Chapter 173: The Brother Who Drinks
The cold thing behind Wei Tianyu’s eyes did not blink, and Mu understood that the pleasantries were over and the work had begun.
He bowed, properly this time. The other face, the one that had never met this man, was no use to him now; the young prince had looked straight through it, and a tool that has been seen through only insults its owner if he keeps holding it up.
Tianyu leaned a shoulder against a column, the bottle hanging from two fingers like a thing he had forgotten he was carrying, and weighed Mu the way a man weighs an animal that has done its trick better than the price he paid for it.
"You handle him well," he said. "My brother. You leave him the parts of the night he needs in order to feel he won, and you carry the rest home in your sleeve. That is good work, and I would hate to lose it. So let me make sure I do not."
The wine had drained out of his voice. What replaced it was dry and exact, a tutor walking a slow pupil through a lesson he had taught many times.
"My brother goes on believing Blood Fang is his. Every coin, every elder, every blade. You will feed that the way you fed it tonight, and you will never let him feel the place where the leash actually runs. He is most useful to me furious and certain. A man who thinks the leash is in his fist spends all his wit on the dog and none of it on the hand. Keep him there. Fed, angry, and sure."
"It will hold, Your Highness," Mu said. "He has no cause to look, and I will give him none."
"Good. Now the other matter." Something moved in the young prince’s face, not warmth but attention, the first true attention he had spent all evening. "The boy. Lin Xuan."
He turned the bottle a slow quarter in his fingers.
"I called him a pawn once. In a room not so different from the one we just left, with you kneeling in it." His mouth curved, and for once there was nothing charming in the curve, only a flat honesty. "I was wrong. Pawns do not lift two mines off me and lay two of your elders in the ground inside one season. I misjudged him, elder, and I am telling you so to your face, because I have no intention of doing it twice, and I will not have a single man under me doing it either."
The bottle went still.
"So you will not move on him. Not a blade, not a coin, nothing he could feel on the back of his neck. The worst mistake I could make now is to teach a clever boy that someone of weight has started watching him. You will put eyes on him instead. Quiet ones. I want to know what he is before I decide what he is worth to me. What woke in that broken body, where it came from, how far it reaches. Bring me knowing. Not war."
"Everything on the boy comes to me." The smoothness in his voice was the smoothness of a man who had cut these channels before. "Not to my brother or any down road with my brother’s people standing on it. You send it the way you send my true correspondence, the same hand, the same mark. My brother keeps the east he expects, the mines, the revenge, the noise. I keep the rest. The day those two cross on one page, elder, it is the last page you ever send me."
"One hand, one mark," Mu answered. "He will never find the seam."
Now the young prince smiled with something close to pleasure, and that pleasure unsettled Mu more than the cold ever had.
"You want to know what I enjoy about all of this?" He pushed off the column without hurry. "My brother wants the throne so badly he can taste copper. The boy in the east wants to live and be left in peace. Every soul in this rotting palace wants something loudly enough to hear through the wall." The bottle rose in a lazy half-toast. "I only want to see how it ends. I find the watching suits me better than the winning ever could." He said it the way another man might own up to a weakness for a rare tea. "It makes me patient. And patience is the one thing not one of them will ever look for in the brother who drinks."
Down the colonnade a boot scraped stone, a guard drifting along his round. Mu caught it half a breath early, and watched the most unsettling thing he had witnessed all night.
The cold went out of Wei Tianyu like a lamp under a dropped cloth. Warmth flooded back into the eyes, the loose grin found his mouth, the spine gave way into its careless slouch, and the flush of wine climbed his throat again as though it had never once gone.
By the time the guard came round the pillar there was only a tipsy young prince propped on an old man’s shoulder, humming, murmuring something fond and slurred about the treachery of stairs.
The guard passed and walked on. Tianyu did not let it fall again. He came off Mu’s shoulder, drank from the bottle he never drank from, and drifted away down the colonnade with his wandering, wordless little tune trailing after him, a harmless drunk going wherever harmless drunks went before dawn.
He did not look back. Over his shoulder, light and bright and pitched for any ear that wanted it, he called, "Safe roads, old man. Mind the eastern ones. I hear they have turned interesting."
And Mu was alone in the cold with his orders, an old man in a grey robe in an empty colonnade, holding a name he had set down in his own ledger a season ago under the word unfinished. He had marked the boy first.
Tonight his master had marked him too. In forty years Mu had learned one reliable thing about a name that two careful men watched at the same time. It did not stay only a name for long.
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