There were two young women at the table opposite the one Chih took, so different that they couldn’t even have been mistress and servant. The smaller woman was dressed in light silk robes in pale blue, her long hair swept up by a small brassy cornet and allowed to stream loose down her back. She sipped at her earthenware teacup as reverently as if it were a sacred elixir, and she sat with her back as straight as the iron pillar at Wei, scorning to touch anything as common as the back of her chair.

Her companion, on the other hand, was ready for the field with the ends of her plain hemp robes hitched up to her belt. She sat with her sandaled bare feet tucked into the rungs of her chair, and she leaned forward with one arm on the table, dipping the end of a fried breadstick into her tea and eating it in large bites.

Despite their differences, the two seemed entirely at ease, and as they waited for their own food Chih watched them curiously out of the corner of their eye.

“We could follow the ox road to An-ti and take a barge downriver,” mused the girl in hemp. “I wouldn’t mind a while to kick back on a barge and watch the riverlands go by.”

“Oh, but sister, that would take so much longer, six days or so at least. It would be faster to take the foot road immediately west, and then we wouldn’t need to pay for the barge. Were you not saying that we must be thrifty only last night?”

“I notice that you’re only worried about thrift, sis, when there’s a water crossing involved. I promise, the Huan River is big and slow as an old sow, it won’t be like the storms you’re used to.”

The girl in silk opened her mouth to reply, but a crashing sound brought her up short. Almost Brilliant peeped in surprise, exploding in frantic wings to sit up on the edge of the tarp, and when they turned, Chih saw what they guessed was their tea splashed on the chest of a large man in the leather clothes of a miner. The man was roughly the shape of a boulder himself, and in his hand, the waitress’s wrist looked as delicate as a flower stem.

“Watch where you’re going, what kind of place is this?” the man growled, giving her a brisk shake. “You think you get to go running around like this is the damned circus?”

“I said I was sorry,” the waitress protested, trying to jerk back, but the man refused to let her go, shaking his head and snorting like a bull getting ready to charge.

“You can’t treat people like that,” he said, and even before Almost Brilliant called with growing alarm, Chih stood up, smiling and opening their hands.