Never a Doormat, Always the Master

The contract Mayson Lane's grandfather left behind promised him in marriage to a daughter of the Lynch family, one of the moneyed houses in Havertry. Mayson was a boy then, and the two of them had been living off what they could pull out of other people's rubbish. His grandfather died and there was nobody else. Cloud Sage came past, took the boy in and brought him up to Mount Kalun. Thirteen years of it put his martial arts at the half-heavenly level, and Cloud Sage told him it was time to go back down, and told him about the betrothal. Mayson had his answer to that before he reached the bottom. 'Being a live-in son-in-law is out of the question. Either the contract is cancelled or they take my surname.' He left the mountain to call it off.