“Oh, sad. I guess it’ll be good news for him that Laike’s not afraid of ghosts. I don’t think Laike’s afraid of anything.” Chongwei elbowed her pale-haired sister. “Have you ever seen Lai scared? I mean, if someone surprises him he will straight up murder them but that’s not really fear so much as it’s instinct.”

Jiewei was quiet, poking at the soupy remains of her decimated tsua-bing. “Sometimes when Xueyu leaves I think he looks scared.”

“Who wins the second and third match?” Suddenly, the Tian girl leaned back in her seat and peered out the little courtyard’s entryway, spying Master Xueyu and his lanky disciple through the space between marketplace bodies.

The older of the Wei sisters followed the princess’ eyes, looking for the Tian boy that was supposed to be accompanying the swordmaster.

“I don’t see your older brother anywhere. I hope he didn’t die?” The words were meant as mostly idle observation—there were more important matters to settle before the three girls’ paths reconvened with their austere teacher and his favorite student. Chongwei turned back to Miyan.

“Anyway. Have him get beat by Meilin. Don’t you think Meilin is a good candidate, Jiewei? ‘Cause he’s not all that good and then after Master Xue gets smacked by Lai, the best, he can feel real bad about himself.”

“Meilin straight sucks, he should totally be second,” Jiewei confirmed, observing the princess with interest. There was so much setup—she wondered how elaborate these setups got, whether she was always building little traps to alter the world for her own entertainment. “And then Chongwei.”

“Fourth and fifth? Or do you want those random, cause they’ll probably come later.” Slowly, slowly, Miyan’s bowl of tsua-bing was inching toward the edge of the table as she continued to track the swordmaster’s advance through the crowd.

“Random is good,” Chongwei confirmed. “Honestly, except for Lai, Master Xue can whip any of his students. Lai’s the only one to ever really best him, and like Jiewei said earlier, he’s gotten smart and doesn’t let him fight near shadows so much anymore because he knows Lai will use them to his advantage.”

The girl turned back down to her own bowl, picking out the remnants that she wanted before the time to go came. The laugh that escaped her was bubbly and sweet, a mirror of her visage rather than her mind full of elaborate grifts. “Gods, this is going to be so good. We’re going to get so many good things now that we know the odds ahead of us.”

As the shopkeeper passed, Miyan looked toward the Weis with a grin. A dramatic sweep of her arm knocked the tsua-bing off the table and onto the ground in a monsoon splash of icy slush, jelly, and fruit cubes. When the dessert hit the ground, the princess stood suddenly, knocking her stool clattering back toward a sleeping dog, now startled awake by the noise. With her eyes wide, her hands coming to cover her shocked mouth, ready to catch her stream of feigned apologies, Miyan tried to clean up with the shopkeeper but the stout grandmotherly figure waved that sweet girl away, insisting on cleaning up the accident alone. As the woman rushed away to fetch a broom, she bumped gently into Xue as he walked in the gate.

The dog ambled over and started eating the ground-jelly. The crow flit to a lower branch before it descended on the mess, trying to snag another piece of taro root—at least until the dog growled, scaring the bird away.

Chongwei looked up with a marked interest at all the commotion, dark eyes following the connections of catastrophe as they branched off and off, weaving happenstance into the fabric of reality. She couldn’t quite tell where deliberate action unspooled into the incidental consequence of what came immediately before but the whole process was fascinating to her.

The master of swords meanwhile caught the old woman and set her straight on her path before approaching the girls.

“Are you girls okay?” He shooed the snarling dog with a few firm stomps of his dusty boot. The creature fit as much of the spilled treat into its mouth as it could before scampering off, fluffy tail tucked down between its strangely bowed back legs.

“No Master Xueyu! I’m not okay!” Miyan whined as she pressed her hands to her cheeks. “I got startled and caused so much trouble for this poor shopkeeper—I’m so clumsy, aah—” The girl hung her head in sorrow.

Laike observed silently, mouth full of pork bun from the sack of food and candy slung over his shoulder. He was still distracted from the scolding he’d gotten, lost in questions of what was and was not, whether Yuhui actually liked him or if he was just some sort of human game to the prince he could still feel in his arms, on his lips.

“I’m sure she doesn’t mind, Lady Miyan,” Xueyu replied, voice softened by the comfort he tried his best to give the young girl. “She’s likely experienced much worse than some spilled ice and sweets.”

As their master bent forward to examine the mess, Chongwei jumped up and put herself in Laike’s face, expression as bright as the pieces of mango lounging in the sun a few feet away from where they gathered. “HEY LAI! What’re you eating? What’d you get today? I want to see all the things.”

“YEAH gimme your bag!” Jiewei chimed in, snatching the bag of food stuffs from Laike’s hands.

“Stop it,” the boy replied quiet, flat, pulling away from the pair of girls suddenly harassing him. He handed his bun over to Chongwei like surrender, head bowed. He didn’t want to discuss why he didn’t feel like eating anymore.

The older of the Wei sisters may have taken the offered bun but it didn’t feel like there was any victory in the boy’s relinquishment. She ripped the remnant in twain, giving half to her sibling.

“Aw. Give it back, Jiewei. He doesn’t want to play.” The brunette turned back to the shadowstalker. “Are you okay, Lai? I thought you were looking forward to this.”

The girl moved back a few steps, but spoke low, serious, communication shared between them. “Did something happen?”

Rolling her eyes, the blonde girl held Laike’s bag straight out for him to take from her clenched fist. “Fiiiiiine. Fine.”

“Nothing happened,” Laike insisted softly, hazel eyes downcast as he took the bag of treats back. He pressed his mouth into a straight line like there was evidence there, like he could bite the memory of Yuhui off his lips. “Nothing important happened.” Doing his best to allay Chongwei’s sudden suspicion, the shadowstalker forced a weak grin onto his face; he leaned into the table to watch Xueyu’s interactions with the princess.

Miyan’s teacup sculpture wobbled with Laike’s disturbance, submitting to gravity in quick order as it scattered across the tabletop in a shattering hail of ceramic and chopsticks. Laike hung his head at the sound of teacups rolling off the table, wincing when he heard them break upon the ground.

“Oh noooo—” Miyan whined like she hadn’t intended for that to happen. “The teacups!”

Xueyu looked up from the girl and over to the darkened visage of his student, a mix of disbelief and disappointment returning in the passing shadow of his flat expression. Even here, away from the strange ambiance of the Tian’s middle child, everything was going wrong. Perhaps the day just wasn’t meant to be—perhaps that was the most disappointing part of it all.

The older man turned and pulled the shopkeeper aside, conversing with the old woman privately regarding the matter of the rippling calamities he saw only as isolated incidents, the mess of food, the fresh sprinkling of broken porcelain.

Chongwei, however, was not dumb. After all the girls stressed about how much the boy enjoyed food, after the expectation that he would be at least ten pounds heavier now that he’d been given full run of the market and Xueyu’s earnings, he still looked down, which meant something was wrong—which meant something happened.

“I’m not an idiot, Lai,” Chongwei scolded, “But if you don’t want to talk about it right now, then fine, just say so, jeez. I’ll let it go ’till we get home, that’s fine.”

“Thanks,” Laike grumbled as he pushed away from the table, frustrated that everything he did today was wrong. “I’m gonna wait outside so I don’t fuck up anything else.”

Jiewei looked to her sister as Laike slunk defeated toward the shop’s gate, unsure of what to do with their big brother acting so out of sorts. The dark haired girl looked back, a world of sedition lurking in the depths of her dark, gentle eyes.

“It’s okay, it’s okay—” Miyan interrupted Xueyu’s conversation with the shopkeeper with a pair of gold coins, far more than the teacups and the desserts and the mess could possibly have been worth. “This makes it better, right?”

Politely bowing to the small princess and the swordsmaster who stood tall beside her, the shopkeeper accepted the offered payment with enthusiasm. The sum was not only handsome recompense for the damage done, but it was the Tian Princess herself that was giving it, she couldn’t have refused even if she wanted to.

Xueyu turned back to the Wei sisters.

“Alright Princess, girls—we should get you all back home. Priestess Jiling is waiting for us and we still have a long trip back to the mountain.”

“Yes Shifu!” Jiewei replied enthusiastically as she linked arms with the princess already flitting toward the gate. After their little deal with Tian Miyan, the younger of the Weis was eager to get back to the mountain—but she was also eager to do a little shopping on their way back to complete the terms of their agreement.

For a girl so focused on causing mischief and mayhem, Chongwei was strangely unenthused about the rest of their shopping trip. She let her sister and their new friend skip ahead, choosing instead to walk alongside her sullen brother. She didn’t press him for information, though; didn’t pester or poke or prod or bother him like she would have any other day. This was big and it required effort to dig down deep. Chongwei would have to be careful with the boy, patient and thorough.

She was quiet at his side. They were not family by blood or genetics—they were family by heart and mind, siblings chosen by fortune and fate and their own discretion, by paths of time too convoluted to unravel and trace to their possible ends. Laike was always there for her and her sister, so she made a silent vow to herself that she’d now return the favor: she would root out the core issue of his dark discontent.