“Well, the Vihnese do . . .”
“And I have every confidence that you will excel as it was expected that your great-grandfather would have done. You come from a good family, you are tenacious, you love the intricacies of the classics and how they bind the world to lawful congress, and anyway, the money is quite gone, and so your instruction is at an end.”
Dieu understood that at least, and nodded dejectedly, though she remembered to pay proper obeisance and thanks to her tutor before he set off for points unknown.
Then she handed the keys to the small house with the hawthorn tree in Hue County over to the impatient landlord, took a last long look around the town she had never left in all her life, and started the long trek east.
* * *
“Oh, we never knew any of that about Dieu,” rumbled Sinh Cam, and Sinh Loan nodded speculatively. Their faces possessed a similar curiosity, a strange thing to see stamped on the face of both a woman and a tiger. Sinh Hoa had dropped her head to her large paws, and she only blinked sleepily at the fire.
“It is appropriate they know more about Scholar Dieu,” Sinh Loan said finally, glancing down at her neatly filed nails. “Dieu was, for all of her blessings and beauty, actually a human after all. Next, you must speak of Ho Thi Thao.”
Sinh Loan sat up straight, giving the impression of a cat setting her tail neatly around her toes.
“Please, continue.”
Chih swallowed, remembered not to smile, and obeyed.
Chapter Five
IN THOSE DAYS, Ahn was not the great empire it would grow to be. It was instead one of sixteen warring states that had all declared themselves the heirs of the great doomed Ku Dynasty. Some had good claims, some had large armies, and it would take at least another generation or so before the true heir to the Ku emerged.
It was through this landscape of war and contested territory that Dieu traveled, and she might begin her day in land controlled by Ing, steal behind the lines of a battle between Ing and Fu-lan, and drink her evening tea on the banks of the river claimed by Vihn.
She had turned out to be a better traveler than she had thought, or at least, she had not been eaten by hungry ghosts or had her skull stolen by fox spirits yet. She had mostly stopped panting whenever she needed to climb a rise, and she had learned early on that you never passed a priestess and her road shrine without offering something, even if it was only a tiny coin, a bun, or a prayer.
Not long after Dieu skirted the Battle of Kirshan—where General Peirong was killed by a raging bull that went on to become the king of Kirshan—she came around a bend in the road to find a small shrine to the goddess Xanh-hui. Behind its iron grating, the upright cabinet contained the goddess’s sigils, a rod and a stoppered pot of healing salve, but sleeping in front of the shrine was the least likely priestess that Dieu had ever seen.
The priestess was a short, squat woman who wore a sleeveless tunic even in the flurry of late spring snow, and instead of trousers and shoes, she went barefoot under a kilt made from the tanned hide of a slate-blue calf. Her hair was loose and tangled, and the only thing that identified her as a priestess at all was the necklace of rough amber beads around her neck from which hung a small wooden carving of the goddess Xanh-hui herself.
* * *
“Oh,” exclaimed Sinh Cam. “That’s Ho Thi Thao!”
“We know,” Sinh Loan said patiently.
“She wore a calfskin kilt because she stole one of the sacred calves from the sun.”
“We know,” Sinh Loan repeated, and Chih sat up a little straighter.
“Actually, I don’t know that story,” they hinted.
“Well, now you do,” said Sinh Cam, pleased.
Sinh Loan sighed, reaching over to ruffle her younger sister’s ears.
“She did,” Sinh Loan said. “When she was very young, her mother told her that she would be forced to eat scraps all her life. She said that Ho Thi Thao was so small that she would trail behind even the pine trees that cared for nothing that tasted good or ran fast.”
“Oh, what a cruel thing for a mother to say,” Si-yu said, and instead of being angry, Sinh Loan inclined her proud head.
“It was. And so to prove her honorable mother wrong, Thi Thao sneaked up to the manor of the sun, where she killed the two cowherds by catching them when they were asleep, and after she ate them, she killed and ate one of the sun’s most precious calves. Then she went home, ate up all the pine trees in Jo Valley, all of the humans, and then her siblings and then her mother.”
“Oh,” said Si-yu faintly, and Sinh Loan smiled briefly at her before turning to Chih.
“There is an addition for your books, cleric. Make a note of it so that they will find it after we eat you. Please continue.”
* * *
Dieu went to put a coin in the bowl at the priestess’s feet, and the priestess came awake with a growl, grabbing her hand before she could complete her obeisance.
“What in the world are you doing?” demanded the priestess.
“I was making an offering,” said Dieu, and now she noticed things she had not seen before. She could see how there were spots of dried blood on the priestess’s tunic, and how her fingernails were thick and white. Priestesses smelled like forbearance and cheap incense, not raw earth and full bellies, and Dieu did her best not to pull her hand from the woman’s grasp.
“Let me see what you are offering,” the woman said, and she made a face when she saw the coin.
“Oh, that’s not worth anything at all.”
“It’s . . . worth one sen or four fi?” suggested Dieu, but the woman shook her head.
“Nothing at all,” she declared, and she smacked Dieu’s hand so that the coin fell into the dirt and rolled away. “What are you going to give me instead?”
“Um. I could say a prayer for the sorrow and suffering of the world . . .”
“No, I don’t want that. What else do you have?”
The woman still smelled full, but there was something in her voice that suggested that was a temporary state, and her eyes, which were round and very lovely, took on a kind of sharp hunger.
“I—I have glutinous rice cakes?”
“Oh!” said the woman in surprise. “That’s fine then. Get them out.”
The rice cakes were all Dieu had to eat for the next two days, but she figured that her chances for being around in two days’ time probably went up if she shared them now. She pulled them one-handed out of her bag, giving them to the woman.
To her surprise, the woman pulled her down to sit next to her in front of the shrine, and let her go, dividing the rice cakes between them.
“You can run away if you like,” the woman said callously—
* * *
“No, she would have said that kindly,” rumbled Sinh Hoa, who Chih had thought was sleeping.
“Lady?”
“She wouldn’t have been mean about it,” said Sinh Hoa sleepily. “It’s a courtesy. It’s permission. It’s being nice.”
“I’ll remember that,” Chih said, and continued.
* * *
“You can run away if you like,” the woman said kindly, “or you can stay and eat.”
Dieu, who had not eaten since daybreak, looked down the long stretch of road and then looked at the rice cakes. Her better judgment told her to run, but her belly told her to get at least one of the rice cakes if she could, and her belly had learned to speak very loudly on her travels.