Epilogue One Year Later
The forty men lay scattered across the mountain pass like particularly unfortunate autumn leaves.
Sword Lady Mei cleaned her blade without looking at them, hair-ribbon flipping in the wind. There was nothing to look at. They had made their choices.
“Thirty-eight,” drawled the man behind her.
She turned.
Leng Shao-yu was leaning against the cliff face with his arms crossed, with the expression of a man who found everything mildly interesting and nothing particularly alarming.
His ink-stained fingers. His scholar’s robes.
His infuriating smirk. Everything about him was entirely unsuitable for a mountain pass in late autumn.
He had not drawn his sword. He never drew his sword. He did other things instead, quiet careful devastating things, and the results were largely the same.
She hated him.
“Forty,” she said.
“Two escaped over the eastern ridge.” He tilted his head. “I let them go.”
“You let them—”
“They’ll report back to their master to let them know the attempt failed. We can follow the trail back.” A pause. “You’re welcome.”
Sword Lady Mei had been the finest blade in the pugilistic world for ten years. She had faced down clan elders and corrupt magistrates and one extremely memorable river demon without her composure flickering once. She was lethal. She was unflappable.
She was going to put this man in the ground.
“We’re going the same direction,” he said before she could speak. “Single and double rooms in the inns cost the same.” He smiled. Her eyes narrowed. Nothing good ever came out of that smile. “It would be wasteful not to travel together.”
“I travel alone,” she said.
“You did,” he agreed pleasantly. “Before me.”
The carriage lurched violently to the left, pitching Yun-si into the side panel.
Yun-si grabbed the window with one hand and her notebook with the other, ink smudging across Sword Lady Mei’s most withering comeback. Outside she heard Ting-zhi’s unhurried voice directing the horse around what sounded like a significant hole in the road.
The carriage settled.
She looked at the swash of ink obliterating the bottom of the page, then lifted the curtains separating her and Ting-zhi on the driving seat. He looked relaxed with one hand easy on the reins, the posture of a man entirely unbothered by nearly sending his wife into a ditch.
“You hit a hole,” she said accusingly.
“There was a hole,” he agreed, without turning around. “In the road.”
“That you were driving on.”
“Roads have holes sometimes.” A pause. “How’s Sword Lady Mei?”
She looked back at the page. The ink had consumed approximately three lines of her best work, including the comeback and the beginning of whatever devastating thing was going to happen next, which she now could not remember.
“She was about to say something very cutting,” Yun-si said. “You ruined it.”
“Mm. What was she going to say?”
“I don’t know now. You made me lose it.”
“She could always just cut him,” he offered. “She usually cuts people when she runs out of words.”
Yun-si opened her mouth. Closed it. This was unfortunately accurate—Sword Lady Mei did like to cut people down when a scene wasn’t going her way, which several readers had written to Old Wang about, and which Old Wang had passed along with the note consider giving her more words.
“She has plenty of words,” Yun-si said with dignity.
“The last book had a fight scene every time she and Leng Shao-yu were in a room together for more than three pages.”
Leng Shao-yu. The rival’s name. Said by Ting-zhi in that unbothered tone of his, in that casual way one used to reference a familiar friend
She didn’t know why it bothered her so much to hear him say it.
“The road,” she said, with great composure, “requires your full attention.”
“The road is fine.” But she could hear that almost-laugh, contained, which she had learned was worse than the actual laugh because it meant he was enjoying himself thoroughly and being very restrained about it. “I’ve read all four books, you know. Leng Shao-yu is very well drawn. Very specific.”
“He’s fictional.”
“Of course.” The horse took a curve, smooth and unhurried. “He does this thing where he arranges things in advance because he knows what she’s going to want before she asks. Very particular character detail.”
“Many characters do that.”
“Name one.”
She looked at the ink smudge across the page.
Looked at the beautiful mountains rolling past the window, the kind of landscape she had been writing about her whole life without ever seeing.
A hawk circled somewhere above the treeline, unhurried, surveying everything below with the magnificent indifference of something that had never once been teased about its own fiction.
She leaned further out the window as the road curved and something new appeared—a valley, green and wide, the river far below catching the last of the afternoon light like someone had dropped a mirror into the landscape.
Ting-zhi’s hand came back through the gap in the curtains, palm up, without a word.
She looked at it.
“You need both hands to drive,” she said.
“The road is straight for the next li. Give me the notebook.”
“Why.”
“Because you’re about to lean out the window to see the valley better and I’d rather hold the notebook than watch it fall down a mountain.”
She looked at the valley. Looked at the notebook. Looked at his hand, still patiently extended, going nowhere.
She put the notebook in it.
Then she leaned out the window, both hands on the frame, the wind hitting her face cold and clean and smelling of pine and distant rain, the valley spreading below her enormous and unmapped and entirely hers to write.
Behind her, she heard the soft sound of a page turning.
“Leng Shao-yu,” Ting-zhi said, with great thoughtfulness, “is very handsomely described.”
“Give me back my notebook.”
“‘His eyes held the particular quality of someone who saw everything and revealed nothing, dark as ink, steady as—’“
“Give me back my notebook right now.”
The almost-laugh became a full laugh. He handed it back through the curtain without looking, his attention returning to the road, shoulders shaking.
As much as she hated to admit it, Sword Lady Mei’s books had become even more popular ever since she introduced the enigmatic Leng Shao-yu.
Old Wang had said in his last letter that her latest Sword Lady Mei huaben had claimed the coveted top spot on the Bestselling Huaben Chart, pushing Moonlit Brush into second place.
Sword Lady Mei could afford to cut more people down.
She drew her sword and flew at Leng Shao-yu, her blade glinting in the setting sun—