While my instruction as a scribe had prepared me for administrative duties, as well as chronicling and even some adjacent skills regarding both law and taxation, what it had not taught me had been the noble art of detecting.
I was finding out, to my utter dissatisfaction, that novels were not as great a source of learning in that regard as I would've liked to believe.
"Most of this is useless," I said, setting aside another list of things that my lady had overheard in her latest outing.
The table in her study was now perennially filled with piles of papers carefully confined to their place in the hierarchy of reliability and actionability, and the latest additions to the lowest rung of the ladder threatened to topple over as its height became untenable.
There was a whisper of silk at my back as she kept fussing with the overly ornate dress she had been forced to don before attending a party for young nobles to mingle and, hopefully, avoid excessive interbreeding.
"You keep saying this whenever I bring you something…"
"You keep bringing me things I can't use."
The silk stopped rustling, and I was brought away from the barely legible thing that my lady insisted was proper calligraphy when I realized what I had just said and to whom.
"I apologize—"
"Wu?"
"… My lady?"
"Have you… Would you like to… cultivate?"
I did not turn around. Did not answer.
My father was a guard. While not a high official and certainly no noble with access to the resources needed for proper cultivation, he was familiar enough with some nuggets of the practice that he had tried to help me develop my own field of elixir.
I had no talent for the art.
Gathering qi… That was straightforward enough, yes. Every living, breathing being did it in some way.
But…
My mind was…
Not good.
I could sit still for hours on end, my focus perfectly honed by the reams of texts that I had gone through ever since the wonders of reading became available to an unworthy lowborn. I could be absorbed by a book, following the flow of word and thought for as long as any allotted candle lasted.
I… I could not sit still and set my mind on a single thing, though. Not for long enough to coalesce my gathered qi, much less refine it into something greater.
My father had, at one point, finally realized it. And given up on me ever living up to the name of 'Wu.'
"I am not suited for it, my lady," I settled on saying.
A manuscript dropped on top of the table, and retreating fingers brushed over my shoulder.
The cover, written with red ink on yellow paper as if the entire book was meant to serve as a talisman, proclaimed this to be…
"The Way of Hound and Master?" I said, noticing that her characters on the cover were legible enough for once, more carefully traced than anything I'd seen from her in years, as I flipped through the silky rice paper and saw the first intricate diagram.
"I… It's untested," she explained, the embarrassment plain to hear in the voice coming from my back. "But the principles… they are sound. I think it would work."
"Sound principles—never mind, work for what?"
"I can't be recognized," she said, her voice tremulous, and…
And I finally turned around.
Behind me, in place of the noble lady in crimson garments that had gone out mere hours ago, was…
Xia.
Xia. Not Lady Zhinu. Not the maddening woman I had to constantly keep at a safe distance for the sake of both of us.
Xia.
"You're making me embarrassed…" she said, lowering her gaze. Sun-kissed, freckled skin reddened across her cheekbones, wild blonde hair stuck out at odd angles that made me want to reach out and…
I was standing in front of her, taller than her, and my hand was going through her locks, setting them not in place, but in another mismatched, wild angle that suited her better than anything artfully placed pins had ever forced on a girl meant to run carefree rather than sit still.
Green eyes. Green eyes surrounded by lightly tanned skin, underlined by precious freckles, looked up at me.
It was enough to distract me from her exposed limbs.
… Almost enough.
Arms and legs were scandalously bare, a golden pelt fashioned as a skirted yet short tunic clung to her waist, hips, and breasts in ways that enhanced more than concealed, and only thick bands of the same fur lent the slightest semblance of modesty to her wrists and ankles.
A single silver sash tied to her right cinched the garment tighter still.
My heart was pounding, my breath was ragged, and I took far too long to discover that the air coming in short gasps past my lips had dried them as I remained still, in front of her, my fingers threading through wild locks.
Green eyes looked up at me.
Only… only the quivering light of two candles at my back belied the stillness of the moment, telling me that we weren't frozen in time. That every second that passed was another forbidden indulgence I had finally fallen for.
After years of being a perfectly average scribe.
"I… I don't think this will suffice as a disguise," I said, trying not to stumble when I stepped back, away from—
She caught my wrist.
A grasp stronger than I could ever hope to be, than anyone without a field of elixir could ever dream of, held me in place, only the very tips of my fingers still brushing her mane.
Then…
She stepped forward.
Her eyelids lowered, her head tilted, and she leaned against my open palm, a soft, barely there, dreamy smile enchanting me as much as the silky hair sliding over my bare skin.
"This… is just a part of the disguise… Wu."
I didn't say anything.
Because I never had nor ever will have all the answers.
I just have some witticisms. Maybe an inkling of true cleverness, from time to time.
But I don't have the answers that matter. The ones that I want.
Nor the answers that slowly opening green eyes asked me to confer.
"Part of the disguise?" I finally told her just… just to break a silence haunted by my drumming heart.
"Read… The manual. At least a bit of it."
And, just like that, she let go of my hand and stepped away, her arms folded behind her back as she bent forward with an expectant smile that did not mask the flush under dotted freckles.
The way that the tunic rose with her posture, baring more than half of her thighs, ensured that my own face heated in answer.
As dignified as I could, I cleared my throat and turned away from smooth, warm skin to the tome she had apparently painstakingly written throughout the entire time her scheme had been brewing.
A tome meant… for me to cultivate.
Even if I wasn't suited for it. Even if my mind was no good.
I reached for it, not with shaking hands, but… with a mask of serenity. Of duty. Of a perfectly average scribe doing what his lady asked of him.
Then I started reading.
The mask grew harder to maintain with every passage.
"… My lady?" I asked after digesting the introductory chapter and the principles outlined in it.
"Yes, Wu?"
"Have you finally gone insane?"
"Rude! That's twice you've accused me of madness! And after I went to all the trouble—"
"This—this is most definitely troubling," I said, on the verge of raising my voice as I pointed at the manuscript lying on the desk, surrounded by a thousand allegations against the Jinyan clan, none of them half as outrageous as what the accursed text suggested I—
"I'm embarrassed too!" she said, her scarlet complexion doing nothing to contradict her words.
"Why would you be embarrassed when you are the one telling me to grab a random girl and—"
"A random girl? You would—you would do such things with a random girl?!"
"If you ordered me to—"
The palm of a hand devoid of the callouses that practiced swordsmen should bear firmly pushed my jaw shut.
Slightly painfully, even.
I glared at her with all the dignity I could muster as she…
Closed her fingers on my cheeks until I was forced to bear a puffy, fish-like appearance.
The humiliation, while certainly in her province to inflict as my mistress, was one I swore not to ever forget.
"Wu, you're supposed to be the smart one," she said, apparently not satisfied with non-verbal insults.
… She was quite near to me, at that point.
Quite near, with her green eyes staring in accusation even as her breath washed over my forcefully pouted lips, her grip on my face not abating in the slightest, the pelt covering her chest brushing over the blue cotton of my own vestments, and…
…
The Way of Hound and Master.
A scandalous text that suggested that one may be able to not only cultivate, but immensely profit from the shared practice of having a… a partner acting like a beast and…
And she was wearing an outrageously revealing tunic fashioned like an animal's pelt.
"Finally…" she mumbled, her mien still crimson as she allowed herself to look away from my wide, panicked gaze.
She still kept pressing my cheeks, though.
"Well? What do you say?" she asked, her lowered stare fixed on the most remote corner of the room.
I, futilely, raised an eyebrow to signal my literal speechlessness rather than devolve to the further indignity of mumbling something unintelligible just to call attention to the current state of affairs. I had worked hard to perfect my diction, and I refused to disgrace my borrowed learning.
This, somehow, just led to an extended silence in which my lady kept being exceedingly near to me, clad in clothes barely more concealing than undergarments, her hand firmly pressed to my chin, her warm breath wetting my exposed collarbone, her chest resting on mine, and…
"Wu? Are you—"
I shook my head in frantic denial.
Or, at least, I tried very hard to do so, seeing as a cultivator was gripping my face.
Slowly, she blinked and turned to look back at me, her green eyes flickering with candlelight that danced across the strands of pristine, golden fur covering the swell of her chest.
More or less at the same time, she reddened further still, let go of my distorted face, covered her lips with a dainty, courtly gesture, and guffawed at me.
Massaging my tender cheeks and the muscles of my jaw, I did my best to appear composed, mildly chastising, and, most of all, mature and poised.
"Please! Please, don't sulk! You're only making it worse!" she said, now holding her stomach as she bent forward, wracked by the apparent comedic genius I had just displayed.
"And to think that you were decrying the abuses perpetrated by uncaring nobles mere minutes ago…" I said, unwelcome feeling returning to my face and bringing heat and tingling along with it.
This scathing display of my capability for sharp yet understated rebukes was met only with further laughter.
So, as befitted my position, I silently waited for my mistress to be done with her entertainment, merely folding my hands over my navel and allowing the long sleeves to… conceal. Something.
Something that I very much refused to hunch over for.
Because she was still near to me, without the varnish her position forced on her, shaking with a laughter that spread across the full softness of her undisguised curves, making breasts, hips, and thighs shake in ways that her restraining clothes usually didn't allow for, not even when in the middle of a sword form, or…
Or in the things she was no longer allowed to do, as we kept up our disguises in a capital that would never accept my lady to be my Xia.
The somber thought was enough to temper my blood, and, slowly, the thing that my lady had hopefully not felt push against her when she was pressing her breasts against my chest receded.
My shame? That… took longer.
Particularly because she kept laughing.
"Are you done?" I asked.
Patiently.
She shook her head frantically enough to distort the sound of her laughter.
It wasn't the answer I had wanted, but it was close enough to the one I had expected.
━❖━
By the time my lady calmed down enough to go from guffawing at my misfortune to hiccupping in the most delightful—inconvenient of ways, I had decided to sit back down and further study the…
The manual.
It was…
Uncomplicated.
At least, in principle.
The very basis of the teachings contained within seemed to me to be a throwback to the earliest stages of cultivation practice: drawing in the characteristics of an animal to further mold the body and its energies, participating of the essence and virtues of the beasts most suited for the individual practitioner.
Once upon a time, that had been all that cultivation was.
Nowadays?
Beast tribes were often scorned. No matter how many of their rank joined the militias of those provinces deprived of resources for proper cultivation, no matter how many of the noble clans could trace their ancestry to one tribe or another, they were just not… proper.
I had often wondered what the ancient founders of those clans would've thought, knowing that the strength that their children inherited from shamans, witches, and wise men would one day become a stigma of lowborns rather than a symbol to aspire to.
So, current political climate notwithstanding, the manual's lessons seemed, to my admittedly layman's perspective, to be sound. One practitioner would channel the essence of a beast, the other would guide them through the process, and, together, the practice would synergize, twinning and entangling the joined energies before raising them to new levels.
It was…
Deeply intimate.
It required trust. Devotion. A single misstep, a single thought from the one acting as master, and the channeler could be irreparably damaged. Lost to animal urges and instincts in the best of cases, robbed of their very life essence in the worst ones.
And Xia wanted me to…
"Stupid hiccup…" she muttered before once again straightening abruptly against the back of her chair, her bust bouncing inside the loose confines of golden fur, her cheeks reddening, and my eyes staying firmly attached to their sockets despite any accusations to the contrary.
"Don't you have… some kind of trick? A pressure point or something?" I suggested, waving my hand in a desperate struggle to draw her attention away from my wandering gaze.
"It never works. Everybody says that it should, but it's—gah! Darn it! Wu, try to scare me!"
"Our taxes are overdue."
"Wha—not funny!"
"Taxes rarely are."
She hiccupped in agreement.
I was oddly pleased by that fact.
"Still not scared…" she said with a moue that no actress would ever capture the essence of.
"If the might of the Imperial Tax Collectors doesn't scare you, my lady, I fear that nothing this lowborn could ever do would stand a chance of shaking your stalwart heart."
She looked at me. Straight at me.
Until green eyes filled my whole world.
Then she hiccupped, her eyes narrowed in clear irritation, and she blew a blond lock out of the way of her right eye.
"You are supposed to be the smart one…" she repeated.
"If I have learned something from listening to tales of ghouls and goblins, it is that they often have little to do with cleverness."
"You really are a—can't you come up with something that would shock me—"
"I'm not going to cultivate with you."
Everything stilled.
I had often been present when my lady trained. While I was obviously not meant to see or overhear anything related to the clan's secrets, I knew most of the commonplace practices that she went through. The sensation of her qi slowly filling up a training hall as her labored breaths accompanied violent yet flowing movements was beyond familiar to me, and I had more than once breathed in air saturated with her very life force, allowing myself the transgression of that intimate, stolen moment as her inner light branched across my lungs and caressed the inside of my veins with reassuring strength.
I had never experienced the world going truly still.
Not even the candlelight flickered, the trailing reflections of twin flames frozen on the reddish, dark table across the gaps between papers.
She wasn't breathing.
Yet she filled the room.
It took all of my courage, all of my strength, and digging up some half-forgotten memories about my father's failed teachings to slowly raise one inquiring eyebrow.
"You… You won't?" she said.
The pressure didn't lessen, but it… shifted. It was no longer a still world, but a heavy one.
A world with unsteady footing.
Slowly, carefully, I stood up, grabbed the manual she had gifted me, the priceless manuscript that could establish a brand new clan with barely any added resources, and walked around the table until I stood in front of her, with… with Xia looking up at me with heartbreaking loss in her eyes.
So I thumped the spine of the manual on her forehead.
"When have I ever denied you anything, you silly girl?" I tried to come across as nonchalant and…
And, instead, I whispered the words in heated reassurance until her smile filled the room and…
And other things.
Indeed, when have I ever denied Xia anything? When have I said 'no' to my lady? When have I managed to do anything other than try and steer her away from disasters in the making?
"The fires of justice will burn down this house of iniquity!"
As I keep dragging around a sack increasingly depleted of its explosive contents, I wonder when, indeed, have I ever succeeded in my attempts at safely steering her away from… anything.
The last occasion that comes to mind involves a swarm of furious bees and an apologetic, teary-eyed girl who felt worse about my stung arms than I seemed to do.
━❖━⧫━❖━
And with this, Wu and Xia veer off straight into next week's… Imperial Interlude.
I had to do some background character building at some point, right?
…
Don't answer that.
Anyway! Chapter 5 is done, polished, and off the press (https://www.patreon.com/collection/2019062), so that just leaves me to edit chapter 6 next week, and then we'll be right in uncharted territory. Wish me luck with not messing this up.
As always, I'd like to thank my credited supporters on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/Agrippa?fan_landing=true): aj0413, Crimson Grave, LearningDiscord, Niklarus, Tinkerware, Varosch, Vergil1989 Crossover King, and Xanah. If you feel like maybe giving them a hand with keeping me in the writing business (and getting an early peek at my chapters before they go public, among other perks), consider joining them or buying one of my books on https://www.amazon.com/stores/Terry-Lavere/author/B0BL7LSX2S. Thank you for reading!