Chapter 158: Choosing to Stay
Su Han’s wife turned a gentler look on Xuan than her husband had managed. "Take care of each other. An alliance lives on paper right up until the moment people start using it badly. Do not let this one rot into duty."
"We won’t," Qingyue said.
Madam Lin Hua stepped forward with a wrapped bundle held in both hands. "Lady Qingyue, this is for your room. Nothing formal, only bedding and a few small things from the storehouse. Silent Peak is not as ready for a guest as it ought to be."
Xuan glanced at her. "I feel there was an insult hidden somewhere in that."
"There was not," Lin Hua said at once.
"It was not hidden," Madam Yu said.
Qingyue accepted the bundle with both hands. "Thank you."
Madam Yu’s face warmed when it turned to the younger woman. "If anything is missing, tell Lian. If Lian cannot fix it, tell me. Do not wait for Xuan to notice. He is useful for a great many things, but I have seen the state of his room with my own eyes."
Xuan said nothing. On balance, it was safer for everyone in the courtyard.
Lin Zhen drew closer to Su Han. Whatever had passed between the two of them across the banquet and the long hours at the treaty table had left something steadier behind. Not friendship yet, not quite, but the first stones of a trust laid down by two men old enough to know how expensive trust could be, and how rarely it came back once it was spent.
"The first group from Frostmoon?" Lin Zhen asked.
"Within ten days," Su Han said. "Fifty disciples to begin with. Two instructors. More once I see how the roads choose to behave."
"Elder Min will have the guest quarters ready."
"My daughter has already readied hers, or so I’m told."
Qingyue did not look away. "I chose a room."
"You invaded a room," Su Han said.
"It was empty, so it was mine to take."
Xuan turned his attention to the Frostmoon banners and worked hard at looking like a man with no part whatsoever in the conversation.
Su Han let the joke go and crossed to his daughter for the part of the morning he had clearly been putting off. He pulled her into a brief embrace, and it came out awkward, the way these things did with her, because Qingyue held herself straight through most of it, spine like a blade that had forgotten how to bend. Just before he let go, her fingers closed once against the back of his sleeve. It was a small thing. For the two of them it counted as a great deal.
When he released her, he pressed two fingers to her forehead, some Frostmoon gesture Xuan did not recognize and knew better than to ask about. "Write, if the mountain turns dull."
"It will not."
"Write anyway."
"I will."
His wife embraced Qingyue after him, softer and longer. She murmured something close to her ear, too low for Xuan to catch, and Qingyue’s face did not change, though her eyes lowered for a breath before she lifted them again. Xuan looked elsewhere. Some goodbyes were not meant to have an audience.
There was nothing left to hold the morning open.
The Frostmoon party formed up along the head of the path. Servants shouldered the last of the cases, the elders fell into place along the flanks, and Su Han looked once at Lin Zhen, once at Xuan, and last of all at his daughter, as though counting the three of them into an order he could carry down the mountain with him.
"Ten days," he said. "Try not to let Skyedge bore her before then."
"I doubt that will be a problem," Qingyue answered.
Xuan could not decide whether to feel insulted or precisely described, and let it pass without comment.
The Frostmoon banners began their slow way down the path, pale blue swallowed bend by bend into the grey of the lower slope. Qingyue watched the thread of them go, unhurried, until the last of the colour slipped from sight past the lower turn. Her face held the whole way down. Only her hands gave anything away, folded a shade tighter inside her sleeves than they had been a breath before.
Xuan stood beside her and did not crowd the quiet with words that would only get in the way. He had learned that much, at least. Some quiet was not his to break, and a woman watching her family shrink to a blue speck on a mountain road had earned hers.
After a while, she spoke. "It feels strange."
"Staying?"
"Choosing to stay." She drew the distinction like it weighed something to her, because it did.
He looked off toward the empty road. "You can still change your mind."
"I know." She turned her back on the place where the banners had gone and faced the mountain rising behind them instead, all grey stone and worn stairs and the long climb up to a peak that was no longer quite the wreck it had been a season ago. "That is why I will not."
They started back up toward Silent Peak together, Lian trailing a few steps behind with Lin Hua’s bundle in her arms and a look that promised she had already found at least three more things wrong with Qingyue’s room and was sorting them by severity. For a sect heir who left frost on the floorboards wherever she stood, Xuan thought, she was about to learn exactly how spartan a once-rotting peak could be.
For all of ten steps, it was almost peaceful.
At the edge of Xuan’s vision, a panel bloomed.
[ Xuan. ]
He nearly sighed. ’What?’
Mira’s voice slid in, dry and without a gram of pity in it.
[ Now that everyone has finished hugging and waving and being moved at one another, you and I need to have a very serious talk about how catastrophically poor you are right now. (¬‿¬) ]
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