Chapter 859 — Twenty-Eighth

CHAPTER 859

Twenty-Eighth

A man at the noodle house shouted for everyone to look at the new issue. Shi Feng had reached twenty-eighth.

The noodle house on Willow Ford’s corner was full at noon, and the shouting man held the Tianji Mansion’s new issue high so the back tables could see it. Steam from the pots hung under the low roof. Nobody was eating.

Shi Feng sat at the back table with Ji Yuanhe and a bowl of beef noodles. He was chewing carefully on the right side of his mouth.

“Who’s Shi Feng? I’ve never heard of him,” a porter said.

“You have. You just don’t know it,” the man with the issue said. “He’s the princess’s alchemist!”

“The princess’s alchemist? The cook from the contest?”

“He beat Jiang Shen in the Jiang family’s own array. My cousin’s wife’s brother serves in the Jiang kitchens. He saw it from the scullery!”

“Wait. Is that the one who brought the bandits into his own tribulation?”

“Six skies on Thunder-Gazing Ridge. Same man!”

“Then he’s the one who folded Qu Ming’s fire into the fountain…”

“Thirty-eighth last issue. Twenty-eighth this one. Who climbs ten places in one issue?”

“Someone who isn’t trying to climb,” an old man by the door said, and slurped his soup.

Nobody had an answer for that. For a moment the whole room argued about whether he was tall or short, and whether he was handsome, and whether it was true that he ate scorched herbs for breakfast. Not one person looked at the young man at the back table with a swollen jaw.

At the counter, Madam Liu Su sat with her odds-book open beside a cup of wine. She looked up, found the back table, and raised her cup half an inch. Then she turned to the room without a word about it.

“Listen, all of you,” Madam Liu Su called. “I’m opening a new book. Does this Shi Feng reach twentieth by spring? Three to one against. Silver only, no promises.”

Half the room crowded toward the counter at once, waving coins.

Ji Yuanhe leaned across the table.

“The rope tightens,” Ji Yuanhe said, very quietly.

Shi Feng finished his noodles.

He put four coppers on the table, one more than the bowl cost, because the noodle seller had given him extra broth without asking. Then he stood up and walked out through the middle of the arguing crowd. A porter stepped back to let him pass and went straight on telling the man beside him that Shi Feng was at least eight feet tall.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” Ji Yuanhe asked, catching up in the lane outside.

“Not yet,” Shi Feng said. “It will when they start knocking on the courtyard gate. Until then it’s only noise. Let them have it.”

“And when they start knocking?” Ji Yuanhe asked. He was still worried, though the crowd had fallen behind them.

“Then I’ll start charging them for the knock,” Shi Feng said, lightening his tone for the old man. “A silver each. Liu Su will want a share, so maybe two.”

Ji Yuanhe sighed and followed him down the lane.

On the balcony of the Phoenix Tail Pavilion, Long Caili had the same issue open on the rail in front of her. The lake wind pressed her veil against her brow.

She’d read the twenty-eighth line once. She didn’t need to read it again. She turned the page anyway and read the trade notices.

“Twenty-eighth,” Shen Yaoqing said from the other end of the rail. She wasn’t looking at the issue. She was looking down at the lake. “Above Jiang Shen.”

“He’ll pass the next one too, if somebody makes him fight,” Long Caili said. “He never seems to go looking for it. It just keeps arriving.”

“Snow falls on a lone pine,” Shen Yaoqing said.

Long Caili turned a page.

“My kitchen tells me,” Long Caili said, “that a Serene Jade servant borrowed a three-tiered lacquer box the other morning. And a jar of the burn salve we keep for the furnace room.”

“Master was hungry,” Shen Yaoqing said.

“Master doesn’t eat lotus-seed congee,” Long Caili said. “She told me so herself, at dinner, ten years ago.”

Shen Yaoqing didn’t answer. A thin colour came up along the edge of her ear and stayed there.

For a while, neither of them spoke. A boat crossed the lake below, and the boatman sang something off-key.

“Master is well enough to travel in a month,” Shen Yaoqing said at last. “The sect has written. I’m taking her north soon.”

“North,” Long Caili repeated.

“Home,” Shen Yaoqing said. “Where else?”

Long Caili folded the issue closed and set it on the rail.

“Before or after he sits a Mark?” Long Caili asked.

Shen Yaoqing’s hands, folded on the rail, went very still.

“…Whenever,” Shen Yaoqing said.

Long Caili looked at her friend for a long moment, amused by the answer. She looked back at the issue before Shen Yaoqing could notice her smile.

“Then it’ll be after,” Long Caili said. “He’s going to the Sky Pavilion in the morning.”