The crowd in the doorways scattered like a flock of pigeons. People who had already been hiding dove deeper into their hiding places. A fruit cart tipped over. The two women on the nearest balcony shrieked and vanished behind their red railing in a flutter of gauze.
"Get," said Nalan Meng, "on the horse."
From somewhere behind a stack of baskets, a woman's voice whispered, far too loudly: "Aiya, mother of heaven, the county master's going to carry out the family law again!"
"Again?"
"You didn't see last time? She hung the King of Soft Rice from the big locust tree in front of the mansion and smoked him like a ham. A whole day and a whole night! You could hear him crying from three streets away!"
"Hiss—" A man sucked in his breath through his teeth. "That's cruel. Ah, suddenly I almost feel sorry for him."
"Almost."
Liu Mang closed his eyes for a second.
Smoked. Like a ham.
Beneath the weight of that stare, under the arrogance of that crack, there was nothing left in him that wanted to argue. Li Yuguo's body certainly didn't. His legs were already moving—meek, obedient, practiced—carrying him past her, across the cracked paving to the blood-bay's side. Nalan Meng swung up into the saddle ahead of him in one smooth motion. The horse sidestepped, rolled its eye at him, and blew contemptuously through its nose.
Liu Mang had never been on a horse in his life.
He got his foot in the stirrup on the second try, grabbed a handful of the saddle's rear rim, hauled, flailed, and landed behind her with a graceless thump that made the horse grunt. His thighs settled on either side of the beast's broad back. His chest was a hand's breadth from her spine.
"Hold on," she said, without turning her head. "If you fall off, I'm not stopping."
He put his hands on her waist.
The horse leapt forward.
There was no warning, no walk, no trot—only a lunge of muscle beneath him and then the iron hooves were bursting against the stone, a drumroll so fast and hard he felt it in his teeth. The avenue blurred. The wind hit him head-on, hot and dry and smelling of dust and baked stone, tearing at his topknot, flattening his robe against his chest. He clung on with his knees and his hands and his whole terrified soul, and for the first hundred paces he thought of nothing but not dying.
Then the wind brought him her scent.
It came off her hair, off the back of her neck, off the warm bare skin of her shoulders, carried straight back into his face by their speed. It was a clean, sweet smell, like roses after rain—no, deeper than that, warmer, with something honeyed underneath it, like sweet-scented osmanthus blooming on an autumn night. Under the flowers was the smell of her: warm skin, a faint salt of sweat from the ride, the leather of her belt and the oil on her sword.
He breathed it in. He couldn't help it. He breathed it in like a drowning man breathing air.
I've never—
It was true. In twenty-eight years, Liu Mang had never been this close to a woman. Not like this. He had brushed shoulders with girls on the subway. He had once been handed change by a pretty cashier and thought about her hand for a week. That was the sum total of it. He had never held a girl around the waist. He had never had a woman's hair whip across his face. He had never sat with his thighs spread around a woman's hips, close enough to feel the heat of her body radiating back into his.
Her waist was under his palms. Narrow. Firm. Through the thin crimson silk he could feel the hard bands of muscle along her sides flexing as she moved with the horse, rising and settling, rising and settling, her body flowing with the beast's gait as if they were one creature. Long years of training had made every proportion of her perfect. There was not a single ounce of softness on her that did not belong there, and the parts that were soft—
He was not going to think about the parts that were soft.
The horse's stride lengthened. Her hips rocked back with it.
And her ass slid back into his lap.
It was the gait. That was all it was. A galloping horse throws its rider forward and back, forward and back, and with every stride Nalan Meng's hips were rocking toward him, and with every stride the saddle was tilting them closer together, and after half a dozen strides there was simply no space left between them at all.
The round of her ass pressed full against his groin.
He felt everything. The thin silk was nothing—a skin of water, a breath. Through it, and through his own trousers, he could feel the warm, heavy, yielding curves of her cheeks settle against him, soft on the surface and firm beneath, the way a ripe peach is soft over its stone. He could feel the deep cleft between them. He could feel, he was almost sure, the thin taut line of whatever she wore beneath, drawn up tight into that cleft.
His body did not ask permission.
The blood that had fled from him on the avenue came roaring back all at once. His cock surged—thick, heavy, instant—swelling so fast it ached, rising up against the inside of his trousers and straining against the silk until the cloth was drawn tight over it. Hard. Harder than he had ever been in his old life, harder than seemed possible. A hot iron rod. He could feel his own pulse beating in it, could feel the swollen head throbbing against the cloth, could feel a single bead of wetness welling at its tip.
And with the next stride, her hips rocked back, and it slotted directly into the crack of her ass.
Oh gods.
It nestled there. The swollen shaft lay pressed full-length in the deep warm groove between her cheeks, with nothing between them but two thin layers of silk, and the soft round globes of her ass closed around it on both sides like two hands. The heat of her poured into it. It was so hot down there. So hot, and so soft, and so tight, and every time the horse's hooves hit the stone, her hips rocked, and her ass rode up the length of his cock and slid back down it again.
Up. Down. Up. Down.
The friction was unbearable. The silk was slick with the sweat of the ride and it slid, slid, slid, the cleft of her ass stroking him from root to tip with every stride of the galloping horse. He felt his balls draw up tight. He felt a hot, liquid pressure gathering low in his belly, coiling, tightening. A sound was trying to climb out of his throat—something between a groan and a whimper—and he bit down on the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood to keep it in.
Stop. Stop. Think of something else. Think of—cold noodles. Lord Yama's beard. Horse-Face's teeth. The River of Three Ways—
The horse took a rut in the road. Her whole body bounced up in the saddle and came down hard, and her ass dropped straight down onto him, and her cheeks clenched around his shaft as she caught her balance.
His hips jerked. He could not stop them. It was pure animal reflex—a short, sharp, helpless thrust up into that soft groove, the swollen head of his cock grinding into the silk-covered cleft of her ass.
Can't put it in, some insane, distant part of his mind recited. Title: the King of Soft Rice. You can enjoy her body. You can't put it in. Should the holder's cock penetrate a woman, it will be sealed for one year—
I'm not putting it in! I'm not putting anything anywhere! I'm on a horse!
Nalan Meng's back went rigid.
He felt it all at once: every muscle in her body locking. The easy rocking flow of her hips stopped dead. Her spine went straight as a spear shaft. Her waist under his palms turned to stone, and the round soft ass pressed against his throbbing cock suddenly clenched, tight and hard, gripping him for one awful heartbeat in a vise of muscle—
Then she spoke, without turning her head, in a voice so low and so calm that it froze the sweat on his skin.
"If you move your thing around again," Nalan Meng said, "I will cut off your thing."
Liu Mang shrank.
His whole body did. His ass scooted backward in the saddle so fast he almost went over the horse's rump. His hands jumped off her waist as if her silk were a red-hot stove, and for one terrible moment he had nothing to hold on to at all, and the ground was blurring past beneath the hooves, and he flailed, and grabbed the rear rim of the saddle behind him, and hung on to it with both fists, leaning back as far from her as the horse's spine would allow.
His cock, abandoned in the open air, gave one last miserable throb and began—slowly, grudgingly, painfully—to subside.
Cut it off.
She would. She absolutely would. And Ye Qiong would be so annoyed that someone beat him to it.
He sat there in a cold sweat for the rest of the ride, staring at the back of her silver helmet, not breathing through his nose.
But he could not quite stop himself noticing one thing.
The tips of her ears, under the edge of the helmet, had gone a deep, burning red. And her thighs, clamped around the horse's flanks, were trembling very slightly—though whether from rage, or from the long gallop, or from something else entirely, he could not have said.
He decided, very wisely, not to ask.
The City Lord's Mansion stood at the northern end of the city, on a low rise above the canals, and it was not what he had expected.
He had pictured a palace. A princess lived here, after all—a daughter of the royal house, a lord of a city. In his notes he had given it nine courtyards and a lake. What the blood-bay clattered up to was an old walled compound of gray brick, solid and square and plain. The lacquer on its great gate had faded from red to a tired rust-pink. The two stone lions flanking the steps were chipped. Weeds pushed up between the paving stones of the forecourt, and the roof tiles over the gatehouse had slipped in places, and someone had patched the gaps with ordinary clay tiles that didn't match.
It was clean. It was orderly. It was not poor, exactly.
But it was a house that had been tightening its belt for a long time.
A pair of gatekeepers hurried out to take the horse. Nalan Meng swung down without a word and strode inside, and Liu Mang slid down after her—landing badly, staggering, catching himself on a lion's chipped head—and followed.
The servants were waiting in the outer courtyard.
Not on purpose. They were simply there, the way servants always are: a groom with a bucket, an old man with a broom, two maids with baskets of laundry on their hips, a cook in a stained apron standing at the kitchen door. They stopped what they were doing as their mistress swept past. They bowed to her.
And then, as he came stumbling through the gate behind her, every one of them turned to look at him.
He braced for contempt. For the jeering of the avenue. For the spit in the gutter.
It was worse than that.
Nobody sneered. Nobody laughed. They simply looked at him with tired eyes—the old man with the broom, the cook, the young maids—and in their faces there was nothing but disappointment. A deep, weary, resigned disappointment, worn smooth by repetition, the way a stone step is worn smooth by feet. Again, those faces said. Again, and again, and again. One of the maids sighed and shook her head and went back to her laundry. The old man looked at the ground. The helplessness in it was so complete that it made Liu Mang's stomach turn over.
They had given up on him.
Not just the city. Not just the crowd on the avenue, who mocked him for sport. The people in his own house, who saw him every day, who swept his floors and cooked his rice, had looked at Li Yuguo for so long and been let down so often that they had stopped expecting anything else.
The King of Soft Rice. The name was not just a joke in the street. It had sunk all the way down, into the bricks of this house, into the hearts of everyone who lived in it.
He lowered his eyes and followed his wife across the courtyard.
She led him through a second gate, past a dry fishpond with a cracked stone bridge, along a covered corridor whose painted beams had flaked down to the bare wood. The air back here was a little cooler. It smelled of old cedar and dust and incense. At the end of the corridor stood a separate hall, smaller than the others, its doors standing open on a dim interior where the red glow of incense sticks hung in the shadows like the eyes of small animals.
The ancestral hall.
Nalan Meng stopped on its threshold and turned to face him. The light from inside fell across one side of her face, and the sun across the other, and in the split between them her eyes were black and very, very cold.
"Kneel down!"