Chapter 176: Your Favorite
"Let me speak plainly, since the wine has us both honest." The prince pitched his voice low and warm, the voice he kept for men he wanted something from. "When our father goes, and the rest of them start tearing at one another, I am going to win. I have spent ten years making certain of it. You know that about me."
"I know you have never lost at anything in your life." Tianyu raised his bottle in tribute. "It is deeply annoying. You would not even let me win at stones when we were boys."
"You would have known if I had let you. That is the entire point." A thin smile. "Stand with me, Tianyu. That is all I am asking. I am not fool enough to want a sword from you, or one single soldier. I want your name on my side of the table when the day comes, where the great clans can see it sitting there. Give me that, and I will keep you in wine and silk and pretty company until you are an old man too fat to climb the stairs to your own bed. Your debts cleared. Your houses kept. Nothing left to do in this life but enjoy it, under a brother who remembers exactly who stood where."
Tianyu listened to the whole of it with his head tipped back against the cushions and his eyes half shut, and for a while he gave no answer at all. He turned the bottle in slow circles against his knee.
"That is a generous offer," he said finally, and he sounded, for once in the evening, almost sober. "Truly, brother. Wine and silk and soft company until I die round and content. You have just described the sum total of my ambitions in a single breath."
The prince let himself taste the front edge of satisfaction, and drew the breath to close the thing.
"But I cannot," Tianyu said softly, before the words could leave him.
The words came out almost sad. He rolled his head along the cushion to look at his brother, and his eyes had gone drunkenly, helplessly earnest.
"You are asking me to choose. And I cannot choose, brother, I am not built for it. I have a big brother who used to carry me on his shoulders so I could see over the crowd at the lantern festivals. I have a big sister who broke a tutor’s fingers once for laying a switch across my hand. And I have you, who put me on my first horse and never once told Father which of us cracked his good hunting bow." He laid a hand flat on his own chest, over the heart, with the clumsy solemnity of a man three bottles deep. "I love the three of you the very same. I always have. You want me to stand on one side of a line and watch the other two of you standing on the far side of it, and I cannot do it. It would break my heart right down the middle. Do not ask me to name which of you I love enough to help you ruin the other two."
The Second Prince stared at him.
Part of him wanted to laugh out loud. It was the most naive thing he had heard said aloud in this palace in ten years, the politics of a small child, of a man who grasped nothing of how a throne changed hands or how quietly a body could fill a ditch. Out of any other mouth at this court, it would have been a stall so thin you could read a newspaper through it.
But this was Tianyu. And from Tianyu, gods help the boy, it carried the ring of something true. The boy did love everyone. The boy had wept over a dead falcon at nine and gotten himself blind drunk at both their uncles’ funerals and never once in his life taken a side in anything harder than which house had the better musicians.
Of course he could not choose between his own blood. He had never chosen anything. Choosing was the single act this soft creature had spent his whole life sliding out from under.
So the prince did not push. Leaning on a sentimental drunk only made him weep, and a weeping brother was no use to any cause. And he had what he came for regardless.
A brother who could not make himself choose was a brother who would not be choosing against him either, and a neutral vote of royal blood weighed nearly as heavy as a loyal one once the clans began to count heads.
He eased back, let the warmth flood his face again, and reached across to fill his brother’s cup with his own hand.
"All right," he said. "All right. I will not ask you to crack that tender heart open tonight." The fondness in it was not entirely manufactured. "But hear me on this one thing, little brother. The door here, at my side, is open. It stays open. Whatever you choose, or never get around to choosing, there is always a place behind me for you when the bells ring. You have only to walk through it." He touched the rim of his cup to the neck of Tianyu’s bottle. "That is more than I have offered a living soul in this family. It is a great deal more than any of them would ever offer you."
Tianyu’s whole face cracked open into a wide, wet, grateful grin, and he knocked his bottle against the cup hard enough to slosh wine over both their wrists.
"See, this. This is why you are my favorite." He pointed an unsteady finger. "Do not tell the other two." He laughed, thoroughly delighted with himself, and drank to seal a bargain that was nothing of the sort.
The Second Prince watched him swallow and felt, for the first hour all night, that the evening had not been a total loss.
He had walked into this room short two mines and a sect’s worth of leverage over the east. He would walk out of it having quietly slipped the one brother nobody else had thought worth courting into his own pocket.
He had no notion that he was the one who had been courted. No notion at all that the door he had just flung wide, with his own mouth, at his own side, opened onto something he would have cut his own hand off to keep bolted shut.
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