"By the look of you, you're not quite convinced?" Li Yunxiu asked, smiling.
The old woodcutter's voice changed — aged and weathered as before, but with something dank seeping in. "Then enlighten me, Top Scholar, and let this old man die understanding. Where exactly did I slip?"
"You borrowed this family's farmstead, and that child's help. You used untainted cured-pork congee and griddle cakes to lower our guard. You even counted on us offering the child a sweet — so the sugar-water would arrive all on its own."
Li Yunxiu delivered her assessment like an examiner. "All of it done very naturally. A pity about the fine details."
"What details?" the old woodcutter asked.
"First: the dog." Li Yunxiu raised her index finger. "However old and well-trained a dog may be, it comes out for a look when strangers arrive. Yours not only never showed itself — it left half its dinner uneaten.
A dog that has been at your side every day — you know how much it eats at a meal. Why would you set out half a bowl too much? Either it was too sick to finish... or it died halfway through eating."
"Second: the child." Li Yunxiu went on. "I confess I hadn't expected you to bring a child for cover. Unluckily, yours is a boy. The hobby-horse and the rattle-drum, well and good — but a wooden comb and cloth dolls are things little girls treasure.
Either your boy has a girl's quiet tastes — or the child who lived here was a girl, and you have already killed her."
"Third: the firewood." She raised a third finger. "The court's ban, the market price — no fault in either. But you did not know that the man who lived here never sold his wood at Lujia Market at all."
The old woodcutter couldn't help himself. "Why not?"
"If he carted his firewood to Lujia Market to sell, his shed would never be stacked so high." She indicated it. "The owner here was old and failing, with a granddaughter to mind, so he stockpiled his wood and sold it to the buyers who passed through.
For you to answer me as you did, either you were brushing me off — or the owner was already dead, and you had dressed yourself in his farmstead to ambush us."
Li Yunxiu regarded him. "One flaw might be chance. Two might be accident. Three is never coincidence — and then your grandson came carrying sugar-water, sweet enough to bury the taste of your poison."
Three slender, snow-white fingers. To Wang Yu, they looked exquisite. To the old woodcutter, they looked like a demon's fangs.
His cheek spasmed; at last he sighed. "The woman Top Scholar deserves the name that shakes the realm. My death is earned. I beg one thing only — spare my little grandson. I promise you he will leave the jianghu and never dare offend you again."
"If he truly is your grandson," Li Yunxiu said evenly, "you should never have carried him into the jianghu at all."
With that, she tipped a bowl of the sugar-water down the old man's throat, and flicked a hand toward Ziling.
Ziling took up the last bowl and poured it into the boy.
"Li Yunxiu! May you die without a burial!" the old man snarled, low and hoarse.
She didn't answer — only sealed his mute acupoint in passing, and watched grandfather and grandson's faces turn black-blue, until blood welled at the corners of their mouths and the last breath left them.
Wang Yu made no show of sainthood. He was growing used to this world — used to death.
Ziling hesitated. "The people who really lived here..."
Li Yunxiu sighed. "He didn't have much time to prepare. Search nearby. With luck..."
"No need to search. The root cellar behind the main house," a voice cut in. "And no need for luck, either. Grandfather and granddaughter — both dead."
Li Yunxiu and Wang Yu spun around. Beneath the tree at the main house's flank stood a man in black.
Wang Yu was past even being shocked. "One after another. And you would be?"
"The man who kills you." The black-clad man wasted no words. "I wasn't going to fight the Southern Sea Twin Swords for the bounty — and when I saw the old fellow show his hand, I'd all but given it up. Who knew old Su would actually manage to poison him dead?"
"With the old man gone, that leaves one woman Top Scholar. Those odds, I'll take." He chuckled to himself.
Li Yunxiu's face finally changed.
The man had appeared without a whisper of sound — his arts were not weak. Elder Yan was dead; Song Yong and the guards counted for nothing; the only one left who could stand between this man and Wang Yu was her.
The man in black looked her up and down, appreciation open in his eyes — and beneath the appreciation, a lechery that couldn't have hidden from her if it tried.
A small tremor ran through her. She gave up half a step — but stayed squarely in front of Wang Yu. "I don't know what bounty they've set on my husband, but we will pay you double. No — triple. I beg you, let this pass."
"With the old man gone, even the woman Top Scholar loses her nerve?"
The man laughed low in his throat and strolled closer, drawing the longsword at his waist in a backhanded pull. "I'm not short of money. But if the Top Scholar cares to share one night's spring breeze with me, I might just spare that useless husband of hers."
"Well? High and mighty while his father lived — flags furled and drums dead the moment the father's gone. Is that the Westguard Prince?" He glanced at Wang Yu, grinning. "Where did all that capital swagger go?"
"My husband..."
Li Yunxiu had barely begun when Wang Yu moved her gently aside.
"To think the strays and curs who weren't fit to pour wine for my gatekeeper now dare bark in my face."
At some point, a stick of kindling had appeared in Wang Yu's hand. He was turning it idly.
He couldn't tell whether Li Yunxiu's alarm was real or theater. But the man had dragged him into it by name — and the character he was playing did not cower behind his wife.
If the mask cracked, it wouldn't stop with the man in black; the guards at the fence would begin to wonder too. And then — exposure.
I've still got a princedom to laze through, thank you very much!
Besides, Wang Yu had watched Elder Yan work, and the Twin Swords too. He held a thread of internal energy now; he knew roughly what to expect — and he had made a preparation or two.
Kindling in his right hand, left hand hanging loose and half-buried in his sleeve, Wang Yu ambled forward. "You use a sword?"
The man in black stared at the stick of firewood, caught between fury and laughter. "Don't tell me you mean to use that as a sword."
"That you'd even ask proves you don't understand the sword." Wang Yu leveled the kindling across his chest, entirely composed. "Leaning on a sword's keenness, trading on its edge — that is the crudest, lowest use a sword has."
The man's eyes tightened a fraction. The father had been an Innate grandmaster. The son's wastrel name filled the capital and his arts were said to be middling — but the man had almost never been seen to fight, and no one knew his true depth.
Judging by this journey's showing, he was probably beneath Li Yunxiu. And yet — look at that composure.
Besides, the father was an Innate grandmaster; on the way of the sword, the son must have heard things worth hearing. If he wanted to talk, the man in black didn't mind listening. It would double as a probe.
"Then what other uses does a sword have?" the man asked.
"Bending and straightening at will; yielding to follow, stretching to meet." Wang Yu's voice was mild. "One begins from the soft sword. Only when the sword is the hand and the hand is the sword can that stage be called complete — and the next stage begun."
The man's grip tightened on his hilt. He had not reached that stage. And...
"There's a next stage?"
"The heavy sword bears no edge; the greatest skill needs none. The soft cannot hold the line, and the hard cannot hold out — so after the soft sword, one trains the heavy. Wield the heavy blade as easily as your own arm, and that stage too is done. Then a man may glimpse the highest realm of the sword."
The man in black had gone grave to his bones. That truths this fine could be spoken in two runs of plain talk — the inheritance of an Innate grandmaster, no mistake. Caught up in it despite himself, he asked, "And the highest realm of the sword?"
"Grass, trees, bamboo, stone — all of them swords, naturally."
Wang Yu lifted the kindling slightly. "When this humble stick of firewood can pour out both the soft sword's coiling lightness and the heavy sword's artless weight — then, and only then, may a man say: my sword is complete."
Open longing flashed through the black-clad man's eyes — then he caught himself and sneered. "And I suppose you'd have me believe you've reached it? Grass and trees and bamboo and stone, all of them swords?"
"Of course not." Wang Yu smiled, easy and unbothered. "I'm holding this thing to look impressive."
Wang Yu was smiling. The man in black was not.
Was it a bluff — or the trick of hiding truth inside bluff? Even if Wang Yu hadn't touched that final realm, if he had genuinely reached bend-and-straighten-at-will, then the man in black was no match for him at all.
As for sword intent, for Innate — he refused to so much as think it. If Wang Yu were an Innate expert, why would he waste all this breath? One thrust of the firewood would have settled it.
"Weren't you going to kill me and bed my wife?" Wang Yu turned the kindling over in his fingers. "Come. Put one thrust in me. Who knows — I might die of it."
The man in black had stopped moving some time ago. The hand around his sword was sweating. Forward or back — he honestly no longer knew.
He was regretting, bitterly, ever swaggering out into the open. A strike from the dark — why hadn't he just struck from the dark?
But then, from the dark, he'd never have heard sword-theory this fine.
Li Yunxiu, too, was staring at Wang Yu in astonishment. Several gold needles lay palmed in her hand; she had sidled two small steps to free half her body for a throw — while keeping the soft, helpless look flawlessly in place.
"If you won't come to me, I'm coming to you." Wang Yu smiled pleasantly and stepped forward.
The man's eyes skittered — to Li Yunxiu, poised as if she might dart in or might not, and something moved in his chest. He surged forward at once, sword rising, internal energy gathering at the point, and flicked the blade at the stick of kindling in Wang Yu's hand.
Scree—
Steel touched firewood — and against every expectation, the wood carried not one thread of internal energy. At the kiss of his energy-laden blade it simply burst, shattering into crumbs.
The man in black froze.
He had gamed out every possibility — including that Wang Yu was truly terrifying and he would have to throw down his sword and run. The one thing he had never imagined was that Wang Yu could be weak. This weak. Almost-no-internal-energy weak.
However feeble you are, you're still an Innate grandmaster's son — there are limits! Didn't you beat a Pacification Commissioner of the Capital Guard half to death?
His stroke bit through air where resistance should have been, and he goggled at Wang Yu — just as Wang Yu's left hand, the one that had hung loose all this while, swept up. A gust of wind driven by internal energy — and a skyful of pale dust came billowing straight into his face.
They stood too close; his whole mind had been nailed to the firewood in Wang Yu's hand. There was no time to react at all before the cloud burst across his face — and into his eyes.