Three jianghu men vomiting blood and keeling over raised no particular waves.
A jianghu grudge, plain as day; no aggrieved family pressing charges; the court not interested — naturally, the spectators weren't about to borrow trouble either.
The house kept serving; the guests kept toasting. The conversations simply grew quieter, all on their own — and stopped touching the Westguard Manor, or any famous master of the rivers and lakes.
***
Back at the Manor, Wang Yu delivered Qianqian to the Wild Goose Pavilion with a bottle of the lavender perfume — then carried a bottle of the tulip to the rear hall.
The Westguard Manor divided into front and rear halls: the front for formal audiences, guests, and banquets; the rear for the business of governing.
Which was where Li Yunxiu now kept her office.
"You went out with Qianqian today?" Li Yunxiu asked.
"Planted informants in the household already?" Wang Yu's eyebrow went up.
The topic visibly pained her. "Ziling went looking for you — that's the only reason I knew. I don't know what enchantment that Qianqian has poured into the servants' ears, but every last maid and footman leans her way."
Wang Yu looked at Li Yunxiu's rather intimidating presence, thought of Qianqian's soft sweetness, and nodded with deep understanding.
"What is that look supposed to mean?" Li Yunxiu knew perfectly well what it meant. But she had a household to run; Qianqian's road was not open to her.
Grace and terror, applied together — that was the proper way!
"I come bearing perfume. Fresh out of the Western Regions — carry it with you, a drop or two at a time, and the scent holds for two hours." Wang Yu set the little tulip bottle on her desk.
Li Yunxiu picked up the metal flask and touched two drops to her sleeve; rich fragrance unfolded through the room.
"Stronger than a sachet. My thanks." She breathed it in, then asked, "So what exactly is this Qianqian's background? Zhao Zheng had old friends of that sort?"
"No idea." Wang Yu shook his head.
"Her surname, then?" With a surname, one could trace family and history.
"No idea." He shook it again.
Li Yunxiu's eyes narrowed. "Then what do you know?"
Wang Yu smiled. "I know she's very pretty."
Li Yunxiu ground her teeth. "Not one man alive is any good. One day a prince, and already it's silk and softness on the brain."
"I'm a perfectly normal man," Wang Yu said, aggrieved. "You won't have me — and you'd bar me from anyone else too? The ones who want to control the Westguard Manor are you and the emperor, not me. If you want the horse to run, you feed the horse some grass."
Li Yunxiu was speechless. Inheriting a princedom didn't count as grass?
And yet — watching Wang Yu spend every hour that wasn't martial practice glued to Qianqian's side, something in Li Yunxiu sat oddly, and would not settle.
By rights, she had no feelings whatsoever of that kind for Wang Yu. She served the emperor; she wanted the realm at peace; Wang Yu was a stranger she cooperated with — a husband on paper only.
But all along the road, this man had stood up at every moment of crisis. He'd out-schemed the black-clad killer; a few words from him had turned Fang Shaobai's whole course. Whether he was discoursing on swords or on wine, there was an unhurried sureness to him that made you look twice.
At the Manor, he hadn't bothered to imitate Zhao Yu's twisted arrogance — instead he had improvised a character all his own: unshaken in crisis, every pearl already in his palm, imperious and decisive.
Never mind that he'd talked Zhao Rong into keeping her alive after learning the late emperor had murdered his father — the day after arriving, he had faced down the Manor's hardest old soldier in open hall and stripped Zhao Siqi of an army. When Li Yunxiu pieced that together, even she had to salute.
His second day. His second day.
He'd been ten years gone from this household. No sane man in that position picks a frontal war with a grandfather-generation founding general — the most senior commander the Manor possessed. Wang Yu had not only picked it; he had won it, cleanly: the Xionglue Army changed hands without a ripple, and afterward Peng Hu and Lu Yunzhou went about telling people the new prince had his father's bearing and a sovereign's air.
The Manor's fiercest general and its famous strategist, declaring loyalty in the same breath — that was what had planted Wang Yu's feet, at a stroke; even her own administration had run smoother for it.
No outsiders had been present at that confrontation. But Peng Hu talked when he drank, and from the shape of his hints, Li Yunxiu had reconstructed the scene easily enough.
Yes — saving her had been saving himself. Even so: a man had stripped a general of his army for her sake. A woman could think about that for a while.
Not that thinking about it meant giving herself over. She admired Wang Yu now — as an exceptionally fine partner in the work. That was all.
If Wang Yu had merely amused himself with the household's maids, Li Yunxiu might not have spared it much attention.
But Qianqian had come out of nowhere and out of every calculation.
She herself was consort by the emperor's own decree; Qianqian was the fiancée chosen by the old prince for his son. The two titles weighed the same — neither yielded an inch to the other.
So Wang Yu-and-Qianqian gave Li Yunxiu the distinct sensation of something of hers being carried off.
Her reason found the sensation ridiculous. The sensation ignored her reason — most sharply whenever Wang Yu was visibly, cheerfully interested in the girl.
"Has she agreed to have you, then?" Li Yunxiu slanted him a look.
"No," Wang Yu reported honestly.
The corner of Li Yunxiu's mouth curled. She didn't know Qianqian's origins, but she knew the girl's quality: no hawk flies before the hare shows. Qianqian would never spend herself cheaply.
"So how do you intend to solve your little problem?" she asked sweetly.
"I intend to buy a courtesan," Wang Yu reported, honest as ever.
"You—!" Li Yunxiu's glare was still loading when Wang Yu cut across it. "I ran into three people in the market today. Wonder if you'd know them."
"What people?"
"A married couple, and a young woman."
He described the middle-aged pair and the girl in green — and the wine-house, and the single hmph that had put three jianghu men on the floor coughing blood.
Li Yunxiu's brows rose. "The man carrying a four-chi wooden case. The woman wearing a purple bamboo flute."
"That's them."
"Features that distinctive, and Zhao Yingjie still drew a blank." She shook her head, smiling. "Too young, that one. He studies the ranked masters of the great powers and forgets the jianghu keeps free agents."
"You know them?"
"Of course I know them." She laughed despite herself. "By now, the people in the rivers and lakes who don't know them could all fit at one table."
"Who are they?"
"The martial world has many famous couples, but only four truly great ones — and they are one of the four." Her voice took on the cadence of quotation. "'Three airs from the lone paulownia, fine as spring breeze; one note of purple jade, clear as the autumn moon.'
Wei Gutong, master of the qin. Yan Ziyu, master of the flute. They wander where they please, answerable to no one — and to hear qin and flute played together by those two is one of the luckiest things that can happen to a pair of ears."
Then she frowned slightly. "But Master Gutong and Madam Ziyu travel alone — the couple, no one else. I've never heard of a child. And the girl in green is the wrong age to be theirs regardless."
Wang Yu spread his hands. "So you don't know either. What exactly qualifies you to laugh at Zhao Yingjie?"
Li Yunxiu came within an inch of throwing her paperweight at him. "The girl stood behind and to the side — an attachment, obviously! Identifying Master Gutong and his wife is entirely sufficient!"
Then she stopped. Her eyes drew tight. "What are they doing in Longshan? Could they be here about the Manor?"
"They're not," Wang Yu said, shaking his head.
"And you know that how?"
"Because if they were here for the Westguard Manor, I would never have walked out of the Wanghai Tower."
Li Yunxiu: "..."
Fair point!
"Then it doesn't concern us." She flapped a hand at him. "Go on, off with you, some of us work for a living. One last word of advice: that Qianqian is nobody's fool and nobody's lamp-oil. Keep some distance — unless you'd like her to be the one who sees through your secret."
Now it was Wang Yu with nothing to say. What a thoroughly terrifying career woman!
Seeing her set the perfume aside, Wang Yu dropped the Qianqian topic and came to his second order of business. "How do the Manor's accounts stand? What's the yearly surplus?"
"Since when do you care about accounts?" Li Yunxiu blinked at him — then grinned. "Relax. There's enough in there for your courtesan."
Wang Yu sighed. "Can a man not take an interest in his own future standard of living?"
"He can!" she said, laughing. "The Manor keeps fifty thousand men of the line, three thousand cavalry, thirty thousand warhorses. Pay aside, there's food, clothing, and the yearly wastage and replacement of arms — that single heading runs over two million taels a year.
Add the laborers, the servants, the craftsmen, and the year's outlay comes to about two million eight hundred thousand.
The good news," and her eyes tilted with the smile, "is that the Manor sits astride the northwest trade road, and with the three prefectures' taxes besides, income runs upward of three million."
"So — a two-hundred-thousand-tael surplus a year?"
"Two hundred seventy, to be exact, last year."
"That's a healthy business."
"Healthy enough to hold ground. Not enough to move." She shook her head. "And the Manor mounted that northern expedition some years back — the inner treasury holds less than a million taels of silver at present.
The day a court order comes and an army has to march, that money is nothing."
Wang Yu pointed east. "When an army marches — shouldn't the court be paying?"
Li Yunxiu burst out laughing despite herself. "There is that."
The Manor could fight the court's wars. Fighting them out of its own purse, on the other hand, would be carrying loyalty to eccentric lengths.
***
Wang Yu came out of the rear hall, took out the two remaining perfume bottles, and delivered his professional assessment.
"Low-proof alcohol base. And this was made by steeping petals — not by extracting the essential oil."
"Stronger than a sachet, sure, but nothing next to a modern perfume — and the 'two hours' is generous. Ninety minutes, at the outside."
"Ten taels of silver for this little bottle. That, gentlemen, is what pure profit margin looks like."
Wang Yu's eyes had begun to gleam. Whatever the world, no money meant no anything. So — was it finally time to do the sort of thing one only did in historical-fiction novels?
Back at Dehe Lodge, he found Zhao Yingjie waiting at the door in a fresh peacock-blue robe of considerable flash, grinning ear to ear, eyes full of conspiracy. "So when do we set out?"
"Change of plans!" Wang Yu waved him off. "Go buy me flowers. Cartloads of petals — and the strongest fired liquor you can find!"
DIY beats a courtesan any day of the week!
Zhao Yingjie: ???