Chapter 948 — Her Business in the North

CHAPTER 948

Her Business in the North

The letter was waiting on the table in Snowpine Court, under a jade paperweight that the outer hall’s stewards had put there so the draught wouldn’t move it.

Shi Feng took off the black sable coat, hung it on the screen and broke the plain wax seal. It was the same small, straight hand as the letter in Hanli.

The inquiry under Long law is being prepared. The Censorate likes that word. It means they haven’t found anything yet.

My elder brother stands with me.

Ji Yuanhe is well. He is counting pills and complaining that the capital’s herbs are wet.

I have bought the empty lot behind the Lianxia pavilion. A furnace room and an herb store. Kang Yi has the deed.

That was all. There was no signature again.

Shi Feng read it twice, the way he’d read the first one. Then he folded it and put it in his sleeve.

“Bad news?” Qin Wuyan asked from the doorway.

“The inquiry’s stalled,” Shi Feng said. “Ji Yuanhe is well. The princess bought the land behind the branch.”

Qin Wuyan nodded and went to check the vents.

The next morning they went down the white stair to Lianxia.

The town looked smaller from the bottom of the stair than it had from the top. Grey roofs, one long market street and a frozen river with sledges parked along the bank. The Caili pavilion stood halfway down the street, its new signboard already dull with frost. Kang Yi was on the step, sweeping snow, and he put down the broom and bowed the moment he saw them.

“Elder Shi,” Kang Yi said. “You’ve had Her Highness’s letter? Then you’ll want to see the lot.”

The lot was behind the pavilion, through a side gate. It was an empty yard about forty paces square, with a broken wall on one side and a dead pear tree in the corner. Snow lay over everything in a smooth white sheet, and nothing had been built on it at all.

Kang Yi walked him round the edge of it with the deed in his hands.

“The furnace room goes here, against the north wall, where the ground’s driest,” Kang Yi said, pointing. “The herb store goes there. Her Highness wants a cold cellar under it, for the frost herbs. And a flue up through the old wall. The builders come when the ground thaws.”

“Who is the furnace room for?” Shi Feng asked.

“For the house, Elder,” Kang Yi said.

“The house has an alchemist?” Shi Feng asked, looking at the dead pear tree.

“Not yet,” Kang Yi said, and bowed again.

Shi Feng smiled faintly. She’d bought a place for him to work without asking him to stay. He wouldn’t embarrass her manager by pressing him.

There were people on the broken wall. Half the street had climbed up to look at the empty lot the princess had bought, and they were arguing about it loudly, the way people argued about something that wasn’t their money.

“A furnace room? In Lianxia? Who’s going to buy pills here?”

“The sect buys pills!”

“The sect has its own furnaces, idiot. A whole hall of them!”

“Nobody digs a well where there’s no water. The princess knows what she’s doing.”

“Then what’s she doing?”

“How should I know? I’m not a princess!”

Kang Yi ignored them. Shi Feng left him to it.

Her letter hadn’t said who the furnace room was for, and he didn’t say it either.

“There’s one more thing,” Shi Feng said, turning back to the side gate. “I need northern frost herbs. A good amount. Frost Lotus Root, Glacier Marrow Moss, Snow Pine Heart. Whatever this town has that the south doesn’t.”

Kang Yi’s face lit up. He took out a small account book.

By the middle of the afternoon, Shi Feng had bought out two herb shops on the market street and half the stock of a third. Frost herbs were cheap at the foot of the Serene Jade, and very dear anywhere south of Frost Pass. The whole lot came to three hundred and fifty thousand. He paid in stone notes and had it all packed in straw and ice.

“And how will Elder Shi carry it up?” Kang Yi asked, eyeing the crates stacked in the pavilion’s yard. “The white stair won’t take a sledge. You’d need fifty porters.”

“Is there another way up?” Shi Feng asked.

“Frost Wind Valley,” Kang Yi said. “The back road. It runs up behind the outer peaks to the sect’s herb terraces, and from the terraces there’s a path to the outer hall. The sect’s own herb carts use it. It’s two days by sledge.”

Kang Yi found him a sledge master that evening. He was a thick-set man in a wolfskin hat called Old Tie, with twenty porters and eight sledges, and he named his price before he’d been asked.

“Two hundred silver to the terraces,” Old Tie said. “And the honoured guest walks with the front sledge. That’s the custom.”

“Why is that the custom?” Shi Feng asked.

“Because if there’s a slide, the front sledge sees it first,” Old Tie said. “It’s a quiet road in winter. No one uses it but the sect’s carts, and they’ve stopped for the season. The dog that bites doesn’t bark, honoured guest. A quiet road is the same.”

They left at dawn. The valley opened past the last houses, a long white trough between two black ridges, with the frozen stream running down the middle of it. The sledges creaked. The porters sang a low marching song to keep the rhythm.

Qin Wuyan walked beside the front sledge and didn’t sing. Every so often he raised his eyes to the ridges on either side and looked at them for a long time.