Chapter 284: The Ones Who Come With Me

He told Qingyue that night. It took under a minute, because she’d worked out most of it at the rail five days ago and the rest of it while he was barring doors on the third terrace.

"I’m going south. It’ll be a long trip and I don’t know what’s at the end of it."

"My case is by the door." She didn’t look up from the ledger. "It’s been by the door since the morning after the wedding."

"You packed before I decided."

"I packed when you started looking at the wrong side of the valley." She turned a page. "Bring the heavy coat. I’ve read that the crossing is miserable."

Lian was in the sick room with Yun Ji, and she’d been there most of two days.

Qingyue had put the man into a preserving cold, a Frostmoon method for keeping the near-dead near, and between that and Lian’s needles the black under his jaw had stopped climbing. It hadn’t gone down. It wasn’t going to go down.

"He’ll hold," Lian said. "Master Fu can maintain it, and the cold does the work. He won’t wake and he won’t worsen. Beyond that I’d be guessing, and I’d rather not guess in front of his wife."

"I want you on the ship."

She started packing her needles away, one by one, into their roll.

"Say why," she said. "And if the answer is that you’d like a familiar face and someone to make you take your pills, I’d rather stay here and be useful."

"The answer is that nobody on this continent can name what’s in that man, and you’re the one who proved it." Xuan crouched by the case. "You went through every book we own and three from the coast, and you got to the truth faster than any physician the palace would have sent. Where we’re going, that stuff grows. Somebody down there sells it, somebody down there cures it, and I need a person standing next to me who can look at a southern reagent and tell me what it does. That isn’t a favor, Lian. It’s the job, and you’re the only one who can do it."

She tied the roll shut and held it a moment.

"I’ve never been off this mountain," she said. "Not properly. I came up that road in a cart when I was eight and I’ve been on it twice since." Her mouth twisted. "I peeled turnips in that kitchen down there for four years. I know the flagstone that rocks. And now I’m going to cross an ocean to argue with foreign apothecaries about a poison."

"You could say no."

"Don’t be stupid." She put the roll in the case and shut it. "I’m saying that a person’s allowed a moment about it, Young Master. I’ve had my moment. It’s over. Tell me what the weather does down there so I know what to pack for him."

He found Tianming in the lower yard the next morning, running the same fourth form, still dropping the same elbow.

"Come with me a minute."

Tianming put the sword up and followed him out to the terrace over the pass, and stood there looking politely puzzled, and Xuan watched him fail entirely to guess what was coming, because it had never once occurred to him to want it out loud.

"I’m leaving the empire," Xuan said. "South, across the water. Qingyue, Lian, Hao. And you, if you want it."

Tianming’s face went blank.

"You need me to hold the mountain."

"Kai holds the mountain."

"Then the outer court, someone has to run the sessions, the intake’s in two months—"

"Tianming." Xuan waited for him to stop. "I’m not looking for a reason to leave you here. I’ve come out here to ask you to come."

The boy opened his mouth and shut it again.

"You’ve never been off this rock," Xuan said. "Not once. You held this place through a war on your own, at nineteen, with nobody above you to ask, and your reward was that everybody who left came home with stories and you got a schedule that ran well. I’ve watched you out here at night for a week building a Foundation form out of something you saw me do six years ago, because that’s the only new thing this mountain has left to give you." He shrugged. "So come and see something. You’ve earned a horizon."

Tianming stood there with his ears going red.

"I’m not strong enough," he said. "Where you’re going, I’d be the weakest person in the group. By a lot. I’d be the one you have to keep an eye on."

"You would."

"Oh."

"You’d also be the one who learns fastest, because everyone else in that group already knows what they are." Xuan folded his arms on the rail. "I don’t need you strong, I need you willing. I’ll handle the rest of it on the road, and by the time we come home you won’t be reverse-engineering forms out of a memory, you’ll be running them properly, because I’ll teach you."

There was a long pause.

"Can I say yes now," Tianming said, "or is there a part where I’m supposed to think about it?"

"Say yes now."

"Yes." It came out cracked. He cleared his throat and got it under control. "Yes. Senior Brother. I’ll go."

Hao needed no persuading whatsoever, which Xuan had expected, and gave a reason that was three reasons stacked on top of each other, which he’d also expected.

"My city, first. I’m going down there tomorrow, I’ll be a fortnight setting it right, and I’ll meet you at the capital before you sail." He was writing while he talked, which he did constantly now. "Second, whoever came up that river came from somewhere, and somebody in a port down south sold them the boats and the salt and the rope. People leave a paper trail even when they’re careful, and I am very good at paper."

"And third?"

"Third." Hao’s brush paused, and something entered his face that Xuan recognized from a hungry street kid outside a warehouse years ago. "There’s an entire continent down there where nobody has ever heard of me. No guild I’m locked out of, no old families with three hundred years of contracts, no ceiling. I could build something down there from a table and a good idea." He went back to writing. "I’d have gone anyway. You’re just paying for the boat."

The goodbyes took the rest of the day.

Lin Zhen walked him out as far as the second gate, and said very little on the way, and at the gate he did the thing he’d done at the wedding, which was to hold his son by both shoulders and look at him.

"I’ve done this before," he said. "You went off to a war and I made my peace with not getting you back, and then I got you back, and I told myself that was the last time I’d have to do that arithmetic." A short breath. "Apparently not."

"I’ll write."

"You’ll write badly and rarely." Lin Zhen let him go. "Take care of the ones you’re taking. They’re all somebody’s, and two of them are mine."

Elder Ren was on his bench, in his patch of sun.

"So you’re off," he said. "I won’t get up."

"I wouldn’t let you."

"I’m eighty-one." Ren looked out at the pass. "Ships take months. You’ll be gone a year at the least, if you come back at all, and I’m eighty-one." He said it plainly, without any weight on it, which was what made it land. "Go on, boy. Don’t stand there working out what to say. I vouched for you and I got to see how it turned out. Not many men get that."

The mothers were easier. Madam Yu pressed a bundle of dried plums on him for the road and told him not to be foolish. Madam Lin Hua cried a little and apologized for it twice.

Kai came out to the courtyard with the storehouse ledger still under his arm, patriarch in all but name, and offered his hand, and Xuan took it.

"The token," Kai said.

"Send it for anything."

"I’ll send it when the salt doesn’t reconcile, purely to irritate you across an ocean."

Yueyue was the one that broke him.

She’d been told. Somebody had explained about continents and ships and how long it takes, and she’d nodded through all of it, and she’d clearly understood exactly one thing out of the whole explanation, which was the part that mattered.

She was waiting at the top of the stair with the wooden tiger held against her chest, and she didn’t run at him this time.

"You’re going away."

"I am."

"For a long time."

"Yes."

She thought about that with her whole face. Then she held the tiger out at arm’s length.

"Take him."

"He’s yours."

"He wins," Yueyue said fiercely, pushing him into Xuan’s hands. "That’s the whole point of him. You take him and then you come back and give him to me, and that’s how I know."

Xuan crouched down and closed his hand around a piece of worn wood that had been chewed on by a toddler and carried through half a war of childhood grievances, and found he couldn’t say anything at all for a moment.

"Deal," he managed.

"Say it properly."

"I’ll bring him back."

She put two small fingers up. He gave her the two fingers back, and she nodded, satisfied, businesslike, and went off up the walk to find her other brother, and made it about ten paces before her shoulders started shaking, and she kept walking anyway.

The tiger went in his inner pocket, where it stayed.