He reached Magol just before dusk: a road town, large enough for two inns and
a constabulary post, small enough that strangers were noticed if they stayed long.
The instinct was to avoid the constabulary post. The counter instinct was that
avoiding it was itself behavior and behavior was information, and that the Crooked
Pine fire was unlikely, six days out in rural administration time, to have generated
descriptions and formal watch lists. The inn would be known as a fire, possibly as a
crime, but Wol ha was known to perhaps ten people within any reasonable radius, and
most of those were dead.
He chose the cheaper inn, paid three coppers for a sleeping mat in the common
room, and spent the evening listening.
This was the most valuable skill he'd discovered since waking in the hay loft:
listening to people in inns. Wol ha had spent nine years as a background element in a
public house, and the training was deep in the body a passivity of expression, a slight
dimming of presence, that allowed conversation to continue around you as though you
were furniture. He settled into it like a familiar garment.
He heard about the fire: it had reached Magol ahead of him, the way news
traveled faster than walking. "The Crooked Pine burned, did you hear? The whole
thing. No survivors they think, or maybe one servant escaped, the patrol wasn't
certain." He kept his eyes on the wall in front of him and his face neutral.
He heard about the road east: clear, a peddler reporting, no unusual blockages
or patrols.
He heard about a tournament in Yeongsa, late in the autumn a sect
competition, apparently regular, drawing cultivators from across the province and
traders who followed the cultivators. The city would be full.
And at the end of the evening, almost incidentally: a large merchant wagon was
leaving for Yeongsa in the morning, and the merchant wanted someone to walk the
cargo.
He found the merchant before the man turned in.
Cheol was middle aged and had a face that suggested granite had undergone a
long process of becoming friendly not yet complete, but genuinely underway. He
looked Jaehyun over with the pragmatic assessment of someone hiring for physical
work, determined that Jae hyun was too thin to be useful as muscle but might function
as a second set of eyes on the road, and offered board and half a copper per day.
Jaehyun accepted.
He slept that night on straw that smelled of other people and livestock, and
despite everything or perhaps because of it, because the body had accumulated four
days of sustained demand and had finally been given food, shelter, and the specific
relief of not being alone in the dark he slept deeply.
The body made these decisions, he was learning, fairly autonomously.
In the morning, he helped load the wagon.