Almost Brilliant whistled, a slight huffiness in her tone. “Well, it’s a very old story,” she said. “Things were different then.”

“You sound just like Wei Jintai. She says it’s all about pity stirred in a cold heart and the triumph that can grow from compassion. I think it’s just another dead girl and another martial cock who’s too busy reading ancient scripts and lording it over the locals to do any good.”

“Are there any stories that you like better?” asked Chih, and Sang flashed them a grin.

“Ones where ugly girls like me get their own revenge? I might have a few.”

Sang, it turned out, had several ugly woman stories, tales from the riverlands about female fighters of extraordinary unattractiveness who became legends through feats of martial brilliance. Chih had heard none of them before, and Almost Brilliant only remembered one or two.

“Crying Rock Bao and the Ugly Woman Master were famous in the west river region, and there’s of course the stories about women like Wild Pig Yi and Earwig Jing, who are local, but sis and I are from the east. I know them less well.”

“You still know a lot, thank you,” said Chih, who was looking forward to writing them down from Almost Brilliant’s recall later. “I had no idea there were so many.”

“Ugly women?” asked Sang in amusement, and they were good enough friends by that point that Chih gave her a quick poke in the shoulder.

“Stories,” they said with a laugh. “I’m less educated than Almost Brilliant in the stories of the riverlands, but very few of the stories that I heard had so many women in them, let alone women who were specifically ugly.”

“And all the women in the stories that you did hear about were beautiful,” Sang said, and Chih nodded.

“At Singing Hills, we do find that most of the women who make it into the archives and histories are called beautiful,” they said.

“And in the stories at least, if a woman is not beautiful, then of course she must be ugly if she is there at all,” Sang said, rolling her eyes, but then Wei Jintai had dropped back to walk with them, clasping her arm around Sang’s waist.

“Are you talking about being ugly again, dear sister?” she exclaimed. “No, how could you, you are the most beautiful girl who ever set foot to ground, the most handsome!”

“Augh, sis, get off!” Sang said, squirming against Wei Jintai’s grasp, but as Chih had seen during the fight at the inn, Wei Jintai was very strong.

“No,” Wei Jintai insisted. “No, not until you say you are beautiful, because you are, the fairest under the heavens, the most lovely!”