When it looked like Sang was still going to resist, Wei Jintai simply lifted her off her feet. Chih thought of what flowing silk robes might hide, how the cloud of pretty pale blue and white could easily flutter to obscure the form underneath, which was likely more stocky and muscular than might be guessed.

“Say it!” Wei Jintai insisted, coming to a complete stop on the trail, and Sang flailed in indignation. “Say how beautiful you are!”

“Fine, fine, I’m the prettiest teapot in Lady Chu’s collection, all right? I’m beautiful, I’m lovely, I’m a delicate flower, now, sis, put me down!”

Satisfied, Wei Jintai set her gently on the road and turned to Chih, bowing deeply before rising with a serious expression in her wide dark eyes.

“Cleric Chih and neixin Almost Brilliant, if you write anything about my beloved sister, you must say correctly that she is beautiful. People must remember how beautiful she is, and how gracious and good.”

“I will certainly recall and record what you have said,” Chih said with a polite bow of their own, and they would. They would write in their own records, and Almost Brilliant would remember and pass on to her own chicks how one bright day in late summer, a martial artist called Wei Jintai had asked them to write how lovely her beloved sister was. They would remember the rest as well, and Chih was still hoping to get that story about the silkworm rescue.

Ahead of them, Lao Bingyi clicked her tongue impatiently, and the three of them hurried to keep up.

“Imagine three clever young things like you wasting your time with those old stories like that,” she scolded. “Ugly women, beautiful women, what foolishness. Most of us are lucky if we’re born with a measure of common sense in our heads.”

“Beauty’s nice though,” said Khanh mildly, and Lao Bingyi gave him a sharp look as well.

“And what would you know about beauty, old man?” she said. “You’ve been living in the woods since the Emperor of Pine and Steel was a boy.”

“I know enough to know I married it,” he said in that same measured tone, and to that, Lao Bingyi made her loudest scoffing noise yet, throwing her hands in the air.

“Frogs and trees, I am marching through the woods with three children and an old fool,” she exclaimed, but there was the slightest pink blush on her cheeks.

Lao Bingyi didn’t hold with stories about the martial heroes at all, but by then she had established a network of kinship ties that at the very edges managed to pull in both Sang and Wei Jintai, and she was pleased to tell them both about it. The sworn brotherhoods and sisterhoods and adoptions of the riverlands could become massively complex and complicated, and Chih was briefly relieved that as a cleric, they were largely spared.