“I’ll do anything,” said the Xie woman. “Please don’t send me back out there. I’ll do anything you want me to.”

Sen just gave her a bland look for a moment before he sighed.

“Did you not understand the requirements when you came in here?” asked Sen for at least the tenth time that morning. “I don’t need sycophants, or courtiers, or sexual playthings, or anything else that doesn’t contribute in some meaningful way. Do you have any skills, any at all, that might actually prove useful?”

“I… I…”

“What is it that you did here before? How did you contribute? What was your job?”

The woman opened and closed her mouth a few times, tears welling up in her eyes, and Sen knew the answer. She didn’t have a job before. Or she’d considered being a noble her profession. Some profession, thought Sen. She’d been a professional at being an awful human being. Sen pushed that thought back. He didn’t know that was true of her, specifically. She might have been a kind person before. He sort of doubted it, but it could be true. Sen sighed. As the morning had dragged on, he’d noticed something about himself. While he still felt almost entirely pitiless toward the men, he’d been making excuses not to send the Xie women back out onto the street. He supposed it was at least partially because he knew what it would mean for them.

The men could probably find work or join gangs. A strong back could let you survive. As for the women, well, he’d seen what happened to them, even back in Orchard’s Reach. A few of them might get extremely lucky and find a soft heart to take them in, but most of them would end up working as prostitutes, or get themselves killed, or probably both. They would lead short lives, brutalized by anyone stronger or in a better financial position than them, which would be almost everyone. He couldn’t stop any of that from happening in the big picture. It was too common. It happened everywhere. But he could decline to contribute to it happening here. At least, he could if he decided to.

“Can you read? Write? Do you have basic math skills?” he asked.

Hope flickered in the woman’s eyes as she nodded frantically and said, “Yes!”

“I guess you’re not hopeless then. Fine. We’ll find something for you to do, but,” he said, holding up a finger, “if you’re told that you’re going to learn how to do something, you will learn it. You will not complain. You will not act as though it’s beneath you. You will apply yourself to it like your continued presence here depends on it. Because it does.”

“I understand, Lord Lu,” said the woman dropping to her knees. “Thank you.”

“Yeah,” muttered Sen.

He walked her through the additional vows he was making everyone take. He’d repeated the words so often that they were just noises falling out of his mouth at this point, wholly devoid of meaning. He noted the brief glow around the woman as the heavens accepted the vow as legitimate. He nodded, mostly to himself, but a relieved breath exploded from the woman. Sen didn’t quite know what to make of that. He wondered if maybe she thought she was lying during the vow, or if she’d thought he was going to change his mind at the last second. It took a few seconds before Sen registered that the woman was still kneeling and that her eyes were fixed on him. She looked expectant.

“Welcome to the service of the House of Lu,” he said but she didn’t get up. “You can rise.”

The woman shot to her feet like she was ready to charge off and accomplish things. Except, she didn’t have anything to accomplish because Sen didn’t have any work for anyone yet. He just called out.

“Pan Shiji!”

The woman who had sworn herself to him, rather than the House of Lu, opened the door and looked in. She had firmly attached herself to him that morning, and he decided having someone on the other side of the door was useful enough that he didn’t send her away. He gestured at the Xie woman.

“She’ll be staying for now. She’ll need quarters.”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Yes, Lord Lu,” said Pan Shiji and turned to the other woman. “Follow me.”

The pair disappeared through the door and Sen found himself alone for more than a minute for the first time that day. His mind turned to that cultivator lair that he knew was hiding beneath the manor. While they hadn’t found anything else on the level of that ginseng root, there had been several other valuable alchemical ingredients. Nothing to start a war for, but things that Sen wouldn’t entrust to the hands of anyone less talented than himself. There had been ice qi-attributed crystal vein flowers, earth qi-attributed plants he couldn’t identify, and, the true prize for Sen, a shadow qi-attributed heartsblood root. All of them were very potent, which meant they needed just the right kind of handling to get the most out of them. He could do it. He was confident that Auntie Caihong could do it. He wanted to think that Fu Ruolan could do it because he wanted to share these prizes with her. For all that, he wasn’t sure. She was quite competent and had a lot of experience, but that didn’t mean that she was the right choice. It felt strange to be in a position where he was evaluating his teacher, but it would be a disservice to those medicinal plants to share them with someone who wasn’t up to the challenge. He was saved from that miserable exercise by Pan Shiji opening the door.

“Lord Lu?”

“Yes,” he said.

“There is a woman here to see you. She says she knows you,” said Pan Shiji, a disquieting note of jealousy in her voice.

“Did you get a name?”

“She calls herself Lo Meifeng.”

“Oh,” said Sen, sitting up straight. “Wait. How did she get inside? I’ve only made a handful of those talismans.”

“Righteous Wu Gang let her inside,” said Pan Shiji.

“Ah, that explains it. Where is she now?”

“She,” said Lo Meifeng, pushing Pan Shiji out of the way, “is right here.”

Sen tried to suppress his amusement and said, “It’s good to see you.”

“Is it?” asked Lo Meifeng before turning a withering look on Pan Shiji. “You can go.”

The mortal woman looked like she might say something until Lo Meifeng narrowed her eyes in a way that made Sen’s skin crawl. Pan Shiji fled the room.

“You don’t normally frighten mortals for fun,” observed Sen.

“You don’t normally do monumentally stupid things like taking over a noble house without at least talking to me about it first.”

The tone was a little playful, but Sen could see real frustration and anger hiding in the back of Lo Meifeng’s eyes. He hadn’t meant to do it, but he’d hurt her by keeping her at a distance. It didn’t matter that he'd intended to insulate her from the insanity that seemed to spring up around him any time he stopped somewhere for more than two hours at a time.

“Would you like to yell at me for a while?” asked Sen.

“Yes!”

Sen waited patiently as Lo Meifeng stormed back and forth in the little room, waving her hands, and calling him an idiot at any place the word would fit into her comments. That turned out to be surprisingly often. When she eventually wound down, Sen gestured to the other chair.

“Would you like to sit?”

She glared at him, then at the chair, and then she slumped into it.

“If you were going to do all of this,” said Lo Meifeng, “why in the thousand hells didn’t you bring me in.”

“Honestly?” asked Sen.

“If you would be so kind.”

“I was trying to be a good friend.”

A dangerous light was birthed in the woman’s eyes, and she said, “A good friend?”

“A lot of people tried to kill me on the way here,” said Sen, lifting a hand to prevent another outburst. “And I mean a lot. That light show right before I arrived was just the last fight in a whole series of them. Once I figured out that I was going to be really loud while I was here, I’ve basically been expecting more of the same. I just didn’t want to put you in harm’s way when these are problems I brought down on my own head. You didn’t ask for them. I’m sure you don’t want them. So, I tried to keep the eyes on me and off of you.”

Lo Meifeng seemed torn about whether she wanted to accept that answer, or if she wanted to hit him with something heavy. She finally heaved a sigh.

“As reasons go, those are not completely terrible ones. It was even thoughtful, in a Sen way, but you’re still an idiot. I mean, you’ve got Wu Gang out there, which isn’t a bad start, but he’s not up to the really dangerous stuff. That girl isn’t going to be worth a damn for anything. And that other guy you’ve got wandering around is probably fine for some low-end murder and espionage, but they aren’t me. And if you want to make this work, you’re going to need someone like me.”

“I thought you were taking some kind of extended vacation.”

“Vacations only work when there isn’t a Sen crashing through the capital like a deranged spirit beast, destroying the established order, and upending a few thousand years of tradition.”

“There’s someone else named Sen in the city?” asked Sen, bending every bit of his will on projecting perfect innocence.

“I will cut you while you sleep.”

“Alright. I hear you. I have been a bit louder than even I was expecting. And you’re not wrong. I can use your help. I wish I had five more of you.”

“Keep your fantasies to yourself,” said Lo Meifeng in a perfect deadpan. “Besides, I doubt you’re enough for even one of me.”

Sen was momentarily taken aback before an impish spirit he didn’t get to indulge that often surfaced.

“Actually, in my fantasy, it’s me, you, and—”

Lo Meifeng lifted an eyebrow and said, “How sure are you that you want to finish that statement?”