Chapter 277: Two Peaks
Frostmoon came up the pass the following morning under white and blue banners, and they came in force, because Su Han had no intention of marrying his only daughter into a mountain sect quietly.
Xuan watched them climb from the terrace and felt the cold coming up ahead of them, which was a thing Frostmoon did on purpose and pretended it did by accident.
Su Han led. Behind him came his sons.
Xuan had heard of them the way you hear of a betrothed’s family, in passing, and he’d never once had them in front of him. The elder was Su Yanzhou, the Frostmoon heir, and he arrived with his hands in his sleeves and his face doing precisely nothing, and looked around the courtyard of the sect his sister was marrying into with the expression of a man auditing a stable.
The younger was Su Zhaolin, and he was grinning before he’d finished the last step.
"So that’s the mountain." Zhaolin took in the silk, the lanterns, the poles, and whistled. "Not bad. Bit vertical. Do you people carry the water up all this by hand, or is there a trick to it?"
"There’s a trick," Xuan said. "It’s called outer disciples."
Zhaolin laughed, loud enough to turn heads, and clapped Xuan on the shoulder like they’d known each other for years. "Good. I like him. Yanzhou, I like him."
"You like everyone," Yanzhou said. "It’s your single most exhausting quality."
Qingyue came down the steps then, and Xuan got to watch something he hadn’t expected to enjoy as much as he did, which was Su Qingyue with her brothers. The ice stayed on, because it always stayed on. But it thinned. Zhaolin caught her in a hug she permitted for exactly two heartbeats before removing him, and Yanzhou said her name once, quietly, and she said his back, and between the three of them ran a whole conversation nobody outside the family was invited to.
Then Zhaolin turned around with a light in his eye that Xuan recognized, because he’d seen it on every young cultivator with an excuse to swing at somebody.
"Right. Custom." He rolled his shoulder. "You want the girl, you go through the brothers. Frostmoon tradition."
"That is not Frostmoon tradition," Yanzhou said.
"It’s my tradition. I made it. Come on, brother-in-law, one round. I’ve had the whole ride up here to look forward to it."
The courtyard went quiet in the way courtyards do when a fight might be about to happen at a wedding. Xuan considered him for a moment. Zhaolin was strong. He was also Foundation, and cheerful, and had absolutely no idea what he was asking for, and there were maybe six people on that mountain who’d read the pressure off Xuan properly and every one of them was watching to see how he’d handle it.
"No," Xuan said.
"No?"
"You’d get hurt, and then your sister would spend her wedding apologizing to your mother, and I’d have started a marriage by putting a Su on his back in front of two sects." He held out his forearm instead, the plain soldier’s grip. "Take that. I’ll owe you a round for a day when it’s nothing but the two of us and a yard, and you can tell everyone you made me pay it."
Zhaolin looked at the offered arm. Then he took it, and the grin came back wider than before.
"You know he’s had to duck three of those since we got word of the engagement," he said to nobody. "Cousins. All of them convinced they’d be the one to knock the imperial polish off him."
"I’ll take them in order."
"I’ll sell tickets."
It was Yanzhou who did the other part, and he did it later, and alone, catching Xuan on the walk above the dueling yard with nobody in earshot.
"I never voted for this betrothal," he said, without preamble. "You should hear that from me instead of hearing it from someone who enjoys saying it. When my father brought it to the family, I argued against a Skyedge match, at length, twice. A small sect, a bad decade, an adopted heir with a curse on him. I thought he was spending my sister on a debt of sentiment."
"You weren’t wrong on the facts."
"I know I wasn’t." Yanzhou’s hands stayed in his sleeves. "And then she went to war with you. And came home. And I’ve spent the ride up this mountain listening to Frostmoon men who were at Northreach describe what happened in that capital, and none of the descriptions were about you being lucky." He turned his head, finally, and the ice in his face gave up about a finger’s width. "She chose you. She’s the most careful person I have ever known, and she chose you, and she has never once in her life chosen wrong. That’s what I’ve got. It’ll have to do us both."
"It does me."
"Good." Yanzhou started to go, then stopped. "One more thing, and then I’ll be pleasant for the rest of the visit. If you make her sorry, no amount of core or crown or imperial marriage will keep me off you. I’ll come up this mountain personally and I won’t hurry."
"If I make her sorry," Xuan said, "I’ll hold the door."
Something that was almost a smile got as far as Yanzhou’s mouth and turned back at the last moment.
"She said you’d say something like that."
The Empress arrived that afternoon, and the mountain came apart at the seams.
She’d sent word ahead, and Lin Zhen had been quietly losing his composure over it since the message came, because a sect like Skyedge does not host a throne. There is no protocol for it. There is no room grand enough. There’s a patriarch standing at the head of a stair he suddenly finds badly swept, wondering whether the second-best hall is an insult.
Xinhua solved it by leaving the empire at the bottom of the mountain.
She came up with a small escort and none of the trappings, in traveling clothes rather than court silk, and when Lin Zhen began the full formal receiving she stopped him after two lines.
"Patriarch, if you make me stand through all of that, I’ll have to make a speech back, and then we’ll be here until dark and nobody will have eaten." She let the warmth into it. "I’m a guest at a wedding. Treat me like one and I’ll consider it the greater honor."
Then she did the thing that settled it, and she did it where every person in the courtyard could see.
She went to Qingyue first.
Not to the patriarchs. Not to Xuan. She crossed the yard to the bride, and greeted her with a courtesy that was a shade deeper than she owed anyone alive, and said something quiet that only the two of them heard, and Qingyue inclined her head and answered it just as quietly.
To most of the mountain it looked like manners. To the handful of people who understood what the coming year held for those two women, it was a statement of order, made in public, without a word of explanation offered to anybody.
[ She’s good at this, ] Mira said. [ That took her about four seconds and it just told two sects exactly where everyone stands, and nobody’s going to be able to gossip about it because there’s nothing to gossip about. ]
’They worked it out between them a while ago. I just get to live in it.’
[ You get to live in it. Try to be worth the trouble.]
The moment held until Yueyue got through the adults.
She marched up to the Empress of the realm with her tiger in her fist and inspected her from about knee level with open, ruthless curiosity.
"Are you the empress?"
The courtyard stopped breathing. Madam Lin Hua made a small sound.
"I am," Xinhua said gravely.
"You’re shorter than they said."
"Yueyue—"
"It’s all right." Xinhua crouched down to the girl’s level, which no one in that yard had ever seen a member of the imperial family do. "Everyone’s shorter than they said. It’s the throne that’s tall." She considered the wooden tiger. "Is that yours?"
"He’s a tiger. He wins."
"Then I’d like to be on his side."
Yueyue thought about this with immense seriousness, and then handed the empress her tiger, which was the single largest honor available anywhere on that mountain, and went off to tell her mother about it at volume.