Chapter 251: The Drunk
For a little while, Xuan let them all have it.
There was nothing else to do with the minutes right after, and they’d earned the pause even if he no longer trusted it. Bo Ren’s guard dragged the escort’s dead into a row and laid their own beside them. Qingyue got herself up off the steps with a hand pressed to her ribs and came to stand at Xuan’s shoulder, and he took her weight without either of them saying a word about it. And Xinhua sat down, at last, in the chair.
Not like a conqueror. She lowered herself onto her father’s throne the way a person sits when their legs have stopped agreeing to hold them up, blood down her side and her dead brother cooling at the foot of the steps, and she put her hands on the worn gold arms and shut her eyes, and for a moment the Third Princess of the empire was only a very tired woman in the one seat that had ever been worth this much.
It should have been the end of the story. In a kinder one, it would have been.
...
Some days south, on a wall he’d already made his peace with dying on, Bai Cheng felt the war end without anyone telling him.
He was up on the parapet of the last ring, spending the last of his ice on a fight he’d long since stopped expecting to win, when the assault simply quit assaulting. He saw it happen to the great sects first. One moment Cloud Veil and Ashvale were grinding his wall down with the patient certainty of men being paid to, and the next, something went out of them all at once, their cultivators pulling up short in the middle of the press, heads turning, like a room full of men who’d each felt the same thread snap somewhere behind their ribs in the same instant.
Because they had. Whatever oath had bound them to the Second Prince, whatever sealed contract had bought their disciples’ lives for his war, had been tied to the man himself, and the man was suddenly, unmistakably, dead.
And a bought army with nothing left to buy it is only a crowd of people who’d all rather be somewhere else.
It came apart from the top down. Cloud Veil accused Ashvale of running first. Ashvale spat that Cloud Veil had never once truly committed. Nobody wanted to be the last disciple to die taking a grain fort for a prince who couldn’t pay the debt anymore, and within the hour the great sects were peeling off the walls and marching their people back down the valley, flinging blame over their shoulders as they went. The imperial ranks, leaderless and unpaid and watching their cultivators walk away, began to break in earnest, and when a hard-riding courier finally came up the south road under a white flag with the Third Princess’s writ and seal, half of them had laid their spears down before he’d finished reading it out.
Bai stood on the last wall of Northreach and watched an army that had been a single push from burying him turn into a rabble arguing its way home, and did not, at first, understand how.
Then he looked to the rise, to the pale command banner of the Second Prince that had flown over the siege since the first hour, the thing that hadn’t so much as stirred while his walls came down around him. As he watched, someone up there hauled it off its pole, and the standard of the man who’d spent a dynasty’s blood on a grain road came down at last and was gone into the dark.
They hadn’t outlasted the siege. He understood that now, standing in the wreck of a defense that should have been his grave. Somewhere far to the north, in a city he would never see, someone had reached up and cut the head clean off the thing that had come to kill him.
"Whoever you are up there," Bai said, to no one, to the north, "I hope she was worth it."
...
In the throne hall of Tianzhao, for one held breath, it was over.
Xuan felt the last of the fight drain out of his own body now that no more of it was coming, and let himself believe, for the length of that breath, that Tianlong’s dying words had been a cruelty and nothing more, a dart flung at his sister to poison the one thing she’d bled for, that the drunk was only a drunk and the vault only a hole in the ground, and that they could bind the wardens and bury the dead and leave Xinhua her quiet, terrible chair in peace.
He believed it for exactly one breath.
Then Mira spoke, and it was the sound of her voice that told him first, before any of the words, because Mira did not sound like this. Mira was never afraid.
[ Xuan. ] Barely a thread in his skull. [ Something just came up the vault stair. And I can’t read it.]
’What do you mean, you can’t? You read everything.’
[ I mean I’m looking straight at it and getting nothing back. No realm I can name, and no bottom to it that I can find. ] Her voice had gone thin as wire. [ Turn around. Slowly. And whatever you do, Xuan, do not do anything.]
He turned.
At the mouth of the torn-open stair, where the vault went down into the dark, a man stood brushing dust off his sleeves.
He wasn’t much to look at, and that was the first wrong thing about him. Middling height, middling build, a soft unremarkable face gone a little loose the way a man’s does after twenty years of pretending to be drunk, travel-stained clothes that wouldn’t have earned a second glance in any market in the empire. He looked like someone’s disappointing uncle, exactly the sort of person nobody in a palace full of ambitious, dangerous people would ever have thought to watch.
And the air around him was wrong in a way that made the wardens, the vault, the dead Second Prince, the whole hard-won horror of the last day feel suddenly small, and very far away.
He finished with his sleeves and looked up, taking in the room without any hurry at all, the throne, the girl bleeding on it, the brother dead on the steps, the exhausted people who’d killed him.
"Oh, good," said the Fourth Prince, in a mild, pleasant, terribly ordinary voice. "You’ve worn each other out and saved me the bother." He looked down at Tianlong’s body without a flicker of grief or triumph, the way a man checks a chore off a list. "Second always did need an audience. I only ever needed everyone looking the other way." He stepped up out of the stair and into the hall, and every warden in the palace turned toward him at once, iron to a lodestone.
And then his mild, forgettable gaze drifted across the wreckage of them, past the princess and the swordsman and the old man, and stopped on Xuan. On the blade in Xuan’s hand. And something moved behind that ordinary face that had nothing ordinary left in it at all.
"Well now." The Fourth Prince tilted his head, looking at Marrow Dragon the way a man looks at something he misplaced a very long time ago. "That’s unexpected. Hello, little dragon. I have been wondering where you got to."