NOVEL NEXT Chapter 286: Mingyu’s Reckoning
Mingyu sat in his study long after the lamps should have been trimmed.
The room had always been a map disguised as furniture. The long table was a river. The shelves were ranges of mountains quietly holding borders in place.
Even the window, with its carved lattice, cut the sky into squares the way a general turns open ground into boxes he can move men across. Tonight, the map looked smaller than he remembered and the squares were not enough.
Lin Wei was alive.
His son was alive.
He let the truth take up space in his chest, heavy and breakable as a cup filled to the rim.
He had carried treaties and sieges and winter campaigns like they were only other ways to breathe. He had never once felt his hands shake doing it. At the gate, when he'd seen the set of Xinying's shoulders and the small, raw fists dug into another man's robe, something tight behind his ribs had threatened to split.
He poured himself wine from a pot gone cool. It tasted thin and mean; he drank anyway. The ink stone beside his hand had skinned over. He tipped water into it and ground the block until the surface took a new shine.
The palace was already whispering.
He didn't need a spy to tell him so.
Doors have the same love of gossip as women with nothing but tongues; walls tilt forward when they think no one is watching. The Empress had gone to the gate in black and boots, not jewels, not lacquer.
She had not waited in the inner court.
She had not let the physicians do their soft theater. She had healed the boy with her own hands and left the mist fading in the air like breath on winter glass. And the heir had wrapped himself around Sun Yizhen as if silk were rope.
Mingyu set the cup down with care and pressed his thumb to the wine-ring it left on the wood.
He was not angry.
Anger would be a luxury.
He had chosen a wife made of edges and weather and will; he did not get to complain when she cut and struck like a storm. He had also chosen to make a family with her, and families were made of facts.
The fact was simple: the child would sleep, or he would not, depending on one man's presence.
Accept the fact. Then move on.
He pulled a blank scroll toward him and smoothed it flat. Brush. Ink. The first strokes came like a rhythm he had known so long his hand could have written them without a mind attached.
— Audit the north and south watches at second bell. Rotate captains without announcement.
— Pull ledgers from river warehouses; copy them twice; seal one set in the inner archives.
— Double sentry posts on the outer roads. No bells rung without two signatures.
— Recall three companies from the southern training grounds; send them to the northern prefectures under the name of bridge repair.
— Quietly prepare requisition of grain from inner prefectures to starve any line that thinks it can feed itself on our mercy.
He paused. Mercy. Xinying had said earlier that it rarely suited her.
He admired that about her. He had learned early that mercy, like wine, was not the thing itself but what you did with it. A general who drank too much lost the edges of his map.
He wrote more, not names—yet—but shapes.
— Lantern codes to be altered for the week; only Shadow and Yaozu to carry the changes.
— All messengers questioned for coin heavier than their belts should afford.
— Physicians restricted from the east hall unless called by the Empress's hand.
— Tailors to prepare plain robes for a guest of the east hall. Title to be determined later.
He let the brush rest.
Guest.
The word was wrong and right at once. Yan Luo had been a shadow where shadows belonged. He had kept Xinying in jasmine tea once, before crowns turned small kindnesses into risk.
He had brought WeiWei back. Those three things were a kind of résumé; they were also a problem.
Ministers would talk.
Old men in brocade love the sound of their own dust.
They would say a fox had been welcomed into the house. They would say an Emperor who let a man stand so close to his heir must be made of damp paper. They would say many things while trying to measure where to plant their own feet next.
He leaned back, letting the chair's old wood creak, and watched the lamplight jitter on the lacquer of the cupboards.
The trick was always the same: give people a shape to look at so they missed the shape behind it.
If he called Yan Luo a "guest," the court would spend a week whispering about guest stipends and seating at festival tables, and in that week the lines Mingyu actually cared about could be drawn without hands grabbing at the brush.
He rubbed at the smudge of ink on his knuckle with his thumb until the skin warmed.
The east chamber had smelled of steam and glue and the metallic sweetness of fear lifting. He'd stood back for once and watched his wife turn her hand and make pain change its mind.
He'd seen Yan Luo watch, too, his eyes widening the way a man's do when he realizes a story he's heard is not a story. No one had spoken about it. That was the other trick to running an empire: decide which truths need names and which truths work better without them.
A knock rippled the lattice. Not the frantic pecking of crisis, not the showy punches of a minister; a measured knock that meant the knuckles belonged to someone who knew how much sound wood should carry at this hour.
"Enter," Mingyu said.
The oldest of the eunuchs slid in sideways, as if not to disturb the patterns of the room. His face belonged to a potter's wheel that had been spun too long—features thinned, smoothed, patient. He held his hands tucked into his sleeves and bowed just enough to move air.
"Your Majesty," he said. "Messages from the north watch and the inner kitchens."
Mingyu lifted his hand. The eunuch stepped forward, placed two slips on the table, retreated the same exact number of paces.
Mingyu read without lifting them.