Chapter Text
He woke slowly, drifting up from unconsciousness like the thick glutinous bubbles in a simmering pot of congee. Sound filtered in first. The monotonous dry crackle and thump of a medicine roller, grinding herbs to powder. Low voices somewhere nearby. More distant, someone played a pipa: a sweet, gentle song he didn’t know, with recurring ripples like water running.
A bubble popped. Awareness of his own body returned. He was sore, aching in every muscle and in the hollows of his bones, and desperately thirsty.
He tried to communicate this to anyone nearby. The words emerged as a groan.
Cloth rustled. A cool hand on his wrist, testing his pulse. A damp, deliciously cold cloth on his brow. A cup held to his lips, while a firm hand supported his head. “You’re safe,” Wen Qing said. “Drink this.”
It tasted awful. He choked and tried to spit. “None of that,” she said reprovingly, and tapped an accupoint he barely felt. “Sleep.”
The lid came down over the pot. He went to sleep.
When he woke again his head was clear. Clearer, at least. He stared for some time at the beams of the ceiling above him. Eventually he summoned the strength to turn his head.
He was lying in his bed in the Hall of Benevolent Radiance. It was daytime, but the doors and windows had been drawn shut, so that light glowed only dimly through their paper lattices. An incense burner next to the bed released plumy wreaths of scented smoke. Somewhere further in the house — the library or garden-room? — the pipa player had been joined by a xiao. He could sense no spiritual energy imbuing the music, but temptation still dragged at his eyelids: close his eyes, listen to the lullaby, slip back into sleep…
He blinked hard.
Impossible that he, who had once run for seven days without rest, should be this weak. Probably it was the incense. He tried pushing himself up on one elbow, so that he could reach across and dowse it, but his treacherous elbow gave way and he thumped down flat again.
On his next try, he fell out of the bed.
“Why can’t you ever stay where you’re put!” Wen Qing rushed out from the closet that held toilet necessities with her belt still askew. She helped him back into bed. Her small hands were unexpectedly strong — or perhaps not so unexpectedly; she was a cultivator, after all. She pulled the quilt up over his shivers and pressed her fingers to the pulse in his wrist.
“The incense,” he persisted.
“It’s helping stabilize your qi, you fool boy. Would you rather I filled you with needles again?”
“No.” He subsided sulkily. His head hurt, and his wrist and knee throbbed where he’d bumped them falling out of bed. The rest of his body ached more dully. He was still thirsty, and he desperately had to pee.
He admitted this, eventually. Further indignities ensued, as Wen Qing summoned Wang Yongqi from his hovering outside the door. Jiang Cheng insisted he could stand on his own. “Try it, then,” Wen Qing snapped.
Wang Yongqi caught him, this time, when he fell. “A thousand apologies, Lord Jiang,” he muttered, staring at his feet.
Jiang Cheng was too uncomfortable to be magnanimous. “Don’t be an ass,” he snapped. “Give me your arm.”
They managed an unsteady walk to the closet. Jiang Cheng insisted on being alone with the chamber pot — he could steady himself with a hand on the wall if need be! — but Wen Qing compounded all humiliations by interrogating him on color and quantity afterwards. She made him drink a bowl of bitter medicine followed by several cups of ginger-infused hot water, while he sat in bed with quilts heaped up around him like an invalid. The water soothed his raw throat, at least, and the ginger settled his uncertain stomach.
“Sect Leader said she’ll visit when you’re feeling strong enough,” Wang Yongqi said, hovering near the foot of the bed. At least he looked as useless as Jiang Cheng felt. “She’s been tracking down the conspirators—”
“None of that,” Wen Qing said sharply. She had two fingers on Jiang Cheng’s pulse again.
He ignored her. “Conspirators? I’d never seen that girl — she couldn’t have been aimed at me, hardly anyone here even knows me.”
But his wife had warned him…
He bolted upright. Zidian crackled recklessly across the back of his hand. The low ebb of qi through his parched meridians surged stronger and left pain spiraling in its wake. He ignored that too. “Is A-Yuan safe? Did they find out I’ve been teaching him? He hasn’t done anything but exist— if they’ve gone after him, too, I’ll—”
“Gods give me patience,” Wen Qing said. A needle flashed out of her sleeve and vanished.
His limbs lost their strength as abruptly as a door slamming. She caught his head, eased him back down, and arranged his nerveless hands neatly over the quilt. “A-Yuan is safe. He and Nurse Guo have been moved. He’s asking about you; we told him you’ve been ill but getting better. This was an attack targeted at Sect Leader through you, Jiang Wanyin, so listen to your doctor and rest before you drive yourself back into qi deviation!”
He couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. Zidian curled cold and quiescent around his finger, silver again instead of lightning. He could only stare at her, furious and frightened.
“You saved your own life, burning that poison out, but you nearly killed yourself doing it. How much did you drink? There was enough left in the pot to kill six men your size. If you hadn’t reacted so quickly, if Sect Leader hadn’t arrived in time to stabilize your qi before you burned yourself up—”
Angry, unshed tears brimmed in her eyes. She blinked them back. A measured breath, and her voice steadied.
“Your death would be tremendously inconvenient to the Sect Leader, Jiang Wanyin, personally as well as politically. The poison has been eliminated from your system, but the damage to your meridians and the destabilization of your golden core still remain. Your own strength is dangerous to you in this state. You must rest. When I deem it advisable you may begin meditation and qi-regulating exercises, under supervision. Your spiritual weapon—”
He blinked hard. It was all he could do. But she hesitated, looking down at him.
“All right,” she said quietly. “Later.” She lifted his right hand and tucked it beneath the quilt. For a moment her own hand lingered there, resting over his.
“You are safe here, Jiang Wanyin. A-Yuan is safe. I… understand that feeling of needing to see to things yourself, because you can’t trust anyone else to care. But Sect Leader does care. About A-Yuan, about this alliance, about you. About the sect. That’s why I followed her. And if she puts her hand to something, she will succeed.”
She looked down at her own hand on the mounded quilt, as if only now recognizing its lingering placement. The color rose in her pale cheeks. She stood and bowed with rigid formality. “Rest, Lord Jiang. You will feel stronger when you wake.”
She retreated to the other side of the room, beyond his range of vision. The medicine grinder took up its rhythmic rolling again. Wang Yongqi gave an apologetic grimace and a deep bow before he, too, slipped away.
Jiang Cheng stared stubbornly at the ceiling.
He didn’t need to ask why, if his wife cared, she wasn’t here. The sect came first; it always would. And Wen Qing’s prickly presence across the room was… comforting, in a way his wife’s could never be. Wen Shuozhen would not have so nearly lost her iron self-control in concern over him. She probably considered any visible emotion unseemly.
“Husband,” she’d called him, as her infusion of spiritual energy stabilized his core and saved his life. He could still hear the echo of that unsteady word. He closed his eyes and saw the memory of her face, pale and strained above him. She’d asked him to hold on. She’d gone to him first, not to the captured poisoner.
Maybe, after all…
Gratefully, Jiang Cheng took refuge in sleep.
He woke for the third time to a dog on his chest.
The dog was not, he realized after a startled moment, actually fully on top of him. From the size of its ears and the fuzziness of its coat it was only a puppy, but it was still too big for that. It lay beside him, curled on top of the quilt in a shaggy black and white mound, but its broad head rested on his chest. One pointed ear had flopped inside out. It was snoring slightly, foolishly, and its paws scrabbled against his side as it dreamed.
The paralyzing needles were gone. Jiang Cheng could move again, with less muscle soreness than before. He freed his right hand from under the quilt and reached up to scratch the dog’s ears. They were impossibly silken-soft. The dog made a pleased little grumble, still half asleep, and pushed its head into his hand.
“You’re awake!” Wen Ning bounced up from a chair across the room. Jiang Cheng started. The dog did too, lifting its head. Seeing Wen Ning, it yawned, licked Jiang Cheng’s hand, and pressed closer for ear-scritches. A tail like a rudder thumped his shins.
Wen Ning beamed. “I knew he’d like you. He’s a spiritual dog, he’ll be extremely smart when he grows up — he’s still a puppy now but you wouldn’t know it by his size, would you? — he’s only half-trained but we told him you’re his master now and he really seemed to understand! And your sister said you’re good with dogs, so you can finish his training as you please.”
Jiang Cheng fixed on the one essential piece of this. “My sister wrote? Does she know what happened? How long have I been asleep?”
Wen Ning counted on his fingers. “A-Jie said you slept for three days before you woke up the first time, and that was two days ago. You probably want a drink, right? She had me keep water warm.”
He bustled over to a little kettle on a brazier, talking over his shoulder. “A-Jie is resting now. She said you can get up, if you feel like it, but you definitely can’t use any spiritual energy and we have to wake her up to check on you before you try going outside. But she’s been awake for days, so if you could let her sleep a little longer before we wake her up…”
Jiang Cheng accepted a cup and Wen Ning’s assistance in sitting up enough to drink. The dog, refusing to be entirely dislodged, rearranged itself to pillow its head on Jiang Cheng’s thigh instead. He let his free hand rest lightly on its skull. It sighed and closed its eyes again. Its curling tail, thick-furred as a fox’s brush, swept the bed.
“What about my sister?” Jiang Cheng asked, when he’d drunk. “Did someone write to her? To my— to Sect Leader Jiang?”
“Not yet,” Wen Ning admitted. “Sect Leader has ordered no one can go in or out of Nightless City. Except for our new friend here, of course! A-Jie had a letter from Jiang-guniang — oh, weeks ago, before you came, talking about how to make you happy here. Jiang-guniang said you loved dogs and couldn’t have one at Lotus Pier. So A-Jie remembered, and told Sect Leader when she came to look at you while you were sleeping. And Sect Leader sent someone off immediately with a pouch of gold for the finest breeder of spiritual dogs, and they brought this big fellow back this morning, and he’s been with you ever since. He can smell poison,” Wen Ning added, proudly.
Jiang Cheng looked down at the dog again. “Does he have a name?” It was easier than any of the other questions he wanted to ask.
“You’re supposed to name him yourself. And feed him yourself, unless you don’t feel well enough…”
“No, I’ll get up.” He pushed back the quilt but then paused for a moment, looking down at the deep brown eyes raised to his. The fluffy tail wagged unceasingly.
“Xiaowang,” Jiang Cheng decided, ridiculously happy, and got out of bed.
He was weak, but not nearly so fragile as he’d been the first time he rose. Five days in bed were enough to weaken any man. But he visited the toilet closet unassisted, and came back out to sit in the garden room and drink bitter medicine followed by several bowls of brown sugar ginger tea.
Xiaowang followed him to the closet, waited outside with only an occasional whine, and then romped at Jiang Cheng’s heels into the garden room. He was a puppy. Five months, Jiang Cheng decided, or maybe four; his enormous size was deceptive, bigger than most full-grown dogs already. His fur still retained the baby fuzz, but the top of his head almost reached Jiang Cheng’s fingertips as they walked. His paws were the size of Jiang Cheng’s palm. His fur was mostly black, symmetrically marked with white on the face and chest, but his belly was a pure, creamy white. He rolled over to display it once Jiang Cheng was seated in the garden room and could properly admire and offer belly rubs.
Wen Ning served the medicine and made the tea with his own hands. He did it cheerfully and confidently, as if pleased to demonstrate a well-mastered skill. But Lao Tong, arriving with bowls of silken congee and steamed egg suitable for an invalid’s stomach, took pains to explain that the cook who made them had served the new sect leader’s household for twenty years, and that Lao Tong himself had overseen every step of the process. He insisted on testing both dishes with a silver needle, anyway, before allowing Jiang Cheng to eat.
“Isn’t Xiaowang supposed to be a poison sniffing dog?” Jiang Cheng asked, offering a spoonful of congee. Xiaowang sniffed and then lapped enthusiastically, sprinkling Jiang Cheng’s sleeve.
Lao Tong made a pained noise. “Perhaps when fully trained. Rest assured, Lord Jiang, until then your food and drink will be tested as vigilantly as the sect leader’s own. If we had suspected you were in any danger—”
“Yes, and why didn’t you?” Jiang Cheng leaned his elbow on the table, feeding scraps of shredded chicken to Xiaowang from his other hand. “I can’t recognize every servant in this courtyard yet, but surely one of you should have noticed that woman was planning something.”
Lao Tong folded immediately into deepest prostration. “This servant deserves to die!”
“Enough,” Jiang Cheng snapped.
Xiaowang’s ears laid back. He lifted his head from Jiang Cheng’s knee and stared fixedly at Lao Tong. An uncertain growl vibrated his throat.
He shouldn’t learn bad habits from the start. Jiang Cheng set his hand firmly on the back of the dog’s neck, fingers sinking into the thick coarse fur, and said, “Easy.”
An ear flicked toward him. The growl stopped, though the tense muscles didn’t relax nor the dog look away from Lao Tong. Jiang Cheng rubbed Xiaowang’s neck reassuringly and said, “I want an explanation. Not thoughtless self-blame, and not excuses.”
Lao Tong kept his prostration for a long moment. Then, cautiously, he unfolded, resting his hands on his knees. His gaze rose no further than the middle of Jiang Cheng’s chest. “The woman… was known to a few of us, Lord Jiang. She had served in a high place in the Sect Leader’s residence until some months ago, when she was dismissed through no fault of her own. When she came to the Hall of Benevolent Radiance claiming to have been reassigned, this servant saw no reason to doubt her.”
Jiang Cheng tousled Xiaowang’s ears and offered another scrap of chicken. “What was her previous position?”
“Wet-nurse,” Wen Shuozhen said, coming through the door in a whisper of brocade-stiff silk robes. She nodded to Wang Yongqi, who drew the sliding door shut again, and to Wen Ning, who was pretending to be invisible by the tea kettle. Her gaze skipped indifferently over Lao Tong and landed on Jiang Cheng with a force that caught his breath.
There was rage in her eyes. Leashed, controlled, bent to her will; but he had seen too much anger—known his own fury far too intimately—to mistake hers. He could believe now that this woman had beheaded her brother with her own sword.
She came toward him and stooped to touch the back of her hand against his cheek. Her skin was cool and smooth.
Staring wide-eyed up at her, too startled to pull away, he saw the moment relief replaced rage. Not all of it, but some. Enough. The tightness around her eyes eased. Her voice came quieter, richer, meant only for him. “Are you well, Husband?”
He cleared his throat. “Well enough. Thank you. For the dog. And...my life.”
She removed her hand and looked down at Xiaowang’s head resting on Jiang Cheng’s knee. “The thought was Wen Qing’s, but I will accept the merit for his procurement. May he be a wiser guard for you than we have been.” A little of the anger returned to her eyes.
Reminded, he said, “A wet-nurse? You mean— She was A-Yuan’s. The one you replaced with Nurse Guo.”
“Yes.” She dismissed Lao Tong with the briefest gesture, but told Wen Ning: “You have done well, Qionglin. When your sister wakes, inform her of Lord Jiang’s condition.”
“Oh. Yes, of course, Sect Leader.” Wen Ning jumped up, bowed deeply over extended arms, and snuck a quick glance at Jiang Cheng. “Make sure you eat! Don’t just feed everything to Xiaowang. Your body forgets how to be hungry.”
That was true. Jiang Cheng said guiltily: “As if I need you to scold me! Go eat something yourself.”
Wen Ning smiled, brilliantly, and scurried out. Wang Yongqi followed him.
Which left the two of them alone, as they had not been since— since Lotus Pier, truly. That night in the mountain hut, with her attendants sleeping on the other side of the screen, barely counted. Jiang Cheng wasn’t sure where to look, or what to do with his hands. He was mortifyingly conscious of wearing nothing but his thin inner clothes.
His wife sat across the table from him, offering her fingers to Xiaowang to sniff. Jiang Cheng ate a few bites of steamed egg, for lack of anything better to do, and asked: “Did the wet-nurse think I was a threat to A-Yuan, too?”
“You, or your children. She’d been told the tea would make you impotent. Embarrassing enough, for a young man, though she hoped repeated doses might render you permanently infertile.” Wen Shuozhen’s expression barely changed, but the rage blazed in her eyes and the hard line of her mouth. “When she realized it was meant to kill you, her only thought was to flee. Not to seek help. She has paid for that.”
Dead already, then. Tortured before she died, without question. Jiang Cheng considered whether he regretted that. He could barely even remember her face: a fleeting impression of a round-cheeked young woman, looking and acting much as any other young servant in the courtyard. Until she hadn’t.
If she’d truly only tried to hurt him because she was worried he’d supplant the child she’d nursed, raised, and protected through the last tumultuous year… he could understand that. Not excuse, not forgive, but understand. What wouldn’t he do, after all, to protect that innocent child who called him ‘Yifu’ and listened to his every word?
The wet-nurse didn’t know Wen Shuozhen’s plans for the boy. Maybe she saw him as Jiang Cheng had, that first day: the last scrap of a bloodline, preserved only until the day he could be replaced. No wonder she’d struck against the only target she could conceivably reach, or harm. Wen Shuozhen’s cultivation was too high, her household undoubtedly too paranoid, to make Jiang Cheng’s mistake.
Or— was there another reason?
“You said ‘she’d been told.’ Who gave her the tea? They must have known it was poison.”
Was that approval softening the anger in his wife’s eyes? She gave Xiaowang a final pat and encouraged the dog back to Jiang Cheng. When the broad head was heavy on his knee again, and his hands occupied in scratching it, she poured herself a little of Wen Ning’s brown sugar ginger tea and said, “I expect you have already realized I have enemies within the sect.”
“I’d have to be blind and stupid not to,” Jiang Cheng retorted. He regretted it immediately. She was finally confiding in him, as he’d wished for weeks — what if she closed him off again now—
Xiaowang whined and licked his hand. Wen Shuozhen’s eyes crinkled, almost a smile.
“My husband is indeed neither,” she said. “He has been patient. I had… misjudged that patience as preoccupation, perhaps. Or as disinterest.”
“Not ignorance?” If she hadn’t shut him down already, maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe he could let himself push.
Her smile deepened, pulling at her lips. “Perhaps at first. Not by the time we met in the bamboo grove. For that misjudgment I apologize. I, too, was preoccupied.”
She turned the tea bowl contemplatively between her hands. “There are several factions among those who oppose me. Some who muttered disapprovingly about my brother’s excesses now mutter about me for ending them. You heard those arguments at the discussion conference.” She dismissed them with a contemptuous wave of her fingers. “Others see only the insult in a woman claiming authority over them. Those, too, I can ignore. For all their complaints about the natural order of the world they have no power to set things aright. But there are those, also, who supported my brother’s vision of the sun dominant in the sky, and they excused — or willingly participated in — all that he did to set it there. Most of them died fighting, but not all. Some fled.”
She was silent a moment, frowning down into her tea. Deciding what to say, or how to say it? How much to tell him, after he’d been brought unwittingly into her struggle and nearly died for it?
Maybe it was finally time to share what he already knew.
“Wen Zhuliu was among them, wasn’t he.”
Her head snapped up. Astonishment touched her eyes, for the first time. “How do you know that name?”
“Wen Qing didn’t tell you? I fought him in Dusk Creek Mountain.” He could enjoy that memory now, along with the look on her face. “My shixiong crossed his trail a few months ago at Baixue Temple. A group of Wen cultivators led by a man in black, searching for something. The Yin Iron? And now you’re looking for him in turn.”
He remembered her instructions to Li Qiuguang, at that tea house in Suizhou. “Do not engage if you encounter that person of whom we spoke. Send your swiftest messenger.” Whom would Li Qiuguang fear, if not the Core-Melting Hand?
“When was this report of Wen Zhuliu?” She leaned forward, intent.
He thought back. Wei Wuxian’s letter had arrived just before Jiang Cheng’s birthday, at the beginning of the eleventh month. He must have written near the middle of the month. And the head priest of Baixue Temple had mentioned seeing the Wen cultivators much earlier than that. Hadn’t he said…?
“Near the beginning of the ninth month, last year.”
She sighed. “Too long ago to track. Baixue Temple is far from Qishan; no wonder my scouts caught no word. Still. We had thought they fled south to Song. If the Core-Melting Hand has come north again… He may indeed be chasing that cursed metal.”
Wei Wuxian would be insufferably pleased to hear he’d been right. Jiang Cheng resolved not to tell him. “Why would he want it? What was Wen Ruohan trying to do with it? What does it even do?”
“I do not know its original purpose. Xue Chonghai sought power through it, first to drive out the invaders from the steppes, then to enslave all the sects and establish a new dynasty for himself. He succeeded in the first goal and failed the second. He may already have been mad by then; my ancestor Wen Mao certainly thought so.”
She settled back in her chair, gazing thoughtfully at him. “You have studied Wen Mao’s writings?”
“Only The Quintessence of the Wen Sect. I don’t think your nephew intended that indoctrination camp to actually educate us.”
“He was badly educated himself. If his father had listened to me, or given the boys to my instruction…” Her mouth twisted mockingly. “But a sister is fit only to educate girls. And the men my brother chose for his sons raised them up worse than if they’d had no teacher at all.”
She sipped her tea, dismissing those old grievances. Reminded, Jiang Cheng ate his cooling congee.
As he swallowed, his wife said: “Wen Mao wrote of the campaign against Xue Chonghai. The Five Great Sects were not yet great, but their cultivators were powerful and courageous. Together with the minor schools assembled under them, they should have easily overwhelmed the Yiling Xue sect. And yet those Xue cultivators, even the youngest and rawest of them, with undeveloped golden cores and unnamed spiritual swords, fought with a strength and ferocity the allies could not match. A cultivator might take a dozen mortal wounds and yet continue to fight. Wen Mao wrote that he himself saw a woman with both arms severed tear out a man’s throat with her teeth.”
“But they could still be killed, couldn’t they? Xue Chonghai hadn’t cultivated immortality with the Yin Iron, right?”
She looked at him with some amusement. He realized that he was leaning forward now with fascinated interest, as if this were the kind of heroic adventure story he and Wei Wuxian had once told each other late into the night. He sat back, embarrassed, and scratched Xiaowang’s ears.
“They could be killed,” his wife confirmed, tucking away her smile. “Beheading worked, or burning. The Wen Sect already specialized in fire talismans and spells; Wen Mao and his disciples were in the vanguard when they finally broke through to Xue Chonghai’s sanctum. They found him alone and utterly mad.
“If he had sought immortality through the Yin Iron, he failed. Wen Mao killed him there, striking off his head and burning his bones. The Five Great Sects attempted to purify the Yin Iron, but their efforts were futile. They broke and divided the pieces, sealing away each fragment in places of intense spiritual energy in the hopes that time would accomplish what cultivation could not.”
“But Wen Ruohan found a piece,” Jiang Cheng said. “And then went looking for more.”
“He had three,” Wen Shuozhen said quietly, “when he died. The first he discovered by accident, I believe — I found no trace of his search for it among his writings, only the record of its discovery, in a grotto in Mount Taibai in the Qinling Mountains. The second his son Wen Chao brought to him from Dafan Mountain. The third… his son Wen Xu brought to him, after Cloud Recesses burned.”
“So he never got the piece Xue Yang had?” Jiang Cheng leaned forward again, elbows on the table. Xiaowang’s head slipped off his knee. The dog sighed gustily and pillowed his head on Jiang Cheng’s foot. Jiang Cheng would make it up to him later. This was important.
Her gaze sharpened. “Xue Yang. That rogue cultivator my brother took in. He was searching for the Yin Iron, too?”
“We found him in Yueyang last summer, after he’d slaughtered every member of the Chang sect there.” Jiang Cheng tried to briefly summarize the events of their search last summer, but he kept having to backtrack to explain: the resonance with Lan Wangji’s piece of Yin Iron that had led them to Yueyang; the fight with Xue Yang over the bloody corpses of the Chang disciples; the daozhang, Xiao Xingchen and Song Zichen, who’d appeared hunting Xue Yang for older crimes.
“Wei Wuxian searched him but couldn’t find the Yin Iron piece. Lan Wangji said he couldn’t be sure if the resonance was because Xue Yang still had the Yin Iron, or he’d hidden it, or he’d already given to someone else but still bore traces of its presence. But he must’ve had it at some point: he was a brilliant swordsman, but even he couldn’t have taken down the entire Chang sect on his own! We took him to Qinghe for Sect Leader Nie’s judgment, but Wen Chao attacked and Xue Yang escaped. I thought maybe, if he was working for Wen Ruohan all that time, he’d gone back to Qishan with Wen Chao.”
Wen Shuozhen shook her head. “He never returned. No wonder, if he’d found a piece of the Yin Iron and chose to keep it for himself. And no wonder, then, that Wen Zhuliu is hunting him…”
“But why would Wen Zhuliu want it?” That was the sticking point, the question that had never made any sense. Wen Zhuliu was the Core-Melting Hand, powerful in his own right, feared and respected by every cultivator in the North. If he didn’t want to bow to Wen Shuozhen he could surely find a high rank in some other sect. Unless…
“Unless he’s trying to build up strength to fight you. Xue Chonghai made an almost unstoppable army with the full Yin Iron. Well, someone had a piece of it in Dafan Mountain, and they attacked us with a stone statue and turned common villagers — farmers, grandmothers — into raving puppets. Like fierce corpses, but still living. We couldn’t reason with them. We could hurt them, but they didn’t seem to feel it. You could do a lot of damage with an army like that… But why would he want to?”
His wife drew a deep breath. She met his eyes, and said: “Because Wen Chao is alive.”
Jiang Cheng stared at her. “Wen Ning said he was dead.”
“Most of Nightless City believes it. They must. I slew the murderer and uprooted his line: that is my claim to authority, my justification for ruling in the face of my sins. If they knew Wen Ruohan’s infant grandson is alive, my legitimacy would erode. How much worse if they knew Wen Ruohan’s adult son still lived and plotted rebellion against me?”
“But he was — an idiot, a coward, he hid behind Wen Zhuliu and all those guards, he couldn’t even fight—”
“Do you think that matters to the kind of people who would follow him?” She smiled faintly, tiredly. He could see the weight of years in her eyes, as he never had before. “My husband is a brave man, a young hero defending righteousness. He does not yet understand that some people desire to be led by a man no better than they themselves are. They seek shelter for their own crimes in the shadow of his greater sins.”
“What happened to ‘the people turn to a benevolent rule as water flows downwards’?” Jiang Cheng challenged.
He’d surprised her into a laugh. Her tired smile turned more real. “My husband has studied.”
“Only a little.”
“Then he may know that Mengzi also said, ‘I have never heard of one who bends himself and make others upright.’ My brother bent himself too far, for too long, and too many of our people followed him. And when the people have learned to take pleasure in wickedness and brutality, they will not love the one who comes to set them aright. They will turn, instead, to the man who will tell them that they were never wrong.”
He… could understand that, maybe. He stirred uneasily. “So Wen Chao has supporters. You said not everyone died fighting, that some fled. Some must’ve just gone into hiding here, right?” He remembered the stern, unsmiling faces in the crowd when he’d first entered Nightless City: the cultivators who didn’t join the disciples’ welcoming lines, the richly dressed couple who turned their faces away as Wen Shuozhen passed. “Were they behind the poisoning?”
“Yes.” She checked the temperature of the teapot and rose gracefully to stir up the coals in the brazier and heat more water. “Questioning the wetnurse gave us one name and the descriptions of a few others. We tracked those down and uncovered a nest of vipers. Several killed themselves before they could be questioned. The rest knew little of value. But they had heard, and believed, that Wen Chao is biding his time in the south, building an army with a prince of Song.”
“A prince of Song?” Even Jiang Cheng knew — any child should know! — how recklessly, maliciously stupid that was. “They left the North when the invaders came, but they’re still writing poems about ‘reclaiming their mountains and rivers.’ If he thinks he can use their help just to get Qishan back—”
“He will give Song a foothold in the North that they will use to reconquer all this land that our great-grandfathers saved. It would be war: as red and bloody as the war they fought against the steppes invaders. Cultivators against imperial armies. Or worse, if Wen Chao finds those pieces of Yin Iron.”
“What about the pieces Wen Ruohan had? You said there were three. Do you still have them? You could use them—”
She turned, the ladle in her hand, her face very still. “Does my husband believe that I alone could wield the resentful power in those tools and yet remain uncorrupted? That is more faith than I merit.”
“Then what are you going to do?” he burst out. “You haven’t found Wen Zhuliu. You can’t send somebody down into Song to assassinate Wen Chao, or I assume you would’ve done it already! You haven’t rooted out all the conspirators here. You have an alliance with our Yunmeng Jiang sect now, sure, but what good is that going to do when an army of puppet soldiers who can’t feel pain come marching up from Song? Even if you manage to reforge ties with the rest of the sects, they’re all too fractured and quarrelsome. They won’t unify behind you the way they did behind Wen Mao.”
“How fortunate, then, that I married a young hero who might, with time, grow into a general.”
He stared at her.
She raised her brows, as if inviting objection. He could think, only: “Was that why you came to Lotus Pier?”
“Not entirely. Not then. It… has more recently become a possibility, as I have grown to better know your worth. But the attempt on your life has shown that we do not have the luxury of time. The serpents who hatched that plot knew of Wen Chao’s survival. They sought to wreck the alliance and shake my hold on power here, to soften my defenses against his return. And they are not alone. There will be others.”
Perhaps she saw something in his face. She said swiftly: “I will protect you to the best of my capabilities. I have more plans in action, but if they go awry, I swear to return you to Lotus Pier before Nightless City falls—”
“No.” His voice cracked, as it had not in months, but he held her gaze. “I am the husband of the Lady of Nightless City. And I was not raised to run.”
She set the refilled teapot on the table and stood beside him, looking down. Her fingertips rested on the back of his hand, almost imperceptibly light. But not even in their marital bed had he felt so aware of her body, her gaze, her relief and approval and pride. He drew a dizzied breath that seemed to do nothing to fill his lungs.
She said quietly, “I brought a far greater treasure than I bargained for out of Lotus Pier.”
Her hand closed over his. She lifted his chin with the other, stooped, and kissed him.
Her mouth was soft and warm and hungry. He found, without warning, his own hunger answering. He was on his feet, his hands at her waist, her breasts crushed against his chest. She cupped his face in both her hands and deepened the kiss, giving and taking, leading and then following. She tasted of ginger and brown sugar and smoke, and she kindled fire in him.
Xiaowang barked.
Wen Shuozhen broke off the kiss. Her body shook against him. She was laughing, almost soundlessly, her face against the side of his neck. “I brought this upon myself, didn’t I? You have a most devoted young protector already…”
“Xiaowang, quiet,” Jiang Cheng said, flushed with embarrassment and thwarted arousal. “Lie down.”
The dog settled obediently, his muzzle on his paws, his eyes fixed watchfully on them.
“He came to you well-trained,” Wen Shuozhen observed, the edge of mirth still lingering in her voice. She stepped back. “One might detect a certain doctor’s influence. Qing’er was very insistent you rest. All the same…”
She reached, deliberately slow, to straighten the line of his collars. “When you have recovered sufficiently to appease your minders, I should like very much to visit you for the night.”
“I’m all right now,” he said, and flushed even hotter.
“Indeed?” Her hands slid a little way down his chest, pressed against him through the thin silk of his inner clothes. She smiled. “A promise then, for a night unscheduled. But I think, my husband, that you should sit down now, and have another drink.”
He obeyed, realizing the weakness in his knees and the slight trembling in his hands only as he sat. The arousal lingered, too. Was it embarrassing to be aroused by one’s own wife?
She’d trusted him. She thought he’d been patient, not merely stubborn. She’d seen in him a young hero who might, someday, lead armies, but who was worthy now to share her most dangerous secrets. She valued him for more than his sect and his seed. And she wanted him, even on a night she wouldn’t conceive.
It was dizzying enough that he had to use both hands to lift his refilled tea bowl. Then she met his eyes across the table, and he nearly spilled it anyway.
He took refuge in questions. “You said you had more plans in action. Have you been looking for the last Yin Iron piece, too? If we find it before Wen Zhuliu does, at least that’s something. Maybe Wen Chao’s Song prince won’t be so eager to reclaim the North if he doesn’t have a puppet army to do it with.”
“Do you ever just rest?” she asked. There was a new kind of fondness in her voice, not exasperation. “Yes, I have been looking for the Yin Iron pieces. I have kept the three my brother found; I had some hopes that resonance between them might aid me in finding the remainder, as you say Lan Wangji used it in Yueyang. There are two pieces remaining, though, not one: Wen Mao’s writings are clear enough on that point. He did not describe the sites of their suppression. Perhaps he wisely feared a descendant like my brother.”
“Two pieces? I guess it makes sense they’d break it into five, for the Five Great Sects, but...” That was twice the trouble, now.
He scowled at his empty tea bowl, then pushed it into the center of the table. “All right. Wen Ruohan found the first one in Mount Taibai.” His congee bowl joined the tea bowl. “Wen Chao found the second piece in Dafan Mountain, before he attacked us with the dancing goddess statue and turned the villagers into puppets.” The steamed egg bowl. “The third piece was Lan Wangji’s. It was suppressed in the Cold Pond Cave in Gusu before he and my shixiong found it. Wen Xu attacked the Cloud Recesses to get that piece.”
Wen Shuozhen pushed her own tea bowl across the table to join his collection. “And the fourth piece, as you say, was in or near Yueyang a year ago.”
“It could be anywhere now, if Xue Yang went back to find it after he escaped from Qinghe. But my shixiong’s been with the daozhang Song Zichen and Xiao Xingchen since the ninth lunar month last year, hunting Xue Yang, and they haven’t found any traces of him. Not that Wei Wuxian’s written about, at least.”
“So either Wen Zhuliu has found him, and the Yin Iron, in which case I would have expected to hear some further word from my spies out of Song… or he has not, yet, and they lead each other on a chase through the North.” She frowned at the bowl. “Well. At least we have a better idea of what to search for, as well.”
“Do you know anything about the fifth piece?”
She drew a ring off her finger and placed it with a cold metallic click in the center of the circle of bowls. “My brother believed it entombed in Dusk Creek Mountain, suppressing the Xuanwu that Lan Wangji and your shixiong killed.” She looked up, meeting his stunned gaze with a faint, rueful smile. “The thing that suppressed the Xuanwu for centuries couldn’t be ordinary, after all.”
“Of course not,” Jiang Cheng croaked, dry-mouthed. He’d been in that cave too — first searching for an unknown something on Wen Chao’s orders, then fighting, then fleeing. Had he really been in the presence of the last piece of Yin Iron?
Would he even have noticed, with the Wen soldiers and then the Xuanwu trying to kill him?
He cleared his throat. “I guess, uh, they didn’t find anything after we left.”
She shook her head. “As my spies reported to me, Wen Chao returned to the cave expecting to find all your corpses, and found instead the Xuanwu dead and only the evidence of a seal lingering. My brother assumed that the Xuanwu’s killers must have taken the Yin Iron piece that anchored the seal. He ordered Wen Chao to retrieve it. I… realized that my moment to act must come then, before Lotus Pier could fall, or the Cloud Recesses burn a second time.”
So that was why, despite Yu Ziyuan’s direst predictions, Wen Chao’s threatened retaliation had never come. Not coincidence. Not at all.
She’d saved Lotus Pier, and never even mentioned it.
He swallowed hard. Tried to cudgel his brains into some kind of thought, into anything that might be worthy of the husband she needed him to be.
“I didn’t see anything that looked like Lan Wangji’s Yin Iron piece when Jin Zixuan and I came back to rescue them…”
“It might have been concealed. If they realized, or even if they didn’t…” She tapped her fingertips against the table, frowning in thought again. “I brought one piece of the Yin Iron with me to the Discussion Conference. There was a resonance, though faint: suppressed, I thought. I was content to leave it then. There was surely no great threat anymore, and I was in no position for further bargaining. Later, in the months before our wedding, I received warnings from my spies on Song. I brought the Yin Iron again when I returned to Lotus Pier. But this time there was no resonance at all.”
“In Lotus Pier?” He stared at her.
And then he remembered. Wei Wuxian’s bloody hands, his deathly grip on a strange sword Jiang Cheng hadn’t been able to pry from his unconscious grasp.
“Wei Wuxian was clutching a sword when I pulled him out of the Xuanwu Cave. It was ancient, filthy. I made him put it in a qiankun pouch. I don’t know what he did with it afterwards. He never talked about it. He might’ve forgotten it too, once he got Suibian back…”
She was leaning forward, her face intent. “Do you remember what it looked like? What it felt like?”
He’d barely looked at the thing, too concerned for Wei Wuxian’s other wounds. “Black iron, I think? It had a twisted grip you’d never want to hold in a real fight. The blade was barely sharp, or he’d’ve gotten a lot worse than a few cuts. It might’ve been centuries old. Do you think—”
“I do. Your shixiong attended our wedding, did he not?”
“Yes. He’d been off with the daozhang for months, but he came back with the Lans, just before the wedding day. He didn’t say anything about the sword then either. I’d forgotten about it entirely.”
He hesitated, looking at her. “If you think it might be related to the Yin Iron… I could write to him. I could ask. He’d come, if I asked.”
“Yes,” she said again. Her face was alight, alive. She reached across the table, past the ring and the bowls, and caught his hand. “Write to your shixiong, my husband, and we may win this battle yet.”
Wei Wuxian,
Remember your promise.
I need you now.