Chapter 924 — The Price of Snow Lotus

CHAPTER 924

The Price of Snow Lotus

The Pavilion courier reached Iron Glacier Hold on the sixth day, with frost in his eyebrows and a letter sealed in plain wax.

“Elder Shi,” the courier said, and bowed to the ground in the snow. “From Her Highness, by way of the Frost Pass tower. I’m to wait for your answer.”

Shi Feng broke the seal on the steps of the guest court. It was the same small, straight hand as the letter at Hanli, and it was just as short.

The inquiry sits. Ruan Heng’s report has been read at court.

Hao Dafu was found and heard. He shouted for an hour. The Censorate wrote all of it down.

My pavilions have signed his train to a three-year salt contract. The pavilions needed salt.

Snow lotus north of Frost Pass is nine hundred a stalk. Anyone who asks more than that is cheating you.

There was no signature.

Shi Feng read it twice. Then he read the third line again.

The Censorate had found Hao Dafu, and the man who’d found him could take away his salt licence any time he liked, just to make him say something different. Now the train was under contract to the princess’s pavilions for three years. Anyone who touched Hao Dafu’s licence would be breaking a contract with Long Caili herself, under Long law. Nobody at court would try it over a salt master.

Shi Feng smiled despite himself. Long Caili had protected Hao Dafu without giving the court a reason to object. She’d even remembered to warn him about herb prices.

He went inside and borrowed a brush from the Hold’s steward.

Received: one letter, from Her Highness.

Hao Dafu: under contract. Thank you.

Snow lotus: nine hundred a stalk. Noted.

Account: still open.

He sealed it and gave it to the courier with silver for the horses. The letter itself he folded small and put away in his ring, next to the one from Hanli.

Helian Ba was waiting in the yard with three horses.

“I’ll walk you to the pass,” Helian Ba said, and swung up. “Uncle’s orders. And mine.”

They rode east for two days through white country, with Qin Wuyan on the third horse behind them, saying nothing at all. On the second evening the land rose ahead into a long saddle of snow between two black peaks. A road ran up it in switchbacks, marked every hundred paces by a pole with a red rag.

“Snow Wolf Pass,” Helian Ba said, and pointed with his axe. “Only way into the Serene Jade lands in winter. Past the top it’s all downhill to the lotus stones.”

At the foot of the pass stood a camp of thirty wagons drawn up in a ring, with fires burning between them and a grey Pavilion banner on the tallest. Eighty people were busy around it: drivers, guards, cooks, two herb clerks with ledgers. A middle-aged man in a grey robe came running out of the ring before the horses had stopped. He had a round face red from the cold and a clerk’s brush still behind his ear.

“Elder Shi! Senior Qin!” Lü Wancheng said, and bowed so deeply his hat fell off. “This one is Lü Wancheng, steward of the Pavilion’s northern herb caravan. The Frost Pass tower sent word you’d come this way. We’ve waited two days. We’d have waited ten!”

Every driver and guard behind him bowed as well, eighty of them at once.

“Steward Lü,” Shi Feng said, and got down from the horse. “You didn’t have to wait.”

“Didn’t have to?” Lü Wancheng asked, picking up his hat. “Thirty wagons of Pavilion herbs, Elder Shi, going over that saddle in winter! And the Pavilion’s most important alchemist on the same road! A careful boat sails ten thousand years. Of course we waited.”

Helian Ba stayed for supper at the caravan’s fire. When he left, he gave Shi Feng a short nod across the flames.

“Show the guest token at any Helian fire,” Helian Ba said, getting up. “They’ll feed you. And if anyone gives you trouble, tell them you put Zhan on his knee. They’ll feed you twice.”

“I’ll tell them I was lucky,” Shi Feng said.

“Then they’ll know you’re lying,” Helian Ba said, and laughed, and rode back west into the dark.

The caravan bedded down. Shi Feng took a blanket to the outer ring of wagons, where the guards kept watch, and sat with his back to a wheel. Qin Wuyan sat beside him on a herb crate, with his hands in his sleeves.

Near midnight the wolves started.

The howl came down from the saddle, long and thin, and another answered it from the left. Then a third. The guards on watch looked at each other and laughed, a little nervously.

“Snow wolves,” one guard said. “They always sing up there. They won’t come near the fires.”

Shi Feng listened.

One howl. A pause. Two together. A pause. One. The same count came again, then again, exactly the same each time. Wolves howled when they felt like it. They didn’t keep time. Something on the saddle was keeping time, and it wanted everyone below to think it was wolves.

He glanced at Qin Wuyan. The old man had turned his head and was looking up at the snowfields. He looked at them for a long while.

“Buried,” Qin Wuyan said.