Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 352: Chapter 347: Dragon Girls’ Invitation

Location:Obsidian City eastern gate → eastern trade road → fourth waypoint → return road → hidden valley approach

Date/Time:Mid Frostforge, 9939 AZI — two-day mission out-and-return

Realm:Lower Realm

The cold at the city’s eastern gate had the particular mid-Frostforge quality that made every breath visible. Jayde’s exhale arrived as a pale plume against the early light. Takara, riding her shoulder with his habitual indifference to the temperature, twitched his blue-tipped ears once against her neck — a small complaint about being woken before the sun had properly settled into its business — and tucked his face into the collar of her coat.

Reiko walked a pace behind her at the lion-sized register he used for public streets. Not small. Not full-sized either. The in-between weight that meant he was ready to grow if the situation required and amused enough by the morning not to.

[The sisters are here already,] he observed through the bond. [Yinglong’s pack is heavier than usual.]

Two-day provisioning, Jayde returned. Matches what she said yesterday.

[Xingteng has a new bracer on her forearm.]

Temper-blacked steel. She bought it in the Hollow Quarter three days ago.

A faint pulse of amusement through the bond. He had known that. He had wanted to see if she had.

The sisters were waiting at the pillar-post marking the eastern trade-road terminus, in the particular easy standing-stance that cultivators adopted when they had done it a thousand times before and had stopped needing to pose for it. Yinglong, taller by half a head, dark hair tied back in the wind-braid the northern mercenary corps used; her brown eyes catching the frost-light cold and clear. Xingteng beside her in the narrower build that had always carried her more lightly on her feet, her dark-grey eyes haunted in the way they always were and, Jayde noticed, a shade less haunted than the last time they had stood together at a gate.

Yinglong raised one hand in the specific half-salute that mercenaries used when they were pleased to see each other and did not wish to admit it.

”You came,” she said.

Jayde raised her own hand in the returning half-salute and did not admit that she was pleased to see them either.

”Your route still east?”

”East, yes,” Yinglong confirmed. ”Two-day contract — low-level escort, salt caravan, paying badly, taking us as far as the third waypoint before we turn off south toward the Hollow Pass. You?”

”Mine’s further east,” Jayde said. ”Solo contract. A merchant out of the Frostforge spice-guild has an item he wants delivered to a client at the fourth waypoint. He offered me triple the going rate because the last three couriers declined the job.”

”Declined why.”

”He wouldn’t say.”

”Declined by dying, probably,” Xingteng remarked, in her low deliberate voice.

”Probably.”

”You took it anyway.”

”I took it anyway,” Jayde agreed.

Xingteng’s expression did not change. But her eyes — haunted grey, watchful as always — rested on Jayde’s face for a fractional second longer than they would have a month ago, and there was, in the hold of them, the specific minute amused-respect of one warrior noting another warrior’s tolerance for nonsense.

”Wise,” she said.

She just teased me, Jayde thought, with a small private delight. Xingteng just teased me.

(I heard.)

Yinglong, beside her sister, had gone very briefly still. Not the stillness of alertness. The stillness of a protective elder sibling who had just heard her damaged sister volunteer dry humour in front of a third party and was containing, with significant effort, the urge to react visibly.

Jayde, who had been a Commander long enough to know what to do with a person’s small offered bravery, did not look at Yinglong. She looked at Xingteng.

”Wise,” she repeated, letting her own mouth do something small and amused. ”I’ll tell the spice-guild merchant you said so, when they’re retrieving my body from the fourth waypoint.”

”You could let us know in advance,” Xingteng said, ”so we can collect.”

”I’ll leave instructions.”

”Appreciated.”

Yinglong, in her peripheral vision, had not yet started breathing again.

”Right,” Jayde said aloud, because the moment needed moving along before Yinglong cracked visibly. ”Same road as far as the third waypoint. Then you bear south, I go on east. Shared formation until we split?”

”Point, flanks, rear,” Yinglong said, her voice only slightly unsteady. ”You take point — you know the eastern route better than either of us.”

”Reiko on left flank. Xingteng right. Yinglong rear.”

”Why me rear.”

”Your sister doesn’t love walking last.”

Xingteng did not comment. She did not need to. The arrangement was the one they had used during the beast tide two Pavilion months ago, when Jayde had first fought alongside them — point, flanks, rear, the shadow-panther at the rear-right pivot, the small white kitten on the point’s shoulder as nominal scout — and it had worked, then, with the specific eerie correctness of a formation that had been used before by people who did not remember using it.

Takara, from Jayde’s shoulder, exhaled against her neck. Small. Warm. The specific small exhale of a kitten who had already made his peace with the day and wished everyone else would make theirs as well.

”Then we move,” Jayde said.

***

The road east of Obsidian City climbed through the Frostforge hills in long, patient switchbacks, past half-frozen streams and the black-stemmed ember-thorn that grew wherever the winter cultivation-sap still flowed. The cold had the specific silvered bite of a season past its midpoint — not the deep-ice of Voidmarch, but the half-wet chill of Frostforge where ice formed, melted by midday, and formed again at dusk. Their breath plumed. The packed frost-dust of the road gave a faint crunch underfoot. Somewhere overhead, a pair of snow-kite hawks circled — not hunting; simply riding the thermal off the warmer southern slope.

They walked in an easy rhythm.

This was, Jayde registered, what travelling with the sisters had become for her. Not the mission — either mission. The four-person formation moving in the specific quiet cadence of cultivators who did not need to speak to know where one another were. No briefings. No status checks. The silence of trained bodies in synchronised motion, held together by the peripheral awareness that all four of them had developed on separate battlefields and had recognised in each other on their first shared combat.

It’s restful, the Fed voice observed, with the slight surprise it always produced when noting that a Doha experience was restful.

(It’s not just restful. It’s quiet. In the way Pavilion quiet is quiet. But out here.)

The Fed voice agreed. It had no further commentary to add.

Jade, Jayde registered, had just used the Pavilion as a benchmark for something outside the Pavilion. That was the first time she had done that since Beastkin. The fissure-rope warmed another notch.

She did not comment on this inside her own head. The warming was not a thing to poke at. It was a thing to let be.

At the second waypoint — a stone marker half-buried in frost-dust, carved with the three-notch mercenary sigil of the Guildhall — they stopped for the midmorning water-ration. Yinglong produced, from some inner compartment of her pack, a small wax-wrapped bundle of travel rations.

”Salted river-fish cakes,” she said. ”Xingteng made them.”

”She did not,” Xingteng said.

”She did not,” Yinglong agreed. ”I made them. Xingteng ate two of them before we left, pretending not to enjoy them. This is the true measure of her regard for my cooking.”

”They were adequate,” Xingteng said.

”Adequate.”

”High praise, coming from her,” Yinglong told Jayde. ”She once described Mother’s festival-stew as competently executed. Mother did not speak to her for two days.”

”Mother,” Xingteng said, ”understood the compliment.”

Jayde took a salted river-fish cake. It was, in fact, adequate. Warm-centred. Faintly smoky. The kind of travel ration that said something about the person who had made it, which was that Yinglong understood hungry people and wanted the cold-weather cultivator in her sister to have enough warm protein to hold out to midday.

Also, the Fed voice noted, with professional interest, the sisters are not mercenaries.

(What.)

Whoever they actually are, it’s not two orphan sword-for-hires who came up in the Hollow Quarter. The older one is trained the way nobility gets trained. Watch the way she watches the road. She’s doing perimeter in three arcs, all concurrent, without visibly looking at any of them. That’s a warlord’s daughter, not a mercenary.

(And Xingteng?)

Xingteng is the same, but damaged. The training is there underneath. You can see it in the way she places her feet. She walks in a pattern that compensates for something that’s no longer there.

(We’re not going to ask.)

No. We’re not.

Takara, on her shoulder, made a small interested mrr at the smell of fish. Xingteng, without looking, held a fragment of her own fish cake down to him. Takara accepted it with the specific polite delicacy he deployed whenever he had decided the giver was worth accepting food from. He chewed it. He made a second, briefer mrr, which Jayde read — as she had learned to read Takara’s full repertoire — as this fish cake is adequate and I am allowing the giver to know that she is not without merit.

Xingteng’s mouth did something that was not quite a smile.

”Your kitten,” she said, ”is a person of discernment.”

”He has opinions,” Jayde agreed.

”Mm.”

Xingteng absently scratched Takara behind his right ear. He allowed it. She did it the way a person did it who had, some long time ago and in some other life, loved small creatures — the specific careful under-the-ear scratch that found the place without searching, the slight pause at the jaw that accounted for the kitten’s preference without needing to ask. Takara, under her fingers, did the half-closing of his eyes that cats did when a good scratch had been correctly delivered.

For approximately six seconds, the two of them existed together in the specific private moment that small animals and damaged humans sometimes shared, in which nothing was required of either party, and nothing was being asked.

Then Xingteng withdrew her hand, resumed her professional mercenary stance, and resumed eating the fish cake.

Yinglong, beside her, had stopped breathing again.

[Jayde,] Reiko said through the bond, so softly it was almost a breath. [She’s a different person today.]

She is.

[Yinglong is trying not to cry.]

I noticed.

[Is it — is this something we did?]

Not us specifically. But being around people who don’t need her to be recovered yet, probably. And the fact that she’s been deciding to try.

[...ah.]

A pause from Reiko. The specific bond-shimmer of a young shadowbeast who was filing the emotional mechanics of a damaged person’s healing, for later use.

***

The third waypoint arrived by midday — a crossroads marker beside a frozen well, with the southern road-sign carved deep in the specific Hollow Pass script and the eastern road-sign carved shallower, as though the eastern road received less traffic and did not warrant the better carving.

They stopped.

”This is us turning off,” Yinglong said.

”This is you turning off,” Jayde agreed.

”You sure you don’t want us to stay with you?”

”Your contract is south. Mine is east. We’ll meet on the way back.”

”When.”

”Two days, third hour past dawn, this marker.”

”Acknowledged.”

Xingteng raised her hand in the mercenary half-salute, without flourish. ”Don’t die at the fourth waypoint.”

”I’ll try not to.”

”If you do die, leave your kitten in the vicinity of your body. I’ll take him.”

Takara, on Jayde’s shoulder, made a sound that was a low, considering mrrow with the specific editorial quality of a creature who was not unwilling to be bequeathed but wished it noted for the record that he had preferences.

”He has opinions,” Jayde repeated.

”I heard.”

They parted. The sisters took the southern track, dropping into the single-file that the narrower Hollow Pass approach required. Jayde and Reiko took the eastern, which broadened as it climbed toward the ranges.

Reiko, through the bond, as the sisters’ silhouettes disappeared around the curve of the southern descent:

[I like them both.]

I know.

[I hope Xingteng’s mission goes all right.]

It will. Yinglong would not have taken a contract she thought would endanger her sister.

[True.]

A pause.

[Jayde.]

Yes.

[I hope ours goes all right, too.]

It will.

[Mm.]

***

The fourth waypoint was reached shortly after dusk.

The item that the spice-guild merchant had wanted delivered turned out to be, against all of Jayde’s standing expectations of spice-guild merchants, an actual spice sample — a small sealed lacquer-jar of dried emberpod, of the specific Ashwick three-season ferment that cost considerably more than the merchant had admitted and which he had been unable to ship by normal means because the two previous couriers had each been intercepted at the fourth waypoint by a small group of competing merchants who had, let us say, expressed strong opinions about the distribution of Ashwick emberpod in the eastern ranges.

The competing merchants were also present for her arrival.

There were four of them. Two cultivators, two ordinary mercantile muscle. They positioned themselves on the road with the specific air of men who had successfully persuaded two previous couriers to donate their cargo, and who were expecting a third successful persuasion.

They persuaded nobody.

Reiko did not even grow large for the occasion. He stayed at his lion-size, which he had calculated — correctly — was exactly large enough to be unignorable and small enough to leave all four men at least one bone unbroken for a later rethinking of their life choices. Takara stayed on Jayde’s shoulder throughout, apparently uninterested in the proceedings. Jayde herself did not need to draw Vael’kir.

The persuasion was conducted with open hands, a measured cultivator’s aura, and a single brief observation by Jayde that if any of them ever approached an Obsidian Academy courier again, she would personally ensure that the spice-guild knew their names and the specific faces of their mothers.

They left.

Jayde delivered the lacquer-jar to the client — a minor lord of the fourth waypoint holding, who had been waiting three weeks for a shipment he had paid for twice already and whose gratitude took the form of a discreet additional purse of spirit stones and an offer of supper which Jayde politely declined on the grounds of return schedule — and turned back west.

***

The return road was quieter than the outbound.

The frost had thickened in the hours since dawn; the afternoon thaw had not been enough to lift it. Their footfalls sounded different on the harder surface, a cleaner crunch, the kind of tread that left visible prints for anyone who might have been watching.

Reiko, flanking now — the formation collapsing to two on the return because there were only two of them — walked close at Jayde’s right side instead of left, because the wind had shifted.

Uneventful, Fed voice noted.

(Good.)

Also warm-thinking.

(What.)

Fish-cake warm. Xingteng-teasing warm. Yinglong-not-breathing warm. You’ve been warm-thinking for six hours.

(...so.)

So. I’m noting it.

(Shut up.)

Affectionately noted.

The third waypoint arrived at mid-morning of the second day, in the exact timing they had agreed. The sisters were there before her, standing at the crossroads in the specific slight-alertness that meant they had arrived early and had been listening for her approach. Yinglong raised her hand. Xingteng raised hers.

”You’re alive,” Xingteng observed.

”You’re also alive.”

”Disappointingly.”

”Xingteng.”

”Yinglong.”

”Don’t tell our clients.”

”Your contracts went well?”

”Adequately,” Xingteng said.

”Very well,” Yinglong translated.

”How about yours?”

”Four men attempted to persuade me that I should donate my cargo to their commercial enterprise.”

”And?”

”They left. Unpersuaded of their own enterprise’s merit.”

”Efficient.”

”I try.”

They resumed formation — the four-person point-flanks-rear, the eerie correctness, the same as before.

They had walked perhaps a quarter-league west when Yinglong stopped in the road.

Her hand went to the inner pocket of her coat.

Jayde, registering the stop before she registered the hand-movement, turned. Reiko paused behind her. Xingteng, already half-stopping, dropped her hand to her sword-hilt in the automatic reflex of a warrior who had experienced her sister’s posture going unexpectedly tense and had not yet evaluated why.

Yinglong withdrew from the inner pocket a small silver-edged folded message-card, of the specific kind that cultivator family-bonds used to pass fast communication between kin.

”It wasn’t there when we left,” she said, almost to herself. ”Someone’s tagged me on the road.”

”From?”

Yinglong opened the card. Read it. Her face did something small and private — the specific expression of a person receiving news from people they had not expected to hear from today.

”Our brothers.”

”Your brothers.”

”Our three brothers,” Yinglong said, ”and a family friend, have apparently been half a day’s walk from here for the last six days, on a contract they will not discuss, in a valley they have described as quiet, which for our brothers means they are hiding from something, and they have only just discovered — because my brothers are not, historically speaking, observant — that Xingteng and I have been working out of Obsidian City for two Pavilion months without telling them.”

Xingteng made a small sound that was not quite a laugh. It was the sound of a woman who was, at this precise moment, entirely unsurprised.

”They’re offended,” Xingteng said.

”They’re deeply offended,” Yinglong confirmed. ”Furious, in fact. The middle one sent the card. I can tell by the handwriting. He has invited us — invited is a generous word — he has informed us that we will be presenting ourselves at their camp for supper. Tonight. No exceptions. They are making stew.”

”Stew.”

”Stew.”

”Jayde,” Yinglong said, turning to her, ”I have a favour to ask.”

Jayde raised an eyebrow.

”My brothers are,” Yinglong said, with the specific careful phrasing of a woman selecting her words for a friend she did not wish to frighten off, ”a lot. Three of them. All of them large. All of them opinionated. And a fourth man with them who is quieter and older and does not speak very much. They have not met anyone of mine in some years. Normally, when I have a new friend, I do not tell them, because my brothers become — invested. They make pronouncements. They ask questions not entirely within the boundaries of good social form. They test her stew.”

”Test her stew.”

”You bring the stew. They sample it. They make observations. It’s a family trait. We believe it indicates care. Others have found it overwhelming.”

”Yinglong.”

”Would you come with us?”

Jayde held her gaze.

”You want me to meet your brothers.”

”Xingteng and I,” Yinglong said, her voice gone quieter, ”have been away from our family for some time. We have not had anyone to introduce to them for a long time. You are — you are our friend. We would like our brothers to know that we have made a friend. If you are willing.”

Behind Yinglong, Xingteng — who had been watching the road and who had not been watching her sister — said, without turning:

”She’s blushing. Look at her. Yinglong, you’re blushing.”

”I am not.”

”You are the colour of Mother’s kitchen bricks.”

”I am not.”

”Jayde, my sister is blushing.”

”She is, a little,” Jayde agreed, her mouth doing the small, amused thing.

”I am not blushing. I am asking a friend for a favor. Friends ask each other favors. There is no blushing involved in the asking of favors. It is a perfectly normal —”

”I’ll come,” Jayde said.

Yinglong stopped.

”You — will.”

”I’ll come. Of course I’ll come.”

Yinglong’s face did the small-private thing it had done when the fish cake vanished. Xingteng, beside her, made an entirely audible small sound of affection and immediately pretended she had not.

[Jayde,] Reiko said through the bond, [she really was blushing.]

I know.

[How are you so good at this?]

I’m a Commander. I had to learn how to say yes to the right things in time.

[Filed.]

***

The detour took them off the westward road and up into a fold of the ranges neither of Jayde’s previous trips had covered — through a narrow pass between two ridges, natural camouflage in the specific way old geology could camouflage a thing when it wanted to, steep stone walls on either side, the road narrowing to a footpath that forced them into single file, the wind funnelling up from a valley below in a thin continuous hush.

Yinglong led. Xingteng took the rear. Jayde walked point of the shortened three-person formation with Reiko close at her right side and Takara tight-curled on her shoulder.

Halfway up the pass, Reiko lifted his great silver-black head once.

[Jayde.]

I feel it.

[It’s old.]

Very.

[Not hostile. Just — deep. The way the Pavilion’s archive is deep. The way Isha’s voice is deep. That kind of depth.]

Jayde’s bond to the Pavilion — the quiet, always-on resonance that existed beneath every conversation, every breath, every movement she had made since she had first stepped into her own soul space and found it full of family — pulsed, once. Not in response to anything she had done. In response to something the valley ahead had done.

She slowed in the pass.

Isha, she sent, through the Pavilion thread.

[I am here, Commander.]

The valley ahead. Tell me what you’re reading.

A pause. Not the pause of a being who did not know the answer. The pause of a being who knew the answer and was choosing how to present it.

[Interesting,] Isha said finally. His voice in her head had the specific warm texture of a scholar who had just identified a thing he had been wondering about for some time. [That resonance pattern — I know it.]

What is it?

[I will not name it for you in advance,] Isha said, with the infuriating scholarly care he always applied to revelations he considered important. [You will see it in a moment. When you see it, if you do not recognise it, I will tell you. But I wish you to see it first. I wish your instincts on it, Commander, before I contaminate them with mine.]

Isha.

[Humour me.]

Fine.

Yinglong, ahead of her, had paused in the pass without turning around. Her shoulders had the precise tension of someone who was pretending not to have noticed the pause behind her and was very aware of it.

”Jayde?”

”Moving,” Jayde said, and moved.

The pass opened.

The valley was small — perhaps a quarter-league across at its widest — bowl-cupped between the two ridges, floored with the pale grey of winter grass that had not been touched by frost because something warm beneath it had kept the frost from settling. At the centre of the bowl, on a small rise that was almost too symmetrical to be natural, stood —

A ring of stones.

Jayde’s breath did the small pause of a cultivator recognising something.

Not a ring in any modern sense. Older than that. A low formation of seven weathered standing stones, set in a circle perhaps five paces across, each stone worked with glyphs that had been cut deep once and smoothed almost to illegibility by the long, patient work of wind and winter. In the centre of the ring, the earth had sunk slightly — the way the ground sank where something underground had once channelled essence and no longer did. The stones were not glowing. They were not humming. But the air above the ring held the specific faint warmth of a formation that had once been active and had not, in the long count of years since, forgotten itself.

The Pavilion bond pulsed in Jayde again. Not a call. A recognition.

[Ah,] Isha said quietly, with the specific satisfied softness of a scholar whose hypothesis had been confirmed. [There.]

Isha. What am I looking at?

[Luminari work,] he said. [Dormant. Very old. Over two hundred thousand years, give or take a couple of millennia. The resonance pattern is unmistakable to anyone who has studied them — which, as I have lamented repeatedly in my archives, very few beings on Doha still have. Commander.]

Dormant.

[Sleeping,] Isha corrected. [There is a distinction. Dormant implies abandoned. This is sleeping. It will wake, if the right hand touches it with the right intent. Not today. Today it is resting. File it, Commander. You will want to know about this place later.]

Later.

[Later,] Isha confirmed. [For now — the sisters’ brothers await you. Attend to the social task in front of you.]

Yinglong, four paces ahead on the valley floor, had turned and was watching Jayde’s face with an expression that did not match her mercenary-cover and that she did not quite know she was making. Xingteng, beside her, had stopped entirely. Her haunted grey eyes were on Jayde, and her breath had gone very small.

From the far side of the valley, half-obscured by the slope of the rise, a voice called.

”Sisters!”

Yinglong turned toward it. Her face broke, fractionally, into a real smile.

”Brothers.”

Four figures at the valley’s far edge, rising from a small campfire that Jayde had not registered until this moment because all her attention had been on the stone ring. Three of them were broad-shouldered, tall, in the unmistakable easy stances of warriors who considered this clearing theirs. One of them apart. Standing slightly back. Not approaching.

Watching Jayde.

She did not need to meet his eyes to feel it. The watcher’s attention arrived across the half-league of open valley with the specific cold-still quality of a predator assessing whether what it was looking at was prey, threat, or something else entirely. His eyes were mercury silver. They did not blink.

Takara, on her shoulder, had gone absolutely still.

Jayde did not reach for Vael’kir. She did not change her stance. She registered the watcher and the three broad-shouldered brothers and the distance between them and herself, and filed the tactical geometry in the slow, measured way Commanders filed such things.

[Jayde,] Reiko said through the bond, so softly it was almost a breath. [The watcher is wrong.]

I know.

[He is very wrong.]

I know, Reiko. Wait.

Yinglong had raised her hand to call back to the brothers. The three broad ones were grinning already, crossing the valley toward her with the opened arms of men who were determined to be loud and affectionate about a sister they had missed.

The watcher had not moved.

His mercury eyes were still on Jayde.

Takara, on her shoulder, had not moved either. His small body had gone the specific tension-still it went when something in his environment had registered as a problem he did not yet have permission to address.

The valley waited.

Jayde, who had walked Commanders through worse opening positions than this, drew a slow, measured breath. Greeted Yinglong’s brothers in her mind. Ran the protocol. Filed the watcher as the person to defuse first, the brothers as the persons to defuse second, and the sisters as the persons who would handle themselves. Planned the smile she would offer the oncoming brother. Planned the observation she would make about his stew, which Yinglong had told her they would sample.

All of which she had planned, and was about to execute, in the remaining three heartbeats before the valley stopped being the valley she had walked into.