“He’s also a descendant of Kada.”
“Brrf?!”
Maomao found herself with bits of peach on her face.
“Oh, my goodness gracious.” Suiren was wiping Maomao’s face in an instant. There were certain people who might have considered it a privilege to have a gorgeous nobleman spit food on them. Maomao, however, could sum it up in one word: unhygienic.
“S-Sorry. Of all the things I thought you would say...” Jinshi said.
“Not at all, sir. I’m not completely certain of this story yet, so I debated whether I should say anything.”
Maomao told him how Tianyu was the son of a hunter, and how one of his ancestors was a woman who’d been Kada’s bedmate.
“I see. Tianyu, he...”
Jinshi also seemed to know something about the autopsies the doctors were performing, and his expression was conflicted: partly accepting, partly knowing that this was a delicate subject.
“So you think he might know something about this tablet?”
“I haven’t asked him, sir,” Maomao said firmly.
“Why not?”
“Tianyu is a man who became a doctor to feed his curiosity. Dissection is what gets him out of bed in the morning, and without Dr. Liu’s astute guidance, by now he would probably be digging up graves or even murdering people outright. As it is, when he catches wind of something that interests him, he disregards his own safety, drags in the people around him, makes a huge scene, and generally causes all kinds of trouble. He’s not someone you can speak to carelessly.”
Jinshi’s and Suiren’s gazes both settled on Maomao. They made her at once uncomfortable and uneasy.
“Yes? What is it?” she asked.
“It’s...nothing,” said Jinshi.
“Nothing at all!” Suiren agreed, and with a jolly hoh-hoh-hoh she began making more tea.
“I even thought it was possible that the dead man, Wang Fang, had been looking for Tianyu.”
“What makes you think that?” Jinshi asked, but it was a difficult question to answer. Here they entered entirely into the realm of Maomao’s suppositions. Maomao couldn’t shake the sense that she spoke much more on the basis of assumptions and educated guesses than she used to.
“Wang Fang appeared to want the tablet,” she said. “Not for its own sake—he was looking for members of the Imperial family. Evidently, he was also investigating the Shin clan’s family heirloom.”
“Ah, yes. The Shin clan, which turned out to be the common denominator behind the three court ladies who killed Wang Fang. Unfortunately we took that investigation as far as we could—but he seems to have stuck his nose in where he shouldn’t.” Jinshi appeared less interested in Wang Fang’s murder than in what he had been after.
“Does that information come from Miss Chue?”
“No... From Hulan. I take it you don’t like him very much,” Jinshi added when he saw Maomao grimace.
“You’d prefer that I did?”
“No—I mean, I understand. But he is useful in his own way.” There was that distant look again.
“He’s a capable servant, but comes with his own challenges, doesn’t he?” said Maomao.
“People have certainly stopped foisting work on me since he got here. I haven’t had to do so many all-nighters.”
“Come to think of it, your color does look better than usual.” Maomao had to acknowledge the little bastard’s talent. “But are you sure you should keep him so close?”
“I can do it, if I just think of him as a Lahan with a slightly different hair color.”
“Yikes! That makes him sound like the most exquisitely awful servant.”
He would do his work, but always with the most untoward looks at his superior.
“He’s quite a capable second-in-command. Even if he does sometimes needle other civil servants’ weak points...”
“He really is just Lahan with a different hair color, isn’t he?” Lahan would deny it if it were put to him in those terms, but that was no skin off Maomao’s nose. “Anyway, sir, I think we’ve gotten off topic.”
Maomao got out of her chair and looked outside the tent. All she saw was the guest house and the forest; there were no commoners’ houses anywhere to be seen. “Tianyu’s home village is supposed to be somewhere around here.”
Jinshi looked startled. “Do you think that’s coincidence?”
“I can only hope, sir.”
In Maomao’s experience, though, there had been disappointingly few cases in which so many coincidences turned out to be, well, coincidence.
There were Wang Fang’s footprints. Tianyu and Joka, both descendants of Kada. The jade tablet. And now, Tianyu’s home area had been chosen as the party’s hunting grounds.
“Urgh. I don’t feel so good,” Maomao said.
“What’s wrong?” Jinshi asked, suddenly seeming to be concerned about his deportment for some reason. Evidently he thought he was the one who had upset her.
“I mean, about Wang Fang. Something about his—well, I mean, about the military’s factional strife—feels inconsistent.”
“How so?”
Maomao had to ponder the question. “It’s hard to say exactly, but the military essentially has three factions—the Empress Dowager’s people, the Empress’s backers, and the neutrals, right? And Wang Fang went from the neutrals to the Empress.”
“That’s right.”
“But does that make sense? Why would Wang Fang, a member of the Empress’s faction, go looking for some undiscovered member of the Imperial family? They have a perfectly good heir in Empress Gyokuyou’s son, so where’s the need to find another?” Maomao crossed her arms. “Moreover, there’s been a lot of injuries related to factional disputes among the soldiers, but they’re all over trivial things. Nobody is fighting for their convictions. It just seems like a lot of young guys who are jumping on the bandwagon so they can let off steam.”
“A lot of them are hot-blooded, indeed. I think I see what you’re saying, though.”
Hearing him say it, it certainly sounded true enough. But by the same token, Maomao saw only a lot of feuding youngsters.
“If I may ask, is this really factional strife?”
“What makes you ask that?”
“Because only young people seem to be involved, not anyone of major importance.”
“Now that you mention it...”
This seemed to spark a thought for Jinshi. He would know the situation better than Maomao did, which suggested she wasn’t just imagining this.
“Something’s odd, though,” Jinshi said. “Have you heard that the U clan is the object of special torment?”
“Yes, sir.”
From the patriarch himself.
“It seems the new faction in the army doesn’t like me much at all.”
That’s what he’d said.
It made sense to go after a weakened, old-line clan—but in Maomao’s opinion, that didn’t rise to the level of factional strife.
“Which clans did you say are involved in today’s hunt?”
“The Shin and the Chu, as well as the Shen—the Monkey clan.”
The Shin again.
Maomao thought of Mister Love Letters and began to worry that he might butt in today.
“It’s about time for you to be getting ready,” Taomei warned Jinshi.
“I have to collect myself,” he said.
“Of course, sir.” Maomao stood up, clenching her fists.
Jinshi, Suiren, and Taomei all looked at her silently.
“What?”
“You’re staying here.”
“B-But what about my zhen?”
“If they exist, I promise we’ll catch one and bring it back to you,” Jinshi said. “So just stay here!”
Maomao was about to tail Jinshi out of the tent, but Suiren caught her by the shoulder. Firmly.