Dieu tucked her grass traveling shawl a little more snugly around her shoulders, and she nibbled at one of her own rice cakes politely as the woman ate the rest, chewing them with a distracted look on her face. As they ate, Dieu became more aware of the fact that the woman didn’t seem to care about the rice cakes at all, and was more interested in looking at Dieu, inspecting her from the top of her wool cap to the toes of her rag-wrapped sandaled feet.
Finally, there was only one rice cake left between them on the stained waxed leaf wrapper, and they both stared at it contemplatively.
“Well,” said the woman presently. “Here.”
Dieu blinked in surprise as the woman picked up the final rice cake and broke it in two. She examined them with a critical eye, and then she offered the larger of the two pieces to Dieu. Dieu started to reach for it, but then the woman held it up to her lips as if she were a very small child.
Hesitantly, because she wanted to get out of the situation without giving offense and because after all she was very hungry, Dieu opened her mouth and allowed herself to be fed the rice cake.
“Well, that’s that,” said the woman with satisfaction, climbing to her feet.
Standing, she was shorter than Dieu, coming barely up to Dieu’s chin, but she was twice as heavy, if not more. Dieu felt no safer looking down at her than she had sitting and sharing a rice cake with her.
“That’s that,” echoed Dieu, and the woman nodded without smiling, shutting her eyes for a moment instead.
“My name is Ho Thi Thao. I’ll ask for your name when I am sure I want it.”
“Will you? Want it, I mean?” asked Dieu in confusion.
“Well, I suppose we’ll see. Come along now.”
* * *
“Goodness,” said Sinh Loan, looking faintly scandalized. “You mean she didn’t know?”
Chih raised their eyebrows at the tiger’s tone.
“She knew that she was sitting down with someone that might have eaten her, madam,” they said politely.
Sinh Cam shook her ears impatiently.
“She didn’t know that Ho Thi Thao was flirting with her! She was being so sweet and romantic, and Scholar Dieu didn’t even appreciate it!”
“How so?” asked Chih. They had taken out their writing materials because the tiger was right; if they didn’t make it out, the abbey at Singing Hills would be fascinated to know this. Maybe they would even get a personal tablet in the hall for the highly esteemed. That was not really a comfort, but it was a nice thought. Now they opened a new page, scooting a little closer to the fire.
“It’s the opening to a proper courtship,” Sinh Loan said primly. “And our ancestress was a paragon of both decorum and passion. In these lesser days, it’s not unknown for a tiger to simply contract a marriage with the first likely looking thing they met on some forest path.”
She reached down to tweak Sinh Hoa’s tail, making the sleepy tiger grunt and Sinh Cam chuff. The more they talked, Chih realized, the more easy the tigers sounded, the more the threatening rocks were smoothed out of their voices.
“When she shared the food that Scholar Dieu offered her rather than eating it all, she was expressing . . . fond feeling and fascination. When she offered her name without asking for Scholar Dieu’s, she was opening the door.”
“Opening the door for what?” asked Chih, fascinated in spite of themself.
Sinh Loan waved a thick hand.
“To any number of things. To a courtship. To a single night of love. To something that would last far longer. To an opportunity to know her more and better. For more.”
“To be dinner,” Si-yu said with a frown, and Sinh Loan laughed.
“Of course, or do you forbid yourself the privilege of slaying a guest who displeases you at the dinner table?”
Si-yu grumbled, but if she was with the mammoth corps, she knew her history and that was certainly not a privilege that the nobles of the north denied themselves when they decided enough was enough.
“Can you tell us more about the possibilities that Ho Thi Thao was hinting at?” Chih asked. “We know so very little about—”
“That’s by design,” said Sinh Loan, “but now you know the part about how unwelcome guests and inquiries can be turned into welcome dinners, yes?”
“Yes, I do,” said Chih. “Moving on.”
Chapter Six
HO THI THAO was a cave dweller like the people who lived in the Painted Cliffs in Anwar, and her cave was a marvel, stretching deep into the mountain. It was an ancient place, lit by a cunning combination of shafts and mirrors. Where those didn’t suffice, there were oil lamps scattered throughout, their tricky light showing off low benches scattered with furs and silk cushions, chests overflowing with strings of gold ingots and tablets of jade and turquoise and a royal armory’s worth of weapons mounted up on the walls.
“Oh, are these the weapons of your ancestors?” asked Dieu politely.
“No, they’re the ones that my ancestors took away from those who would reproach them,” said Ho Thi Thao.
Dieu, who after all had studied all her life to be a scholar, recognized some of the weapons on the wall. There was the shield of Wei Lee Lan, who had gone missing some hundred years ago, a pair of matched daggers taken from a captain of the Stinging Nettle Society that went on to become the notorious Sisterhood, and the tiger-killing sword of General Truc Quy. Of course, General Quy had killed tigers until the tigers killed her, and Dieu finally figured out what kind of demon she had followed home.
* * *
“And what else?” asked Sinh Cam excitedly.
Chih, who had been worried about the line about following the demon home, blinked in surprise.
“What else what?”
“What else did Ho Thi Thao have on her wall? What did she show off to Scholar Dieu?”
“We just have records of those three things, the shield and the daggers and the tiger-killing sword . . .”
“Oh, it’s like the tack that the great Ho-shuh was wearing before she and Jo-woon went off to defeat King-Whale,” said Si-yu unexpectedly.
She had settled Bao-so as close to the fire as she dared, and she was seated against Piluk’s foreleg, Piluk’s trunk wrapped around her hand and occasionally swinging it gently.
“Yes?” asked Chih.
“And the storyteller always has to say what Ho-shuh was wearing and where it came from. The stirrups always come from Pari-kie, though, where I’m from.”
“Of course they do,” said Sinh Loan agreeably. “And of course, Cleric Chih, you should make sure that future tellings of this story mention that Ho Thi Thao had the gloves of the Great Butcher Ik-jee on her wall as well. The Great Butcher was defeated by a tiger from the Boarbacks, you know.”
“I will,” said Chih, making the notation. If they or their notes made it back to the Singing Hills, the Divine would be very pleased, especially if this shed some light on what had happened to the hunter the north called the Magnificent Ik-jee, who had disappeared without a trace some two hundred years ago.
Everyone settled back into an expectant listening air except for Bao-so, who was unconscious, and Sinh Hoa, who was definitely sleeping. The sky beyond the barn was now entirely black, eating up the shapes of the trees and everything but the faint scatter of snow on the ground, which sparkled in the dim firelight. The cold was sinking into everything, and Chih shrugged a little further into their sheepskin coat, folding their hands into the pockets inside the sleeves.