Chapter 33: The Foundation
The stonemasons arrived on the third day of autumn.
Seven of them, from a Western Reaches contractor settlement two weeks west of Hekou, with two oxcarts of tools and enough dressed stone to begin three foundations. Their foreman was a compact woman named Ru who walked the training ground perimeter before speaking, pressed her heel into the soil at four points, and told me the northern flat was workable.
Gao Ren was already there. He had been waiting for the stonemasons the way he waited for ore shipments, standing at the northern edge of the flat with his arms folded.
He and Ru spent the first hour arguing about the cultivation hall's foundation depth, but by midday they were working off the same plan.
I left them to it and went to meet the Luan cousins.
They had been housed in the two buildings east of the Pei household since arriving in the days after Mother's burial.
Ten people total who had backgrounds as healers, farmers, and there was a carpenter named Luan Fen who had finished his assigned building in eleven days and was already asking what to do next. I had been managing the integration from a distance through.
They told me stories of Mother while I did their intake.
They knew the girl she had been in Chenjia, the apprentice who had been too serious for her age and then suddenly warm when she thought no one was watching, the one Sun Ai had called her best student while complaining that she asked too many questions. They had stories I had never heard. They produced them without being asked, over the rice and salted fish Tong Lian had sent over.