Chapter 191: Terms
The inn off the market square went by the Copper Kettle, and it was deep into a busy evening when they pushed through the door: full tables, a fog of woodsmoke and stew, and a landlord shaped like a rice barrel who took one look at Qingyue and brightened as if she’d walked in owing him money and come to pay it back.
"Young Mistress Su." He wiped his hands down his apron and bustled around the counter. "Didn’t reckon I’d see you back on this road."
"You still owe me a bottle of the good plum wine, Old Fu."
"Owe you two, and I know it." He beamed. "Rooms?"
Xuan laid a hand on the counter. "One."
He turned to Qingyue as he said it, a question rather than an assumption, the whole of it crossing the space between them in the half-breath before she answered.
Something shifted beneath the cool of her face, the frost easing back until it almost passed for a smile, and she gave the smallest nod. One room. That was fine. More than fine, said the warmth she let show now, and under it, plain as ink to anyone who’d learned to read her, the understanding that he might try his luck once the door was shut, and that she wouldn’t stop him.
[ Oh, smooth. ] Mira sounded entirely too pleased with him. [ Look at you, making moves. I’m getting secondhand butterflies over here. ]
’Not now.’
"One room," Old Fu said, and had the good grace to ask nothing further. "And the lad?"
Xuan tipped his head at the boy, who’d staked out a spot by the door with his satchel and his suspicion, missing none of it. "That depends on a conversation we’re about to have."
Qingyue took the key sliding across the counter. "I’m going to scrub a week of road off. Try not to buy anything you can’t afford while I’m gone." A pause, drier. "That includes people."
She took the stairs without waiting for an answer, and Xuan turned to the real work of the night.
He steered the boy to a corner table, put a bowl of stew and a torn loaf in front of him, and watched three days of hunger wrestle three days of paranoia. Hunger won in a rout. The kid ate like the bowl might be taken back.
"Name," Xuan said.
The boy spoke around a full mouth. "Does it change your offer?"
"No."
"Hao. Chen Hao, if you’re writing it down." He swallowed. "Half the province is named Chen, so don’t wear yourself out remembering it."
[ Chen Hao. ] Mira filed it away, delighted. [ Common as mud, worth ten times more. Get him. ]
"All right, Hao." Xuan leaned back. "Here’s where things stand. You’ve got a mind worth ten of anyone manning that gate and nothing else to your name: no papers, no coin, and nobody in this city who’d notice if you fell in the river. I’ve got a sect that needs exactly what’s rattling around in your skull, and a purse deep enough to feed you while you put it to use. So I’m going to hire you."
Hao lowered the spoon. For once the wariness had a direction to point in. "Hire me as what?"
"Strategist. Buyer. Whatever you want to call the man who turns a mountain of ore into something that can pay an army."
"That’s a heavy bet on a kid you met an hour ago."
’Mira’s never wrong about this,’ was what Xuan didn’t say. "I back my own read. The only question left is whether you’re worth it or whether you just move your mouth quickly."
"Terms," Hao said. The suspicion hadn’t left him, but the hunger in him had swung toward something a good deal bigger than stew.
"You work for Skyedge. I feed you, house you, put boots on you that have soles, and I never once ask where you’ve been or why gates with paperwork make you sweat. In exchange, that head of yours works for me. Three years. Whatever you build, the sect owns, and the sect sets your pay."
Hao laughed, short and disbelieving. "That’s not a job. That’s basically owning a man."
"It’s a roof and three meals more than you had this morning."
"It’s daylight robbery, is what it is." But he hadn’t left the chair. He was running the numbers, and the numbers were grim, and grim beat the gutter every day of the week.
"One year," he said. "Not three."
"Three."
"Two, and at the end I renegotiate or I walk. And if I make you money, real money, I take one coin in twenty of everything over whatever line you set. Not a wage. A cut. Wages are for people you can swap out."
Xuan studied him: a half-starved boy haggling percentages in boots with no soles left, furious and unbroken and quick as a struck match. Admiration was not the word he’d expected to feel tonight, and here it was anyway.
"Three years," Xuan said. "One coin in thirty, over a line I set. And you get the boots by morning."
Hao’s jaw flexed. It was a bad deal. It was a bad deal the way a plank is a bad boat, right up until the water’s at your chin.
"One in twenty-five," he tried.
"One in thirty. I’m the one who fed you."
Hao held out one more breath, hating every part of it, and spat in his palm and shoved it across the table, a scowl and a grin at war on his face. "Deal, you thief."
Xuan clasped the offered hand, spit and all, because you didn’t win a boy like this by wrinkling your nose at him.
[ Quarter of a million Origin Points just leapt a whole lot closer, ] Mira crowed. [ And he called you a thief while shaking on it. Marry Qingyue, keep this one, retire happy. ]
Xuan started to rise, the deal struck and the meal earned, the whole business tidier than he’d let himself hope. Hao beat him to it, wiping his palm down his shirt, his voice gone light and idle.
"Word of advice, since I work for you now." He nodded at the belt where the token had gone back out of sight. "Lead with the sect and you’ll get shrugs. Skyedge is a rumor this far south. But the young lord who snapped the Heavenly Sword Pavilion’s golden boy over his knee at Yuncheng and gave him his life back afterward?" The grin thinned to something older than his years. "That one, they tell stories about. You never said a word of it to me. I just like knowing who’s bought me before the ink’s dry."
Xuan didn’t move a muscle.
[ ...oh, ] Mira said, and all the fizz drained out of her. [ He put that together from a scrap of jade and your face. ]
Xuan looked at the boy, filthy and cocky and three days empty, already three moves ahead of every man who’d tried to stop him at that gate, and understood he had ridden into this city to buy himself a merchant and might have just bought something a great deal harder to keep on a leash.
"Finish your stew, Chen Hao," he said, and meant a good deal more by it than the words carried.