Two days had passed since Xuan walked back through Skyedge’s gates, and the Silent Peak had him to itself again.
That was the polite na for it. The Silent Peak — what the household called his pavilion when it rembered to be courteous. When courtesy ran thin, and around here it ran thin often, they called it the Rotting Peak: the farthest, smallest, most thoroughly forgotten roost in the whole residential cluster, a hut a sect files a son away in once it has given up on him, squatting over a starved courtyard with a screen of dead bamboo at the back and a dry well behind it.
That was the old map. Months ago, a man called Ethan had opened a stranger’s eyes in this body and inherited the wreck along with the na. The bamboo wasn’t dead anymore. Nothing in the yard was. The peak had quit rotting and started answering to a single na, and the household’s nickna had aged into a bad joke no one told to his face.
Right now the place held no one worth counting. Lian was off across the cluster taking her lesson from the old man, learning to coax fire under a pill furnace without flinching. Wei had the outer yard, walking disciples through their forms exactly as ordered, no teaching asked of him, only the dull, holy labor of making sure they did the thing right, since Xuan had already hamred the fundantals into them and half the roster had since been shipped off to hold two freshly bled mines.
’What do you make of that, Mira? Half my yard reassigned to mine duty.’
[ Sound enough. ] Her voice unspooled at the corner of his vision, unhurried. [ Skyedge used to run those mines the usual way: rotating disciples through guard duty, survey work, ore handling, and maintenance under elders who knew the shafts. It was part training, part service to the sect, and part how a clan keeps its own resources in its own hands. What they lacked back then was not sense, but depth. Too few bodies, too many duties, and Blood Fang took advantage of the gaps. ]
[ Now they have numbers on the mountain again, so they have thrown a proper cordon around both pits. Outer watch, inner watch, runners between the shafts, elders posted near the deeper vein. After clawing them back at the price you paid, nobody is eager to trust the mines to habit and hope. ]
[ They’ll surface once it is nailed down. Your father sooner, if sothing needs him. And you had best be presentable when he does, because Su Qingyue and Su Han ride in to talk terms before long. By what Elder Ren let slip, the marriage is not the whole of it. ]
’So he told . That surprised more than it should have.’ He turned a loose thread of it over. ’He made a point of saying Su Han is the one keen on marriage.’
[ And you do not suppose the lady is keen as well? ] Mira sounded thrilled to be asked. [ Cast your mind back to the last ti the two of you stood together. Who put the marriage pact on the table, out loud, in her own words? Not her father, her. To you. ]
’You are reading a great deal into one sentence.’
[ Woman’s intuition. (¬‿¬) ] The two words arrived smug as a cat on a warm tile. [ A girl who wants no part of it does not hand you the secret herself, first thing, before anyone has made her. ]
’If you say so.’ He let her have it; arguing intuition with a system that claid to own one was a war without a frontline. ’Fine. We’ll let future- fret over whatever the Frostmoon heir wants from present-.’
He rolled his shoulder, and the talk circled back to the splinter that had been working under his nail since the road ho. ’Which leaves the real problem. What in the nine hells do I do with Han Ying.’
[ You’ve boxed yourself in there. ]
’I’m aware.’ He had fed his father the line that the elder bolted. A tidy story, easily swallowed, and his father, short of n and shorter of patience, hadn’t peeled off a squad to chase a ghost into the western dark. ’No pursuit. So now I’m holding a Blood Fang elder who officially doesn’t exist.’
[ And you can’t stable him at the mine. ] Mira ran the math flat and quick. [ A demonic elder loitering around the very pits Skyedge just buried n to take? There’s no telling of that with a straight face. Were he stronger, the lie might be worth the trouble. He isn’t. He’s a liability. ]
’Right.’ He breathed out through his nose and pitched his voice low, to the one party in the room who hadn’t yet been invited to speak. "Well. You. Anything to say for yourself?"
The answer climbed from sowhere under his usual eyeline, in the careful, sanded-down tone of a man weighing each word as though it might be his last.
"I can serve you best by living here, young master. Under your roof. Where your eyes never leave ."
’See, that’s the trouble. I don’t want his eyes near , never mind the reverse.’ Xuan’s mouth thinned. ’Having him underfoot doesn’t sit right with . You’re the clever one. Anything? Because I’ve run dry.’
[ As it happens — ] her voice brightened, that spark she got right before she enjoyed herself at soone’s expense [ — I’ve had an idea. ]
And only here, as Xuan unfolded to his feet and worked the crick from his spine, would a guest have grasped the true shape of the room.
Because the thing he had been perched on all this while was no chair.
Han Ying knelt on all fours in the middle of the floor, palms flat, spine level, a Foundation Establishnt elder of the Blood Fang sect holding the patient pose of a stool that has learned to dread its master’s weight. He had served as footrest and throne both for the better part of an hour, while above him a crippled boy wearing another man’s soul debated, at his leisure, precisely what a creature like that was good for.
The elder didn’t twitch. Sowhere on the long road east he had made his peace with the floor as a survivable place to live.
Xuan brushed off the back of his robe, considered the bowed grey head beneath him, and arched a brow at the empty air where his system kept its grin.
’Go on, then. Let’s hear it.’
[ Oh, you are going to like this one, Xuan. ]
User Comments
0 comments from readers