Chapter 278: Union
They lit the lanterns at dusk, and the whole climb of the ceremonial stair came up out of the dark in a long line of small fires, all the way to the yard where two sects were waiting.
Xuan stood at the top of it in red, with Marrow Dragon at his hip because Skyedge marries with the sword worn, and watched Su Qingyue come up the stairs toward him.
She wore Frostmoon white under Skyedge red, which had taken two households a full day of negotiation to agree on, and she climbed the stair the way she did everything, unhurried, exact, entirely herself. The cracked-ice clasp held her hair. Her face gave the crowd nothing.
When she reached him, she stopped closer than the rite strictly asked for, and out of the corner of her mouth, so quietly that nobody else on the mountain caught it, she said:
"Your father’s crying."
’He is not.’
He was. Lin Zhen had his patriarch’s face on, and it was doing an excellent job, and it was failing entirely around the eyes.
The rite went the old way. Lin Zhen and Su Han spoke it together, one line each, turn and turn about, two patriarchs who’d gambled their houses on the same war standing shoulder to shoulder to close the deal they’d made before any of it started. Three bows: to heaven, to the ancestors of both peaks, and last to each other. The shared cup, passed twice. The names entered into both sect registries in the same hour, in two different hands, so that neither mountain could ever claim it had given more than it got.
And at the end of it, because Frostmoon does not attend a wedding without doing something with the weather, Qingyue lifted one hand and put a fine, thin frost across the whole of the dueling yard, drifting down through the lantern light in a slow silver fall.
Xuan drew.
He’d been thinking about this since the capital, and he’d practiced it in a locked room where nobody could see, and he’d told exactly one person, who had opinions.
The Plum Blossom Sword opened above the yard.
Sword-light bloomed off Marrow Dragon in a spreading fall of petals, dozens of them at once, curving out through the descending frost and catching every falling grain of it, so that the yard filled with light and ice turning together in the dark. The first form ran into the second and the second into the third. The petals opened and opened, and not one of them cut anything, because there was nothing there to cut, and that was the point.
Two sects made a sound that had no dignity in it whatsoever.
Because the last time most of these people had seen Lin Xuan hold a sword, he’d been a boy dragging himself through a form in a courtyard with his meridians rotting, and here he was married on a mountain, throwing a Golden Core sword art through his wife’s frost for the sole purpose of making something pretty.
[ Showoff, ] Mira said, warm as he’d ever heard her. [ Go on. Kiss her and let me have my evening off.]
Qingyue looked at the light coming down around them, and then at him, and one corner of her mouth gave up.
"You practiced that."
"Extensively."
"You’re ridiculous." She took the front of his robe in her fist and pulled him down and kissed him in front of both sects, an empress, three mothers, two brothers, an entire outer court, and a five-year-old shouting encouragement from the upper walk.
The banquet ran long into the night, and the mountain, which had never in living memory had a reason to celebrate anything, threw itself at the job with the enthusiasm of the badly out of practice.
Hao closed two supply contracts before the second course and pretended he hadn’t. Zhaolin poured Xuan drink after drink with an increasingly determined expression, discovered somewhere around the eighth what a Golden Core body does to wine, and announced to the table that his new brother-in-law was a cheat and he wanted his tradition back. Yanzhou drank very little and, near the end of the night, refilled Xuan’s cup himself without being asked, which from that quarter was practically an embrace.
Wei Tianming sat down at the outer disciples’ tables instead of the high ones, where he’d have been welcome, and Xuan watched a boy who used to flinch when the training master raised his voice hold court over three dozen younger disciples who plainly thought he hung the moon.
Elder Ren fell asleep in a chair near the braziers and no one had the heart to move him.
Lian appeared at Xuan’s elbow twice, once with food he hadn’t asked for and once to take a cup out of his hand and replace it with tea, and both times she was gone before he could argue. Madam Lin Hua cried. Madam Yu, who did not cry, spent the evening making certain everyone else was fed, which was the same thing in her language.
Yueyue fell asleep under the high table with the wooden tiger on her chest and the Empress’s outer cloak over her, which nobody could explain and everybody found suspicious.
Late on, when the noise had thinned and the lanterns were burning down, Xuan found himself at the rail of the upper walk with his wife beside him, looking out over a mountain full of light.
"Your family’s terrifying," he said.
"You’ve met two of them. There are cousins." Qingyue leaned her shoulder against his arm. "Yanzhou threatened you."
"He threatened me very politely."
"That’s how you know it was real." She was quiet a moment. "She stood at the back. All night. I looked for her twice, and both times she’d put herself at the edge of things where nobody would think to seat her above me."
"That was deliberate."
"I know. That’s why I’m mentioning it." Qingyue watched the lanterns. "When it’s her turn, I’ll stand at the back for her. Tell her that, or don’t, whichever you think she’d rather. But it’ll happen the same either way."
Down in the yard somebody started a song badly, and eight people joined in worse, and Zhaolin’s voice came up over all of them, cheerfully out of key.
Xuan stood at the rail with a mountain celebrating below him and the woman he’d married warm against his arm, and let himself have it, all of it, for as long as the night was willing to hold still.