Chapter 227: Open the Gate
Boots, a lot of them, coming up from the lower rings.
Xuan got his hand around Marrow Dragon’s grip and found that his hand had opinions about it. His ribs ground when he breathed. There was no qi anywhere in him, only the dry ache where it used to live.
’The pill. If I take it now—’
[ Absolutely not. ] Mira cut him off flat. [ Crossing a stage isn’t swallowing a sweet. Your body locks up while it beds in, and you’d spend the next hour flat on your back and drooling in the middle of a fortress that wants you dead. It sits safe in the inventory and that’s where it stays until there’s a door between us and this war. ]
’Understood.’
Xinhua limped over, one hand pressed to her side, blood drying black down half her face, and came to the same arithmetic he had.
"Neither of us can fight our way to that gatehouse."
"No." Xuan crouched by Cang Yuwen’s body, wincing all the way down, and worked something free from the dead man’s belt. A heavy bronze token on a chain, the Cang sigil cut deep into it, the commander’s authority of Northreach in a lump of metal. "So let’s not fight."
Her eyebrow went up. "That’s his seal."
"This fortress just lost the only man allowed to tell it what to do." He straightened, hung the chain around his neck, and let it sit where anyone running past would see it first. "Two thousand men out there have no orders and no commander and a great deal of noise coming from every direction. Frightened men don’t check credentials. They obey whoever sounds certain."
Xinhua’s laugh came out cracked and delighted. "You’re going to bluff a garrison."
"I’m going to give it a job."
The first company that came pounding into the ruined yard found a bloodied officer with the general’s seal on his chest, standing over the wreckage, pointing east and barking like a man whose patience had died an hour ago.
"Where in all hells have you been? The princess broke for the east wall with a dozen of her people, the general’s gone after them, and every company in this fortress is to seal the east ring, now, before she gets over it!" He jabbed the token at their captain. "Move! You want to explain to Cang Yuwen why she walked out of his fortress?"
They ran east.
The second ran east. The third he sent to the river gate, because two thousand men running in two wrong directions beat two thousand running in one.
"You realize," Xinhua murmured, hobbling at his shoulder as the yard emptied around them, "that you just moved an entire garrison off a wall with a piece of jewelry and a bad temper."
"Everybody’s very obedient in the dark when someone’s shouting."
They made the second gatehouse in a hundred limping paces. The winch crew were at their posts yet, since nobody had told them otherwise, and Xinhua handled them with the last dregs at the bottom of her core: a whisper of frost across the floor, boots welded to stone, six very confused soldiers frozen where they stood. She leaned on the doorframe afterward and breathed like a woman who’d run up a mountain.
"That’s me finished," she said. "Genuinely. There’s nothing left in there."
"Then we do it the mortal way."
The counterweights hung on two great iron levers, and the mechanism was built for four strong men with qi in them. They had one broken-ribbed swordsman and one emptied princess. Xuan got his shoulder under the first lever and shoved, and something in his chest screamed, and the lever moved a hand’s width and stopped.
Xinhua threw her weight against it beside him without being asked.
They pushed together, teeth locked, foreheads nearly touching, two bloodied wrecks leaning on a bar of iron, and the counterweight groaned, tipped, and fell.
Somewhere far below them, chain thundered through housings the size of a horse, and the main gate of Northreach ground open into the night.
Xuan hauled himself to the arrow slit and shoved the signal flare through it, and a streak of green fire went up over the fortress and burst above the valley, bright enough to throw shadows on the hills.
The hills answered.
They came down out of the dark in a wave, torches kindling all along the slope as the banners rose: Skyedge’s white and grey, Frostmoon’s pale blue, the scarlet of Thunder Lotus, Phoenix Mirror’s gold, and over all of it the white bridge-banner of the Heavenly Sword Pavilion, riding to war for the first time in a generation. The roar of it hitting an open gate at a dead run rolled up the valley and shook dust from the rafters.
Xuan leaned against the wall beside Xinhua, and neither of them had anything left to hold themselves up with except the stone and each other, and they watched an army pour through a door they had opened with a dead man’s necklace and a lot of poor decisions.
"We did that," Xinhua said.
"You stabbed him. I mostly bled and shouted."
"Don’t be modest, it doesn’t suit you at all." She let her head rest back against the stone. "Northreach is mine. My brother is going to have such a bad morning."
The fighting below ended fast, which is what happens to a garrison sent east while an army comes in from the north. By the time Xuan half-walked and half-fell down the gatehouse stairs, Cang’s officers were surrendering by companies.
Qingyue found him, cutting straight through a courtyard full of moving soldiers the instant she spotted the gatehouse.
She stopped a pace away and took him in properly, and Xuan watched every piece of her strategist’s composure drop off her face.
He knew what she was seeing. Both of them soaked to the elbows, his ribs plain in how he stood, the princess of the empire propped against him with blood dried down half her face, the two of them upright only because they were leaning on each other.
"You’re hurt." Qingyue was already under his arm, taking his weight off Xinhua without a word of ceremony, her hands quick and professional at his side while her voice stayed steady by pure will. "Ribs. Anything else? Xuan, look at me and answer, don’t be brave about it."
"Ribs, and I’m empty. That’s the whole list."
"And you." She turned to Xinhua, and there wasn’t a scrap of coldness in it, only the same brisk worry. "Your Highness, you can barely stand. Sit down before you fall down and let me get a healer up here for both of you."
Xinhua blinked at her, and something in the princess’s face softened into open surprise. "You’re not going to ask me why I came out of a fortress leaning on your betrothed?"
"I can see why. He’s the only thing that was holding you up." Qingyue’s mouth twitched, tired and honest. "You went in there with him and you came out with him. That makes us allies, and if half of what he’s going to tell me later is true, I probably owe you for keeping him breathing."
"I’d say we broke even."
"Then sit down, and stop bleeding on my sect’s new fortress."
A hoarse laugh escaped Xinhua as she let herself be lowered onto a broken cart-bed, and Xuan, sagging between the two of them with his ribs on fire, decided he’d never been more grateful for anything in his life than for the fact that these two women had apparently just decided to get along.
Which lasted exactly as long as it took a rider to come through the open gate at a gallop, screaming for the Princess before his horse had stopped moving.