Chapter 288: The Last Morning

Xuan spent his last morning in the empire signing things.

It turned out that leaving a continent properly was mostly paperwork. He put his name on the standing arrangements for the Skyedge estates, on the terms of the imperial credit Hao would be drawing against, on a document authorizing Lian to requisition materials from any imperial dispensary between here and the water, and on eleven other pages he read carefully and understood about two thirds of.

A letter had come up from Skyedge on the fast post, in his brother’s crabbed hand, and it said in full:

The salt reconciled. It was arithmetic. Yueyue has asked about the tiger four times. The intake numbers are worse than you said. Do not write back with advice.

Xuan read it twice and put it in his coat.

’He’s going to be good at it,’ he told Mira.

[ He’s going to be miserable and competent, which in a patriarch is the same thing. ]

Hao came aboard the Grey Heron ahead of everyone with a folder under his arm and the look of a man who has slept four hours in three days and is deeply satisfied about it.

"River city," he said, without preamble. "Two hundred and six dead. Four hundred wounded, most of them coming through. I’ve put Old Wen on the wharf accounts and Su Yi over the granaries, and neither of them can steal without the other noticing, which is how I’ve arranged it." He turned a page. "Widows and orphans on a stipend out of my own accounts, not the city’s, so nobody can vote it away while I’m gone. Walls surveyed. Two watchtowers going up on the north bank. If they come back, the city won’t be asleep."

"And if they come back in force?"

"Then the city burns and I’ll have wasted a lot of money on watchtowers." Hao shut the folder. "I’d rather waste it."

Elder Pei was waiting at the head of the pier.

She’d come down herself, in the plain travel clothes she wore when she didn’t want anyone stopping her in a corridor, and she handed him a sealed packet before she said a word.

"Copies of everything," she said. "The original working, my notes on the anchor set, the re-inking schedule, the guard rotation, and my honest opinion, which is in the last three pages and which I would not put in front of the council."

"What’s your honest opinion?"

"That I don’t know." She said it without any drama in it at all. "The stones fade. The men sleep badly. Nothing has cracked and nothing is going to crack this year, and I’ve stopped pretending I can tell you whether that’s a flawed formation or something inside the knot leaning on the door." She looked past him, up the hill road. "I’ve asked for six more formation specialists from the Pavilion and the ministry both. Yan Wuji is giving me four of his."

"He’s rebuilding with forty disciples."

"He offered before I finished the sentence." Pei’s mouth twisted. "That boy would give me his last four people and go dig the foundations himself. Somebody should tell him he’s allowed to say no."

"He won’t hear it from me. I’ve tried."

Yan Wuji came down to see them off with the four he’d promised, and stood at the end of the pier in Pavilion white with an elder’s cord he still wore like a borrowed coat.

"Write to Pei, not to me," he said. "I’ll be up to my elbows in roofing for a year, and she’ll actually read it."

"Take care of your forty."

"I’ll take care of the forty." He put out his hand and Xuan took it. "Ten years."

"Ten years."

The team assembled on deck in stages, which is how everything happens on a ship.

Lian came aboard behind three crates and supervised the loading of all three personally, having concluded within a day that sailors handle crates the way they handle everything, which is with confidence. She had a fourth, smaller case she carried herself and let nobody touch, and Xuan didn’t ask.

Tianming stood at the rail looking at the harbor with an expression Xuan had last seen on his own face at about fifteen.

"That’s the sea."

"That’s the harbor. The sea’s the other side of the wall."

"There’s more of it?"

"There’s a great deal more of it."

"Right." Tianming gripped the rail with both hands. "How long until we can’t see land?"

"Second day."

"Understood," he said, and held that rail for the next hour.

The Empress came down to the docks in full state, because she had to.

It was a departure of an imperial legation, and the empire had opinions about how those looked, so there were officials and a guard detail and a small crowd, and Xinhua stood on the pier in court dress and gave him a public farewell that was gracious, warm, entirely correct, and about ninety seconds long.

The private one happened in the harbormaster’s office, which was small and smelled of tar and had a window with a broken shutter.

She shut the door and dropped the empire outside it, the way she’d been learning to do.

"I haven’t sent word ahead," she said. "Nothing to Anhu, nothing to the port, nothing on the fast post. You’ll come off that ship and not one person on that continent will know you were coming."

"Your own people don’t know?"

"Mine least of all." She folded her arms. "A legation that’s expecting you meets you at the pier with a banner and a dinner, and by the second night every sect within a hundred miles has your name and your business off a servant. I’d rather you got a look at that continent before it gets a look at you."

"And when I do go to them?"

"You’re a trader with papers, and you stay one as long as it holds. Take a roof, a name, a line of credit. Don’t tell them what you’re hunting or why." She said it without a scrap of apology. "Those two have lasted down there because everyone forgot they existed. Hand a forgotten man a secret and he stops being forgotten."

She took something from her sleeve and put it in his hand. It was heavier than it looked, a token of dark metal with the imperial mark cut deep.

"That one isn’t ceremonial. Any imperial asset, any ship, any officer of mine anywhere in the world, sees it and does what you tell them, and doesn’t ask you a single question about it. There are four in existence and I hold two."

Xuan turned it over. "This is an enormous amount of authority to hand a man getting on a boat."

"It’s the authority to give an order without explaining yourself, which is the only kind worth carrying where you’re going." She shrugged. "You’ll need it or you won’t. I’d rather you had it in a bad month than have it sitting in a drawer here being decorative."

He put it away. She stood with her back against the door and looked at the broken shutter for a moment.

"I’m not going to do the other thing," she said.

"Which one?"

"The one where I tell you how long it’s going to be, and you feel it, and you get on that ship carrying it." Her voice had gone very level. "I could. I’ve had the speech in my head since the mountain. I could stand here and be honest about the fact that I waited a year to marry you and got four days, and that I’ll be running an empire alone in a palace where everyone I grew up with is dead or in a box, and I’d probably do it well enough that you’d think about it every night at sea."

"You would."

"So I’m not doing it." She shrugged, and the shrug was the worst part. "You’d stay. Or you’d go and be worse at it, which is the same as staying and less use to anyone. I chose a man who goes and does things, and it’s an idiot who chooses that and then complains about the going."

"Xinhua."

"I’m not being noble. I want that on the record." She met his eye. "I’m being selfish in a long-term way, which is the only kind of selfish worth being. Go find out who’s cutting up my river cities and what’s in that poison, and come back, and then we’ll have the rest of it. That’s the arrangement. I’m holding you to the last part."

"I’ll come back."

"I know." She opened the door. "Say it in front of Qingyue too. She’ll hold you to it harder than I will and she has less to lose by shouting."

Qingyue was waiting on the pier with the two of them in mind, which Xuan understood the moment he saw where she’d placed herself.

She’d come down early and stayed off the ship, and she was standing far enough from the imperial party to be no part of the ceremony and near enough that Xinhua would pass her on the way back.

They spoke for a while. Xuan didn’t hear it and didn’t try to.

Whatever was said, Xinhua touched her arm once at the end of it, briefly, in front of the entire dock and every official on it, and walked back up the pier looking like an empress.

"What did you say to her?" he asked, when Qingyue came aboard.

"That’s between us." She took the rail beside him. "I’ll tell you one part. I told her I’d send her letters. Mine, not yours, because yours will be four lines about weather and she deserves better than that."

"That’s kind."

"It’s practical. She’s going to be alone in that palace and there’s no one left in it who knew her before the crown." Qingyue looked out at the water. "And she’s mine now too, in the way that counts. I don’t do things by halves and I never said I would."

They cast off on the turn of the tide.

The Grey Heron came out through the harbor mouth with the city sliding past on the starboard side, the scaffolding, the new roofs, the processional avenue with its dead buried down the middle of it, and Xuan stood at the stern and watched an empire he’d helped build get smaller.

He found the black hill last.

It stood beyond the eastern wall with the guard fires burning on it, small and orange in the morning haze, one on the terrace and two on the road, exactly where Pei’s rotation put them. It looked like nothing at all. It looked like a hill with people camped on it.

’Anything?’ he asked.

Mira took her time.

[ Nothing I can feel from here, ] she said. [ And I’ve been looking every day since the coronation, which I hadn’t got around to telling you.]

’I’d worked it out.’

[ It’ll hold, Xuan. Pei’s careful, Wuji’s people are good, and whatever’s on that hill has nowhere it can go in a year. Look at the water instead.]

’Give me the heading.’

[ South, and a touch west until we’re clear of the strait. Straight down after that.]

’And once we land?’

[ We ask after a man in a white robe with red at the cuffs, and we do it somewhere that trades in answers.] Her voice picked up, the way it did when she was pleased about something and pretending not to be. [ There’s a sect close of the coast

that deals in poisons and nothing else. It’s close to where we’re putting in. They’ll name that toxin the moment Lian describes it, and people who sell poison always know who’s been buying.]

’Two birds.’

[ Two birds and the nest. Start there.]

The hill went behind the headland and out of sight.

Xuan put his hand in his coat, past his brother’s letter and the Empress’s token, and found the worn wooden tiger where he’d put it, and stood there holding it while the harbor closed up astern.

He turned around and faced the open water, and went to find out whether Tianming had been sick yet.