18. Disappeared

Lao Wang was interred in the town’s public cemetery with all the honors befitting “the Meng patriarch,” with many Yiling citizens and the Nie standing as witness. She and the boys cried as they burned joss paper and incense, while Meng Yao presided over the event with the exacting etiquette Yanli had come to expect from him.

Privately, she worried about burying him with the wrong name, but Wei Ying assured her that the old man had made peace with it long ago, and had told Ying’er that her cooking was worth the displeasure of his ancestors. She smiled through her tears and picked the fanciest, most expensive memorial tablet design for them to keep in the house to honor him, and had A’Cheng carve his real name, Wang Qiang, on the back of it.

(She wondered if it was even his real name, given what he had revealed to her about his past, but it was too late to ask him anymore.)

“Only the best for the Grandmaster Pickpocket of Yiling!” Ying’er said brightly after they set it up in their private room that was, now, their ancestor hall. He gently leaned Lao Wang’s (scrubbed clean) cane against the shelf holding the tablet before breaking down in heaving sobs. A’Cheng held him tight and A’Yao stood close, a hand on each of their shoulders, firm and steady as a rock.

As for the Nie, A’Yao was right: Nie Huaisang had his guards wrapped around his little finger. He demanded to stay for two weeks to watch Yanli embroider several custom commissions for him, and not a single person, Nie or Wei, tried to argue him out of it.

At least he paid top dollar for the work, Yanli thought, as he also picked out three ready-made fans and then bought them for three times her asking price. The only reason she did not refuse the outrageous sums was because A’Yao assured her that it was still half the price of what her work was selling for in larger cities throughout the jianghu. She tried very hard not to be too prideful about that, but the amused expression on A’Yao’s face told her that she failed.

The Nie set up camp outside of the siheyuan in a nearby field, much to the spectacle of her neighbors, who were mostly farmers. Within days, the rumor was out that they had been chasing the bandits all the way from Qinghe and killed them in a big, dramatic battle at Meng Manor. And Grandfather Meng had died defending Miss Meng’s honor! What a noble way for the Meng Patriarch to move on to a glorious rebirth!

Yanli thought it was ridiculous, but Nie Huaisang looked very smug about it.

In the end, though, the Nie spent most of their time with Yanli and her family. Nie Zonghui was very aware of just how much food his squad needed, so sent several of them into town and bought enough staples to get them through, which endeared them to every grocer a ten-mile radius. A brother-sister duo also volunteered to help in the kitchen and turned out to be decent cooks on their own. One of them specialized in grilling meat, which earned her the immediate adoration of Ying’er and A’Cheng. Yanli thought they would have asked for her hand in marriage if she had not been a grandmother over forty years of age.

Wei Ying recovered quickly from his trial with the Burial Mounds, but was unable to explain to anyone exactly what had happened to him. The Nie medic told Yanli and A’Yao that it was something akin to a qi deviation, and they needed to be careful, since it was possible the experience had made him more susceptible to the strong yin of resentful energy than most young men his age were.

Ying’er was cagey when asked about it, but claimed he could not explain it with words. Yanli and A’Yao agreed privately to keep a sharp eye out for him.

Nie Zonghui generously offered to help all three Meng boys with their sword work, much to their undying joy (or in A’Yao’s case, his very polite and deferential gratitude), saying that since they weren’t working with sabers, he was not revealing any sect secrets. The only one who was unhappy about that was Nie Huaisang, who took to hiding behind Yanli when practice started up every morning. She did not mind because he was a fan of classical poetry and so they spent the time discussing (and arguing about) their favorite poems.

But eventually the custom pieces were finished and Nie Zonghui hauled Nie Huaisang onto a saber, despite his tears, and flew north again, headed back to Qinghe.

Then, quietly, everything returned to normal.

A’Yao took over the accounting business from a very relieved A’Cheng while Yanli finally finished converting the leather-smith workshop into a warehouse for all of her supplies and fabrics. Wei Ying adjusted his anti-pest talismans, which littered the kitchen and pantry, to account for silk, cotton, and linen. Yanli really wished there was a way to sell the talismans in town that did not reveal the fact that the Meng household was secretly filled with cultivators.

A’Yao’s penance for disappearing for so long was to regale the boys every night with a story about a place he visited while on the run. His perfect memory meant he remembered all sorts of details about even the most modest villages, and he was a decent storyteller (a skill she suspected he learned at the brothel, but she knew better than to ask). Naturally, he turned it into a challenging game that kept them all riveted far past nightfall for months on end.

“False! False! They do not ride goats like horses in Shangdian!” A’Cheng shouted out. He was busy wrapping a new skein of floss around a bobbin, so did not look up.

“You don’t know that,” A’Yao said with his blandest expression. Yanli thought he could play the most high-stakes game of weiqi with the emperor and never twitch a muscle.

“No no no, he’s right. There’s no way they ride goats like horses,” Wei Ying said, also not looking up from his project. He was sketching out a new landscape screen design for Yanli to embroider.

“That’s two votes. JieJie?” He smiled at her. She knew it was fake because it did not show his dimples.

“I also say no.” She shook her head.

“You are correct! They do not. I never saw any goats much bigger than what we have here in Yiling.”

“Ha! I knew it!” A’Cheng crowed in triumph.

“But that is where the story ends tonight. It is late, and everyone must go to bed,” A’Yao said, to groans of disappointment.

Yanli watched Wei Ying and A’Cheng carefully. In the months since the Nie had left, they had sometimes acted in secretive ways that bothered her. A’Yao had chuckled when she mentioned it, noting that they were both now fifteen years old, and that “boys keep secrets that girls do not want to know about.” She did him a kindness and did not mention that he was only seventeen himself.

They scuttled off to bed while Yanli and A’Yao made sure the house was closed up for the night, drowsey and moving slowly in the late autumn chill.

As she walked through the courtyard past the stump of the dead pear tree, which now served as the base for a large pot of kitchen herbs, she looked up towards the dark peaks of the Burial Mounds, where the miasma of resentful energy always swirled, blacker than the darkest of nights. Yanli had become inured to it, as most Yiling residents were, but no one could ever forget it entirely. It was a blight on the land and forever doomed the towns that skirted around it to poverty and instability. When she and A’Yao had finally purchased the house in full, the former owner made it clear there were no take-backs.

She went to bed, unsettled and exhausted, and suffered nightmares the whole night.

When she woke, it was to an entirely too quiet household. It was also very late in the morning, which was highly unusual. Wei Ying would sleep until afternoon if left unsupervised, but she always made sure everyone was up by dawn to start their chores and be ready for their studies after breakfast.

A’Yao was not a morning person either, but at least he got up with minimal fussing…without any fussing at all, usually, since getting him to engage in conversation before his morning tea was a fruitless endeavor. He and Wei Ying could not possibly be more different in personality, but before mid-morning they both walked around quietly, squinting at the world as if betrayed by the sun itself.

She sat up slowly, feeling heavy and lethargic. She rarely drank liquor, as it was ill advised for her health, but she knew what it felt like to wake up with a hangover.

They had not drunk any alcohol the night before.

Getting dressed, she opened the door to her room and headed over to the boys’ room and knocked on the frame.

“Uh?” A’Yao’s voice called out, sounding the way she felt. She gave him a moment to get his bearings. “What the hell?”

He almost never cursed, so she knew he was as thrown by the situation as she was.

“A’Yao, I just woke up myself. Are the boys in there with you?”

There was a long pause, and Yanli humored herself with the thought that she could hear his brain trying to engage.

“No.” He sounded confused. She heard him getting dressed and a moment later he slid the door open, one hand pulling up his long hair into a bun, a hair pin clutched in his teeth and a questioning expression on his face.

“I don’t know. I just woke up too. I feel hungover.”

He nodded, then pinned his hair in place. “I did too.”

He probably cleared it with his qi, she thought jealously as she led them into the courtyard. They stood there, looking around. They could feel from the energies around them that, aside from the chickens, they were the only ones in the house.

“What did those hooligans do?” A’Yao asked through clinched teeth.

Yanli thought for a second. “They served us tea last night, remember? They made a big production out of it.”

He put a hand over his eyes. “They drugged us and ran away? But why, A’Li?” He looked at the house gate, which was as closed as they had left it the night before, locked from the inside. Not that it was hard for the boys to simply use their cultivation to air-walk up and over the walls, they did it all the time. Wei Ying loved sitting on the roof at dusk.

“And where?” He added with a huff.

Yanli wracked her brain, dismissing options like “returned to Lotus Pier” and “joined a traveling circus.” As she stood there thinking, A’Yao straightened up, his gaze focused far past the house.

Toward the Burial Mounds.

She turned around so fast she almost made herself dizzy. There, in the ever-dark haze of the mountains, a series of red lightning bolts were shooting up off the east side of the nearest peak in a display she had never seen the likes of in the four years they had lived there.

“Those fucking idiots,” A’Yao shouted and ran for the gate, Yanli hot on his heels.