Chapter 214: The Summons and the Father
The rider had come under the Third Princess’s own seal and would not be housed, watered, or made to wait, which told Xuan more about the state of the war than the letter did.
He read it in the war room with the scorch of the tribulation still tight across his skin, and the words were stripped of ceremony. The Second Prince held the capital and the seal. The Third Princess held the south, the righteous banner, and a coalition that swelled by the week. And near the bottom, in a hand different from the scribe’s, a line added after the formal body: that Lin Xuan of Skyedge was asked to come to her in person, at the mortal city his sect held below the mountain, before the host moved.
"She names you and not me." Lin Zhen turned the letter with one finger. "A patriarch could take that as a slight."
"You could." Xuan didn’t. "But she isn’t asking Skyedge to send a delegation. She’s asking for one man, by name, to come sit across a table from her." He tapped the added line. "That’s not how you summon an allied sect. That’s how you ask to meet a person."
"And why would a princess at war want to meet you in person, at this of all moments?" Lin Zhen’s tone wasn’t hard, only careful. "I’ve turned it over since the rider came in. I don’t have a clean answer. She knows we’re loyal, we’ve bled to prove it. She doesn’t need to look you in the eye to keep two mountains marching under her banner."
"No." Xuan weighed it a moment. "Word travels. She’ll have heard what happened on the road, that the Second Prince spent a legion’s worth of men and a suppression array to put me in a ditch, and that I walked out of it and he didn’t get what he wanted. A prince doesn’t spend that on a nobody." He turned the possibilities over and set most of them down unfinished, because he didn’t have enough to hold them. "Whatever her reason is, she wants to see the man it happened to with her own eyes. Maybe to weigh me. Maybe only to know I’m on my feet. I won’t know which until I’m across a table from her, and neither will you."
"That is the part I dislike." Lin Zhen exhaled. "A reason I can’t see is a reason I can’t guard you against."
"Then I’ll go and find out what it is. It’s a short ride to our own city, Father. If a princess wants to look me over on ground we already own, that’s about the safest meeting I’ve been offered all season."
Lin Zhen conceded it with a slow nod, and let the letter lie, and for a while neither of them reached for the wine that had gone cold between them. The war room emptied by degrees, elders and captains filing out to their own work, until it held only the two of them, father and son.
"Sit with me a moment," Lin Zhen said, though Xuan already had, and poured two fresh cups, and this time pushed one across. "The council can wait. I’ve spent the whole evening being a patriarch. I’d like to be your father for the length of a cup."
"The arm’s healed." Xuan wrapped a hand around the cup. "Lian’s pills did their work. You don’t have to—"
"I watched you carried in covered in another man’s blood, missing the use of an arm, a dead Pavilion elder in the cart behind you. The next chance you got, you walked into that breakthrough chamber and called the heavens down on your own head." His hand around his own cup was not quite steady. "So let me worry aloud for the length of a cup, and after that I’ll go back to sending you to a war."
Xuan quieted, because there are moments to be clever and this was not one of them.
"You don’t remember the state you were in when you were small," Lin Zhen said, looking into the wine rather than at him. "You wouldn’t. But I do. I remember every physician in the province telling me, gently, in the tone men use when they tell you not to hope, that the boy would not see twenty. That the channels were dead, that no amount of resource or care would change it, that the kindest thing I could do was love him for whatever time was left and not fill his head with a future he’d never reach." His jaw worked. "I did not accept it. I raised you as though the future were coming anyway. And something changed in you, and the future came, and I have spent every day since half-afraid the world would notice its mistake and take it back."
’He means the day I woke up in here,’ Xuan thought, going motionless. ’He doesn’t know what happened. He only knows his dying son opened his eyes one morning and started living. And he’s been holding his breath under it ever since.’
"Father—"
"Let me finish, since I’ve started." He looked up at last, and the patriarch was entirely gone from his face. "You have a habit of spending yourself right down to the floor because you can, because you always find one more clever thing to do with the last of yourself, and it works, and every time it works you learn the wrong lesson from it. One day the ledger won’t balance. One day there won’t be a trick left, and you’ll have spent the last coin, and I will be an old man burying the son three physicians already buried once in their heads before you proved them fools." His voice roughened. "I am not asking you to be careful, because I know my son and you’d only lie to me. I’m asking you to remember that you are not the boy they gave up on. You don’t have to keep proving you deserved to live. You did that. You’ve been doing it since the morning you woke up different. Let it be enough, now and again."
Xuan looked at his father, this hard, proud man who ran a sect off a cliff-face and had just laid the softest part of himself on a table between two cups of cold wine, and felt something in his own chest give that he usually kept locked.
"I hear you," he said, and meant it, which he rarely did when he said it to anyone else. "I won’t promise to stop being clever. But I’ll promise to remember there’s a man up here who’d rather I came home than won."
"That will do." Lin Zhen let out a breath and, with visible effort, put the patriarch back on like a coat. "It will have to, because I am, in fact, sending you down to meet her regardless, and into a war after it. Frostmoon rides with you. Su Qingyue’s father and I have agreed the two houses move as one host from here." He turned his cup. "Wei Tianming stays behind to hold the outer disciples together. The boy’s grown into that duty better than either of us expected, given how it fell to him, and I’d rather not pull the ground out from under him now that he’s finally steady on it. He’ll keep the mountain running while you’re gone."
"He’ll do it well," Xuan said, and meant that too. The frightened inner disciple who’d been handed a job nobody gave him, only because Xuan had let the work drift off his own shoulders one month at a time, had quietly become the man the outer ranks answered to. "He worried himself half to death over it at the start. He doesn’t anymore."
"People grow into what you trust them with. It’s the whole art of running a sect." Lin Zhen almost smiled, and something of the old satisfaction crossed his face, the wolf under the father. "Which brings me to the last thing before I let you sleep." He set the cup down. "We’ve smelted the first usable billet of Dragonvein out of the deep seam. It’s in Silent Peak." He met his son’s eye. "You’ve a new realm to swing a blade with and the rarest sword-metal under heaven waiting in our own forge. Don’t you want to put the two together? That tired old sword of yours has carried you long enough. Make it into something worth the man that princess sent for."