The Pei clan compound sat on the western side of the commons across the river fork, separated from the main village by the bridge and the open field that had been cleared after the fires. The compound had its own gate, its own well, its own small courtyard at the center where the clan gathered for the morning al and the morning work assignnts.
By the ti we arrived at the third notch, the courtyard was already in motion. Won were carrying water from the well to the cookhouse. Two n were splitting kindling at the woodpile near the south wall. Three children were running between the buildings with the small directed energy of children who had been given chores and were trying to do them well.
Pei Tao, the clan elder, t us at the gate. He was sixty-three, the oldest surviving male of the senior household after the fires, and he wore the gray sash of his rank wrapped twice around his middle in the way the Pei n of his generation had always worn it. He bowed to .
"Squad Captain. We were not expecting you this morning."
"I am running cultivation practice with the second cohort, Elder Pei. I would like to have the cohort move through the courtyard at low intensity for the next two notches while the morning's work continues. They will be quiet, and Wei Bolin and I will be with them throughout."
Pei Tao nodded.
"It is not a problem, Squad Captain. The clan is honored to assist the Academy."
"Thank you, Elder."
I turned to the cohort and spoke to them in a hushed tone as to not allow the Pei Clan to be aware of my words.
"You will pair with mbers of the clan as I direct, and you will perform the breath cycle and the channel awareness work we practiced yesterday. When you have read your assigned partner, you will stand and walk to , and I will tell you who to read next. Do not speak the readings aloud, do you understand?”
"Yes, Squad Captain."
"Good. Lin Zhi, you will start with the woman at the well. Sun Hai, the man at the woodpile on the left. Mu Renshu, the man at the woodpile on the right. Cao Yan, the woman who is sweeping the south porch.”
I guestured with my hand.
“Scatter."
They moved to their assigned partners and the work began.
I had positioned myself at the center of the courtyard near the low wall that separated the cookhouse from the gathering space, where I could see all four students at the sa ti and where I could move between them without drawing attention from the clan mbers who were not aware that anything more than a cultivation lesson was taking place. Bolin stood ten paces from at an angle, which gave him a different sightline on the sa students and on the clan mbers who passed through the courtyard during the work.
I had told the cohort what they were doing, but I had not told them what I was doing, which was reading every Pei in the courtyard alongside their work.
The technique Shan Pei had taught worked at greater range than I had let the cohort believe. The students were reading at arm's length, which was the distance their first day of channel work had given them.
My own range was wider. I had been working the technique for two weeks under Shan Pei's correction, and I could now register kinship signatures across a courtyard if the courtyard was not too crowded and the wind was not blowing the wrong way. The students were the cover. Their visible work made it appear that the only readings happening were theirs while under the guise of routine pulse checks. The actual readings were mine.
I began with the woman at the well, who had been paired with Lin Zhi. The student knelt beside her under the pretense of helping her draw water and held the breath cycle while the woman lifted the bucket. From ten paces I read the woman's signature against the broader Pei field, and the signature was Pei. It was thin in the ways that married-in signatures were always thin, but it was Pei, and it had been Pei for the thirty years she had been in the clan. Her na was Pei i. She was the wife of the second cousin of Pei Tao, born in a neighboring village and married into the clan when she was sixteen, and she was not the soldier I was looking for.
I marked her clear.
Lin Zhi rose from the well and walked toward , and I said quietly, "The first man at the woodpile next."
She turned and went to the woodpile, and I had now read her partner and she had now read her partner, and the readings agreed.
The man at the woodpile on the left was Pei Bao, thirty-eight, one of Pei Tao's nephews by the second household, who had been at the compound for as long as the records went back. His signature was solid Pei. He was not the soldier, and I marked him clear and watched Sun Hai sit beside him on a low stool to examine the pile of kindling for the breath exercise.
The man at the woodpile on the right was Pei Wu, and his signature was off.
I held the read and steadied my breath and ran it again to make sure. The signature was different on three counts. It was thinner than a married-in Pei signature should be, which suggested that the marriage was either recent or had not happened. It carried a base note that was neither the eastern Pei base nor the western Pei base, and it did not match the two married-in lines I had encountered in the courtyard so far. Most importantly, it carried the faint dry coldness that Lin Zhi had described in Sun Hai's signature the day before, the dry-winter-field signature of the n who had been raised in the dry uplands east of the river fork.
The signature was Qinghe.
I held my face still.
I signaled Mu Renshu over to with a small gesture. The boy left his position at the right side of the woodpile and walked across the courtyard toward at the slow even pace of a student returning for instruction.
"Mu Renshu, read the man you just left and tell what you find."
He turned, breathed, held the cycle for two breaths, and then turned back to .
"He is not Pei, Squad Captain. He is not from the families I have read so far this morning."
"Hold that knowledge and continue down the line.”
He returned to his station, and I marked Pei Wu as the first.
I stood at the center of the courtyard and I let the breath settle, and I let the marking sit on without showing it on my face. The man who had been listed as Pei Wu in the household record I had compiled six weeks ago was a Qinghe soldier. He had co into the clan with a forged claim of marriage to a Pei daughter who, if I went back to the rolls, I would find listed in a way that did not allow the marriage to be verified.
This was a mistake of my own making.
I shifted my attention to the south porch where Cao Yan was working with the woman sweeping, who was Pei Hua, married into the clan twelve years ago from a village two days' ride east. Her signature was clean Pei, and I marked her clear.
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The morning work continued in the courtyard.
I moved my position to the cookhouse so that I could read the won working over the stoves, of which there were four. Three of them were Pei by birth. The fourth was a woman of forty who had been listed as a married-in aunt nad Pei Lan, the recent widow of Pei Tao's youngest brother who had died at the fires, and her signature was wrong.
It was off in the sa way Pei Wu's signature had been off, but not identically. The base note was not the dry-winter-field of the Qinghe uplands. It was the heavier wet base of the river plain to the south of Qinghe, which was different territory, but the sa political alignnt.
Pei Lan had been married to Pei Tao's youngest brother for less than a year before he died, which ant that the kinship she had built with the clan had not had ti to develop the resonance that long marriages produced. There was no resonance to read at all. She was a woman in her forties who had walked into the clan with a na and a story and a marriage certificate that no one in the clan had been in a position to challenge during the migration to Hekou.
I called Lin Zhi over to with a small gesture.
"Lin Zhi. Read the woman at the third stove from the left and tell what you find."
She walked across the courtyard, knelt at the bench beside the third stove on the pretext of asking the woman about the herb she was crushing, breathed twice, and returned.
"She is Pei, Squad Captain."
"Good. Now the woman at the fourth stove."
She returned a minute later with a different look on her face, quieter, and she did not speak right away.
"Squad Captain, I don’t think that thje fourth stove woman is a Pei. The signature…it doesn’t match anything I have read in this courtyard so far."
"Good, now read the man bringing in the bundle of kindling at the gate, and then return to ."
"Yes, Squad Captain."
She went to the gate, and the cohort was now reading the sa compound I was reading, and they were independently confirming what I had already marked. The cover was holding. None of the Pei in the courtyard had registered that anything more than ordinary cultivation practice was occurring around them. Pei Wu had not noticed, Pei Lan had not noticed, and the third soldier, when I found him, would not notice either.
I moved to the eastern wall of the courtyard, where the third soldier was harder.
He was sitting at the small table outside the third household, nding a saddle strap with a bone awl. His listed na was Pei Cheng. He was twenty-six, listed as a son of the third household who had returned from the eastern road two months before the fires, and his signature carried more Pei in it than either of the first two soldiers had carried. The kinship resonance was thin but present. He had Pei blood in him sowhere, at least at one or two generations back, which made the read difficult, because the technique was sharpest when the signature was either clearly kin or clearly not kin, and his signature sat in the middle.
I called Bolin over.
"Read the man nding the saddle strap. Tell what you find."
Bolin walked the long way around the courtyard, stopping at the woodpile to make brief small talk with one of the older n so that his approach to the third household did not look like a direct line. He passed within two paces of Pei Cheng's table, paused, exchanged a brief word about the saddle strap, and walked on. He returned to at the eastern wall a minute later.
"He is half-Pei," Bolin said quietly. "He may be a child of a Pei daughter who was sent east and did not co back. The Qinghe half is the dominant signature in his channels. Whatever he was raised as, it was not as a Pei."
"That confirms it," I said, and I marked him as the third.
I held the courtyard for another half-notch.
I read every remaining Pei in the compound, including the children, including the elders who had not yet erged into the courtyard, and Bolin walked the periter to read the ones working in the back fields, and the cohort continued their assigned pairings while I worked. By the ti the first notch of midday approached, I had read every mber of the clan who was on the compound grounds, and I had marked three.
Three was the number I had feared. It was the number that confird that my omissions on the household record had been deliberate enough to matter and limited enough that the village had not yet paid the full cost. Three soldiers, three nas, three families that had been carrying Qinghe loyalty inside the clan walls for the length of ti I had let the records sit unrevised.
I caught Xu Bing's eye from across the courtyard. He had been standing at the gate during the entire visit, far enough from the work that the clan mbers would not have understood his presence as anything other than the normal escort the Squad Captain traveled with.
I walked to him.
"I have three nas," I said to him in a hushed tone. "Pei Wu. Pei Lan. Pei Cheng."
He did not write them down. He repeated them back to once, exactly, and then nodded his head.
"They will be taken tonight," I said. "I will speak to Lieutenant Fei Liao on our return, and the petition to add them to the public sentencing will be on his table by the evening. The taking will happen in the third watch of tonight, after they are asleep.”
"Yes, Squad Captain."
"You will lead one of the teams. Choose the other two leaders yourself, and use n who have done quiet work before."
"Yes, Squad Captain."
He moved to the gate to begin assembling the teams.
I returned to the center of the courtyard. The cohort was still working. Lin Zhi was reading her seventh partner. Sun Hai was reading his fifth. Mu Renshu was reading his fourth, and Cao Yan was reading his fourth as well. They had read most of the courtyard between them. I watched them work for another few breaths.
I called the cohort in.
They stopped, and they sat, and they drank while I went to find Pei Tao.
He was at the back of the compound supervising the repair of a section of wall that had cracked in the winter. I told him that the cohort had completed the work I had needed them to do, that the clan had been generous in allowing it, that the Academy was grateful, and that I would be returning with the cohort to the village within the next quarter notch. He bowed and thanked for honoring the clan with the visit, and he did not know.
I walked back to the cohort.
"It is ti for us to return to the commons.”
The ride back to Hekou was quiet. I let the cohort ride together at the front, with Bolin at the rear, and I rode in the middle, and I let the cold afternoon air sit on my face. The cohort spoke quietly to each other about what they had felt in the courtyard.
They were comparing notes on what the not-Pei signatures had felt like, and they had each correctly identified one of the soldiers I had marked.
I would tell them, eventually, that they had done so, but not today.
Today, they would believe that the exercise had been cultivation practice and that I had collected their readings as part of the assessnt. I needed the cover to hold for the next twelve hours, until Xu Bing's teams had completed the takings. After that, the cohort would learn what they had been part of, and they would learn how I had read the courtyard at distance, and they would learn the technique for themselves.
For the mont, they were students riding ho from a long morning of work, and they were proud of themselves, and they were right to be.
We arrived at the gate at the second notch of the afternoon. I sent the cohort to the eastern dormitory to rest and to eat with Wei Suyin in the company of Wei Bolin, anwhile I walked directly to the garrison building.
Fei Liao was at his table when I ca in. I sat across from him and I told him what I had done, and I gave him the three nas, and I told him about Xu Bing's teams and the timing of the third watch. I asked for the petition to be written and signed.
Fei Liao took up his brush and wrote the petition while I watched. The petition added Pei Wu, Pei Lan, and Pei Cheng to the docket of the public sentencing already scheduled for Pei Yan, on the basis of the cultivation reading I had conducted that morning, with Wei Bolin as second cultivator providing independent verification, and with the additional charges to be determined under interrogation following the takings. He signed it, sealed it with the lieutenant's seal, and pushed it across the table to .
"You will hold the public sentencing on the morning. The Commander will be inford by the next courier."
I bowed my head. "Yes, Lieutenant."
"Squad Captain,” Fei Liao gave a once over.
"You did a soldier’s work today. I wanted you to know that the Commander will see it as well.
Pride swelled in my chest as I inclined my head to him once more. "I am grateful, Lieutenant.”
The third watch ca, and I did not sleep through it. I sat at the curriculum room with the lamp burning low and I waited. Suyin slept in the back room of the clinic, the cohort slept in the eastern dormitory, and the compound was as quiet as it ever was at that hour, with only the faint sound of the river and the occasional creak of the wind in the timbers of the older buildings.
Xu Bing's first runner ca back at the middle of the third watch.
"Pei Wu has been taken, Squad Captain. He was asleep on the south side of the second household, and he is now in the garrison cell."
A quarter notch later, the second runner ca.
"Pei Lan has been taken, Squad Captain. She woke when the team entered, but she did not cry out. She is in the garrison cell."
A quarter notch after that, the third runner ca.
"Pei Cheng has been taken, Squad Captain. He fought, and the team subdued him. He is in the garrison cell with a broken nose."
I nodded.
"Tell Xu Bing that I will speak to all three at the first notch tomorrow, and tell him that the public sentencing is in the morning, with Pei Yan to be sentenced alongside them. The clan will be inford at the second notch."
"Yes, Squad Captain."
The runner went, and I closed the lamp.
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