Both Sect Heads Wanted Out of the Marriage, So They Tried to Ruin the Town Together novel · Chapter 18 of 24
Chapter 18: Trial of the Cups
The Trial of the Cups was held on the temple steps at noon, with the whole town sitting on the hill.
Forty small white cups stood on a long table, each with a paper label tied to its handle in the Chair's square hand.
"Some labels are true and some are lies," said the Chair. "Name every cup, and tell me which labels lie."
"And if I get one wrong?" said Luoyi.
"Then you will have been wrong in front of eight hundred people."
The crowd made a happy sound.
Zhuyuan stepped up behind her with a strip of clean grey silk.
He tied it over her eyes with fingers slower than they needed to be, and the knot settled against her braid.
The hill fell away to a murmur, and the dark was the way she had always tasted best.
Cup one was cold stone and fennel.
"The Hearth well," she said. "The label's right."
Cup two was rice wine, sweet and a little proud.
"The widow's. She put ginger in it, which I told her not to, and it's better."
Somewhere on the hill the widow shrieked.
Cup eleven tasted of lamp oil and sleeplessness.
"Steward Ma's tea, seven shades too strong," she said. "He brews it like that at night when he thinks nobody's watching."
A grunt came from the crowd that might have been Ma.
Cup nineteen was so foul she gagged, and then it was delicious.
"Rowdy Tiger with plum," she said. "That's Xiaohe's."
"I knew it!" cried Xiaohe.
Cup thirty-one, she spat onto the stones.
"This is sour," she said, and pulled the blindfold off. "It's water gone bad at the root."
"It's stone and rot, near the temple. A pipe cracked in the flood and nobody noticed."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of Both Sect Heads Wanted Out of the Marriage, So They Tried to Ruin the Town Together are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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