’Looks like Kai turned up sothing worth reading,’ Xuan thought, more to himself than to Mira. ’And from his face, sothing he wishes he hadn’t.’
He crossed to his brother. Lin Kai held a single sheet pinched in both hands, dense with writing, closer to a letter than any of the dry tallies stacked around it.
"What did you find that’s worth a word like that?" Xuan asked, once he was close enough to.
Kai didn’t answer. He turned the paper around and held it out.
Xuan took it, flipped it right way up, and read. A letter, in Madam i’s hand, addressed to one Elder Mu. The body of it carried nothing he hadn’t braced for, just a tidy account of the past month inside Skyedge, comings and goings, who said what at which council, less a confession than a steward’s monthly report handed to a man on the other side of the line. It only nailed the lid down on what they had already buried: the first wife had been feeding the enemy with both hands. Old news, dressed up in her own penmanship.
So the letter itself wasn’t the prize. Xuan lifted his eyes, drawn more by the noise in the room and the duller racket rolling up out of the throat where Han Ying had gone down into the dark, the elder who was not, at this mont, steering his own feet.
Wei spoke up from the doorway, careful with it. "Young Master, I know I’ve no place second-guessing your calls. But is everything alright down there with that elder? If he turns on us, I’m not sure there’s much the three of us could do to stop him."
Lin Kai’s head ca up at that. Even he wanted the answer, enough to set down the bundle he’d been combing, more of his mother’s reports by the look of the stack.
Xuan held quiet a breath, because he was busy elsewhere. ’How’s it going down there, Mira?’
[ Oh, all wrapped up. I’ll wipe the old man down a little and bring him back to you. ]
"It’s all good and I’m sure he handled it well," Xuan said aloud. "Nothing’s going to happen down there. Both of you can breathe."
Kai didn’t look convinced. Wei didn’t either, though so of the tension drained out of his shoulders.
Xuan turned back to his brother. "Hey. Do you know anyone who goes by Elder Mu?"
Kai went quiet a beat. "No. No idea, and it’s chewing at , because that na’s on damn near every page from here to there." He jerked his chin at a fat run of docunts fanned across the table.
’Have we ever crossed an Elder Mu?’ Xuan asked, inward.
[ No. Nothing on file for anyone wearing that na. ]
"Worth holding onto that na," Xuan told him. "You ca down here for sothing, and now you’ve got a thread to pull. This Elder Mu could be the whole reason your mother did what she did."
Kai said nothing. He began squaring the loose papers into a stack, his hands a shade rougher than the job asked for.
"It’s driving out of my skull," he muttered. "Why can’t any of it be simple? I just want to know why she did it. What they put in front of her to turn her head like that." His jaw set. "I need to go to the capital and find out who he is. They work for the Second Prince, don’t they? So I will go straight to the source."
Xuan shut that down before it could grow legs. "You’re not getting within a mile of the Second Prince. You’re the young master of a regional sect, Kai. We’re bigger than the local outfits, fine, but we’re nothing to the powers stacked above us. He’d turn you away at the gate. No, worse, he’d have you taken and keep you. Father only walked out of that city alive because the Yuncheng tournant gave him cover. You ride in now, the one thing you’ll manage is dragging the whole sect into a fire we can’t put out. Sit on it for now."
Kai stepped in close and put it to his face. "And what would you know about any of it? You don’t have a mother. She wasn’t yours. So you’ve got no idea what I’m carrying right now. I want answers, and I want them soon."
Xuan let out a slow breath. There was no profit in squaring off against Kai over this. It was true enough on the surface; he had never owned a mother in this life. But Ethan had. Ethan had loved his fiercely, would have spent his own life without a second thought to keep hers easy. The grief standing in front of him was not a language he was deaf to.
So he gave it to him straight. "Maybe I don’t know how it feels, Kai. You’re hurting, and you’ve every right to be. But rember what I told you. Your mont will co. Today you walked away with a lead you didn’t have an hour ago, and that counts for sothing. And if you charge into the capital, what, you draw on them? At your level they’ll lay you in the dirt before your blade ever clears the sheath."
"My level’s the sa as yours now." Kai’s eyes held without a flinch. "They’d do the sa to you."
"They would." Xuan t it without heat. "Which is exactly why I’m not riding to the capital either, not yet. There’s a war coming for the whole continent before long, and I’d sooner not burn the days we’ve got left chasing a na into a cell."
Sothing in that reached him, or at least set him quiet. Before Kai could turn it over any further, a familiar weight climbed back up out of the lower dark.
Han Ying stepped into the office, spear at rest, the front of his robe damp and gone darker than it had left. Five fewer breaths in the mountain. The place was theirs now, top to bottom.
Xuan looked to Wei and Kai. "Go up and check the surface for company. They marched a force out on a job, rember, and there’s nothing stopping it from wandering ho. I want eyes outside before it does."
Kai looked at him. A flicker of the old refusal rose behind his face, and died there. He rembered whose word ran in this place, that their father had set it so, and whatever he made of his brother on a given day, this ti he swallowed it and gave a short nod.
"You," he said to Wei. "With ."
Wei startled. "M-?"
"You see another spare pair of boots standing around?"
The boy scrambled after him, and the two of them climbed away up the tunnel toward the open night, their footsteps thinning into the stone until the office held nothing but the lamp.
Which left Xuan alone in that low light with the thing wearing Han Ying’s skin, the elder standing patient and hollow in the middle of the room, waiting on a will that was not his own. Xuan rolled the stiffness out of his shoulders, set the dead woman’s letter face-down on the table, and looked the old man over slow, boots to brow.
’Right, then, Mira,’ he murmured. ’Just us and the borrowed elder. Let’s sort him out.’
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