Record of those present at the River Fork Academy, Hekou Village, on the night of the fifteenth day of deep winter.
Pei Liang — Founder, River Fork Academy — Alive
Pei Hao — Senior cultivator, militia commander — Alive
Wei Suyin — Head of clinic, zone instructor — Alive
Wei Bolin — Zone instructor — Alive
Duan — Militia trainer — Alive
Gao Ren — Forge master — Alive
Gao Shu — Forge master's daughter — Alive
Luan Mei — Head of household operations — Alive
Shan Pei — Militia, cultivator — Alive
Liu Jun — Clinic staff — Alive
Luan Feng — Administrative records — Alive
Wei Kang — Militia, Wei brother — Alive
Wei Lun — Militia, Wei brother — Alive
Zhao Lin — Zone assistant instructor, Zhao Ping's son — Alive
Zhao Ping — Militia, field coordinator — Alive
Zhao Jun — Militia, field assistant, Zhao Ping's son — Alive
She had been the last one.
After the second wave of mobilization took her brothers, after the third wave took her sons, she had been what remained. A woman in a house built for eight people. A woman who had screamed at the collectors for three weeks about Wu Bao and had her voice give out before they stopped listening.
When the story came east about the Pei brothers and the Defection of Hekou Village, she had felt it....
Fury.
They had done what she begged her brothers to do. What she had begged Wu Jun to consider, and he had said no because the penalty for desertion was death and he would not leave his brothers. He had gone and died anyways.
Wu Chen had gone and died anyways.
How dare they survive when her sons had not.
When the rest of the scattered Pei clan began talking about going to Hekou, about rebuilding the clan name, she had listened to every conversation with her hands trembling against her lap, and her face scrunched into a grimace.
You don't know that it was them, they said. You would see, once you got there.
She already knew. The men who fought the militia at Hekou were the men conscripted under Lu Fang. The logic was simple and she had followed it to its end.
She wrote the plea to the Lord of Qinghe. She described the village, the defection, and a description of the brothers who ran it, and she also detailed the strategic position of Hekou in the Western Reaches border approach, and what a well-placed strike could do there.
The Lord's response had been enthusiastic. He sent four soldiers, four men who were highly trained as scouts and infiltrators, and they came south to meet her and ensured her safe passage through the Qinghe territories.
She arrived at Hekou three weeks ahead of the clan.
It was there at the gate when she heard footsteps and turned to find the younger one. She knew his face from descriptions sent by her father, and knew his mother's eyes before he said a word.
She introduced herself and told him his father's older sister had been her mother.
He brought her inside.
The older brother was at the main room table and stood when they came through the door. He was large and warm, his face making no attempt to conceal what it felt, and he ushered the children outside and poured the tea and settled into his chair with his elbows on the table. She watched his hands on the teacups and thought: this is the man who built the place that killed my sons. She folded her hands in her lap and answered everything he asked.
She told them what they needed to hear and also what was true, because the best cover was a thinly veiled truth. She spoke about the mobilization waves. Her brothers in the second. Her sons in the third, Wu Jun, Wu Chen, Wu Bao, in the order they left her. The ridge path. She said she wanted to learn to fight and watched Liang return her gaze without flinching.
He documented her that night. Luan cousin, Chenjia intake, two months prior. By morning the records said she had always been here.
She told him she would be at Duan's session first.
She was there before the fifth notch.
Every morning before Duan arrived she ran the footwork drills from the day before.
That first evening, Suyin taught her the first three stances on the training ground and she ran them until the light was gone. Suyin counted each one in the same even voice she used for everything, and Pei Yan thought: this woman was here when it happened. She ran the stances until she could not see the markings anymore.
Gao Ren corrected her footwork one evening.
He appeared while she was running the drills alone in the dusk. He paused, then walked over without asking and said: Your base. He adjusted the angle of her back foot, demonstrated three steps with his limp and his steadiness, and went back to the forge without ceremony.
She ran it again. She ran it until the light was gone and he stood at the edge of the ground offering a correction when she needed one, which from Gao Ren was the nearest thing to praise she had seen him give.
She liked him immediately and kept moving.
She then used his name one week later.
At the garrison administrative room she gave a false name and said she was verifying a supply contract for the smith Gao Ren. The soldier at the desk did not question this. She read the casualty list from the Hekou engagement standing at the desk with the paper in both hands, and when she found the names her chest went cold and the breath left her.
Wu Jun. Wu Chen.
Killed in engagement. No effects recovered. No bodies returned.
She stood there, offered the kind garrison records worker a smile, then handed the record back and walked out into the winter air.
The second evening Suyin corrected her grip on the polearm, a single touch on her shoulder to adjust the angle.
She trained every morning. She watched the cultivation sessions from the perimeter without being invited in. She watched the cohort in zone three and saw the faces of young men learning to fight. In turn, it made her think about those who, much like her brothers and sons, hadn't been given a choice.
She walked the compound ground every day and looked at the south gate.
Had her sons died near the gate? In the open ground where the zone markings now sat? Had it been fast?
She had made the decision before she arrived not to imagine the how. She would not build the scene because once she built it she would have to live in it.
What she could not stop was the moment after. Whether anyone had stopped, whether anyone had said anything, whether the fighting was too loud and too fast for anyone to pause for two young men from the eastern settlements who had been conscripted three weeks before and never asked for any of it. Whether her sons had called out for her in their last moments, or whether death had come too fast or too slow.
A kind death was dying old. It was dying in a bed you had slept in surrounded by family, with your children and your children's children sitting by you.
Her sons had not been granted that kind of death.
But in the midst of her fury and grief, it was the girl who nearly stopped her plot.
Gao Shu found her at the forge one afternoon when she was helping Gao Ren shift iron stock. Ten years old, talking without stopping, fully absorbed in whatever she was saying. She told Pei Yan about the academy and the cultivation work and about how she was learning to see the pathways in other people. She formed a sign with her small hands, two fingers curved, thumb extended, and looked at Pei Yan.
"I can almost see them," Gao Shu said. "Instructor Wei Suyin says it takes practice but I can feel them when I concentrate."
Pei Yan looked at the girl's hands.
Wu Bao had been ten when she taught him how to read crop rotation records. He held the paper with a seriousness too large for a child's body, the same way Gao Shu held the sign.
She excused herself and walked to the south wall and stood there until the feeling passed.
The rest of the clan arrived in pieces over the following weeks.
She watched Pei Liang receive them at the gate, document them, and fold them into the compound's operations. She watched the Luan Clan treat them like family and the village extend the same warmth it had extended to her.
The four soldiers from Qinghe came in disguised within the second group, led to the gate by Shan Pei's white cat that had apparently guided the family group through the southern roads. Nobody questioned them. The clan's numbers had been stripped so far in the years of mobilization that nobody knew which cousins still existed or where they had come from.
The eldest soldier was the one she took her tea with.
They had agreed upon the protocol before their departure, when the Lord's soldiers had first been sent to her settlement to plan the operation. Tea at the commons hearth, two afternoons a week, with whichever cousin was least watched.
If all was well she took one sip before she spoke.
If something was wrong, she took two, and the "cousin" knew to look into it and to say "how refreshing!" so that she would know he had understood.
After that, if she placed her cup down with the handle turned inward instead of outward, the preparation moved forward that night without another word spoken.
The first time she drank tea with the eldest, she took one sip.
She asked him how the Luan women had received him. He said they had been kind. He said the bread at the evening meal had been better than what he had eaten on the ridge road. She asked after the two cousins who had come in with him. He said they were settling. They spoke for a quarter notch. She left her cup half-full on the hearth stone with the handle turned outward, and she went to the training ground, and she ran the drills until the light was gone.
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She drank tea with him two afternoons a week after that.
On the third week she began to feel it, a shadow on the wall, eyes that laid on her and stalked her every move. She watched what she did more carefully and changed nothing else of her habits.
The following afternoon she sat with the eldest at the commons hearth and she lifted the cup to her mouth and she took two sips before she spoke.
The eldest did not move his face. He lifted his own cup. He drank from it and set it down and looked at the fire at the hearth.
"How refreshing," he said quietly.
She asked him about the bread.
He said the bread was the same. He said a cousin from the far settlement had brought a jar of salted plums, and he thought she would like them, and he would bring her one on the next afternoon. They spoke about plums for a quarter notch. She left her cup half-full on the hearth stone with the handle turned outward, and she went to the training ground, and she ran the drills until the light was gone.
She did not turn the handle inward yet.
She had a shadow. She wanted to know who the shadow was before she committed.
The second shadow she caught on the fifth week. The face from the garrison records desk, the soldier who had handed her the casualty list without question, now appearing near her during drills which made her wonder why had a garrison soldier strayed so far from his post.
The operation had escalated, and with that, she needed to make her move as soon as possible.
She went to the commons hearth that afternoon.
The eldest soldier was already there. He had the two cups out on the hearth stone. He had the iron kettle on the coals. He looked up when she sat down, and she sat across from him with her knees tucked under the bench and her hands folded in her lap, and she watched him pour the tea.
She took two sips before she spoke.
His cup did not pause on its way up.
"How refreshing," he said.
She asked him about the salted plums.
He said the cousin from the far settlement had left, but she had been kind enough to leave the jar, and there was enough for a handful more afternoons. She asked after the calmest cousin. He said the calmest cousin was sleeping well. She asked after the broken-finger cousin. He said the broken-finger cousin had been helping Luan Feng with the administrative records and had a feel for the figures. They spoke about figures for another quarter notch.
She finished her tea.
She set the cup down on the hearth stone.
She turned the handle inward before she stood.
She did not look at him as she turned the handle. Her hand did not linger. The turn was the smallest motion she had made since she had arrived at Hekou, and it was the one that started the fire.
The eldest did not look at the cup. He did not need to. He had been watching her hands without appearing to watch them from the moment she had sat down, because that was what the eldest did, and the turn registered in his peripheral vision the way a fox registers a shift in the grass.
She walked to the training ground and she ran the drills until the light was gone.
The first fire caught an hour before dawn.
It was the garrison storage, set by the broken-finger soldier working alone in the dark with the pitch rags and the striking stone and the two hidden bundles of kindling he had pressed against the dry timber of the south wall of the building two nights earlier. The storage building had been sealed the previous autumn with fresh pitch on the roof, and the pitch on the roof was what turned a small ignition into a wall of orange inside of three breaths. The timber drew the fire up. The draft through the eaves pulled it sideways. By the time the first voice from the garrison quarters called out that the storage was burning, the fire had already found the ceiling beams.
The watcher on shift that hour was the garrison records soldier, the second shadow, the one Pei Yan had caught on the fifth week.
He was walking the eastern arc of the perimeter when the flames found the roof of the garrison storage. He stopped on the path. He watched the orange climb the wall of the building he had been posted near every afternoon for two weeks, and he understood the fire was wrong, and he understood at the same moment that the fire was the wrong shape for an accident in a compound he knew the layout of as well as he knew his own hand. He turned on his heel.
He began running toward the curriculum room where Pei Liang slept.
He had two things to report. The first was the fire. The second was that he had felt something wrong about the Pei woman for the last four days, a quality of stillness in her evening drills that had nothing to do with a tired cousin and everything to do with someone waiting for a signal, and he had meant to report it to Pei Liang that morning at the first notch, and now he would not have the luxury of waiting until the first notch, he would report both at once and let the founder decide what to do about the woman.
He did not reach the curriculum room.
The eldest soldier had tracked the watchers' rotations over the two weeks since Pei Yan had turned the cup handle inward, and he had known, the moment the orange climbed the wall of the garrison storage, exactly where on the path this watcher would be and exactly which route he would take toward the curriculum room. The eldest had positioned himself at the blind corner behind the grain depot where the path bent around the storage shed and the eaves hung low enough to block the sightline from the north wall. The watcher came through the corner at a run. He was not expecting a cousin at that corner. He was not expecting anything at that corner. By the time he understood the cousin was not a cousin, the eldest had his hand across the man's mouth and his blade under the man's jaw, and the watcher made one sound, short and wet, and then no sound at all.
The eldest lowered him to the ground behind the storage shed. He wiped the blade on the watcher's cloak. He pulled the cloak over the body. He turned and moved toward the grain depot, because the grain depot was the fire that mattered, and the grain depot was his by the division of work, and the second fire had to catch before the compound finished rousing around the first.
Pei Yan did not see any of it.
She was already at the floorboard.
She had lifted it in the dark when the first voice from the garrison quarters called out about the storage, which was the signal the four soldiers had agreed upon three weeks earlier. The four spears came out of the space beneath the boards in the order she had laid them. She drew her short sword, eastern steel, the blade she had carried out of the settlement strapped against her back under the bundle and never shown to anyone. She held it at her side and breathed until her hands were steady.
She had learned the four soldiers over the weeks without needing their names. The eldest was compact and he moved without waste. The second had a broken left index finger that had healed crooked and gripped the spear shaft higher than most to compensate for it. The third was young enough to have been Wu Bao's age, and she had spent weeks not looking at his face directly. The fourth was the calmest of them and she trusted him the most.
They moved through the compound without sound, without light, using the routes she had memorized over time of walking the same paths.
The watch had changed a moment ago, and the storage fire was climbing the eastern sky, and the compound was rousing toward the orange and away from the dormitory and the clinic. Now was the perfect time to strike.
They entered the Wei compound first.
The eastern dormitory door opened without resistance. The room was dark without a torchlight, and one of the Wei brothers, Wei Kang, slept at the near end, while his younger brother Wei Lun at slept at the far end.
Pei Yan drew in a breath and hardened her heart.
Kang had corrected her grip on the polearm during their third session and thanked her when she returned the correction the following week.
Lun had shared his evening rice with her without her asking him to. He was thoughtful and prideful, there was also a sense that he begrudgingly approved of Suyin's infatuation with the younger Pei brother...
She stepped aside and two of the soldiers went through.
The two soldiers went through the door and she stood in the frame and listened. The sound of spear shafts moving, the wet sound of blades finding flesh, a sharp exhale from Kang that cut off before it became a word, a heavier sound from Lun that was shorter. She breathed through her nose and kept her eyes on the compound outside.
When the soldiers came back out she turned and kept moving towards the clinic.
Liu Jun looked up when it opened.
"What's..."
The soldiers came through the door and the spears took him in the chest and throat. He went down the wall with blood splattered against the wall and his body knocked the oil lamp sideways on his way down. The cloth spread for the morning's dressings caught and the flame found the wall, setting it ablaze.
She pulled the door shut.
Through the wood she could hear the fire finding the roof timbers.
She kept walking.
The garrison storage was fully alight by the time they reached the militia ground. The eldest had set the grain depot after dragging the watcher's body behind the storage shed, and the grain depot had caught fast, the dry timber going up hard and the grain sacks inside becoming fuel once the flames found the lower row. Orange light poured from both ends of the compound now, climbing the walls of both buildings and pouring into the yard, casting long shadows across the training ground.
Duan was at the weapon rack.
He was crouched over the lower row checking the inventory, already moving before they had crossed half the yard. She had underestimated how fast he would be. He came up out of the crouch and had the polearm off the rack before any of them reached him.
He put the eldest soldier down with a clean strike across the knee, the crack of it audible across the yard, and the man yelped and went down hard and did not get back up. Duan held the second soldier at range with the polearm shaft and was already tracking the third when the third came in lower than the angle required and drove the spear through his back from the left.
Duan lurched forward and caught himself on the weapon rack with one hand while he still held the polearm in the other.
Gao Ren appeared in the forge doorway with one lamp in hand and a hammer in the other. His eyes moved across the yard to see Duan on the rack, the soldiers and Pei Yan surrounding him, and he had a hard time making sense of it all, but his face hardened and his grip on his hammer tightened.
Duan turned his head. His voice came out rough, stripped of volume but not of clarity.
"Gao Ren. Run."
Gao Ren did not listen, he took one step forward and engaged another soldier, attempting to drive him back with his hammer.
Pei Yan came in from his blind side and drove the short sword into Gao Ren's back.
He fell forward onto his knees, and then his face. The hammer fell from his hand and rang against the packed earth.
She stood over him as the blood dripped from her blade.
"Forgive me," Pei Yan said.
Zhao Ping was crossing the training ground.
She did not know where he had come from. He had no reason to be out at this hour but he was there, already moving fast, already decided something was wrong before he saw them. He had his sword half-drawn when he saw her face in the firelight and his eyes went to the bodies on the ground.
"Pei Yan." He said her name quietly, and his expression of disbelief was clear to her to see.
The sword came the rest of the way out.
She had two soldiers on their feet. The eldest was down with a broken knee meanwhile the third had Duan's blood on his spear.
They flanked wide, one to each side, and Zhao Ping read it and moved to cover the angle that gave him the wall at his back.
He was a good fighter. He held both soldiers with the sword and kept his feet and the compound wall behind him, and she circled to the left because she needed to come from the side he had learned to trust, and she watched him track the closer soldier and the farther soldier.
She timed it just right for when he was preoccupied with engaging one of the soldiers. One of the spears took him in the knee while his base was exposed. He grunted and dropped his spear onto the ground, and Pei Yan finished the job with a slash against the back of his neck, cutting it deep enough for blood to ooze from his wound as he fell onto the ground in a heap.
She stepped back and suddenly heard a scream.
It was Gao Shu.
She stood in the forge doorway and stared down at her father's bloodied body. The sound came out of her at a pitch that reached every corner of the compound and kept going, and after that nothing was quiet anymore.
Lights everywhere. Voices. People stumbling out of buildings not yet understanding what was burning or what was screaming.
Luan cousins were present at the eastern gate.
Zhao Jun, who was Zhao Ping's son, was yelling and calling for water to put out the fire.
The Pei children from the east dormitory, Hao's children among them, crying in the dark while the light of the fire was painting their faces orange.
The cat came off the south wall.
Pei Yan had seen the animal on the training ground a hundred times. It was small and white, and always perched on Shan Pei's shoulders. She had never thought much of it.
The animal crossed the training ground in a span of heartbeats, low to the ground, moving without sound, and its eyes in the firelight were bloodshot red. Pei Yan brought her sword up and stood her ground because her legs refused to do anything else, and she was still standing when the animal's fangs stopped a couple feet away from her and held.
"Shu Shu, heel!"
That was Shan Pei's voice. The animal did not move nor blink after the command was given.
He walked between them and turned to face the beast.
"She is more valuable alive," he said.
The compound was full of fire and sound. The clinic burning hard, the grain depot collapsing inward on itself, the garrison storage sending sparks up into the dark. Two of her soldiers were down in the yard, put there by Duan before he fell. The other two she could not see.
Hao's voice somewhere in the dark, moving fast. Suyin from the direction of the burning clinic with her polearm in hand, and Luan Mei began shouting for her cousins by name.
Gao Shu was on the ground sobbing over her father's body still, and Shan Pei's face turned pale at the sight of it.
Pei Liang appeared at the edge of the training ground.
Then Hao.
Then Suyin.
Then the others, one by one, until the circle was closed and Pei Yan stood in the center of it.
She swung the short sword at Pei Hao but he caught it and yanked it from her grasp.
She drove her elbow back at Suyin behind her, but Suyin sidestepped it.
She tried to break left toward the south gate and Shan Pei closed the gap before she had taken three steps and pushed her back into the center of the circle.
Pei Yan stared into their eyes, each one of their cold hard eyes, and she thought that, this was it, this was how her sons died. They were alone and afraid surrounded by enemies.
Pei Yan let out a blood-curdling battle cry, and she charged directly at Pei Liang because he was the face she had come here for, his father's jaw, his father's shoulders, the man who had built the school on the ground where her sons died.
His fist caught her in the stomach and all the air left her body all at once. The dark came in from the edges and she went down on her knees.
She could not breathe, nor could she see clearly. The fire was everywhere and the voices were everywhere and she was flat on the ground where she imagined where Wu Jun and Wu Chen had fallen. As her vision faded, she pressed her hands onto the cold hard earth.
She thought: let me see them on the other side.
She thought: Wu Bao, you come home.
The dark closed over her.
Pei Liang — Founder, River Fork Academy — Alive
Pei Hao — Senior cultivator, militia commander — Alive
Wei Suyin — Head of clinic, zone instructor — Alive
Wei Bolin — Zone instructor — Alive
Duan — Militia trainer — Deceased
Gao Ren — Forge master — Deceased
Gao Shu — Forge master's daughter — Alive
Luan Mei — Head of household operations — Alive
Shan Pei — Militia, cultivator — Alive
Liu Jun — Clinic staff — Deceased
Luan Feng — Administrative records — Alive
Wei Kang — Militia, Wei brother — Deceased
Wei Lun — Militia, Wei brother — Deceased
Zhao Lin — Zone assistant instructor, Zhao Ping's son — Alive
Zhao Ping — Militia, field coordinator — Deceased
Zhao Jun — Militia, field assistant, Zhao Ping's son — Alive