Five of us went down from Capital Peak on the morning of the twelfth day. I was the only one who hadn’t slept.

I’d spent the night counting pills into bottles, counting them again, and lying in the dark doing sums. By dawn I’d stopped being able to tell whether I was tired or simply excited. I washed my face in cold water and went down to the foot of the mountain with my magic bag tied under my robe, where nobody could brush against it.

Liu-shixiong led us. He was a lean, sleepy-looking senior with ink on his fingers, sent down with Li to buy supplies on our shifu’s list. An older disciple whose name I didn’t catch was going home to see his mother. And He Fei had come because his cousin in the Trading Division had found him a buyer in town for a crate of his family’s dried mushrooms, which he’d been carrying around the dormitory for a week like a dowry.

We waited an hour at the bottom of the path for the Heaven Peak party. Nobody complained. I heard them long before I saw them, a cheerful, carrying noise of young men laughing, and above it a girl’s high giggle that rose and fell like a kettle someone kept taking off the heat.

Mo Gu-shishu walked at the front. He was a big man in a grey-green robe with a heavy, set face. He didn’t apologise for being late or even look at us. Behind him came a dozen Heaven Peak disciples, and in the middle of them, being walked along like a bride in a procession, was the girl from the library with the face like a painted fan.

I’d learned her name since. Tang YunQi. The Grand Master’s daughter.

She gave the five of us from Capital Peak one glance, as if we were a row of pots by a back door, and went back to laughing at whatever the boy on her left had said.

I made sure to stand behind He Fei.

“Your aunt won’t be in town, will she?” he asked me quietly, while we waited for the birds.

I looked at him. “My aunt?”

“Sorry.” He went pink. “I just thought, if Peach Blossom Village is near He Ping. Jiang Liu said on the road here that you’d lived with your aunt’s family since you were seven. After your mother died.” He swallowed. “He said they were glad to see the back of you. I didn’t believe that part.”

So that was the girl whose life I had. A mother who’d died young, and an aunt’s family who had been glad of an excuse. I waited to feel something on her behalf and mostly felt relief. Nobody from Peach Blossom Village would be coming up the mountain to visit. Nobody there would be watching to see if I’d changed.

The other thing was that Jiang Liu had spent the road here telling strangers my business. I liked that a good deal less.

“It’s fine,” I said. “We weren’t close.”

He Fei nodded as though that explained a great deal, which I supposed it did.

Our birds were waiting in a field at the foot of the mountain, tethered to stakes driven into the grass. I had seen pictures of them in the library’s geography books, but the pictures hadn’t prepared me for the size. They stood twice as tall as a man, broad-backed and long-necked, with grey-brown feathers that shone like oiled leather and small, furious amber eyes. Each one wore a saddle like a padded bench, with straps. The smallest carried five.

The Heaven Peak disciples took the two big ones and filled them with noise. The five of us climbed onto the third in silence. When the bird stood, my stomach stayed on the ground. When it ran, I gripped the strap in front of me hard enough to hurt and kept my eyes on Liu-shixiong’s back. When it opened its wings and the field fell away underneath us, I forgot to be frightened and looked down.

The mountains lay folded below us in green and blue, the peaks of the sect wrapped in cloud, terraces and roofs and threads of white water. Then the green opened out into farmland, and roads, and the long curve of a river. I’d flown once in my old life, to a graduation in another city, with my knees pressed against the seat in front. This was better. I’d have paid for this.

It was over far too soon. We came down in a square of beaten earth with thatched pens along one side, where more of the great birds dozed with their heads tucked under their wings. A handful of men in the black of the Warrior Division were waiting by the pens.

I recognised one of them before I’d got both feet on the ground.

He was standing a little apart from the others with his hands behind his back, tall, black-robed, his face as still as a carving. The Da Shixiong, Lin Xiao; I’d picked up his name in the canteen since. The man from the library who never turned his head.

Tang YunQi saw him a moment after I did. She came down off her bird in a flutter of pale silk, cried “Xiao-shixiong!” in a voice that set my teeth on edge, and ran at him with her arms out.

He stepped aside. She caught his sleeve instead of his chest, laughed as though this was a game they played every time, and wound both her arms around his.

“Let go,” he said.

It wasn’t loud. But I knew that voice. I’d heard it over the warrior-quarter wall a week ago, ending a conversation in a single word. Every hair on my arms stood up.

She didn’t let go. He didn’t say it again. He simply stood there with her hanging off his arm, looking at nothing, until Mo Gu-shishu came over to him. Then something happened that I hadn’t expected. Mo Gu-shishu smiled. His heavy face opened up as if a shutter had been lifted. He clapped the Da Shixiong on the shoulder and talked to him like an uncle with a favourite nephew. The Da Shixiong answered in a few words. He did not smile back.

I kept my head down and my eyes on the ground and was careful not to look at him again. Whatever that thing was, I’d heard him being begged not to go after it alone. I didn’t want him wondering whether anyone had been on the other side of that wall.

“We’re in He Ping,” Mo Gu-shishu said, turning to the rest of us with his face shut again. “Buy what you came for. We meet here tomorrow, the same hour. Nobody will wait for you.”

Then he walked off towards the noise of the town with all of Heaven Peak and the Warrior Division behind him. We were left standing in the square.

Liu-shixiong sighed. “Li and I have Shifu’s list to fill,” he told us. “The rest of you are on your own until tomorrow. Don’t be late. He meant it.”

He Fei went off with his crate of mushrooms on his shoulder, looking hopeful. The older disciple went off to his mother. I stood in the square for a moment longer with my hand on my magic bag and the whole of He Ping town in front of me and let myself enjoy it.

Then I went to work.

North Street was where the pill shops were. I found it by following the money: the better-dressed people, the porters with locked chests, the guards at the doors. One whole side of the street faced south into the sun; every shopfront on it sold pills. Some had painted signs with gold characters I could half read. Some had nothing but a cloth banner and a queue. The air smelled faintly of medicine, like the street outside a hospital.

I didn’t go into any of them. I walked the whole length of the street once, then back down the other side. I watched which shops were full and which were empty, and what the people coming out were carrying. I stopped at the window of a big shop near the middle and read the price slips pinned beside the bottles until a boy came out to ask if I was buying. Level-two and level-three pills, mostly. Level-one pills were stacked on a low shelf near the door, sold by the bottle, cheap. A bottle of twenty low-grade Dispelling Pills was marked at twenty-two gold.

So a shop would buy at twenty if I was lucky, fifteen if I wasn’t.

I chose the first shop for its queue: busy enough to be honest, not so busy that they’d have time to care about me. A young attendant took me into a back room, where an older man glanced at my bottle, tipped out three pills, rolled them once in his palm without looking at them, and offered me fourteen gold for the twenty.

“Sixteen,” I said.

“Fifteen.”

I took it. I hadn’t come to win against him. I’d come to see how closely he’d look. He hadn’t looked at all.

The second shop was smaller, a few doors down, with a painted sign that said Spring Pavilion in green and a front room so clean it squeaked. The man who saw me in its back room was past sixty, grey at the temples, with an upright back and a pleasant, alert face. He didn’t make small talk. He asked what level I was selling, and when I said level one, he didn’t sigh, which I liked him for.

I set two bottles on his table. Twenty ordinary Dispelling Pills in one, twenty ordinary Accumulate Energy Pills in the other.

He tipped a pill out of the first bottle and rolled it in his palm. Then he held it up to the light from the high window and turned it slowly, like a jeweller with a stone. He tipped out a second pill and held the two side by side.

“Clean refining,” he said. “Very even. Low grade, of course. Twenty gold a bottle.”

That was five more than the queue shop had paid, for the same pills. He’d looked, and he’d seen the work in them, and he’d paid for what he saw. That was all I needed to know about him.

I put the third bottle on the table.

He frowned at it, because it looked the same as the other two, and tipped out a pill. I watched his face. For a moment nothing happened. Then he went still. He picked up one of the pills from the first bottle, set the two together in his palm and held them both to the window for a long time.

“These are a shade darker,” he said at last.

“Yes.”

“Not mid grade. The colour’s too light for mid grade.” He looked up at me. His eyes had gone sharp. “Then what?”

“Low grade. The same herbs as the others, from the same garden.” I folded my hands in my lap. “My master distils them more than once. He reckons the risk at about one in ten.”

The manager put the pill down on the table as carefully as if it might go off.

“I’ve sold pills on this street for forty years,” he said. “No low-grade pill I’ve ever handled has gone under fifteen. Not from anyone.”

“Then you’ll be the first,” I said. “If you want them.”

I put the fourth bottle beside it. “Accumulate Energy. The same.”

He tipped one out, held it to the light and let out a long breath through his nose. “Do you know why nobody buys these?” he said. “A practitioner opening his meridians takes one, two at most, and prays. At twenty parts in a hundred, the energy runs wild in one man out of every few. At ten…” He shook his head slowly. “The Dispelling Pills I can sell. These, people will queue for.”

That answered the question I’d brought down the mountain. I kept my face still and made a note to refine three of these for every one of the others.

He looked at me properly then, for the first time: the plain sect robe, the thin wrists, the hairpin that had cost the original You XiaoMo nothing. I knew what he was seeing. A girl too young and too poor to have made anything like this. An errand runner.

That was the idea.

“Your master,” he said. “May I ask his name?”

“He doesn’t come down the mountain,” I said. “He doesn’t deal with shops, and he’d rather nobody talked about him. That’s why he sends me.”

He didn’t ask again. He looked at the dark little pill for a while longer, tapping one finger on the table. Then he said, “Ten gold a pill, for the dark ones. And twenty a bottle for the others. That’s well above what you’ll get anywhere else on this street, and you’ll have seen that already.” His mouth twitched. “I watched you walk past twice.”

I liked him a little more for that, too.

“Twelve,” I said. “For the dark ones.”

“Young lady.”

“Twelve, and you get first offer on half of everything my master sends down. Before any other shop on this street sees it.” I put my hand flat on the table beside the bottle. “And nobody hears from you that these pills exist. Not where they came from, not who brought them, not that you’ve ever met me. If my master hears his name in this street, he’ll stop sending them, and you’ll be the one he blames.”

He sat back in his chair and studied me, the way he’d studied the pill.

“Done,” he said. “Twelve. Half of every batch, first sight. And I’ve never met you.”

I’d brought forty of the dark pills, twenty of each, and kept four back in the bottom of my bag, wrapped in a twist of cloth, because I didn’t know what tomorrow would want of me. He counted the forty twice. Then he counted out four hundred and eighty gold pieces, and forty more for the two ordinary bottles, into a leather purse that he gave me without being asked.

Five hundred and twenty gold, and fifteen from the queue shop. Five hundred and thirty-five. In my old life I’d once worked out that my student loan would take eleven years to pay off. Here, an ordinary family could live for half a month on a single gold piece. I sat on the stool in the back room of the Spring Pavilion with the purse in my lap and didn’t trust my face, so I kept it down.

“Next month?” the manager asked as he showed me out.

“If my master’s pleased,” I said.

He smiled. “Then I’ll hope he’s pleased.”

The shop for women’s things was on a side street off the market square, where I’d never have found it if I hadn’t been looking. A bolt of red silk hung over the door like a tongue. Inside it was narrow and dim, smelling of sandalwood and face powder. Every wall was lined with little drawers and shelves: combs of horn and tortoiseshell, hairpins, ribbons, pots of rouge, bottles of hair oil, papers of powder folded into neat white squares. Two girls stood at the counter giggling over a box of hair flowers.

The woman behind the counter was about forty-five, small and square, in a dark plum gown with the sleeves pinned back to the elbow so they wouldn’t trail in anything. She had a broad, plain face, heavy brows and quick black eyes. When the girls had paid and gone, she looked at me and said, “You’re not here for a hair flower.”

“No, madam.”

“Good. They’re overpriced.” She put both her hands on the counter. “What are you selling?”

I took out one of the two pill bottles I’d filled with balm and set it in front of her.

She looked at the bottle. Then she looked at me with one heavy eyebrow raised. “This is a pill bottle.”

“It’s a salve. For bruises and scars. And the complexion.”

“Hm.” She unstoppered it and sniffed. Her eyebrow came down a little. “Peaceful Mind?”

“For the scent.”

“What’s under it?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“Of course you’d rather not.” She dipped one blunt finger in, rubbed a little of the balm into the back of her left hand, and turned it to the window. There was an old burn scar on her wrist, shiny and puckered, about the size of a copper coin. She worked a little more of the balm into that. Then she stood with her hand held out in front of her and watched it for so long that I started to wonder if she’d forgotten me.

“It goes in,” she said at last. “It doesn’t sit on top and shine like goose fat, which is what most of them do. And it doesn’t smell like a kitchen.” She looked up. “Does it do anything?”

“The bruise I tested it on faded in three days. The one I didn’t treat took nine.”

“Three days on one bruise. That’s not a test, that’s a story.” She said it flatly, without any sneer at all. “I’ll need to see it on more than one bruise before I put my name to it. My customers come back, and when something doesn’t work, they come back angry, and they come back to me.” She tapped the bottle with her fingernail. “And nobody will buy face cream out of a pill bottle. They’ll think it’s medicine and it’ll frighten them.”

I opened my mouth to argue and closed it again. She was right, and I’d known it before I walked in; I’d only hoped she wouldn’t say it.

“How much do you have?” she asked.

“Two bottles.”

“Then here’s what I’ll do.” She reached under the counter and set out two small round jars of white porcelain, each with a lid painted with a single green leaf. “These are four silver each, which is what they cost me, because I’m not going to make money from you on jars. Put your salve in these. I’ll keep both on the counter for a month, on sale or return. If they sell, I take a third of the price. If they come back, I’ll tell you why.” She looked at me. “What’s it called?”

“Jade Dew Balm.”

She said it once under her breath, testing it as she’d tested the salve. “That’s good,” she said. “Who thought of that?”

“I did.”

“Then you’ve got more sense than most of the people who come in here trying to sell me things.” She put the jars in front of me. “And what do I call you, if anyone asks?”

“Nobody asks,” I said. “That’s part of the price.”

She looked at me for a moment, then gave a short laugh. “Fine. Nobody asks. I’m Su. Everyone calls me Madam Su, though there hasn’t been a Master Su for nine years.” She held out her hand across the counter, palm up, as merchants do to close a bargain, and I put mine in it. Her grip was dry and strong. “One month. Bring me more if they go.”

I spooned the balm into her jars with a little bone spatula she lent me, paid her eight silver for them, and left feeling oddly light. She hadn’t bargained me down. She hadn’t promised me anything. She’d pointed out two mistakes I’d made, charged me nothing for the advice, and told me exactly how she’d judge me.

I’d expected to be cheated somewhere in He Ping. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might be dealt with fairly, and I wasn’t sure what to do with it.

The furniture shop was on a broad street near the river, three shopfronts wide, with cupboards and chests standing outside on the paving to show what was inside. I’d come for storage. My pocket had land and water and nothing else. Seeds were going to need drawers, labelled, before I had any hope of keeping track of what I’d planted.

There were four attendants inside. Three were busy with customers. The fourth stood alone in a corner beside a stack of birchwood stools, a thin boy of maybe fifteen with big ears, his hands clasped in front of him.

“Dong Jiu!” called the nearest attendant, a sleek young man with oiled hair, without looking round from his own customer. “Why are you standing there? Can’t you see we’ve got a guest?” He said guest the way you’d say beggar, and I saw his eyes slide over my plain robe and my unpainted face and dismiss me.

The boy in the corner jumped as if he’d been slapped and came over, wiping his palms on his apron. “Gu-guest,” he said. “Good morning. Are you looking for furnishings?”

The sleek attendant snorted without turning round. “No, she’s come to buy pills, you fool. Of course she’s looking for furnishings.”

Dong Jiu went red to the tips of his large ears.

I’d seen that before. The newest pharmacist on a shift gets the customer nobody wants: the one with a prescription in a language nobody can read, the one who’ll complain, the one with no insurance. If the new one fumbles it, everyone gets a laugh. I’d been the new one.

I looked at the sleek attendant’s back for a moment. Then I turned to Dong Jiu and smiled at him as warmly as I knew how.

“I’m looking for a lot of things,” I said. “Do you mind if I tell you all at once?”

“N-no, guest. Please.”

I gave him the whole list. A tall cabinet of small drawers, eighty at least, each with a label board. Four chests with lids. Two low shelves. A table, a stool, a set of nested wooden trays, three buckets, a dipper, a pair of wooden rakes. I rattled it off quickly, partly to see what he would do. When I’d finished, he closed his eyes for a moment and gave every item back to me in order, with the sizes. Then he asked whether I wanted the cabinet in poplar or birch, because the birch drawers stuck less in damp weather.

I let a moment pass. Then I said, loudly enough to carry, “You remembered all of that?”

The sleek attendant’s customer turned to look. So did the manager, a stout man in a brown waistcoat who’d been doing accounts behind the counter.

Dong Jiu went red again, but differently. “It’s only a list, guest.”

“It’s sixteen things,” I said. “With sizes. I couldn’t have done it.” I turned to the manager, who was already coming round the counter with a smile on his face that hadn’t been there before. “I’ll take all of it. Birch for the cabinet. He’s very good.”

They had all of it in the back. It came to twenty-six gold and forty silver, more than the shop had seen from one customer all morning, judging by the manager’s face. They packed it straight into my magic bag, the cabinet and chests and buckets folding away into the cloth one after another until the attendants were staring. When the last tray went in, the sleek young man had stopped serving his own customer and was simply watching, with his mouth turned down at the corners, as his little joke walked out of the door with twenty-six gold of business.

Outside, Dong Jiu ran after me with the receipt I’d left on the counter.

“Guest!” He held it out, out of breath. “Your paper.”

I took it. “What’s your full name?”

“Dong Jiu, guest.” He blinked. “Just Dong Jiu.”

“Dong Jiu.” I folded the receipt and put it away. “I’ll be back next month. I’ll ask for you.”

He stood in the street with his mouth open and his big ears burning. I walked away before he could thank me, because I didn’t want to be thanked. A boy who could hold sixteen items and their measurements in his head after hearing them once, and who was treated like dirt by people who couldn’t, was worth more than twenty-six gold to somebody. I intended to be the somebody.

I was crossing the market square towards the seed shops when the crowd in front of me split apart.

A young man came through it running, in the black robe of the Warrior Division. He wasn’t running like a man who was late. He ran like a man leaving a burning building, his face grey, his mouth set, his eyes fixed on something far ahead. People shouted after him; he didn’t hear them.

Another man in black caught him by the arm at the edge of the square and swung him round.

“Zhou Peng! What’s happened?”

“Where’s Mo-shishu?” Zhou Peng’s voice cracked down the middle. “I need Mo-shishu, now. It’s Da Shixiong. He went in alone. I told him not to go alone.” He wrenched his arm free. “It’s life or death. Where is he?”

The other man pointed. Zhou Peng was gone again, shoving through the crowd towards North Street.

I stood where I was in the middle of the square, with people flowing round me, and thought about a cold voice behind a wall saying Enough. About a man standing at the outpost that morning with a girl hanging off his arm, looking at nothing, as if he’d already been somewhere else.

None of my business. I’d decided that a week ago. Nothing had changed except that now I had a purse of gold to protect and a long list of things still to buy. Men like him had their own people. They had Mo Gu-shishu and Zhou Peng and the whole Warrior Division. They didn’t need a probationary mage with a green aura.

I went to buy seeds.

The biggest seed shop in He Ping was called the Orchid Pavilion, at the far end of the next street. I made myself visit three smaller ones first to learn the prices. When I walked in, I knew roughly what everything should cost. The attendant was a polished young man with a fixed smile who sold seeds in paper packets of a hundred, two hundred, five hundred or a thousand. He had eighty kinds of level-two seed at one gold for five hundred. He had sixty-four kinds of level three at four gold for five hundred, and when he saw me hesitate over that, he leaned in and murmured that if I took both levels, he’d add a full set of level-one seeds as well, free.

Buy two, get one free. I nearly laughed. I’d stood behind a counter beside a basket of discounted cold-and-flu tablets for a whole winter placement and watched people buy three packets they didn’t need because the third was free. I knew exactly what he was doing.

I bought the lot anyway. Eighty packets of level two and sixty-four of level three, three hundred and thirty-six gold, and a free set of level one that I would have bought regardless. Lake water could do what a season of sunshine did in a night. Every packet I bought would become a field.

When the attendant had bowed me out, the sky over the rooftops was going orange, my purse was a good deal lighter, and I had nowhere to sleep.

That turned out to be a problem. The rest houses were on West Street. The first three I tried were full. The fourth was full too, and the manager there took pity on me and explained why: it was the first of the month, when every shop on North Street and South Street restocked, and buyers came in from every town for fifty miles. There wasn’t a cheap bed left in He Ping.

There was an expensive one. The Najia Rest House stood at the end of West Street, three storeys of polished timber with red lanterns at the door and a smell of roasting duck coming out of it that made my stomach turn over. The manager behind the counter was a little wrinkled man working an abacus. When I asked for a room, he checked his ledger and told me he had two left. High-class rooms. Five gold.

Five gold would feed a farming family for more than two months. I didn’t say that’s robbery, though I thought it.

“What does five gold include?” I asked instead.

He blinked at me. Nobody, I gathered, had ever asked. “The room. Hot water. Dinner sent up, and breakfast.”

“Bath water?”

“As much as you like, guest.”

“Then I’ll take it,” I said, and put five gold on his counter.

The room was on the top floor at the end of a long, quiet corridor. It had a real bed with a quilt of blue silk, a carved screen, a brass basin and a window that looked out over the rooftops of the town to the river. A boy brought up four dishes on a tray and a pot of tea. Two more boys came with buckets of hot water, and then they went away and left me alone.

I ate everything. It was the best food I’d had in this world; in fairness, it beat most of what I’d had in the last. I bathed in hot water I hadn’t had to carry. Then I bolted the door, sat on the bed with my magic bag in my lap, touched the place over my breastbone where the mark came up, and went into the pocket.

The light there was the same as always, even and pale, from nowhere. My three beds of Peaceful Mind were in flower now, the first one waist-high. I took everything out of the bag onto the grass. I set the tall birch cabinet on the flat ground near the lake, the chests beside it, the rakes and buckets in a row, and then sat down on the grass with a hundred and forty-five packets of seeds and began sorting them into drawers. I wrote the name of every herb on its label board with my split brush, badly, in the only script I could manage.

It took hours. When I came out again, I sat on the edge of the silk bed and did my accounts.

Day 12. He Ping.

In: 535 g (Shop 1, 20 ord. Disp. = 15 g; Spring Pavilion, 40 ord. = 40 g, 40 dist. @ 12 = 480 g). AE > Disp. Make 3:1. SP = 1st offer, ½ every batch. Secrecy agreed. Story: errand girl for reclusive master.

Out: furniture 26.4 g; seeds 336 g; jars 0.08 g; room 5 g. Left: ~167 g.

Held: 4 dist. Disp., 25 ord. Disp.

Balm: Madam Su (side st. off mkt sq., red silk over door). 2 jars, 1 month, sale or return, her cut ⅓. Honest? Probably. Wants more evidence. Get it.

Dong Jiu: memory. Remember.

Da Shixiong: “life or death.” Not mine.

My stomach rumbled. It was well into the night, the dishes had been cleared hours ago, and the smell of roast duck was still drifting up the stairwell. I tied my bag back under my robe, unbolted the door and stepped out into the corridor to look for something to eat.

The door of the room beside mine opened at the same moment.

A man came out of it, in a long white robe of plain-looking cloth that, when the lantern light caught it, was nothing like plain. It was fine and costly and it moved like water. He was tall. I looked up from the robe to his face, already starting to step aside for him, and stopped.

The Da Shixiong. The same cut face, the same thin mouth, the same height.

He wasn’t hurt. There was no blood on him, no sign of whatever Zhou Peng had been running across the town to find help for. He stood in the lantern light in his white robe as though he’d been resting in that room all afternoon.

My body bowed before my mind had decided anything. “Da Shixiong,” I said.

He looked down at me. For a moment there was nothing in his face at all. No recognition. He looked at me the way you’d look at a door you’d never noticed, in a corridor you’d walked down a hundred times.

Then the corners of his mouth curved up, slow and warm, and Lin Xiao, who hadn’t smiled since he was twelve years old, smiled at me.