Chapter 1026 — The Hawthorn

CHAPTER 1026

The Hawthorn

Shi Feng picked the stick up off the ice.

The sugar had frozen hard. The fruit was fresh, bought that morning or the day before, and the stick was cut clean at both ends. It had been set down with care, not dropped. A man had stood here through three skies with this in his folded hands, and when the last bolt went up, he’d bent and laid it on the ice and gone.

Shi Feng felt cold anger as he held the stick. The Fifteenth hadn’t forgotten the abduction. He wanted Shi Feng to remember it too.

The wind came across the lake and moved the reeds. Behind him, the Helian warriors and the patrol disciples came round the shore at a jog, and slowed when they saw his face, and stopped some way off. Helian Ba came last, carrying the boy on his back.

“Brother Shi?” Helian Ba asked, much more quietly than usual. “What is it? Is it poisoned?”

“No,” Shi Feng said.

“Then what is it?” Helian Ba asked.

Shi Feng turned the stick once in his fingers.

“A man took me out of an alley in Luoxia,” Shi Feng said. “A long time ago, in the south. There was a girl buying these at the end of the alley. I looked at her, and then I was somewhere else.”

He didn’t say anything more than that.

Nobody asked. Helian Ba opened his mouth, looked at the stick, and shut it again. The patrol disciples looked at the ice. Shen Yaoqing stood a little apart with her hand off her sword now, and her face showed nothing at all.

Qin Wuyan came along the reeds last. He stopped beside Shi Feng and looked at the hawthorn, and then at the place on the ice where the man had stood.

“The Fifteenth,” Qin Wuyan said. “He waited for you to be whole.”

“Whole?” Helian Ba asked. “What does that mean, whole?”

“Peak,” Qin Wuyan said. “Like him.”

Shi Feng wrapped the stick in a strip of clean cloth from his ring and put it in his sleeve, beside the empty jade box.

“He’ll send for me soon,” Shi Feng said, putting the cloth away. “Let’s go home. My leg still needs stitching.”

They reached Beiling two days later.

The city knew before they arrived. The Helian warriors had ridden ahead, and the Helian warriors couldn’t keep quiet about anything. By the time Shi Feng limped through the north gate, the teahouse on the corner of Salt Street had a storyteller on a stool and a crowd out the door.

“A hundred mirrors!” the storyteller cried, slapping his fan on the table. “A hundred! And every one a door to hell! And what does our alchemist do? He shuts his eyes!”

“Shuts his eyes? In the middle of a fight?”

“And then the sky came down on him, and he ate the lightning!”

“Ate it? You can’t eat lightning!”

“The Helian saw it with their own eyes! Hearing a hundred times isn’t as good as seeing once!”

“…”

Shi Feng walked past the door with his hood up. Nobody looked twice at a limping man in a borrowed coat.

At Northwind House the boy ran ahead of them into the furnace room, and Mei Shuo dropped a whole tray of dried roots on the floor and didn’t pick them up. Mei Shuo was overjoyed and afraid to believe it. He caught the boy by both shoulders and checked his wrists, then every finger.

“You kept counting,” Mei Shuo said, his voice shaking.

“Two thousand and fifty,” the boy said proudly. “Then Master Shi threw me.”

Mei Shuo turned round and bowed to Shi Feng until his head was lower than his waist. The thirteen behind him did the same, all at once, in silence.

“Get up,” Shi Feng said. “All of you. Your rice is getting cold.”

A courier was waiting in the front hall the next morning.

He wore the dark blue of the Long household with a silver badge at his collar, and he’d ridden hard. Mud was dried to his knees. He stood very straight and held out a folded paper with both hands, without a word of greeting.

“Master Shi,” the courier said. “From Her Highness. I’m to wait for nothing.”

Shi Feng unfolded it.

It was a bill, written in a clerk’s neat hand on Northwind House paper. Rice for fourteen alchemists, twenty days. Firewood. Lamp oil. Bedding. Total: one thousand four hundred silver.

Across the bottom, in red, it was stamped paid.

Shi Feng looked at the stamp, then at the courier.

“She’s billing me for rice,” Shi Feng said, “and she’s already paid the bill.”

“Her Highness bills everything,” the courier said stiffly. “Her Highness pays when she chooses. That’s a separate matter.”

Tong Xian lowered her head over the ledger at the counting-room door. She was trying to hide her smile.

“Is that the whole message?” Shi Feng asked.

“There’s one line more,” the courier said. “Her Highness will inspect her house within the week.”

He bowed once, turned on his heel and walked out to his horse.

Shi Feng stood in the front hall with the bill in his hand. He’d killed the Sixteenth Elder, broken through on a frozen lake and been watched by the man who had once taken him out of the world, and all of it had happened in one week. Now he had a week to make a grain house fit for a princess.

“Tong Xian,” Shi Feng said. “How clean is the guest room?”

“It’s been ready since the day you came, Master Shi,” Tong Xian said, and turned a page.