Despite the ‘feast’, the mood in the Copperstriker den was far from festive. The bodies of two males lay in caves nearby, already wrapped in jejing as they awaited burning. A single female who had fought on Litz’s side had also succumbed, and she would lie in her hut for the required two days so mourners could come to say their goodbyes, a pile of jejing and firemoss smoking nearby. The smell of the moss already seeped into the cavern, but Kaz doubted anyone but her mate and pups would visit for fear that Pilla would judge them for it.
Still, the food was good, and plentiful, and Kaz hadn’t been able to relax and enjoy a properly cooked and seasoned meal in over a week. It was even funny to watch the reaction of those around him as they saw the ‘fuergar’ on his shoulder delicately take tidbits from his fingers and hold it in her small paws as she ate. He could tell that some were disgusted, others concerned, and a few intrigued.
Gaoda and Raff were already eating by the time Kaz caught up to them. Lianhua held one of the fragile plates the humans stored in their pouches, but she had clearly been waiting for him, because she relaxed and smiled when he appeared. Kaz wagged his tail at her before going to get his own meal, then returned and sat beside her.
They ate in companionable silence for a while, with nearby kobolds casting curious looks in his direction, though none dared to speak to him while Lianhua was there. It wasn’t until Raff got up and came back with a second plate of food that he noticed the creature on Kaz’s shoulder and recoiled.
“What is that?” the big male asked, pointing at Li.
Kaz tilted his head. “My… pet. I was dragged off by a great woshi, and when it threw me into its breeding pool for its young to eat, she was also there. We escaped together, and I fed and cared for her while I was lost.”
All true, technically, except possibly the ‘pet’ part. Kaz was fairly certain that if Li could speak, she would claim him as her pet, rather than the other way around. Or perhaps they were simply friends, which was better anyway.
Gaoda looked up, and his lip curled as he saw Li. “That’s a rat.”
Kaz blinked. “She is not.” Also true.
“It is! A disease-carrying rodent! I won’t allow it,” the male said, leaning away from Kaz.
Lianhua smiled and reached up to pet the dragon, to Gaoda’s obvious dismay. Fortunately, Li was full, happy, and liked Lianhua as much as she liked anyone, so she allowed it. Kaz wondered if the human felt fur or scales beneath her fingers.
“I think she’s cute. And Kaz even named her after me!” Lianhua said.
Gaoda gave Lianhua an appalled look, and Kaz wasn’t sure if that had been a wise thing to say, but Lianhua wasn’t done.
“No one has ever been able to do a proper study of the fuergar. They die in captivity, and no one has been able to observe them for long in the wild.” Lianhua put a sliver of meat in her mouth, chewing on it with a smile. Kaz decided now wasn’t the time to tell her she was eating fuergar.
When she finished her bite, Lianhua said, “This is the perfect opportunity to watch one of the creatures, and see how it’s different from a normal rat. I can write at least two papers on it, perhaps three!”
Gaoda opened and closed his mouth, but Lianhua was already going on about how one scholar or another had written treatises on the creatures of the Shensheng mountain, but there was barely anything about the fuergar, and lopo had been left out entirely. She went on for so long that Raff left to get a third serving of food, and Gaoda followed him, though he hadn’t eaten half of his first yet.
Once they were gone, Lianhua fell silent, rubbing her throat as she grimaced slightly. “I thought they’d never leave,” she muttered. “I was running out of wandering sages who might possibly have been to this area and written about it.”
Kaz passed Li another chunk of meat, trying not to think about the fact that it must look like he was feeding fuergar to a fuergar, not that the voracious creatures would care. “You made all that up?”
Lianhua waggled a hand. “Only some. Several of those sages have written about Shensheng mountain, but they focused mainly on the Deep, and the plants and creatures that could be found there, as well as the indigenous kobold tribes. I read them while I was researching the Diushi, but the scrolls are all quite old, and the language archaic. Honestly, they weren’t very helpful, and I don’t remember a single mention of your fuergar.”
Kaz nodded. “That makes sense. There are very few wild beasts in the Deep. Every inch is controlled by one tribe or another, and they have enough members that they can patrol them regularly. Some creatures are kept for food, but fuergar aren’t among them. I never saw one until we entered the mid-levels, so if there are any in the Deep, they’ve learned to hide very well.”
The two fell silent as Raff and Gaoda returned. Gaoda sat quite a bit further from them than he had initially, but he didn’t say anything else, now that Lianhua had made her approval of the new addition plain. Kaz wasn’t entirely comfortable with the looks the male was sending Li, but he was distracted when Lianhua held something out toward him.
The nearly-translucent cup was one Kaz had seen Lianhua use before, but she had never offered it to him. Carefully, he accepted it, wincing as his long claws clicked against the side. He could feel the heat of the softly steaming contents through it, and a sweet, smoky scent filled his nose.
“It’s tea,” Lianhua said, accepting a second cup from an impassive Chi Yincang. The male was by far the cleanest of them, having somehow remained clear of most of the bug guts and bits of legs and chitin that was splattered over the others, and his fingers left no trace of gore on the fragile vessel as he handed it over.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Lianhua’s hands, too, looked clean, and Kaz wished he had thought to cleanse his own before taking the cup. He had been too hungry to even think about how filthy he was, but as smears appeared where he held the cup, he tried to hand it back to Lianhua.
She shook her head, sipping her tea with a satisfied smile. “Cups can be washed,” she told him. “Try it. It’s made with the first fresh spring leaves of the Longjing tea plant, which only grows in my home province.”
Kaz lapped cautiously at the brown liquid, and found that while it was warm, it wasn’t unpleasantly so. It was sweet, and tasted a bit like tanuo, a rare lichen that only grew by water under the greenish light of glow-worms.
“It’s good,” he told Lianhua, and she smiled. “But what are spring leaves?”
The female stared at him before shaking her head slowly. “There are no seasons here, are there? And no plants with proper leaves or flowers.”
Kaz shrugged. “I don’t know what seasons or leaves are, but a few mosses do produce flowers. The jiyun feed from them, though, so it’s best to avoid them.”
This began a lively conversation wherein Kaz learned that unlike the constant, steady temperature of the caves and tunnels within the mountain, the outside world had ‘weather’ and ‘seasons’. Once, he had seen frozen water fall from clouds above the dragon’s den, but Lianhua said that sometimes liquid water also fell, and a day could go from cold, to warm, and back to cold. He also learned that the strips of hair above the human’s eyes were called ‘eyebrows’, and wondered why Lianhua laughed so hard when he asked if Gaoda was still immature, since he didn’t have face-fur like the other two males.
The rest of the meal passed by so pleasantly that Kaz completely forgot he had set his teacup down by his side when he was trying to explain what a woshi looked like. She finally declared it to be a ‘salamander’, and they went on from there, so when he stood up and knocked the cup over, it came as a surprise to them both.
Kaz quickly scooped the cup into his hands, seeing that while most of it had remained intact, a large crack ran down one side, and a triangular piece had broken off completely. His ears flattened and he let out a soft whine as he held it out toward Lianhua.
“I’m sorry,” he said, trying to set the triangle back into the gap it had left behind.
Lianhua shook her head, gently taking the pieces from him and placing them into the pouch at her waist. “It’s all right. When I get home, Grandfather will fix it, and I’ll remember this conversation every time I use it.”
Kaz still felt terrible, and Lianhua could obviously tell, because she took a second cup from her pouch. This one was even lovelier than the first, with a tracery of pink flowers on delicate green stems. Elongated green ovals framed the pretty blossoms, and Lianhua pointed to one with a smile.
“This is a leaf, and these are the flowers of a plum tree. This cup has been mine since I was a little girl, and Grandfather has had to repair it more than once.” She turned the cup in her palm, and Kaz saw several seams of gold running through it, holding together pieces that had obviously been broken.
“The technique is called ‘kintsugi’. My Grandfather is a master of the art, and says that our flaws and imperfections only highlight the beauty in all of us.” Lianhua gently stroked one of the gilt junctions. “Each of these holds a memory for me. Some of them are lessons, and some are simply reminders of moments spent with my grandfather, watching him work.”
Kaz pressed his hand over his abdomen. “How is it done?”
She smiled. “Grandfather will tell you that you must begin by embracing the whole life of the object. Think about when it was new, and how it became worn over time as it was used and cherished. Then, accept that it has broken, but remember that simply because something is no longer as it once was, that makes it no less precious. The things that remain of its youth and purpose are still beautiful, and the changes you make will be, too.”
Tucking the cup away, she chuckled. “That and some gold dust and resin will repair the piece, but Grandfather will also tell you that it is in taking the time to cherish the object and recognize its resilience that practicality becomes art.”
Kaz nodded, fist clenching over the shattered core hidden within his body. “Is it as strong as it was before?”
She shrugged, her eyes distant. “After something is broken, it’s never the same. It might be weaker, or it might be stronger. That all depends on the object and the artist who repairs it.”
Lianhua seemed to shake herself from a dream, gaze sharpening as she smiled down at him. “Now, let’s see if we can get a bath. Even fuulong silk needs to be washed sometimes, and you, my friend, have enough bug parts in your fur to make another nest of zhiwu.”
She hesitated. “Speaking of which… Is it all right that we killed them all? Didn’t you say that their webbing is useful? Are they common enough that the Copperstrikers will be able to find another nest easily?”
Kaz wagged his tail. This human really was kind. “The ones we killed were the males. Zhiwu only have one female at a time, and she can’t move once she begins laying eggs. There will be eggs in the nest, and the female will tend them. When those hatch, the Copperstrikers will harvest the webs and discarded egg sacs. There won’t be any more until some of the newly hatched males reach maturity, but they grow quickly. By this time next year, the nest will be back to normal.”
“We just settled in this territory a little over a month ago,” Pilla said, stepping up beside them. She must have been waiting for them to finish with their conversation, an unexpectedly considerate action from a female.
“We hadn’t even started harvesting the webs yet,” she went on, “and there are quite a few old egg sacs. They’ll need to be cleansed more thoroughly than fresh ones, and webbing made with them breaks down more quickly, but there should be plenty, so long as we don’t declare vara on any of the neighboring tribes, which I don’t intend to do.”
Lianhua turned to the chief with a smile, and Kaz stepped back behind the human female, lowering his head in a gesture of respect.
Pilla had taken the time to bathe, and her long fur gleamed a rich copper in the light of Gaoda’s ki ball. Kaz sniffed, startled to realize that she had applied weiba powder, something that females only did when they were courting a mate or readying themselves to meet with a female of another tribe in order to acquire a mate. The female kobold didn’t look at him, but he saw her ears turn pink again as she spoke to Lianhua, and he knew she hadn’t missed the twitch of his nose.
“I remembered that you enjoy warm water, Lianhua, so I had the pups bring buckets of water, and assigned some females to warm it.” A wicked glint in her eyes made Kaz guess that the females assigned to this menial task were probably former members of Litz’s group.
Pilla turned away, and Lianhua and Kaz followed her. Raff hopped up as they passed, burped loudly, and pounded on his chest, looking relieved.
“You goin’ to wash up, Lianhua?” he asked.
Lianhua nodded, and Raff grinned. “Reckon I’ll keep watch while you do that, and then take a turn. Gaoda, you in?”
Gaoda stood, shaking his robe so bug bits clattered to the ground around him. “I’ll go after my cousin. You may wait.”
Raff sighed deeply, but shrugged. “Clean is clean. I’m just looking forward to a good night’s rest, and then we can finally head out tomorrow.”
All eyes turned to Lianhua, who nodded. “Tomorrow we leave.”