Chapter 818 — The Token

CHAPTER 818

The Token

“You don’t have to yield,” Shi Feng said politely. “Nobody’s asking you to.”

Qu Ming’s glowing hands didn’t lower. Behind him, the bronze of the sixth Mirror showed his back, his smoking hem and the burnt stump at his side.

“Then what do you want?” Qu Ming demanded.

“I want to get to the Old Crater before the gate opens at dusk,” Shi Feng said. “You’re in my road again. So here’s how it is. You have two ways out of the Burnt Pines, and one of them is a token.”

Qu Ming laughed. It came out too high.

“You can’t touch me,” Qu Ming said. He said it loudly, for the Mirror. “Kill a hunter and your whole banner’s finished. The princess loses everything. Do you think this young lord doesn’t know the law?”

“You know it very well,” Shi Feng said. “You quoted it to me an hour ago. So you’ll know that the law says kill. It doesn’t say anything about knock down.”

Qu Ming’s laugh stopped.

“First,” Shi Feng said, “you crush your token, and the wardens come and fetch you, and you walk to the beacon on your own feet. Second, you don’t. Then I put you down in the ash, here, under that Mirror, and you lie there with your face in it until the wardens come looking. Either way you leave the Hunt. Either way the cores stay with us.” He waited a moment. “One of those ways, you’re standing up when the city sees you.”

The wind changed. Smoke rolled across the clearing between them and thinned.

“You wouldn’t dare,” Qu Ming said.

“Young Master Qu,” Shi Feng said. “Have I ever said I’d do something and then not done it?”

Qu Ming didn’t answer that. He moved instead.

Both palms came forward together. The last of his Scorching Sun Flame left them in one white-gold spear of heat, aimed not at Shi Feng’s chest but at the pack on his back, where the cores were.

Shi Feng didn’t step aside. He put out his left hand, struck the Second Anvil Fire once, and swallowed the spear into the count. Then he flicked his fingers and let it go into the ground at Qu Ming’s feet.

The ash there turned to glass.

Qu Ming looked down at it. A little ring of black glass had formed around his boots, still smoking.

His hands had stopped glowing. There was nothing left in them.

For a long moment, the only sound in the Burnt Pines was the fire roaring away into the distance.

Then Qu Ming reached into his sleeve and took out his jade token.

His hand was shaking. He looked at the token, at the Mirror, at Shi Feng, and at the four pouches hanging from Hou Tieshou’s belt. Everything the Azure Sun had hunted in five days.

“This isn’t over,” Qu Ming said hoarsely.

“I know,” Shi Feng said. He kept his hand raised until Qu Ming’s fingers closed on the token. “Crush it. We’re leaving with the cores.”

Qu Ming crushed the token.

A pillar of white light shot up out of his fist, straight into the sky above the Burnt Pines, high enough to be seen from every ring of the preserve. In less time than it took to drink a cup of tea, two wardens in Long-family brown came down out of the air on either side of him and landed lightly in the ash.

They bowed to Qu Ming. They bowed to Shi Feng too, exactly as deeply.

“Young Master Qu Ming of the Azure Sun is withdrawn from the Hunt,” the elder warden announced. “The wardens will escort you out. Please come this way.”

Qu Ming didn’t move.

The younger warden took his elbow, gently and very firmly, and the three of them rose into the air together. Qu Ming didn’t look down. The smoke from his hem trailed after him in a thin grey line until the sky swallowed it.

Hou Tieshou let out a long breath.

“He crushed it,” Hou Tieshou said. “In front of the Mirror. The Azure Sun young lord crushed his own token in front of the whole city!”

“He’s out,” Shi Feng said, watching the wardens rise beyond the smoke. “Check everyone’s packs. We’ve still got a gate to reach.”

In the Tally Pavilion, nobody on the stand spoke for some time.

The sixth Mirror hung on the far wall, as tall as two men. It showed the burnt clearing, the glass ring in the ash, and the princess’s banner walking north out of the frame with an extra four pouches. The Azure Sun’s empty seat sat at the end of the row.

Shen Yaoqing sat at Long Caili’s right hand with her cup in front of her. She’d watched the whole thing without moving.

“…” Shen Yaoqing said.

She watched the empty road for a long time after the banner had gone. Then she turned her head.

“Will the Azure Sun forgive this?” Shen Yaoqing asked quietly.

Long Caili drank beneath her veil without lifting it. Through the gauze, her eyes showed nothing.

“No,” Long Caili said. “But I saw who lit the fire and who offered to let the other banner leave. The Azure Sun can’t turn that around while the Mirror’s record is here.”

Shen Yaoqing looked at her friend for a long moment. Then she looked back at the Mirror.

“Qu Hanshan will hear of it by tonight,” Shen Yaoqing said.

“Qu Hanshan will hear of it within the hour,” Long Caili said. “His grandson is being carried out over the Antler Gate in front of ten thousand people. Old men always hear about their grandsons first.” She set the cup down, exactly in its ring on the table. “Let him hear. My hunter followed the law. The Mirror says so. If the Azure Sun wants a grudge, it can carry one with my name on it.”

“Your name,” Shen Yaoqing said. “Or his?”

Long Caili didn’t answer that.

She looked instead at the eighth Mirror, high on the right side of the wall. It showed a long causeway of black stones running across black marsh water toward the shut gate of the Old Crater. Halfway along it, alone, a monk in yellow robes sat cross-legged on the stones with his eyes closed.

He’d been sitting there since yesterday. In all that time, not one banner had got past him.