Chapter 162: Say the Boring Thing
Guo finally caught up to me. He'd walked four days to reach our camp, and when he finally stumbled into the firelight, he was covered in dirt and looking ready to kill someone; Tao Tao just handed him a bowl of soup before he could get a word in, since that's the one rule we actually enforce.
"You made it way worse," he said.
"I did."
"I had four hundred people to deal with. Now I've got eleven hundred, and some guy's actually opened an inn because of it." He slammed the bowl down on a rock. "I can't do my job. I can't haul wood. My own daughter can't even walk down the lane without people bugging her about what I'm supposedly like when I'm home."
"I know. I'm sorry."
"'Sorry' doesn't fix anything." He glared at me. "You're the most powerful thing in existence. Just fix it."
"I can't," I told him.
"Then what's the point of you?"
"Honestly? In this, there isn't one," I said. "That's the truth, and you deserve to hear it. I can hold up a collapsing mountain, sure; but I can't force four hundred million people to stop believing a lie. And every time I try to deny it, the rumor just gets stronger because my denial is basically the only 'proof' they need. I sat down across from him. "I've been the wrong shape for this my whole life, and being the 'wrong shape' is exactly how I got famous in the first place."
Guo buried his face in his hands.
"So I'm just stuck with it then."
"Some of it. Not all." I pushed his bowl back toward him. "Eat, then let me go get Ji Lan; she's going to explain how to get out of this because I'd only make it worse."
— • —
Ji Lan showed up, stared at him for a few seconds, and said, "You've been telling this story in taverns for nine years."
"…Yeah."
"Drunk?"
"Most of the time."
"Good. That's the entire solution, so quit moping." She sat down and folded her hands. "Here is what you're working with. You have a story four hundred million people love, and a denial from him that they've correctly tagged as exactly what someone would say if the story were real. You can't beat that with a 'no'." She leaned in. "You beat it by telling a better, actually true story. And the good news is that the truth about you is incredibly boring, and boring is the one thing a legend can't survive."
"I don't get it."
"Nobody has ever heard your side," Ji Lan said. "That's the problem. For nine years, you're the only person who hasn't told this story in public. Everyone else has had their turn. So go tell it. All of it. The real version. Even the parts where you look like an idiot — especially those."
Guo turned bright red. "There are a lot of those."
"How many drinks were you in?"
"…Eleven."
"Perfect," Ji Lan said. "Lead with the eleven."
— • —
He did it in the Reedmoor square, because she insisted it had to be his home town, his own neighbors, in daylight, while completely sober, with the eleven hundred listeners watching.
I was there. I stayed in the back and didn't say a word, following strict instructions, because Ji Lan said if I even nodded, it would become 'The Calamity attended the succession' and we'd be stuck cleaning up the mess for another year.
Guo was terrible at the speech. That's exactly why it worked.
"Right," he started. "So. I was eleven drinks in.
"I did go to the wedding. Everyone went to the wedding. There were — I don't know the number, there were so many people on that hill you couldn't even sit. I was a mile back. I could see a fire. I couldn't see a man. I couldn't have told you which speck he was even if my life depended on it.
"I've claimed in this square that I was at the front. That was a lie. I've claimed he walked past me. He didn't; some guy in a coat walked past our group on the path an hour before, and I've never been sure if it was him, but I kept saying it was because people kept buying me drinks whenever I did.
"I've never talked to Lin Bo in my life. He's standing right there at the back, and this is the first time I've actually been close enough to see his face.
"He didn't choose me for anything. He came to my house nine days ago, sat on a cask, and told me he couldn't help. It was the least useful thing anyone has ever said to me, and I'm pretty sure it was the truth.
"And the boy who got better — " He stopped, struggling, but forced himself to keep going. "I put my hand on that kid's head because his mom was crying and I'm a coward who didn't know what else to do. I don't know if I did anything. I don't know if you lot did it by just wanting to believe I could. Don't send me your children. Please, don't. If you send me a child and I can't heal them, I have to stand there and watch, and I'd rather go back to being a liar in a tavern than do that one more time."
He ran out of things to say, just standing there, until someone in the back shouted, "How many drinks?" and Guo answered, "Eleven," and the whole square burst out laughing. That was it.
That was the moment the legend died. It died laughing, which Ji Lan says is the only way a legend ever truly goes out.
— • —
It took about three weeks for everything to fall apart. Belief didn't fade out; it just snapped, falling away all at once like a wall hitting the ground after standing for days.
The inn closed down. The queue went home in pairs and groups, mostly feeling a bit embarrassed, some annoyed at him, and a few annoyed at themselves — which, honestly, is the healthy way to end it.
It didn't all just vanish, though.
"He's still Renowned," Xue Ningzhi said a month later, holding that sheet of hers. "Dropped from Storied, but he's holding steady. About four hundred thousand people figure he's a decent enough cooper, and that isn't shifting. They heard him being honest in the square; there's nothing stickier in this world than a man who admits the truth in public."
"Is he handling it okay?"
"He isn't exactly thrilled," Xue Ningzhi said. "He can lift a full cask over his head with one hand, which he says helps his back. People keep stopping by to make him settle boundary disputes once a month — and he does it, usually pretty badly, but they keep coming back anyway."
"And the kids?"
"Nobody sends him kids anymore," she said. "He told them not to, right in public, and explained why. They listened. Honestly, it's the only part of this whole mess he actually cares about."
— • —
I headed back to Reedmoor that spring, mostly because it felt wrong to stay away.
His shutters were wide open, a cask sat on the block, and he'd knocked about nine years of dust off the shop.
"You," he said.
"Me."
"Are you here to make things worse again?"
"I just want to buy a bucket."
"I don't make buckets; I make casks." He set his tools down anyway. "There's a guy in the next village who makes buckets, but he's not great at it, so I'd really prefer you didn't."
I sat on the block. He let me.
"How's it going?"
"Stupid," Guo said. "I settled a boundary line last month. Two brothers, forty years of fighting. I told them to give the land to the one who'd actually walked the fence, and they both went off happy, though I still have no clue if that was right." He scratched his jaw. "I'm not wise, and I want that clear. I'm just the only person they'll both listen to, so I say something and they leave."
"That's pretty much what wise is."
"Don't start that." He pointed a tool at me. "That's exactly how this stuff starts."
I laughed. He didn't for a couple seconds, but then he finally cracked a grin.
"My daughter's doing okay," he said once we'd moved past it. "That's the main thing I'd say if you were only hearing one bit of news. Things went worse for her than me, but it's all come out right now. She gets asked about it and tells them her dad just lies in pubs, and they laugh, and that's the end of it." He flipped the cask over. "I wouldn't have gotten that back if I'd just stayed quiet and let them have the nice version."
"No."
"So." He shrugged, went back to work, and muttered the rest to the wood. "Come back when you need a cask, then."
— • —
It was warm — getting late in the season.
I made the soup.
"So," said Yun Shu.
"Don't."
"I'm not even going to say anything."
"You're going to be saying it for a year."
"I'm going to say it for nine years," Yun Shu replied, "which is how long you managed to avoid filing a denial. That was a really good run, and you just threw it all away on a Tuesday because you wanted to be a policy again." She took a bite. "How's the rule?"
Because there's a rule now. I sat down with Ji Lan, Yun Shu, and Xue Ningzhi, and we wrote it down properly, which is honestly the most embarrassing thing I've ever done regarding my own reputation, and it goes like this:
They can say whatever they want about me. Anything. Sneezing, pants, rivers, seven feet tall, the pot. I don't answer, I don't correct them, and I don't care — the ones that turn out true are mostly just an inconvenience for me.
They just can't hang it on anyone else. The second a story about me attaches to someone who didn't ask for it, it's not my legend anymore; it's a stranger's life. So I go — fast, not in eight days — and I bring Ji Lan, and we don't deny it; we just get them to tell the true, boring version in their own square, in their own voice.
"It's a worse rule than the old one," I said.
"It's a rule with a real person in it," Yun Shu said. "All the good ones have people in them." She reached over and stole the last of my bread, like she always does. "Anyway. Seven feet tall."
"Don't."
"There's a carpenter in Greenmarch charging two coppers just for a look at a doorway."
"I know all about that doorway."
"I'm going to go see the doorway," said Yun Shu.
She went and saw the doorway. She paid the two coppers. She says it was worth it and she refuses to tell me why.