Chapter 174: A Trick of the Lamp
The Second Prince stood over his map and let the quiet of the emptied room cool his temper, which had not improved at being made to share his own war council with a drunk.
The doors opened again without a knock. He did not need to look up to know which of his siblings owned that particular shortage of manners.
Tianyu drifted back in, bottle swinging, and tipped a long swallow of it down his throat as he came, the very picture of a man returning from nothing more pressing than a visit to the gardens to relieve himself.
"There." He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. "Sent your guest out the way he came in. Strange little fellow." He let himself down onto the arm of a couch and squinted, as though trying to place the old man’s face in some memory and failing. "Poor thing looks like he sleeps in a coffin and pays rent on it. Where do you find them, brother? Truly. Do you keep a cellar somewhere with a sign on it?"
The Second Prince crossed the room before his brother had finished talking.
He did not plan the blow. His hand simply made the decision for him, the way it had made the decision about the teacup, and the flat of it caught Tianyu across the cheek with a crack that bounced off the lacquered walls and rang out in the bare room.
"Let that be the last time you interrupt me, brother of mine." His voice did not climb. "I was holding business in this room that decides things you will never be sober enough to follow, and you wandered into it as if it were a wine hall. The next time you shame me in my own house, I may forget you are our father’s son."
Tianyu’s head went with the slap and came back slowly. A red bloom was already rising along his cheekbone.
And he was smiling.
It was a small thing, hardly a pull at one corner of his mouth, gone almost before it arrived, but the Second Prince had read faces in this palace his whole life, and he caught it. For half a breath it was the wrong smile for a drunk who had just been struck by a man who could snap him in two. It was the smile of something else. Something that had allowed itself to be hit.
The Second Prince blinked.
And there was only his brother, one hand creeping up to cradle his reddening face, eyes wet and unfocused and wounded, gazing up at him with the soft, stunned hurt of a boy slapped by someone he had trusted not to.
The Second Prince let the unease move through him and out the other side, the way a man releases a creak in an old house at night. He was tired. The hour was wretched, his father was rotting toward death three halls away, and he had spent the small hours being lied to with great courtesy by a sect elder.
A flicker of the lamp. A flicker of his own frayed nerves, nothing more. His brother was precisely what his brother had always been. The soft one. The wasted one. The one the court tittered about behind their fans.
"Gods, you strike like Father used to." Tianyu worked his jaw from side to side and grinned through the wince, pressing the rising welt with two careful fingers. "He always had the better excuse, mind. A tutor I had made weep, a lesson I had skipped for the wine houses." He hissed at his own touch and beamed at it like a prize. "I am going to feel this one over breakfast, brother. You should be proud."
The prince let the noise wash past him.
"Pour me a cup," the prince said, the heat in him sinking into something heavier and more useful. "Since you have made my night your concern, you can keep me company while I rescue what is left of it."
Tianyu brightened at once, the slap forgotten the way a small child forgets a scolding. He poured, slopping a measure over the rim, and pressed the cup into his brother’s hand before retreating to the couch with his own bottle hugged against his chest.
"You work yourself half to death, you know that?" He drank. "All these maps and midnight visitors. Father is the one with one foot in the grave, and yet here you are looking more like a corpse than he does." A bright, careless grin. "So what is it tonight? Did somebody walk off with a province? Did your eastern dogs miss a payment?"
The Second Prince held his brother over the rim of the cup, and concluded, as he concluded every time, that there was nothing in the boy to fear. A man could think aloud in front of furniture, and his youngest brother was a soft and harmless piece of it, draped across the couch waiting to be told it was clever.
"Something close to that," he said. He turned back to the map, to the long northern roads and the sealed eastern passes and the capital sitting at the heart of it like a stone in a fist. "Tell me, Tianyu. How much do you truly understand about what becomes of this family the morning the old man finally lets go of the world?"
His brother blinked up at him, glassy and fond and uncomprehending, and said something about needing more wine before a question that large.
The Second Prince did not catch the flicker a second time. He had already explained the first one away. And so the second son of the Emperor refilled his drunk little brother’s cup with his own hand, and began, with the slow patience of a man walking a simpleton through his letters, to lay out the whole board of the empire for the one player at the table who had memorized it long before either of them was born.
Comments