Chapter 221: The Bait
"You want to know my plan." The tiredness folded away, and the strategist came back up behind her eyes, quick and awake. "Good. I’d rather you understood it than followed it blind. Pour yourself more tea, this takes a moment."
He poured. She drew a line on the tabletop with one fingertip, an idle map in spilled water.
"Here’s the trouble. Tianlong is stronger than me. I won’t pretend otherwise, and neither should you. He has the capital, the seal, more armies, and a coalition of clans and generals he bought with the promise of the moon. If this comes down to two hosts meeting in a field, he has more men, and I lose, and my brothers’ graves were for nothing." She tapped the water-line. "So I’m not going to meet him in a field. Not yet."
"You’re going to make him come to you."
"I’m going to make him come to me." Her mouth curved, pleased he’d caught it fast. "Northreach. A fortress-town three days south of the capital, planted on the only good road between his armies and their grain. It’s the throat his whole northern host breathes through. It isn’t glamorous, it isn’t the capital, and it’s held by one of the clans he bought, not by his own men." She drew a small circle around it. "I want it taken. Openly. Loudly. With banners."
"And the moment you take it," Xuan said slowly, watching the map fill in, "you’ve got your hand around his windpipe. His armies in the north can’t be fed without that road. He can’t just leave you squatting on it."
"He can’t leave me holding it for a week," she agreed. "So he does the one thing a proud man with more soldiers always does. He peels a large part of his strength off the capital and sends it howling south to take Northreach back, because he cannot afford to look like a usurper who lost a town in the first month of his own war." Her eyes came up to his, bright and cold and delighted. "And while every eye in the empire is fixed on that road, watching whether the little fortress holds, the capital he stripped bare to save it is standing there with the throne inside it and half the guard gone."
Xuan went quiet, turning the whole beautiful, vicious design of it over.
"Northreach isn’t the target," he said. "It’s the bait. You don’t even need to hold it forever. You just need to hold it long enough, and make it loud enough, that he empties his own house to come and get it."
"Now you have it." She eased back, and there was frank pleasure in her face, the specific joy of a clever person watching another clever person keep up. "Two fists. One closes on Northreach and makes all the noise in the world. The other goes for the capital while his back is turned. He can defend the throne or he can defend the road that feeds his armies. He cannot do both at once, and whichever he chooses, he loses the other." She lifted her tea in a small, dry toast. "I’m going to make the strongest man in the empire tear himself in half deciding which of two things he wants more."
"That," Xuan admitted, "is genuinely nasty. I mean that as the highest compliment I have."
"I know you do. It’s why I like you." She studied him a moment, and something shifted in how she was looking at him, the last of the imperial distance thinning out of it. "Which brings me to a small thing, and after it a large one. The small thing first." A faint, almost sheepish smile. "Would you stop calling me Your Highness when it’s the two of us? Every time you say it I feel like you’re bowing at me across the table, and I’d rather talk to the man than the title. I’ve had a lifetime of people talking to the title."
"What would you rather I call you?"
"Xinhua would do. It’s my name. I don’t hear it often enough from anyone who isn’t trying to get something from me." She tilted her head. "And you? Everyone in that province calls you Master Lin like you’re an institution. I refuse to believe that’s what your friends use."
"Xuan’s fine." He found himself smiling before he’d decided to. "Just Xuan. "Master Lin" always makes me look over my shoulder for my father, though."
"Xuan, then." She said it like she was trying the weight of it, and looked pleased with the result. "There. Now we’re two people at a table instead of a princess and an asset. It’ll make the next part easier."
"The large thing."
"The large thing." She leaned in, elbows on the wood, all the warmth intact but the steel showing plainly through it now, no longer bothering to hide from him. "I have sects for the noise at Northreach. Righteous banners, angry commanders, men who want to be seen standing against a usurper. What I don’t have enough of is people who can walk into a fortress full of the enemy and quietly make it fall from the inside before the banners ever arrive." Her eyes held his. "A man who took a walled city apart in a fortnight without a single siege engine. Who cracked a mine network open with his head and not an army. Who my brother wanted dead badly enough to spend a legion on it in a ditch." A pause. "I don’t want you standing in a line at Northreach, Xuan. Anyone can stand in a line. I want you to be the reason the gates are already open when my host gets there."
The teahouse had gone quiet around them, the river moving below, the whole enormous machine of the war turning on the small table between two cups of cooling tea.
Xuan looked at the water-map, at the little circle around Northreach, at the woman across from him who had just handed him the most dangerous job in the empire as though offering him more tea.
He’d already decided. He’d decided somewhere around the word bait, when the whole design clicked into place and the old itch woke behind his ribs.
"All right," he said. "I’m in. We’ll talk terms, and they won’t be cheap, but I’m in." He leaned forward to meet her, and the strategist in him was fully awake now, grinning. "So tell me the only thing that actually matters. When do you plan to attack?"