The mud was pleasantly cold between my toes.

  I stood ankle-deep in the flooded paddy, my hemp trousers rolled to the knee, and felt the soft earth yield beneath my feet. Around me, a dozen figures bent and rose in the rhythm of the harvest, a handful of Black Wind escorts, and me. The morning mist was still rising from the water, turning the workers into misty apparitions as they moved through the rows of golden rice.

  My shoulders ached. My lower back had begun its familiar protest an hour ago. The bundled stalks in my arms were heavier than they looked, and the water made every step a negotiation.

  And yet. I shifted my weight, feeling the mud accept me with indifference. Here was a strange mercy I had not expected: my left leg was shorter now, after the healing. Not by much, perhaps the width of two fingers, but enough that I noticed on harder ground.

  But here, in the soft, yielding mud, I did not limp. The ground rose to meet my shorter step as easily as my longer one.

  "Layla!"

  Wei Jin's voice. I looked up to find him three rows over, stripped to a simple undyed tunic, his military posture and straight back incongruous among the slouching farmers. He was pointing at my bundle.

  "You're binding them too loose. They'll scatter before you reach the cart."

  I looked down at my work. He was right. The stalks were already slipping free of their ties.

  "Perhaps I'm creating employment for the gleaners," I called back.

  His expression didn't change that much, but I had learned to read the minute shifts around his eyes. That was as close as Wei Jin came to showing he was amused.

  The old farmer woman beside me, Qiu Lanying, though everyone called her Grandmother Qiu, reached over with weathered hands. "Like this, girl. Like this." She retied my bundle with three efficient movements. "You speak so prettily, but your hands are still learning."

  "My hands learned other things," I said in my defense. I braced byself for a jab at my previous profession, not that she would know what it had been.

  "Hmph. City things." But there was no malice in it. She patted my arm and moved on to the next row, already bending for more stalks.

  I watched her go. In Chang'an, my foreignness had been my currency, the exotic flower, the dark eyes that promised forbidden things. Here, I was still an attraction but almost an innocent one, a curiosity. What tripped them up was my accent.

  "You talk like a court lady," one of the younger farmers had said yesterday, genuinely puzzled. "All your words are so... round."

  Chang'an speech. The dialect of the capital, precise and measured, so different from the lilting Wu tongue of JiangNan. But here at least people would try to speak in offical tongues where they could to me.

  The sun climbed higher, burning off the mist. Wei Jin worked with the focused efficiency of a man who had spent years learning to do exactly what was needed. He'd told me he farmed before, while not deployed and clearly he did so more than he let on.

  I caught myself watching him more than I should. I could see the muscles on his forearm ripple as he tightened the binding of another bundle.

  Our eyes met across the flooded rows. I stuck my tongue out at him in what I hoped was a mischievous manner.

  Wei Jin was legible in a way that should have frustrated me. He said what he meant. He meant what he said. There were no hidden currents to navigate, no subtle games to play.

  It was like trying to dance with a stone pillar. And somehow, I found I didn't mind.

  The harvest break came when the sun stood three hands above the eastern hills.

  We gathered at the edge of the paddy where someone had set up a makeshift rest station, rough blankets spread on dry ground, a basket of steamed buns, a clay jug that turned out to contain rice wine of questionable vintage.

  I settled onto a blanket with a groan I didn't bother to suppress. Every muscle in my back was lodging formal complaints. Grandmother Qiu pressed a steamed bun into my hands before I could reach for one.

  "Eat. You're too thin."

  "I'm exactly the right amount of thin."

  "Nonsense."

  The bun was warm and slightly sweet, the dough pillowy soft. I bit into it and tasted red bean paste, and something in my chest loosened unexpectedly. My mother would make sweet Halva... I chewed. Swallowed. The memory retreated to wherever I kept such things.

  Wei Jin lowered himself onto the blanket beside and accepted a bun from Grandmother Qiu with a proper bow of thanks that made the old woman cackle.

  "So formal! Are you courting me, soldier?"

  "I am just expressing appropriate gratitude," Wei Jin said, completely serious.

  This sent the nearby farmers into fits of laughter. Wei Jin looked faintly confused, which only made them laugh harder. I found myself coerced into a smile, just the corners of my mouth turning up of their own accord.

  One of the escort members, a wiry man named Zhou Daming who had joined us two months ago, produced the jug of rice wine and began pouring into small clay cups.

  "To the harvest," he declared. "And to the Black Wind Escorts, who have discovered that farming is harder than fighting."

  A ragged cheer went up. Cups were raised and drained.

  Zhou Daming offered a cup to Wei Jin.

  "No." The refusal was instant, military crisp. "I don't drink on duty."

  "This isn't duty," Zhou Daming protested.

  "We are representatives of the company. I at least, am always on duty."

  I plucked the cup from Zhou Daming's hand and took a sip. The wine was rough, barely filtered, with a sweetness that clung to the back of my throat.

  "He's incapable of relaxation," I said as leaned on his shoulder, scandalous, well maybe in Chang'an, "It's a internal excess of fire. Very serious."

  Wei Jin turned to look at me.

  "I am perfectly capable of relaxation."

  "Name one time."

  A pause. I watched him actually consider the question, searching his memory for evidence of leisure.

  "I... sat by the river last week... with you"

  "Relaxation achieved." I couldn't believe I had to hide a blush, raised my cup in a mock toast. "Truly, you are a master of the restful arts."

  His did that thing again, the deep warm rumble that was his version of a laugh. I wanted to make it happen again. I knew better than to want things. But the warning felt distant, muffled, like a voice from another room.

  The harvest work ended at midday. The farmers would return tomorrow to finish the last rows, but we escorts were released.

  Wei Jin found me as I was scraping dried mud from my calves at the edge of the paddy.

  "There's a temple," he said, without preamble. "A half li's walk. They have an old ginkgo tree."

  I looked up at him. His face was carefully neutral.

  "Are you asking me to take a walk with you, Wei Jin?"

  "I am informing you of a point of local interest."

  "Ah. A tactical briefing."

  "I'm courting you." The man actually cracked a smile.

  I did too, a calculatedly shy one, "I'm interested."

  The path wound through the patchwork of paddies and up into the low hills that bordered SongJiaTun. The mud from the morning's work was drying on our legs, flaking off in pale patches with every step. Cicadas screamed from the trees, that particular late-summer desperation, as if they knew the cold was coming.

  The air was thick with moisture, nothing like the dry clarity of Chang'an. Every breath felt like drinking something.

  "You're from here," I said eventually breaking the comfortable silence. "JiangNan."

  "Originally." He kept his eyes on the path. "A village about sixty li south. I haven't been back."

  "How long?"

  "Fourteen years."

  I let that sit. Fourteen years. He would have been a boy when he left. Thirteen, fourteen, perhaps.

  "My captain was from the north," he said. "The frontier. He used to say that the south made soft soldiers."

  "Did you agree?"

  "No." A pause. "But I understood why he said it. The frontier is... different. The cold. The emptiness."

  "My mother used to sing while she cooked," I said, knowing when a subject dragged the mood down.

  Wei Jin glanced at me, waiting.

  "Arabic songs. From before she was brought east. I don't remember the words anymore, just the sound. And the smell of the spices she used, things you couldn't get here, but she'd saved them. Used them only for special occasions."

  I wondered why I was telling him this. A door I closed opened a crack, and the smell of cardamom and rose water drifted through.

  "What happened to her?"

  "She died. When I was six. Sickness, they said. After that..." I shrugged. "After that, I learned other songs."

  Wei Jin nodded.

  The temple was modest, a small wooden structure with a curved roof, paint fading, tucked into a fold of the hills. Before it stood the ginkgo tree.

  The tree was vast. Its trunk was wider than three men could span with their arms, the bark deeply furrowed with age, and its canopy spread above us like a green sky. The leaves were just beginning to turn, the edges showing gold. In a month, the whole tree would be a flame of yellow.

  "They say it was planted in the Qin dynasty," Wei Jin said. "Eight hundred years old. Maybe more."

  I walked forward slowly, approaching the tree the way you might approach something sacred.

  "Do you believe that?" I asked. "That it's eight hundred years old?"

  "Does it matter?"

  I touched the bark. It was rough and warm under my palm.

  "No," I said. "I suppose it doesn't."

  We sat in the shade of the ancient tree, our backs against the massive trunk. The cicadas were quieter here, or perhaps I had simply stopped noticing them. A breeze moved through the leaves above us, and the light shifted, dappling.

  The shade was cool. The bark was warm against my back. I stretched my legs out finding the grass beyond the tree's shadow. The blades were cool and slightly damp, individual points of sensation.

  I sat there for what felt like days, feeling. The grass was cool, and no one was paying to see this.

  I leaned my head back against the tree and closed my eyes.

  "There's a food stall on the way back. If you're hungry."

  "Wei Jin." I opened my eyes. "Are you asking me to share a meal with you?"

  "I am observing that the tactical opportunity is available."

  He rose first and offered me his hand. I took it, letting him pull me to my feet.

  The food stall was exactly what you'd expect from a crossroads in rural JiangNan, a wooden awning propped up on bamboo poles, a few rough benches, and an old man stirring an enormous pot of something that smelled far better than it had any right to.

  "Noodles," the old man announced, not bothering to ask what we wanted. "Pork bone broth. Pickled vegetables on the side. Two bowls."

  We sat on a bench that creaked under Wei Jin's weight. The late afternoon sun slanted through the awning, painting stripes of gold and shadow across the worn wood. Other travelers drifted past on the road, farmers heading home, a merchant with a cart of bolted cloth, a group of children chasing each other in some incomprehensible game.

  The noodles arrived in chipped pottery bowls, steam rising in lazy curls. I picked up my chopsticks and ate.

  The broth was rich with marrow, the noodles chewy, the pickled vegetables sharp enough to cut through the fat.

  When I looked up, Wei Jin was watching me.

  "What?"

  "Nothing." But his expression had softened again, that almost-warmth around his eyes.

  "You're staring."

  "Your noodle technique is... unique."

  I choked on a laugh, nearly inhaling broth. "Unique. High praise from the master of tactical briefings."

  "I call it as I see it."

  We finished our bowls and the old man refilled them, waving off Wei Jin's attempt to pay.

  "Friends of the Escorts eat free," he said gruffly. Wei Jin paid him anyways, as was the company regulation.

  I was contemplating a third bowl when a portly man in a plain hemp robe settled onto the bench across from us. He had the soft hands of a scholar and the watchful eyes of someone used to reading rooms. His clothes were simple, almost shabby, a farmer's best, perhaps, or a merchant down on his luck.

  But I had met him two months ago, when he'd come to bless the Escorts' operation in his territory. Magistrate Han Wenzheng looked different out of his official robes, but the sharpness in his eyes was the same.

  Wei Jin had recognized him too. His posture shifted almost imperceptibly.

  The noodle seller's face lit up when he saw the new arrival. "Ah! The usual?"

  "Please, Uncle Chen. And another round for my friends here, on me."

  He was already ladling broth. "You should come by more often. The wife asks after you."

  Han Wenzheng accepted this with an easy smile. When Uncle Chen had shuffled back to his pot, the magistrate turned to us and dropped the pretense.

  "Lady Layla. Commander Wei. I was hoping I'd find you here."

  "You were hoping?" I raised an eyebrow. "Or you were watching?"

  He laughed, a hollow, measured sound. "A little of both." He shrugged, unashamed. "I find one learns more about a district from a noodle stall than from a hundred reports. The farmers talk here. The merchants. The refugees." He paused. "And apparently, the Black Wind Escorts."

  "We were helping with the harvest," Wei Jin said, carefully neutral.

  "I know. You're not bad with a sickle." Han Wenzheng's eyes crinkled. "And your companion moves like she's never performed harder labor than bundling rice, but she's learning."

  "Why seek us out like this, Magistrate?" I asked. "You could have sent a runner. Summoned us properly."

  "I could have. But then I'd be Magistrate Han in my official robes, and you'd be representatives of the Escorts, and we'd both say exactly what protocol demands." He picked up his chopsticks, twirling noodles. "This way, we're just three people sharing a meal. Much more honest, don't you think?"

  He was good. The kind of official who survived because he actually knew his territory.

  "The situation is changing," Han Wenzheng said, his voice dropping. "You've seen the refugees?"

  "We've seen some," Wei Jin said.

  "More are coming. Many more." The magistrate's jovial mask slipped slightly, revealing the exhaustion beneath. "Luoyang may have already fallen, the reports are confused, but nothing good. People are fleeing south. The roads are becoming... difficult."

  "What are you proposing, Magistrate?" I asked. Clearly it was better to be direct with him.

  He pushed his bowl aside and folded his hands on the rough wooden table. "I want to hire the Black Wind Escorts. Officially deputized but paid out of pocket, standard rates, with bonuses for refugees safely delivered to designated camps."

  Wei Jin's expression didn't change, but I felt him tense beside me. "To what end? We'd have to consider this carefully."

  "Of course, of course." Han Wenzheng nodded easily. "But consider what I'm offering. Legitimacy. You've been operating in a gray area, useful, but unofficial. This would make you recognized agents of the state. Your people would have authority on the roads. Protection under law."

  And we would owe him. We would be accountable to him. Nothing was ever just a gift.

  He must have seen the skepticism in my eyes, because he sighed and set down his chopsticks.

  "Let me be candid with you, Lady Layla." He rubbed his temples. "The north is in chaos. When the capital is uncertain, they send investigators. And when investigators come, they look for money." A wry, self-deprecating smile. "It is much easier to survive an audit when one has excess funds to show than when one must squeeze copper from unwilling taxpayers. Save the officials first, then save the people. Crude, but true."

  I watched him, reassessing. There it was. The real calculation.

  "The Escorts are useful to me," he continued, unashamed. "You handle the roads, the refugees, the banditry. I can reduce my garrison spending accordingly. And frankly your contract is cheaper and involves less paperwork... and oversight." He spread his hands. "Fewer soldiers on my books means more flexibility in my accounts. Everyone benefits."

  Ghost soldiers. The oldest trick in the provincial playbook.

  "And," Han Wenzheng added, his voice dropping further, "in times of crisis, there are opportunities. The prefecture is watching. The capital is watching." His eyes glittered with something that wasn't quite greed, but wasn't far from it. "I intend to be one of the ones who rises."

  He wasn't wrong about the value. Official backing would change everything.

  "There's more," Han Wenzheng continued, lowering his voice further. "The refugees, some of them aren't what you'd expect. Not just farmers and merchants. I've had reports of... others. People who used to have power. Titles. Land. People who are now discovering what it means to own nothing."

  "Northern aristocrats," I said.

  He nodded, his expression troubled. "Some of them. Running ahead of the rebellion. They have nothing left but their names, and those names might get them killed if the wrong people find them." He paused. "I need someone who can handle... complicated situations. Who can keep the peace when very different kinds of people are forced to share the same road. Someone without local interests."

  I glanced at Wei Jin.

  "We'll need to discuss this with our captains," he said finally, his voice carefully neutral. "The Escorts don't take contracts without proper deliberation."

  "Of course." Han Wenzheng rose from the bench, brushing off his plain hemp robe. For a moment, the shabby disguise fell away entirely, and the magistrate stood there, tired, worried, but resolute. "Consider it carefully. And quickly. The need is urgent." He paused. "The world is changing, my friends. Faster than any of us expected. The question is whether we change with it, or get swept away."