarily. It's policy." He glanced up. "It also encourages future surrenders, which reduces the cost of territorial expansion."
I recognized the logic.
"What happens now?" I asked.
"Formal integration into the Western Reaches administrative framework begins immediately. Your iron supply contract remains active. Tax assessment at standard rates after the autumn harvest. A garrison element will be stationed within response distance on a permanent basis." His brush moved. "Commander Xu will issue a summons when she requires your presence. Expect it within three years."
"Why in three years?"
"The Lord of the Western Reaches has a standing treaty with the Lord of Qinghe. It expires in the winter of the third year."
That made sense to me. She more than likely expected mobilization around that time. Moving troops took time, which meant the campaign would occur in the spring or summer of the following year. I figured that she would want to discuss more than just the village, but our training grounds as well.
But that was a worry for another time.
Hao on the other hand didn't wait for Wen's process to finish. By the time the sun began to rise above the commons, he was sitting with Shan, the hill clan cultivator, and they were sharing rice from the same bowl.
Shan had been pinned under Hao's knee only a few hours ago, and now he was eating with the man who'd beaten him and listening to whatever Hao was saying with an expression I recognized. The expression of someone caught in Hao's gravity.
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By evening, two of the captured soldiers had joined the conversation. By nightfall, Shan was helping Gao Ren stack firewood for the celebration feast.
The families who hadn't fought were watching from doorways and windows. The children had been kept inside during the ambush and were now emerging out into the world. A woman from the Liu family was scrubbing the commons with river water and a brush, working at a dark stain that wasn't going to come out.
I turned and found Suyin behind the Wei compound.
She was sitting on the ground with her back against the wall, knees drawn up with her arms wrapped around them. Her spear was leaning against the wall beside her. The one she'd thrown was still somewhere in the commons, probably being collected with the other weapons. The one beside her was her training spear. She'd grabbed it after the fight, I guessed, because holding it must have provided some comfort to her.
Her hands were shaking.
I sat down beside her an arm's length apart, looking at the same patch of sky above the eastern fields.
We sat there for a while.
"I keep seeing it," she began to say. "The spear going in and the sound it made. He screamed and I was glad. For a second I was glad he was hurt, and then I wasn't glad, and then I didn't feel anything at all."
I held out my hand with my palm raised up. The tremor was back, the same one that had started on the road and stopped had now returned once again.
Suyin looked at my shaking hand then held hers out and it trembled just like mine did.
"Matching set," I said.
She almost laughed. It came out closer to a breath. She took my hand and held it the way she had the night at the training post, her fingers wrapping around mine, both of us trembling against each other.
I looked at her. Fourteen years old. Dark hair pulled loose from the working knot, strands stuck to her face with sweat and dust.
I felt something shift in my chest. An awareness that had been building for weeks, something I'd been filing under "later" alongside every other personal thing I couldn't afford to process.
Suyin liked me.
She liked me the way a girl liked a boy. And sitting here, holding her shaking hand in mine, I could feel how easy it would be to let that current carry me away.
But I couldn't let that happen because I wasn't the person she thought I was. I was wearing the mask of a fifteen year old, but this wasn't who I truly was, and letting her believe otherwise was a cruelty I wouldn't commit.
"Suyin."
She looked at me.
"You know that my mother lost a daughter. Before Hao and I were born. She lived less than a winter."
Suyin's grip tightened slightly. "Mother Pei mentioned it once when we were grinding chrysanthemum."
"My mother never got to raise a daughter. She got two sons who track mud through the house and forget to eat when they're working." I looked at our joined hands. "And then you walked into her house and started learning everything she had to teach, and she started laughing again. You did that."
Suyin's eyes were bright.
"You're the sister I never had," I said. "You're family, Suyin. I need you to know that."
She was quiet for a long time.
Then she smiled up at me. She understood exactly what I was saying. All of it. The boundary and the place I was making for her that was permanent and still close and may not have been at all what she'd imagined but maybe, I hoped, it was still something that she could hold onto.
"Family," she echoed my words and squeezed my hand before finally letting go.
She stood and then walked toward the Pei household where my mother was probably already waiting with tea and herbs for the rest of the villagers to enjoy.
I sat against the wall a while longer.
The feast began at sundown and lasted until the stars turned.
Mother came out. She emerged from the house leaning on Suyin's arm, thinner than she'd been at the start of summer, but upright. She carried a bundle of dried herbs and a grinding stone and she set up a treatment station near the commons fire without being asked because nobody needed to ask Mother Pei to heal.
Suyin worked beside her along with Liu Jun, the boy who'd refused the spear and chosen medicine, knelt on her other side grinding herbs.
The food was simple at the feast was simple: rice, preserved vegetables, and the last of the autumn pork.
Zhao Ping sat by the fire with his son Zhao Jun and didn't speak. When he finally did, he looked at me across the flames and said, "The fence was storng."
I nodded, "Yes, it did."
That was all he said, and from Zhao Ping, it was the highest compliment I'd ever receive.
Merchant Wang Su arrived at midnight. He had heard the news on the road, from whom I didn't ask, and he rode his cart through the gate with a cask of rice wine that he claimed was for celebration but was probably for sale at triple markup. Hao embraced him like a brother and the wine went around to everyone and even I drank a cup of it.
By the time I was on my second cup of wine, Duan had gathered an audience.
He stood near the fire with his arms spread, retelling the road encounter with Commander Xu as if it were an epic ballad. In his new version, I hadn't just walked out of the tree line with my hands up. Instead I had strolled out, casual as morning, looked a column of twenty-two mounted soldiers and three cultivators dead in the eyes, and told their commander that she should be grateful that I was willing to talk instead of fight. The crowd ate it up. The Tongshan families leaned in. Even Shan, sitting at the edge of the firelight, tilted his head to listen.
"And the negotiation," Duan continued, warming to it. "The boy stands there, fifteen years old, ore dust in his hair, and he says to this woman, this commander who could level a hillside, he says 'can I count on your protection?' Like he was placing an order at market."
There was a loud burst of laughter I saw that Hao was grinning. Zhao Ping's eyes widened with shock.
"And then when Lu Fang ran," Duan's voice dropped, and the crowd went quiet. "The boy walked through the fighting, pulled that little dagger from his sleeve, caught Lu Fang by the hair, and put him down like a rabid dog. The most unsettling part was that he wiped the blade on his trousers, and kept moving. I think he was looking for more dogs to put down!"
He mimed the motion and the crowd stared. A child near the front pressed closer to her mother.
I sat at the back of the crowd and couldn't help but chuckle. Duan's version bore a passing resemblance to what had actually happened the way a painting bore a resemblance to the landscape it depicted. The broad strokes were there. The details had been improved considerably.
But the crowd needed it.
They needed the story of a boy who walked through fire without blinking, because the story made them feel like the village that produced him could walk through anything as well.
Hao caught me watching and walked over. "Shan's staying."
I nodded. "And it only took you one afternoon to do so."
Hao shrugged. "I just told him what we've been doing and asked him if he wanted to be part of it. He said he'd never been asked a question like that before." Hao looked back at Shan, who went back to carrying logs for the Western Reaches forces.
"He's been fighting for people who treat him like a weapon his whole life. I offered him something different."
"And what was that?" I asked.
"A home."
Three of the seven prisoners chose to stay. Shan, and two infantry soldiers named Tao and Ma who'd been conscripted from farming villages not unlike Hekou. The other four would be released at the northern road the next morning, given provisions and pointed toward the border.
I went to the training grounds after the feast and visualized what needed to happen next. Sooner or later Commander Xu will mention the training grounds, and I would have to clarify what it truly was. I didn't want our future Sect to be policed by a political entity, nor did I want it to have any affiliations or overhead, but that was much more complicated now that we had been absorbed into the Western Reaches.
While I paced in thought, I found Hao at the edge of the field and I sat beside him.
"You know what I keep thinking about?" he asked.
"Tell me," I urged him.
"The refugees, the Tongshan families, and the Liuwan families, they all came here because they had nowhere else to go.
He looked at the field. "I want to build a place where anyone can come and learn and grow."
I nodded along with him as he continued to share his thoughts. "A sanctuary, Liang. That's what I want Hekou to become. A place where people can come and feel safe."
I looked at the training ground and the river where Bolin had broken through.
At the hillside where Hao had cracked the earth with a stomp and changed both our lives.
"What you're describing," I began to say, " is a place built on shared knowledge."
Hao gave a defeated sigh which was rare for him. "Is that stupid?"
"No." I corrected him immediately, then said mostly to myself, "A sect..."
Hao turned to me. "A what?"
"A school of thought. We can build a place where knowledge is gathered, taught, and preserved for generations. It can be a center of learning and knowledge, and we can promote health and wellness for all."
Hao was quiet as he contemplated my words. I could tell that what I said resonated deeply within his heart as well as his mind.
"I hope that we can build something like that here," Hao said.
I shared that sentiment and stared up at the night sky where the stars shined brighter than ever before. I leaned toward my brother and placed my hand on his shoulder before saying,
"The birth of a Sect, the idea of an institution called a Sect, has to begin here."