Zhenxi manor stood on the western side of Fanxing’s many streets, a quiet and calm place compared to the bustle of the more populated areas, the marketplaces, the avenues lined with street stalls and buskers of all sorts. On this side of town one could hear the wind as it traveled on the air of a melody. When it ran its fingers through the proud banners handspun by Zhenxi elders, chimes filled the nearby alleys in gentle songs of sudden making—every one was a singular masterpiece, no melody or rhythm was ever repeated.
Gui Ao slowed his horse from a canter to a trot, a trot to a walk. He approached the large steps leading up to the secretive clan’s headquarters, sweat beading on his forehead, papers tucked under his arm. He dismounted Potato, boots hitting the ground with a dense thud, and handed her reins over to a statue of a dragon whose open mouth seemed to be waiting to accept those thin strips of leather.
The Zhenxi clan was isolated and insular. They functioned sort of like the Luanshi Sect in the sense that they took in anyone—so long as that anyone met their two prerequisites: they must be willing to trade their surname for Zhenxi and they must be a woman. The clan prized art above all else—each woman who joined was expected to take up a skill to better herself and better the group as a whole—but that didn’t mean that they were incapable on the arena’s battlefloor. The Zhenxi were skilled fighters taught by the swordmistress Zhenxi Naohe, a woman who was said to have murdered her husband, the black widow of Fanxing City.
Ao was intent on seeing his mother and giving her the papers from Feng Ban.
Ao was intent on getting the truth out this woman who’d kept such a secret from him for so long.
The leader of the Zhenxi clan, the devastating Zhenxi Jiewang, was the queen of her own realm. Though she was a subject under Tian rule, her small kingdom was afforded a bubble of self governance, hardly disturbed by the Tian family and never their King. If ever the royal family came calling, it was the Tian Queen who did so and only ever on equal ground. So it was no surprise, then, that Zhenxi Jiewang’s daughters and nieces did as they pleased in and around Fanxing without regard for rank or reprisal.
The proud royal who greeted Gui Ao today was Jiewang’s wild daughter, her youngest child, the firebrand Zhenxi Anji, champion of her clan’s arena lineup. “Halt, Gui Ao,” she demanded, blocking the boy’s path as he approached the Zhenxi royal compound, her mother’s sprawling garden of light. She was a slight girl with a fuck you, fight me tilt to her head, a gladiator’s challenge always rough on the edge of her voice; she was draped in deep green and violet, threads of gold geometry woven through and under the chrysanthemums embroidered at her hems. The warrior crossed her arms. “Your arrival was unannounced—just ‘cause your mom lives here doesn’t mean you can come to the House of Zhenxi whenever you feel like it.”
“It’s important.” Caught off guard, Ao paused for a few seconds then kept walking. He strode right up to the girl looking her in the eyes. His wavy hair was mussed from the ride, wind-swept and frazzled, unsure of exactly what direction it wanted to go. “I don’t have time for stupid announcements today. Go get her. If you’re not going to let me inside, then go get her.”
“I’m not your bitch-boy errand girl,” the warrior spat back, stepping up chest to chest with the mercenary on her doorstep. She was a mongoose snarl, her eyes flashing black and gold in the afternoon sun. “Get on your knees and ask me proper, boy—ask me with some respect in your mouth or I’ll put it there for you.”
Looking down his nose at the girl, the Gui son exhaled a long breath before complying. Slowly he lowered himself to his knees. He bent at the waist and dipped his head low, blood-hungry hands folded into a shape more proper. He didn’t want trouble with the girl—Ao didn’t have the time, nor the heart, to keep up his disrespect.
“Please,” he tried again, poison tongue sharp behind his canines. “Please, Zhenxi Anji, let me see my mother.”
“Tch, no fun,” Anji grumbled as she rolled her eyes. “Stay, puppy.”
The girl left Ao on the ground outside her mother’s chrysanthemum palace, shooing one of her attendants to fetch the swordmaster for her coward of a son.
Within moments, Anji’s voice was heard dueling with another—a sharp ratatat exchange that saw the young warrior fuming down the light bathed center courtyard and beyond Zhenxi Jiewang’s court, to the clan’s training yard. Zhenxi Naohe was soon at her son’s side, taking him by the elbows and urging him off his knees.
“Ao-ao,” she chided. Ao’s mother had a strict voice, reserved and stern, softened only by a veiled love for her two sons and none other. “Come now—if you treat young mistress Anji like a Princess, what do you think she’ll become?”
“I didn’t want her to go fucking crazy on me. You know how she is.” Ao looked at his mother different today, excited to see her but with an anxious bend. It’d been so long—all those months spent cold and alone in the north, the avalanche, the bandits, the in-fighting with his brother—the oldest of that eradicated line pulled his mother to him, hugging her tightly with one arm. “I don’t really have the time or money to spend all day with the doctor. Feng Ban took me into the forest and told me some things. Can we go somewhere alone?”
Features drawn, the woman nodded her silent assent, leading her son up the Zhenxi stronghold’s steps and into the complex.
In the sprawling gardens crisscrossed with ponds and streams, Zhenxi Naohe held a modest residence in the western quarter. Despite her leader’s generosity, the swordmistress of the Zhenxi sisterhood preferred to live without lavish surroundings, preferring the simplicity of nature to the spectacle of wealth. She’d had more than enough living as a captive of the Feng family’s extravagance—now she longed for nothing more than the treetops and birdsong that marked her happy youth. She guided her son to a pavilion near her home, overlooking a lotus filled waterway. Here they heard nothing but the lapping of water at the building’s stilts; Fanxing’s din seemed very far away.
“Did he find something?” the woman asked, holding her elbows like it would hold down any rage that may surface if she were presented evidence of the Feng clan’s treachery.
“Yeah, I guess.” Ao offered the papers Ban entrusted to him. “He said these are correspondences between Zao and Feng—” The mercenary was already exasperated, tired and weary from his wild ride day that was far from being over. “Mom, I killed that guy. How could you let Lin and I believe that we were related to that clan of monsters this whole time? How could you keep the truth from us? We’d do anything for you, why weren’t you honest?”
Naohe took the papers from her son and briskly leafed through them, pulling out one to read. The corner of the page shook with the trembling of the woman’s hand. She quickly pushed the paper back into the leather roll looking up at her son, now grown taller than she.
“I made a promise to your father: that I would keep your and your brother safe. You can be upset with me, that is your right—but do not talk to me like I have not suffered too; do not act like I was happy to lie to you.”
Ao frowned deeply, unwilling to lash out at his mother despite the fire of frustration that burned deep inside of him. He turned away from the woman, leaning over the railing of the pavilion, looking down into the water flecked with the afternoon’s light.
“What happens now?” Ao queried. “What will you do now? When will Lin and I be allowed to meet our true father?”
“It will be his choice to reveal himself. When the time comes, you will know your father.” Naohe’s face was caught in a soft moment, so different from the strict mistress of swords the Zhenxi knew her to be, the hard edged murderess Fanxing crafted in her wake. She only indulged these modest vulnerabilities with her sons; she saved all her kind words for the handful of moments she was permitted with the pair of boys she was forbidden from raising herself. She handed the roll back to her child, strong and indignant before her. “You will take these and, when the battle for the Millipede is over, you will use your audience with the King to level your accusations and present these documents. All of Fanxing will be watching. Even if the King turns out to be unjust or is indebted to the Feng clan, the people will know the kind of unforgivable scum Feng Youzui truly is and pressure his hand. You must not let anyone know these exist. Can you do this, Ying Ao?”
“Yeah.” Ao faced his mother again and took the roll back, shoving it under his arm. Now, there was a dejection to his growl, a wilting weakness to the threat of his bite. Why did he have to do this? Why did the responsibility of clearing a name he never knew rest heavy on his shoulders, why was duty laid in the cup of his bloody palms? He would do the deed—of course he would, he hated the Fengs with a red-sighted passion—but Ao was tired from the back and forth, the hither and yon.
“My name is Gui Ao, though,” the boy corrected. “And it will be as long as I know no Ying.”
Naohe’s eyes grew wide; her face drained of colour and was replaced by a livid deathcast. Ao’s temper came from somewhere; his source stood right before him. The woman took her son’s arm in her vice grip and snatched the roll forcibly back.
“If this is who my son has become, he should leave,” she ordered, tossing Ao’s arm and sending him stumbling toward the pavilion’s entry steps. She turned away, unwilling to look at him. She clutched the roll of old letters in her hands. “I will find someone else to petition on our behalf.”
Catching himself on a pillar of the exit, Ao looked back to his mother. “If I am not allowed to be who I am then who do you expect me to be, a mythological Ying? Would a Ying not act like this? How am I supposed to know?”
“My son would stand by the word of his mother without dig, without reluctance, without the drag of his step; he would strive to clear the name of a woman who gave up her life so he might live his; to clear the name of a father who was betrayed by those who still seek to use him.” Naohe’s voice was calm, heavy; she was a low frequency gravitas, thick as the sky. She did not turn. “My boy Ao would not wound me so; he would not scar my heart by forsaking this name that is not yet valuable. He would not make a mockery of my years as a pariah, my years denied the presence of my own children. My boy Ao would not be so cruel.”
“… I’m sorry,” Ao replied, eyes trained on the woman, not wanting to upset her again. He stood up straight and faced her again, hand extended. “I’m sorry, mother. Give me the papers.”
“I will find someone else to petition on our behalf,” Ao’s mother repeated, turning now to exit the pavilion herself. “Please don’t trouble yourself.”
“Fine.” The Gui boy stepped aside so the woman could leave.
Without another look to her son, Naohe held her head high and left him at the pavilion outside her home as she went inside, shutting the door behind her.
When Lin returned, Ao was not present at their shoddy shared home at the Feng estate. Without any leads, the younger of the Gui brothers was off to track his kin, which was, surprisingly, quite easy because Turnip always knew exactly where Potato was located.
Venturing into the House of Canghua, the mercenary was overwhelmed by the smell of perfume, incense, and wine. Waving away the girls at the entrance, the boy quickly spotted his brother, drinking at a low table near a window overlooking the pleasure house’s courtyard.
“Look at you, always frugal,” Lin’ai teased as he sat across from his elder. “Is it true that the wine is cheaper here because they want you to get drunk and spend more money on women?”
“Yes,” his brother plainly replied, watching the way a woman playfully shimmied around the dark silks of an unknown man, iridescence casting an auroral array of colors around her long, flowing robes. Trinkets of gold and milky pearl hung around her waist, sentenced by the movement of her hips to live their lives in the sway of jingling dance. He looked over to Lin after a moment, motioning to a passing girl for another glass. Ao’s cheeks were pink. The evenings were warm and he was starting to feel the alcohol. “Did you just get back?”
“A-yup,” Lin confirmed, playfully. He was too chipper for the storm clouds looming over his brother’s head. “I still have a boyfriend and you look like a sad drunk. What happened?”
“I’ve had a fucking day, Lin. Feng Ban took me into the forest and told me that Feng Huacai isn’t our dad, explained that we’re part of a pair of clans that ruled the forest or some shit and were betrayed and destroyed by the Fengs in the war, then gave me a bunch of papers to take to mom. I went to see mom and pissed her off really bad because she called me Ying Ao and I said that I am Gui Ao because I don’t know Ying and she pushed me and told me to leave.” Ao slumped into his palm, elbow resting on the barely clean table. Candlelight cast his shadow long, dithering and dreary.
“The Lady of the Mountain gave us a present. Will that cheer you up?” Lin seemed to gloss entirely over the huge revelation Ao had just let flood out all over the table and, instead, dumped the broken reliquary onto the table between them. He tucked the splintered wooden lacquer back into box shape to keep the black silk from spilling out. “Uh. Someone dropped it before they handed it to me. Sorry.”
If he were honest, Lin’ai knew something was amiss since he was a child—with the way their uncle treated them, Lin always felt like an abandoned cause, feral even with their assumed father watching over him. Ao’s words were confirmation of a long held belief rather than an explosion rocking the foundation of his person. If it wasn’t Ao, then Lin hardly knew it. That was the gift his brother gave him: a pass on all the familial worry that loomed in blade shape over their heads.
Ao’s dark eyes shifted to look at the pitiful excuse for a box but he made no other movements for it. “I don’t give a shit about presents right now. Glad you worked it out with your boy, though.”
“Thanks, I got super laid.” Lin cheerfully took the second glass from the attendant when she returned, pouring himself some wine from his brother’s carafe. “I don’t know what’s gonna cheer you up. I guess, yeah, I kinda wanna know who our dad is but in the grand scheme of things, what does it matter? Who cares what our family name is? It’s always been you and me against the world, whether or not our name is Gui or Ying or that fucking guy—nothing changes, right? So what do you want out of all this? If you make a choice, I’ll make that choice with you.”
“I guess I just want people to let me be who I fucking am?” Ao’s tongue ran over his front teeth, contemplative. “I dunno, Lin. I care what our family name is. I made the choice to violently refuse being a Feng, fought to be a Gui because we’re our mother’s sons and I’m proud of her, to have her name, and will fucking murder anyone who looks down on me because of it. I just—fuck, man. I’m twenty-five years old and she spoke to me like I was a child, like this whole time I was someone better than who I actually am. I immediately apologized to her and it still wasn’t enough. If it’s such a big deal that I’m a Ying, then why have they been keeping it from us this whole time? How do I know that I want to be a Ying if the man who is my father doesn’t trust me enough to look me in the eyes? Ugh, I’m just so frustrated.”
“So, wait—Feng Ban told you all of this to start out?” Lin took a drink, then refilled both glasses. “Okay, take me back to this morning.”
“UGHH, LIN.” Ao rolled his eyes, then sat up straighter. He swallowed the rest of his glass and refilled it. “Okay, so when I got back from seeing you off, Ban said he was going to tack Potato and that we were going hunting because he made me a new bow. We were riding out of the city and got on the subject of mom and he said it was important we stay close to our roots and I told him our roots were rotten because they’re half-Feng and he said Huacai wasn’t our dad.”
Ao rambled through the story as best he could, occasionally pausing to go back and correct a misspoken detail. He told his brother about the pair of forest tribes, explained how they used artifacts different from the clans in Fanxing, went into the particulars regarding the foul plots the Feng clan constructed when it was Tians and the rest of their immediate world against the mad tyrant Zao Beiguan. He was more solemn when it came to recounting the specifics of his meeting with their mother.
“—So, I mean, yeah.” Ao was three more glasses into the story. “I know I was shitty but aren’t I always shitty? She said I had a right to be upset, and yet, when I express being upset she says I am cruel and mocking her sacrifice.”
“You’re shitty to everyone except for mom,” Lin corrected. “Mostly to mom, you’re like mommy I love you, mommy please don’t let the Zhenxi clan make me into a rug so maybe you can see where the departure was strange to her.” He leaned onto his elbows, considering the scenario, fingers steepled before his pursed lips. He grinned suddenly, seeming to forget that he was supposed to be pursuing a solution to their problems. “Ha, wouldn’t it be funny if Feng Ban was our dad?”
“I apologized to her RIGHT AWAY, LIN!!!!” Ao slapped a hand on the table, rattling their collection of cups and lone bottle. He leaned forward again. “Ban’s apparently a Ying but I dunno if he’s our dad. He said he promised mom he’d watch us. If he was our father, why wouldn’t he just fucking say so?”
“Maybe you didn’t apologize RIGHT AWAY HARD ENOUGH, AO-AO!!!” Lin slapped the table back but exerted too much force, nearly toppling their bottle of wine. Fumbling, he caught the teetering treasure and put it back upright. Quiet admonitions came from a nearby table who cleared out of the range of the rowdy Gui boys. Lin’ai’s voice returned to a secretive volume. “I mean, look: if the guy’s been keeping secrets for twelve whole years, why would they spill the whole story right before everything comes into place? Who makes a bow for someone who’s not paying them, anyways? C’mon, Ao.”
Ao pointed at his sibling, vicious. “No, you come on! Just because he’s a kinda decent person doesn’t mean he’s our dad, Lin. He’s been nice to us before. Does that make you want to call him your father?”
Lin’ai leaned on the table. “Look, Ao-ao, I’mma level with you: when we were kids, I called a lot of dudes father if I thought I could scam a bowl of pork hocks out of them, so calling one more guy dad doesn’t really put me out.”
Ao leaned forward, laying his forehead in his palm. “Admitting you’ll call anyone daddy for some pork hocks is not a good look, Lin. How the fuck are you in a relationship with a prince again? My Gods.”
“I like pork hocks. Can we order food?” Lin looked up and around to see if he could hail down their attendant.
“If I get you food are you gonna focus for more than two seconds?”
“Probably,” Lin looked up, mischievous. “I expended a lot of calories today, if you get my meaning.”
“Rich boy can’t even get you a meal? Uh-huh, okay. Fucking fine, get what you want.” Ao spoke as he was getting what he wanted. The older Gui boy refilled his cup.
“We were fucking in the woods outside a monastery, where you think I’m gonna get fed at?” Lin grinned before he got their girl’s attention, quickly ordering a couple of dishes.
Ao stumbled down the quiet halls of the Feng manor, those long corridors darkened by the moonless night.
“Fuck, I can’t walk straight,” he complained to his brother, reaching out to steady himself on the other boy. “Why did you make me drink so much?”
“You shouldn’t have opened your mouth so wide when I was pouring three bottles into your face.” Lin was, in contrast to his brother, a comfortable level of drunk—warm and belligerent and not even remotely nauseous. Maybe this was his fault. Lin had no idea how much Ao had drunk before Turnip found Potato. “Y’wanna get to your bed? D’y’wanna puke your soul out?”
“No. I wanna go see Ban and ask him if he’s our dad.” Ao took a turn, heading down the hall housing the man’s private quarters. There was a light on, a low glow from quiet candles in the dim.
“Okay okay okay—” Lin tried to keep ahold of Ao as he took a sharp turn toward Ban’s small palace within the confines of the Feng patriarch’s gilded cage. “—we can go ask and then it’s sleepy time for Ao-ao.”
“Yeah, fine.” Ao stopped before the door that made the open-air passageway a dead end, lifting a balled fist to knock his knuckles gently against it.
From inside, Ban’s gruff voice, seemingly distracted behind the door, conceded entry with a simply stated: “Enter.”
Ao pulled the door just enough to stick his head inside. “Are you my dad?”
“Mine too?” Lin peeked over his brother’s drunken head, ready to see the fruits of his drunken prodding.
Ban was lounging in his bed fully dressed, languidly reading an ancient swordsman’s manual resting against his leg. Without looking up at the pair, the swordsman turned the page. “Yes.”