“Oh, a neixin,” the young lady in silk said. “Then you must be a scholar as well as a cleric.”

“Say rather a historian and observer, and I have certainly observed a wonder today. May I ask for your names?”

The young lady rose immediately to her feet, clasping her right fist in her hand and bowing low. It was a martial form of deference, and Chih belatedly stumbled to their own feet to return with a bow of their own.

“Honored cleric, I am Wei Jintai of the Fengxi Wei in the Verdant Islands, martial daughter of Yo Laozi.”

While still bowed, Wei Jintai lifted her foot and gently mule-kicked the chair that her companion sat on, bringing her reluctantly to her feet as well. The other woman bowed curtly.

“I’m Sang,” she said diffidently. “I’m just here to manage the money.”

Wei Jintai straightened up, frowning with irritation.

“This is my sworn sister, Mac Sang,” she said. “Please, mistress neixin, if you remember us unworthy wanderers at all, please remember that.”

“It is my duty and my honor, Wei Jintai,” chirped Almost Brilliant, and only Chih knew her well enough to see how she was practically quivering with delight.

“She does a great deal more than hold the purse strings,” Wei Jintai said almost anxiously. “She is more clever than a barrow of foxes. She once retrieved a colony of silkworms from the foreigners who had stolen them, and then—”

“Ah, the cleric doesn’t want to hear about that, sis,” said Sang in a way that made Chih wonder what had happened to the silkworms after they were retrieved. Silkworms in Anh could only be owned by the nobles, and the finer varieties, the ones that spun gold thread and celadon thread and plum-colored thread, were guarded as obsessively as eligible daughters. It had been a real scandal when undyed green silk from the Verdant Islands appeared on the market last year.

“I would love to hear whatever you had to tell me,” they said diplomatically, but before anyone could say anything else, the curtains over the exit swung open again and a middle-aged couple came in. The woman walked slightly ahead of the man, and Chih recognized them as the pair from the barber’s tent.

“Frogs and trees, what in the world is all of this?” the woman exclaimed, toeing a chair leg out of her path. “Is there not one inn in all the riverlands that can keep a tidy common room?”

The man behind her, better groomed now, shrugged, but before he could say anything, the woman’s censorious gaze landed on the three of them in the sheltered seating area. She was perhaps in her mid-forties, and Chih instinctively sat up straighter. Out of the corner of their eye, they could see Wei Jintai and Sang do the same.

“You three,” she said, pointing at them imperiously. “Are you responsible for all of this mayhem?”