Wei Tianlong listened the way he listened to most things, with the half-lidded patience of a man who had been read poetry against his will many times in childhood.

When Zhao finished, the prince extended a finger and rolled the unopened slip across the small lacquered table beside the throne.

"Two years."

Zhao did not answer. He was not meant to.

"Two years ago this woman wrote me a letter that said she needed help in a single thing." The prince’s mouth tilted into a small private amusement. "I administered the help. A Young Master of a regional sect lost the use of his body. A patriarch left his sect for the capital and was politely kept here longer than he had planned. She used that window to take what she had been asked to take. Now — two years later — she writes me again, with the same handwriting, asking the same favor, because the rat she had trapped in the corner clawed his way out of it. And the rat is asking questions I would prefer he did not ask."

He turned the slip on the table with the tip of one finger.

"I gave them two chances, Zhao. I am a generous man. I have never been a patient one. The boy will not be reasoned with. His father will not be reasoned with either. So we move on to the people who do not require reasoning. The wife needs the power."

He flicked the slip across the lacquer at Zhao.

"Send Blood Fang. I do not need to stain my own hands with a regional matter. They will manage. You will keep the trail buried."

"Yes, my prince."

Zhao caught the slip and tucked it into his sleeve. He did not rise to leave because the news in his other sleeve had not yet been delivered. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

"My prince. I have a second message. A worse one."

The prince’s eye opened a fraction wider.

"Then deliver it."

"The other elder was killed in Yuncheng."

A long beat.

The prince’s expression did not so much change as deepen at the edges.

"Was it him?"

Zhao inclined his head.

The prince exhaled through his nose. A small unamused sound. He brought his outstretched leg down off the arm of the throne, the heel of his boot meeting the polished stone with a low contained thump that meant something inside him had moved.

"Tch. That man gives me nothing but problems. I cannot afford to move against him from here, not while the succession stays open." His attention came back to Zhao with the flat focus of a knife laid across a tabletop. "And, Zhao. Make sure no one hears about this. If anyone hears about this, your head will roll. So will mine."

Zhao bowed. His shoulders trembled inside the robe and the bow hid it adequately.

"Yes, my prince."

He withdrew.

The prince stayed on the throne, one leg back over the arm, the slip from the regional sect open between two fingers.

He read the handwriting of a first wife who had begun, somewhere along the line, to confuse the help he had administered with the leash she had been wearing the whole time. He read it twice. He folded it. He held it over the small brazier at his elbow and let it take fire from the bottom edge.

The room held the smell of burnt paper for the time of a slow breath, and then it did not.

—————————————————————

South of Yuncheng, on a different road, a different carriage carried a very different conversation.

Inside, a young woman in a gray-green travelling robe held a half-eaten sliver of spiced melon in a paper wrap. Her hair fell long and green over the cushion behind her. Her irises matched the hair one tone darker, the green of a forest before a storm. Her maidservant — older, in a plain brown robe, the precise quiet hands of a southerner — sat across from her with a tea cup that had cooled a quarter hour ago.

"Young Mistress." The maidservant chose her question the way a maidservant on a long contract chose her questions. "Are you certain about returning this way? You were summoned to cure an illness. We spent months crossing the strait to reach this continent. And now we leave without doing the work?"

"The patient appears healthy enough to me." The young woman bit into the melon at the corner of her mouth. "I find no reason to remain on a continent where my services are no longer required."

"...If you say so, young mistress."

"I do say so. We also know what is about to happen here. It is better to be away from it." A small private amusement tilted her mouth at one side. "Besides. I have a feeling I will run into him again before long."

"As you say, young mistress. It could become dangerous to stay."

Outside the carriage, the southern road carried on its slow afternoon hum. The wheels ate their stretch of stone. The horses kept their pace.

Some thirty paces back along the bend the carriage had cleared a few breaths earlier, twenty bandits lay across the dust of the road in the loose, peaceful arrangement of men who had been moving with bad intent and had then, very suddenly, stopped moving with intent of any kind. A thin curl of pale green vapor was finishing its rise into the late air above them. None of the men were moving. Some of them would, in an hour or two. None of them would be moving with the same purpose they had been moving with before.

The carriage rolled on without slowing.

—————————————————————

Far east of that road, on another road that also ran south, a man rode alone.

His mount was a tall iron-gray that had been bred somewhere men did not advertise the breed. The man on its back was lying along its neck in the loose drape of a rider who trusted the horse more than the road and was using neither hand on the reins. One hand cradled an open wineskin. The other was tucked under his chin.

His robe was white, the collar and cuffs traced with thin lines of red, as if a few drops of blood had decided to stay along the seams instead of falling. White hair to the shoulders. A straight sword in its scabbard at his hip, riding loose in the way scabbards rode loose when the owner was not anticipating a need.

His mouth carried the slow easy curve of a man who had attended an event for free that he would have paid handsomely to attend.

He raised the wineskin without sitting up and took a long pull.

’Coming to that tournament was worth the ride after all.’

He returned the wineskin to his chest and let the horse continue along the road. The horse continued.

He went on smiling.

—————————————————————

The first inn the Skyedge convoy stopped at on the first night was a low timber compound at the foot of the eastern range. The horses had been stabled and watered. The carriages had been pulled into the inner yard. The household had been distributed across two corridors of rooms on the second floor.

Lin Xuan had been given the corner room at the end of the western corridor.

He had eaten, washed, and dragged a meditation cushion to the window. Plain Steel rested against the inside wall at the angle a sword rested at when its owner had not yet called the night over.

[ Xuan. Footsteps. Two of them. Coming up the corridor toward your door. ]

’Father?’

[ Patriarch Lin and Elder Ren. Both. ]

’...Both?’

[ Yeah. ]

He set the cushion aside and rose, because two men of that weight did not walk a corridor together in the small hours of a journey’s first night to discuss the price of a porter’s wage.

The knock arrived at the cadence of his father’s hand.

"Xuan’er. May we enter?"

He drew his breath into the small even count he had been practicing since the morning of the alley.

"Father. Please."

The door eased open.

His father and Senior Elder Ren stepped inside, closed the door behind them, and brought into the small lamp-lit room a weight of intention the small lamp-lit room had not been built to hold.

Lin Zhen pulled the second cushion to a position across from the meditation cushion and lowered himself onto it without ceremony.

"Son. We have a conversation to have."