They went out the north gate at first light: an ox, a corpse cart with nothing in it, four rite-keepers, and one noblewoman of the Snowlight Pavilion sitting on a folded blanket with her sword across her knees, radiating an unwillingness to discuss the matter that was visible from a hundred paces.
Girin drove.
"I want to say," he said, at about the second li, "that I have carried a great many things in this cart and never a client."
"I'm not a client," said Hong Yeohwa. "I've paid for the cart."
"That's what a client is."
"I've paid for the cart, the ox, four days of feed and the wheelwright's bill from the shed roof, which the Hall was going to have to eat." She looked straight ahead. "That makes me a patron. Patrons ride."
Girin thought about it for a li and a half.
"That's true," he admitted, with the resentment of a man who has been out-argued by arithmetic. "Fine. Patrons ride. But patrons don't get out and push."
"I'll push."
"Nobody pushes but me," said Girin, mortally offended, and that was, more or less, the end of that.
Doha sat on the tailgate with his legs hanging and let the road go past, and by the third li he had begun to catalogue what he was carrying.
Three seams. He had been told he would always know the number precisely, and it had turned out to be true in a way that was worse than he had expected: it was not that he could count them; it was that he could feel where each one was, the way you can feel a splinter you have stopped bothering about.
Iron Coin sat low under the sternum on the right, and it wanted to show something to a boy who was not there.
Hong Ji-an sat higher and to the left, thin as paper, and it wanted to get an arm up.
And in the middle, big, patient, not going anywhere: don't drop it. I have it. Don't drop it.
Twice on the first day Doha caught his own left hand doing something with its fingers when he was not looking at it — a small specific curl, closing on a sheath that wasn't there.
Chan-i saw him notice.
"That's normal," he said.
"Is it?"
"That's normal at two," said Chan-i. "Which is not the same thing, and I want you to remember I said the second part."
They came into Sohari on the evening of the third day.
It was a proper town: nine hundred people, four inns, a river with two mills, and a county office with a man in it who was paid to write things down. It sat where the north road met the river road, which meant it had money, which meant it had a sect.
"The Green Reed Pavilion," said Hong Yeohwa. "Forty students. Two elders. They hold the escort contracts for everything between here and the pass, and they've held them for sixty years, and they are desperately respectable."
"Is that bad?"
"It's a way of being frightened," she said. "My sect is the same, and I'd say the same about us. When you've got forty students and a sixty-year contract, the worst thing that can happen to you is not a war. It's a story. One bad story and the contracts go to somebody in Weonju, and there's nothing left of you in eleven years."
Doha looked at the town.
"Then a man died on their road nineteen days ago, and the county wrote bandits," he said.
"And nobody argued," said Hong Yeohwa. "Because nobody wanted a story."
The Green Reed Pavilion sent a man to the inn before they had finished unloading.
He was about thirty-five, extremely polite, and he had clearly been chosen for the job by somebody who wanted the Hall told something without any elder having to be in the room while it was said.
"The Pavilion offers its respect to the Hall of the Ninth Rite," he said, bowing to a spot approximately eighteen inches to the left of Chan-i, which was as close as most people could manage. "And wishes to convey that the road between Sohari and the pass has been safe for four years, and that the incident at the millrace was an isolated matter involving persons unknown, and that there is nothing in the county requiring the Hall's attention."
"How kind," said Chan-i. "We'll be here five days."
The man's polite expression did not move.
"There is nothing requiring the Hall's attention," he repeated.
"Then it'll be a restful five days," said Chan-i.
There were four things requiring the Hall's attention in Sohari county, and they found the first one before breakfast.
The innkeeper's wife told them. She did it in the yard, wiping her hands, in the flat voice of a woman who had decided something in the night and was going to say it before she lost her nerve.
"There's a girl at Hwabon," she said. "Eight days. Her mother won't put her in the ground."
"Why not?" said Doha.
"Because she keeps moving."