Please Stop Spreading Rumors About Me — They Keep Coming True

I decided to walk into the Crossed’s camp with no sword, no shield, and no plan, which by now you’ll recognize as roughly my entire method for everything.

Everyone told me not to.

That’s fair; it was a stupid idea.

Bai Qing pointed out, correctly, that a hundred people with blades who believe your gentleness is getting their families killed are not a crowd you want to be unarmed in the middle of.

Xue Ningzhi pointed out, more coldly, that if the strongest being alive walks into an armed camp and one nervous boy puts a knife in him, the belief-stream does interesting things, and none of them are good.

Yun Shu didn’t tell me not to go.

My partner has never wasted her breath telling me not to do the thing I’ve already decided to do.

She just said, ”Take Tao Tao. He won’t lift a hand while she’s standing there. And you’re not going to be able to say the thing that needs saying. She might.”

So it was the two of us who walked up the road to the Crossed, unarmed, in the open, in the middle of the afternoon so nobody could pretend it was an ambush.

The most powerful being that has ever lived and a girl who founds gentle movements, walking into a camp of people who’d decided we were the reason their children were dying, carrying nothing.

I want to tell you what the camp was like, because it matters, and because the easy version of this story — the one where the sword-people are villains — is a lie, and I’ve promised you I won’t tell you those.

They were not monsters.

That’s the whole thing.

They were the most ordinary people in the world.

There was a woman mending a coat.

There were two men arguing about firewood.

There was somebody’s grandmother stirring a pot, and the smell of it was the smell of every camp I’ve ever been in, ours included.

These were not cruel people who had chosen cruelty.

These were grieving people who had gotten tired of losing, and had picked up the only thing anybody had ever offered them that made the losing stop, and I understood, walking through them, that if my own town had burned and my own people had died forty feet from a strong man who wouldn’t move, I might be mending a coat in this exact camp.

That’s the part nobody tells you about the people on the other side of the line.

They are not the other kind of person.

They’re you, standing where the ground broke differently.

— • —

Ma Jun came out to meet us.

Fifteen.

I have to keep saying it because I kept forgetting it, looking at him.

He carried himself like a man of fifty who has buried everyone he loves, which, near enough, he had.

There was a terrible steadiness in him — not rage, I could have talked to rage.

Grief that has gone all the way cold and turned into purpose, which is the hardest thing in the world to reach, because it doesn’t want to be comforted.

It’s already made its peace.

That’s what’s so frightening about it.

He was gentle with us.

That was the worst part, exactly as it had been the worst part when he was gentle with Tao Tao in Chapter — well.

When he broke her heart the first time.

”Sister Tao,” he said, and bowed to her, properly, the way she’d taught him.

”Teacher.”

That one was to me, and it went into me like a blade, because I was his teacher, or one of them, and he’d learned the doorkeeper’s art from us and then unlearned it, and here he was calling me teacher with a sword on his hip that we’d sworn the art would never carry again.

”You shouldn’t have come. But I’m glad you’re safe. Will you eat?”

And we sat down in the camp of the people who thought we were killing their children, and they fed us, because they were decent people, and that is the true horror of this entire war and I need you to sit in it with me the way I had to.

I didn’t try to win.

I want that on the record, because it was the single hardest thing I did that whole terrible day, harder than the gate at Cairnhold.

Every part of me wanted to argue him back to us — I had speeches, I always have speeches — and I understood, sitting there, that a speech was exactly the wrong weapon, that this boy had heard every beautiful thing anyone could say about mercy while he watched a man die on a bridge, and that one more beautiful thing from the strongest being alive would only prove the woman’s point: it’s easy to be gentle when nothing can touch you.

So I didn’t tell him he was wrong.

Because — and this is the thing I could not get around, the thing I still can’t — he wasn’t, entirely.

The blade works.

The towns he guarded didn’t burn.