Chapter 172: Paint
The room had not warmed by a single degree, and now there was a drunk prince on the couch enjoying it.
Mu kept his hands folded and his face the face of a man who had never once met the young fellow in front of him, which was the hardest piece of work his trade had asked of him in years.
Wei Tianyu made himself comfortable the way a cat makes itself comfortable on a document someone is trying to read. He took a long pull from the bottle, grimaced, and held it up to the lamp as if the brandy had let him down on a personal level.
"Brother, this is an insult. Truly. I have drunk better off the back of a cart." He dropped the bottle to his knee and flapped a loose hand at the map pinned under its bronze weights. "And that. Gods, what is that, the eastern border? Who drew it? It looks like a man bled on a tablecloth."
The Second Prince did not glance at the map. He looked at his brother with the flat patience of a man counting the reasons not to do something he would enjoy.
"You’re drunk."
"I’m always drunk. It is the one thing about me you can rely on." Tianyu smiled, bright and easy, and tipped the bottle toward Mu across the room. "You look like you need this more than I do, old man. You have gone awfully pale. Has my brother been frightening you? He does that. It is mostly posture."
Mu dipped his head a fraction, the polite confusion of a servant spoken to out of turn, and held his tongue. Inside, he filed the line away with the others. ’Mostly posture.’ Two words, dropped like a coin a man did not want in his pocket, and they handed the whole room the verdict of the youngest brother on the eldest: theatre. No one at this table was meant to hear that. Only one person had said it as though it cost him nothing at all.
The Second Prince had clearly decided the evening was finished. No man could hold a conversation about buried mines and dead elders with his little brother draped across the furniture, narrating it.
"We are done for tonight, elder." He did not lift his voice; he never had to. "You will have the rest of what I want from you before you leave the capital. Someone will find you."
Mu rose, gave the bow the moment asked of him, and turned to go.
"Oh, let me, let me." Tianyu was off the couch before anyone had asked him for a thing, bottle swinging, the very soul of helpfulness. "I will walk the old fellow out. These halls are a maze after dark, brother, and I know every wrong turn in them by heart. I have taken all of them on the way home." He was already drifting across the room, herding Mu toward the corridor with the loose, friendly authority of a man too drunk to be argued with. "Come on, come on. Let me get you to a gate where the guard will not want to go through your sleeves."
The Second Prince looked at the pair of them, his humiliating brother and the sect elder he wanted out of his house, and visibly decided that being rid of both in one stroke was worth more than the dignity of doing it himself.
"By all means," he said. "See him out."
The doors closed behind them, and the western residence folded the two of them into its lamplit dark.
Tianyu kept the act up the first length of corridor, humming some wandering little tune under his breath, a tune with no words to it, tossing Mu the occasional bright nothing about the wine, the hour, a girl whose name he had clearly already mislaid.
A pair of guards held the turn ahead. He hailed them, butchered one man’s name on purpose, laughed at himself for it. They eased. The youngest prince, drunk again.
Mu played his part and waited. He had served this man’s voice for two years from the wrong side of a screen of white silk, and he knew, the way a fisherman knows the change in a wind, that the performance would end the instant the last witness dropped away behind them.
They turned into a colonnade with no one in it, the city a scatter of far lamps beyond the open arches, and the humming stopped between one note and the next.
It was not a slow thing. No sigh. No squaring of the shoulders, no little performance of putting a performance down. The wine-flush at his throat was simply gone, the way a coat of paint is gone the moment you learn it was paint, and the loose warmth that had filled his eyes an instant before drained out of them and left behind something that did not drink, had never drunk, and considered Mu with the patient interest of a man turning over an instrument he already owned.
"’I do not waste good knives.’" Wei Tianyu said it softly. "’I forge the next one.’"
It was the same light voice the whole capital had agreed not to take seriously, and there was not one grain of wine left in it. He turned Mu’s own words over in the dark, the words Mu had spoken in a sealed room before this drunk prince had supposedly tripped through its door, and he smiled, and the smile had teeth behind it now.
"That was very good, elder. I heard all of it, from the first lie to the last. I do so enjoy watching you work."
Mu, who managed princes for a living, who had buried his own elders without losing an hour of sleep and crossed the tightest watch the capital had worn in a generation that same night without a flicker, felt his pulse change in his chest.
The man his brother had just waved out of the room like a drunk child had stood at the door of a sealed council, listened to every word, and chosen the precise moment to walk in.
Here, in the empty colonnade, with no silk between them and no one left to perform for, Mu understood the thing he had always half known and never let himself hold: that he was, and had always been, the smaller man standing in the dark.
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