Please Stop Spreading Rumors About Me — They Keep Coming True

Chapter 83: The Poisoned Well

The town of Threewells didn’t open for us. It took me most of a day to understand that this was the whole new war. And it was worse than anything Lu had thrown at us yet.

A month ago, a grieving town opened like a flower. We’d ride in. The door-showers would fan out. By evening, there’d be new stars over the roofs and people weeping the good kind of weeping. Because someone had finally shown them the third door.

That had been the rhythm of the whole campaign.

I’d let myself get used to it. The way you get used to good weather and forget it can turn.

Threewells was turned. You could feel it the moment we came down the road between the reed-flats. Past the three old wells the town was named for. Into a market square where the grief was thick as fog.

Every single door was shut.

Not shut against the dark. Shut against us.

People looked at our door-showers the way you look at a man selling a cure from the back of a cart. That particular narrowed, folded-arm look. The one that says, ’I know what you are, and I’m not buying.’

And when young Ru — good, earnest Ru, who’d ridden two days to bring us to Hua and had barely recovered from losing her — knocked gently on a grieving widow’s door and started to say the words, ’there’s a third door, may I show you,’ the woman looked at him with a weary contempt that stopped him cold.

’The grey man warned us about you.’

That was the phrase we heard all day. At door after shut door.

The grey man warned us about you.

Lu had gotten there first. Not with his old two-door mercy. He’d learned, after Millbrook, that we’d just come behind him and show the third door and un-rig his choice. So he’d changed the game entirely.

He’d stopped trying to hide the third door. Instead, he’d poisoned it.

He’d sat down with the grieving of Threewells, gentle as ever. And he’d told them a story about us. That the healers who’d come knocking wanted to keep them hurting. That a movement of the wounded was useful to us. That we needed their grief to fuel our war against him. That the whole beautiful thing about ’carrying the scar’ was really just a trick to keep them bleeding for our cause.

And then he’d offered himself as the only honest man in the county.

’I want nothing from you. I don’t need your pain for any war. I’m only offering rest. They’re the ones with something to gain.’

And it had worked. Because it was a good lie.

I want to be honest about how good it was. Because we spent that whole first day breaking ourselves against it and getting nowhere.

It was good because you cannot argue with it. That’s the thing that took me half a day of watching our door-showers fail to understand.

Every word you say to defend yourself against ’you’re running a con’ is exactly what a con man would say.

’We really do want to heal you’ — that’s what a swindler says. ’We’re not asking you for anything’ — swindler. ’We’re the ones telling you the truth’ — every liar in the history of the world has said those exact words.

The more earnestly you protest your innocence, the more you sound like a guilty man protesting.

Lu had built a lie with no handle on it. A smooth wall. And we threw ourselves at it all day and slid off.

It was Ji Lan who finally named why. And I should have gone to her first. Because this was her whole old world. The world of Renown. Of making people believe things. The game she’d played at the top for thirty years before she ever met me.

’You can’t out-argue a story,’ she said that night. We’d gathered defeated at the edge of town. ’I could have told you that this morning and saved you a day of bruises.’

She leaned in.

’People don’t believe things because the argument is good. They believe things because the story fits. Because it matches what they already feel in their gut. And a grieving person’s gut already believes the world takes and takes and never gives. So ’the healers are taking from you’ fits like a key in a lock.’

She looked around at us. Grim. Clear-eyed. Completely in her element for the first time in weeks.

’And ’the healers want to give you something for free’ doesn’t fit at all. Because nothing in this life is free. Everybody knows that. So obviously there’s a catch.’

She let it sit.

’You will never win this with words. I spent thirty years learning that words only ever confirm what people already believe. You can’t tell a suspicious person you’re honest.’

’You can only do a thing a con man could never do. You beat a lie you can’t argue with by making it collide with something it can’t explain.’

And then, because the universe has a sense of humor, someone recognized me, and made everything much worse.

I’d been hanging back, mostly. The strongest man alive is not much use knocking on doors. I’d learned that lesson a tier ago. But a boy came running across the square, the way boys do when they think they’ve seen someone from a story. He pointed at me and shouted, to the whole listening town, ’That’s him! That’s Lin Bo! The demon-slayer! The Mythic one! I heard the sneeze story, it’s really him!’

I have never in my life felt a town’s suspicion harden so fast.

Because of course. Of course.

Here came the famous one. The most renowned being that has ever lived. The man whose name pattered down from every tavern in the world. The star at the top of the whole movement. Walking into their grief.

And Lu’s story clicked one notch tighter in every folded-armed heart in that square.

See? The famous man himself. You think he got that famous by giving things away for free? You think a legend that big doesn’t run on something? He needs your grief for his legend.

The grey man told us. Here’s the proof, standing right there, too famous to be honest.

My fame, the thing I’d climbed a whole ladder to earn, the thing that made me unkillable and Mythic and the brightest soul alive — my fame was Lu’s best weapon in Threewells.

It confirmed the poison just by existing.

The more renowned I was, the more I looked exactly like the con Lu had described: a man getting rich and legendary off other people’s pain.

So I did the only useful thing I have ever learned to do.

I stepped back into the shadow of a cart. The most powerful being that has ever lived hiding behind a vegetable stall. And I got out of the way.

’You can’t be here,’ Yun Shu said quietly. She came to stand beside me in the shadow. She wasn’t scolding. She understood it before I did.

’Not for this one. You’re proof of the lie. Every minute they see the famous demon-slayer, the story gets stronger.’

She looked at me. There was something gentle and a little sad in it.

’The strongest man in the world, and the best thing you can do for Threewells is not be seen.’

’I know,’ I said.

And I did know. And I’d made my peace with it a long way back. But I’ll tell you it landed strange all the same. Standing in the dark behind a cart of turnips. Hearing my own name run through the square like a rumor of something dirty.

For a year I’d wanted, more than anything, for people to know my name. And here was a whole town that knew it. And the knowing was the thing hurting them.

I’d gotten everything I wanted, again, in exactly the wrong shape.

But there was no time to feel sorry about it. Because there was a clock, and its name was Gao.

Bai Qing found him. Of course she did. The gate-keeper of the overlooked always finds the one everyone else has walked past. Gao was the hardest case in a town full of hard cases. The reason was written all through his story. And when I heard it I understood why Lu’s poison had gone into him like it was made for him. Because in a way it was.

Gao had raised his little brother, Wei, from a boy, after their parents went. He’d worked himself to the bone to give Wei a better trade than the one that had killed their father. Wei had been running cargo on the river. The dangerous work. The work where men drowned. And Gao had spent ten years saving, coin by coin, to buy Wei out of it. To set him up safe in a shop, away from the water.

And then, one season, with the money finally almost enough, a man had come to Threewells. Smiling, trustworthy, with a scheme that would double Gao’s savings in a season. And Gao, who wanted so badly to get his brother safe, had trusted him.

And the man had taken everything.

Every coin of ten years. Gone in a night.

And so Wei had stayed on the river. Because there was no money to buy him out anymore. One more season, just one more, until they could rebuild. And in that one more season, the river had taken him.

Gao had trusted one man, one time, to save his brother. And that trust had ruined them, and left Wei on the water, and the water had killed him.

And Gao had been living inside that ever since: that his brother was dead because he, Gao, had been fool enough to hope. Fool enough to trust. Fool enough to believe a smiling stranger who wanted something.

Now do you see why Lu’s story fit him like a key in a lock.

Because along had come another smiling stranger. Us. With another scheme that sounded too good. Carry your grief and it’ll heal, trust us. And Lu’s grey man had gotten to Gao first and said the truest-sounding thing anyone had ever said to him: don’t trust them. They want something. Everyone who ever offered you something wanted something, and look what it cost you last time. I’m the only one who wants nothing. Set it down. Forget. It’s the only thing in this world with no catch.

And Gao — who had one dead brother’s worth of evidence that hope is a con and trust is a knife — had believed him all the way down. He’d decided.

The Forgetters were coming back for him in two days. He was going to set Wei down, forgetting him entirely. Because carrying him meant carrying the guilt of having killed him with a foolish hope. And because the grey man had convinced him that the only people offering an alternative were liars running a longer con.

He wouldn’t let us in. Not Mu Chen, not Bai Qing, not earnest young Ru.

He stood in his doorway, a big worn hollow man, and he said, ’The grey man told me about you. You want me to keep hurting so you can use it. He’s the only one who ever told me the truth — that everyone who offers you something is reaching for your pocket.’

And he shut the door.

We stood in the dark street of a poisoned town with two days on the clock and a smooth wall we couldn’t argue our way through. I understood, with a cold clarity, that everything we’d learned — the third door, the un-rigging, the whole careful honest craft — was useless here. Because it all depended on a grieving heart being willing to hear us. And Lu had made Gao unable to hear a single word.

Ji Lan was right. We couldn’t tell Gao anything. Words only confirm what people already believe. And Gao already believed we were liars.

We could only do a thing a con man could never do.

And I lay awake behind that cart of turnips half the night. Listening to my own poisoned name patter through the dark. Trying to think of what in the whole world a con man could never, ever do. Until, somewhere near dawn, I understood. It was so simple and so backwards that I laughed out loud in the dark, alone. The strongest man alive, finally seeing the one move that could break the smooth wall.