The Fox Borrows the Tiger

The forest fears the fox, the King of Chu is told. It doesn't. It fears the king's army walking behind him.

Every borrowed power forgets it was borrowed. Read whose teeth are in the room.

The steward came through the market like weather, and the stalls bent before him.

He was nobody — the Wu could see that in a breath, a soft man with soft hands — but he carried his lord's seal on a cord at his hip and let it show, and he bought at the price he named and not the price asked, and the grain-women thanked him for the privilege. A fishmonger slow to give way got the flat of the man's tongue and a promise that the lord would hear of it, and the fishmonger went grey and bowed to the dirt.

"They're frightened of him," Dog said, half a question. He did not sound sure; the man did not read as anything to fear.

"They are not frightened of him at all." The Wu did not look up from the salt. "They are frightened of the man whose seal he carries, who is not here and never has to be. The steward only walks in front. Everything that scatters, scatters from the thing behind him — and he has begun to think it scatters from him."

She watched the soft man swell as he went, taking the bows for his own, and felt the old cold familiarity of it, because it was her own trade laid bare in the street. A woman knelt at her mat not for her but for the dread of the stalks, the spirits, the dark behind the bronze coins — and the Wu walked in front of that dread the way the steward walked in front of his lord. The whole craft was a fox with a tiger at her back.

"The day he forgets the seal isn't his own teeth," she said, "is the day he names the wrong man and the lord lets him hang for the insolence of it. The fox is safe exactly as long as it remembers it is a fox." She tied off the salt. "That is the only honest thing in the trade, boy. Knowing whose teeth are in the room. Mine were never mine."

Dog looked at her a moment, the way he looked when she had told him more than she meant to, and said nothing, and they went out past the steward, who did not see them, being busy being a tiger.