One advantage of the court’s northerly summerings was the ability to receive visitors who could not, due to some constraint of politics, be granted the legitimacy of a reception at the Orchid Palace. During the reign of Cold Tenshing, of course, audiences of all kinds were understandably reduced, but the Summer Palace remained a useful means of propitiating a certain class of allies to the throne. The first such occasion came with a visit from the Frontier Gagers' Consortium, a trade guild described over the noon meal as "mountain men without the wit to do aught but extort from honest craftsmen" by the Iron Rhetorician. Lin Ben leaned over to a fellow novice, an archer of Imja by the name of Lin Lagba, and asked "What is a gager?"

Lin Lagba shrugged, but Gregarious Lin turned from the bench behind them and said "An enforcer of liquor taxes. Customarily betruncheoned or otherwise girt for dispute."

"What has Iron got against taxes?" asked Lin Ben. "They pay his stipend, do they not?"

"Ah, the gager gives with one hand and takes with the other," said Gregarious. "From where do you hail, stripling?"

"Lin Ben hails from the Great South Plain, handmaid province to our shining capital," Lin Ben said stiffly.

"A farmboy, then. Does the excise-man come to your father's barn with his sack of takings in one hand and death in the other?"

"Citizens of the Royal Province do not require such tart inducements to do our part," said Lin Ben.

"Well, the hairy moonshine-runners of the logging colonies do," said Gregarious. "Which would trouble Iron not one bit, save that they pass their costs on to their customers." 

"I begin to apprehend,” said Lin Ben, who had never tasted aught stronger than rice wine with water. "Gregarious, what do you rate his prospects of suing the Gagers' Consortium for mercy? Surely a man of Iron's charisma can make a plangent case.”

"Ha!" said Gregarious. "I rate it poor and poorer, like Iron himself—and me as well, make no mistake! But fear not, young Ben. We have obtained an alternative supply."

Lin Ben concealed his interest. Lin Lagba did not exercise the same decorum. "What supply, Gregarious?"

The senior boxer gave his subordinates a smug smile. "Alas," he said, "it comes to us on condition of secrecy. Perhaps, when trust increases, we may more broadly disseminate our source. For now, though..." He shrugged in a nearly sincere apology, then returned to his lunch.

To Lin Ben, there seemed pomp enough to the gagers’ fête. They processed behind banners of red and silver—“blood and money," Gregarious Lin would later explain—preceded by heavy-bearded dancers in long coats, who slashed the air with sabres, and followed by a women's chorus with high-slit skirts, who sang a folk song to the beat of golden tambourines. This all occurred before the person of King Tenshing Panchama, who had entered the throne room shuffling and leaning like an old man on the arms of Queen Charvi and the King’s Lama, flanked by Gregarious Lin and the Iron Rhetorician. After the gagers' display, the King stood, unassisted but not without trembling, and carefully recited an eloquent statement on the deep and abiding bonds of amity that joined the Orchid Throne and the Frontier Gagers' Consortium, and the personal joy that he himself took in the prospect of sharing rice and salt with the eminent—indeed, storied—leaders of the organization. The delivery was both clear and sincere, but the effect was colored by the king's habit of periodic contemplation of a particularly interesting word, seeming to roll it around in his mouth like a hard candy while the gagers waited for the sentence to continue. 

After the speech, the summer court and the gagers repaired to the banquet hall, allowing the performers to make a discreet exit to the soldiers' mess—which was vacant, as the fighting men not on patrol were engaged with the festivities, ensuring that any roistering remained benign. Lin Ben was stationed near one end of the royal table, not far from the king and the three present queens, who ate with the Summer Palace’s handful of reluctant mandarins and the headmen of the Frontier Gagers' Consortium. The King ate and spoke with the same doddering hesitancy he had displayed in the throne room—yet Ben could see the power in his frame: The hardness in his hands, the strength in the arms and shoulders whose muscles bunched and elongated under the loose-hanging white coat. His attending lama did not eat at the table, but arrived twice to administer a dose of some stinking tea. The king made perfunctory responses to the gagers and barely acknowledged the junior Queens, Sarisha and Mani, the latter of whom picked at her food and, after rushing from the table for a long absence, returned only to excuse herself. He did not look directly at Queen Charvi, but muttered phrases to which she responded in low, short sentences, and plucked at her sleeve as a nervous child might at a parent's.

The idiosyncrasies of the royal family could easily have enthralled Lin Ben for the entire evening, save that he caught the eye of the serving-girl clearing Queen Mani’s place and realized that she was Chesa, dressed in the servants' ceremonial blue. Lin Ben was no connoisseur of colors, to be sure, and the dim torchlight and leaping shadows hardly improved his expertise—yet he flattered himself for noticing, or at any rate believing, that the color somehow softened the sharp lines of her nose and cheekbones, and that the cut and weight of the fabric lent a flowing smoothness to her wiry frame without obscuring any of her slender grace. (It must be noted that Lin Ben had indulged from a communal wineskin before the event, with no dinner to dull the impact.) He saw the same start of recognition in her eyes as she took in his own dress greens, which he had always thought rather smartly tailored for his build. After a quick check for any rowdiness that might escalate in his absence, he took the route to the privy chamber, hoping Chesa would understand the import of his exit and intercept him.

The nearest chamber was not so far from the banquet hall, but as soon as he reached it and began to wait, a pair of gagers stumbled by. "The Crescent," said  one, a powerfully built man with a beard as heavy as the sabre-dancers', "the Green Morning stands between us and sweet relief!"

"Not at all," said Lin Ben. "If the truth be known, there is no one now utilizing the privy, and it is my honor and pleasure to cede its use to you."

"No one now utilizing it?" said the other gager, a slimmer man and clean-shaven. "Then why is the Green Morning interposed?"

Lin Ben withdrew to the side of the hallway, executing the Abasement to an Honored Guest. It was at this point that Chesa appeared, behind the gagers. Lin Ben looked at her to shoo her off, but the gagers followed his gaze. The bearded one nearly shouted a laugh. "Hist," he said, "is it an assignation we disrupt?"

"The Green Morning hankers to slip into a stinking hole, methinks," said the clean-shaven one.

"By no means," Lin Ben said between his teeth. "You have lamented the insistence of Nature's call at some length now; if our presence discommodes you from answering it, we will gladly vacate ourselves, that you may vacate yours."

"Abandoning a guest is no hospitality," said the clean-shaven gager. "In any case, the King has granted us the use of his house, and here stands a bit of it that looks in need of use." This with a glance at Chesa that made his meaning evident.

At this juncture, the impulses at war inside Lin Ben were clear enough—for a youth of the Green Morning is not disposed to be judicious about the disputes he chooses, especially before an object of desire. Let us add to this a youth's inexperience with his own limitations, insulating Lin Ben from all but the most abstract realization that against two hard and cunning bag-men he might well fail and be killed. And yet, we have perhaps perceived some small decency or at least conventionality in Lin Ben, whereby we might well surmise that he would resist attacking honored guests of the King; further, speaking for conventionality if not decency, he might well be sensitive to the small value of a scullion's virtue, set against the hospitality proffered to two prominent businessmen of the North, however limited their prominence or questionable their business. 

Chesa, for her part, was also transfixed by warring impulses. Her attraction to Lin Ben was in the field, to be sure, but only by courtesy; it had been outflanked, its line broken, and its forces well and truly routed by small detachments from the competing calculations that now vied for the control of her limbs. On the one hand, in the event of violence, the gagers’ victory could surely not be desired. On the other, what would Lin Ben do if the victory were his? A brother of the Green Morning newly covered in glory was not a safe creature, especially possessed of a claim on Chesa’s virtue that any of his brothers would endorse. And a resolution without violence—well, that had its own complications; for, frustrated, what could be more predictable than for these gagers to spread word that Chesa had taken the role of instigator or coquette in the encounter? It would be a small enough thing for a King or mandarin to placate the Frontier Gagers’ Consortium with the severance of a scullion, but it would leave Chesa abandoned in the north, nowhere to go but the village she once called home. And that, to her, would be slow death; and, to believe it, simply imagine what would lead a capable and sharp-minded woman to make a pilgrimage on foot, hundreds of miles to the south, for the privilege of working in a kitchen. 

Cazart! The battlefield of Chesa's mind is knee-deep in red mud now, it can be clearly seen; and, in this light, perhaps the reader will more fully appreciate the poise required for her to utter the phrase, "From what village hail you, gager?" 

Suspicious, the bearded gager narrowed his eyes and growled, "The village of Amity, maid of mine, where we will shortly honeymoon.” He would have embroidered the conceit save that, over the word "Amity," the clean-shaven gager had stuttered "Jorde." 

"Jorde?" said Chesa. "A pleasant little fief, as I remember it, with citizens even of feature and free with speech."

"Well, I thank you," said the clean-shaven gager.

"Perhaps you remember Wheelwright Jigmey of the Thews," said Chesa, "and his five strapping sons. Cousins of mine."

"I had not heard Jigmey given that style," said the clean-shaven gager, "nor had he, at my recollection, so many sons."

"Huge Okko and Jenden Ape-Shoulders are of a previous marriage," Chesa said smoothly, "much older, and they return only for weddings and funerals, much like my own family. Young Gephel has yet to gain his father's strength, it is true, but he is near thirteen, is he not? I remember Jenden at thirteen swelling like rising dough."

"Which inflates with gas," the bearded gager said roughly, "making it soft and tender, so that it collapses when it is beaten. Come, stump, the chit hoodwinks you."

The clean-shaven gager shook his head. “Jigmey has a son named Gephel," he said, "and he is thirteen, or near it."

"Very well," said the bearded gager, "when we are done with this scullion, you and I will go to Jorde and dispose of father and son both.”

"Done?" said the clean-shaven gager. "And how shall we find ourselves 'done' with a kinswoman of my village, who might just as well be my neighbor? Her honor is mine to champion, sir!"

"Yours to champion?" spluttered Lin Ben. "The Crescent, I should say she is mine!"

"I will defend my privilege in any mode of dispute you care to name," said the clean-shaven gager. "The winner may have the honor of killing my colleague."

"Very well," rumbled the bearded gager. "I'll gladly take a man's truncheon to whichever of you manages to pinch the other hard enough to make him cry. And then—sweet Amity!" This he uttered with a batlike open-armed gesture, turning a leer of hot glee to Chesa, of whom there was, thankfully, at this time, no trace.

For a moment, none of the three men spoke, each lost in his own attempts to comprehend the situation.

Bearded and clean-shaven gager at last looked one at the other. "'Twould be impolitic to kill the Green Morning, would it not?" said the clean-shaven gager. "The two of us, I mean."

"I would have killed you for the gain of sweet Amity, and I should do it now for her loss," said the bearded gager. "But perhaps collaboration on a drubbing will salve the offense."

"Very well," said Lin Ben, ill concealing his apprehension. "Drub or be drubbed. So be it. Who first?"

Doubtless we need not describe the ugly white smile that split the beard of the bearded gager; and we flatter ourselves that the reader has, at this juncture, enough sympathy for Lin Ben that the details of the proceedings need not be related. Suffice it to say that the gagers left the scene bloodied but satisfied—enough so, indeed, that they did their foe a favor, for by their rapid dissemination of the encounter's outcome, Lin Ben's Green Morning brothers were swiftly apprised of his fate and could quickly dislodge him from the privy aperture, into which he had been inserted head first up to the elbows.