014. a proposition

Tian Miyan was nothing if she was not constantly prepared. 

Even as the shop’s attendant sat down three heaping bowls of tsua-bing with all sorts of sweet toppings piled high on top, the princess concentrated on her task which may have seemed like some strange ritual to her mountain-raised guests. 

She balanced a pair of chopsticks between two overturned teacups and set another one on top, careful to prevent it from falling. “Now,” she began as she balanced yet another set of chopsticks on that solitary teacup, about an inch apart. “I have a proposition. You ladies look like you would be willing to do business if the trade is fair, and I think I have something you would be very interested in.”

The older of the Wei sisters, Chongwei, tilted her head. A spoon was already stuffed into her mouth, cheeks curiously puffed with an overabundance of colorful fruits and drizzlings and fine shavings of ice. Her hair bobbed with the motion, fluffy bangs shifting very slightly, loose curls of her short hair flopping to frame the roundness of her greed. She briefly glanced at her sister, then back to the princess.

“Okei. Wats yer propfosishun?” The dark-haired sister asked before swallowing, tongue cooled, breath chill. She was working on a new shovel-full of desert immediately, diligent like there was no time to waste on politeness, even in front of royalty. “We like business if the business is good.” The second bite followed her words with little delay.

Jiewei was similarly face-first into the dessert, deprived of this quantity of sugar for her whole life. How often had she and Chongwei muscled their way into the Luanshi kitchens to steal plain rock sugar to eat like candy, to use like currency among the orphan population?

“We’ll be the ones who decide what we’re interested in!” the younger girl said pointing her spoon at the princess after she swallowed.

“Do you know what I do?” Miyan asked, still focused on the tower she was constructing. “It is similar to my mother, who can weave threads of trouble into the best laid plans, who can paint good fortune into a dire scenario. I can make things happen by doing something very, very small—set into motion a chain of events that terminates in whatever objective I want to accomplish.”

“Uh-huh,” Chongwei replied with some skepticism as she slowly pulled her utensil from her pursed lips. “So you want to do something for us or are you threatening us?”

“I’m setting up a series of events that will make Shifu Xueyu lose five consecutive sparring matches on the mountain next week,” the girl replied as she looked up with a pleasant smile. “I thought it would be funny. I think you two might think it’s funny too. All you have to do is tell me about your big brother—the guy in black you came down with.” Tilting her head, the princess let another pair of teacups go, precariously balanced on the far ends of the chopsticks set atop the center. “I’ll keep dessert rolling for as long as you keep talking. Don’t worry, I’m not cruel.”

The blonde sister looked at her dark haired elder, then back at Miyan. “Why do you want information on Laike?”

“My brother, Yuhui, thinks he’s cute,” the princess said with a mock gag. “He’s got a gross love-at-first-sight crush on him and now he wants all the deets. I scammed some jewelry offa him as payment for my services—” She patted the pin sticking out of her hair. “—but it’s not about the value of the item. I just like seeing his face when he sees that I have his things. That’s my real reward.”

“Hold on,” the brunette grifter lifted her palm, fingers delicately splayed in her request for a pause. “If you’re already intent on bringing this great pain to Xue—and don’t get me wrong it will totally, like, be a riot—then where’s our incentive to give you those details? You get to pick what you want, we’re not going to sit by and get told what we’re getting. That’s not how deals work, Princess.”

“I’m not intent on bringing pain to Xueyu. I want Yuhui to suffer watching me wear our mother’s hairpin,” the girl clarified as she donned a soft pout. “Besides, I’m not all powerful. I’ve only got a bead on some sparring sessions right now. I have to be able to see it through. I can’t make ANYTHING happen. I can just nudge things, you know? And what I can nudge right now are these five sparring sessions, one at a time.” Miyan paused in her setup, a single chopstick in each hand. “Or I could just not mess with him. I mean it’s your call, sis.”

Chongwei lifted her shoulder in a shrug. “How about this, so we can feel like we have some choice in the matter: you do the thing to Xueyu, but then you also buy us both something nice out here in the market. Something we can remember our partnership by, something pretty so when we look back, we can recall this beautiful agreement we’re about to come to.” Back to her sister, then. “Does that sound good to you, Jiewei?”

“I’d say that’s a bargain for how much info we have to sell,” Jiewei confirmed, though she was distracted from their business dealings by the dessert slowly melting before her. “Eat your thing, Chongwei, the ice isn’t gonna last forever—”

“It’s a deal then.” Miyan was always happy to come to an agreement with a new contact. “I’ll even let you decide who gets to best him, but it has to make sense in how he’d choose. You can think about it. We have a little time before I can start this.” Squinting, the princess looked up at the sky like she was waiting for something.

“Okay. Sooo,” the older girl hummed, dipping back into her treat, “I guess the first thing you should know about Lai is that he can’t keep secrets. And I’m not talking about him falling apart reluctantly after a tense interrogation—as soon as someone asks him for the truth he spits it out like it hurts him just to keep it in. He’s a friendly boy, but he doesn’t make friends easily. In fact, a lot of the other trainees are jealous of him. They talk shit behind his back and constantly try to challenge him, but he kicks their asses every time. He’s really good at dishing out a beating,” she laughed, “We’ve won so much shit off of people because of him. Just this morning a kid got his whole leg snapped in half because of Lai—I can still hear the way that bone cracked in my head, oh my Gods.”

Chongwei looked to Jiewei, then back to Miyan. “What sort of other stuff do you want to know?”

“I need favorites: food, activities, people, whatever. What’s he do in his off time, what’s he afraid of, what’s his story.” A pause followed by an impish grin. “Does he like boys? Has he ever had a boyfriend?”

“I think his favorite food is anything edible,” Jiewei scoffed. ” I think he’ll eat anything. When Xueyu left us in the middle of nowhere on the mountain and we had to make our way back, the first thing he did was kill a deer. Do you remember, Chongwei? We came back and he had blood all on him and Jiling was SO UPSET we all took a caning. Anyways I’ve seen him eat three dozen dumplings in one go—he’s so skinny where do those things even go?”

Chongwei rolled her eyes—not for her sister, but for the boy in question’s stomach capacity. “With how busy everyone keeps him? He obviously works them off.” She focused back on the Tian daughter. “He’s never had a boyfriend, but there was this one disciple a few years back, Chen. I’m pretty sure he had a crush on him. Lai was so cute whenever he was around, he’d always try to impress him, especially when they sparred—I dunno how to really describe it, but like, imagine two boys flirting with each other during swordplay. That’s really what it looked like to me, it was something about their movements, the way they looked at each other. Did you see it like that, Jiewei? Anyway, Chen left, he went to travel, so I’m pretty sure nothing deep ever really got to be established between him and Laike.”

“Yeah they’d get all close and tense, and Master Xueyu would always call their duels at a draw before they touched mouths, like bleeeaaaaahhhh.” The younger sister stuck out her tongue, mimicking the gross makeout sessions Xueyu had repeatedly struck from existence. “He was cute but so serious—just sorta stared at me when I would try to joke with him you know? But I saw him smile for Lai. They were sweet together, ugh my teeth.” Folding her hands under her chin, Jiewei thought a little harder. “I mean I’ve seen him looking at some of the priestesses in the mountain halls too—but I dunno, that might have been him staring into space filled with actual hunger and not hunger for the ladies, you know?” She reiterated, as if they could forget: “He’s always hungry.”

“Mmhmm,” Miyan hummed as a crow flew overhead and landed in the branches of a nearby dogwood tree. “I’ll give the first win to Laike.” The princess picked a little piece of sweetened taro root off of her tsua-bing and held it up above her head. The crow left the branches and snatched up the sweet, returning to the tree to settle on a different branch to enjoy its meal.

“I’m surprised he’s not consistently beating that old man already, honestly. Probably just a matter of time there.” Chongwei poked at the icy catastrophe of sugar before her. “His favorite people are obviously us, but he likes Master Xueyu too, and Mistress Jiling. He’s known them for a while. Got picked up when he was… hm, like six?”

“It’s cause Master makes him use a real sword when they spar, not enough shadows on the yard—plus his actual sword is kind of a bitch. I think she’s drunk on cooking wine half the time,” Jiewei announced like she was an expert on the subject. She continued like she was about to confide some embarrassing detail, leaning in with her voice low. “Did you know he still sleeps with that blue and silver brocade blanket Xueyu found him with? He’s fully growed, what does he need a security blankie for?”

Nevermind that Jiewei still slept with the one he’d given her when she’d arrived at Yunji.

“Oh my Gods, right?” Chongwei looked to her sister with scandal in her eyes. “Okay, so listen to this, Princess—when we came to the mountain, Lai gave us each these really fancy blankets to sleep with and for the longest time I thought he was a rich kid who was shunning his lifestyle. I was like ‘why don’t you just go home?’ and ‘where are all your other nice things, tell me about your family’ but he wouldn’t and everyone just kept insisting that he was an orphan like us. So I’m thinking, how does he have these super nice blankets? These are not handouts, and if they are, then they’re from like… high society.” The brunette girl leaned forward, pensively resting her chin on folded knuckles. “I mean, I guess I kinda don’t blame him for still sleeping with that blanket. It’s nice! I used to wrap mine around my shoulders like a cape. Really makes me feel not like human trash.” She smiled at the memory.

“Do you remember that one time we went to his little loft room in the middle of the night and we demanded we get to play toys with him? And he just stared at us, like super sleepy but… kinda sad? I don’t know, I woulda slapped myself back down the ladder we crawled up on, but he didn’t get mad with us. He lit a lamp and put it on the floor and asked us to sit down with him.” Jiewei looked a little wistful at the memory. She remembered being terrified as a child; remembered Chongwei’s spitfire mouth always covering that same fear. Laike had always made the Weis feel safer, from that first gifted blanket to the ride down the mountain today. “And then I remember you were like hey what am I supposed to be looking at here buddy I don’t have all day and then all of a sudden there were shadows of all these toys and things on the wall.”

The older girl snapped straight, wrists flapping excitedly at the memory. “OH! Yeah! He went into that story about how he’s rich on the other side but he can’t bring his toys or his parents over to this side, he could only show them to us in the shadows cast by his light. Ugh. Laike is really just the best. Come to think of it Princess, if your brother is a jerk and breaks his heart or even makes him a little upset, then I’m going to hurt him really bad, okay? I don’t even care about laws. I’ll do a crime so fast.”

“Yuhui is flighty, captivated by beauty like a magpie,” Miyan observed in over-serene lyrical poetry complete with hand poses before her face fell into a more natural state, savvy with lips pursed. The transition from princess to girl happened in the blink of an eye, batted lash missing the drop in her character. “If you wanna know anything about him, I’ll dish—he’s harmless.”

Chongwei tilted her head, picking up her spoon to thoughtlessly push the remnants of her desert around its shallow dish. Small chunks of fruit swam around the striking swirls of brightly colored syrups and bits of bean.

“Okay,” the older girl hummed, “Well, you say your brother is harmless, but is he actually nice? How stuck up is he? Has he had a lot of boyfriends? Does he send you out to do this for every boy he likes?”

“Yes,” Miyan said too quickly. “But that doesn’t mean he’s had lots of boyfriends. He doesn’t really get a chance. He’s just… curious.” The princess finally picked up her own spoon to take a single bite of her dessert. “He’s not really stuck-up though. I don’t think he’s ever had the chance. He’s alone all the time because everyone is afraid of his ghosts—the only person who’s not family that hangs around him is Ren Fei. Yuhui’s kindhearted; optimistic; generous.”

“Oh, sad. I guess it’ll be good news for him that Laike’s not afraid of ghosts. I don’t think Laike’s afraid of anything.” Chongwei elbowed her pale-haired sister. “Have you ever seen Lai scared? I mean, if someone surprises him he will straight up murder them but that’s not really fear so much as it’s instinct.”

Jiewei was quiet, poking at the soupy remains of her decimated tsua-bing. “Sometimes when Xueyu leaves I think he looks scared.”