Chapter 209: Home, and What Followed
Skyedge came up out of the dusk on the tenth day, and Xuan had never in either of his lives been so glad to see a fortress cling to a rock.
The wards recognized him before the gate did. He felt the outer array pass over the three of them like a hand checking faces, and the great doors were already grinding open, disciples spilling down the steps with torches, and somewhere above them a horn went up announcing that the young master had come home not dead, which was more of an achievement this particular season than anyone on those walls yet understood.
Lin Zhen was in the courtyard before they’d dismounted.
The patriarch of Skyedge did not run. He walked, fast, with his robes snapping at his heels, and he stopped in front of Xuan’s horse and looked up at him with an expression Xuan had spent a whole first childhood in another world never once being shown by anyone. He reached up and gripped Xuan’s forearm as he came down, hard, as you grip a thing you’d braced yourself to lose.
"You’re late," Lin Zhen said, and his voice wasn’t steady. "You’re eight days late, and I’ve had two ravens telling me the Redthroat road was cut, and no word from you on either of them." He looked at the arm Xuan was favoring, the healing brace, and his jaw worked. "Tell me whose blood that was."
"Mostly other people’s." Xuan let the older man hold his arm and didn’t pull away, which for him was a considerable statement. "It’s a long story, and a bad one, and Elder Shen of the Heavenly Sword Pavilion is in a cart behind us wrapped in his own sect’s colours. He bought us the road. I’d like him sent home with everything the honour’s worth."
Something moved through Lin Zhen’s face, grief and calculation braided together as they always were in men who led. "It will be done tonight."
Qingyue had come down off her own horse, upright by willpower alone, and Lin Zhen turned to her and inclined his head with a warmth that surprised her visibly.
"Young Mistress Su. Your father has been raising the roof of my message hall for a week. He’ll sleep tonight for the first time since you left." His eye went past her, to the third rider, the boy in travel-stained clothes clutching a lacquered document case to his chest like it contained his own heart, watching the patriarch of a cultivation sect with the wary calm of a man pricing a room he’d been shoved into. "And this one is?"
"His name’s Chen Hao." Xuan set a hand on the boy’s shoulder. "He’s mortal, before you ask, and no, that isn’t a problem. Father, the whole game we’re in now runs on grain, coin, roads, supply, and numbers, and I’ve watched this boy do sums in his head that my quartermasters would need a week and an abacus to lose. I took a mortal river city apart and had it feeding us inside a fortnight, and it was mostly his hands on the ledgers. He’s worth more to Skyedge than another sword. I’d stake the mines on it."
Lin Zhen studied the boy for a long moment.
Hao, to his credit, didn’t flinch. He met the old man’s gaze and offered a small, correct bow, and said, "Your son overpays me one coin in thirty, sir. I intend to make you regret every fraction of it."
For the first time in a week, something that was almost a laugh escaped Lin Zhen.
"A mortal accountant who negotiates with the man who could have him thrown off the mountain." He shook his head slowly. "My son collects the strangest things, and every one of them turns out to be worth ten of what it cost." He gestured at the hall. "Come inside, all of you. There’s a great deal to say, and none of it should be said in a courtyard."
Warmth only carried a household so far, and Skyedge’s ran on order. Wei Tianming appeared at Lin Zhen’s shoulder as though summoned by the word inside, with the alchemist Lian a pace behind him, and the two of them folded the boy up between them before Hao quite understood he’d been redirected.
"We’ll get him fed, housed and out of those road clothes," Wei said. "Silent Peak?"
"Silent Peak," Lin Zhen confirmed. "Beside the young master’s own rooms. Give him the guest suite, not a disciple’s cell. Whatever he is, he arrived under Xuan’s hand." He looked at Hao. "You’ll be treated as an honoured guest of this sect for as long as you keep my son’s faith, boy. Wei Tianming will see to anything you need."
Hao shot Xuan a single glance, half alarm and half accusation, the look of a man realizing he was being escorted somewhere pleasant by people he couldn’t read.
"They’re not going to hurt you," Xuan said. "That one’s my second. That one brews the pills that’ll fix my arm. Go. Eat something. Sleep somewhere that isn’t a saddle. We’ll talk about your empire in the morning."
"My empire," Hao muttered, letting himself be steered toward the Silent Peak path. "I leave one desk and I inherit an entire mountain of new ones. This is a trap. I knew you were a trap the day you paid for me."
Lian said something to him low and dry as they went, and Hao’s startled voice floated back, arguing already, until the three of them were gone up the lantern-lit stairs and the courtyard held only the people who needed to have the hard conversation.
Lin Zhen’s warmth folded away like a fan closing.
"Not the hall," he said. "The inner room. Elder Ren is waiting there." He was already moving. "Wei will settle the boy. You two are going to sit down, and drink something hot, and tell me every step of that road from the Pavilion’s gate to my courtyard, because I have spent eight days imagining it and I would rather have the truth, however ugly."
The inner room was small and warded to the teeth, and Elder Ren rose when they entered, the old logistics-master’s face creasing with plain relief at the sight of Xuan on his feet. Hot wine went into cups nobody reached for. Xuan lowered himself into a chair and let the ache in his arm remind him he was alive, and Qingyue took the seat beside him close enough that their sleeves touched, and neither of them made anything of it.
"Start with the ambush," Lin Zhen said, settling opposite. "The ravens said the road was cut. They didn’t say by whom, and I have spent a week refusing to guess."
"The Second Prince." Xuan turned his cup without drinking. "Legion suppression array, siege crossbows with the army stamps filed off, thirty men with no colours and a Foundation swordsman running them. The order to kill me went out before the Emperor’s death was even announced." He met his father’s eyes. "It wasn’t the city he wanted. It was me, off the board, before I could be any use to the Third Princess. We’re committed, Father. Whatever we were before, we’re the Second Prince’s enemy now, in writing, in blood, with a dead Pavilion elder as the receipt."
Elder Ren let out a slow breath. Lin Zhen didn’t move, absorbing it as bedrock absorbs a blow, and the only sound in the warded room was the wine going cold in four untouched cups.
"That is very bad," Lin Zhen said at last. "It is also, unfortunately, no longer the worst of it." He set his hands flat on the table. "While you were on that road, things happened inside the capital."