Chapter 10

Lord Hara had never been so nervous as when the second major cultivator came to see him at his meager little hall. There was nothing that he feared more than being caught in the battles between two giants waging a war where people like him were not the pawns, but the ants that were crushed underfoot without a thought. It happened all of the time in the larger provinces, which was one of the reasons he had volunteered for this sleepy little posting.

This cultivator actually looked like a cultivator. Not like the understated hidden master who was raising a monster at all. She was of an average height for a woman, but her skin was pale as snow and her hair as black as the firmament. She radiated a cold feeling that Hara felt in his bones before he felt it on his skin.

Part of him wanted to kowtow as though he were meeting the emperor himself, but he merely bowed the proper depth that a local lord was expected to bow to a cultivator of unknown power and association. There was nothing that she could object to in his bow without revealing who she was and why she had come to the western provinces, on the edge of the great Qi desert.

She stared down at him as he recovered from his bow, despite being shorter than him. She had a haughty expression on her face and she tapped her closed fan against one palm impatiently.

“You are the lord of the Misikio Province, correct?” she asked.

“Not the entire province,” he corrected. “The Susuka county only.”

“Yes, that’s what I meant,” she said. “Tell me, have you noticed anything strange in your lands in the last decade or two?”

“Strange? How do you mean?”

“Anything strange. Anything at all,” she said.

“I can’t think of anything that might draw an interest from a powerful cultivator such as yourself,” he said judiciously. “The last two decades have been very quiet. Bountiful and quiet. Our tax revenue has steadily increased for the last thirty years, in fact.”

“Thirty years?” she said, cocking her head. “What happened thirty years ago?”

“Nothing of significance that I was aware of,” Lord Hara said carefully. It was nothing more than the truth, and it was also a blatant lie.

He wasn’t aware of the fact that a powerful cultivator and his cultivator wife had appeared in his predicessor’s lands twenty-nine years ago until just recently. So saying that he ‘was aware of’ it when it occurred was technically the truth. He was aware of it now, but he hadn’t been when it happened.

Her eyes narrowed on him, and he felt a shiver pass through his bones.

“You’re hiding something?”

He swallowed nervously. “Yes,” he said.

“Tell me.”

“I am caught between a tiger and a dragon, my lady. Please take mercy.”

She stared at him for a moment. “I see. Am I the tiger or the dragon?”

“I have no way of knowing. I swear. But if I divulge the other party’s secrets, then they will take vengeance I am certain. Please, I beg your understanding.”

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“You have answered the question I was looking for. A wind spirit I was hunting was plucked from my grasp several years ago, you see. I tracked it to this land, but aside from the unexpected Qi oasis in your county I found nothing out of the ordinary to explain where it had gone,” she said. She opened the fan and used it on herself for a moment. “My daughter was so disappointed when she was forced to bond a lesser spirit.”

Lord Hara swallowed, remembering the flying boy who had shocked him so thoroughly. “Will you retaliate?”

“When I do not know if I am a dragon challenging a tiger or a tiger challenging a dragon?” she asked rhetorically. She sighed. “If the other cultivator who snatched the prize from my grasp is responsible for this oasis, then they are a hidden master beyond compare. I should like to introduce myself and congratulate them on their well earned victory in the game that they likely did not realize that they were even playing. And I would meet the child who bonded the spirit.”

“My lady, please --”

“I will cause no trouble,” she promised. “I will give to you a letter of introduction and invitation and I will wait in the nearby city for two weeks for a reply. That is all.”

Lord Hara released several clenched muscles. He just had to deliver a letter to a cultivator who, now that he thought about it, technically owed him a favor. Had he not helped build the farmer’s new mansion?

“I will see that it is delivered personally,” he promised.

“See that you do,” she agreed. Then she turned and departed, and the chill in his bones slowly thawed as she did so.

He collapsed once she was gone. The letter was delivered to his hands the next day, and he rode for six hours through the cold winter rain to deliver it.

The cultivator’s wife – herself a cultivator of rare power if the rumors were true, he reminded himself lest some part of him unclench and accidentally cause offense – saw his miserable state and chastised him for abusing his horse. She insisted that he spend the night and that the animal sleep in their barn after it was properly tended to.

She sent the children to watch him unsaddle, feed, and brush his animal. Lord Hara did not consider himself above caring for a horse; he was a local and minor lord and literally couldn’t afford to be too haughty. And it was a very nice horse and he really couldn’t afford to abuse it too much.

He was surprised when the air in the barn suddenly turned balmy despite the lack of a fire, and the water seemed to drip straight out of both his own coat and the horse’s tack. He glanced at the children, who had conspiratorial grins on their faces, except for the eleven year old boy who was looking at the younger boy, the one who could fly, with a suspicious glare.

“How are you doing that?” the older boy demanded of the younger one.

“Doing what?” the younger boy asked innocently.

“I’m not making the room hot, you are. But you can’t do that because your spirit isn’t fire,” the older boy said.

“It’s the same air whether its hot or cold. I’m just reminding it what it’s like to be a warm evening in the summer. It will forget and remember that it’s winter when we leave,” the younger boy answered.

“Don’t mind them,” the girl said. “My brother is an idiot and Tan loves to show off. I’m the one who’s actually being helpful and making you dry.”

Hara swallowed nervously as he realized that the master cultivator wasn’t raising one monster but four of them. He looked at the oldest boy, a big brute of a child in the body but a clear intelligence and kindness in his eyes. “And you, son? Are you a cultivator too?”

“I cultivate the earth like Master Shen,” the oldest boy said. “I’m the reason that the ground beneath your feet isn’t muddy right now.”

“Thank you for that,” Hara said, and he continued to go about seeing to the comfort of his horse before retiring with the children to the main house, where he presented the lady cultivator’s letter, and then to the guest house, which was the old home that the new building had replaced. The children appeared once in the evening to deliver him a hot meal, but he was otherwise left alone.

In the morning, the cultivator appeared.

“If she causes problems for you, let me know. You haven’t done anything to deserve them. I’ll sort this out without involving you further if I can,” Master Shen told Lord Hara.

“This humble magistrate thanks the master cultivator,” Lord Hara said, bowing the proper depth for a lord of his station to bow to a cultivator of unknown power. It was, he realized too late, an invitation to answer that question.

But the man simply grinned at him. “No. I don’t want to scare your horse,” he said, and then he turned and walked away, leaving Lord Hara to finish saddling his horse and ride away into the early morning mist.