i had used the seconds Lin Xuan had spent against the three Blood Fang to do sothing he had not anticipated.
She had crossed the road and reached her son.
She was kneeling at his level in the mud, the silvered blade pressed against her own thigh for support, the seven cuts of Beidou painting her robe in colours her body did not have enough left to lose. She had lowered her free hand and placed it against the side of Lin Kai’s face. The hand was warm against his cheek through all of it.
"Lin Kai. Son. Look at . Look at ."
Lin Kai brought his face up.
For the first ti in the entire combat, he saw his mother.
For years, she had been the fixed point of his world. The person who told him when to stand, when to bow, when to hate, when to smile while hatred sat behind his teeth. He had mistaken that certainty for love because children did not have better nas for chains when the chains are warm. Now she was kneeling in the mud, bleeding through silk, and asking him to beco the last blade in her hand.
"Listen. We don’t have ti. Your father is hurt, Elder Ren has lost an arm, the Blood Fang are about to break the line. If you stand up now, son — if you cross the road, just one cut — we still leave this pass with the seal. One cut for your mother. Help , Lin Kai. Help ." Her free hand moved from his cheek to the back of his neck, the hand pulling him gently toward her shoulder the way a mother gathered a child. "Help . Help your mother."
Behind her words, the second round of the arithtic finished landing inside Lin Kai’s head.
’Why was I not enough? Why was an adopted son in the seat where I was supposed to be?’
’It was not love.’
’It was control. She has wanted Skyedge from before I was born. Father was in the way. Xuan was in the way. I was in the way too — until I could be made useful enough to swing a blade in the right direction at the right hour.’
’She has been raising as a weapon. The entire ti.’
His right hand — the hand she had brushed at the wrist when he was four to teach him how to hold a spoon — moved down through the mud beside his knee. It closed on the hilt of the sword she had given him on his fourteenth birthday. The i family heirloom from the southern branch. The only sword he had ever owned in personal na. The gift she had presented across the council table with both hands.
i was still talking.
"...we leave through the side road, the carriages cannot follow, my brother’s people will et us at the third inn south of the river, you will not need to lift a sword again, I have arrangents for everything, all I need is that one—"
Lin Kai lifted the gift sword.
He placed it through the centre of his mother’s torso.
The blade went in with the small wet ease that all true cuts went in with when the man holding the hilt had been practising against straw posts since he was six. It found the space between her ribs the way her own breath would have found the sa space if she had still been alive enough to take it. It travelled forward through her heart and exited an inch from her spine.
i kept talking for half a heartbeat — the body did not yet know.
Then the body knew.
Her face lowered. She saw the hilt in her own chest. Her eyes lifted to her son’s face, and what she found there was not the boy she had been raising for twenty years to be her weapon. What she found was a young man who had finally caught up to the truth she had been building around him.
"...son."
Lin Kai held her at the shoulders with his free hand. His voice ca out quieter than the rain.
"I’m sorry, mother. You’ve had bad years. It’s better that you rest now." He kept the sword where it was. "I cannot kill my father. I cannot kill anyone for you. I think you have done this wrong."
A small inhalation through his nose, the kind a child made before saying sothing they had been holding inside for a long ti.
"I am sorry for disappointing you these years. I hope you find peace in the heavens if they open for you."
She opened her mouth. Nothing ca out of it but blood.
Her body lost its control. She fell forward, the full weight of a dying woman, against the chest of her own son, her arms going slack at her sides, her head landing in the hollow of his shoulder, her hair empty of every grand calculation it had been arranging for twenty years.
Lin Kai held her there.
The sword she had given him stayed inside her, the hilt still in his hand.
Lin Xuan crossed the wet stone toward them.
He did not run. He walked because he knew that running would not help anything anymore. Plain Steel hung at his side, the tip touching the mud in a thin trail.
He arrived three paces from where Lin Kai was sitting.
He did not co closer than that.
He did not speak.
He did not place a hand on his stepbrother’s shoulder.
Madam i lay against the chest of her only son. Her hair was dark with the rain and dark with what the rain was carrying out of her.
The Blood Fang formations had broken across the pass. The remaining Skyedge guards were finishing the disciples who had not yet finished dying. Lin Zhen had gone to one knee with his long sword in the mud. Elder Ren was holding the brachial line of the arm he no longer had.
The rain kept falling.
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