Chapter 11

Tan sat anxiously at the table. It had been a few days since the fancy man on the horse had spent the night and his parents were being weird. He sort of felt like he’d been called to be scolded at, even though he was mostly sure that he hadn’t done anything wrong lately. Lately. They hadn’t found out about --

“You’re not in trouble, Tan,” his mother told him. “Should you be?”

“No!” he said immediately. “What’s going on? You’ve been funny since the man with the horse came.”

“It’s not you. It’s Zephyr,” his father said, sighing.

“What about her?” Tan asked.

“It’s complicated, Tan, but someone else thinks that because they were hunting her for longer than I was, they have a stronger claim to her than we do,” he said.

“Well they can’t have her. She’s mine,” Tan said.

“Obviously. They’re not talking about taking her away from you. They can’t do that without – drastic measures. And it doesn’t sound like they’re monstrous. The truth is that one of their proposed methods of settling this is simply that we give them a few replacement spirits of lesser strength. We have hundreds of those in the shed, so as long as they’re not fibbing in their letter we should be able to buy them off,” his father explained.

“Okay,” Tan said. “Then why are you acting weird.”

“Because their preferred method of settling this dispute is by marrying you to the child who they think should have gotten Zephyr instead,” his mother said. “And unfortunately they’ve phrased it in such a way that it’s a difficult request to refuse out of hand.”

“I can’t get married, I’m only nine,” Tan pointed out.

“You can get married when you turn sixteen, which is a blink of the eye to some cultivators,” his father said. “Anyway, it’s not the marriage itself that we can’t turn down. It’s the introduction to the girl who might have gotten Zephyr if the Zang family’s spirit hunters had been significantly better at their job. I hadn’t even realized that they were after Zephyr when I found her and bound her to the stone I gave you.”

“What if I hate her?” Tan asked.

“Then you just have to say that you hate her and you never want to see her again and that’s the end of it,” his mother promised. “But you do have to meet her and play with her for a few hours. And you have to promise not to say that you hate her until you’ve actually had a chance to know whether you’ll hate her or not.”

“I already know that I will,” Tan said. “Zephyr hates her and I don’t know why, but I know that if Zephyr hates her then I’ll hate her. Zephyr says that the reason she likes me is because she hates the Zang family.”

“Okay,” his father said. “That’s good. If we blame it on Zephyr that makes it easier to get out of the arranged marriage. But you still have to meet the girl and play with her for a few hours.”

“Do I really?”

“Yes.”

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“Fine.”

“We’ll leave for Lima City tomorrow. We’ll leave Safron with the aunties in the village and the other children will be fine fending for themselves for three days,” his father announced.

“I thought it was six days to Lima City from here,” Tan objected, not really wanting to spend so long on the road.

“It’s a six day journey if you’re a mortal, Tan. But you can fly, and your father and I are quite fast enough to keep up with you on the ground,” his mother pointed out. “It shouldn’t take us an entire day, but we’ll make our presence known when we arrive tomorrow, meet the child and her family the day after, and one way or another we’ll return after that.”

“Oh,” Tan said. For all that he was proud of his speed, he hadn’t really put it together that the world was a much smaller place for him than it was for the normal children in the village quite before that moment.

As he went to bed, he entertained the dreams that Zephyr sent him of an ugly girl with a pig nose and an ugly fat forehead. His parents sat downstairs, Wensho holding her husband’s hand.

“It was bound to happen eventually,” she said sadly. “The others will see our children’s potential and try to claim their hearts away from us.”

“They’ll try,” Tren agreed. “I’m pretty sure the Zang family’s bid is already dead in the water.”

“But there will be others,” Wensho objected. “Other girls. Other boys for Safron. They’ll keep coming until someone wins the hearts of our children. Or at least their oaths.”

“Not everyone can break the rules like we did,” Tren said, squeesing her hand.

“But our children can.”

“Not yet they can’t,” Tren said. “Not until they climb three or four more realms.”

“Do you really see Tan’s pace slowing down anytime soon?” Wensho asked, laughing lightheartedly. “He’ll be stronger than either of us before he’s thirty.”

“Speak for yourself,” Tren mumbled.

“I happen to know for a fact that I can speak for the both of us,” she teased. “It’s what being your wife means.”

He grumbled. They kissed, and they moved their discussion into the bedroom.

In the morning, the Shen family said goodbye to their three students/farm hands, placing Pao in charge while the adults and Tan were away. They moved at a sedate pace to the village, taking the full hour while allowing Safron to walk or be carried as the mood struck her. She was rather excited to be visiting her ‘aunties’ in the village, even though she knew that they weren’t really related and they were just old women who often watched the young children for the adults when they were busy.

Once the little girl was safely ensconced in the watchful care of the village’s child tenders, the mother, father, son trio set out overland at the speed of cultivators.

Fast.

Tan had been given directions to reach the city in case he got separated from his parents, but that proved not to be a problem as they each easily kept up with the boy despite the fact that he could fly without tiring for hours, and the fact that he could outrace most birds. This was the furthest and longest that he’d ever flown at one time, and when he got tired, it was all at once.

He fell from the sky, but his parents had been prepared for this possibility and Tren leapt into the air to catch his nine year old son before the boy hit the ground. They stopped to eat lunch, with Tan eating a special honey cake that his mother had prepared for him specifically to repleninish his internal qi. When they set off again, it was at a more sedate pace, but they were already most of the way there and they arrived in the late afternoon.

The following hours were miserable for Tan, as he was bathed to remove the dust from the road, then he was brought to a seamstress and poked needlessly with pins for hours while a new and uncomfortable outfit was designed for him to wear the following day. No matter how he objected his parents wouldn’t relent and allow him to go to the meeting in his normal clothes. He had to wear this, this monstrosity that took twenty minutes to put on! And it was so uncomfortable!

Well, it would be more comfortable once it was held together by actual stitches and not just pins, he reflected as the seamstress helped him change out of it and allowed him to dress in his normal clothes again. But the green shirt with the yellow leggings and the fancy embroidery that announced him as an air cultivator was …

Okay, so he liked the embroidery a little bit.

But the hat was stupid.