Chapter 276: The Mountain, Again
Xuan could have walked up the mountain like a person. He’d walked it a thousand times, up the prayer stone road, past the cedar grove, the long grind of steps that had nearly killed him back when climbing them took him half a morning and a rest at the top.
He flew instead.
[ You’re going to land in the middle of that courtyard, aren’t you, ] Mira said, as the peak came up under them. [ In front of everyone. With the sword. Very casually, like you’ve been doing it for years.]
’I might.’
[ You absolutely will. You’ve been planning it since we left the capital. I’ve been in your head the whole ride, Xuan, you rehearsed the landing.]
’Once. I rehearsed it once.’
He came in over the outer wall with Marrow Dragon humming under his feet and the whole of Skyedge opening up below him, and set down in the middle of the main courtyard, and the mountain stopped what it was doing.
The outer disciples got there first, because outer disciples are always the ones sweeping a courtyard when something happens in it. Brooms hung forgotten. A boy of maybe thirteen sat down hard on the flagstones. Word went up the steps faster than any of them could run it, and by the time Xuan straightened out of the landing there were faces at every rail on the upper walk.
They weren’t looking at a young lord home from a war. Flight came a full stage above where he’d left this mountain, and every cultivator in the yard knew it, and under that was the other thing, the pressure of a core they could feel from across the stones without a word said about it.
The first one down the steps was Wei Tianming, and he came at a run he tried to turn into a dignified walk halfway across the yard, which fooled nobody.
"Senior Brother." He pulled up short and bowed, too deep, the way he always bowed when he was rattled. "You’re. That was flight. You flew."
"I did."
"Golden Core." Tianming’s voice cracked on it. "You left here Foundation."
"I did that too." Xuan let the sword settle back to his hip. "Report, Tianming. The mountain. All of it."
That put the young man back on ground he could stand on, and Xuan had done it on purpose. Tianming straightened, and something steadier came into him, and he gave the report like a man who’d been rehearsing it far longer than Xuan had rehearsed a landing.
The outer courts had held. Attendance through the whole war, every morning session, every weekly test. Nine disciples had tried to leave in the first month, when the rumors were worst and the mountain was empty of anyone senior. He’d talked seven of them into staying. The two who went, he’d sent off with travel coin and no shame on their names, because he’d decided a boy scared out of his wits was still a boy, and Skyedge wasn’t in the business of ruining them.
Xuan listened to all of it, and thought about a nervous, blue-eyed boy who used to flinch at raised voices and had spent this entire war alone on a mountain holding a sect together with nobody above him to ask.
"You know what you did here," Xuan said, when he’d finished.
"I kept the schedule," Tianming said. "That’s all it was. Anybody could have run a morning session."
"Skyedge sat down at an imperial table because there was still a Skyedge to sit down." Xuan let that stand between them a moment. "Nobody’s building statues of the man who ran the morning sessions. But I know what this place would have looked like if you’d folded, and so do you, and you didn’t fold. So take it when I say it. You held my sect for me."
Tianming’s ears went red, and he bowed again, and said nothing at all, which from him was as good as a speech.
Elder Ren was waiting at the top of the stair.
He hadn’t hurried. He stood with his one hand tucked into his sleeve and his silver eyes doing what they’d always done, which was miss nothing, and he took his time reading Xuan from a dozen paces off. Whatever he found in there kept him quiet a good while.
"Well," he said at last. "That’s a core."
"It is."
"It reads wrong." Ren tilted his head a fraction. "I’ve measured a few hundred cultivators in my life, boy. A Golden Core turns like a pearl in a cup. Yours turns like something with corners on it." He waited exactly long enough to make his point, then let it go, which was the whole of the kindness. "I won’t ask. You’ve been keeping your own counsel since you were fifteen and it’s worked out better for this sect than anything I ever advised."
"Thank you."
"Don’t thank me, I’m being lazy." A dry sound in the old man’s throat. "I vouched for you nineteen years ago. A bundle in a blanket and a bad idea, and Tao told me I’d disgrace the council with it. I have been called a great many things for that vote."
"And now?"
"Now they’ve stopped calling me anything, which is worse. Now they ask my opinion." Ren turned toward the upper terrace, and there was a rasp under his voice he didn’t quite hide. "Come on. Your father’s been standing at the top of these stairs since dawn pretending he came out for the air."
Lin Zhen was, indeed, standing at the top of the stairs pretending he’d come out for the air.
They walked the mountain together, and the mountain had been dressed for a wedding.
Red silk ran the length of every stone rail, tied off at each post. Lanterns hung the full climb of the ceremonial stair, unlit yet, hundreds of them, swaying a little in the cold. The dueling yard had been swept down to bare stone and ringed with braziers, and above it on the twin poles hung the black and gold and red of Skyedge beside the white and blue of Frostmoon, so close their edges brushed when the wind came up the pass.
"There has never been this much silk on this mountain," Lin Zhen said. "Not for my wedding. Not for my father’s. We couldn’t have afforded the poles."
"We can afford the poles now."
"We can afford a great deal now. Your man has been terrorizing the merchant houses in the valley for a week." Something almost like a grin got loose on the patriarch’s face. "Four of them came up here to complain to me personally. I told them I had no authority over him whatsoever, which is true, and enjoyed myself enormously."
Hao was down in the lower court with a ledger open on a barrel, doing exactly what he’d been accused of. He raised the brush in salute without looking up.
"Two more carts by evening," he called. "The wine man tried to double his price when he heard who was coming. He’s now supplying the wine at cost, in exchange for the honor of saying he supplied it, which he suggested himself after a short conversation."
"How short?"
"Long enough for him to have the idea and think it was his."
Lian had the interior, which meant Lian had everything that mattered to anyone actually living in the buildings, and she’d taken the whole sprawling business of housing two sects and an imperial party and reduced it to a schedule that fit on one page. She caught Xuan on the walk outside the guest wing, took him in from boots to hairline with the flat efficiency she’d used on him since he was too weak to sit up, and made a small sound of grudging approval.
"You’re standing straight," she said.
"I’ve been resting. You wrote me a schedule and I mostly followed it."
"You followed the parts you liked." She tugged a fold of his collar into line without asking, the way she’d done ten thousand times. "Your rooms are aired. Your wedding robe is hung and I’ve already had it let out at the shoulders twice, because you’ve come back a different size and nobody thought to tell the woman doing the fitting."
"Sorry."
"Don’t be sorry. Be still, later, when I pin it." She pushed a stray thread off his sleeve. "Young Master. It’s a good day for this house."
Then a small body hit him at knee height at a dead run.
Yueyue had the wooden tiger clamped in one fist, the same tiger, worn shinier since he’d seen it last, and she had a great deal to say and no intention of taking turns saying it.
"You flew. I saw. I was on the walk and I saw you come over the wall and I told Mother and she said I was making it up and then everybody started shouting so I was right." She pulled back far enough to look him in the face and put two small fingers up in the air, waiting, entirely serious.
Xuan gave her the two fingers back.
"Also," she said, satisfied, "I said you’d win the war. I said it. I said it to Big Brother Kai and he said don’t say things like that, and I said them anyway, and I was right about that too."
"You were right about that too."
"I’m right a lot." She waggled the tiger at him. "Can you do it again? The flying. Can you do it now?"
"I’m greeting our father."
"You can greet him flying."
Behind her, Madam Lin Hua came up the walk laughing at that, and Madam Yu behind her in her pale green, more contained, and both of them greeted him warmly, and the strange thing was how ordinary it was. This house had spent a long time being a place where Xuan counted his steps. Now a little girl hung off his sleeve demanding aerial displays, and her mother was telling him he looked thin, and the whole business was as unremarkable as breakfast.
He noticed Lin Kai on the far end of the walk, standing back from all of it, and inclined his head. Kai returned it. Neither of them made it more than that, and neither of them made it less, and Yueyue, oblivious, went and fastened herself to her other brother’s leg, and the moment went by without anybody having to solve anything.