Chapter 41: Wet Sheets

I put my clothes on.

Mostly. My robe went on inside out again. One sandal. I didn’t care. I ran back to Seo-rin’s room, slid the door open, and both women sat up in her bed so fast they cracked heads.

"Fire," I said. "Dawn. The washing quarter. Elder Gu. The Boar’s men."

Four words in, Ayla was already reaching for her sword.

Seo-rin didn’t reach for anything. She just sat there in the dark with the blanket around her shoulders, hair everywhere, a gold anklet that wasn’t hers on her foot, and I could see her face doing math.

"How many?" she said.

"I don’t know. The Boar’s men. Oil. Torches."

"Wind?"

"What?"

"Which way is the wind blowing, Mu-jin?"

I didn’t know. Ayla went to the window. Licked her finger. Stuck it out.

"From the river," she said. "Toward the canal."

Seo-rin closed her eyes. "Then if the first house goes, the wind carries it down the row. Forty houses. Wooden. Old. Full of dry laundry." She opened her eyes. "The whole quarter burns in a quarter hour."

Nobody said anything.

Then Seo-rin threw off the blanket and grabbed her abacus.

"Ayla. Wake the academy girls on this floor. All of them. Tell them to bring buckets." She was pulling her robe on as she talked. "Mu-jin. The laundry women. You know their tap."

"Tap. Pause. Tap tap."

"Run."

I ran.

Through the dark dock district. Past the noodle stall. Past the Black Boar gambling house, all its lamps still lit, men laughing inside. Down to the east canal, where the washing quarter sits along the water — rows and rows of little wooden houses crammed together, with bamboo poles sticking out of every window and lines of laundry strung across the alleys between them like spider webs.

Everything was dark. Everyone was asleep.

I found the first door. Knocked.

Tap. Pause. Tap tap.

Nothing.

Tap. Pause. Tap tap.

The door opened a crack. An eye. Old. Wrinkled. Furious at being woken up.

Then it saw me. And it went wide.

"Baek boy," hissed the old woman with three missing teeth. "What—"

"Fire," I said. "Dawn. Elder Gu. He’s paying the Boar to burn you out."

She stared at me.

Then she turned around and screamed into the dark house behind her in a voice that could have woken the dead in three provinces.

"GET UP! ALL OF YOU! THE OLD GOAT’S COMING TO BURN US!"

And the washing quarter woke up.

Not slowly. All at once. Like a kicked hive. Doors banging open up and down the row. Lamps lit. Women pouring out into the alleys in their sleeping clothes, hair wraps half on, babies on hips, old ones and young ones and fat ones and skinny ones, all of them shouting at each other.

And in the middle of them, in a patched apron with a gray head-wrap, holding a wooden laundry paddle like a sword, was Seol.

She saw me.

She didn’t ask what was happening. She’d already heard. She just looked at me with those wild eyes.

"He’s coming for them because of me," she said.

"He’s coming for them because he’s a bastard."

She laughed. Shaky. Then she turned around and started shouting orders like she’d been running a household for twenty-one years.

Which she had.

"Wet everything! Every sheet! Every blanket! Dunk them in the canal and hang them back up! A wet sheet doesn’t burn! Buckets in a line from the water! Children to the bridge! MOVE!"

The laundry women moved.

By the time the sky turned gray, the washing quarter looked like a ship in a storm.

Every line in every alley was hung with dripping sheets. Every roof had a wet blanket thrown over it. Two long lines of women stretched from the canal steps up into the alleys, passing buckets hand to hand. Ayla showed up with nine academy girls in sleeping robes and their own buckets. Seo-rin was standing on an upturned washtub at the main crossing with her abacus, shouting numbers: "Third row needs more! Fourth row is soaked enough! Move six women to the north end!"

Tae-man showed up halfway through, panting, with a whole noodle cart full of water jars. He’d stolen the cart. He didn’t care.

And then, at the north end of the quarter, where the alley opens onto the dock road, the torches came.

Ten of them. Maybe twelve. Bobbing through the dawn mist. Men in sleeveless shirts with boar tattoos. Carrying clay jars that sloshed.

Oil.

And at the front, with a bandaged hand and a club — a new one — Boar Neck.

He stopped when he saw us.

I don’t think he expected a hundred laundry women. Wet. Angry. Holding buckets and wooden paddles and rolled-up wet sheets. Lined up across the end of the alley like an army.

I don’t think he expected me, standing in the front row in an inside-out robe and one sandal.

He stared at me.

"You," he said.

"Me."

"The Boar said if I saw your face at the docks again—"

"This isn’t the docks," I said. "It’s the washing quarter. Totally different neighborhood."

One of the laundry women snorted.

Boar Neck’s face went red.

He lifted his torch.

"Burn it," he said.

I’m not a hero. I keep telling you that.

I didn’t win that fight. The laundry women did.

The first thug who ran forward with his oil jar got hit in the face with a soaking wet sheet thrown by a woman built like a blacksmith. It wrapped around his head. He dropped the jar. It smashed on the wet stones. The oil just sat there in a puddle of canal water and didn’t do anything.

The second one swung his torch at a laundry line. The wet sheet hissed. Steam came off it. The torch went out.

He stared at it.

The young woman with the baby on her back hit him in the knees with a laundry paddle. He went down.

Ayla came through the middle of it like a sandstorm. Not even drawing her sword. Just using the flat of the sheath. Crack. Crack. Crack. Every thug who got near her ended up in the canal.

And then Boar Neck came for me.

Of course he did.

He came straight down the alley with his club up, right at me, in the exact same way he swung at me in that fish-gut alley three weeks ago. Shoulder dropping first.

Tap tap, I thought.

Falling Pine.

Slip left.

Weight forward. Hips first. Captain Jin’s hands on my hips at dawn.

I slipped left.

My whole body went with it. Smooth. Clean. The club whooshed past my ear and hit nothing, and Boar Neck’s own momentum carried him forward one step too far—

Right into Seol.

Who hit him across the back of the head with a laundry paddle so hard it cracked in half.

He went down face first into a puddle of canal water and lamp oil and didn’t get up.

Seol stood over him with half a paddle in her hand. Breathing hard. Head-wrap knocked sideways. Eyes blazing.

"Twenty-one years," she said to nobody. "I always wanted to hit SOMEONE from that house."

The laundry women cheered.

The rest of the Boar’s men ran.

One house caught. Just one. At the very north end. A thug threw his torch onto a roof before Ayla knocked him into the canal, and a corner of the old dry thatch went up before the bucket line could reach it.

We got it out. It took twenty women and a lot of screaming. Half the roof was gone. The family who lived there was standing in the alley crying.

But the other thirty-nine houses were fine.

I was sitting on the canal steps afterward, soaking wet, covered in soot, my one sandal gone now too. Watching the sun come up gold through the smoke.

Someone sat down next to me.

Gray armor. No — not armor. Just her dark red uniform. Sleeves rolled up. Soot on her face. Wet to the knees.

Captain Jin Ha-seul.

"You came," I said.

"A steward," she said, "is allowed to take a walk."

"At dawn. In the washing quarter. Carrying a bucket."

"It’s a free city."

I looked at her. She had a burn on the back of her hand. Fresh. Red.

"That’s not from walking."

She looked down at her hand. Like she hadn’t noticed.

"The house at the north end," she said quietly. "There was a little boy still inside. Asleep under a basket. Nobody counted him." She flexed her fingers. "I counted him."

I didn’t know what to say.

So I took her hand. The burned one. Turned it over. Looked at the burn.

She didn’t pull away.

"Yeon-hee has a balm for this," I said. "Mint and ginger. It stings."

"Everything stings."

She was looking at me.

I looked back.

And for the first time since she’d walked into the courtyard of the Blue Willow Inn with her scroll and her soldiers, her face wasn’t a wall. It was just a face. A tired, sooty, thirty-five-year-old face that had just pulled a little boy out of a burning house and disobeyed a direct order to do it.

[Desire +25.]

"I disobeyed him," she said. "Elder Gu. I left my post. If he finds out—"

"He won’t."

"He will." She laughed. It was the first time I’d heard her laugh. Rough. Rusty. Like a door nobody had opened in a long time. "I’ve been a soldier for ten years, Baek Mu-jin. I’ve never disobeyed an order. Not once. Not even when my husband was giving them."

"How does it feel?"

She thought about it.

"Like taking off armor," she said.

Then she kissed me.

Not gentle. Not careful. A soldier’s kiss. Straight in, no warning, her sooty hand gripping the back of my neck so hard it hurt. She kissed me like she was storming a gate. Like she’d been planning this attack since the hot spring and had finally decided to commit.

She pushed me back against the stone canal steps. Water lapping at our feet. Laundry women everywhere. I could hear them. Somebody whistled. Somebody laughed.

She didn’t stop.

Her hands were rough. Calloused from sword grips. They slid inside my wet robe and pressed flat against my ribs, right on the bruises, and I hissed, and she bit my lip, and pulled back an inch and looked at me with her short hair dripping and her eyes completely, totally on fire.

"Fence post," she breathed. "He said I was a fence post."

"He was an idiot."

"Say it again."

"He was an idiot."

She kissed me again, harder. Her knee pushed between mine. Her whole armored, scarred, soldier’s body pressing down on me on the wet stone steps while the sun came up gold through the smoke and the laundry women cheered and the old one with three missing teeth shouted "GET A ROOM, CAPTAIN!"

[Target: Jin Ha-seul.]

[Desire +20.]

[Harmony formation: locked. 16 days remaining.]

Of course.

She pulled back again, panting. Her lips were swollen. There was soot on her teeth.

"Not here," she said. "Not like this. Not with—"

"Captain Jin."

The voice came from the top of the canal steps.

Calm. Cold. Perfectly even.

We both froze.

I looked up.

Standing at the top of the steps, with six Gu Clan guards behind him and the gold sunrise behind his back, leaning very slightly on a black walking stick with his left hand, was a tall, thin, gray-bearded man in an elegant robe.

Elder Gu Seung-hwan.

He looked at the half-burned house. At the wet sheets. At the hundred laundry women, who had all gone dead silent. At Boar Neck, still face down in the canal water.

At the woman in the laundry apron with half a broken paddle in her hand, standing very still at the edge of the crowd, with her head-wrap knocked sideways and her face showing.

His eyes stayed on Seol for a long moment.

Then they moved down the steps.

To his steward. On top of the boy he was going to kill in twenty days. With her hand inside his robe.

"Captain Jin," said Elder Gu softly. "I believe I ordered you to remain at the inn."