Chapter 268: What Qingyue Chose

Qingyue found the Princess in a garden that was only half a garden, because half of it had been trampled to mud in the taking of the city and no one had gotten around to the flowers yet.

Xinhua was sitting on the one intact bench, a stack of reports she wasn’t reading in her lap, looking at the ruined beds like they were a problem she could solve if she stared long enough. She didn’t hear Qingyue come, which said something about how tired she was, because people usually heard Frostmoon coming the way you hear cold coming.

"You’ll ruin your eyes reading in this light," Qingyue said.

Xinhua looked up, and to her credit didn’t bother to pretend she’d been reading. "I wasn’t, really. I was avoiding people."

"I’m people."

"You’re less people than most." She moved the reports off the bench, an invitation. "Sit, if you want. I warn you I’m poor company tonight."

Qingyue sat. For a while neither of them said anything, which suited her. She’d come here to have a conversation she’d been turning over for a while, and she saw no reason to rush at it.

"You’ve been avoiding me specifically," Qingyue said, when she’d let the quiet run its course.

Xinhua didn’t insult her by denying it. "A little. Yes."

"Because of Xuan."

"Because of Xuan." The Princess said it evenly, but her hands went still on her knee. "You’re direct. I’d heard that about you, and I appreciate it, mostly, and I’ll be honest that right now I’d have taken another few days of not having this conversation."

"I’d rather have it once, cleanly, than have it live in the corners of every room the three of us share." Qingyue looked out at the mud. "I don’t like things living in corners."

"No. I imagine you don’t."

Qingyue let that sit a moment, then went at it plainly. "I’m not blind, and I’m not stupid, and I’ve been near the two of you through a war. Something grew between you in it. Don’t tell me it didn’t. You’d only make us both feel worse, and you’d be lying to a woman who watches people for a living."

Xinhua was quiet a beat. "No. I won’t tell you it didn’t."

"Good."

"Qingyue—" The Princess turned toward her, and there was something careful and unhappy in it. "I want to say a thing before you say yours, because I think I owe it. I did not set out to take anything of yours. That matters to me, that you hear it. He is your betrothed. Both peaks blessed it. I know exactly what I’d be standing in the middle of, and I have spent a great deal of the little sleep I get trying to decide how to stand out of it instead."

"And?"

"And I haven’t managed it." She said it like an admission of failure. "I’ve killed a brother and sealed another and taken a throne, and the one thing I can’t seem to do by force of will is stop feeling what I feel. Which is new, and unwelcome, and I don’t have a plan for it, and I hate not having a plan."

Qingyue almost smiled. "You sound like him."

"That’s not a comfort."

"It wasn’t meant as one." Qingyue shifted to face her more fully. "Now hear mine, because you’ve assumed the shape of this conversation and you’ve assumed it wrong. You think I came out here to warn you off. To draw a line. You’ve been bracing for it."

"...Yes."

"I didn’t."

Xinhua blinked, and for a moment the Empress fell entirely away and left only a tired young woman who’d expected a fight and been handed something she didn’t recognize. "Then what did you come out here to do?"

"To choose." Qingyue held her eyes. "That’s the part everyone gets wrong about people like me. They think because I’m quiet, things happen to me. That I’ll be gracious, and swallow it, and let a princess and a war arrange my life around me while I keep my face still about it." Her voice didn’t rise, but iron came into it. "I don’t get arranged, Xinhua. I decide. And I have decided this, on my own, with my eyes open, before either of you got a chance to decide it for me."

"Decided what?"

"That there’s room." She said it simply. "That I would rather share something real than hoard a smaller version of it out of pride, and that I’ve watched you, these past days, and I don’t find you a thing to be jealous of. I find you a person I could stand beside." A pause. "That’s a rarer thing than love, in my experience. I like plenty of people I couldn’t stand beside. You, I could."

Xinhua stared at her. "You’re serious."

"I’m always serious. It’s my worst quality." That got the ghost of something out of the Princess, and Qingyue let it breathe before she went on. "Understand me, though. This is not resignation. If I’d looked at you and found a schemer, or a woman who’d use him, or someone I couldn’t respect, we would be having an entirely different conversation, and you would be enjoying it a great deal less. This isn’t me giving something up. It’s me choosing to let something in, because I looked at it clearly and judged it worth letting in. Those are not the same, and I’ll thank you never to mistake one for the other."

"I wouldn’t dare," Xinhua said, and meant it.

"Good."

They sat with it a moment. Out beyond the ruined beds, somewhere in the recovering city, a bell rang the hour, ordinary and unhurried.

"For what it’s worth," Xinhua said, slower now, "I did not expect that. Any of it. I had a whole miserable speech prepared about duty and stepping back and doing the honorable thing."

"I could tell. You had the face for it."

"I’m going to have to think of something to do with the speech now."

"Waste it," Qingyue said. "The honorable thing was always going to make all three of us quietly miserable and call it virtue. I’ve no patience for that particular flavor of noble. I’d rather we simply be honest, and difficult, and real, than polite and hollow."

Xinhua let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "He said something like that once. About honesty being difficult and worth it."

"He would. It’s one of the few genuinely good things about him, under all the cleverness." Qingyue’s mouth curved, just barely. "The cleverness gets tiresome. The honesty, I’ll keep."

That surprised a real laugh out of the Princess, short and startled, the first Qingyue had heard from her that wasn’t weighed down with a crown. "You love him."

"Obviously. I’m not doing this out of civic feeling." Qingyue tilted her head. "And you do too, and you’ve been carrying it around like a crime you committed. Stop. It isn’t one. Not to me, and I’m the only person whose opinion on the matter you actually needed."

Xinhua was quiet for a long moment, and when she spoke her voice had lost the practiced evenness entirely. "Why are you being kind to me about this? You had every right to be otherwise. I half wanted you to be. It would have been simpler to deserve."

"Because I don’t confuse kind with weak, and I don’t do things to be simpler." Qingyue stood, unhurried, and looked down at her. "And because I meant what I said. I could stand beside you. That’s not a small thing for me to decide about a person, and I don’t hand it out to be nice. I handed it to you because you earned it, holding a broken host together and grieving your family and carrying a throne, and doing all three at once without letting any of them drop." A pause. "That’s the sort of person I want at his other side, if there’s going to be one. Better you than someone I’d have to watch."

Xinhua rose as well, and for a moment the two of them stood in the half-ruined garden, a princess about to be an empress and the young mistress of a cold mountain, taking each other’s measure one last time and finding, both of them, that the measure held.

"Then we should probably tell him," Xinhua said.

"We should let him work it out himself," Qingyue said. "It’ll take him a week and he’ll be insufferably pleased when he finally gets there, and I find I want to watch that happen."

"That’s a little cruel."

"It’s a little cruel. He can survive a little cruel. He survived a god." Qingyue turned to go, then paused. "For the record. I’ll be first. In everything that has an order to it. That’s the one line I do draw, and it isn’t about you, it’s about two peaks and a promise that came before you. Everything past that line, we’ll manage between us, as equals, and I’ll expect the same care from you that I’m extending. Agreed?"

"Agreed," Xinhua said, without hesitation, and it had the weight of a treaty, because between two people like them, that’s exactly what it was.

"Good." Qingyue inclined her head, the smallest courtesy, and it landed like the largest, because Frostmoon didn’t spend them lightly. "Get some sleep, Empress. Stop reading in the dark. And leave the flowers, they’ll come back on their own once someone stops walking on them."

She left the Princess standing in her half-garden with a speech she’d never give and a thing she hadn’t expected to be handed, and walked back into the recovering city with the clean, settled feeling of a woman who had looked at a hard thing directly, decided what she wanted, and said so out loud, which was the only way Su Qingyue had ever known how to live.