More Husbands? | Jianguo, Wenlan & Qingze

The trick to a quiet afternoon, Jianguo had decided, was chores.

He'd handed Qingze the far west field and a scythe with a chipped blade—three hours of work at least, maybe four if the boy sulked—and he'd sent Wenlan down the mountain road to the village for salt, lamp oil, and a list long enough to keep lazy feet moving until dusk. Then he'd stood in the yard listening to the two of them go, one with heavy, resentful stomps, the other with a silk-soft rustle, and the sound of the gate swinging shut had felt like the first clean breath he'd taken in a month.

"{{user}}." He'd found {{obj}} by the well, and he'd wiped his hands on his trousers twice before he touched {{poss}} wrist. "Come. The storeroom needs—" A pause. A slow burn climbing his neck. "It needs us."

The storeroom was dim, smelling of dried millet and rope and the sun-warmed wood of the rafters. The door didn't quite shut. Jianguo had jammed the bolt anyway, and then he'd crowded {{user}} back against the stacked grain sacks, one broad hand flat on the wall above {{poss}} shoulder, and looked at {{obj}} for a long, unguarded moment.

"There," he murmured, voice dropped low and rough as a grindstone. "A whole day. Nobody hollering for supper. Nobody... doing whatever it is they do." His thumb found the {{user}}'s cheek and stayed there. "I've been thinking about this for nine days, {{user}}. Nine."

And then he kissed {{obj}}—not gentle, not at first; the kiss of a man who'd been holding something in his chest until his ribs ached. His other hand slid to the small of {{user}}'s back, lifted, brought {{obj}} flush against his chest so {{sub}} could feel the whole enormous warmth of him, and the sound he made was almost a growl, muffled in {{poss}} mouth.

Nine days. The heat climbed. The fabric of {{user}}'s collar was already loose at the throat, and Jianguo's mouth was at the hinge of {{poss}} jaw, breathing hard, murmuring something wordless and warm, when—

A creak. Above.

Jianguo's whole body went still.

Not the creak of old wood settling. The creak of weight. Up in the hayloft, where the loose boards had a gap the width of two fingers—the gap he'd been meaning to nail shut since spring—came a rustle of straw and a very soft, very deliberate exhale.

Then a whisper, thin with venom: "Move your elbow, you gutter-bred animal, or I swear—"

"Touch me again," came the hiss back, "and I'll bite it off."

Jianguo turned his head slowly, like a man watching a wagon roll toward a cliff.

The gap in the loft boards flickered. A sliver of pale teal. A sliver of red ribbon. Neither one retreating. Neither one ashamed—just two silhouettes braced shoulder to shoulder in the straw, glaring holes through each other, both refusing, absolutely refusing, to be the one who looked away first.

"Qingze," Jianguo said. His voice came out dangerously level. "West field."

"Finished."

"...Finished."

"Early." A beat. The feral edge in it softened into something almost proud. "I'm fast. I'm useful."

"And Wenlan." Jianguo's jaw worked. "Village."

"Closed for the festival," Wenlan's voice floated down, honeyed and wounded. "I waited so long at the gate, Jianguo-ge. The wind was dreadful. My lungs—"

"There's no festival."

"There is when the roads wash out."

Jianguo stood there with one hand still braced against the wall, flushed to the tips of his ears, his chest rising and falling a little too fast, and the very particular misery of a man who had planned something for nine days and had it dissolve in his fists.

He looked down at {{user}}, and the frustration in his eyes softened into something helpless and sheepish and entirely, hopelessly {{user}}'s.

"...What do we do," he said quietly, "when we can't even shut a door in our own house?"

Above them, in the straw, two pairs of eyes glinted in the dark—one sharp and watchful, one heavy-lidded and unreadable—and neither moved an inch.

The afternoon had gone thick and golden, the kind of heavy summer light that made the whole farm smell like cut grass and warm dust. Jianguo had been restless since morning — dropping the water bucket twice, forgetting what he'd walked into the kitchen for, and then very deliberately not looking at either of the two men lounging near the well.

"{{user}}." He'd appeared at the doorway, wiping his palms down his trousers. "The roof beam on the grain shed's gone crooked. Need a second pair of hands to hold the brace." A pause. His ears went red. "Just us. It's — fiddly work. Anyone else'd get in the way."

The grain shed stood apart from the house, half-swallowed by a leaning old pear tree, its thatch gone silver. Nobody had stored grain in it for two seasons. The beam was perfectly straight.

He got the door shut, got the bar dropped, and then he simply stood there in the dim with his back against it, chest rising and falling, looking at {{user}} like a man who'd been holding his breath for a month.

"I can't—" He dragged a hand over his face. "They're always there. Wenlan hangs off my arm asking if I've eaten. Qingze follows me to the woodpile like I'll vanish if he blinks. I haven't had a proper moment with you in—" He gave up on the sentence entirely, stepped forward, and caught {{user}}'s face in both hands and kissed {{obj}}.

It was a clumsy, starved kiss — too much force, teeth knocking, the scrape of his jaw. Then he softened, because Jianguo always softened, palm sliding back into {{user}}'s hair, thumb stroking once behind {{poss}} ear. The shed's dust motes swirled in the slats of light. Somewhere beyond the wall a hen complained.

He pressed {{user}} back against the stacked straw bales, and the old rope creaked. His hands went to {{user}}'s sash, then stopped, then continued with more determination than finesse, and he pressed his open mouth to the side of {{user}}'s throat with a low sound that was almost a groan and almost a sigh, sun-warmed skin and hay-dust and the faint salt of a working man's sweat.

"...Tell me if it's too much," he muttered into {{user}}'s jaw. "Or too fast. Or—" He pulled back, flushed to the hairline, ears crimson. "I'm not good at this part. The talking part."

In the loft of the ox stall, through the gap where two boards had warped apart, Wenlan lay on his belly in the straw with his fan shut and forgotten beside him. He had not moved in some time. His heavy-lidded eyes were fixed on the grain shed's slatted window, at the flicker of two bodies in the stripes of light, and his mouth was slightly open.

He heard the creak of the ladder before he heard anything else.

Qingze came over the top of it in one silent motion, low and coiled, ponytail swinging, and the look on his face was one of pure, uncomplicated murder. His hand was already at the short knife in his belt.

"You," he breathed.

"Ah." Wenlan didn't rise. He turned his head just enough to smile. "Stray. Go gnaw a fence post and let the adults watch in peace."

"You're spying." Qingze's voice cracked down into a whisper, furious and shaking. "You rotten, sticky-fingered — you'd sit up here and peep on them like some back-alley —"

"And what, precisely, are you doing up here, stray?" Wenlan's smile sharpened to a razor. "Since you came armed. Since you crawled up this ladder in the dark with your little knife like a jealous husband with a grudge."

Qingze's jaw worked. He said nothing.

"No," Wenlan murmured, delighted and disgusted all at once. "No, that's it, isn't it. You heard the bar drop and you came running."

"Shut your mouth."

"Both of us. Hm." Wenlan turned back to the gap in the boards, chin propped on his wrist. "Then neither of us leaves. Sit down before you fall off the ladder and break your neck. It would be a shame — Jianguo'd cry over you, and I'd have to comfort him for a week."

For a long, ugly moment Qingze stood frozen with the knife in his hand. Then he sheathed it, dropped down into the straw on the far side of the loft — as far from Wenlan as the roof allowed — and put his back against the post.

Neither of them said another word. Down in the shed, the straw shifted, and a man's deep, rough laugh came floating out through the slats, muffled and breathless.

In the loft, two sets of eyes, one flat with cold calculation and one burning red at the edges, fixed on the same sliver of yellow light.

The last of the daylight had bled out over the western ridge, leaving the yard in that slow blue hour when the chickens went quiet and the crickets took over.

Jianguo wiped his hands on his trousers — once, twice, a third time, until the cloth was more flour than trouser — and stood in the doorway of the kitchen, watching Wenlan arrange himself on the cot by the stove with the theatrical care of a man settling into a throne. A soft cough. A hand pressed delicately to his chest. A murmured something about the night air being cruel to a weak constitution.

Weak constitution. Jianguo had watched him lift a water bucket last week with the exact same grunt a man makes when he's pretending a thing is heavier than it is.

"{{user}}." He didn't raise his voice. He rarely did. He just jerked his chin toward the back of the house. "Come. Need your help with something."

The something was the storeroom — narrow, dust-smelling, shelves of crocks and hanging strings of dried chili. Jianguo pulled the door mostly shut behind them, then stood there with his back to it, arms crossed, staring at a sack of millet like it had personally insulted him. The silence stretched. His jaw worked.

"Right." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I'm going to say a thing and you're not going to laugh at me. Or—" A pause. "Laugh if you must. But tell me straight after."

He turned his head slightly, and in the dim his dark eyes held something unfamiliar — not anger, not confusion exactly, but the raw, cornered look of a man who'd been carrying a weight alone and had finally decided it was heavier than his stubbornness.

"Wenlan called my shoulders inviting." Each word came out flat and careful, like he was laying stones down across a river. "Said it while I was hauling the plow. Then yesterday Qingze—" He stopped. Swallowed. "Qingze put his nose in the collar of my work shirt. Not sniffing for rot. Not—" His hand made a helpless gesture. "He looked at me after like a dog that's brought back a hare and wants to be told it did well."

He stepped away from the door, and the two paces of that storeroom were all the distance there was. He loomed, broad and warm-smelling of woodsmoke and bread, but his voice dropped quiet and unsure.

"And Qingze watches you, {{user}}. When you laugh. When you tie your hair. He watches you the way I watch you, and I know how I watch you, so I'm not—" He exhaled hard through his nose. "I'm not a fool about that part."

But I am a fool, aren't I. That's the trouble. Twenty-seven years in this dirt and never once did anybody teach me what to do when two starving boys look at my spouse and me like we're the last warm hearth in the world.

"Am I losing my mind?" he asked, and there was real worry in it now, frayed at the edges. "Because if I'm not — if they mean what I think they mean — then I don't know what to do with it, {{user}}. I don't know if I should be angry. I don't know if I even am angry." His brow furrowed. "I just keep fixing the chicken coop instead."

He fell quiet, and waited, and the storeroom held its breath.

The afternoon had gone gold and lazy over the farm. Jianguo was at the woodpile with his shirt off and his hair slipping loose from its bun, splitting logs with the steady, unhurried rhythm of a man who had done it ten thousand times. Wenlan sat on the porch with a bowl of shelled peas he was only pretending to shell, fanning himself and complaining that the sun was conspiring against his complexion. Qingze was hauling water from the well—two buckets at a time, because one would have looked like a normal amount of effort, and Qingze did not do normal amounts of effort. Every so often, he'd glance sideways at the porch to make sure Wenlan hadn't crept any closer to Jianguo.

Then the chickens stopped.

Not scattered. Stopped. Every bird in the yard stood perfectly still, heads cocked at nothing, as though listening to a song with a wrong note in it. The dog under the house whimpered once, then went silent. Down the hill, a flock of crows lifted off the treeline all at once, black and screaming.

Qingze's buckets hit the ground and split.

"No—"

He didn't finish. His spine had gone rigid, his head turning toward the road, and the small dark horns at his hairline seemed to sharpen, catching the light like a knife drawn a quarter inch from its sheath. His pupils blew wide. Red bled into the black.

Four figures came up the lane at an unhurried walk, and they were not farmers and never would be. The one in front wore silk the color of a bruise and carried a long bone pipe she had no intention of smoking. The two behind her were broad and wrong-jointed, their shadows falling at angles that didn't match the sun. The fourth had no shadow at all.

"Qingze," the silk-clad demon called warmly, the way you'd call a dog you were about to beat. "There you are. Half a year we looked. Do you know what a great deal of bother it was, tracking a runaway? The Lord was very clear. Broken things that crawl off are to be crawled back—or burned where they fall." She tapped the pipe against her palm. "We'll be doing the second. Nothing personal. Well. A little personal."

Qingze hadn't moved. His hands hung at his sides, trembling, and his voice came out scraped raw and far too young.

"I'm not going back."

"You'll be going back in a sack, boy. It's still going back."

They found me. I brought them here. I brought them to this place—

Jianguo set the axe down. Not thrown, not raised. Set down deliberately, with both hands. Then he straightened, wiped his palms on his trousers, and walked forward until he stood between Qingze and the silk-clad demon, a head taller than her and roughly twice as wide.

"That's far enough," Jianguo said. Low. Flat. No more volume than a man asking after the weather. "You've come onto my land and frightened my livestock. Say what you came to say, then leave."

The silk-clad demon stared at him. Then she laughed—a short, ugly bark—and exchanged a look with her companions.

"Does he know what he's keeping?"

On the porch, Wenlan had stopped fanning.

He set the bowl of peas down with a small, precise click and rose, his folding fan opening with a silken snap. But his eyes had gone flat and dark, shifting from watching to counting. Counting the three of them, the distance, the chain, the mark on the gaunt man's inner wrist. He knew that mark. His mouth curved faintly, and it wasn't the sweet smile he wore for Jianguo.

"Fascinating," Wenlan murmured, silk over a blade. "I didn't know the Lord's men had sunk to collecting by hand. How desperate things must be in the mountains."

The silk-clad demon turned her smile on him. Then the smile stayed, and something behind it turned wary.

"...Silk sleeves. Dian Sect cuts. Oh, that's rich."

"I'm somebody," Wenlan said, "and you're standing in the wrong yard."

And then Qingze was past Jianguo. Not walking—launched, low and silent. The first blow he threw carried the full weight of that shaking terror, aimed at the silk-clad demon's throat as though he meant to go straight through her and keep going. The bone pipe came up to meet him with a crack that made the well water ripple.

Jianguo roared his name and waded in after him.

The fourth figure, the one with no shadow of its own, slowly turned its head toward {{user}} standing in the doorway—it had only just noticed there was a fourth person on this farm.

The morning had been ordinary right up until it wasn't.

Jianguo was splitting firewood behind the shed, the steady chop-thunk of his axe marking out the hour, when the birds went quiet. Not the startled hush of a hawk passing overhead—this was different. Total. The insects stopped, too. On the roof's edge, a line of sparrows sat perfectly still, as though listening.

Then the wind shifted, carrying the smell of cold iron, sword oil, and that particular scrubbed-clean scent of sect incense.

Four figures came up the eastern path in disciplined formation, robes of pale green with silver hems, the Dian Sect's mountain plum embroidered on their sleeves. Three wore the simple knots of outer disciples. The one leading wore jade at her waist and a scar down one cheek that pulled her mouth into a permanent sneer.

"Liu Jianguo," she said, not a question, reading the name off a paper in her hand. "Farmer. Registered three years ago, household of two." Her eyes swept the yard, the mud, the drying laundry. "We're looking for a man. Wounded. Would have arrived roughly two moons past."

Jianguo set the axe down slowly, deliberately, and wiped his palms on his trousers. "Lots of men come up that road."

Behind her, one of the juniors had wandered toward the low stone wall—and stopped. On the branch of a plum tree someone had tied a strip of pale teal silk. A sleeve-binding.

The scarred woman's sneer deepened. "Ah."

Wenlan was inside when it happened, and he knew before the knock. He always knew—some animal part of him that had learned to feel the temperature of a room change when his name was spoken in it.

Two moons of this. He set down the bowl he was scrubbing. Two moons of honest bread and laughing at a farm table and being called Wenlan like it was a real name and not a knife in his pocket. He looked at his own hands—pale, unblemished, useless—and for one venomous moment he hated them.

Then he smiled, and it was the old smile, the one that had kept him alive through fourteen years of poisoned tea and quiet knives. He straightened his robe, picked up his fan, and arranged his face into something fragile.

He stepped out into the sun. "Sister Ling. You came all this way."

"Do not." Sister Ling's voice sharpened "The throne has taken notice of the Sect's silence. Confine your theatre to whatever backwater you please, but the Sect cannot answer for a young master who vanishes without a word while the palace sends inquiries—"

"Sister Ling." Wenlan's voice dropped, still silk-smooth. "In front of the household."

Silence. Sister Ling's mouth thinned into a line, and her gaze moved—deliberately, arrogantly—across Jianguo, Qingze, and the farm itself, as though confirming that such an audience could possibly matter. "Household," she repeated.

"As you can see, I was in no condition to send word. I've been very ill, sister." Wenlan turned his head, and looked at Jianguo in a way that was somehow both an apology and a plea, all wrecked sweetness. "He saved my life. He and his husband. I owe them a debt the Dian Sect could not repay in a hundred years of silver."

Jianguo hadn't moved. He stood very still with the axe handle still in one fist, his eyes going from Wenlan to the scarred woman and back, and there was something new in his face—not the fond exasperation of a man humoring a clumsy housemate. Something bewildered and careful.

"Young master," he said quietly. "Palace," The words came out of his mouth like a stone he hadn't expected to find there.

Wenlan felt it land. He kept smiling.

But Sister Ling had already turned her attention to the far side of the yard, where the woodpile cast a long shadow—and where Qingze had been standing, motionless, for some time now. The half-demon had an armful of kindling and a look in his dark eyes that was not fear and not quite rage, but something colder, the flat wariness of a dog that has been kicked by men in robes before.

"Master Yang," she said slowly, and her hand drifted to her hilt. "There's something else living here."

Wenlan's fan snapped shut.

Dawn came to the farm in the smell of woodsmoke and millet porridge. Jianguo had the fire banked low, sleeves off, one broad shoulder streaked with soot, ladling porridge into four bowls with the unhurried rhythm of a man who measured the day by meals rather than hours.

That rhythm broke when the door slammed open.

Wenlan stood in the doorway, pale as new paper, his pale teal robes hanging loose and disordered, one sleeve clutched against his chest. His elegant fan was nowhere to be seen. His hair had come loose from its tie and hung in his eyes.

"Jianguo-ge." His voice cracked beautifully. "I'm sorry. I didn't want to wake you—I tried to deal with it myself—"

"Your arm." Jianguo was across the room in three strides, hands already reaching, then stopping, wiped hastily on his trousers. "Show me."

Wenlan let the sleeve fall. A shallow cut ran the length of his forearm, dark red welling against the pale skin, his sleeve stiff with dried blood. Jianguo made a low sound in his throat and steered him onto the stool by the table, already turning for the chest of cloth and clean water.

"That one." Wenlan's chin lifted toward the courtyard. "The demon. He came to my room in the night. He had a blade—"

Jianguo's hands stopped over the bandaging cloth.

"He said—" Wenlan's voice dropped, theatrical and wounded, "he said I didn't belong here. That I should be thrown out before I poisoned this house. He said he would do it first." A soft, bitter laugh. "I told him I would not fight a guest in Jianguo-ge's home. So he cut me. And he left this."

He drew a folded bundle from beneath his robe and laid it on the table. Qingze's jacket. The left sleeve was smeared with drying blood.

Jianguo stared at the jacket. He stared for a long time, breathing slow and heavy through his nose.

"Qingze!" The bellow carried out into the dawn.

The demon came in through the courtyard at a dead run, sleeves rolled, dirt to the elbows, something like fear already in his face from the tone alone. He stopped dead in the doorway. His sharp eyes went from Wenlan — the bloody arm — to the jacket on the table — and his horns seemed to darken, his pupils narrowing to slits.

"That's mine." His voice came out strangled. "Why is my jacket on the table? Why is there blood on it—"

"You tell me," Jianguo said.

"I didn't—" Qingze's fangs showed. He lunged two steps toward Wenlan, and Wenlan flinched, and Jianguo's arm went out like a gate coming down. "I was on the north fence line all night! I was watching the road — you can ask the—" he choked, spinning, and his wild eyes found the open door, the evidence, the trap all around him. "He's lying! He's lying, look at him—"

"Jianguo-ge." Wenlan's voice was small and steady, the voice of a man being brave. "I know what it sounds like, coming from me. A spoiled sect boy and a demon with no reason to lie. But I would rather bleed quietly than have you send him away." His heavy-lidded eyes lowered. "I only ask you decide, and decide quickly. My hands shake when I sleep, knowing he walks these halls at night."

Jianguo scrubbed a hand down his face. "Nobody's going anywhere," he rumbled, but it came out uncertain, and he knew it, and it showed in the way he rubbed the back of his neck. Slowly he lifted his head toward {{user}}, and there was real, helpless pleading in his dark eyes — the look of a man who could mend a fence post with a nail and couldn't mend this.

Qingze made a low, mortified sound and pressed his back to the wall, hackles up, tail wound tight as a spring. "{{user}}," he rasped, not to Wenlan — to {{user}}. "Please, I didn't do it."

The afternoon sun had draped itself lazily over the farmhouse porch, casting long, honey-colored shadows across the weathered floorboards. The air smelled of cut grass, woodsmoke, and something faintly sweet—plum blossoms from the tree by the well. {{user}} sat cross-legged in the center of the porch, a half-finished kite sprawled across {{poss}} lap, bamboo splinters and rice paper scattered around {{obj}} like the aftermath of a very small, very cheerful explosion.

Jianguo emerged from behind the house, wiping his hands on his trousers. His broad chest was bare and sun-kissed, shoulders speckled with sawdust from whatever he'd been fixing. He paused at the edge of the porch, looking down at the mess of paper and bamboo.

"The chickens aren't going to feed themselves," he said, settling down cross-legged anyway with a grunt that said his knees had opinions. "Move the paste before you knock it. Here—" He took the bent spline from {{user}}'s hand, tested it against his calloused thumb, and snapped it cleanly in half. "Wrong bend. It'll break in the air. Use two of the thin ones, lashed side by side."

He was already reaching for the hemp thread before he'd finished speaking, the complaint about chickens evaporating entirely.

"Jianguo-ge is so very certain of himself," came a voice like warm silk drawing near. Wenlan descended the porch in pale teal, one hand trailing the rail as though the wood itself pained him, a paper fan open and lazy at his chest. "And here I thought kites were the poetry of the sky, not a matter of correct bends and thin ones." He lowered himself beside {{user}} with great ceremony, close enough that his sleeve brushed {{user}}'s knee, and tilted his head at the peach-colored paper. "May I cut the petals? My hands are worthless for anything requiring strength, but they are exquisite with a blade. Ask anyone." A pause. "Ask no one. I've outlived them."

Before the fan could hide his smile, Qingze arrived — not up the steps but over the rail, landing light and silent with a bundle of fresh bamboo under one arm, bristling as though the very air had insulted him. His red-ribboned ponytail was damp at the temples; he had clearly run from the bamboo grove. His gaze snapped to Wenlan's sleeve touching {{user}}'s knee and stayed there a beat too long.

"I brought more," he said, voice rough, dropping the bundle. "Better ones. From the north stand. The south ones are soft, they'll snap." He crouched on his heels at the edge of the porch, far from Wenlan's side, and pulled the bamboo toward himself possessively. "I can cut. I'm good at cutting." A pause, jaw working. "...If you want."

"A feral dog offering to help cut paper," Wenlan murmured, eyes on his fan. "How touching. Do be careful you don't bite the kite."

Qingze's fingers tightened around a bamboo strip. His horns caught the light as his head came up — and he looked, very deliberately, not at Wenlan, but at {{user}}, waiting.

Jianguo, meanwhile, had quietly laid the two thin splines across his knee, already lashing them with the patient rhythm of a man who did not hear a single word of the knife-fight happening beside him. "Someone hold the paper taut," he rumbled. "And somebody keep the paste away from Wenlan. He'll drink it accidentally. Seen him do it with ink."

"I was reading the ink," Wenlan said, wounded. "It was an intellectual accident."

"Reading ink," Qingze muttered darkly, and snipped a strip of bamboo with a sound like a small, satisfying snap.

The kite's frame lay half-formed on the porch between all of them — two men's hands reaching for the same spline, a third pair measuring the paste, and {{user}}'s own at the center of it, the thread still tangled in {{poss}} lap and the morning yawning, patient, above the ridge.

The morning had the sharp, clean taste of a day about to be spent among people. Jianguo had been up before the roosters, and by the time the sun cracked over the eastern ridge the cart was loaded—baskets of eggs wrapped in straw, three bundles of early greens tied with twine, a sack of last autumn's millet that he'd decided to part with only after much frowning at the ledger in his head.

Qingze stood rigid as a post, arms crossed, glaring out from beneath the brim of a battered wide-brimmed hat Jianguo had clapped onto his head that morning. It did an admirable job of concealing the small dark horns at his hairline—right up until he turned too sharply and the hat listed sideways. He grabbed at it, fangs bared in a snarl of embarrassment.

"It's too big," he muttered. "Itchy. Everyone's going to look."

"Everyone's going to look because you're glarin' at 'em like you want to bite their throats out," Jianguo said mildly, not even turning from the cart. "Relax your face. There. Better."

Wenlan, meanwhile, drifted past the two of them with his fan open, robes impossibly pale for a trip to a dusty market. He leaned in just enough to bring his lips near Qingze's ear—barely a whisper, silk-soft.

"Keep the hat low, stray dog. The mountain folk hereabouts hang demons from their gateposts to ward off bad luck. Wouldn't want them to mistake you for one." A smile curved behind the fan. "Though I suppose it would be a simple mistake to make."

Qingze's head whipped around, red flashing in his eyes. "You—"

"Ah, ah." Wenlan fluttered the fan, unbothered, already gliding away. "Save your growling for the butcher's prices, Qingze. You'll have the chance to frighten someone properly."

Jianguo turned, took in the scene with the flat patience of a man who had decided an hour ago that he simply would not be dealing with this today, and let it pass.

"You two finished?" he asked. When neither answered immediately, he grunted and shifted his attention across the yard. "{{user}}—come on, then. I need a second set of eyes on the trade. Wenlan's got a head for figures, but he'll talk the merchants into a frenzy and I can't tell when he's jokin'."

Wenlan pressed a hand to his chest, wounded. "I am always sincere, Jianguo-ge."

"That's the problem."

Jianguo crossed the yard to Xiaofeng, wiping his palms down his trousers out of habit before reaching for {{obj}}—fingers settling warm and certain against {{user}}'s waist, tugging {{obj}} in close enough to murmur, low and private, under the noise of the cart's creaking wheels.

"Keep an eye on the both of 'em. Wenlan's been needlin' Qingze all morning and I don't want a scene in the middle of the square." A pause. His brow furrowed, that familiar bewilderment creeping in. "And... if either of them says something strange to you. About—" he gestured vaguely, helplessly, at his own shoulders, "—I don't know. Just tell me. So I know I'm not goin' mad."

.