Chapter 828 — The Tally

CHAPTER 828

The Tally

“The banner of the Third Prince,” the Tianji scribe called out. “Eleven thousand, four hundred and six.”

The scale was a bronze beam ten feet long, hung in front of the Tally Pavilion’s stand. Beast cores lay piled in its pan, from Ironbark Boar cores the size of walnuts to python cores the size of melons. The scribe read the weight off the beam, his assistant wrote it on the board, and the crowd outside the wall roared.

Twelve banners had come out of the preserve. Four had been carried. The princess’s banner stood in front of the stand last, all four of them, and only one stood without help.

That one was Hou Tieshou, swaying on his bitten legs.

“The banner of Princess Long Caili,” the scribe called. “To the scale.”

Hou Tieshou stepped up with his arm strapped to his chest and tipped their sack out with his good hand. The cores rolled into the pan. The beam dipped, hesitated, and kept dipping.

The stand went quiet.

The scribe leaned close to the beam and looked at it for a long time.

“Eleven thousand, four hundred and fifty-one,” the Tianji scribe said.

For a moment nobody understood.

“First! The princess’s banner is first!”

“By forty-five! What’s forty-five?”

“That’s one python core! One Mist Python core!”

“…”

Grand Warden Long Hengjie rose at the end of the stand.

“The Imperial Hunt is closed,” Long Hengjie said. “First, the banner of Princess Long Caili. Second, the banner of the Third Prince. The winning banner’s lord takes the first pick of the Inner Treasury’s first tier, and the first word at the next court audience.”

He looked down at the Third Prince’s hunters by the scale. “Victory and defeat are common matters for a soldier,” Long Hengjie added.

Hou Tieshou turned to Shi Feng with his eyes shining.

“Brother Shi,” Hou Tieshou said hoarsely. “One python. One. If you’d eaten that one too—”

“Then I’d have been sick, and we’d have been second,” Shi Feng said. “That’s why I didn’t.”

They were called up onto the stand.

Long Caili sat where she’d sat for seven days, in pale grey silk and her gauze veil, with a cup of tea someone had just refilled. Shen Yaoqing sat beside her and watched Shi Feng climb. Her eyes went to the blood dried on his left side, then to his face.

Four seats down, the Third Prince didn’t turn his head.

He was tall and narrow-faced. He wore black, with a silver collar. He’d watched the Hunt the way a man watches rain.

“Congratulations, sister,” the Third Prince said. “Your guest bleeds on the Emperor’s grass.”

“He bleeds,” Long Caili said, without looking at him either. “He doesn’t stay down. I hired him for the second part.”

The Third Prince said nothing more. Nobody on the stand laughed.

A hunter had been poisoned at his inn the night before the Hunt. Bandits had come over the array wall into an Imperial preserve, cut down a Tang banner in a riverbed, and attacked the princess’s banner three times. Every warden’s slate on the stand said so.

Long Hengjie unrolled the first tier and read it out, entry by entry, because a prize read in silence could be disputed later.

Long Caili took the list from him, read it once from top to bottom, and pointed. The Third Prince listened with his chin on his knuckles.

“Which line, sister?” the Third Prince said.

Long Caili didn’t answer him. She turned the roll and pointed at the same line again. Her steward copied the line onto the entry sheet and folded it under her seal, in the half of the record her brother’s people couldn’t read.

Long Hengjie bowed and wrote it on the open page.

She turned to her four hunters.

“Clause eleven,” Long Caili said. “The banner’s prize is shared among the hunters at the Treasury’s valuation, paid in cash, within the day.”

She held out her hand. Her steward put four envelopes into it.

“One million, five hundred thousand each,” Long Caili said.

Hou Tieshou made a strangled noise.

“One... one point five...” Yue Shaoan stammered. “Your Highness, I only smelled things!”

“You smelled them correctly,” Long Caili said. “That’s the job.”

Jiao Lanyin took hers with her good hand, bowed exactly as low as courtesy required, and said nothing at all.

Long Caili gave Shi Feng his last.

“Count it,” Long Caili said.

“I trust Your Highness,” Shi Feng said.

“I didn’t ask whether you trust me. I told you to count it,” Long Caili said evenly.

Shi Feng opened the envelope and counted the notes on the stand, in front of the Third Prince, the Grand Warden and the Pavilion. It came to exactly one million, five hundred thousand.

“Correct,” Shi Feng said.

“Of course it is,” Long Caili said, and sat down.

[Cash: about 11.5M | Note: Hunt banner share, 1,500,000]

At the Antler Gate that evening, the paper-sellers were crying the Tianji Mansion’s newest issue. Hou Tieshou bought one with his own copper, opened it on his knee, and ran his thick finger down the list of the Hundred Famed Tianxing.

“Brother Shi!” Hou Tieshou shouted. “Forty-fourth! You’re forty-fourth! You were sixty-something before the Hunt!”

Two hunters from the Gu banner walked past, sleeves mud-stained from the preserve. They didn’t look at Shi Feng.

“Forty-fourth? Who’s that?” one of them asked.

“Some Shi. Nobody reads that far down,” the other said.

They walked on.

“I read that far down!” Hou Tieshou shouted after them.

“Good,” Shi Feng said. “Then one man’s read it. That’s enough.”

He’d already turned from the gate. Long Caili’s carriage stood at the end of the road, and Ji Yuanhe was in the city, behind her walls, waiting without knowing what for.

Shi Feng walked up to the carriage window.

“Your Highness,” Shi Feng said. “I need a room tonight with no windows, no Pavilion witness, and a door nobody opens until I do.”

Long Caili looked at him through the window. Her eyes went to the dried blood on his side, and stayed there.

“The sealed room under the east hall,” Long Caili said. “It’s been ready since the third day.”