Xiahou Zuo gave the order, and every last official of the Xinzhou prefecture was beheaded — from the prefect down to the constables, over three hundred heads fell in the streets. For a time, blood flowed in rivers.

In a time of such upheaval, Xiahou Zuo’s actions could not be measured against any statute. In this Dachu, the law had long since become a dead letter.

The people of the city were first frightened, and then elated.

Most people are quick to find contentment. When they learned that all the officials who had lorded over them had lost their heads, they felt that good days must be coming.

As the common people always said: *See — the bad times have passed. Can the good times be far behind?*

Xiahou Zuo returned from overseeing the executions in the street and, the moment he stepped through the gate of the prefectural compound, found Li Chi standing beneath a bare and leafless tree in a daze. He circled Li Chi once.

“What are you staring at?” Xiahou Zuo asked.

Li Chi sighed. “I’m working out what to do with the silver.”

“I’ve done the arithmetic,” said Xiahou Zuo. “I’ll take eighty thousand — the rest is yours. The silver confiscated from Liu Wenju’s household comes to over eighty thousand in total; I’ll take all of it for the fallen soldiers’ death compensation and for building the monument. There should still be a great deal left over.”

Li Chi shook his head. “We can’t touch all of it.”

He looked at Xiahou Zuo and said: “The forty-five thousand that Cui Hansheng and the others pooled together — that I can take. But everything from the confiscations has to stay, exactly as it is.”

Xiahou Zuo asked: “Leave it behind?”

A moment later he understood, and sighed. “You’re right. If we don’t leave some for my father, his mood is going to be hard to read.”

Li Chi gave a sound of agreement and smiled. “Whatever it is, it’s income. Leave the silver, come back to it later — it should come in useful.”

Xiahou Zuo clapped him on the shoulder and said: “This morning I sent the letter out. By tomorrow at the latest my father’s men should arrive. His main force isn’t far — he himself may well show up, which means I need to leave today.”

Li Chi paused. “Tomorrow is New Year’s.”

Xiahou Zuo suddenly reached out and pulled Li Chi into a firm embrace, then said: “New Year’s or not — for brothers like you and me, it doesn’t matter that much. You regard me as your elder brother. That’s enough.”

He let go and smiled. “You’d all better leave quickly too. Knowing my father the way I do, if you stay, that forty-five thousand taels won’t be leaving with you.”

Li Chi nodded. “Fair enough. Let’s go.”

“I’ll take fifty of my men north,” said Xiahou Zuo. “I’ll leave the other fifty to escort you back to Jizhou. The roads aren’t safe, and you’re carrying all that silver — enough to drive men to madness.”

Li Chi shook his head. “No need. The people who can protect me should be arriving soon enough.”

“Who?” Xiahou Zuo asked.

“Unless I’m mistaken,” Li Chi said, “Yu Chaozong will send someone to find me. Working through the possibilities — it can only be Old Zhuang coming back. If Yu Chaozong’s intentions toward me are only moderate, then Old Zhuang will come alone. If he comes with men, then Yu Chaozong’s message is: I’m here whenever you’re ready, no pressure.”

Xiahou Zuo said: “If it’s the latter, then he’s a better man than I gave him credit for.”

Li Chi smiled. “Relax. I’m not foolish.”

Xiahou Zuo shook his head. “Everyone thinks you’re sharp enough — that you can scheme but can’t be schemed against. But I know something they don’t. You’re a fool. A genuine, bone-deep fool.”

Li Chi stood there blinking.

Xiahou Zuo reached up and ruffled Li Chi’s hair. “You… whoever manages to fool you, and get you to call them brother — well…”

He decided not to finish the sentence, because he knew Li Chi had his own plans. And whatever else could be said of Yu Chaozong, he really was considerably better than most men in the official world. Thinking it through honestly, Xiahou Zuo had to ask himself: was Yu Chaozong actually worse than his own father, Prince Yu?

Truthfully — letting Li Chi follow the great aristocratic families to fight for the world would end with those families swallowing him whole, without leaving so much as a scrap.

“Then I’ll wait until first light tomorrow,” Xiahou Zuo said. “If Yu Chaozong’s man has arrived by then, I’ll feel easy about heading north. If not, I’ll leave fifty men to escort you to Jizhou and have them find their way back to me from there.”

Li Chi gave a sound of assent. “Then let’s see the new year in tonight — never mind whether it’s the twenty-ninth or the thirtieth.”

Xiahou Zuo burst out laughing. “You really are a fool.”

The two of them walked back toward the residence. They had barely stepped through the gate when an aide came with an urgent report: a unit had appeared outside the city — roughly a hundred or more, armed and mounted double, appearing exceptionally formidable.

The man leading them said his surname was Zhuang, and had come to request an audience with Young Master Li.

Xiahou Zuo looked at Li Chi with curiosity. “You didn’t say anything about coming to Xinzhou when you left Daizhou Pass. How did Yu Chaozong’s man know to find you here?”

Li Chi smiled. “Old Zhuang is a man of few words, but he thinks things through carefully. When we left Daizhou Pass, I knew we couldn’t make it back before New Year’s. On the way we’d inevitably run into Prince Yu’s or Prince Wu’s forces and have to detour — and the only way to detour was through Xinzhou.”

Xiahou Zuo nodded. “Good. With him protecting you, I can rest easy.”

Before long, Zhuang Wudi led his men into the city. The unit that had numbered over two hundred before the battle at Daizhou Pass had suffered seventy or eighty casualties — now reduced to a hundred and twenty or so. But having come through that battle, these men looked sharper and harder than before.

Li Chi ran to the city gate to meet Zhuang Wudi. While still some distance away, Zhuang Wudi caught sight of Li Chi and grinned.

“Brother Zhuang.”

Li Chi clasped his hands in greeting.

Zhuang Wudi curled his lip. “Save the formalities. The men are hungry.”

“There’s food in the pot,” said Li Chi.

Zhuang Wudi swung down from his horse. “Then let’s go!”

With Zhuang Wudi’s arrival, most of Xiahou Zuo’s concerns settled. In truth, in all the world as it stood now, there were only two people whose wellbeing Xiahou Zuo could not bring himself to be indifferent to. One was his mother. The other was Li Chi.

As for his father — he had nothing to worry about there.

That night, everyone gathered together in Xinzhou. It was an unusual scene: a hundred frontier soldiers and a hundred-odd rebel fighters, seated together in open and cheerful revelry.

Without Li Chi, it was hard to imagine such a gathering ever taking place.

The next morning, Xiahou Zuo loaded up over eighty thousand taels of silver and rode back toward Daizhou Pass, leaving thirty soldiers to hold the compound and await the arrival of Prince Yu’s men.

Li Chi and the others set off in the opposite direction — Xiahou Zuo heading northeast, they heading southwest.

The return journey presented a considerably more imposing spectacle. With over a hundred formidable cavalry riders as escort and five or six large carts in a line, the procession carried a certain grandeur.

Li Chi and the others rode in the front carriage, which wasn’t cramped. The next three carried silver and supplies. Behind those, two more carriages: one for Yuan Jiabei’s family of three, one for Liu Yingyuan’s family of three.

They had barely left Xinzhou for half a day when Prince Yu arrived with his forces in person. Li Chi could imagine clearly the look on Prince Yu’s face when he learned that Xiahou Zuo had already departed — exasperated, with perhaps three parts quiet satisfaction mixed in.

His own men were taking over Xinzhou; he had gained another city. And the confiscated silver — there was more of it than what Li Chi and Xiahou Zuo had taken combined.

Li Chi had done this deliberately. If he had left no silver behind, life back in Jizhou would be difficult for all of them once Prince Yu returned. By leaving it, Prince Yu wouldn’t trouble himself over how much they had taken.

Sometimes surrendering a portion is how you secure a portion. Life itself was no different. Too full, and things overflow and break. The right measure is to be only half-satisfied.

The journey had exceeded all expectations when compared to how they’d left Jizhou. Setting out to see Zhuang Wudi off, none of them had anticipated stirring up trouble in the Yanshan mountains, nor going to Daizhou Pass to resist the Black Wu forces.

Still less had they expected to root out the scoundrels of Xinzhou and rescue Yuan Jiabei’s family and Liu Yingyuan’s family.

Everything felt at once as though it had all been arranged, and at the same time entirely accidental.

Among all of them, only two had experienced the whole journey as pure sightseeing: the Dog and Shen Diao.

Yu Jiuling looked around at everyone and then let out a sudden snicker.

Li Chi looked at him. “What are you laughing at? That came out rather sly-sounding.”

Yu Jiuling smiled. “Do you all remember why we left Jizhou in the first place?”

Without waiting for an answer, he laughed and said himself: “We left Jizhou to see Brother Zhuang home — and after all this wandering, we never sent him home at all.”

Zhuang Wudi: “I’ll send you home right now.”

Yu Jiuling shifted backward. “A gentleman uses words, not fists.”

“I’m not a gentleman,” said Zhuang Wudi.

“Don’t say that,” said Yu Jiuling earnestly. “How can you speak of yourself that way? I won’t stand for it — you are absolutely a gentleman. There are few men in this world with more of the gentleman in them than you. I’ll be upset if you keep talking like that.”

Zhuang Wudi: “Pfft!”

Yu Jiuling wiped his face. “See — so very gentlemanly…”

The road from Xinzhou to Jizhou was not short, but no one was in a rush. The journey was quiet and unhurried, a welcome ease after everything — at least far more relaxed than the Yanshan Camp or Daizhou Pass.

After ten days or so, they returned to Jizhou. And this time, Li Chi noticed something different about the city.

The previous year they had gone out before the new year and come back afterward; then, the desolation outside the walls had stood in stark contrast to the singing and dancing within. But this time, coming back, he found that beneath all the festive red decorations hung throughout the streets, not a single face wore any genuine joy. The entire city was gray — even draped in red, the color seemed leached into something colorless and dull.

The people were gray. The roof tiles were gray. The sky was gray. The world was gray.

With Prince Yu’s household token, it was no great difficulty to bring the whole group through the city gates. But the next question immediately presented itself.

All these people — where were they going to live?

Li Chi had been thinking it over for the entire journey. He was someone who habitually made preparations before things came to a head.

“Let’s buy a big property,” he said, looking at his master and the others. “One that can give everyone here a plausible and above-board identity, and that’s spacious enough for all of us.”

Yu Jiuling asked: “You’ve already decided on something, haven’t you.”

Li Chi nodded. “I have. We should buy the old premises that used to belong to the Yiji Hall and set up some kind of business there. That place has been sitting empty — nobody’s touched it since all those people died there. Merchants think it’s cursed and won’t go near it. And since last year, the people running businesses in the city have been struggling — everyone’s strapped for funds.”

He glanced back at the loaded carts and said: “We also need to find Liu Yingyuan’s family a proper place to settle. That location suits them well — they’d all have something useful to do.”

Changmei the Daoist asked: “What sort of business would we be running?”

Li Chi was quiet for a moment, then broke into a smile.

“A restaurant. I’ll be the head chef.”

Changmei the Daoist blinked, and then said: “Let’s just divide the silver and go our separate ways right now.”

Mister Yan, Yu Jiuling, and Zhuang Wudi raised their hands in unison: “Agreed!”

Shen Diao: “Hmph hmph…”

—