Chapter 253: Twenty Years
Xuan didn’t put the sword down.
It wasn’t defiance, exactly. It was that his hand had stopped taking orders from the part of him that wanted to live and decided, on its own, that whatever this thing wanted from Marrow Dragon, it wasn’t getting it for free.
The Fourth looked almost pleased. "No? Good. I didn’t think you would." He settled back on his heels, unhurried, a man with nowhere else in the world he needed to be. "Then let’s do it the other way. Let me talk. I’ve waited twenty years to say any of this out loud, and I find I’ve earned a little indulgence."
"The first thing you should understand is that I never wanted the chair. My brother died an hour ago still sure this was a war over a throne, and he died a fool for it. Thrones are for men who need other people to agree they matter." He glanced, without much interest, at the torn stair behind him. "I wanted what was under it. I’ve wanted it since before any of you were born, and now I have it, and the empire can keep its chair and its corpses and its very tired princess. None of that was ever the point."
Xuan kept his mouth working, because a talking man wasn’t a killing one. "And a drunk did all of this. Somehow."
"The way I did everything. Through other hands, while they thought the leash ran the other direction." The soft eyes settled on him. "Blood Fang, for one. The demon sect that’s given your little corner of the world so much grief. It has a patriarch. Two great elders at Nascent Soul, very proud, very frightening. They’ve taken their orders from me longer than they’d admit even to themselves." A thin curl of the mouth. "My brother spent years congratulating himself on having Blood Fang by the throat. He never once worked out that the sect he thought he owned was the same hand feeding him every clever decision he was so proud of making. I played him like a flute the whole war. He’d have hated that more than he hated dying."
"And Skyedge?" Xuan’s voice had gone rough. "You reached all the way to a mountain on the edge of nowhere."
"Skyedge reached to me. One woman in it did." The mild tone didn’t shift, and the floor dropped out from under Xuan anyway, because he knew what was coming a half-second before it came. "Madam Mei. Your father’s first wife. Your brother’s mother. She looked at the sect her husband ran and wanted it for her own blood so badly she’d have burned the mountain down to seat her son on it. All she lacked was someone with the reach to make that happen." He opened his soft hands. "I have a great deal of reach. She worked for me for years and thought she was using me the entire time. They always do."
Xuan should have stopped there. He couldn’t. He had to hear the last of it, even the part he could feel coming like a blade out of the dark. "Then it was you. The curse. When I was a boy. The two years I spent alone in a room watching my own meridians rot out from under me while everyone waited for me to die."
"It was." The Fourth said it the way another man might admit to forgetting a name, with a mild, untroubled regret. "And I’d have you understand it was nothing personal, because you were nothing to me. A child. A minor son of a minor sect, beneath my notice, and I’d have left you exactly there." The boredom went out of his eyes all at once. "Except that you were born carrying something that had no business existing in a boy off a mountain. A physique. They call it Sword Absolute, though the name means little to the thing itself. And I could feel it even at a distance, even in a half-dead child. Growing. Climbing toward something no one else in this world was climbing toward. Toward the very thing I’d spent my life reaching for." He tilted his head. "I don’t share. So I reached out one quiet hand, put a rot in a child’s meridians, and sat back to watch a dangerous little seed die in the dark before it could ever become my problem."
"It should have worked."
And there, at last, something crossed the soft face that Xuan hadn’t seen on it in all the bottomless calm. Puzzlement. Real, genuine puzzlement, and beneath it, so faint he nearly missed it, the first thread of something like unease. "That rot does not lift. There’s no sect medicine that so much as touches it, and there was certainly no one in that back room with the skill or the will to try. You were finished. I checked. For years you were a dying thing rotting quietly in a corner, exactly as I built it." His gaze moved over Xuan, slow, reading him like a page in a language he’d thought he owned and suddenly wasn’t sure he did. "And then one day you simply weren’t. The seed I killed climbed up off its deathbed and started growing again, faster than before, as if dying had only cleared its throat. And for the life of me, boy, and I have a very great deal of life, I cannot work out how it happened." A pause. "That’s curious. I’ve never cared for curious. Curious is the only thing in this world that has ever cost me anything."
Xuan barely heard the end of it. He was somewhere else, standing in the wreck of his own history while pieces he’d spent a lifetime treating as separate storms slid together into one weather: the curse that stole his childhood, the two years he’d rotted in a back room, the Blood Fang blades that came for him again and again the moment he got well, Madam Mei holding the door for them from inside his own home, Elder Mu and the men above Elder Mu and the hand above all of them that no one had ever managed to put a name to.
They had never been unconnected. They were all one man. One patient, soft-faced man, reaching down out of the dark across two decades to press his thumb on a life he’d decided didn’t get to happen.
The Fourth was still talking, something mild about the physique, about how much simpler it would go if Xuan cooperated. Xuan wasn’t listening anymore.
He was looking at the unremarkable man in the travel-stained clothes, the man he could have passed in any market in the empire without a second glance, and understanding him with a cold that went all the way to the floor of him. The knives in the dark. The stolen years. The graves other people kept digging for him. Every enemy he had ever faced had come from one hand, and he had never once known it.
He’d spent his whole life fighting something with no face and no name, and it had a face now. It was standing ten feet away, at a fraction of its full and terrible strength, watching him with a mild and patient hunger, and it had just told him in the pleasantest voice imaginable that it had never once stopped reaching for his life.
The war he thought he’d been fighting his entire life had a single mind behind it.
And that mind was in the room with him.