He'd fallen into a pit of garbage, and he wasn't happy about it.
Eirian couldn't help but grimace as they pulled him out of it. "At least it's dry."
"Such a comfort." The soldier had muttered, fruitlessly trying to brush himself off.
Eirian leaned back over the hole, illuminating it with her torch. It looked like a garbage pit; she could see shards of pottery in the walls. Pieces of broken clay tablets and bones mixed in with the dirt. "Think there's anything useful down here?"
"I'm not going back to check." The soldier instantly snapped, then flushed and remembered himself. He bowed before Li made him, nearly whacking his head on a shelf in the process. "Sorry, your grace."
Eirian snorted. "It's fine. I wouldn't want to go down there either. I don't see anything that looks like it's in one piece anyway." She pushed herself back up. "If there's anything useful, it's in the tablets up here."
"That's a lot of tablets to check." Li sighed. "And too many people will make air an issue."
"Let's start with the ones with Sorrian." Eirian decided. "There's our best chance anyway."
"Go up and get some fresh air. Tell them we'll be up once we've checked the tablets." Li told the soldier, who bowed gratefully and headed topside.
Eirian's stomach growled again. "I hope you read fast."
***
Chenzhou and Yuze perked up when they heard movement in the doorway to the cellar.
The soldier that had accompanied Eirian and Li climbed out, covered in far more dirt than he had been when he'd gone in.
"What the hell happened to you?" One of the other guards asked.
"Found the garbage dump." He muttered and they gave him a wide berth as he stomped a few feet away to try and clean himself off. "We found some clay tablets with writing on them. Her Grace thinks they might be records. They're going to read them and then come out."
"We should go in to help." Lady Yang immediately headed towards the entrance.
The soldier shook his head. "They said no. The air's thin, it can't support too many people."
"How long do you think it'll take?" Yuze asked.
The soldier knocked chunks of rank dirt off his pants. "Not too long. There weren't that many that fit the timeframe. A lot of them were written in languages that stopped being used long before the village burned."
Yuze turned to Chenzhou, who paced in front of the entrance. "You know, if there are records in this cellar, there's probably more in other cellars. Might be worth trying to find them while we wait."
Lady Yang frowned, displeased, but she eventually gave a jerky nod and motioned to several soldiers. "Come with me, we'll start at the houses still standing by the gate."
Lord Yin sighed. "Very well. Come on you lot. We'll start by the orchard." The soldiers that followed him looked far less pleased about their task than those following Yang.
"I'll take another ground and search those houses in front of the manor." Yuze sighed, knowing full well Chenzhou wasn't going to leave until Eirian and Li came up. He turned to Finn, Emmy, and Patrick. "You three stay with him. If anything happens, yell." All three of them snapped off sharp salutes that they were far too young for.
Chenzhou turned back to the doorway as they left. They couldn't hear any noise from inside the cellar, and it was pointless to try and call out and distract them, so Chenzhou held himself back.
Anna and Marian were safe with their guards by the gates and Chenzhou longed to have Anna next to him, someone to lean on, to turn to. Anna never failed to have solid advice, despite her dislike of being involved in the management of the Camelia.
Eirian took so many risks and now that Chenzhou was facing a long life instead of a short one, the idea of risking his newfound future made his hands shake and his palms sweat. Chenzhou hadn't been very fearless before and a new lease on life wasn't enough to change that.
And now ghosts were real, and magic had returned to the Camelia, and everything was a lot more dangerous than it had been.
He'd been so distracted by his health, then by his mother, that he hadn't had time to stop and think about what his new years would mean for his new marriage.
He loved Anna. Had since he was old enough to understand what love was. Eirian was supposed to be a savior, but now she was his wife unless they went through the trouble of divorcing. Divorce in Sorrow was a simple matter when you didn't have titles and gold. If you didn't have either of those things, you could simply go to the High Court, speak to an agent and as long as both parties wanted it, it took all of an afternoon. When you had land and gold, divorce negotiations took almost as long as marriage negotiations, no matter what had been written into the marriage contract.
The contract he'd signed with Eirian's father stipulated that no matter when the marriage ended, or how, he'd forfeited any right to reclaim the bride price. Eirian's father had wanted inheritance rights to the Camelia originally, but Chenzhou wasn't that stupid. Regardless of what happened between Eirian and Chenzhou, he wasn't just going to hand over the Camelia to anyone.
Let alone to the only family in Sorrow that would then have a monopoly on land, gold, and soldiers in the entire country.
Chenzhou had written in the addendum that Eirian's heir would be her choice but needn't be her blood. Eirian's father had fought hard and, in the end, Chenzhou had to double the initial bride price to get him to budge.
Did Eirian want children of her own?
Chenzhou had once dreamed of his own, but he wasn't going to have one only to die while they were still a child.
Anna wanted children, but she'd agreed there was no point in having them if Chenzhou was going to die before he could raise them.
~ tbc