Chapter 285: Back to the Capital

The capital had stopped being a wound and started being a city again, and Xuan noticed it first through the noise.

The last time he’d ridden these avenues they’d been quiet enough to hear his own horse. Now there was scaffolding up the whole eastern quarter, and the racket of it carried three streets: hammers, saws, a foreman screaming at somebody about the wrong grade of timber. Market stalls had come back to the processional avenue, which they were absolutely not permitted to do, and the guard had apparently decided not to fight about it.

Tianming rode the whole way in with his mouth slightly open.

"How many people live here?"

"About a million, before the war," Hao said. "Call it six hundred thousand now. It’ll be back over a million inside five years, and half of them will be new, and that’s where the money is."

"There are more people on that one street than have ever lived on our mountain."

"There are more people in that noodle shop than have ever lived on your mountain," Hao said, not unkindly. "Keep your purse in front of you and stop looking up. You look like a man who wants to be robbed and would find the experience educational."

They found the Empress in a working room off the old ministry hall, not on the throne, with four officials waiting and a fifth being dismantled.

Xuan had come to watch her do this and had gotten better at it since. She didn’t raise her voice. She let the man finish his entire prepared position about grain reallocation, and then she asked him three questions in a row, and by the third one the man had discovered on his own that his numbers only worked if two counties agreed to starve.

"Rework it and bring it back tomorrow," she said. "You’re not wrong about the priority. You’re wrong about the arithmetic, and I need you to be the person who catches that before I do, because I can’t be the last check on every ledger in this empire."

The official left looking like a man who’d been let off and put to work in the same breath, which was the whole trick of her.

She had them clear the room after that.

"Well," she said, dropping into the chair properly. "You look like a man who’s come to ask for something enormous."

"Is it that obvious?"

"You’ve got your explaining face on. I’ve seen it three times and it’s cost me a war, a sword sect, and a seat at my own table." She waved a hand. "Go on."

So he told her.

He gave her the version that worked without Mira in it, which was most of it, and the parts he had to fudge he fudged the way he always had: he knew things, he had for years, nobody had ever gotten a straight answer about it and the answers had always been good. Raiders off the river at Hao’s city. Weapons and techniques nobody could name. A poison that wasn’t in any book on this continent, sitting in a man in her own guest hall right now, held under a Frostmoon cold because it couldn’t be cured. A disc off a corpse with a mark on it that pointed south, across the water.

He left out the two words Mira had given him, because those he wasn’t going to hand anyone.

Xinhua listened without interrupting, which he’d noticed was her actual talent, and when he finished she was quiet for a moment.

"You’re going," she said.

"I’m going."

"You’d already decided before you walked in here, and this whole recitation was a courtesy." Her mouth twitched. "I’m not complaining. It was a good recitation. Here’s my problem with it."

"Go on."

"You’ve described this to me as a personal trip. Your friend’s city, your poison, your mystery." She leaned forward. "An armed force nobody can identify came up an imperial river, took apart a chartered trade city, killed imperial subjects, and left. That’s not your business, Xuan. That’s mine. You’ve just brought me a border incident and tried to dress it up as a favor."

Xuan sat back and let himself enjoy it. "You’re annoyed."

"I’m delighted. It’s the first interesting thing anyone’s put in front of me in a month, and it’s an excuse to do something instead of arbitrating grain." She was already reaching for paper. "Right. You’d have gone on a hired boat with four people and a bag of silver, and gotten yourselves killed in a foreign port for the crime of looking wealthy and having no friends."

"That was roughly the plan."

"Here’s the better one." She wrote as she talked, fast, in a hand he could barely follow. "You go as an imperial legation. First contact with the southern courts since the war, opening trade discussions, congratulations to whoever’s in charge down there on whatever they’ve done recently. It’s overdue, it’s true, and it means a group of armed cultivators can move around a foreign continent without every local sect deciding you’re an invasion."

"And when we start asking questions about raiders and poison?"

"That’s what a legation does. You’re establishing the safety of imperial shipping." She didn’t look up. "Ships. I’ll give you the Grey Heron out of the southern yards, she’s fast and she’s boring and nobody looks at her twice, and I’d rather you weren’t announced by a warship. Papers for all five of you. Letters of credit that any decent southern house will honor, which will save your friend three months of building trust from nothing."

"He’ll cry."

"He’ll bill me." She kept writing. "There’s a trade legation in a port city down there called Anhu. Two of the old dynasty’s people, who I have kept on precisely because they’ve been forgotten and nobody’s had time to corrupt them. They’re the only assets I have on that continent and they’re yours."

"You’re giving me your whole southern position."

"I’m giving my consort a mandate to go find out who’s cutting up my river cities," Xinhua said. "The fact that you were leaving anyway is a coincidence I intend to take full credit for in front of the council."

Elder Pei came to him that evening, on her own, which was how he knew it wasn’t nothing.

They walked out to where the black hill was visible over the rooftops, with the guard fires burning on it, small and steady.

"It holds," she said, before he could ask. "Let me say that first, because I don’t want you standing there imagining the worst while I get to it. The wards hold. Nothing’s cracked, nothing’s slipped, the knot is exactly where we left it."

"But something’s off."

"The ward-stones need re-inking." Pei folded her arms. "The formula I used should hold six months on a working of that size, and I’ve had my people go over the anchor set three times since the coronation. The characters fade. Not fast. Just faster than they’ve any business fading."

"Something’s eating at it."

"Or it’s a formation built by a woman who’d been awake for four days working with materials scavenged out of a dead city, and it has flaws, which is the boring answer and probably the true one." She said it in the tone of someone who’d been talking herself into that for weeks. "The guard rotation sleeps badly up there. Two of them have asked to be moved and I moved them and didn’t ask why. I’ve stopped putting anyone on that hill for more than a month at a stretch."

"What do you need?"

"Nothing you can give me from a boat." A short breath. "I’m telling you because you’re the only other person alive who knows what’s actually in that knot, and if I keep it to myself and something happens while you’re at sea, I’ll have to live with having been polite about it."

Xuan looked at the fires on the hill for a while.

"Write to me," he said. "Everything. Even the boring answer. Especially the boring answer."

The wedding preparations, meanwhile, had achieved a state Xuan could only describe as institutional panic.

An imperial wedding apparently required eleven ministries, and every one of them had produced a document, and someone had decided that the consort should approve the seating of the third and fourth ranks personally. Xuan approved two hundred names he did not know in a single afternoon and privately assumed several of them were the same man.

Hao took one look at the flower budget and had to go outside.

Lian, given a wing of the palace and a staff of imperial physicians to work with, discovered inside a day that being handed six well-trained subordinates is worse than doing it yourself, and reorganized them into something that functioned by the end of the week.

Tianming got lost twice, was found once in the wrong courtyard being politely interrogated by palace guards, and started sleeping better once Xuan put him on a training yard with actual opponents his own age.

"They’re all better than me," he reported, glowing, with a spectacular bruise on his jaw.

"That’s the idea."

Qingyue and the Empress had dinner together twice that week, without him.

He didn’t hear about the first one until afterward. He heard about the second because he walked into the wrong sitting room looking for a map and found the two of them at a low table with a pot of tea and the wedding seating plan between them, and Qingyue was saying something about the third-rank tables that made Xinhua put her face in her hand and laugh in a way empresses are not supposed to laugh.

They both looked up. Xuan stood in the doorway holding a rolled chart.

"I was looking for the harbor map."

"It’s in the other room," Xinhua said.

"Right."

"Xuan." Qingyue didn’t turn around. "Go away."

He went away.

He stood outside in the corridor for a second with his ears warm, and heard them start up again behind the door, and had the distinct sense of a man who has walked into a room where two people are doing something considerably more complicated than getting along, and doing it well, and does not have a part in it.

’Say nothing,’ he told Mira.

[ I wasn’t going to.] A pause. [ I was going to say several things, and I’ve decided to save them, because you’re going to need cheering up in about a month when you’re on a boat and seasick and neither of them is there.]