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“Like normal kids,” Moon offered with a smile.

“Exactly. But Shifu and the other elders of the sect never beat us or hurt us as part of training or punishment. Those scars…we all have scars like that. They’re from the battles we fought while we were still human.”

“Was it a war? Did your sect fight in a war?”

Sean resumed walking. His posture was less stiff now, his arms swinging loosely at his sides. “No. Our shifu had a close friendship with the emperor, and he regarded our sect as a secondary army. We would come in to help supplement the regular army when there were uprisings or whispers of treason. The kingdom covered a lot of territory, and there were all these regions that had kings who ruled the mini kingdoms, but they still had to answer to the emperor.”

“And maybe some of those kings decided they didn’t want to answer to the emperor.”

“Oh yeah, there was a lot of that stupidity. It would be like one of your state governors one day deciding they no longer wanted to listen to your president and…um…”

“Congress,” Moon supplied. “And we’ve had some governors mouth off like that.”

Sean snorted. “Times like that, our sect would sometimes be called in to apply pressure to the king to make him see the error of his ways.”

Moon chuckled. Their pressure came as swords, spears, and crossbows.

“In those the days, there were many more of us,” Sean added softly. He picked up his pace. “Didi never accompanied us on those missions. I went on only a few myself before…”

“Didi? That means younger brother, right? Did Yichen not go because he was so much younger than the rest of you?” That was something he was struggling with—a mental picture of Wu Yichen. The Zhang clan members always referred to him as Wu-di or Didi. As a result, Moon was always picturing him as this sassy teenager who was caught up in stuff that he shouldn’t have been involved in.

“Mn. Yichen is younger by human years. I think he was twenty-one when Jiang made him a vampire. That puts him three years younger than me and Jun-Jun. Six years younger than Chen and eleven years younger than Zhang-ge.” Sean leaned closer to Moon and smirked. “Which is why Zhang-ge has a big brother attitude toward all of us.”

“I’ve noticed that.”

Sean climbed up on a fallen log and gazed out at the green canopy spread out in front of them. They’d reached the apex of a hill that gave them a good view of the valley where they suspected the door would open. A trickle of white smoke curled up from the trees. God, please don’t let anyone be camping there.

“But Yichen’s age wasn’t the only reason he didn’t go on some of those missions.” Sean hopped off the log and stared at Moon. “He was also the eldest son of the king of the Wu kingdom. You know, one of those kingdoms that owed fealty to the emperor.”

Moon tripped at that bomb and Sean caught his arm, stopping him from face-planting into a mud puddle.

“You mean, Wu Yichen is actually Prince Wu Yichen?” Moon demanded when Sean got him on his feet.

“Yes. I don’t know the entire story.” Sean stopped and Moon smiled.

The man was the best gossip. Would he have been able to get this much information out of Chen without a lot of arm twisting? Probably not. But it might have been fun to wear Chen down.

“But…” Sean continued after a second, earning a chuckle from Moon, “the belief is that either some rumors surfaced that the Wu kingdom wanted to separate from the rest of the country or that the king was planning to revolt and seize the throne. However, I don’t think there was a lot of proof. So, Emperor Wu—no relation to the Wu kingdom—‘asked’ that the king send his eldest son to the Sword of the Heavenly Garden Sect to train for the next ten years.”

“And that’s your sect, right?”

Sean nodded. “Correct. Our sect was highly regarded in the jianghu.1 Er…I mean the martial arts world. It was a great honor to study under these masters. Some of the greatest warriors in history came from our sect.”

“This was the same sect that had very close ties to the emperor. There was no question of where the sect leaders’ loyalties lay,” Moon interjected.

“Correct,” Sean said with a wink.

“So, Yichen was a prisoner.”

Sean made a face and wobbled his right hand from side to side. “He became leverage over his father. If the rumors were untrue and the king was loyal to the emperor, his son had nothing to worry about. He was going to receive an education better than he could receive at home.”

“And if the rumors were true, Yichen’s father now had an excellent reason to become loyal to the emperor,” Moon mumbled. Part of him could only marvel at the craftiness of the man, while another part winced on behalf of young Wu Yichen. “Did he know? When Yichen arrived at the sect, was he old enough to understand what was happening? The politics of it all.”