Chapter 228: The Bait Is Taken
The rider was off his horse before it stopped, and he didn’t waste breath on ceremony.
"Your Highness! The Second Prince has broken camp. He’s emptying the northern garrisons and marching them south. Forty thousand at least, maybe fifty, with Cloud Veil and Ashvale banners riding at the head of them." He gulped air. "They’re coming for Northreach. Six days out, seven at the most."
Xinhua stood there in a ruined courtyard, bleeding, holding a fortress she’d owned for under an hour, and started to laugh.
"He did it," she said. "He actually did it. He looked at a road with a fortress on it and a throne behind him, and he chose the road."
"Congratulations," Xuan offered. "We won a castle. Our prize is that fifty thousand men are coming to take it back."
"Isn’t it wonderful?" She wiped blood off her cheek with the back of her wrist, grinning like a woman who’d just watched a coin land on the side she called. "Every soldier on that road is a soldier not standing between me and my father’s throne."
The war council convened three hours later in Cang Yuwen’s own map room, and Xuan attended it with his ribs strapped, a healer’s paste burning cold under the bandages, and a sword he was in no condition to lift.
The room filled with people who had opinions: captains of Skyedge and Frostmoon, a Thunder Lotus elder with a scorched sleeve, the Phoenix Mirror commander who’d lost sixty disciples coming through the gate, and one very tired princess. The talk went in circles a while, as talk does when everyone in a room is exhausted and nobody wants to say the frightening thing first.
Xuan said it.
"Northreach has to hold." He put a finger on the map, on the fortress they were standing in. "That’s the whole plan. The second Tianlong hears this place has fallen back into his hands, he turns his army around and goes home, and we’ve spent all this blood for nothing. As long as those walls fly your banner, fifty thousand men stay right here, staring at stone, three days from a capital they can’t get back to in time." He looked up. "This fortress isn’t a prize. It’s a nail. It only works if it stays hammered in."
The Thunder Lotus elder grunted. "You’re asking us to stand under fifty thousand men and two great sects."
"I’m asking you to stand behind three rings of wall that a thousand men just cost us to take, with the bridge in your hands and the only road for forty miles under your arrows." Xuan met his eye. "They have to come to you, up a valley, through a gate. You don’t have to beat them. You have to bore them for two weeks."
"And where will you be while we’re being bored?"
Xinhua answered that one. "Taking the capital."
The room went very quiet.
"He’s stripped it," she said, tracing the road north with one finger. "Every man on that march is a man off my father’s walls. Three days from here to Tianzhao by the eastern trails, and while his army walks south past us in the dark, we walk north past them." Her mouth curved. "Two armies passing each other in the night, each one heading for the other’s house. I’ve wanted to do this since I was nineteen."
"Small group," Xuan added. "Fast, quiet, nothing that looks like an army. We can’t fight our way into the capital and we’re not going to try. We’re going to do to Tianzhao what we just did to Northreach."
"Walk in the front door with the right face on," Qingyue said from his shoulder, "and open it from the inside." She’d been quiet the whole council, and when she spoke everyone listened, which Xuan noted with some private satisfaction. "I’m going with him."
The Frostmoon captain shifted. "Young Mistress, your father’s forces—"
"My father’s forces are holding this fortress, and they’ll hold it better under you than under me, because you’ve defended walls before and I’ve only ever taken them." Her chin came up. "I’m not perched on a rampart for two weeks while the war gets decided three days north of me. And I’m not letting him walk into the imperial capital with only a princess for company. Twice now he’s gone through a gate without me. It won’t happen a third time."
Xinhua’s eyebrows rose, and something like approval crossed her face. "I’ve no objection at all."
"Then it’s decided," Xuan said. "Northreach holds. Skyedge, Frostmoon, Thunder Lotus and Phoenix Mirror man the walls. And a very small number of us take a very long walk north."
"Not as small as you think." Xinhua unrolled a second dispatch and pushed it across the table. "This came in with the rider. The Heavenly Sword Pavilion is sending a company to us, and they’re not sending it here." She tapped the map north of Tianzhao. "They’re sending it to the capital. Sword-brothers, not banners. Quiet men who can move through a city." Her eyes flicked up to his. "Led, I’m told, by their young master. Someone you know."
’Yan Wuji,’ Xuan thought, and felt something loosen in his chest for the first time all night. ’They’re really in it. He’s really coming.’
[ Told you the dead elder would move that mountain, ] Mira said. [ Also, and I hate to bring numbers into a nice moment: you’re about to walk into the most heavily warded city on the continent with two broken ribs and a dry dantian. ]
’I’ll heal on the road. And I’ve got a pill in the inventory for when we’re somewhere with a door.’
[ You do. And you’re not touching it until we are, because I’d rather not have you unconscious in a ditch when the imperial guard walks past. ]
The council broke up into a hundred smaller arguments about supply and watch rotations, and Xuan stepped out onto the gatehouse wall with Qingyue while the sky went grey over the valley. Down below, allied soldiers were already dragging Cang’s dead off the stones and stacking the fortress’s stores for a siege.
"Two weeks," Qingyue said, watching them. "That’s what we’ve asked those people to give us."
"Some of them won’t."
"No." Her hand found his on the parapet, and neither of them made anything of it. "So let’s be worth it."
They were on that wall yet when the second rider came up the valley road, and this one wore no colors at all, and he came looking for the Princess with a message he refused to give to anyone else.
Xuan watched Xinhua read it, and watched her face do something he hadn’t seen it do before — not anger, not calculation, but a blank and total confusion, as though the ground had moved under a woman who always knew where the ground was.
"Xinhua." He straightened. "What is it?"
"My brother." She lowered the paper slowly. "Not Tianlong. The other one."
"The Fourth?"
"He’s moved." She looked up, and there was something close to fear in it. "Two nights ago. Nobody can tell me where he went, or what he took with him, or who he took it from. Only that the drunk everyone in that palace laughed at for twenty years walked out of the capital in the dark while his brother and sister were busy destroying each other." Her fingers tightened on the paper. "And not one person in the entire empire seems to know what he did."