Chapter 190: A Good Acquisition
The line at the eastern gate crawled, and by the time they neared the front the sun had dropped well past noon. Merchants shuffled forward cart by cart while guards pried through cargo, thumbed travel papers, and now and again marched some unlucky traveler under the pale formation humming in the gatehouse arch.
Nobody put Xuan and Qingyue through any of it. A guard with a captain’s sash took one look at how they carried themselves, caught the press of cultivation rolling off them, and his questions dried up into a short bow and a wave. Cultivators didn’t wait in lines. That held true in every city on the map, and this one was no exception.
They had almost cleared the arch when the shouting started.
Wedged against the gatehouse wall, a boy was losing an argument with two guards. He looked no older than seventeen, all elbows and road dust, a battered satchel hugged to his chest like it held everything he owned. He had no cart and no papers, and from the state of his boots, nothing on him worth the trouble of a search.
"—I keep telling you, I can’t buy papers until I’m inside earning, and I can’t earn until you let me—"
"No papers, no gate. Move along before I move you."
The boy didn’t move. He switched tracks instead, quick, like a kid who’d hit this exact wall a hundred times and kept a dozen ways over it in his back pocket. "So log me as freight. Goods in transit, no named owner, and your own gate ledger allows it. Section nine. Charge me the cargo fee, pocket the coppers, and nobody above you ever hears a word. You come out ahead, I come out inside, everyone goes home happy."
The nearer guard opened his mouth, closed it, and plainly went hunting for section nine somewhere in his memory. He didn’t find it. "...Move."
Xuan had stopped his horse without deciding to, the reins slack in his hand.
[ Oh, hello. ] Mira came awake all at once, bright with interest. [ Xuan, the kid, not the guards. Look at what’s going on behind that face. ]
’I’m looking.’
[ Real talent up there, the strategy kind and the numbers kind both. He read that gate ledger like you read a duel. A planner and a trader in one skinny package, and he’s about to get tossed in a ditch for it. Drag him home to Skyedge and you’ve patched the exact leak your mountain’s been bleeding coin from. Also, footnote: a lovely way to chip at those two hundred fifty thousand Origin Points. ]
’You buried the lede with the footnote.’
Xuan swung down and crossed the last stretch of cobbles before the guard could follow through on the threat. "He’s with me," he said.
The guard rounded on him, jaw already set to snap at whoever was interrupting, and got no further than a breath. Xuan leaned a thin thread of qi on the air between them, enough that the man felt his knees go uncertain before his head worked out why. His other hand turned up to show the token resting on the palm: green sect-jade, Skyedge’s mark cut deep into the face.
The captain reached them fast. Whatever Skyedge meant this far south, the word cultivator meant the same everywhere, and none of it was worth a gate guard’s neck. "Young master, forgive us. We didn’t know the boy was with your party." He waved the two of them through with an eagerness that would have been comic on any calmer day.
The boy went rigid, satchel half-crushed against his ribs, and Xuan could all but hear the arithmetic racing along behind his face.
They passed under the arch together, the kid dropping into step half behind him, wary as a dog that had learned what boots were for.
Past the gate the city opened up in a rush of noise and bodies: hawkers bawling over each other, the reek of fish and tar and hot oil off the river, coin and cargo moving every way he looked.
Xuan read the whole of it the way he read anything with a price on it, weighing the crowds and the goods and the coin changing hands. Qingyue hadn’t oversold the place.
"You’re waiting for me to tell you the catch," Xuan said.
"I’m waiting to hear what it costs me." The boy kept his eyes on the crowd, marking exits. "Nobody spends a cultivator’s word on a stranger for nothing. So either you’re an idiot, which you’re not, or you want something off me."
"Not wrong."
"Careful, mostly. An idiot would’ve kept his papers." He risked a look up. "So what’s the price?"
Xuan weighed the kid, the question, and the small fortune Mira had just dropped in his lap. "A roof and a hot meal first. You can hear my terms once you’ve eaten. You look like you’ve been chewing on air for a week."
"Three days," the boy muttered, and scowled, furious he’d answered at all.
Qingyue had watched the whole thing without a trace of surprise. "There’s an inn off the market square," she said, turning her horse toward the thick of the city. "Warm beds, a kitchen that won’t poison you, and a landlord who still owes me from the last time I came through. Bring your stray. I want a bath and a wall between me and this road."
Xuan fell in after her. Behind him the boy hovered at the mouth of the street, weighing the cost of following against the cost of being left out on the stones, and, being cleverer than he was proud, followed.
[ I adore him, ] Mira sighed, happy as a cat in sun. [ Land him, Xuan. Whatever it takes. ]
’Working on it.’ Xuan watched the kid clock every alley and rooftop as he walked, trusting nothing on the street, least of all the man who’d just bought his way in. ’Which is the problem. A boy that clever doesn’t hand his whole life to a stranger because the stranger paid his gate fee.’
Three of them rode into the city now instead of two, toward a warm inn and a conversation Xuan hadn’t the first idea how to win.