#*bows

___

Less than two hours after she wakes, Yanli escapes from the Mo estate in such turmoil that she almost forgets to take the donkey with her.

Keep your wits about you, she berates herself, dressing herself in the only set of spare robes she could find before squirming out of the shed’s high window and crumpling into the dust outside. Mo Xuanyu meant to bring back A-Xian, but that means that A-Xian is...

She blinks back tears, dragging the donkey down the road behind her as she reads over Mo Xuanyu’s letter again. The poor boy had been one of Jin Guangshan’s illegitimate sons, Jiang Yanli’s own xiaoshuzi, and Jin Guangyao had exiled him because he had learned the truth about Qin Su being his younger half-sister.

He was behind your death, too, the letter said. I believe he might even have organized Jin Zixuan’s assassination, since he most likely murdered our father, as well.

Jiang Yanli grits her teeth and pushes on. The single long cut in her arm throbs--a cut that will heal only when Jin Guangyao dies, according to Mo Xuanyu--but the sting is nothing to the twenty hours of sheer agony that was giving birth to Jin Ling, who turned out so big and chubby that she spent the first few hours of his life wondering how such an enormous baby could have possibly fit inside her.

How old would A-Ling be now? she wonders. Did Jin Guangyao and Qin Su bring him up, in mine and Zixuan’s place?

Oddly enough, she doesn’t find herself shying away at the thought of bringing Jin Guangyao to justice. She can probably count on Nie Mingjue to do the actual killing, if it comes to it; there was bad blood between the two even before she and her husband died, and quite frankly, she doesn’t blame Nie Mingjue for it.

A-Xian tore the men who killed the Jiang shidis and shimeis limb from limb, and she would expect no less from a man who watched Jin Guangyao kill his brothers-in-arms right before his eyes.

But then, why did they swear brotherhood after that?

It must have been for Zewu-jun’s sake, Yanli thinks wearily, when she finally stops at a river crossing and leads her donkey down onto the pebbly beach to take a drink. Though I doubt that Zewu-jun could have sworn brotherhood with anyone who had Lan blood on their hands, whether he owed them a life-debt or not.

Her stomach growls, and she searches in the donkey’s saddle-bag for something to eat just in case the owners of the Mo estate had left some bread or fruit there to coax the animal with. Her brief hunt yields a pair of shriveling apples, half-dried but not yet spoiled, so she washes down the fresher one with plenty of cold water and feeds the bigger, drier apple to the donkey.

“I think I’ll call you Apple,” she laughs, as it wolfs down the fruit before sticking its muzzle back into the bubbling stream. “Do you like your name, xiao-pingguo?”

Little Apple takes to the name well enough, and brays contentedly every time she calls it. They rest together by the river for an hour, with Yanli napping in the shade with Little Apple keeping guard; and she starts off again just after noon, hoping to find a main road that might direct her to a town and then towards the nearest cultivation sect.

Jiang Yanli has to admit that Yunmeng Jiang is out of the question: because as much as she loves her younger brother, she highly doubts that he won’t do something stupid if he thinks some nameless Jin exile is pretending to be her. And she certainly can’t go back to Lanling with Jin Guangyao still there, so her quarry will have to be the Gusu Lan clan. Hanguang-jun was friends with her A-Xian, and would surely hear her out for his sake if for nothing else; and Zewu-jun is not as hot-tempered as Chifeng-zun, meaning that Yanli will come to no harm even if Lan-zongzhu doesn’t believe her.

“Xiao-Pingguo,” Yanli begins, stepping over something silvery in the grass as the two of them head deeper into the woods, “how far do you think the--”

Suddenly, her legs go out from under her. Little Apple brays and backs away in alarm, tossing his head anxiously as Yanli struggles into a sitting position and tries to make sense of the fact that her donkey is now over ten feet below her.

“What on earth?” she mutters, biting back one of A-Xian’s favorite curse words as she takes stock of her current situation: trapped inside a net swaying far above the ground, and with no means of cutting her way free from it without breaking her own neck.

“It caught something!” Yanli hears a boyish voice shout, followed by the crackling of someone rushing through the forest and the twang of a drawn bowstring. “Duck, Yu-da-shixiong! I’m going to shoot!”

“You are going to do no such thing,” someone else drawls, with a hint of a sharp Northern accent that reminds her of her late mother. “At least see what you’ve caught, you onionhead. If your stupid nets managed to catch a Lan, you’ll have Chifeng-zun and Hanguang-jun dragging you to Jin-zongzhu for punishment. Chifeng-zun might even punish you himself, since he’s Jin-zongzhu’s sworn da-ge. Do you really want to take the risk?”

“No,” the first boy grumbles. “And anyway, it looks like it’s just--you!”

The sudden dislike in his voice makes Yanli look down, startled, and then the breath flies out of her body as the Jin disciple marches up to stand beneath her.