Wang Yu hauled the ox-cart to a stop — his rein-work still wanted practice — and looked the newcomer over.
Twenty-three or twenty-four, in a long robe of proper blue gone somewhat rumpled; a face built for carefree insolence, currently laboring to squeeze out a harmless, ingratiating smile.
Catching Wang Yu's glance, he edged the sword a little further behind his back.
Now here was an interesting young man.
A light moved through Wang Yu's eyes, and he waved the man over. "Get on."
The young man's smile bloomed. He came up beside the cart at a quick step, offered a bow first to Li Yunxiu and Ziling inside the canopy, and only then swung up and settled next to Wang Yu.
"My thanks, brother!" the young man said. "I flagged down three carts. You're the only one who'd take me."
Wang Yu glanced at the sword by the man's hand. "Out on the open road, a little caution is easy to understand."
It was a black-scabbarded longsword — the cotton cord wrapping its hilt thumbed to a gloss, the leather sheath scored all over. A thoroughly veteran article.
The young man lounged back against the canopy frame and asked, smiling, "And you're not afraid?"
"If you meant me harm, you'd either have hidden the sword properly — or drawn it already." Wang Yu shook his head, then let a sliver of mischief show. "Who knows? With you aboard, I might just be safer than before."
The young man barked a laugh, then hefted the sword by way of explanation. "A gift of my school. I can hardly leave it in a ditch."
Wang Yu allowed that this was fair, then asked, "We're bound west, for Puning County. Is that on your road?"
"What luck! Puning County is exactly where I'm headed." The young man nodded very quickly.
"Then it's on the road." Wang Yu lifted the whip, and the old yellow ox leaned back into motion.
***
Spring stood at its full; even the afternoon sun carried a bright edge, and the breeze made the body easy and the mind easier.
Chance-met strangers, they skipped the exchange of names and simply talked.
Wang Yu learned that the young man was a local — bound for Puning County because fellow disciples of his school had run into trouble there, and he was going to lend a hand. The young man learned that Wang Yu was from Pingjin Prefecture in the Capital Circuit, traveling northwest for his father's funeral.
Inside the canopy, Ziling threw Li Yunxiu a baffled look — why would he invite an unknown jianghu man onto the cart? — but didn't dare ask aloud.
Li Yunxiu knew her puzzlement. Smiling, she pointed first at the three of them and held up three fingers; then at the young man, and held up four.
Ziling chewed on that a moment — then looked at Wang Yu with something close to admiration.
Three days had passed since they slipped out of sight. By now, every killer on the road would know the quarry had gone to ground. The ones who hadn't given up would be sitting on the chokepoints toward Longshan Prefecture — and the Puning County ahead was a waystation town on one of the very roads leading from Lujia Market toward Longshan. Odds were fair that unfriendly eyes were on its traffic at this hour.
However good the disguises, they were still one man and two women, the ages roughly right. Li Yunxiu could paint all three of them old — but paint could not teach a spine to stoop, and a mask played past its limits gave itself away.
So: pick up a passenger or two on the road, local for preference — and the very profile the killers watched for dissolved.
The one thing that sat uneasily with Li Yunxiu was that Wang Yu had invited a jianghu man, not the peddler or footman or craftsman she'd have chosen. Then again — darkest under the lamp: a local jianghu face might turn eyes away better than any peddler. Provided, of course, they never slipped in front of him.
Nothing under heaven came pure profit; take the good, carry the risk.
She watched the two up front — one wry and easy, the other loose and unhampered. Wang Yu held forth on Pingjin Prefecture like a hometown man, and the young man, hearing he'd been seven or eight years away, filled him in on the roads and customs of the northwest.
Then a banner-pole rose over the road ahead, a single character on the cloth — TEA. A tea shed, pitched on the left of the way.
"Our water's nearly done — we'll buy a bowl from the owner and beg a refill." Wang Yu called it back into the canopy, then added to the young man, "And a bowl of the sobering stuff for you."
"Much obliged, brother." The young man stood on no ceremony at all.
Wang Yu drew the cart up beside the tea shed, took the waterskin Li Yunxiu passed out, and went in to buy.
The young man stayed where he was, lounging against the canopy edge — one lazy sweep of the eyes taking in everyone under the awning.
Of the seven or eight tables, half were occupied. At two sat traveling merchants and peddlers, drinking their tea with heads well down; the single glance they spared the ox-cart and the shabby scholar was a glance of pure sympathy.
At the other two sat several men whose faces promised nothing good. Their leader, a big fellow, sat with his shirt hanging open and half a jar of wine in front of him — in a tea shed.
Wang Yu asked the owner for four bowls of tea and begged a bag of water, then produced a deflated little purse and counted twelve coppers into the man's palm.
At the sight of that flat purse, the men around the big fellow looked a question at their chief. He gave a snort — and jerked his chin forward anyway. Two men peeled off their bench and boxed Wang Yu in, one ahead, one behind.
"Traveling, brother?" asked the one in front.
"Brother. Lend us a little something to spend," said the one behind, looking him up and down.
Wang Yu had dressed the part for exactly this audience: a few dozen coppers in the purse, and half a tael of silver beneath them — not enough to grow a bigger greed, not so little as to draw a beating that would force his hand and expose him.
But before he could pay, the young man on the cart spoke up.
"Curly Dog. Puning County not big enough for your strutting anymore? Out here bullying travelers now?"
"Who said that?!"
"Slander! Our chief's title is Curly BEAR!"
The big man surged up in fury — but his followers had already done the shouting for him.
"Your name, stranger!" the big man barked at the cart.
The young man didn't answer. He simply tossed his longsword, scabbard and all, to one particular follower — a man who had rushed several steps toward him to show loyalty to his chief, while carefully not getting anywhere near him.
The man caught the sword and stood blinking at the young man, utterly lost.
The young man pointed at Curly Bear. Light dawned. The follower scurried back, sword cradled in both hands, and delivered it to his chief.
"Boss, what's he mean by this?"
"Handing his own weapon over — scared witless? Or surrendering?"
Curly Bear took the sword, and his heart gave one heavy thud of misgiving. He pulled the scabbard close and studied it.
"Looks pretty beat-up to me," one man offered. "Another one with no money on him."
"He's jianghu for certain. But who hands over his own blade?" another puzzled.
"There's a character carved here — 'White.' On a scabbard that's plainly black?" The third man had sharp eyes. "Is he blind or something?"
The words were still leaving his mouth when Curly Bear spun as if lightning-struck and slapped him across the face. "YOU'RE blind! Your whole family's blind!"
The man clutched his cheek and stared at his chief in terror, with no idea which word had been the wrong one.
Then he watched that chief turn back toward the young man — the rage on his face transmuting mid-turn into a fawning grin — and hurry out of the tea shed at a small trot, sword held high on both palms, all the way to the ox-cart.
"This lowly one has eyes and yet failed to see! Had I known it was the Little Sword Immortal, Young Hero Fang, gracing us in person — magnanimity, sir, magnanimity! Forgive me this once!"
Even as he laid the longsword back before the young man, he was flinging desperate signals sideways at the two men crowding Wang Yu.
Those two could read a room — and at the words "Little Sword Immortal," Wang Yu apparently sprouted three-foot spikes: they shot backward, heads bowed and hands folded, doing their level best to become quiet, transparent furniture.
Only the young man rolled his eyes. He reached out, took back the sword, and issued a correction. "Not 'Little Sword Immortal.' It's 'the Sword in the Wine.'"
"Yes, yes, yes! Just as Young Hero Fang says!" Curly Bear nodded like a woodpecker. Whatever you say, sir. Exactly that.
The young man's lip curled, but he pressed it no further. "Aren't you supposed to be sitting in Puning County, running your hall and collecting your street money? What are you doing out here?"
Curly Bear produced a very ugly smile. "Some hard cases blew into the county a while back — and then the heroes of the Taihua Sect and the reverend masters of the Great Vajra Temple came down over it. This lowly one didn't dare stay underfoot, so I stepped out to find some quiet."
"And spent the quiet bullying travelers?" The young man's smile went nowhere near his eyes.
Curly Bear's grin curdled until it looked worse than weeping. "Just — gathering a little coin, airing out my temper. I'd never dare harm a life."
The young man's gaze slid sideways. Curly Bear corrected course instantly. "I'll return every copper!"
The young man nodded. "You take the county's money and you do the county's work — that, I don't touch. But pulling this out here? One real hard case in a black mood, and you're a smear on the road. You know that."
"Never again! Never!" More woodpecker nodding — and then, with immense respect: "And what brings your worship out this way? Anything this lowly one can do to serve?"
"Whatever it is you left the county to avoid," the young man said, "is exactly what I'm going in for."
"Ah..." Curly Bear's face performed its sympathy.
"Go on — camp out here a few days." The young man waved him off, then thought of something else. "How did this business pull in the Great Vajra Temple as well? Who came?"
"Don't ask me how — I wouldn't know!" Curly Bear shook his head hard, then remembered that he did know one thing. "It's Master Hongzhao."
The young man clicked his tongue twice and flicked his hand, and Curly Bear evaporated.
Meanwhile, Wang Yu came back to the cart with a full waterskin — trailed by the two erstwhile toll collectors, each meekly carrying two bowls of tea — and observed, deadpan: "Turns out I can tell fortunes. Give a man a ride, and I really am safer for it."
The young man laughed with him, took his bowl of tea, and drained it in one go.
***
The ox-cart took to the road again.
Wang Yu looked over at his passenger. "So you're the strongest of the Taihua Sect's new generation — the Little Sword Immortal, Fang Shaobai."
He truly hadn't planned this. One random passenger, picked up to blur a profile — and the man turned out to be the ace the Taihua Sect had put forward as the finest enforcer of its rising generation.
"You've heard of me too?"
Fang Shaobai's eyebrows rose, though not far. The jianghu's people and their stories were the storytellers' stock-in-trade in every town; ordinary folk were endlessly curious about the hidden martial world. Plenty of great martial names were famous in the streets.
Then he lifted the gourd in his hand. "'Little Sword Immortal' is flattery of the kind that gets a man killed. Besides, I refuse to carry a 'Little' in my title. So I gave myself a new one — the Sword in the Wine!"
With that, Fang Shaobai pulled the stopper and drank deep and happy.
The smell of the wine spread on the air.
Wang Yu sniffed at it, gave Fang Shaobai a sidelong look of frank disbelief, and said, "The Sword in the Wine? A grown man, drinking fruit wine — and drunk enough on it to miss his road?"