Chapter 280: Brothers

Xuan found his brother in the outer court storehouse, doing the least glamorous job on the mountain.

Kai had the winter registers out on a plank bench and was working through them by hand, counting sacks against a column of figures, marking corrections in a small crabbed script. He’d taken his outer robe off and hung it on a hook. There was flour dust on his forearms.

Nobody had assigned him this. Xuan knew the schedule; the storehouse count was a steward’s job who’d gone down the mountain with the wedding carts and wasn’t back yet. Kai had noticed the gap and filled it, alone, in a cold building where nobody would ever come looking to be impressed.

"You’re counting rice," Xuan said.

Kai didn’t look up. "Somebody has to. Half the household stores went into feeding two sects and an imperial party, and if we don’t reconcile it now we’ll find out in the spring when it’s a problem."

"How bad?"

"Not bad. We over-bought, which was your man’s doing, and I’d rather that than the other way." He made a mark. "There’s a discrepancy in the salt. It’ll be arithmetic, not theft. It’s always arithmetic."

Xuan leaned against the doorframe and let him work a minute.

Twelve years of history stood in that room with them, and neither of them touched it. That was how they’d been doing this since the war ended. Civil. Careful. Two men passing each other in corridors with a nod, sharing a table at meals, saying nothing that couldn’t be said in front of a child.

’You could give me a moment,’ Xuan told the back of his own skull.

[ Wasn’t going to say a word. This one’s yours.] And she went quiet, and stayed quiet, which from her was practically a courtesy.

"I’m leaving," Xuan said.

Kai’s brush stopped. He finished the figure he was on, set the brush down across the inkstone, and turned around.

"When?"

"Soon. We go back down to the capital, and I’m not coming back up for a long while after that." Xuan kept it plain. "My life’s down there now. The Empress, the court, all of it. I’ll be married into the throne before the season turns. There’s no version of that where I run a mountain three provinces north."

"I assumed as much."

"Here’s the part you haven’t assumed." Xuan pushed off the doorframe. "I want you to take the mountain."

Kai’s face did something complicated and shut it down fast.

"The mountain is Father’s."

"The mountain is Father’s, and Father is sixty-one and just walked a war and a wedding, and he’ll be at that council table in the capital more than he’s here from now on, because that’s what a founder’s seat costs." Xuan let that sit. "Somebody runs this place while he’s away. Somebody who’s here every day, who knows the registers and the elders and which storehouse leaks. I’m asking you to be that."

"You’re asking me."

"I’m asking you."

Kai laughed, once, with no humor in it at all, and folded his arms.

"Let’s be honest about what this is," he said. "You’ve won everything there is to win. You’re a Golden Core, you’re marrying an empress, your sect sits at an imperial table, and you don’t need this mountain anymore. So on your way out the door you’ve decided to leave the family disappointment something to do, so he stops looking like a disappointment. Do I have it about right?"

"No."

"It’s charity, Xuan."

"It’s a job." Xuan’s voice didn’t rise. "And if you think it’s a small one, you haven’t looked at what this sect turned into while you were counting salt."

"I know what it turned into."

"I don’t think you do." Xuan came further into the room. "A year ago this was a poor school on a bad mountain that the whole valley had written off. Right now every merchant house within four days is trying to get a son in the door. We’re going to have three hundred applicants at the next intake and beds for forty. The Empress herself climbed those stairs. There are people in this empire who would burn a great deal to have Skyedge fail, because a founder’s seat is a founder’s seat and there are only so many, and the second we look weak somebody is going to test it." He held Kai’s eye. "That’s what you’d be taking. Not a consolation prize. The hardest job on this mountain, at the worst possible moment to be bad at it, and if you get it wrong everything I bled for goes down with you."

Kai was quiet.

"You’ve thought about this," he said finally.

"I’ve thought about nothing else for a week."

"And you picked me." His jaw worked. "You could have Tianming. He held this place through the whole war, he’s competent, he’s liked, and he has never once in his life done anything anyone would have to forgive."

There it was. Nearer than either of them had come to it in years, and still not said out loud, and Xuan had no intention of dragging it into the light on a cold afternoon in a storehouse.

"Tianming’s coming with me," he said.

"So I was second."

"I picked you first, and afterward I found something for Tianming, because the man’s earned more than a morning schedule." Xuan let a beat go by. "You want the real reason? Fine. It’s not the registers, though you’re better at them than anyone here. It’s not that you’re Father’s blood, though the elders will swallow it easier and you know it."

"So what is it?"

"Yueyue."

Kai’s arms came unfolded.

"She sleeps with that tiger and she talks about me like I hung the moon," Xuan said, "and I’ve been home how long? She came to me at a run, told me everything she’d been saving up, and then she went and attached herself to your leg, because you’re the one who’s actually here. You walked her to lessons every day of that war. When the news came down from the capital and this mountain was frightened out of its wits, she wasn’t frightened, and that wasn’t me. I was three provinces away being a hero in a story she can’t understand yet." He shrugged. "I’m the brother who flies. You’re the brother who’s there. She’ll grow up on this mountain either way. I’d rather she grew up on one you’re running."

Kai turned back toward the bench, and put a hand flat on the plank, and stood like that for a while.

"I’m not going to apologize to you," he said. "Not for everything. I don’t have a speech that covers it and I’d rather not hand you a bad one."

"I’m not asking for a speech." Xuan meant it. "You did what you did. I did what I did. I’m not standing here telling you it’s all forgotten, because it isn’t, and we’d both hear the lie." He shrugged again, tired and honest. "But I’ve watched you these past weeks. You count the rice nobody’s watching you count. You take the child to lessons. That’s not nothing. That’s most of what running a sect actually is."

"That’s a very low standard."

"It’s the only standard that holds up." Xuan half-smiled. "Everything else is swordsmanship and luck."

Kai let out a breath that had a laugh buried somewhere in it.

"The elders will fight me on half of it," he said.

"Elder Ren won’t. Get him on your side first and the rest of them fold." Xuan pulled something from his sleeve and set it on the bench beside the registers: a plain token, unmarked, unremarkable. "And this goes with the job. You send that to the capital and it reaches me. Not a letter to the household, not word through Father, not a request to the palace that sits in somebody’s tray for a month. Straight to me."

Kai picked it up and turned it over.

"For emergencies."

"For anything." Xuan said it flatly. "You get in over your head, you send it. You need money you can’t explain, you send it. You want to know how to handle a merchant house that’s leaning on you, you send it and I’ll tell you exactly which one of their cousins to threaten. I’m going a long way south, Kai, but I’m not gone, and I’d rather you called me for something stupid than sat on something serious out of pride."

"Pride’s the family disease."

"Father’s got it worst."

"Father is the source." Kai closed his hand around the token. He looked at the registers, and the flour dust, and the cold room, and his mouth twisted. "I’ll do it."

"Good."

"I’ll probably do it badly for the first year."

"Everyone does everything badly for the first year." Xuan turned to go. "Send the token when you do."

He got three steps.

"Xuan."

He turned back, and Kai crossed the storehouse and put both arms around him, hard, the way men who never do this do it when they finally do. It lasted about two seconds. It was awkward and it was too tight and one of them knocked the inkstone over.

It ended, and Kai stepped back and neither of them said a word about it.

"Get out of my storehouse," Kai said, mopping ink off the bench with his sleeve. "I’ve got salt to reconcile."

Xuan went.

Yueyue caught him on the walk outside, going the other way at a full run, and shouted something about the tiger and a roof without stopping. He heard her hit the storehouse door and heard Kai’s voice go up half an octave telling her to keep away from the ink, and stood in the cold listening to that for a moment before he moved on.

He found his father on the upper terrace, where his father always was.

"You spoke to your brother," Lin Zhen said.

"You knew I would."

"I hoped you would. There’s a difference, and I’ve learned not to push you on the hoping." The old man kept his eyes on the pass. "He’ll take it?"

"He’ll take it."

Lin Zhen nodded slowly, and something came off his shoulders that had been on them a long time.

"Good," he said. "I can go down that mountain without lying awake about what I’m leaving up here. That’s more than I expected out of this life, and I’ll take it."