NOVEL WEB Chapter 255: Where She Wants To Be
Mingyu let the thought sit where it wanted to sit, knowing that the palace outside this little box would not like the shape of it.
Plenty of men still loved calligraphy more than clean streets. They would compose essays on hospitality while their kitchens went empty. They would forget that his wife, the soon to be Empress slept because he had put her there, not because ink had decreed the right to silence.
"We will treat them like guests," he said at last, "until they behave like dangers."
Deming's brows arched. "And then?"
Mingyu looked at the broken seal on the table. He thought of the cool curve of Xinying's forehead against his mouth, of the weight she had allowed him to take for a moment without trying to carry it herself. He thought of the way she had said I ended it without raising her voice and watched a room full of men remember their spines.
"And then," he continued, a small smile on his face, "we will be polite." A beat. "And final."
The line satisfied Deming in the way a promise given without witnesses can satisfy men who have never needed witnesses to believe what they are owed. Longzi's mouth did that small thing it did when he filed a line away to turn into strategy later.
"We will tighten the roads," Mingyu announced, his eyes narrowing. "Ration permission slips to the outer posts. No unescorted movement from any guest compound. Make sure to have our people everywhere… seen or unseen. Servants talk when they sweep, and I want to know who delivers notes to whom without having to touch the notes."
"Yaozu will want that job," Deming replied, nodding his head. "He listens to weaving better than most."
"Good," Mingyu grunted. He didn't say 'he is with her'. He didn't have to.
Both of the other men knew the order of his loyalties. Both accepted it because they understood that in a city that had forgotten how to feel clean air in its lungs, his particular loyalty was the only reason any of them would.
Longzi tapped the map beside a small, unlabeled circle near the Baiguang line. "This hamlet has a shrine with a registry that was kept even during the famine ten years ago. The old priest writes in a hand my tutor would have beaten me for, but he writes about everyone. If Yuyan wants to make a pilgrimage of kindness, she would have stopped there to be seen being seen."
Deming's eyes narrowed. "You want to post men there."
"I want to post a woman there who has a good memory for faces and a bad habit of making gifts that look like accidents," Longzi said. "And three boys who play dice badly but always win. And someone who can carry news to us as if it were bread."
"Do it," Mingyu agreed. "And get the information as soon as possible."
Deming flicked a glance at the slips. "And question the envoys she requested. Let's see just how she was lucky enough to make it past Xinying without getting killed. Was it luck, or did she already know that Xinying was on the way?"
"What did she actually request," Mingyu asked, because the word requested had a way of becoming demanded when it crossed a courtyard.
"'Passage for the grieving to return north with what is left of their lives,'" Deming recited, voice dry. "Which is to say, lanes for her people to move by her grace, with our escort, under the story she tells."
"Grant it," Mingyu shrugged like it wasn't a big deal.
Deming's head came up.
However, Mingyu continued before he could object. "On our papers, not hers. With our stamps, not hers. Men at the turns who smile and count and do not touch. Every cart that passes is tallied twice, once by us and once by the same hands that will have to carry it if a wheel breaks. If Yuyan wants to be seen arranging mercy for the people, let everyone also see that mercy comes because we made safe roads."
Longzi's smile warmed a fraction. "You'd turn her theater into our stage."
"I'd turn her applause into a tax," Mingyu said.
Deming exhaled, something like a laugh buried somewhere under the bone-weary of too many nights like this. He rubbed at the bridge of his nose and then dropped his hand. "You want to end this without starting a new chapter."
"I want Xinying to sleep two nights in a row without waking to count enemies behind her eyelids," Mingyu thought, but he didn't admit it. Out loud he simply shook his head, "I want the court to stop pretending that peace is a debate. I want peace that will last so that we can all relax for a change and go back to making this country what it could have been if not for my father. I want to rule, to change laws, to look after my people. Not worry about what others would do to us in a moment of weakness."
There was silence again. But this time, it was the good kind. The kind that meant the shape of the room had changed into something useful.
From the corridor came the soft shuffle of a eunuch adjusting weight from one foot to the other, the clink of a guard's buckle settling. The palace kept time like that: small, precise sounds that meant the world was still holding together.
Deming reached for the broken seal and turned it between his fingers until the wax caught the light and then dulled again. "You know," he said, not looking up, "if she had died with the rest of them, I would have been tempted to forgive anyone left standing. But since she lives, since Bai Yuyan still breathes air, I find myself wanting to be generous to no one."
"Generosity is expensive," Longzi murmured. "Especially for those who can't afford it."
"Sleep is pricier," Mingyu agreed, and the other two let that be the last word because they heard who he meant.
He stood. Chairs slid on wood. Decisions fell into columns in their heads. The room with no windows had done what it always did best: made the outside smaller until the inside could think.
At the door, Mingyu paused. "No proclamations," he added, almost an afterthought.
Deming tilted his head. "You don't want to calm them."
"I want them to watch," Mingyu said. "People behave better when they suspect they are being measured."
"And if they aren't ?" Longzi asked, that flicker of dry humor back under his tongue.
Mingyu thought of the smear of blood across the knuckles of a hand that had killed an empire at dawn and then turned a child's ribbon around its wrist at dusk. He thought of the way Xinying's eyes had gone soft for a boy who couldn't say his own name and hard for a princess who said hers too often. He thought of the way she had smiled at Yuyan without heat and called her the right name.
"Then we stop measuring," he said, "and we finish what Xinying started."
He opened the door. The corridor remembered how to breathe. Guards straightened as if pulled up by wire. Eunuchs dipped exactly the right amount. The maids lifted the tea tray, ready to follow him wherever he would go next.
"Have a room prepared near the guest compound," he told the senior eunuch. "Plain. Clean. A scribe's table and a cot."
"For… Your Highness?" the man asked, startled.
"For whoever counts," Mingyu instructed, already walking.
He didn't look back toward the Emperor's chambers. He didn't have to.
He could feel the gravity of that room like a hand on his back, steadying him down the stairs. Yaozu would be as still as a knife beside the bed… or in it if she allowed him to be. Shadow would huff once and pretend to sleep with one eye open. And Xinying—if the world behaved like it should for once—would breathe evenly through the deep hours, unbothered by the palace's habit of narrating itself at night.
Deming caught up at the landing. "We start with Longzi's shrine," he said.
"And the roads," Longzi added, already calculating who owed him favors to make it happen without anyone noticing they had been made to help.
Mingyu nodded. "Quietly. Quickly."
They turned into the colder corridor that led toward the outer offices. Somewhere beyond the eaves, a bell marked the hour—not loud, not ceremonial. Just a workman's bell, the sound of a city reminding itself to keep moving.
"Make sure the guest compound's kitchens have salt," Mingyu said.
Deming blinked, confused. "Salt?"
"People feel seen when the broth doesn't taste like water," Mingyu answered. "And Yuyan eats like anyone else when she is hungry enough."
Longzi's glance sideways was fond and tired in equal measure. "You learned that from her."
Mingyu didn't have to ask who her was. "I did," he agreed. "And I plan to use everything I've learned to make the world a place where she wants to be."
He didn't slow. He didn't look back. He let the palace carry him forward the way a river carries a boat that knows where it means to go.
Behind him, in a room with no windows, the brazier's ember died with a clean sigh.
Ahead of him, the night divided neatly into the parts that belonged to strategy and the one small, unarguable part that belonged to sleep.
He intended to guard both.