"No." Li Yan did not turn around.
"Are you certain? I feel I would remember a face like—"
"Quite certain." Li Yan picked up the grey robe from the attendant’s reluctant hands.
The young man opened his mouth again, clearly unused to being dismissed so thoroughly by anyone, let alone a stranger covered in dust in the corner of a tailor shop.
The shop attendant, delighted by the sudden turn of drama unfolding in her store, decided this was the perfect moment to intervene on behalf of aesthetics.
"He will take the coral instead." She whisked the grey robe out of Li Yan’s hands before he could protest and pressed the warmer silk into his arms in its place. "Trust me, young master. A man with your coloring should never be caught dead in grey."
Li Yan shot her a look that promised retribution. She only beamed back at him, entirely unrepentant.
The stranger in the doorway did not bother hiding his interest anymore.
"I agree with her." He inclined his head slightly. "Hu Bai," he added, as though the name might buy him another moment of Li Yan’s attention. "Since you seem intent on pretending we are strangers, we might as well be properly introduced ones."
"No one asked you." Li Yan walked toward the back room to change, leaving both the attendant and Hu Bai staring after him with two very different, equally helpless expressions.
Li Yan stepped behind the changing screen, shed the ruined robe, and pulled the coral silk over his shoulders. The fabric settled against his skin, lighter than he expected, and when he glanced down at himself he stopped.
The color suited him. He turned his wrist, watching the sleeve catch the light, and found himself oddly reluctant to admit the attendant had been right.
A basin of water sat on a low stand near the screen. He knelt beside it and scrubbed the dried blood from his jaw and throat, the water clouding pink, until his skin showed clean again beneath.
"A hairpin would complete it, Master." Xiaoxiao’s voice bloomed with sudden enthusiasm. "You cannot walk about with your hair half-undone and pretend it is a fashion choice. Allow me."
A soft chime sounded at the edge of his awareness, and a slender pin materialized in his palm, carved from pale jade and tipped with a small phoenix in flight.
"Where did you even acquire taste?" Li Yan murmured, turning the pin between his fingers.
"I have watched empresses dress themselves for a thousand years, Master. I have opinions."
Li Yan said nothing further, but he used the pin, twisting his hair back with practiced fingers until it sat neat against his nape. He studied his reflection in the small bronze mirror propped against the wall. The bruised, blood-streaked wretch who had crawled out of that alley was gone. What looked back at him now was something else entirely.
He stepped out from behind the screen.
Hu Bai, who had clearly not moved from his spot near the counter in all this time, went utterly still.
"I knew it." He closed the distance before Li Yan had taken two steps. "I knew you would look like this. Heaven above, look at you. That color was made for you. Whoever dressed you deserves a medal, a title, a—"
"An extra robe, apparently." The attendant cut in, beaming as she pressed a second folded silk into Li Yan’s arms, a deep plum to match the coral. "You wear my work better than any customer I have had all year. Take this one as well, and pay only for the first. It is the least I can do for such fine advertising."
Li Yan opened his mouth to refuse, then decided against wasting the effort. He inclined his head instead, accepting the second robe with as much grace as he could summon while Hu Bai continued talking without any apparent need to breathe.
"The color of your eyes in this light." Hu Bai leaned in closer than was strictly necessary. "I have never seen anything quite like it. Let me know your name, at least. A man cannot be expected to forget a face like yours and then have no name to put to it. That would be a cruelty."
Li Yan’s jaw tightened. His lips twitched, a small crack in the composure he had held since the alley.
"Truly, where are you from? Someone with a face like that does not simply appear in a tailor’s shop and vanish. Perhaps I could escort you somewhere. Anywhere. I have a carriage waiting, and—"
Li Yan’s patience, worn thin by a beating, a false death, and an afternoon spent haggling over robe colors, finally gave out. He turned, seized a fistful of Hu Bai’s fine indigo collar, and hauled him down to eye level.
"I do not wish to hear another word." His voice dropped low and flat, every trace of the fragile Ger gone from it. "I am not interested. Leave me be."
He released the collar with a small shove, turned on his heel, and thanked the attendant with a short bow before sweeping out through the door, the bell chiming sharply behind him.
He did not slow his pace, not through the street, not around the corner, not until several turns had put the tailor’s shop well out of sight.
"You may stop now, Master." A pause, then Xiaoxiao’s tone shifted, losing its earlier lightness. "He is no longer visible. Though a warning, if you will permit one: that man carries himself with far too much power for an idle merchant’s son. Should he wish to find you again, Master, it would not prove difficult."
Li Yan slowed his steps at last, letting the noise of the street settle back around him: cart wheels, hawkers calling their wares, the ordinary hum of a city that knew nothing of what he had survived that morning.
"Powerful how," he asked, keeping his voice low enough that only Xiaoxiao would catch it.
"Difficult to say with certainty from a single glance, Master. But the cut of his robes, the quality of the jade in his hair, the attendant who followed at a distance these are not the trappings of an ordinary man playing at wealth. A true merchant’s son postures. He does not need to."
Li Yan turned that over as he walked, tucking the extra robe beneath his arm. He had spent his entire first life invisible to men like that, beneath their notice, beneath even their contempt. It unsettled him more than he cared to admit, being noticed so thoroughly by someone who very likely had the means to make good on that interest.
Still, there were more pressing matters than a persistent stranger with fine robes and finer manners. He had an inn to find, rest his body, and plans to lay before Li Wei or their father. Think to ask questions about a corpse that had refused to stay dead.
"An inn, then," Li Yan said. "Somewhere quiet. Somewhere no one thinks to look for a dead man."