The Witch in the Woods: The Transmigration of Hazel-Anne Davis

Master Hui's eyes flicked once past Yan Luo's shoulder. Gaoyu didn't turn. He didn't need to. Men who stare at escape routes tell on themselves.

Yan Luo picked up a bead from a tray and rolled it between forefinger and thumb. It was made from bone, not glass.

He smiled at Hui. "There's a ledger under the ledger," he said softly. "And then there's the book you keep between your lungs and your spine so no one can steal it when you sleep. You use your left foot to scratch the floor when you're thinking. You just did."

Hui went still. The bead clicked once against the porcelain cup.

"Where," Yan Luo said.

Hui swallowed. He had made his living on knowing just how far to bow without falling. He made the mistake of trying it now.

"Yan Luo," he said, his politeness sliding over his fear like lacquer over a crack, "this is larger than either of us. I can't—"

Yan Luo tilted his head. The bead dropped. It hit the cup rim and chipped it—a small, ugly sound. "Larger than you," he corrected, his voice not changing at all. "Not larger than me."

Hui looked at him then—really looked, as if he had turned aside like a man turns from a blade and now finally saw the edge. "Why are you doing this for a royal brat that can't even speak."

Yao Luo cocked his head to the side and stared at the man. "Because that royal brat is my son. And if you think I am going to allow anything to happen to him, especially from people that want to claim that they are mine, well… I think it is time that I reminded everyone why I am called the King of Hell."

"South cistern," he said hoarsely. "The old one. They keep the children there before they send them out with the pilgrims at first light. The faces are fixed at the bathhouse by Wutong Gate. The coin changes hands at the incense stall that's never open."

Yan Luo stood. "You should run," he said almost kindly. "Not because you think you'll get away, but because I like when men try."

He left the back room. The bead-merchant stared down at the knife she was not holding. Light-Step was sweating like a man in a fever.

"Take him home," Yan Luo told Gaoyu, jerking his chin at the runner. "If he leaves again tonight, cut two tendons and call it mercy."

Light-Step made a sound like he wanted to pray and had forgotten how.

-----

The south cistern was a throat cut into the earth and left to heal wrong. Winter made its breath white. The door to the lower chamber had been barred from the outside with an old beam and a prayer stamped into the wood. Prayers rot. Beams rot. Both can still resist long enough to irritate.

"Lift," Yan Luo said.

His men lifted. The beam came free with a groan that made the hair along his arms rise, not from fear but from the way old wood remembers rain. He stepped into the dark and let the cold touch his face.

Cisterns make their own silence. This one did not. Children breathe differently when they're asleep because they can. Empty rooms never forget you're alone.

"Lantern," he said.

Light pooled into the corners like guilt. Rope fibers lay in a coil, cut in a hurry. Someone had not wanted to waste time untying knots. A bowl tipped on its side, a smear of paste clinging to the lip.

He touched it and brought his finger to his tongue.

Sweet.

The same sweet he'd smelled in the tea kettle in his head when he'd replayed the servant's story. It would make a child's eyes heavy and his limbs slower than they ought to be if he needed to run.

He crouched by a mark near the wall, small, regular. Someone had dragged something wooden across stone—a crate that had been a chair before it had been a prison. He moved his lantern.

There, in the dust: three small scuffs together, then a pause, then three again. A signal. Boys who can't speak learn to speak anyway.

Yan Luo closed his eyes and saw small fingers pressing those scuffs, making a prayer that did not use words. He opened them and discovered he had already decided. "They moved him," he said. "Upstairs. Out. Caught their breath here and then ran."

"Which way?" Gaoyu asked.

Yan Luo lifted the lantern and looked at the beam they had set aside. The side that had faced the wall was clean—too clean. The other was dusty. Someone had brushed it with a cloth after they set it down, then picked it up again and put it back wrong. Men who are afraid make mistakes with right and left.

"Wutong Gate," he said. "Bathhouse. Now."

------

The bathhouse was closed. Doors latched. The keeper asleep upstairs with a dog that was more nose than brain. Yan Luo didn't knock.

Steam rose where a brazier had heated a small pool. On a bench: a kit that would pass every inspection from a half-blind constable—ointment for winter skin, combs, cloths. Under the cloths: dye, glue, razors. The edge on the razors said the last hand to touch them had been patient.

He opened the dye jar. Brown. A red-brown when thin. He set it down and found, under the bench, a tiny thing that stopped him where he stood: the head of a painted wooden crane, snapped from its body, the peg that should have sat in a hole now ragged with force.

He held it between forefinger and thumb. The paint had flaked where small teeth had worried it in thought.

"Little Crane," he said aloud, and the ledger in Master Hui's drawer gave him his answer back.

Gaoyu peered over his shoulder. "Too late," he said.

"Not yet," Yan Luo said. He looked at the drain.

The bathhouse would have poured its dirty water into a run that fed the alley behind the incense stall. Pilgrims would gather there at first light, their packs full of rice donations and small lies.

A child with new hair and a new bruise could walk among them and become a cousin by the time the city gate remembered to count.

"Wake the incense seller," he said. "And the man who counts the pilgrims' beads. Tell them it's a blessing."

"What if they don't believe in blessings?" Gaoyu asked.

"Then tell them I don't either," Yan Luo said.

He slid the crane head into his sleeve, tucked where the blood had dried. He closed his eyes once, saw her face the way it had not broken when anyone else would have shattered, and let that be the last soft thing he allowed himself tonight.

"Net the gate," he said, already walking. "Every pilgrim line. Every charity cart. Every man who thinks a child can be folded into luggage and carried out like shame."

"And if they fight?" Gaoyu asked.

Yan Luo's smile returned, small and lethal. "Then we stop pretending we're civilized."

He stepped into the cold, and the market stepped with him.