Silently she rose to a kneeling position, her lance in her hands. She was a darker spot of night, and immediately a dozen different arrows shot from a dozen different directions, and so very great was her skill that she knocked them all aside, sending them spinning to the ground.

Another knock came from the palanquin, and she knocked back again, because all was well, after all. She was Wild Pig Yi, and arrows shot from the dark were nothing to her.

Another flight of arrows came, and then another, and then when they failed as the first flight had, the bandits fell silent. For a while, they were quiet, and Wild Pig Yi thought that they might have seen the error of their ways and crept off to find better prey.

Just when she was starting to relax, however, a man came out of the trees, his pace slow and deliberate, and in his hands, he held a hammer of the kind they use to drive fence posts, so heavy that he had to drag it along the ground so he would not be exhausted when it came time to use it—

“Gravewraith Chen!” squeaked Almost Brilliant. “It’s Gravewraith Chen!”

Chih jumped a mile because they had not realized that Almost Brilliant had awakened to listen, and they said the hoopoe’s name in shocked surprise.

“Khanh was telling us a story,” they exclaimed, and Almost Brilliant came to perch on Chih’s shoulder, tossing her little head like she did when she had done something wrong and didn’t care to admit it.

“Everyone knows that it is Gravewraith Chen with the hammer,” she said pertly. “He was one of the Thunderous Four who almost brought down the King of Mount Lonefox. He got his name because when they were beaten nearly to death and buried in a deep crevasse that went down to the heart of the mountain, he was the only one who survived to crawl out and enact his terrible revenge.”

Chih cleared their throat pointedly, because one of the first rules they learned on the road was that it was exceedingly bad manners to tell someone their own story, and nodded to Khanh.

“Please, I would very much like to hear the rest of this story,” they said hopefully, and Khanh nodded, concealing a smile behind his hand.

“Well, maybe it was Gravewraith Chen after all,” he said. “It could have been. You know, in those days, people lived longer than they seem to now. It might very well have been him.”

Let’s say it was Gravewraith Chen, emerged from his crevasse, and he heaved his hammer up to point it at Wild Pig Yi.

“Leave that cargo to me if you value your life,” he said. “I own everything that crosses this part of the riverlands.”

“You don’t,” Wild Pig Yi said. “You own what you can take, and brother, I’m telling you now that you cannot take this.”