Liu Xue had been awake for an hour when the watch-disciple knocked, and she had heard every word said at the ford through two walls and a shutter.
She let him get as far as “Senior Sister, forgive this disciple, there’s a—” before she opened the door.
He took one look at her and forgot the rest of it.
That happened often enough that she no longer minded.
It saved time.
“Bring me the boy,” she said, “and only the boy.”
The crowd had already had its story.
She had no use for that version.
The boy from Clearwater was perhaps fifteen, and he’d ridden all night on a horse that was too big for him.
She sat him on the bench in the post-house and put a cup of hot water in his hands.
She waited until they had stopped shaking enough to hold it.
Then she asked him to tell her only what he had seen with his own eyes.
It was a great deal less than a thousand dead.
A young man with long hair had come down the forest road faster than a horse.
The ground on the hill had split where he started, a mile out.
He had killed the gate guard, old Shuan, with a single blow.
The boy hadn’t seen the blow, only what came after.
He had taken coin and grain and four horses and the village’s spirit stone, and gone back into the forest with three ragged men and a cart.
No one else had been touched.
Foundation Establishment, then, from the speed and the voice.
Probably early, and new to it, judging from the size of the hole he had left behind him.
The powerful rarely wasted strength like that.
A rogue cultivator who had found some power and decided mortals were a harvest.
“How tall was he?” she asked.
The boy flushed.
“Maybe a bit taller than you, Immortal.”
“And the dancing?”
He turned his cup in his hands.
“I didn’t see any dancing,” he said at last, very low.
“He was on his knees by Shuan.
I think he was crying.
The tanner’s wife said dancing, and then everyone said it.”
Liu Xue considered that.
Men wept over their work sometimes.
It didn’t make them less dangerous.
In her experience it often made them more so, because a man who could weep and then take a village’s last spirit stone had already argued himself past the part that mattered. Find the original chapter at g.com.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You were brave to ride.
Go home by the river road, not the north one.”
Outside, the watch-disciple was waiting, and he fell in half a step behind her as she walked down to the water.
“Senior Sister, should I send to the Peak?” he asked.
“The ford’s calling him the Demon of Clearwater already.”
“Then the ford is being generous.” She looked north, where the road went up into the trees and the forest took it.
The Peak kept its posts at the fords so that when a thing like this came down a road, someone would come.
That was the bargain.
It was, as it happened, exactly her job.
“Record it: one killed, one village robbed, a rogue at Foundation, heading north.
Say I’ve gone to look.”
“Alone, Senior Sister?”
She didn’t answer, because it wasn’t a question that needed one.
Then she was gone from the bank.
The only sign of which way she’d gone was a line of frost laid along the north road, on a mild morning at the end of summer.