The morning we left QingTian was cold and bright, the the mountains looked as if they had been carved from blue glass. Our breath rose in thick plumes as we gathered by the brick facade of Deng Yuan's yaodong, the village headman standing stiff and formal beside his pregnant wife, who clutched a bundle of flatbread she insisted we take.

  Deng Yuan held the SanYanChong upright at his side, the heavy iron barrels resting against his shoulder, the wooden stock planted on the frozen ground. He held it like a man leaning while surveying his fields. The fire rope, was coiled at his side.

  "I'm not sure he'd actually be able to use it under real pressure," Lady Chen murmured to me, her voice pitched low enough that Deng Yuan couldn't hear.

  "Perhaps," I conceded. "But he has the fire rope, and the bandits heard him practicing all yesterday afternoon." I gave her a knowing look.

  I stepped up and clasped Deng Yuan's arm in a firm grip. "Lǐzhèng. Thank you for your hospitality and for taking care of your village."

  "Aye, Mister Cui." He straightened, and for a moment the uncertain farmer was gone. "You've done more for us than I could ever repay, and that's the truth of it."

  We departed in a loose column. Lady Chen, Jìngxī, and Língzhú rode the three horses we had between us, their saddlebags heavy with grain recovered from Xie Qingyun's hidden stores. The rest of us walked. Xie and his three men fell into a rough file with riders on either side and with me amongst them.

  The grain in the saddlebags was our travel supply and, eventually, Xie's payment. Two dǒu for each of his men when we reached the county seat, as promised. The horses bore the weight without complaint, though Língzhú's mount, a temperamental grey mare, made her displeasure known with the occasional indignant snort that set the other two horses' ears twitching.

  The path from QingTian wound north and downhill through a narrow gorge, the cliff walls pressing close on either side, their surfaces streaked with ice where groundwater had seeped and frozen in long, glittering curtains. The road itself was barely wide enough for two men abreast, a packed-earth track. Língzhú rode with her map balanced on the pommel of her saddle, her pencil occasionally darting out to correct a contour line or add a notation. I had the impression she was enjoying the paperwork as much as the journey.

  Our first day went without a hitch, and at night the four of us took turns standing watch while paired with one of Xie's men. I found myself with Ding Mingyu, the gunner who clearly didn't hold much of a grudge.

  "I go where I ain't hungry or cold," Ding said when I asked him how he ended up in the JiangHu. "Ain't much work for a man who can't read that's not a guard, a soldier, or a farmer."

  "You were a farmer before?"

  "Tenant farmer." He spat to the side, though the gesture seemed more habit than contempt. "Worked the same plot my father worked, and his father before him. Landlord took half of everythin' we grew, and the taxman took half of what was left. Good year, bad year, didn't matter none. Always ended up with just enough to not starve." He shrugged. "Then one year there wasn't enough, and I figured I'd rather take my chances on the road than watch my belly eat itself."

  "No family to stay for?"

  "Never had one. Almost did, once." He was quiet for a moment, staring at the embers. "Girl from the next village over. But the magistrate wanted a concubine. Way it goes."

  "You ever regret being a bandit?"

  Ding considered the question with the same unhurried pragmatism "Ain't like we go around murderin' folks. Most villages, we show up, they give us a bit of grain, we move on. Nobody gets hurt. They're payin' us same as they'd pay the taxman, only we're honest about what it is."

  On our second day we'd been walking for perhaps an hour, the gorge beginning to widen into a scrubby valley of bare oaks and frost-bitten grass, when Xie Qingyun held up a hand.

  "Hooves," Xie said, his voice barely above a breath. He tilted his head, his one good eye narrowing as he listened. "Coming from the north. Moving easy, not in a hurry. Maybe a dozen. Maybe more. No heavy armor."

  Behind us, Xie's men fanned out into a line, their spears held in two hands. Jìngxī and Língzhú exchanged a glance. Língzhú quietly rolled up her map and stowed the pencil.

  They were right there.

  A dozen mounted men, their squat, powerful horses steaming in the cold air, rounded the corner. They wore heavy furs over leather-lamilar armor, their faces wind-burned and dark beneath caps of wolf skin. Their weapons were the curved swords, short spears hanging from hooks on their saddles, and short bows of the steppe. Khitan.

  We were distinctly short on shields.

  The lead rider, a broad-shouldered man with a thick scar bisecting his left eyebrow, had been turning in his saddle to say something to the man behind him when we appeared. His hand went to his spear before his mouth had finished forming whatever joke he'd been telling.

  We stared at each other across the frozen air. Their horses were well-fed, which meant they had a camp nearby with proper supply.

  The lead rider's eyes swept over our group.

  "The grain," he said. "Off the horses. All of it."

  "And the girl. She comes with us." He made a show of looking her up and down, his grin widening. "Our brother has been wanting a new woman to warm his tent. She's a bit thin for his tastes, though."

  This drew a few laughs from his men.

  It was Xie Qingyun who spoke first, his gravelly voice cutting through the laughter with the blunt directness of a man who had spent decades stripping conversations to their bones.

  "Why not the nuns as well?"

  The question was so plainly delivered, so devoid of any tactical motive, that I almost turned to stare at him. The Khitan leader, however, did not laugh. His grin faded, and he glanced at Jìngxī and Língzhú with an expression that was, to my genuine surprise, something approaching unease. He brought a fist to his chest in a short, almost reflexive gesture of warding, and dipped his head toward Jìngxī in a bow that, while shallow, carried the unmistakable weight of superstitious deference.

  "We do not touch nuns," he said, dead serious. "It is bad luck. We would not invite spiritual retaliation." He made another warding gesture, this one more emphatic. "But the grain, the thin girl, and your weapons. Now. Or we take them over your bodies."

  Jìngxī let out a sharp, irritated breath through her nose. She nudged her horse forward out of our formation, drawing her sword.

  "Jìngxī—" Língzhú called out, her voice between warning and resignation.

  The Khitan leader saw her coming, and his initial reaction was a broad, incredulous grin. He leveled his short spear at her with the lazy confidence.

  His mistake. Jìngxī came in at an angle, her horse cutting left as her sword swung right, a trajectory that forced him to adjust his aim across the far side of his own body. His spear thrust was late by a fraction and short by a hair to strike, and he could tell. So instead he rotated it and let her blade meet the shaft of his weapon.

  His grip nearly failed him. The grin vanished. His fingers scrambled to re-seat themselves on the shaft and I saw the flash of genuine alarm cross his scarred face as he realized this was not the easy fight he had anticipated. He wrenched his horse backward, opening the distance with two sharp kicks to its flanks.

  His men responded on instinct. Short bows came up. Arrows hissed toward the advancing nun in a loose, converging volley.

  Jìngxī's sword became a blur and turned to limit her profile. Three arrows were batted aside, The fourth passed close enough to her cheek.

  "Form Line! Cover the flanks!"

  The three bandits spread wide across the narrow path, their weapons raised, filling the gaps between the trees on either side of our riders. Their spears were long and they were able to control the space well. Xie and I stood the furthest to either flank.\

  The riders let forth another loose volley of arrows.

  Behind me, one of Ding let out a choked grunt. I turned to see him stagger, an arrow buried deep in his chest just below the collarbone, the shaft still quivering. His knees buckled and he hit the frozen ground with a heavy thud, his face contorted in shock and pain.

  "Advance!" I ordered. We needed to close the distance to have any chance of not being picked off from a distance. The tight terrain and bend in the road was to our advantage, they being unable to flank us.

  Língzhú and Lady Chen urged their horses forward to join Jìngxī, and suddenly the Khitan found themselves facing a front three horses wide on a path that could barely accommodate half his force side by side.

  I could see the calculation happening behind the leader's eyes. As he backed his horse up. As he came in line with two of his allies. Any more and they wouldn't be able to turn.

  Jìngxī did not share his patience for tactical assessment. She pressed forward shouldering past a reaching spear thrust, and her blade found the chest of the nearest rider. The cut was clean and direct, a diagonal slash. The edge bit into layered leather and a plate of crude lamellar beneath, and the armor did its work. The rider rocked in his saddle, a line of bright red blooming where the steel had parted the outermost layer, but the wound was shallow, the bone and muscle beneath unbreached. He clutched his reins and hauled his horse sideways, his face twisted more in pain.

  More arrows stopped Lady Chen and LingZhu from advancing, as they stopped to parry them before they could fly by.

  I stepped forward and leveled my spear at a second rider who had been edging along the left flank, testing whether the trees might offer a path. The gleaming steel point tracked his movement and he drew his horse up short, unwilling to advance into its reach while hemmed in by branches on one side and my spear on the other.

  A sharp, high whistle cut through the cold air. The Khitan leader, had made his decision. The riders wheeled as in place, a fluid, practiced motion that spoke of years together in the saddle, and within moments they were moving back up the path from which they had come, the clatter of hooves on frozen earth receding into the gorge.

  "They'll report back." Lady Chen noted, "If their main force is large enough, they could try this road again in numbers."

  "Let them try," Jìngxī snorted.

  I was already kneeling beside Ding. He was alive, but his breathing was a shallow, wet rasp that I did not like. The arrow had punched through leather and lodged deep, its angle suggesting it had missed the lung but only just. I snapped the shaft short, leaving the head in place rather than risk tearing something vital, and pressed a folded cloth against the wound.

  "He needs a physician," Língzhú said, crouching beside me.

  "He needs to not be here," Xie corrected, his voice flat. He was already shrugging off his heavy outer coat. "We fashion a litter from branches and a bed roll"

  We bound the litter together with rope and belt leather, two straight branches and some rope, the wounded man strapped down as gently as haste would allow. Two of Xie's took the front poles, and Xie himself took one of the rear handles and I took the last.

  Our pace didn't slow and instead we made haste. We decided to press on to the county rather than making camp that night.

  "I came this way for a reason," Xie remarked, shifting the litter pole on his shoulder. "Any fool on a horse takes the valley road. Any fool without one takes this."

  Ding, drifted in and out of a shallow, fitful consciousness. Lady Chen checked his wound twice.

  We made good time, and just before dawn, the gorge began to widen. The dense, tangled forest thinned into scattered copses of bare-limbed wood and the occasional stubborn pine.

  And there, perhaps two li ahead across a stretch of frost-whitened farmland, was the county seat.

  The walls were packed earth faced with stone, perhaps fifteen feet high, with square watchtowers at the corners and a gatehouse that looked like it had been reinforced recently with fresh timber. Not impressive by the standards of a proper prefectural capital, let alone a city like Luoyang.

  The gates, however, were shut.

  "Well," Xie said, setting down his end of the litter and wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. He squinted at the closed gates with his one good eye. "I don't suppose they're expecting us."