Chapter 118: Tired
Han Ying stood ringed by every blade Skyedge had marched down the mountain, and not one of the men holding those blades had the faintest notion the elder was a puppet on Xuan’s string. That was a fact Xuan had no intention of handing them.
He had passed the controls to Mira the instant the floor fell quiet. She could run the old man’s body better than he could while splitting his attention a dozen ways, which left him free to stand there wearing the face of a wary young master while she worked the strings. And it cracked open a door he had not counted on finding ajar. A Blood Fang elder, mouth and memory both on a leash. You did not squander a thing like that on a tidy execution. You asked it questions.
So when Lin Zhen’s question fell over the ring, the elder finally opened his mouth.
"What in every hell turns a Blood Fang elder loose on his own?" Han Ying repeated, rolling the words around like a stone in the cheek.
Every sword in the circle tightened at the sound of him, knuckles blanching, the whole ring braced for the lunge they were certain had to follow. None followed.
"The answer is plainer than you’d ever guess, Patriarch Lin Zhen. I’m tired."
"Tired?" Lin Zhen turned the word over and plainly judged it counterfeit. "I don’t buy that, Han Ying. They tell me you’ve given five decades to that sect. A man doesn’t wake one morning sick of the thing he poured his whole life into."
Han Ying scratched at the back of his neck, a small, threadbare motion. At the gesture Lin Kai and the two core disciples coiled, Qi pooling in their palms, half a breath off loosing whatever they had primed. Lin Zhen raised a hand and halted them.
"He carries no killing intent. Leave him be."
The elder dipped his head at the courtesy and went on, his voice worn down to the grain. "Just so. Worn clean through, by the whole of it. You’re a patriarch yourself, so you know the toll a sect takes. Your whole life, handed over a sliver at a time, and they teach you to call it duty. But you don’t know the half of what festers inside Blood Fang. A great deal has curdled my stomach across the years, and for every one of them I’ve put in, I’ve never been handed a say in a single thing. So tell me, why keep standing at the shoulder of men who never once bothered to respect me? An elder of a demonic sect, no less." He pushed out a thin breath. "When word came down that they were shipping me off to wet-nurse a mine in the dark, I thought, why not. Why not turn the blade around for once in my life."
Lin Zhen and the others listened without a word, and the oddness of it pinned them in place. An elder of a demon sect, spitting on his own. Yet barely a fortnight gone, three of Skyedge’s own elders had sold the sect from the inside, so the shape of betrayal had stopped startling any of them. They took it down whole.
What none of them grasped was that the choice had never been the old man’s. Every syllable rode out on Mira’s command, fed down the centipede knotted against his marrow. And here was the thread that pulled a faint cold through even Xuan: a good measure of what the elder confessed was true. Not scripted. His. Grievances he had buried somewhere deep, hauled up and walked out into the open at last.
People haul freight they never once set down in front of another living soul. Opinions they hold and carry to the grave unspoken, because to speak them is to pay for them, and a shut mouth is the wiser bet more often than not. The centipede merely skipped the arithmetic and turned the man’s pockets out onto the floor.
Lin Zhen leaned into it, curiosity drawing the questions out of him despite himself. "And what exactly is rotting in Blood Fang that a man like you would flinch from? Given your history, I struggle to picture anything that could prick a conscience such as yours."
Han Ying hauled in a long breath and forced the next words past a weight he had no hand in.
[ Oh, this one’s worth your ears. ] Mira, bright with mischief at the back of his skull. [ Hold still and listen. Our little passenger is about to bring up something we can actually spend. ]
"We were sold," Han Ying said. "The whole sect, bought and bagged. The Second Prince has a hand around our throat, and he spends us on his squabbles in the capital like coin he never had to earn. Disciples died for it. A great many things happened that had no right to. So I turned my back, in the end."
"And what now?" Lin Zhen held the point of his blade where it hung. "You can’t crawl home to your sect after a night like this one."
"So I wander." A shrug rolled through the old shoulders. "I’ll scrape a living off the open road. The world is wide enough to swallow one tired man."
"And you imagine I ought to let you walk out of here breathing, after everything you have done?"
"If I hand over some of what I still carry up here," Han Ying tapped a finger to his temple, "I’d call that a fair toll for the road."
Lin Zhen’s expression stayed unbought, the blade unmoved. Xuan read the refusal hardening in his father’s jaw and stepped forward before it could set.
"Let him talk, Father. There might be something in it for us."
The patriarch weighed his son a beat and gave a curt nod. Han Ying inclined his head toward Xuan.
"My thanks, young master. That other mine of yours, the second one we took off you, it’s in a sorry state this very night. The Second Prince made his move, and the garrison’s been bled thin to feed an operation running close beside it. The fangs that ought to be guarding that ore are somewhere else entirely while we speak."
Xuan had the whole shape of it before the elder finished sketching the edges.
"Father." He turned, and the plan was already running cold and quick behind his eyes. "Let me go to the second mine. Tonight, while the door’s still swinging open. We take both of them back before the sun clears the ridge."
