Chapter 269: The Woman on the Throne

Xinhua sent for him near midnight, which was either very improper or entirely reasonable depending on how you counted, and Xuan had stopped counting that way some time ago.

She wasn’t in the throne room. She was in a small side chamber off it, the kind of room a ruler actually lives in as opposed to the grand ones they perform in, with a low fire and two chairs and a decanter someone had thoughtfully left and she had not touched. She was still dressed for the day’s endless business, but she’d taken the pins out of her hair, and something about that small undoing made her look less like an empire and more like a person who was tired of being one.

"You wanted to see me," Xuan said.

"I wanted to not be alone for an hour, and you were the name that came to mind." She gestured at the other chair. "That’s more honest than a summons deserves, but you get honest from me at this hour or nothing."

He sat.

[ Bold of her, ] Mira observed, dry as a bone. [ Summoning a man to her private rooms at midnight to ’not be alone.’ In my day we had a word for that. Several words.]

’Behave.’

[ I’m always behaved. I’m a picture of restraint. Look at me not saying anything about the hair.]

Xinhua didn’t notice the small twitch at the corner of his mouth, or chose not to. She was looking at the fire.

"Do you know what nobody warned me about," she said. "Winning. Not the getting of it. The after. Everyone tells you how to fight for a throne. Nobody sits you down and explains what to do with your hands the first quiet night you have one."

"In fairness, most people who fight for thrones don’t survive to need the advice."

"That’s grim."

"You started it."

That earned him a look, half a smile in it. "I did, didn’t I."

They sat a moment. The fire cracked and settled.

"I keep waiting to feel like an empress," she said, quieter. "I keep thinking it’ll arrive. Some morning I’ll wake up and the weight will have turned into authority, and I’ll simply be the thing everyone’s already treating me as. It hasn’t come. I still feel like a girl who got very lucky and very unlucky in the same week, wearing a role three sizes too heavy."

"That feeling doesn’t go away," Xuan said. "I’ve got a bit of experience being handed things too big for me. The trick isn’t growing into them. It’s learning to carry them while they’re still too big, and letting everyone assume that’s the same as fitting."

[ Oh, that’s good, ] Mira said. [ That’s genuinely good advice. Quick, ruin it by looking pleased with yourself.]

’I’m not looking pleased with myself.’

[ You absolutely are. I can feel your face from in here.]

Xinhua turned from the fire to look at him properly. "You do that. You know that? You say a true thing so plainly it takes me a second to notice you’ve handed me exactly the thing I needed. He’s like this, I keep meaning to tell people. He looks like he’s just talking."

"It’s a survival trait. Nobody guards against the boy who’s just talking."

"No." Something moved behind her eyes. "No, they don’t."

The quiet stretched, and it wasn’t uncomfortable, and that in itself was the strange part. Xuan had spent a war learning to read this woman across battlefields, and it was disorienting to sit across a fire from her with nothing to read but the plain fact of her being tired and human and near.

"Can I tell you the thing I actually can’t say to anyone else," she said.

"That’s usually why people send for me at midnight."

"I don’t regret it." She said it low, like a confession. "Any of it. The things I did to get here. I’ve turned it over waiting to feel the guilt everyone would expect, and it isn’t there, and that frightens me more than guilt would. What kind of person feels nothing about the worst things they’ve done?"

[ Careful, ] Mira murmured, and all the tartness had gone out of her. [ This one’s real. Don’t be clever at her. Be kind.]

He didn’t need telling. "The kind who did them for reasons that held," Xuan said. "You didn’t do those things because they were easy or because you enjoyed them. You did them because the alternative was worse, for more people, and some part of you added it up and paid the price on purpose. That’s not the absence of feeling. That’s what it looks like from the inside when a person carries something so they don’t have to hand it to someone weaker." He held her gaze. "You’ll feel it. Later. When it’s safe to. Grief and guilt don’t send ahead to schedule an appointment. They just show up one ordinary afternoon when you’ve finally got room. Right now you don’t have room. That’s not a flaw in you. It’s mercy, buying you time to be able to afford it."

Xinhua was quiet a long moment.

"You should have been a priest," she said finally, unsteadily. "Or a con artist. I genuinely can’t always tell which."

"The pay’s better as a con artist."

She laughed, and it cracked halfway, and she pressed the back of her hand briefly to her mouth as if she could put it back, and Xuan understood that he’d found the seam under the composure and the thing behind it had been waiting a long time for somewhere safe to come out.

"I’m not going to fall apart in front of you," she said, when she had it back.

"You could. I wouldn’t tell anyone. I’m remarkably discreet, ask anyone who trusts me with things."

[ You are the least discreet person I have ever been surgically attached to, ] Mira said. [ You tell me everything, and I’m technically you.]

’You don’t count.’

[ I’m going to remember that.]

"No," Xinhua said, and there was something decided in it now, a woman making a choice rather than losing a battle. "I’m not going to fall apart. But I am going to do the other thing I sent for you to do, and I’d rather do it than talk myself out of it for another hour, because I’ve done enough not doing things I wanted this year."

Xuan went still. "Xinhua—"

"Qingyue talked to me." She said it plainly, watching his face. "You didn’t know that. I can see you didn’t. She found me in a garden and took apart every reason I’d built for keeping my distance, one at a time, until I didn’t have any left. She’s rather good at it. Frightening woman. I like her enormously."

[ Told you, ] Mira said, insufferably. [ A week, I said. She figured it out for you and you’re STILL a step behind. Try to keep up, hero.]

’Not now.’

[ Oh, definitely now. This is the best seat in the house.]

"She said there was room," Xinhua went on, "and that she’d decided there was, on her own, and that it wasn’t hers to hoard or mine to steal but something we’d manage between us, as equals. She used the word treaty. And she said she’d be first, which I’ve agreed to, and which I mention so there’s nothing hidden between the three of us going in." A breath. "So it isn’t a thing I’m taking from anyone. She handed it to me with her eyes open. And I’m done being noble about a thing that would only make all three of us quietly unhappy and call it virtue."

"She said that last part almost word for word," Xuan managed.

"She would. You two are worse than each other." Xinhua rose, and crossed the small distance between the chairs, and stood in front of him with the fire behind her, an empress and a young woman and, for this one held moment, only the second of those. "Stop being clever, Xuan. Just this once. I’ve had a very long war and a very long week and I would like, for about ten seconds, to not have to be strategic about anything."

He stood, because there are moments a person doesn’t stay sitting through.

"For the record," he said quietly, "I’m not being clever right now. I’ve got nothing clever left. You’d be amazed how little of it survives a god."

"Good," she said. "Then don’t start."

And she kissed him, there in the firelit little room where rulers are allowed to be people, unhurried and certain and entirely her own choice, the way she’d done everything that had brought her to a throne, and Xuan kissed her back, and for a while there was nothing strategic in either of them at all.

[ ...I’ll give you the room, ] Mira said, and for once there was no barb in it, only something almost fond, and then, mercifully, she went quiet and let him have the moment unwatched.

When they drew apart, Xinhua didn’t step back, and didn’t rush to fill the silence with anything managed. She just looked at him, close, and let herself be looked at, the pins out of her hair and the empire set down for once outside the door.

"That’s better," she said softly. "That’s the first thing in a long time I’ve done only because I wanted to."

"Keep a list," Xuan said. "Of things you do only because you want to. It’ll be a short list at first. Grow it."

"Is that priest advice or con artist advice?"

"Both. The good ones overlap more than you’d think."

She almost laughed again, and this time it didn’t crack, and she rested her forehead against his for a moment in the quiet firelit room, two people who’d started as strangers on opposite sides of a war and found, at the tired end of it, that the ground between them had turned into something worth standing on. Outside, a recovering city kept its small night noises. Inside, for one unhurried hour, nobody was an empress or a weapon or a boy carrying too much. They were just warm, and near, and choosing it, and that was enough to be going on with.