Chapter 168: A Private Understanding
The two guards had the good sense not to move.
Wei Tianlong looked at the ruin of porcelain across his floor, then at the men frozen in his doorway, and felt the heat in his chest bank back down to its usual low, even burn.
The display was beneath him; he had known it before the cup left his hand. A prince who let a ledger crack his composure was a prince who would let worse things crack it later, and he had spent twenty-eight years making certain there were no worse things in his life to crack it.
The cup had felt good, even so. He allowed himself that much.
"Leave it," he said, to no one and everyone. "And walk with me."
He rose in one motion, the open ledger left face-up where it lay, and crossed to the doors with the unhurried stride of a man who had never once needed to hurry toward anything. The attendant fell in at his shoulder. The guards peeled out of his way and found other places to put their eyes.
The corridors of the western residence were waking under the grey light, lamps burning along the lacquered walls, servants pressing themselves flat to the panels and bowing to the boards as he passed. He moved through them the way water moves down a channel cut for it, taking no notice, expecting none returned.
The residence was his to the last roof tile, given to him by a father who had given his other children smaller things and called it fairness. Wei Tianlong had never minded the lie. A man who needed the gift to be fair was a man who did not intend to take the rest of it for himself.
"Tell me again," he said. "And this time give me the part you folded inside the word ’both.’"
"Your Highness?"
"You told me Skyedge had taken back two galleries as if the two weighed the same." He did not slow. "One is a hole in the ground that prints silver. The other is the only place under heaven the Dragonvein comes out of. You handed me ’both’ and let the word carry past the single gallery that actually bleeds me. Say that one aloud."
A breath from the attendant, the breath of a man who had hoped the word would do his work for him. "The Dragonvein seam, Your Highness. It changed hands with the rest of the mountain."
Wei Tianlong said nothing for the length of a corridor.
He had not raised the armies of the north out of sentiment. Men cost grain, grain cost silver, and a blade in each fist of a hundred thousand men cost metal that did not come back once it had been spent.
The Dragonvein did not rust, did not fatigue, did not fail at the guard where a lesser steel would shear apart. There was a single seam of it under heaven, and heaven, in what he had taken for a quiet understanding between the two of them, had set that seam inside a mountain held by a sect far too broken to lift it.
He had been drinking from it for two years, through hands that ran nowhere near his own, hoarding against the season the old man three halls away finally let go of the world.
And a half-dead boy and his cripple of a father had lifted the cup right off his lips.
"How much of it was already cut and stacked?" he asked.
"Near a year’s draw was still in the under-vaults when the mountain changed hands, Your Highness. It changed hands with the mountain."
So the boy had not only shut the tap. He had walked off with the cistern. The prince filed the figure away without letting it reach his face, and turned the older question over instead, the one that had been gnawing at him since the cup.
"How does a sect I personally arranged to leave bleeding in a ditch find the legs to tear back two mines inside one moon?"
"The same boy, Your Highness." The attendant set each word down the way a man sets his weight on river ice. "The one the first reports wrote off as cursed and dying. He lived. He took the Crown of Yuncheng this season, and by every account it was his plan that clawed the mines back, not the patriarch’s."
A short sound left the prince, not quite a laugh. "The Crown of Yuncheng." He turned the words over with the mild distaste of a man told the rat in his cellar had won a ribbon. "A regional bracket. Worn-out pavilion masters and sect darlings drilling the same forms until a crowd mistakes the rehearsal for art. One cursed boy walks through that and a whole province decides the heavens have spoken. The east has always confused a loud season for a change in its fortunes."
The corridor gave onto a covered walk above the gardens, the city beyond the wall half-drowned in the grey before sunrise. He stopped at the rail and looked out over the slate roofs running down toward the palace proper, toward the hall where an emperor was spending the last of his months refusing to say which of his children would be left holding the wreckage.
It would be him. He had stopped wondering about that years ago. The eldest could not refine a drop of Qi and would not last a season on a throne that ran on strength. The third had been a genuine problem until a single intercepted letter cost her half her court in a week, and she had been licking that wound ever since. The board had three pieces that could not move and one that could. He had only ever been waiting for the bell.
"Three months," he said, half to the city. "Perhaps fewer. And on the morning it rings for my father, every regional sect from this wall to the eastern sea will look up and decide which of us is worth kneeling to. I had meant Skyedge to be a closed question long before that bell. A name already in my hand, a seam already in my stores." His fingers spread once against the cold stone. "Instead I hold an empty gallery and a boy with a ribbon, and the east will whisper that the Second Prince let his grip slip in a backwater while he was looking the other way."
"That part need not leave the residence, Your Highness," the attendant offered.
"Everything leaves the residence." He said it without heat, a man reciting a law of the world to a child. "The only question is what it has turned into by the time it reaches a room that counts."
He pushed off the rail.
"I have indulged the long way around for two years," he said, starting back along the walk. "Letters. Coin moved through three pairs of hands. A first wife planted in their own house, a son turned against his own blood, an elder waiting on their own road. I bought every quiet knife the ground allowed me. Every last one of them is buried or beyond my reach now, and the mountain is back under the patriarch’s boot. The patient road has run out of road."
"Then what would you have us do, Your Highness?"
The prince weighed the grey city one breath longer, and the answer arrived in him whole, the way answers tended to once he had stopped being angry enough to chase one.
"Bring me Mu."
The attendant’s step caught for half a beat. "Elder Mu does not come to the capital, Your Highness. The arrangement has always run the other way. Lord Zhao carries the word out to him."
"The arrangement is whatever I decide it is this morning." He did not lift his voice. He had never needed to. "Blood Fang has let a sect I bled for two years haul itself off the floor and dust its robes. An elder of theirs will stand in this residence and account for it to my face, on the coin I paid for it, and he will tell me what they intend to do about the boy. Send word east today. I want Mu here, on his own two legs, inside the week."
"He will not take kindly to being summoned," the attendant said, with great care.
A thin curve touched the prince’s mouth, the nearest thing to pleasure his face had worn since the cup.
"No," he agreed. "He will not."
He turned back toward his study and the ledgers waiting in the grey, and gave the order with a flick of two fingers. Before the sun had cleared the outer wall, a rider would be on the eastern road carrying a summons no elder of Blood Fang had ever been handed, and the Second Prince of Tianheng would be back at his desk, untroubled, certain of how the season ended and whose hand was on the knife when it did.
He was certain of a great many things that week. He would be wrong about almost all of them.
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