Jade War

The woman hesitated, biting her lip and looking at Wen with a sort of cornered gratitude. Then she nodded, turned away, and left. Mila was not very knowledgeable about the Mountain’s business and did not always know what to look for, copying whatever she saw lying around when the opportunity arose. Some of what she gave to Wen was useful, much of it was not, but she was motivated. Wen was cautiously optimistic this time; the detailed meeting schedule of Ayt Mada’s new Weather Man would shed light on the Mountain’s business priorities and biggest constituents.

Wen sipped her spiced tea and rubbed her swollen feet. Over the past year, she and Kaul Shae had found and cultivated a handful of informers. It was as Hilo had said to Kehn and Tar at the dinner table: No Peak needed rats everywhere, not only on the street, and not only on the Horn’s side. The women’s bathhouse was perhaps the most invisible place in the city for Wen to meet spies; she rarely saw Green Bones here, and those she did see—stressed young women needing a break from keeping up with their male peers—had their facials or massages and left without lingering in the teahouse. The owners were well aware that they were located on a territorial border and had absolutely nothing to gain from betraying either clan and risking their advantageous status as a business of no disputable importance. And while the Weather Man of No Peak could not spend a suspiciously large number of hours receiving spa services, no one batted an eye at the indulgences of the Pillar’s wife.

Wen had considered telling Hilo what she was doing. Perhaps it would prove to him that she was serious and capable of being fully involved in the clan’s matters, and even if he did not approve on principle, he would have to see the enormous usefulness of her actions and come over to her thinking. Hilo was accepting of people as they were; he had never once made her feel shame for her parents’ well-known disgrace across both major clans, her rumored illegitimacy, or her condition as a stone-eye. For that, she loved him ferociously. She hated to keep secrets from him. But for Kaul Hilo, there was a stark division in the world that determined a person’s duties and destiny—a line drawn with jade.

When she became pregnant, Wen reluctantly came to the conclusion that her husband would not condone even the minimal risk she was taking by meeting informers in the Celestial Radiance. In addition, being honest with Hilo would mean exposing Shae’s orchestration, and the Weather Man was entitled to the secrecy of her methods and sources of information. As long as Hilo thought his wife’s bathhouse visits were simply innocuous pampering and good for her health and that of the baby, he would see no reason to prevent them. The potential value of what she and Shae might learn about the clan’s enemies was more important than Wen’s peace of mind, and the relationship between the Pillar and the Weather Man could not be risked. The family’s survival depended on it. The Pillar was the master of the clan, the spine of the body, but a spine that was not well supported would sag and break. Wen’s late brother-in-law, Kaul Lan, had been a good Pillar, but dragged down by a senile grandfather, a treacherous Weather Man, and a faithless wife. He’d tried too hard to carry the clan on his own, hadn’t claimed help when he should have, had kept his sister and his cousin out of the clan at the time he needed them the most. He’d made every effort to be strong, and it had made him weak. Wen would not let that happen to her own husband.

She relaxed on the cushions and read a book for fifteen minutes until she saw her second informer pad into the teahouse in slippers, smelling of bath salts. A woman in her late fifties, Mrs. Lonto was a hairdresser who had owned and run her salon in the wealthy, Mountain-controlled district of High Ground for thirty years. Over the decades, she’d heard all manner of stories, rumors, and gossip circulate among her clientele, which consisted primarily of the wives, mothers, and other female relatives of the Mountain’s highest-rank Fists, Luckbringers, and Lantern Men. Not only were Mrs. Lonto’s clients keenly, jealously aware of the social standing, fortunes, and alliances of the various powerful families in the Mountain, more than a few of them whispered harshly about Ayt Mada, the one woman who controlled the lives of their men more than they did.