Chapter 177: Family, After All
The bottle gave out somewhere past the hour of the rat, and Tianyu turned it upside down over his mouth to prove it, chasing the last amber bead onto his tongue with the tragic dignity of a man at a graveside.
"Well." He peeled himself off the couch in stages, rising like a foal that did not trust its own legs. "That is my cue. A dead bottle is the gods telling a man to go and find a livelier room." He grinned. "There is a girl at the Plum Door who has been swearing for a month she will teach me a southern song. I have decided tonight is the night I let her fail at it."
The Second Prince, looser himself than he had been in months, surprised them both.
"Wait. Before you go." He crossed to the writing table, lifted a brush, and inked a short line onto a slip in his own hand. "I will send a few of mine along to the Plum Door behind you. Some of the dancers from the western house. Call it a gift."
Tianyu blinked at him, and for once the astonishment on his face asked for no acting at all.
"Who are you, and what have you done with my brother?" He laughed, delighted and lost. "Truly, what has gotten into you today? You do not send me gifts. You send me lectures and a tally of my unpaid debts. What happened?"
The Second Prince came close to laughing too, and what answered was nearer to honesty than anything he had spent all night.
"It has been a long day." He laid the brush down. "A long year, if I am being truthful with you. And the days ahead are going to run longer than this one, and far bloodier, and once they begin I will not have an idle hour to spend on wine, or women, or my own brother, for a long while. So I find I would sooner pass tonight enjoying what is in front of me than glaring at a map until dawn." He folded the slip into Tianyu’s hand. "Take the girls. Drink the wine. One of us should still remember how, before the world turns serious on us."
Tianyu closed his fingers around the paper and pressed it to his heart like a love letter.
"Now that is the brother I grew up with." He was already drifting toward the door, the empty bottle swinging from two fingers. "And I will pay the kindness back, since we have both gone generous tonight. I will send a few of my own your way, brother. The very best ones. The ones I keep for myself." He winked. "You work too hard. Let someone unknot you for an evening."
"My thanks," the Second Prince said, and to his own faint surprise, found that he meant it.
And the youngest son of Tianheng took his leave the way he took all things, lightly, humming that wandering little tune without any words to it, a harmless drunk weaving away down the corridor toward a bottle and a bed and a girl who would never get her song finished.
He held the weave in his walk until the last of his brother’s guards had dropped away behind him. The humming carried him around two corners and out through a courtyard where the cold dawn air finally reached his face, and by the time he stepped into the long colonnade, there was nothing drunk left anywhere in him.
Wei Tianyu turned the little slip over in his fingers, his brother’s hand inked black and certain across it, and let himself, in the quiet of his own skull, the first honest thought of the night.
’The very best ones. The ones I keep for myself.’
He had not lied about that. He would send his brother the finest he had. He simply kept a different measure of fine than the one his brother had in mind.
The girls who would arrive at the Second Prince’s door in a day or two would be lovely, and quick, and warm, and every one of them would be Tianyu’s own, raised and trained for precisely this. They would laugh at his jokes and refill his cup and curl against him in the dark, and they would keep him soft. Flattered, unhurried, his vices fed and his guard down, well content with the company in his bed and blind to the brother who drank.
And between the laughing and the wine, they would talk. A worried little whisper here, a rumor half caught at some other lord’s table there, always something that grazed the one nerve his brother could never leave alone. What the eastern clans were saying now.
Which rival had grinned a shade wider than he should have this week. Nothing a girl could be blamed for repeating, and nothing his brother could let lie. He would lie awake on it. He would wake reaching for a brush, redrawing plans that wanted no redrawing, doubling guards, hunting shadows that Tianyu’s own people had painted on the wall the night before. A man could be worn to the bone simply by being handed, in soft company, more directions to look than one mind could hold at once.
His brother had asked for a knife in the east and called it owning a sect. Tonight he had asked for women in his bed and called it a gift between brothers. The man kept pressing the keys to his own house into Tianyu’s hand and thanking him warmly for carrying them off.
Tianyu slid the slip into his sleeve, alongside an older and colder list of things that wanted doing, and lifted his face toward the thin grey rumor of morning gathering at the rim of the sky.
The wine houses could keep. The girl at the Plum Door could fail at her song some other night. He had told his brother a kind of truth there as well, because he did mean to go and see someone before he let himself sleep.
Family, after all. It had been a long time since he had spent a quiet hour with his father, only the two of them, with no physicians hovering and no court bending an ear, to say the things a devoted son keeps back for his father alone.
He turned, not toward the outer gates and the wine and the music, but inward, toward the sealed heart of the palace, where an emperor lay dying by the inch and could no longer so much as turn his own head upon the pillow.
And Wei Tianyu went to call on his father, humming under his breath, with the dawn coming up grey and patient at his back.
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