Chapter 279: Morning After

Xuan woke up married.

It arrived on him slowly, the way good news does when you’re warm and horizontal and in no hurry to verify anything. Grey light through the paper screens. The smell of last night’s braziers gone cold somewhere down the hall. A weight against his shoulder that had never been there before any other morning of his life.

Qingyue was asleep on her front with one arm thrown across him and her hair loose all over the pillow, which he’d honestly never expected to see. She kept that clasp in from waking to sleeping. He’d assumed she took it out in a locked room by candlelight under a signed agreement.

He lay there and didn’t move, mostly because moving would end it.

[ Morning. ]

’You’re back.’

[ I went away like a lady, thank you very much. I have been reading in another room, metaphorically speaking, since roughly the second time somebody knocked over that lamp.] A pause with entirely too much in it. [ You have a bruise on your neck, by the way. High. The collar won’t cover it.]

’Mira.’

[ I’m only telling you because your father is going to see it in about an hour and I want you braced.]

Qingyue stirred against his shoulder, made a sound of low complaint at the light, and did not open her eyes.

"You’re awake," she said into his collarbone. "You’ve gone tense. You think about things loudly."

"I’m enjoying myself. It’s a different tension."

"Mm." She shifted closer, entirely without dignity, and he decided not to point that out, because he wanted to keep the arm where it was. "The whole mountain is going to look at us at breakfast."

"They are."

"Zhaolin will say something."

"He’ll say several things. He’ll have been drafting them since the banquet."

"I’ll freeze his tea." She said it with her eyes closed, perfectly serious, and Xuan started laughing and got an elbow in the ribs for it, and lay there in a cold room in a warm bed feeling like the luckiest idiot on the continent.

They stayed there longer than they should have. Nobody came looking. Somebody had clearly issued instructions, and he had a strong suspicion whose.

The mountain, when he finally got out into it, looked like a place that had thrown its first party in living memory and slightly overshot.

Red silk still ran the rails, sagging now where the knots had loosened overnight. The lanterns had burned down to stubs the whole length of the ceremonial stair. Two outer disciples were moving through the lower court with brooms and the specific caution of the very hungover, and a third had given up entirely and lay flat on a bench with his forearm over his eyes.

Hao had a table out in the sun with three ledgers open and a cup of something dark at his elbow, and he looked appalling.

"Don’t," he said, without looking up. "I know."

"I wasn’t going to say anything."

"You were going to say something about the wine man." Hao turned a page with the tenderness of a man handling his own skull. "For the record, everything came in under budget, the household is fed for the week on what’s left, and four merchant houses in that valley now owe this sect favors instead of the other way around." He finally glanced up, bloodshot and pleased with himself. "Also your brother-in-law can’t hold his drink and tried to buy my horse at three in the morning."

"Which brother-in-law."

"Guess."

Frostmoon left before noon.

They formed up in the lower court in white and blue with the cold coming off them the way it always did, and Su Han and Lin Zhen walked the last stretch to the gate together, ahead of everyone, talking quietly.

Xuan watched them go down the steps side by side and thought about how those two men had done this. Two middling sects on two poor mountains, one of them nearly bankrupt, betting everything they had on a princess most of the empire had written off as the harmless one. They’d been laughed at in rooms with better furniture than either of them owned. Now one had a founder’s seat and the other had married his daughter into it, and they were walking down a stair together like a pair of old farmers pleased with a harvest.

Su Han said something at the gate. Lin Zhen laughed out loud, which Xuan had heard maybe four times in his life.

Yanzhou found him afterward, on the walk, in the same unannounced way he did everything.

"We’re away," he said. "My father will write. He writes constantly and expects an answer within the week, so develop a system."

"Noted."

Yanzhou looked out at the pass for a moment with his hands in his sleeves.

"She sleeps badly," he said. "Always has. Since she was small. She’ll tell you she doesn’t and she’ll be lying, and she gets short with people around the fourth or fifth night of it, and the trick is you don’t ask her about it, you just find a reason to keep her up talking until she stops guarding it." He said it flatly, like a man reading out an inventory. "She’d take my head off if she knew I told you."

"Then she won’t know."

"No." He turned to go, and paused. "It was a good wedding, Lin Xuan. The mountain suits her better than I expected. That’s the last generous thing I’m saying for a year, so enjoy it."

Zhaolin, of course, collected.

He’d remembered. Xuan had half hoped a night of that much wine would erase the whole thing, and instead the man came bounding into the upper yard already stripped to his underlayer, in the cold, at an hour when his own escort was trying to leave.

"You owe me a round. In a yard. With nobody watching." He spread his arms at the empty court. "Yard. Nobody watching. Pay up, brother-in-law."

"Your father’s at the gate."

"He’ll wait. He likes me." Zhaolin rolled his neck. "One exchange. That’s all I want. I’ve been telling people for a month that I’d get one exchange out of the man who took the capital and I refuse to go home a liar."

So Xuan gave him one.

He kept it honest, which was the only way to give a man like that anything. He didn’t use the core, didn’t use the arts, didn’t hold himself up above it where the whole thing would have felt like an adult humoring a child. He met Zhaolin blade to blade in a cold empty courtyard and let the exchange run four beats longer than it had any business running, and let Zhaolin push him back half a step on the third, and only ended it on the fifth, disarming him with a turn of the wrist that the man could actually see coming if he thought about it later.

Zhaolin stood there breathing hard with his sword six feet away in the dirt and started grinning like he’d won money.

"Third beat," he said. "You went back. I moved you."

"You did."

"I want that in writing."

"I’ll have Hao draft it."

"He’ll charge me." Zhaolin retrieved his blade, and clapped Xuan on the shoulder hard enough to rock him. "Take care of her. And when you’re bored of being important, come south of the ridge and we’ll go drinking somewhere nobody’s heard of either of us."

Then there was Yueyue, who had been waiting all morning and had run out of patience approximately at dawn.

She was at the end of the walk with the wooden tiger in her fist and an expression of pure prosecutorial fury.

"You said."

"I said I’d greet our father first. I greeted him. There were also two weddings and a banquet."

"One wedding," Yueyue said.

"It felt like two."

"You said." She waggled the tiger. "You promised. And then you got married and everybody was talking and I waited and waited."

Xuan crouched down in front of her, and considered the sky, which was clear and cold and had nothing in it at all, and considered his father, who was on the other side of the mountain saying goodbye to Frostmoon and would not be able to intervene in time.

"How high?"

Her whole face changed.

He took her up.

He kept it slow, and he kept a hand locked in the back of her collar the entire time despite her loud and repeated opinion that this was unnecessary, and he took his little sister up off the ceremonial stair and out over the cedar grove on the flat of Marrow Dragon, in a wide easy circle above the roofs of the sect.

She screamed the whole way. Delighted, ear-splitting, absolutely unembarrassed screaming, the kind that carries a long way in cold mountain air, and down below people came out into the courts to see what was being murdered.

"HIGHER."

"This is high."

"That’s the training hall! It’s tiny! Big Brother Xuan, it’s TINY!"

"That’s how roofs work from up here."

"Can we go over the wall? Can we go over the WALL?"

They went over the wall. Of course they went over the wall. He came back around and set down in the middle of the main courtyard where half the sect had gathered to watch, and Yueyue’s legs gave out on the flagstones, and she got straight back up and announced to an audience of thirty adults that she had been higher than the training hall roof and everyone else had not.

Lian arrived to collect her, took in the situation without a word, and gave Xuan a look he’d been receiving since he was nine.

"Her mother is going to have that conversation with you," she said.

"Worth it."

"You say that a great deal lately." She caught Yueyue’s hand as the girl tried to negotiate a second flight. "Your robe’s on the rail. I’ve taken it in at the shoulders again, because apparently you’re not finished growing into whatever you’ve turned into." A beat, drier. "Congratulations, Young Master. She’s good for you. Tell her I said the opposite."

He spent the rest of the day doing nothing, which he hadn’t done in longer than he could remember.

He watched Tianming run a training session below and did not interfere once, which took actual effort. He ate too much. He slept in the afternoon, in a chair, in the sun, like an old man.

And in the evening he found his wife at the rail above the pass with the last of the Frostmoon column a small pale line far down the road, and stood beside her without saying anything, and she leaned her shoulder into his arm the way she had at the banquet, and the two of them watched her family go home.

"Your brother told me you sleep badly," Xuan said.

Qingyue didn’t move.

"Yanzhou is a dead man," she said calmly. "It’ll take time. He’ll never see it coming."