Hairpin and Fire

The hairpin itself seemed to made out of some sort of wood coated in a glossy lacquer with a red carnelian agate at the end shaped into a butterfly. Hanging from a hole drilled into one of the wings, were two tassels. One had a tiny aquamarine gem and the other, a similar sized chrysoprase. It was laying there among many other, much more expensive-looking hair ornaments, but as the hairpin reminded her of her mother, she decided to purchase that one instead. A deciding factor for her purchase was also the fact that on the wood of the ornament was an engraving not unlike one she remembered seeing long ago. Perhaps a decade ago - a memory that stood out among the blurry images that waltzed across her memory.

"Excuse me, Auntie. How much does this hairpin cost?" she asked the stand owner.

The woman looked over to her and as she looked at the hairpin she was pointing to, her eyes widened and she quickly looked over to who had asked and hurriedly did a double take. Ruan Mu Chou was slightly annoyed as the people from the other store had done the same thing to her, 'Wasn't it just asking for a price? Why does she have to act surprised and flustered? It's not as if I'm her first customer.' Her stall was teeming with young mistresses looking for hair ornaments and she acted as if she was her first in a long time. Nonetheless, she suppressed her annoyance as she knew she probably wouldn't have been annoyed in the first place if it weren't for the seller being the 3rd person having looked at her the same way.

"You can take it. It's free." she said. She was jumpy and her eyes looked from left to right on the street of the marketplace as she said it. Ruan Mu Chou would've been suspicious if she had been paying attention to the woman in the first place, but as soon as she said "free" she looked at the curious hairpin, grabbed it, and walked away. If the guards had noticed something, they kept their lips sealed tighter than... anyways, the one who had noticed something strange was her younger brother, Li Feng.

"Big sister... Don't you think there was something...off about that woman?" he asked as he held his elder sister's hand.

"What do you mean, Feng'er?" she asked as she looked towards him, confused.

"She looked pretty shady to me. She kept glancing from side to side and hurriedly gave you the hairpin... Something's wrong." said Li Feng as he felt a shiver run down his back. At the same time, Ruan Mu Chou got goosebumps and felt a shiver at the back of her neck. 'Feng'er is right. Something's wrong.' she had thought that with the abundant amount of specially trained guards they would be safe, so she had let her guard down, but she had begun to feel an increasing sense of doom. 'If what Feng'er said was right, then this all started with that stall owner and this hairpin. I have to test and see whether this has a tracker.'

For safe measure she decided to verify whether her suspicions were correct. In order to do so though, she had to put the hairpin in a place where no one other than the possible trackers would find it, in the possibility that it was not a tracker. In which case, she'd proceed with her previous plan of gifting it to her mother.

She looked around and conveniently found a slight inconspicuous crack in the corner of the sidewalk where she could fit it in. As she walked by it, she quickly dropped it from within her robes and kicked it over with her foot - this was successful because she was learned in the ways of hiding. She'd often sneak out and purchase her favorite books or stationary and her mother would often be sitting on her bed, combing her hair while waiting for her. Anyways, after kicking it into the hole she walked away and pretended to be looking around for products to buy while squeezing her brother's hand gently. From an outsider's point of view, they looked like two siblings leisurely strolling about the market square. This facade was kept up for another twenty minutes until she realized that she no longer felt the goosebumps and the piercing shiver on her nape - for five minutes before she felt it again. When she realized this, her eyes went cold and she became as vigilant as possible without alerting others that there was something wrong. They were in the middle of a crowd and anyone could be the perpetrator behind the tracking hairpin. She had concluded that while the hairpin was a tracking device, it seemed as if they weren't after the hairpin, but the person who had grabbed it, which was her. Still, she felt that the woman at the stall wasn't the main villain, if she believed Li Feng's description and she did, the woman he described was not portrayed as the malefactor. More like a hostage.

She glanced at her brother, who was also glancing at her from time to time, and squeezed his hand again. Ruan Li Feng was always a smart boy, given he mostly used his smarts for mischievous things, but he still excelled at almost all the things he put his mind to. Like learning how to recognize when his elder sister was tracing letters on his palm.

'C A L M' she spelled on his palm. He slightly nodded back at her.

As they walked in circles around the market square, from stall to window, she began to notice two people following their route. She was sure it was them since she purposefully had gone in huge circles.

One of the stalkers was standing at a stall selling fruits and was wearing murky green pants with a shirt of the same style, but black in color, along with a pair of black fitted boots. The other was identically dressed, the only difference being that he had the top portion of his hair tied up in a knot. Both also had something inside of a boot each. She noticed that when both of them walked around. The sound of their footprints were uneven. One foot stepped lighter than the other and it was visible when they walked in the mud in between the stores. One footprint was considerably deeper than the other.

When she noticed this along with the fact that they were following her and Li Feng, she decided to make use of the crowded areas around her. So she screamed.

"Those two are armed!" she roared. It was one of the five rules that no one entering the market square could have any form of weapons, not even kitchen knives were sold here. This was implemented after a massacre occurred seven years ago. At the time, 13 people were cut down by a deranged man with a long sword screaming nonsensical things about how "cultivators" were after him. He must've read too many books, it's common knowledge that only warriors exist. No cultivators.

After yelling, the market square became a coagulation of mass hysteria and panic and people trying to get away, but in their distress they kept those two following her and Li Feng, from catching up to them as she carried her brother and ran. She ran out of the commerce area and did not stop until she made it to the forest where her uncle's estate existed. She stopped and looked behind her to make sure their pursuers weren't around. She didn't want to lead them to the home she had come to love more than anything, because it was where her grandfather, mother, uncle, brother, and she lived in.

Once she made sure no one was following her, she sprinted towards the house and kept going frantically. To her horror though, when she was two miles away from her home, she saw an enormous pillar of smoke snaking its way through the trees. From the approximate location of her uncle's estate.