Chapter Text
They didn’t go straight to Carp Tower, and Jiang Cheng didn’t think instantly of her.
Jin Ling was still reeling from all the events and revelations of Guanyin Temple, still sporting a red line across his throat where Jin Guangyao had pressed a garrote to it. Jiang Cheng himself was shakier than he’d ever let on; even his core—no, his core, dammit—couldn’t heal a chest wound in mere hours.
They went to Lotus Pier, the one place where Jiang Cheng knew he could keep Jin Ling safe. He made him eat—just some soup and rice, what the kitchens already had ready—and he thought he probably ate himself, although he didn’t really register doing so. He got Jin Ling settled into bed, in his childhood bed, in his childhood room, the room that would always belong to Jin Ling, even now that he was—Jin-zongzhu. (Ugh, Jiang Cheng thought, it won’t go smoothly; there will be attempts, I’m going to need to be in Lanling a lot, to throw my weight around, all with the part of his mind that could never rest when it came to political questions, no matter what else was going on.)
And then, finally, Jiang Cheng sat on the floor by his nephew’s bed, too drained to even think of getting up to find his own bed, and let his head tilt back against the frame, and listened to his sister’s son breathe, and took all the comfort he could in the sound of those soft, even breaths of sleep, because Jin Ling lived.
The red line on his throat—it had almost been the end of everything, with Baxia trying to take A-Ling’s head clean off. Jiang Cheng couldn’t stop seeing Wen Ning’s bleeding hands, holding it back from him. The very thought of Wen Ning filled Jiang Cheng with a disgusting, poisonous mess of feeling, which he desperately wished to exorcise—if he could have done so by hitting Wen Ning a whole bunch more times with Zidian, that would be very satisfying, probably—but braided along with that poison was frantic gratitude that Jin Ling lived, and was sleeping only inches from Jiang Cheng’s head, with only a single light bandage over the wound Jin Guangyao had put on his throat.
Can I never be rid of you? Jiang Cheng thought wearily of Wen Ning. Your family killed mine. Why do I always have to be grateful to you?
And then, Jiang Cheng thought, you were supposed to be dead. You were supposed to be ashes, along with your sister. Why aren’t you ashes?
And then Jiang Cheng began to think very hard.
***
“Just a few more minutes, Jiujiu, please,” Jin Ling moaned, as he felt the familiar prod at the back of his skull.
“Up,” Jiujiu said, crisply. “You’ve had a rest. We need to go to Lanling.”
“I don’t want to go to Lanling,” Jin Ling muttered into his pillow.
“But we’re going anyway. Get up and get dressed.” Jiujiu’s voice brooked no argument, so Jin Ling reluctantly dragged himself out of his bed, and shuffled over to wash his face. He had clean clothes waiting for him, laid out, at least, and a shaobing to pick up and eat even as his uncle hustled them both out of the family quarters the moment Jin Ling’s robes were properly tied.
Jin Ling gnawed on the stuffed bread, still bleary, half-listening to Jiang Cheng give instructions to the Jiang. Yesterday’s disciples were rotated out, replaced by a fresh contingent who’d done no traveling, and were as strong as they could be. “You’re all right to fly?” Jiujiu did ask him, before they set out.
He nodded. Food and sleep had helped, and his throat didn’t even hurt anymore. “Are you?”
“I can manage,” Jiujiu said, and Jin Ling didn’t doubt it. His uncle’s cultivation was stronger than most.
They flew close together, ahead of the Jiang disciples, which gave Jin Ling the chance to ask, “Why do we have to go to Lanling right away?”
“This isn’t going to be a normal transition of power. It’s important to secure your position before any of those fucking vultures get ideas.”
“We couldn’t do that from Lotus Pier?”
His uncle shook his head. “You’re Jin-zongzhu now, A-Ling. I can back you, but you don’t answer to me, and you can’t be perceived as my puppet. Do you understand? In the eyes of the Jianghu, I can be your ally through this, but I cannot be your authority. You need to be in Carp Tower.”
“I know that,” Jin Ling said. It’s not like Jiujiu had never given him this talk before, although it had never felt quite so overwhelmingly immediate as it did now. That was why he would have liked another day or two in Lotus Pier, before doing this.
“Also,” his uncle said, and then hesitated, and drew a little closer on Sandu, close enough to take Jin Ling’s arm in his hand. “It’s clear now that Jin-zong—that Jin Guangyao was concealing a great deal. Better to—bring it out quickly, and quietly, while you have the luxury of privacy.”
Jin Ling’s face must have shown how uncomfortable he was with that, because Jiujiu gripped his arm a little harder, and said, “He was holding at least one prisoner in Carp Tower. There might be more.”
There might be prisoners who weren’t fierce corpses, Jin Ling realized. Private prisoners who needed things like food and water, whose care might have been abandoned when their captor unexpectedly fled Lanling, to protect himself. Prisoners whose lives might not be able to wait on Jin Ling’s comfort, to be freed.
He swallowed, and nodded, and they pressed on to Lanling.
***
When they arrived, Jiujiu set the tone by initially barking orders, first to the guards and servants of Lanling, as well as to the Jiang disciples, but every order phrased in deference to Jin Ling’s imputed desires. “Jin-zongzhu will need his quarters aired out! Jin-zongzhu will require his senior advisors to be informed when they will meet! Jin-zongzhu will need Jin-zongzhu’s office secured under lock and by guard, and the key placed in his hand in the next five minutes!” Every demand was greeted with a head-bob and a yes, Jiang-zongzhu! while Jin Ling tried to look composed, and nodded at each of his uncle’s declarations, trying to make it clear that yes, these were Jin-zongzhu’s orders, even if conveyed through someone else’s mouth.
When the office key was laid in Jin Ling’s hand, and a sufficient mass of Jin cultivators had bowed, while addressing Jin Ling as Jin-zongzhu, Jiang Cheng finally stepped back. “I’ll be here, A-Ling, but you have to give the orders, now,” he told him, softly.
“I know,” Jin Ling said, and raised his head, and declared, “I will meet with the senior advisors tomorrow morning.”
***
They took lunch together in Jin Ling’s own private quarters—not the ones Jiang Cheng had demanded aired out, but his regular, childhood rooms—and Jiang Cheng methodically checked every single dish for poison, burning through an entire stack of poison-detect talismans to do it. He didn’t just check the dishes bearing the food itself, but also checked each utensil and empty plate and bowl, before he’d allow Jin Ling to serve food onto them.
“That’s a little bit much, Jiujiu!” Jin Ling protested, but Jiang Cheng shook his head.
“It’s not. How do you think I got poisoned here? You’re going to need to do this, A-Ling. At every meal.”
Jin Ling repressed a shiver, remembering that. It had been one of the most terrifying experiences of Jin Ling’s entire life.
“Hey,” Jiujiu said, and rested a hand on Jin Ling’s. “I have a whole qiankun pouch’s worth of these ready for you. And you know how to draw one yourself.” He did; Jin Ling could draw a poison-detect talisman in his sleep; Jiujiu had made sure of it.
“We don’t do that at Lotus Pier…” Nor had they routinely done it in Carp Tower. Had they? Had Jiujiu been testing his food all this time?
“We don’t need to do it at Lotus Pier,” Jiujiu said. “We didn’t—need to do it with you quite so much here, but it’s necessary now.”
Knowing this made the food tasteless Jin Ling’s mouth, and hard to swallow, but he ate anyway. He might as well, since his uncle had gone to the trouble of making sure it was safe to eat.
“A-Ling,” Jiujiu said. “Do you happen to know what room Jin Guangyao kept for me—that night that I was poisoned?”
Jin Ling nodded. He actually remembered it very well, since he’d snuck his way into the room, scared and seeking reassurance.
“Can you show me?”
“Of course, Jiujiu. But why?”
Jiang Cheng tapped his hand on the table, and shook his head. “Just...show me.”
It took Jin Lin a couple of hours to mentally retrace the way back to that room; it had been a number of years ago, after all. He identified it with some certainty in the east wing. It was not a remarkable room. It was a room large enough for a bed and chairs, and maybe a table; an inner room with no windows. Any number of rooms in Carp Tower looked like this one. But Jin Ling was sure it had been this one.
Jiang Cheng examined the walls closely, and prodded the floorboards with his booted feet.
“What are you looking for?”
“Secret passageways,” his uncle said. “Two-way bronze mirrors. That sort of thing.” (But…there were no mirrors in the room?) Jiujiu eventually stepped out of the room, and sighted down the corridor in both directions, north and south, then produced a talisman from his robes, flicking it neatly to the south.
Nothing happened.
“Jiujiu, what are you doing?”
“Hush,” Jiujiu said, and pulled out a second talisman, and sent it down the north end of the hall.
Down at the very end of the northern point in the hall, the painted wood shimmered, and vanished, and behind the illusion lay…another door.
“I knew it,” Jiujiu breathed, and pressed down past it, leaving Jin Ling to follow in his footsteps.
“Knew what? Why is this here? Are we looking for…something specific?”
“Maybe,” his uncle said. It turned out that there was a hidden corridor behind that door, and Jiang Cheng was striding down it with great purpose. At the end of the corridor, there was yet another door, a heavily warded door, and Jin Ling’s uncle, Sandu Shengshou, did not hesitate to raise his arm and strike down those wards with Zidian.
The door sizzled with the aftermath of the lightning, as Jiujiu kicked it in.
It was, Jin Ling observed, more of a suite than a room, but there was no door besides the one Jiujiu had just broken down, and the sole inhabitant of the room looked up, instantly, her eyes flickering past Jin Ling to land on Jiujiu.
She’d been meditating, probably, and she was a little slow to scramble to her feet, almost missing her grab at a low table to steady herself, her eyes still glued on Jin Ling’s uncle.
“So…you’re alive,” she said, in a scratchy voice. “Good. I’m glad.”
Jiujiu instantly pulled a water bottle from his sleeve and handed it to her, covering the space between them in two steps. The woman drank from it, deeply, and then again, and visibly forced herself to stop, her hands shaking, as she tried to hand the bamboo flask back.
“Keep it,” Jiujiu told her. “Do you need to eat?”
She hesitated and then nodded. “After this, though,” she said, still hoarse, clutching the water bottle.
“Fine. Come on. Can you walk?”
She nodded again.
“A-Ling—let’s go.”
“Jiujiu, what is this?” Jin Ling asked. After a moment, he tentatively offered the woman his arm, and after a moment, she took it.
“Maybe one of Jin Guangyao’s victims,” Jiujiu said. “Or maybe one of his collaborators.”
The woman, leaning on Jin Ling, didn’t hurry herself to say which one she was.
***
“Jin Guangyao is dead,” Jiujiu said, once they were back in Jin Ling’s rooms. Jiujiu had gone to some pains to make sure they were not seen doing so, and had ensconced them behind the privacy screens, before presenting their rescue with a bag of peanuts, as well as tea, which he made and served with no ceremony.
The woman nodded, briskly, like she’d expected the news, and drained her teacup. Jiujiu filled it without commentary.
“Do you want to know how?”
“Should it matter to me, how?”
“Maybe,” Jiujiu said. “Your brother is alive.”
Her face ticked up. “You’ve seen him?” She looked tortured. “How does he look?”
“He’s—himself,” Jiujiu said. “Very fully himself.” His jaw twitched. “He’s free.”
The woman closed her eyes, and exhaled. “So. Was it A-Ning who killed Jin Guangyao? Will there…be consequences?”
“He did not, and no, none for him, lucky him,” Jiujiu said. “Although I’m starting to wonder if he shouldn’t have been the one to do it; it seems he had as much right or more than anyone else. What the hell happened?”
As broad and vague as this question was, the woman seemed to understand its intent well enough, because she said, “The day I came here, Jin-zongzhu—Jin Guangshan, then—had me brought to his office and told me I worked for him, now. He told me that he would kill me if I defied him. I…tried to bargain for Wei Wuxian’s life. It did not go well.” She swallowed. “A few hours after that, Jin Guangshan took me out and showed me the bodies of my family on the walls of Carp Tower, and he told me it was not a negotiation.”
Jiujiu’s jaw clenched again.
“I probably would have killed him, after that,” the woman said, her voice stark and simple. “As soon as I had the chance, I mean. But—then Jin Guangyao showed me that they still had A-Ning. And they were—they were hurting him.” She buried her face in her hands. “They’d put nails through his hands and nails through his feet, and nails into his head.”
“He seems well enough now,” Jiujiu said. Jin Ling thought he was trying to help.
“Can I see him? Please?”
“I—I will try to make that happen,” Jiujiu said. “I don’t know where he is right now.”
“Why not!”
“Because he’s free,” Jiujiu said, and his voice became acerbic. “I don’t have any way of tracking him. Maybe Wei Wuxian does.”
“Wei Wuxian?” she said, sitting up straight. “Wei Wuxian! Is he—”
“Wei Wuxian is,” Jiujiu said. “But I don’t know where Wei Wuxian is, either, and I care even less.”
Jiujiu was lying about not caring, but Jin Ling wasn’t going to be the one to say so. Besides, he was more concerned about the fact that—if this was the Ghost General’s sister, that meant that this was Wen Qing, the co-conspirator of the Yiling Laozu, back when he’d tried to form his own sect in the Burial Mounds, with a bunch of escaped Wen-dogs and war criminals.
Except that that wasn’t true, was it? Even the true parts of it weren’t really what everyone said they were. Wen Qing probably hadn’t even done horrible experiments on kidnapped children .
But…I bet she really is a doctor.
That was when Jin Ling realized why she looked familiar, and it was not because she resembled her brother, Wen Ning. (Although she did resemble her brother, Wen Ning.) It was because Jin Ling had met her before.
“Daifu,” he said, realizing. “Daifu? You’re the doctor who saved Jiujiu’s life!”
Wen Qing pressed her lips together, looking over at him. “Jin-gongzi has a good memory.” She actually smiled, a tiny little bit.
“You’ve met?” Jiujiu asked, his eyebrows raised. “And it’s Jin-zongzhu, now.”
“My apologies, Jin-zongzhu,” Wen Qing said, and bowed to him. To his uncle she said, “As it happens, we have. The night you were poisoned.”
“I snuck into your room,” Jin Ling said. “Shenshen put me to bed and told me not to worry, but I couldn’t help but worry. So I gave one of the servants my third-best gold-and-garnet hairpin to show me where Shushu had taken you to be treated.”
“Your third-best, eh? That’s all I rated?” Jiujiu shook his head. And then said,“So that’s where that damn thing went…”
Wen Qing surprised everyone in the room by bursting out into laughter—herself included, Jin Ling thought, from the startled look on her face, as she laughed. Then her face went serious once more, and she looked at Jin Ling. “Jin-gong—Jin-zongzhu was in very great distress, seeing how ill you were, Jiang-zongzhu. I did my best to reassure him.”
“You—you promised me he wouldn’t die like A-Die and A-Niang. And he didn’t!” Jin Ling said, and for some reason his throat still went tight at the memory, even though that was years and years ago, and Jiujiu had gotten better and he was just fine now, except for the chest wound. Speaking of which! “Wen-daifu, Jiujiu took a sword blow to the chest just yesterday. Could you examine him, please?”
“A-Ling,” Jiujiu said, exasperated. “I’m fine, and Wen-guniang has been out of that cell your uncle locked her in for barely an hour! Show some courtesy!”
“I don’t mind, Jin-zongzhu, but I don’t have anything to treat him with, should he need it,” Wen Qing warned him.
Jin Ling rose, and produced the basic emergency medical treatment kit Jiujiu had always insisted that Jin Ling keep close to hand, looking at his uncle smugly as he did so.
“Fucking—fine. A-Ling, go around,” Jiujiu said, in an ominous voice, pointing him to the other side of the screens. He never did like to let Jin Ling see him with his chest bared.
Jin Ling went around, satisfied by the victory of making sure Jiujiu was being looked after by a doctor he trusted down to his very bones.
Even if that doctor turned out to be a Wen, and the sister of the man who’d put his arm through Jin Ling’s father’s chest, and killed him in an instant, when Jin Ling was too young to remember him.
Jiujiu and Wen Qing were muttering at one another, much more than they probably needed to just to discuss the treatment of a single wound, and Jin Ling could have tried to make it out, but instead, he went over and sat on the edge of his bed, and tried to think.
***
“So,” Jiang Cheng said, in a low voice. “You were real after all.”
Wen Qing’s hands stilled, just for a moment, as she peeled back the robes of his chest. She didn’t mean to let them linger and yet linger they did. Oh god, I’ve missed touch…I wish I could hold your hands. “I always wondered if you remembered that night.”
“Remembered, yes, in a hazy sort of way,” he said, his voice still quiet, and deeper than it was, in her memories. “I thought it was a fever dream, though. The sight of your face—it couldn’t be real, any more than A-Jie’s face was real. Or so I told myself.”
That’s…good, Wen Qing thought, comforted in a way she did not think she deserved. She’d certainly considered the possibility that he’d recognized her indeed, and chosen not to act, for whatever reason.
For whatever reason, hah! She’d known exactly the reason she thought he might: she’d stolen his brother from him. Wen Qing and Wen Ning and all her family had. They’d stolen Wei Wuxian from Yunmeng Jiang, for the sake of his protection, and then as good as stolen his life, when A-Ning lost control and killed Jin Zixuan. That the Wen would die had felt inevitable, even as they endured, in those fifteen months in the Burial Mounds. But when they’d finally gone to their deaths, they’d dragged Wei Wuxian down with them, when he never should have been tangled up with them in the first place.
She’d known Jiang Cheng would never forgive her for it; it was why she’d given him the comb back, when he’d come to try and fail to beg his brother to come home. She’d taken his brother from him, and that ended all possibilities between them, even more definitively than the slaughter of his family and his sect by hers had.
Given the opportunity to free someone who’d taken A-Ning from her, the same way…she thought she’d probably let them rot.
“But you’re here now,” she said, holding her voice steady, her tone neutral. “What made you question that?”
“If Jin Guangyao and Jin Guangshan did not scruple to enslave your brother, to use him rather than to execute him for Jin Zixuan’s death, I thought perhaps they might do the same with the last great living Wen physician,” Jiang Cheng said, steadily. “I also saw the bodies of your family on the walls of Carp Tower. I didn’t see yours there, though.” He swallowed, and she was mesmerized by the way his long, beautiful throat worked. “They said they’d burned you, along with the Ghost General. But—there Wen Ning was, sixteen years after he was supposed to have truly died, with not a speck of ash on him.”
“And so. You came to Carp Tower once more,” Wen Qing said, something huge and heavy and warm, throbbing in her chest. “To see if perhaps I was in another dungeon.”
“And so.”
“When—did all this happen? Jin-zongzhu’s death, these secrets coming to light—?”
“Yesterday,” Jiang Cheng said. He closed his eyes and for a moment she could see how weary he was. “And a few days before—things have been happening fast.”
It didn’t feel fast to her; the past few weeks had in fact been agonizingly slow. It wasn’t the first time she’d run out of rice and water, and been forced to fall back on inedia. Xue Yang liked sharp things; Su She was given to bluster; Jin Guangyao enjoyed visiting to see the effects of starvation and dehydration, on an prisoner he sometimes deemed insufficiently cooperative.
A-Ning had been all that mattered, in all these years, and Wen Qing would have told him so, just to get him to stop trying the rest of it, but why hand an enemy the key to your heart? All right, he’d already been holding it, but she didn’t need to confirm that for him.
“What now, for me?” she said, fixing her eyes on Jiang Cheng’s wound, which was healing nicely. She’d cleaned dried blood from it, and smeared it with compounds to discourage infection, and encourage the circulation of both blood and qi, which would promote the natural healing of the body. And then…she ran into a problem. Which was that Jiang Cheng had shrugged off enough of his robes to give her access to his wound, and she’d been able to snip off the old binding, but she couldn’t possibly secure fresh bindings, with his arms still covered, so.
He grunted, not yet aware of her dilemma. “You can do whatever you want,” he said. Before those words could fill her with terror, he continued, “But I can give you protection in Lotus Pier, if you want it.”
“You’d—truly give me safe harbor in Yunmeng?”
“Did you think I came here, hoping to find you and free you just so I could abandon you?”
What if I deserved it?
“You’re going to need to strip down,” she said, instead, holding up a roll of bandage.
“And you’re going to need a safe harbor,” Jiang Cheng said, holding her gaze for a long moment. “But like I said, you can do whatever you want.” And he broke eye contact, and with a poorly-masked wince, he pushed his robes off his arms, and let them fall around him, baring his whole upper body.
Wen Qing sucked in a breath and held it, spent a little too long, looking at that chest, those shoulders—before she gestured at him to raise his arms. He did so, but she could see it pained him, so she was efficient with the bandaging, securing the fresh compress over his wound as quickly as she could.
“You can put those down now,” she said, and in an absurd and self-indulgent act, she took his hands in hers, and used them to lower his arms slowly, until they laid against his sides. His bare arms rested against his bare torso; his eyes, open wide, rested on her face. Oh, I’ve never once forgotten how beautiful your eyes are. “Do you need—help in dressing?”
He slowly shook his head no, and for some reason, her cheeks were flaming. She stepped around the privacy screen. Her work was, of course, done.
***
He gave her a folded handkerchief, when he set her off with two Jiang disciples, not even waiting until the morning to fly. He seemed very eager to get her out of Lanling, and young Jin Ling seemed to concur, which told her as much as she thought she needed to know about the state of Lanling Jin in the aftermath of Jin Guangyao’s death.
“No one in Yunmeng will question you, with this escort,” Jiang Cheng had told her, “but if anyone does, show them this, and they will know you have my protection. If—for some fucking reason, your brother decides to come back there—he also has my protection. Do you understand?”
She did not, but she took the handkerchief anyway, and tucked it into her sleeve.
She should have anticipated, but somehow, she did not, what the rising sun would do to eyes that had not seen natural light in such a long time. Wen Qing cried out, as dawn broke, and she almost stumbled off the Jiang disciple’s sword, as sunlight touched her eyes for the first time in sixteen years.
“Are you all right?” the disciple yelped, wrapping his arms around her, to hold her steady.
“I’ll be fine,” she said, dizzy, eyes clenched tightly shut. “It’s just too bright—” Wen Qing groped in a sleeve for something, anything, to bind across her eyes, and her hand came across Jiang Cheng’s handkerchief. She pulled it out, and realized it was wrapped around something sharp; she shoved the whatever-it-was back into her sleeve, and then folded and tied the cloth around her head, with a tremendous sigh of relief, the painfully bright light dimmed enough not to hurt any more.
It wasn’t until a few hours later in the flight, when she happened to put her hand back into her sleeve, and touched that sharp object again, when she realized I know what this is. She knew it just by feel, now that she held it properly. The carving on the wood was so familiar, under a thumb that had traced it a hundred times, a thousand times, before she’d surrendered it back to him.
Oh, Wen Qing thought, and pulled the comb from her sleeve, and let her thumb trace the carvings there again.
The sunshine was still unbearably bright. That had to be the reason tears kept slipping from her eyes, soaking the handkerchief.