We turned and walked back toward the village. I found I was in no hurry to arrive.

  "Brother Cui, then," she said, testing the words. A faint, residual blush still colored her cheeks, but her voice had found its footing again. "For now. Given that we are traveling companions."

  I laughed, "Brother Cui it is. And in that case, I'll keep to Lady Chen, as before." I gave her a sidelong glance and affected a tone of wounded dignity.

  We walked on, and the silence between us was no longer brittle. Our footsteps fell into a rhythm on the frozen path.

  "Lady Chen," I said, after we had passed the bend where the camphor trees grew thicker. "May I ask you something?"

  "You've been remarkably restrained in your questions, Brother Cui. I was beginning to wonder if you'd lost your curiosity along with your army."

  I deserved that. "Zhang RuLin. Colonel Zhang, the Divine Strategy Army. What is he to you?"

  She was quiet for several steps, long enough that I thought she might deflect.

  "We are zhījǐ," she said at last, her voice carrying that particular weight the word demanded. "He saw me when no one else could. He gave me back my name when the world had taken it from me. He trusted me with his plans, his secrets, his..." She trailed off, her brow furrowing as if confronting a knot she had been working at for some time. "His vision."

  "That is no small thing," I said carefully.

  "No. It is not." She paused again, and this time the silence had an edge to it. "Although I have been questioning it of late."

  I glanced at her, surprised. To question a zhījǐ bond was to question one's own judgment, one's own ability to know another person. It was not a thing said lightly.

  She looked at me.

  "Would you be willing to accept a ridiculous premise?" she asked.

  "It sounds as though this is something important," I said, letting the humor drain from my voice. I held her gaze. "Can you trust me with it?"

  A smile, small but real, graced her lips.

  "I'm convinced I could trust you with just about anything, Brother Cui."

  I opened my mouth, the words already forming—

  "But," she added hastily, one hand rising in a gesture to cut me off, "I'm not quite ready to tell you everything yet."

  She took a breath, the vapor plume rising and vanishing into the grey sky.

  "Zhang RuLin can predict the future." She said it flatly, without embellishment, as one might state that water flows downhill. "I believe he may come from a distant time yet to pass. A future, perhaps a thousand years hence."

  I stared at her. "Well, that would explain a great deal. He certainly fights like a man who's read the ending of the book first." I stroked my chin in mock contemplation. "I suppose a fortune teller with a very good workshop could—"

  I caught the expression that flashed across her face. It was brief, a fraction of a heartbeat, but I knew fury when I saw it.

  I stopped myself. "Forgive me, Lady Chen," I said, and I meant it. "Please, continue. I'm listening."

  She studied me for a moment, weighing whether my contrition was genuine. Whatever she found in my face seemed to satisfy her, because she nodded and went on.

  "He knew the rebellion was coming." Her voice was low, precise. "Not in the way that court officials speak of tensions and possibilities. He knew the month, though he was off by four. He knew the route of advance. He knew that An Lushan's forces would sweep south and that the court's response would be slow, confused, and poorly coordinated."

  I felt the first cold prickle of something that was not amusement travel down my spine.

  "He knew they would send Feng Changqing and Gao XianZhu to hold Luoyang," she continued. "He knew Feng would rely on conscripted levies because the court had allowed the regular garrison to deteriorate. He knew the defensive strategy would fail."

  The prickle became a chill.

  "He predicted that LuoYang and later Chang'an itself would fall," she said.

  "He also told me," she said, and now her voice carried the specific weight of a thing she had turned over in her mind for a long time, "that killing An Lushan would not end the rebellion. That the chaos continued for years afterward."

  "Then why," I said slowly, "are we walking toward Youzhou?"

  "Because I don't believe in fate," she said. "Zhang RuLin sees the future as a river with a fixed course. I think he may be wrong. I think the river can be turned."

  I considered this. The tactician in me, the part that had spent a lifetime reading terrain and calculating odds, was already working the problem.

  "You may be onto something," I said, the thought crystallizing as I spoke. "The Luo River bridges are gone. Your father saw to that. Without those crossings, the main army's supply lines to the west are severed. Moving a force large enough to threaten Chang'an overland, through the mountains and around the river network..." I shook my head, the numbers taking shape in my mind as naturally as breathing. "The logistics would be ruinous. You'd need to rebuild the crossings first, and that takes months. All without control of the far side no less."

  "Perhaps then... millions of lives could be saved," she almost whispered.

  We stood there for a moment, two figures on a frozen mountain path, the village smoke rising in the distance and the snow settling softly on our shoulders.

  I shifted the SanYanChong on my shoulder and started walking again. After a moment, she fell into step beside me.

  "Lady Chen," I said.

  "Brother Cui?"

  "If Colonel Zhang truly knows what is coming, and we are walking into the teeth of it anyway..." I allowed myself a grim, lopsided smile. "Then I suppose we had better have a very good plan."

  "That," she said, and for the first time since her confession, I heard something that sounded almost like confidence, "is what I was hoping you'd say."

  The brick facade of the yaodong came into view around the next bend, its entrance framed by a thin curl of smoke from within. A familiar figure was waiting outside, stamping her feet against the cold and blowing into her cupped hands. Língzhú spotted us and waved, her face brightening.

  Lady Chen touched my arm, slowing our pace just enough to steal a few more moments. "Brother Cui. What do you intend to do with the bandits? After they tell us where their grain stores are?"

  Grain was grain, and a village that had been taxed twice and robbed besides could use every dǒu we could recover. But I didn't have time to answer properly. Língzhú was bounding toward us with the particular enthusiasm of a woman who delighted to see anyone at all.

  I turned to Lady Chen quickly. "Could you teach Deng Yuan to use the SanYanChong? A few hours ought to be enough for the basics, you said so yourself."

  She considered it for barely a moment before giving a sharp nod. "I'll see to it this afternoon."

  Then Língzhú was upon us, her breath pluming in quick, cheerful clouds. "You're back! Good, good." She fell into step beside us, "Jìngxī is almost finished with them. I have to say, they've become considerably more... amicable over the last couple of days." A note of wry amusement crept into her voice.

  "They haven't given you any trouble?" I asked.

  "Trouble?" Língzhú let out a soft laugh. She held the heavy wooden door open for us, and we ducked inside.

  The yaodong was warm and dim, the air thick with the faintly sweet smell of the loess walls and the sharper tang of unwashed men. The bandits sat in a loose row along the curved back wall, their wrists still bound in front of them with hemp rope, though the knots looked more symbolic than secure at this point. A few had the glazed, distant expressions of men whose minds had retreated to some private sanctuary. Others stared at the floor with the fixed intensity of prisoners counting the cracks in the stone.

  At the center of the cave, seated on a low stool with the rigid posture of a lecturing elder, Jìngxī held a yellowed scroll open in her left hand and held up to her face. Her voice filled the space with a measured, unhurried cadence, each character given its full weight and then some, the ancient words of Laozi rendered with the relentless patience of water wearing at stone.

  "...the Dao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Dao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name..."

  She had, at some point, started from the beginning again.

  The gunner, who had wielded the unloaded SanYanChong, was fighting a losing battle with a yawn. His jaw began to stretch, his eyes to water. Jìngxī did not pause her reading. She simply lifted her gaze from the scroll and looked at him.

  The yawn died a strangled death somewhere in the back of his throat. He swallowed it, his spine straightening. Jìngxī's eyes returned to the page without so much as a flicker of acknowledgment, and the reading continued.

  Lady Chen and I exchanged a glance. I pressed my lips together very firmly to contain what wanted to come out.

  Xie Qingyun was seated at the end of the row. He appeared to have achieved a state of transcendence that had less to do with Daoist philosophy and more to do with the sheer, practiced endurance of a man who had survived worse. His one good eye was half-lidded, his expression one of terminal boredom. He did not so much as twitch at Jìngxī's gaze. He had either made his peace with the lectures or had simply ceased to fear death.

  He noticed our entrance before the others did. Without straightening from his slouch against the cave wall, he raised his bound hands in a casual wave, the gesture carrying an air of weary familiarity, as if we were old acquaintances meeting at a teahouse rather than captor and captive.

  Jìngxī read on for a few moments more. Finally, with the deliberate care of a woman closing a chapter she fully intended to reopen, she rolled the scroll shut and tucked it into her sleeve.

  "Well then," she said, turning to address the row of captives "How do we feel?"

  A beat of silence. The bandits looked at one another, calculating the safest possible answer.

  Xie Qingyun spoke first. "Enlightened," he said, his voice flat. Then he turned to me, and with a fluidity that surprised me given his bonds, he brought his fists together in a proper martial salute.

  "And ready to make a deal."

  Língzhú stepped forward, her arms folded. Then let's start with the grain, Brother Xie. Are you willing to tell us where you've stored it?

  Xie Qingyun tilted his head, his one good eye sweeping across his men before settling back on Língzhú. "I could. But I need to know my brothers won't starve come the deep of winter." He lifted his bound hands in a gesture that encompassed the row of captives behind him. "It's not just the grain I took from this village. There's the stores I raided from the county granary as well. Rightfully raided, since Baron Ma wasn't sharing it with anyone."

  "Before you were kicked out by the northern horsemen raiders?"

  A ripple of discomfort passed through the seated bandits. Xie's jaw tightened, and for a moment I thought his pride might get the better of his pragmatism.

  "My little arm can hardly beat a big leg, Shītài. They had horses and numbers. We had a cave and a bluff." He shrugged, the hemp rope pulling taut across his wrists. "But yes. The grain is from the county stores. More than enough to feed this village and my men through winter and into spring, if it's managed properly."

  I stepped forward.

  "Four seats," I said. "Village guard positions, under Lǐzhèng Deng Yuan's authority. You pick the four of your men best suited to the work. They'll be fed, housed, and paid from the village's common fund once we've recovered the grain." I held up four fingers, then folded them into a fist. "In return, they defend QingTian with their lives. No raiding. No extortion. They answer to the Lǐzhèng, and they earn their place like any other man."

  The bandits stirred. I saw the gunner glance at the man beside him, a flicker of hope breaking through the fog of two days' captivity and Daoist scripture. Four men fed and sheltered was no small thing. Xie, however, was counting. His eye moved from me to his men and back.

  "That's four," he said. "I've got eight, counting myself."

  "The remaining four, yourself included, I have a different use for." I crouched down, bringing myself to his eye level. "You know the terrain between here and the county seat. The trails, the passes, which routes the horsemen patrol and which they ignore. I need guides. Supplied with two dou grain from the stores."

  His expression sharpened. "Guides. To the county. And the horsemen."

  "I want to see what we're dealing with. And if the opportunity presents itself, I'd like to see if we can't persuade them to find somewhere else to winter."

  I paused, letting the next words carry their full weight. "You'd have your territory back."

  Xie Qingyun studied me, "And if you can't persuade them? If there are too many, or they're better armed than you expect?"

  I smiled and swept my hand toward the three women beside me.

  "You've seen what they can do," I said simply.

  Xie's gaze lingered on Lady Chen for a long moment. I could see him replaying the fight at the village entrance.

  He let out a long, slow breath through his nose. "It's about the best we're going to get, isn't it?"

  He nodded. Then his eye flicked to the SanYanChong still resting against my shoulder.

  "One more thing," he said, his voice dropping to the casual tone of a man adding a minor afterthought. "The thunder weapon. Leave it with us when you go."

  "No," I said, and I said it without hesitation. "This stays with the Lǐzhèng." I met Xie's eye. "In case anyone has cause to question his authority."

  Xie held my gaze for a long moment, the one-eyed veteran measuring the man before him. A dry, grudging smile cracked his weathered face.

  "Fair enough," he said.

  I reached down and cut the hemp bonds at his wrists with a small knife from my belt. He rubbed the raw, reddened skin where the rope had been, flexing his fingers. Then he extended his right hand, palm up, in the open-handed clasp of a deal.

  I took it. His grip was rough, calloused, and firm. I matched it.

  "You have my word, Brother Xie," I said.

  And you have my grain, Brother Cui. I'll mark it on the Shitai's map."

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