“But it would be your story,” Chih said, trying not to insist. “It would be the truth. Wouldn’t that be better than—”

“What my story is, cleric, is mine. You have the rest, and you’ll tell the rest. Be happy with that. My story’s mine, and you don’t get to have it.”

Lao Bingyi shook her head.

“Half of the stories never remember Khanh anyway. They make him a dead bodyguard or a traitor or a fool. They say he’s from the Carcanet Mountains or Vinh or Ue County, anything but a nice Viet boy from Ko-anam Ford who doesn’t much like to talk about himself. What good is that?”

She turned her muscled back pointedly to Chih, and Chih sighed and gave up, stripping and wading into the water. It was frigid, but they adjusted to it with long breaths until they were submerged up to their shoulders.

Lao Bingyi waded out to settle her basket on the rock spar, selecting another bottle and using the contents to lather her skin.

“I think Wei Jintai might stay with us a while,” she said thoughtfully. “And if we keep Wei Jintai, I have hopes we’ll keep Mac Sang as well. She’s a likely looking thing. Sensible. We never have enough of that in the riverlands. I know that my old man would love to hear about those silkworms she doesn’t want to talk about. It sounds like the kind of thing he would have done before his feet started to hurt.

“They’ll tell stories about Wei Jintai if they’ve not already started,” she continued. “You have one now. I imagine you even think it’s the truth.”

There was something arch and catlike about her tone, and Chih considered before they answered.

“I know what I have seen,” Chih said finally. “There’s what Almost Brilliant has seen. There’s what the people who survive her will say. Auntie, there’s what you will say as well.”

Lao Bingyi took down her hair, thick and heavy, strikingly black, though whether it was luck or cassia dye that kept it so, Chih couldn’t guess. It was easy to imagine the cruel wife of Master See and the girl from Taiyuan with hair like that. Perhaps Wild Pig Yi had hair like that too, but they didn’t say such things about her.

“I will be good to her,” Lao Bingyi said. “The frogs and trees only know that she will need it. And cleric, what will you say?”

“I’ll do my best to be honest,” Chih said, and somewhat to their surprise, Lao Bingyi smiled. It was a riverlands thing, feral and strange and certain.

“Good,” she said. “And you cannot help being kind. So I suppose that will work itself out.”