“Of course not,” she said. “I’m a neixin, not a bird.”

It was, in fact, a matter of some debate, one in which Chih privately decided to believe whatever Almost Brilliant did, but it didn’t seem like the right time to go into it. There was a tension to the valley that hadn’t been there before, and it made the muscles at the back of their neck ache, as if at every moment they were resisting the urge to look around and see what was behind them.

Sometime after lunch, Lao Bingyi groaned, shaking her head.

“I swear, this path only gets worse and worse every time I walk it. You know when I was a young girl I could run up and down a mountain carrying my pack as if it was nothing? Frogs and trees, what I would not give to be that young again.”

It took Chih a moment to catch on, but Sang no time at all.

“Here, let me help you with that, auntie. Look, I’m barely carrying anything at all…”

There was a standard back and forth, oh, you couldn’t and no, see, I’m already taking it, and then Sang and Chih split Lao Bingyi’s pack between their own loads. Wei Jintai would have taken some as well, but Khanh was fussing at her about her pack arrangement, something about distributing weight badly and it having consequences later on in life.

“Now you must be very careful with my things,” Lao Bingyi said when they were resettled. “Those are supplies we went a long way to get and presents for my family besides, all right?”

“Of course, auntie,” said Sang and Chih in near chorus, and they glanced at each other.

“Some instincts never die, huh, Cleric Chih?”

“The world is built on who carries what and for who,” Chih said, settling the weight more comfortably on their shoulders. “It’s not a bad world where we carry presents for people who feed us.”

“It is very important that nothing gets broken,” Lao Bingyi repeated. “I will be so sad if those things come to harm, so you must walk at the center of the road, all right? Where it’s straight and where you won’t trip.”

“Ha, you underestimate me, auntie, I can trip over nothing at all,” Sang said, but obligingly she and Chih walked at the center of the road, sticking to the driest spots and the most stable ones.

It was all done so neatly that Chih didn’t even realize they were being shielded until Almost Brilliant trilled a frantic alarm, and Lao Bingyi stopped dead in front of them.