Chapter 22.5: Epilogue – The Idea

I dropped Lu Fang’s body onto the ground.

I wiped the dagger on my trousers and turned and looked at the commons where the militia were disarming the surviving soldiers and Hao was pulling Shan to his feet with his hands bound by rope.

“Bind the survivors and treat the wounded. Treat ours first, then we treat theirs. Someone get Suyin to check Hao’s arm.”

People moved when I spoke. The village responded to my voice the way it usually responded to Hao’s.

In the meantime I walked through the gate and past the road where Lu Fang’s cart sat empty, and further beyond the tree line where the northern approach met the open fields.

I made it thirty meters into the trees before I vomited.

I braced myself against a birch trunk and emptied everything in my stomach onto the forest floor, heaving until there was nothing left, and then heaving again because my body hadn’t caught up to what I had done. My hands gripped the bark hard enough to tear it.

When the nausea finally passed, I stood still and drew in deep restorative breaths with my forehead against the tree and the dagger still in my hand.

I cleaned the still bloody steel on a handful of leaves and sheathed it against my forearm and wiped my mouth with my sleeve.

Then I walked back to the village.

Administrator Wen conducted business while the blood on the ground was still drying.

Lu Fang’s surviving soldiers sat in a line near the grain bins, hands bound, heads down. Seven of them. Five hadn’t made it. Their bodies were being moved to the edge of the commons by militia volunteers who handled the dead with a soldier’s respect. After all, they were just like them in a way, farmers and countrymen who were forced to fight in a battle that they had no chance of winning.

Hao approached me before I found him.

His knuckles were split and his left wrist was splinted, probably fractured from blocking the hill tribe cultivator’s attack that was aimed directly at me. The splint appeared to have been Suyin’s doing, no doubt done at the behest of Mother.

He looked at me and I saw the question form before he asked it.

“Are you hurt?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Your hands….”

I looked down and saw that my palms were raw and bleeding from the birch bark. I hadn’t noticed.

“Not from the fight,” I said hurriedly.

Hao studied my face. He had a way of looking at people that stripped the surface away, and he was doing it now, reading whatever was written underneath the composure I was holding together.

“I saw you kill him,” Hao said.

It took all I could to not flinch at his words. “He was going to reach the road. If he made it back to Meishan, then the Prefect would’ve sent everything he had.”

“I know why you did it.” Hao’s voice was quiet. “I’m just asking, are you okay?”

The question was so simple it almost broke me. Are you okay?

“I don’t know yet,” I replied. It was honest as I could be about it. The feelings were far too complicated and there was far more work to be done. “Ask me tomorrow.”

He nodded. He didn’t push. He just gave me a quick hug of relief and then turned to help the militia with the bodies.

That was Hao. He’d fought a cultivator hand to hand, taken damage, won, and his first priority walking out of the fight was checking whether his younger brother was okay.

I didn’t deserve him.

I approached Administrator Wen in the commons and saw that he had set up a field desk on the same crate Hao used for village meetings. He addressed me without looking up.

“Seven taken prisoner with five soldiers dead. One cultivator detained, and one tax collector killed.” He said each item like a line on an inventory sheet. “The imprisoned soldiers and the cultivator will be offered terms. Those who accept service under the Western Reaches will be reassigned. Those who refuse will be released at the border.”

I raised a brow at his words. “Released?”

“The Lord of the Western Reaches doesn’t execute prisoners of war who surrender voluntarily. It’s policy.” He glanced up. “It also encourages future surrenders, which reduces the cost of territorial expansion.”

I recognized the logic.

“What happens now?” I asked.

“Formal integration into the Western Reaches administrative framework begins immediately. Your iron supply contract remains active. Tax assessment at standard rates after the autumn harvest. A garrison element will be stationed within response distance on a permanent basis.” His brush moved. “Commander Xu will issue a summons when she requires your presence. Expect it within three years.”

“Why in three years?”

“The Lord of the Western Reaches has a standing treaty with the Lord of Qinghe. It expires in the winter of the third year.”

That made sense to me. She more than likely expected mobilization around that time. Moving troops took time, which meant the campaign would occur in the spring or summer of the following year. I figured that she would want to discuss more than just the village, but our training grounds as well.

But that was a worry for another time.

Hao on the other hand didn’t wait for Wen’s process to finish. By the time the sun began to rise above the commons, he was sitting with Shan, the hill clan cultivator, and they were sharing rice from the same bowl.

Shan had been pinned under Hao’s knee only a few hours ago, and now he was eating with the man who’d beaten him and listening to whatever Hao was saying with an expression I recognized. The expression of someone caught in Hao’s gravity.

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By evening, two of the captured soldiers had joined the conversation. By nightfall, Shan was helping Gao Ren stack firewood for the celebration feast.

The families who hadn’t fought were watching from doorways and windows. The children had been kept inside during the ambush and were now emerging out into the world. A woman from the Liu family was scrubbing the commons with river water and a brush, working at a dark stain that wasn’t going to come out.

I turned and found Suyin behind the Wei compound.

She was sitting on the ground with her back against the wall, knees drawn up with her arms wrapped around them. Her spear was leaning against the wall beside her. The one she’d thrown was still somewhere in the commons, probably being collected with the other weapons. The one beside her was her training spear. She’d grabbed it after the fight, I guessed, because holding it must have provided some comfort to her.

Her hands were shaking.

I sat down beside her an arm’s length apart, looking at the same patch of sky above the eastern fields.

We sat there for a while.

“I keep seeing it,” she began to say. “The spear going in and the sound it made. He screamed and I was glad. For a second I was glad he was hurt, and then I wasn’t glad, and then I didn’t feel anything at all.”

I held out my hand with my palm raised up. The tremor was back, the same one that had started on the road and stopped had now returned once again.

Suyin looked at my shaking hand then held hers out and it trembled just like mine did.

“Matching set,” I said.

She almost laughed. It came out closer to a breath. She took my hand and held it the way she had the night at the training post, her fingers wrapping around mine, both of us trembling against each other.

I looked at her. Fourteen years old. Dark hair pulled loose from the working knot, strands stuck to her face with sweat and dust.

I felt something shift in my chest. An awareness that had been building for weeks, something I’d been filing under “later” alongside every other personal thing I couldn’t afford to process.