“I know what my mother told me,” Almost Brilliant said before Chih could reply. “I do not know how a young master of the Southern Monkey style would tell it to me.”

“Hardly a master,” said Wei Jintai with modesty, “and truly, only the most minor student in the long history of the martial world.”

Chih waited, and Wei Jintai walked a little slower, letting the others gain some distance from them.

“If auntie is a local, it must still be a bitter pill for her,” she whispered. “No matter what the local martial families and sects could do, there was no stopping the Hollow Hand. In those days, they ruled the lower riverlands as fully and as cruelly as any warlord. Auntie jokes, but they really could disappear into the mist, and not just because they knew the land better than anyone else. They had sheared off slivers of their cores and exchanged them for pieces of the old wraiths that live on the mountaintops. They strung people up like butcher birds, so that all would mark their wickedness.”

Wei Jintai shook her head.

“The rule of the Hollow Hand stretched over the riverlands like a shadow, and it was only the Shaking Earth Master who could defeat them. He was the greatest martial arts master in the region at the time, but he had a heart made of stone. He wouldn’t move from his fortress unless he was carried forth in a bedecked palanquin. Some reckoned he was just as bad as the Hollow Hand itself if he would sit in his fortress on the river and ignore the cries of the Hollow Hand’s victims.”

“What moved him?” asked Chih.

“A beautiful maiden from Taiyuan,” Wei Jintai said. “She was the daughter of the illustrious Nie family, as beautiful as the moon wreathed in clouds and as accomplished as a dozen Anh courtesans. Her parents sent her east to meet her bridegroom in the city.”

She shook her head.

“The processional must have looked quite the prize to the Hollow Hand, and they descended not long after they had come through the pass at Chifeng. They killed the drovers, the guards, and her servants, and they strung them up along the road on both sides, taking her dowry for their own.”

Wei Jintai glanced at the group walking ahead, Sang with a slightly embattled look as she tried to complete her family tree to Khanh and Lao Bingyi’s satisfaction. When she saw that they were not going to be interrupted, she continued even more softly.