Chapter 32: Chapter 30: A Violent Distraction

“How long have you been awake for?”

 

“I didn’t go to sleep in the first place. I might smear my cosmetics.”

 

“Oh is that so?”

 

“Partially, I also wished to talk to you, oh you great and wonderous master! After all, the last time you were seen was over ten years ago, and before that it was four hundred. I presume you also have something to ask, otherwise you would not have come towards me.”

 

“You’re an astute thief, aren’t you?”

 

“Thief? Why, I am insulted. A thief implies some sort of thin fingered little peasant, doesn’t it? I set my sights on higher objects.”

 

“Such as the pearls of Fish People? I don’t know many thieves willing to be marked for death by carrying those things, you must be quite confident in your abilities.”

 

“Well of course I am, I am a scholar and a so-called gentleman. Besides, she’s certainly not going to need all those pearls anymore, so I took the liberty of claiming them. Now, lets go speak somewhere else so we do not wake Li or the girl.”

 

Then with the softest shuffle of fabric and the gentlest of steps, the two men left the room and Bo finally opened his eyes. He wanted to laugh but as he looked around the dark room he found that both Li Baobao and Zhu Er were still fast asleep and realized he did not want to wake them. He also wanted to know what they were talking about. What was so important that they couldn’t involve him in it anyway?

 

So he waited a few more moments, then slowly rose to his own feet. He checked both Li Baobao and Zhu Er to make sure they were both asleep, carefully hopping over Baozi, and then tip-toed out of the room and into the dark inn’s hall.

 

Immediately he felt a spring of panic when he noticed two figures at the end of the hall facing him only to calm down when he saw they were just two servant girls carrying pitchers of water. They were whispering very softly to each other as they walked before going silent as their eyes fell on him. One girl gasped while the other gave him a shy smile and bowed apologetically, “I’m very sorry sir! Did we wake you up?”

 

Bo shook his head quickly, “nah! No! I was just… I just needed to go out for a walk, you know!” He began stretching as he babbled, rolling up his sleeves to show off what he considered to be rather manly looking arms. “Just going out to stretch a bit, keeping my body in top form. You know? Probably not. But what I’m saying is that as a man, we gotta make sure we’re physically in peak condition!” His face suddenly flushed as he saw the girls did not look impressed with him, and that he had been babbling on. So he quickly straightened up and pulled his sleeves down. “Aaaand I have to go. Thank you!”

 

The two girls went past him and left a water pitcher at the door Bo had emerged from, one whispering to the other, “I think he has to pee…”

 

His face flushed more as he walked as swiftly as he could. In the halls lined with shut doors with the occasional wafts of conversation he found himself wondering where Liu Xie and Rui Yifu had vanished. The young man went down the stairs to the first floor of the inn and mentally floundered for a while. He did not want to run into those girls again so soon.

 

“...-mortal I am honestly shocked…”

 

Bo spun on his heel in the direction of the voice, being led out of the inn and into a small courtyard where he instantly slunk into a low leafy bush as Rui Yifu and Liu Xie spoke to each other under the moonlight and entwining tree branches of the courtyard.

 

The courtyard itself was rather scrubby looking, a few large trees and a lot of bushes that looked like they had seen better days. Bo had a feeling more than a few of them could do with a good pruning.

 

“Well why would I just tell everyone? It would cause a commotion and petitioners coming everywhere to bribe me or begging to be my disciple,” Liu Xie shrugged. "I only ever took Gu, and even that was because of outside reasons."

 

“It’s understandable, yet I can’t help but feel you aren’t being truthful,” Rui Yifu said. His voice had a strange bouncy tone to it. “The Bone Willow Immortal in legend removed his own head before Lady Gu, and was a wretched soft boned old man with a thick belly and liverspots. You, however, are a young pale man with flawless features.” He reached up to gently run a slender hand over Liu Xie’s face and Bo felt his stomach turn. “Very nice flawless features. Almost as nice as my own really.”

 

Liu Xie reached up to snatch Rui Yifu’s hand away, “oh do you expect for me to turn into an old man suddenly?”

 

“No,” Rui Yifu replied.

 

Bo blinked as Rui Yifu’s free hand suddenly brought a brief silvery flash across Liu Xie’s neck, a dazzlingly bright arc in the moonlight. His hand then fell back to his side, a long danger held between delicate fingers that dripped with a thick red blood. Bo’s own blood ran cold. He wanted to get up, to charge forward and knock the life from Rui’s body but the cold and quick way that the man’s blade had come out had him shiver in fear.

 

Liu Xie’s head then fell from his body and onto the ground with a wooden thump, his black hair falling over his face as more red slowly oozed from the stump of his neck.

 

Bo began to get up, working up his courage to get ready to tackle Rui Yifu when a gurgling sigh stopped him. “Well that was rude,” Liu Xie’s voice spoke although it came from neither the headless body nor the bodiless head.

 

“If I asked, you wouldn’t let me do it!” Rui Yifu answered, trying to flick off the liquid from his blade. “What is this? Is this sap?” He then took to wiping the thick syrupy blood off the blade with a loose bit of fabric he procured from somewhere within his sleeves.

 

Liu Xie’s body reached down and picked up the head by its long hair, allowing it to swing in the night air for a bit. The eyes rolled in their sockets much like Bo’s stomach rolled in his body and he watched a few flailing roots suddenly emerge from the neck stump. Then Liu Xie put his head back onto his bleeding stump of a neck and wiped off the blood that had oozed over his face, “are you happy? Or do you want to cut something else off?”

 

Rui Yifu’s eyes immediately went downwards, Liu Xie’s eyes widened a little and Rui laughed. “No, no, there isn’t much to cut there.”

 

“Were you truly certain of my identity?” Liu Xie asked, tipping his newly reattached head to the side. Bo squinted in the darkness, but the pale moonlight illuminated just enough to show that the spot where Liu Xie had reattached his head was somewhat greenish.

 

Rui Yifu shrugged, “in all honesty, only partially. The legends of the Bone Willow Sage, the Bone Willow Immortal, whatever name you use, are all very conflicting but they do agree that when Lady Gu emerged from her two hundred years of prayer, it was you who greeted her and removed your own head to demonstrate your immortality.”

 

Bo’s eyelids were beginning to get heavy. He was more exhausted than he wanted to admit even with the brief burst of adrenaline.

 

“And apparently prefer casting me as an ugly old man,” Liu Xie sounded a bit displeased. “Like I was some sort of pervert waiting around a woman’s bath.”

 

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“Well you aren’t an old man, true,” Rui Yifu agreed. “But, this doesn’t answer another question or disprove you being a lecher. Why do you have little Zhu Er?”

 

“So you’ve moved past the idea I’m some practitioner of the Forbidden White Arts and that I’m some sort of scum?”

 

“Of course not, immortals can be drawn to those lures of power just as much as a regular person, I mean what else could have happened to the missing immortals of the Ten?” Rui Yifu shrugged, “but you clearly didn’t just find her in some tree.”

 

This Bo agreed with, Liu Xie had to have found the bitey little sister in some sort of garbage pile or kennel.

 

Liu Xie was quiet for a moment as he turned his face up to the sky above. Bo felt as though a wet blanket had been thrown on him, a heavy somber thing. “Because I love her mother.”

 

Bo leaned back slightly, and he could hear a soft exhale from Rui Yifu. “What?” Bo whispered and Rui asked at the same time.

 

“One day I looked across and I saw a strange girl sitting on top of a strong workhorse, her hair was red and gold and she held a basket of persimmons she had bought for her father. Her eyes were bluer than the sky, and her face had the pink river of a scar from the corner of her lip to the bottom of her jaw,” Liu Xie said softly. Bo had heard many tones from Liu Xie, usually some sort of condescension, exhaustion or vague annoyance. But never had he heard him sound so melancholic or grossly poetic. “Her name was Eona, she was the daughter of an ambassador to the Southern Kingdom. I wanted her to call me her husband immediately.”

 

“Romantic,” Rui Yifu snorted.

 

“Yes, it took me two years to work up the nerve to speak to her and the first thing she did was bash my face open.”

 

“I can’t blame her.”

 

Liu Xie turned his head back down to look at Rui Yifu, “we spent… a lot of time together. She was kind, and strong-”

 

“What do you mean by ‘strong’!?” Rui Yifu sounded alarmed. "Were you two fighting each other?"

 

Liu Xie’s lips split into a grin that made Bo shudder. “She chopped wood and fought bears and bandits. I watched her throw a man into a river once. It was beautiful, she was beautiful. I didn’t want a beauty who caused fish to drown or made flowers feel ashamed, I wanted her,” he was gushing, wide eyed and his face almost pink in a blush. “Yet she could just as well sew clothes or make jams or be a nervous bundle when faced with others she felt above her station. Yet no matter how often I told her of my love or how many gifts I gave her, she did not think herself worthy of me. I could never understand, I still can’t understand, why she did not see what I do…”

 

“...So what happened?” Rui Yifu prodded, leaning close to Liu Xie. Bo also found himself leaning close, wondering what was so appealing by such a barbaric sounding woman. He personally always believed he would marry some pretty looking rich girl and get her land and build a nice house for his mother and find good husbands for his sisters… his throat became dry. He could not do that anymore, could he?

 

They were ash and memories.

 

“...Ambassadorships end,” Liu Xie breathed deeply. “She… went back… to the Snow Hell, Norwen. And… married another man, and so Idony was born.”

 

“Hnnn…” Rui Yifu’s voice sounded unsympathetic.

 

“I… she… she never thought herself good enough. She always joked or said I deserved a princess, a noble woman, someone with soft hands and a good ear for singing. Every time she said she loved me I think she felt like she thought she didn't deserve to be with me…” dark rolls of red tears poured down his face slowly. “But I was the one who didn’t deserve her, I should have made her stay…”

 

“And now you seek to go to the First Palace to… do what? Atone for your failure? Leave the child there to become a nun or a lost scholar? You know what's beyond the Silent Mountains better than almost any mortal alive.” Rui Yifu interrogated, taking advantage of Liu Xie’s mental state to press forward. He sneered at Liu Xie. “Given that she married another man and bore him a child… maybe she didn’t love you as much as you think she di-”

 

Rui Yifu was suddenly halfway on the other side of the courtyard and Bo felt something warm trickling down his cheek. Slowly he turned his head to see several long willow leaves embedded in the wall behind him, strange symbols softly glowing on them before fading away. He hesitantly touched one and found it felt like cold metal. His eyes further widened as he saw sliver-thin cuts open up on his finger.

 

“Now who is the rude one?” Rui Yifu mocked, “all I was doing was asking you questions and you attack me like this!”

 

“I’m going to rip out your tongue,” Liu Xie replied brightly, “now hold still.”

 

“You’re awfully immature for a man who has been alive for over three thousand years!” Rui Yifu complained, fading into the shadows behind the moonlight just as a dozen willow leaves tore through the bushes and trees. Then a dozen slender knives flashed out from one pool of darkness. “Maybe I will cut it off after all! See if she still likes you then as a eunuch!”

 

Bo wanted to watch, but the steady trickle of blood and the leaves in the wall behind him made him think better. Instead he got to his feet and quickly dashed back inside the inn. Things were dead silent except for an occasional snore as he ran back up to the second floor, past the doors and their pitchers to go awaken Li Baobao and Idony to warn them that Liu Xie and Rui Yifu had snapped. As he ran he wondered what could they even do? They were not exactly sages or immortals themselves.

 

Although he considered that Zhu Er and her pig could live as they were meant to, as wild animals in the forest.

 

He opened the door, “Li! Wake up!”

 

Li Baobao was already awake, clutching his side and staring up at Bo with bleary eyes, “behind you,” he croaked before Bo’s own eyes were full of stars and his head felt like seeds were gushing from his nose while a starburst of red poured from his skull. He collapsed to the ground, conscious enough to see a few booted feet shuffling around a flailing sack. Instinctively he grabbed one man's ankle and held as tightly as he could.

 

“We are so sorry! Please forgive us!” A man’s voice spoke to Bo and Li Baobao, “we can’t… we can’t lose our own! Please, forgive us for this!”

 

The little girl roared from within the sack, and then came a heavy stomp. The roar became a whimper, but the flailing did not stop. Bo grabbed one of the legs nearest to him, and another boot came down and he screamed in pain as bone rapidly splintered. His fingers dug into the ankle until he could feel his nails bite past flesh and someone started kicking at his stomach and the back of his head. He was not going to just... lay and watch again... he was...

 

“Please... “

 

“Forgive us.”

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