Chapter 286: The Consort [I]

At Skyedge they’d hung lanterns up a stair and a five-year-old had screamed encouragement from the upper walk.

The empire did it differently.

They closed the processional avenue from the outer gate to the palace steps and lined both sides of it with troops in ceremonial red, and behind the troops they put the city, and the city had turned out in numbers Xuan gave up trying to estimate somewhere past the third ward. Every rooftop with a view had people on it. The ministries had produced a schedule for the day that ran to nine pages, and Xuan had been awake since before dawn being moved through it by officials who addressed him in the third person while he was standing in front of them.

By the time he reached the top of the palace steps he had not seen a single face he knew in over an hour.

[ You’ve got the look, ] Mira said. [ The one from the coronation. The ’I am a farm boy and everyone is about to find out’ look.]

’I’m allowed it.’

[ You’re the second most powerful person in an empire and you’re wearing a robe that cost more than the mountain you grew up on. ] A beat. [ It has forty-one panels. I counted while they were sewing you into it. Somebody’s whole career is those forty-one panels.]

’It weighs as much as armor.’

[ It is armor. Different siege.]

The rite went on most of the afternoon.

There were readings. There were three separate presentations of documents, one of which formally entered his name in the imperial house registry and took the better part of an hour because a man in a tall hat read the whole lineage aloud, starting three hundred years back and working forward through emperors and princes and cousins until he arrived, in the same flat ceremonial drone, at Lin Xuan, of the Skyedge Sword Sect, founder-seated.

The Skyedge Sword Sect. Read out in the imperial registry, in front of the court, in the same breath as three centuries of dynasty.

Xuan kept his face right where it had been. Somewhere in the second rank his father made a sound he covered badly with a cough.

And under the ceremony, running the whole time like a stream under ice, Xuan did the arithmetic he’d been doing all day and couldn’t stop.

Seventeen years old, on the floor of a courtyard on a poor mountain, coughing blood into his own sleeve while a physician told his father the meridians were finished and there was no point wasting good medicine. Sixteen, being told which of his stepbrothers he’d be handing his inheritance to. Fourteen, unable to climb the stair to his own rooms without stopping twice.

Here.

The formal seating had put Qingyue in the second rank, on the left, four places from the front, which was where the ministry’s chart said the wife of an imperial consort went.

She wasn’t there.

Xuan found her during the third reading, and had to look twice, because she’d gone back. Well back. She was standing at the rear of the hall with the Frostmoon delegation, among her father’s people, in Frostmoon white, with her hands in her sleeves and her face doing absolutely nothing.

He learned the rest of it later from Hao, who’d been near enough to hear.

A chamberlain had gone to her before the rite with the seating chart and shown her the place, and she’d declined it. He’d explained the chart. She’d declined it again. He’d begun to explain, with increasing volume, that the arrangement was ministerial and not open to preference, at which point Su Qingyue had asked him whether he’d like to take the argument to the Empress, who had personally approved the chart, and see how that went for him.

The chamberlain had left her where she stood.

She caught Xuan looking, from a hundred feet back through a crowd of the most important people in the world, and gave him one small nod. Nothing more.

’She promised she’d do that,’ Xuan said.

[ On a rail, at her own wedding, before you’d worked out that anyone had promised anything.] Mira was quiet a moment. [ It’s the most expensive thing anyone will do for you today, and there are eleven ministries out there spending your treasury.]

Xinhua came up the aisle with the whole apparatus of an empire around her, and he watched her carry it and thought about how much she hated the weight of the ceremonial headpiece and had never once said so where anyone could hear.

They stood through the vows in front of thousands of people.

And halfway through the longest of them, while a minister read a passage about the harmony of the imperial house that had clearly been written by a committee three dynasties ago, the Empress of the realm turned her head about two degrees and said, without moving her mouth much:

"There are two more of these."

"Two more passages?"

"Two more ministers. One of them stammers." Her expression had not changed by a hair. "I’ve been standing since the fifth hour. I can no longer feel my left foot and I’m being married in front of six hundred thousand people, and if I go over, you catch me and we tell the histories it was emotion."

"Understood."

"Don’t make me laugh, Xuan. I’ll be in a scroll."

He got through the rest of it by not looking at her.

The banquet, mercifully, was a banquet, and banquets are the same everywhere once the wine is out.

Yan Wuji found him near the middle of it, and he came in Pavilion white with the elder’s cord on his shoulder, which was new, and which explained itself.

"They gave you the sect."

"They gave me what’s left of it, which is Elder Pei, forty disciples, and a hall with the roof off." Yan Wuji turned his cup without drinking from it. "There was no one else. That’s the whole of the reasoning. I’m the golden son by process of elimination."

"You’d have been it anyway."

"Maybe." He looked out over the hall. "I wanted to say a thing and I’ve been rehearsing it since the road, so let me get it out badly rather than not at all. I came into your war because I owed you a duel debt and I thought it would make my name. I came out of it with four graves and a sect to rebuild and no one left to ask for advice." A short breath. "And I’d do it again. I want you to know that. Not out of loyalty. Because it was the right side and I was on it, and at nineteen I couldn’t have told you the difference."

"You could come south."

"I know."

"I’ve got a boat and a mandate and no idea what I’m sailing into."

"And I’ve got forty disciples who watched everyone above them die, and if I get on a boat they’ll scatter inside a year." Yan Wuji managed something almost like a grin. "Ask me in ten years. If the Pavilion’s standing and you’re still getting into things, I’ll come and be useful."

"That’s a promise."

"It’s a debt. I keep those."

Lin Zhen and Su Han spent the evening at the same table, as they had at Skyedge, two patriarchs from two poor mountains sitting in an imperial hall being deferred to by men who wouldn’t have taken their letters two years ago. Xuan watched his father accept a courtesy from a duke and return it, and thought that of everything the war had bought, that was the piece he’d take.

Late on, Qingyue came and found him.

"You’re going to be told to leave soon," she said. "There’s a whole procession for it. Four men will walk you down a corridor holding lamps."

"Four?"

"I’ve read the schedule. I was bored." She adjusted his collar, which did not need it, which was the point. "Go on, husband. She’s had a long day, she’s been standing since the fifth hour, and I’d like at least one of us to give her a decent evening."

"You could stop being reasonable at any time. It’s unnerving."

"I’m never reasonable. I’m accurate." She stepped back. "And I meant what I said on that rail. I’ll not have her thinking I stood at the back tonight as a favor she owes me. I did it because it’s true, and true things are easier to live in."

There were, in the end, four men with lamps.

They walked him down a corridor in ceremonial procession, and one of them announced him at a door in a voice that carried the length of the wing, and then all four of them bowed and withdrew and left him standing outside the Empress’s private apartments feeling roughly the way he had before his first tournament round.

Xinhua opened the door herself.

She’d taken the headpiece off. It sat on a table behind her, and without it she was somebody’s tired daughter in an over-embroidered robe, with a line pressed into her forehead where the thing had been digging in since dawn.

"They announced you," she said. "Down the entire wing. A man shouted your name at a door."

"Twice, actually."

"I heard it in here." She stood back to let him in. "I want you to know that I did not order any of that, and I have already given instructions that it never happens again."

’Mira.’

[ Already gone,] she said, warm and entirely without a barb in it. [ Goodnight, Xuan.]

Xinhua shut the door behind him and put her back against it and let out a breath she’d evidently been holding since the fifth hour of the morning.

"Right," she said. "That’s the empire done for the day."