Chapter 171: Don’t Mind Me
The prince let the quiet work for him a breath before he spent his first question, the way a man lets a blade warm in his hand before the first cut.
"Two years," he said. "Two years of my silver poured east through hands I will never speak aloud, and a regional sect I had bled to its knees stands taller this season than it stood the last. A boy I paid to keep crippled took a tournament and emptied two of my mines into his own vaults. So before you tell me whose fault it was, elder, answer me one thing. Did my coin buy me a sect, or did it buy me a very expensive way to lose one?"
Mu let the question rest on him with the weight a loyal servant would give it, and answered it the way he answered everything dangerous, by agreeing with the part that cost him nothing.
"You bought a sect, Your Highness. I will not insult you by pretending that sect did not fail you." He bowed his head a fraction, showing the exact amount of contrition he had decided the room required. "But the failure did not begin at the second mine, nor even at the first. It began earlier, with a man whose death has already charged him the only price the field accepts."
"Cao Yan."
"Yes, Your Highness. Cao Yan was the first crack. Fifteen years of work, discipline, and useful cruelty, wasted because he rode east with an order in one hand and a grudge in the other, and somewhere on that road he forgot which one we had sent him to use. He went hunting the patriarch’s bloodline instead of guarding the pressure we had built around the patriarch’s purse. That mistake did not lose both mines by itself, but it loosened the hand Blood Fang had around Skyedge’s throat."
"And the second mine?"
"Han Ying inherited a post already weakened, under a sect that chose this season, of every season it owned, to find its spine." Mu opened one hand, a small concession to the unkindness of weather. "Two losses, Your Highness. One began with a dead man’s appetite. The other ended with a traitor standing on ground already turning against him. Neither of them proves the disloyalty of Blood Fang, which remains yours, and which is the whole reason I climbed your mountain on my own legs rather than send you a letter and a bow."
"Convenient." The prince’s voice did not climb. "A sect whose every failure can be hung on a corpse is a sect that has learned to keep a corpse within reach."
"Cao Yan was no corpse of convenience, Your Highness. He was fifteen years of investment, and I would have him breathing again if breathing were on offer." Mu held the gold stare without leaning into it. "I do not waste good knives. I bury them when they break, and then I forge the next one."
The prince weighed that for a long count, the gold of his eyes giving nothing back. Mu had set the bait with care. A failure the man could believe in, a loyalty he wanted to believe in, and a road leading away from the question that gnawed at every humiliated lord, which was never who failed me but always what do we do now. He watched the prince’s jaw loosen to ask the second one.
The door at the far end of the room opened without a knock.
It opened the way a door opens for a man who has never once in his life wondered whether he was allowed through it. No guard announced him. No guard, Mu understood in the same breath, had found the nerve to try.
The young man who came through it wore the wreckage of a long night he had not yet finished, an outer robe slung half off one shoulder, the sash gone slack, the collar open at a throat that still carried the warm flush of wine. He was handsome in the careless fashion that emptied the purses of merchant daughters and the good sense of older women, a face built for lamplight and poor decisions, and he carried a tall porcelain bottle by its neck in two fingers, swinging it a little as he came, as if the war room were one more parlour and he had only wandered in looking for a better one.
Mu’s whole body went calm in the particular way it went calm only near the genuinely dangerous, and he kept every grain of that calm off his face. The Second Prince looked at the youngest of his brothers and saw an inconvenience. Mu looked at the same man and felt the floor of the conversation quietly drop out from under it, though he would have died before he let his hands unfold from his lap to say so.
Across the table, the prince’s cold focus curdled into the flat irritation of an elder brother who has found the baby of the family somewhere he has no business standing. He drew breath to say as much.
The young prince got there first. He raised the bottle a few inches, a small toast to no one in particular, and smiled the easy, unbothered smile of a man who had never once read a room he did not already own.
"Oh, don’t let me interrupt."
His voice arrived soft and light and almost too pleasant for the cold hanging in the room, a young man’s voice with something nearly feminine worn over it like a coat borrowed for the evening, the voice half the capital knew from the upper floors of its wine houses three nights out of every seven. He waved the bottle in a slow circle that took in the map, the prince, the old man in grey, the whole grim little council, and found a couch along the wall, and folded onto it without waiting to be offered a seat.
"Truly. Don’t mind me." He propped the bottle on one knee and tipped his head back against the cushions, eyes half closed, the picture of a man settling in to enjoy a show he had paid good money for. "You were in the middle of something serious, by the look of all these faces. Please. Carry on."
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