Instead she found her home on the imperial highways and waterways, falling in with pilgrims and mercenaries and theater people. She found them more welcoming than her mother’s family, who had nothing to fear but the tax collectors and one another’s sharp tongues. The road people liked her for her strength and her courage, and for her part, she liked riding in their wagons and receiving their money in exchange for only a little bit of brawling when the bandits came looking for easy prey.

Ha, do you know, there are still roads in the riverlands that have stones engraved with her name? They tell about how she defeated such and such bandit chieftain or such and such tiger queen, and they make it sound like such a grand battle, as if she were the master of some sect or other, someone near Perfected and gleaming with virtue.

Instead, she was a brawler to the core, exactly as graceful and powerful as the pigs who they say spared her and raised her up on sow’s milk and raw meat. She could gore with her lance as well as a pig could her tusks. She was known to be kind, which you should never confuse with being gracious or beautiful or courteous.

The riverlands have always been a contested territory. How could we avoid such a thing, when we are watered by the Huan River, which bleeds its wealth west to the kingdom of Vihn and which can carry the troops from Anh to our doors in twenty days? Wild pigs, tigers, foxes, they all make their territories across the ones that humans propose, and they’ll defend them. Even the northern countries occasionally come down to bite us and make sure we’re still too mean for invasion.

We belong to everyone and to no one, and when some bandit sets up as a ruler, the usual response is to call them what they want to be called and then not to cry very much when the next murderer comes in. We don’t do well with kings here, or queens, or lords. We have a governor, I believe, who stays very politely behind his men at Mo-Lai Fortress, and we tolerate the mayors because they’re mostly concerned with keeping the local roads fixed and the poor fed. They know how patient the riverlands aren’t, and so they keep to themselves. Good.

You may imagine that this was a place where Wild Pig Yi felt very much at home, and so she lived on the riverland roads for ten years. She protected the heir to the Phoenix Throne as she returned to claim her maternal title. She defeated the Wild Rock of Anpur in a wrestling match fifty-one throws out of a hundred. With the help of a sly fox girl with eyes painted over her eyes, she broke the Four Dams, an attempt by a wicked governor to starve out the people downriver.