Chapter 175: The Question
He laid it out the way a man recites a story he has told himself a thousand nights in the dark.
Their father had three months left in him, perhaps fewer. He had named no heir and never would, because naming one was a confession that he was leaving, and the Emperor had never once in his life admitted to leaving a room, let alone the world.
So when the last breath went out of the old man, the empire would not pass to anyone. It would be taken. The only question worth a coin was whose hand would be closed around it when the moment came.
"Mm," Tianyu said to the ceiling. "Sounds exhausting."
The prince ignored that and went on, because he had not started talking for his brother’s benefit. He talked about the northern armies he held, the grain he had stockpiled, the generals he had bought through three sets of hands.
He talked about the eldest, who could not refine a drop of Qi and would not last a season on a throne that ran on strength. He talked about their sister, who had been a real threat until a single letter went astray and cost her half her court in a week.
Tianyu refilled his cup, slopping a little, and turned the bottle in the lamplight as if the answer to something floated in it.
"You know Father never named that grey mare he loved? The quick one." He squinted at nothing. "Said a name only tells the gods which one you would weep over, so he never gave her one, and she died a nameless horse in a stall." A loose shrug rolled through him. "He will not name an heir for the same reason. Naming the chair you mean to keep just shows the whole room where to shove." He drank. "Goes to whoever is already in the chair when he stops breathing, anyway. Everyone else is furniture turning up late to a house that already has an owner."
The Second Prince looked at his brother a long while.
"Yes," he said slowly. "That is exactly it. That is the precise thing every fool circling this throne cannot grasp. It will not be handed down. It will be held." He had carried that thought alone in this room for a hundred nights, and hearing it climb out of a wine cup pleased and disquieted him at once. "I have said it to myself in nearly those words."
"There you go." Tianyu beamed, pleased to have been agreed with about something, the way a dog is pleased without knowing why. "Hold the chair. Very wise. I can barely hold my drink."
The prince almost smiled, and went back to the board, warmer to it now. He spoke of the factions, of which great clans were waiting to see which way the wind leaned before they spent a son on it, of his sister gone quiet in her wing of the palace.
"Quiet." Tianyu rolled the word around with the wine. "Everybody frets about the loudest brother. The one shouting in council. The one buying his generals where the whole court can watch him do it. But loud is only frightened, is it not? A man sure of his hand never feels the need to show it." He yawned hugely and scratched his jaw. "If I were you, brother, I would not waste one breath on whoever is asking for things. I would watch the one in this family who has stopped asking for anything at all. That is the one who already decided he does not need to."
The Second Prince put his cup down.
"You are drunk," he said, "and you are not wrong." It came out quieter than he meant it. He had thought exactly this about his sister, that her new quiet was worse than any noise she had ever made, and here was the thought again, handed back to him across a couch by a boy too soft to use it. "The dangerous one is never the one making demands. I have built my whole reading of this court on that single line."
"Have you." Tianyu’s eyes had gone glassy and fond again. "Smart. You were always the smart one. I got the face, you got the head. Poor Father got neither, in the end."
The joke slid off the prince without catching. He refilled his own cup this time, and looked at his brother with something he had not pointed at the boy in years.
The boy was a ruin, and would go on being a ruin until the wine finally stopped his heart. But a ruin who could read the board this clearly with half a bottle in him was a ruin who could be aimed, and more than that, he was the one thing in this rotted court the prince could be sure of.
Blood.
He had spent fifteen years writing the boy off as a stain on the family name, a soft thing to be married into some border house and forgotten. He saw now that he had been wasteful with him.
Even a stain owned a vote when the throne came open, and a vote already his by blood cost a great deal less than one he would have to buy. When the bells finally tolled for their father, the men who counted would tally which siblings stood where, and a brother at his shoulder, drunk or sober, was a brother not standing at someone else’s.
"Tianyu." The prince turned his cup slowly between his fingers, choosing his words with more care than he had spent all night. "When that morning comes, and it is coming, this family is going to break into pieces, and every piece will be asked the same question. Which brother do you kneel to." He let the words hang in the lamplight. "I am going to need to know, well before that day, where it is you will be standing."
His brother gazed up at him, slow and unfocused, a man trying to follow a sentence that had wandered somewhere out past his reach.
And the Second Prince of Tianheng leaned in across the little table to make his useless, harmless, blood-bound little brother an offer.
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