Fox and Phoenix (Lóng City 1)

She’s my friend. I’m glad she’s here. What else could I possibly want?

It took a long time before I could fall asleep.

6

NOT ONLY DID YÚN BRING PASSPORTS AND GEAR, she

also brought maps. Expensive maps, drawn with colored ink on thick parchment, and spelled against rain and rot and mice, just like those used by merchants. She hauled them out one by one—maps of cities and towns and wayside stations, maps that showed highways and side roads and even the tiny goat tracks criss-crossing the wild middle regions, maps for every part of the Seventy Kingdoms. Everywhere except the Phoenix Empire.

When I asked about that, she shook her head. “We’ll buy those at the border. Just in case someone got curious.”

“You think someone might?”

“Yes, I do. Things are wrong, Kai. All kinds of wrong. I think . . .” She sent me a sidelong glance, as though she wasn’t sure how I’d take her next words. “I think we ought to take some precautions.”

Precautions was a polite weasel-word for “let’s do everything my way, stupid boy.” Ever since Lóng City, I’d kept to the main highways. Yún changed all that. Ai-ya, did she change it. Over breakfast, she laid out a complicated zigzag route, from this side road to that one, up and down the mountains. It was like charting the wandering path of a drunken gargoyle.

“That makes no sense,” I told her.

“Just so,” she replied.

As if that explained anything.

I told you she was bossy, I said to Chen.

Chen snuffled. You could argue with her. Explain why she’s wrong.

She’s not wrong. Not really. Just . . . bossy.

Chen didn’t even bother to answer me, but I could hear him laughing, oh so quietly.

Stupid pig-spirit, I thought, not for the first time.

STILL GRUMBLING TO myself, I helped Yún pack up our belongings. The rain had eased up during the night, but as soon as we set off, it came down harder than before—a steady soaking rain that never stopped for the next ten days. No matter how much I argued, Yún refused to give up her crazy ideas. So up and downhill we slogged through the mud. The mountains turned into great looming walls of granite, streaked and capped by frozen snow, like colossal silent guards standing watch. There were days when the clouds thinned out and we could see patches of sky overhead. Other days, the clouds sank low, and our world turned into a cold, gray, wet mist, and we could hardly tell where the path ended.

We had just crossed over the pass into Snow Thunder City when sleet started to fall along with the rain. We stumbled onward, half-blinded and numb, until we came to a small inn huddled by the side of the road. It looked more like a jumble of rocks than a real inn, but at least there were stables for our pony, and pots of scalding hot tea waiting for us in the common room.

“They charge too much here,” I said. I was beating my hands together. Water streamed from my clothes, which had given up their waterproof spells a couple days before.

“We don’t have much choice,” Yún replied. “We can get more money at the next piaohao. Your ma mi arranged that—”

She broke off as the serving boy approached with a pot of butter tea. The boy filled our mugs, then held out a hand and announced the price. Twice what we’d paid at the previous place. Ignoring the choking noise I made, Yún counted out the outrageous sum into his palm.

“You say you serve good curry here,” she said. “How much?”

He named a sum three times higher than what we paid for the tea.

I gulped. Yún never flinched. “Two bowls, please. And send a third one to the stables.”

We’d lodged the griffin in the stables with our packs and pony. The innkeeper had argued at first. He didn’t like monsters under his roof. It upset the customers and terrified the staff. Yún had patiently argued back that there were no other customers, and was he saying that he and his serving boy were afraid of a tiny fluffy creature? Before the innkeeper could invent a new objection, she had pulled out her purse and smiled. That ended the argument. It always did.

The serving boy apparently didn’t like the griffin any more than his master did, because he scowled when she mentioned the stables. Yún silently added another coin to the pile. The boy grunted, scooped the coins into his palm, and slouched away.

“Why are you wasting money?” I hissed. We had counted our funds the night before. Even with camping in shelters, we were spending a lot more than we both expected.

“I want to make sure he gives the stew to the griffin and doesn’t eat it himself. Did you see how skinny he is? He’s like one of those runty trees we passed coming up the trail, the one that had lost all its needles. I wonder if the innkeeper feeds him at all.”

“I bet he does feed him. I bet he and the old man murder all their customers and eat them. That’s why no one else is here.”