Emmy was sure what to make of Lord Ye. She'd never been this close to him before. He rarely made public appearances except when he was leading the Crimson Army to and from the Camelia. And frankly, Emmy and Patrick were too low-level to ever be in the same room as him unless they'd done something very, very wrong or very, very right.
Since that kind of attention was a double-edged sword, they both avoided it.
He wasn't as…impressive as she'd been expecting? Stoic or hard or angry. All the things someone being poisoned for years probably should have been.
Not that she was supposed to know about that part, but she had ears, and they were all in close quarters given the safety concerns of this trip, so she'd picked up all kinds of interesting tidbits.
Lady Ye was having weird dreams.
Finn had no concept of status and kept acting like she was more family than boss.
Lord Ye was clearly…putting off making some important decisions. Unsure what he was supposed to be focused on, given the drastic change in his circumstances.
Lord Rong was avoiding anything and everything that had the slightest connection to additional responsibility. He was clearly still annoyed he'd been left in charge by the long nap Lord and Lady Ye had taken.
Lord Ye was the son of a commoner born in Tira-Lian, and something of his mother's had been killing him.
His mistress was pretty fucking bold, given how she acted in front of Lady Ye.
Lady Ye didn't care about Lord Ye's mistress at all. Or she's a master at psychological manipulation and just pretending.
Lord Yin and Lady Yang are planning something. Probably Lord Zhao, too, but he's clearly distracted by his little crush on Lady Ye.
Lord Rong's female spy is in love with him, and he has no clue. That one's actually pretty funny when she thinks about it, because he's supposed to be so smart.
His other spy is…Emmy is ninety percent certain he wasn't born in the Land of Sorrow, but she has no idea why she thinks that. Nothing about him gives anything away about who he is or where he's from, but whenever she looks at himself something just feels…off. Emmy has good instincts, she honed them well when she and Patrick were young and starving on the streets, just trying to make it until they were old enough to join the Crimson Army. Emmy could tell whether or not someone was trustworthy from ten paces, but she'd never encountered someone like the man who wore the fox mask.
It wasn't that he felt untrustworthy, because oddly enough he kind of did. It was more he didn't feel…right. Like there was something wrong, but she couldn't figure out how to put it in words, so she just hadn't said anything.
Patrick idolized Lord Rong and his agents and still had dreams of joining their ranks even though Emmy kept warning him that he didn't have the right personality for it. Her baby brother was too bright and too boisterous and too enthusiastic to be bound to the shadows.
He also couldn't keep a secret to save his life.
He and Finn were off to the side throwing out increasingly ridiculous theories about what could be written on the clay tablets.
It was probably just someone's grocery list. An inventory of the cellar.
"What if its spells?" Patrick waved his arms, pretending to be a wizard weaving magic. "Like secret spells that no one's supposed to know about, but the Song Family kept them hidden for years and that's why their ghosts are so strong?"
Finn was nodding along, buying into everything because the youngest Vermeer had clearly been to sheltered his entire life. Emmy was halfway convinced he'd hand over a pouch of gold to a stranger just because they asked.
At least Fox, who was crouched nearby, was shaking his head. She couldn't see his face, but his relaxed posture seemed to signify more amusement than anything else.
Another strange thing about him.
The shifting of dirt and grunts had all of them turning to the entrance to the cellar.
"Eirian?" Chenzhou and Finn both scrambled over.
A hand emerged holding a clay tablet and Eirian's voice, distant and small due to the tunnel. "Take this."
Chenzhou looked a little bewildered as he did and then her hand came back with another tablet.
She handed up twenty before she and Li climbed out of the cellar themselves as the sun was just beginning to set.
After confirming the two of them were fine, Chenzhou began to examine one of the tablets.
Emmy picked one up herself and turned it over in her hands. It was a simple tablet, the size of a book really, but half as thin. Someone had painstakingly smoothed the clay flat before carving neat lines of characters across it. They'd clearly been done when the clay was still somewhat wet, because they the sides were sharp and clean and there were no cracks in the clay.
Emmy couldn't write, but she could read somewhat. At least Sorrian, and she could recognize some of the more common symbols the tribe's used, but her parents had died too young to teach her and Patrick could never sit still long enough to learn. Without any desire to advance in the ranks of the Crimson Army, there was no reason for her learn either.
She picked out Yang and Yin halfway down, followed by something she thinks are numbers.
"They're birth records." Eirian explains to Chenzhou. "As far as we can tell anyway. The languages change and I don't know them except Sorrian. I recognized some of the names from the families at Court. And-" She shifted through the stack of tablets to find the one she was looking for and handed it to Chenzhou triumphantly. "This one says Ye."
"Oh." Chenzhou took the tablet automatically, staring down at it with something like awe on his face.
~ tbc