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Banners of morning mist drape the terraced fields as he urges his horse across the ford. The village, his last landmark, is tucked in a bend in the narrow river just upstream. The current runs swift, and water dapples the horses' flanks as they ride on: he and his mount, and the spare horse on her lead. The road winds through orchards of plum and peach, lychee and apricot, ever higher into the verdant hills that peak into mountains on the cloud-circled horizon.
It is finally spring in the mountains, Mu Nihuang's last letter said. The plums blossomed well. It'll be a good year for them.
He did not write back. She wouldn't expect a speedy reply; she understood that his personal correspondence would often get buried under the affairs of the empire. A month after that letter arrived, he was gone.
He's ridden for twenty-eight days, a full turn of the moon. River crossings, mountain passes, thousands of li.
Twelve years, or twenty-five, of carrying this same tired heart that still pulls him onward. He made himself stop tallying the days. He can never quite stop remembering.
Plums hang in the trees like glossy black pearls; others already litter the grass, fragrant, split apart in their ripeness. Farther away, pickers from the village weave between the trees with their baskets, their hands stained with fruit.
The house, nestled in a dip in the ridged hills, is beautiful and homely, not grand but well kept. The buildings frame a lushly growing yard, and the grounds are hemmed by a stone wall, more to mark their boundary than to defend them. Smoke from a kitchen fire floats above the little valley. The paper windows of the house are thrown wide to let in the cool morning light before the heat descends.
The gate to the yard is open. He is under no illusion that he's been let this close unobserved, but he ties his horses next to the watering trough by the gate, and goes in.
The path to the house is paved with smooth flat stones. Somewhere out of sight, chickens cluck and flutter, and a pigeon coos mournfully. Horses move lazily in the paddock beyond the garden. A woman emerges from the house: a trim, solid figure in the shade of the veranda.
"Husband," she calls over her shoulder, "the messenger is here! I'll see him in."
She comes into the sunlight, and he chokes on nothing but the sight of her. Her clothes are simple, unlike the rich silks she would wear to court, but the years sit lightly upon her shoulders; the spring in her step is as supple as ever. While her hair is tied at the nape of her neck in the sedate fashion of a married woman, it still falls down her back thick and dark as a stroke of good ink.
Last time he saw her, she knelt to him at a private audience and asked for his leave to marry. Her betrothed, his dearest friend, their childhood companion, had lived through the battles in the north. A miraculous recovery, some claimed. The skill of his doctor, she asserted.
She brought the news knowing it would be a sword through his heart, and still she was right when she said, I did not want you to hear this from anyone else. I hope you may forgive me someday, Your Majesty.
There's nothing to forgive, Princess, he told her, half-strangled by hurt and relief and breathtaking love. He is alive. How can I not be glad?
With an aching smile and another deep obeisance, she left with his imperial permission to wed the jianghu scholar Su Zhe.
Here, in the sunlit yard, it takes her a few paces to understand he isn't coming to meet her or offering a greeting, like the courier she's mistaken him for would. Her brow furrows—there are faint lines there he does not remember, either—and slowly, her hand goes to her mouth.
He watches her war with herself, swamped in her astonishment. Her gaze swims with the same tangled things that shoot up into his own mind, splintering the lull of the ride.
If she says Your Majesty now, he—he does not know. He will crumple and fall. He journeyed for a month to be here, and there, the plan ends.
"Xiao Jingyan," Mu Nihuang whispers through her trembling fingers. "What are you—how in the name of—"
Should he bow, he thinks, wild, unmoored—kneel in the sand of the yard like a lord of yore, come to entreat a sage hidden in the hills?
Mu Nihuang is no sage, or even a wife to one. But she was once the Princess-Marshal of Yunnan. She's rarely met a hurdle she would not try to vault head-on.
"Stay there," she says, as if he would move for all treasures in the empire. She rounds on her heel to shout back into the house, "Dearest husband! Perhaps you'd care to explain why the Son of Heaven, His Imperial Majesty, may he reign for ten thousand years, is standing in my yard?"
There is a loud clatter from inside. His heart jolts in echo: dearest husband. The tinge of fondness in her annoyance. This peaceful, prosperous house, the veranda freshly sanded, the jasmine in bloom, like dawn clouds perched on the bushes.
What is he doing? As if compelled by the same question, Nihuang looks him up and down: travel-stained, dishevelled, half-mad with purpose and yearning.
"I'm not that anymore," he says, rough with disuse. The horses do not make for great conversationalists. "I left, Nihuang. I stepped down."
The understanding that tightens her mouth slices deep behind his ribs. Her emotions always take over her whole face, and the flash of renewed surprise fades into something vastly gentle, her eyes narrowing, her jaw softening.
"Jingyan—"
That is new. He only has a breath to marvel at it, his plain name from her mouth, before the door is thrown open behind her.
And there he is. After half a lifetime he was never supposed to have, after years of silence and second-hand news gleaned from the letters his wife kept writing and sending with undying persistence, there he is. Alive, alive, alive.
His wrists are narrow, his cheeks sharp and angular, his hair still half-loose after sleep. Despite his thinness, the gaunt look of illness is gone, the sense of a man driven beyond his limits smoothed into calmer composure. At present, that calm is faltering fast as fury and disbelief brew in his eyes.
He's been more dream and memory than living presence to Jingyan, and yet, looking at him, Jingyan could never mistake him for another. Not ever again.
"You did what?" Lin Shu demands, without a trace of humility or deflection. Jingyan wants to drink in his temper like water from an ice spring.
"I stepped down," he says, with an absurd serenity, "in favour of my son." His nephew, his brother's blood, but his, in the end.
Lin Shu grabs on to a column of the veranda. Since Nihuang doesn't dart in to support him, it must be emotion, not a dizzy spell, that makes him clutch the wood white-knuckled.
"You did not," Lin Shu says, as if the weight of his words could alter the world that is. "You cannot be here. It's a month's ride from Jinling! What about the court? What about the empire? I spent—I spent my life to put you on the throne. What madness is this, Xiao Jingyan?"
If it is madness, then it is the kind that keeps alive the lost and despairing, that shines a light behind locks and bars, that sustains hope when you can see no way out.
"I mourned you for thirteen years." He hears Nihuang make a muffled sound, but sets his gaze on Lin Shu. "I tended to Da Liang for twelve. I ruled it for ten of those years."
He never could quite stop remembering. The figures are thorns upon his tongue, but Lin Shu cannot see how they cut.
"You are the emperor. I made you. I gave you everything you needed to set the realm right, and you—you've thrown it away."
"Shu-lang." Nihuang puts her small, strong hand over Lin Shu's shaking one.
"You gave me everything I needed." Jingyan swallows. "I did the work, xiao-Shu. You know that. Your spies in Jinling have told you that."
Ostensibly, Mu Nihuang no longer commands Yunnan's armies. Ostensibly, Lin Shu is dead in the public eye, and Mei Changsu ceded the Jiangzuo Alliance into younger, capable hands before he departed for Meiling. Some years after that campaign, Mu Nihuang married a commoner, a brilliant but mysterious scholar from the jianghu, and paid no mind to the wicked tongues that wagged at her match. She had the eager support of her brother, the Prince of Yunnan, and the blessing of the emperor himself. Who else could overturn her desire in the matter?
In practice, a brisk flow of intelligence runs through this house, and both husband and wife are hip-deep in the current. Prince Mu Qing consulting them both in matters of both internal and foreign strategy must be the least of it.
Jingyan should, perhaps, be proud of outriding their informants on his way south.
"Don't xiao-Shu me, you impossible, stubborn fool!" Lin Shu barks, as if the familiar name were a particular offence. "Do you understand what you've done?"
"Given the way you're speaking to him," Nihuang says, "it is a good thing he's no longer the emperor. You might keep your head, honoured husband."
At that, Lin Shu folds down onto the steps of the veranda, dropping his head against his free hand. The other is still grasping Nihuang's, and she squeezes it covertly as she turns back to Jingyan.
She spoke his name without titles, without hedges. Jingyan. The way Lin Shu always called him, flouting his nominal seniority and his princely status.
"You've ridden a long way," she says. "Will you come in? There's tea and congee, and fresh fruit."
"Invite him in, why don't you? I suppose this cannot get any worse." Finding his feet, Lin Shu goes back into the house, as if they were still youngsters beholden to no propriety.
On that belated reminder, Jingyan bows his head. "I thank Lady Mu for her gracious hospitality."
"Come, please." Nihuang's smile is only a slight shifting around her eyes. "I'll send someone to bring your horses in."
The plums blossomed well. I hope you are also in good health.
When they were young—bright, bold children who were promised the world—it was Lin Shu that acted as the hinge between him and Nihuang. They both loved him, turned towards his brilliance like flowers to the sun, grieved him together before duty drove them to different edges of the empire. But in these last years, the letters were always in her hand; Jingyan would pick them from among the reports and petitions and read them over and over in the unquiet shelter of his own rooms.
He has envied her bitterly. In the end, she wed Lin Shu. She walked with him as he learned to live again. She brought him home to Yunnan.
And yet, she did not forget. She strung up endless lines of words like a bridge of bird wings across the Heavenly River, so Jingyan would know.
That is how he feels, following the two of them inside: each step he takes may be the one that scatters his footholds and plunges him into the abyss, but he must keep moving.
The airy sitting room, with its door panels open into the inner yard, seems to double as a study. Shelves slough against each other under the weight of bound volumes and stacks of papers. A low bed takes up one wall, covered in silk bolsters and light summer quilts. A maid slinks into the room and sets down a filled washbasin and a clean cloth for Jingyan. Her bow is courteous, but not a full obeisance: in his unassuming garb, she must take him to be simply a friend of the household.
The imperial robes, their priceless brocades and rare fabrics, always felt lined with stones upon his shoulders. Shedding his dusty surcoat into the maid's expectant arms, he washes the journey's grime from his face and hands.
That done, he's quietly glad to sink onto a sitting cushion while Nihuang arranges for another bowl and a pot of hot water for the breakfast he clearly interrupted. The table is set for only two.
"A-Xiang is visiting her cousins at Mu Estate," she supplies before he can comment on the missing family member: a daughter, almost nine years old, clever and willful as her parents. Nihuang's letters have painted a vibrant picture. "I meant to fetch her today."
"I've put you out," he says, and it might be the most normal thing he's said today. "My apologies."
"You could never." She lifts the steaming pot. "She likes Qing-er's household better, anyway. It's much livelier there, and incidentally, it has been pleasantly quiet here for the last few days."
He lets her pour for him. Everything breathes a tranquillity that he knows he's shaking by his mere presence. He's known such calm in precious few places in his life, but he lets it soak into him now. Even if he came in vain. Even if they never—
Go. If it is what your heart tells you, then go, my dear. Show me I was wrong.
What does his heart tell him? Like an unbroken horse, it has bucked the bridle and crop of his duty one last time, and bolted for freedom.
As Nihuang raises her head, Jingyan realises he is, again, under observation.
Lin Shu walks more softly than he did as a boisterous youth. He also holds himself with greater ease than he ever did in Jinling, a decade younger and on the brink of his death, but tension dwells in every line of his body. The gentler light in the room reveals strands of silver in his hair, which is partly twisted up in the jianghu style, with the same jade guan.
"You planned this." Lin Shu slides the door shut behind him, cutting off the footfalls of a servant going by. "You planned this, and you didn't breathe a word to—" To me. To us.
Jingyan marshals himself. "You refused every honour and every title I ever tried to offer you. You did not want to bend the emperor's ear or know his mind. Why would I owe you the news of my abdication?"
"I swear to my ancestors, it's as if you were put on this earth to vex me! There was never a place for me in the imperial court. I was—I am—Lin Shu could not climb from his grave, even for your sake. He had to go back into the shadows. I gave you the world, and now you've dropped it!"
"Did I ask you for the world?" There's a hollow place at the core of him that resounds with the question. "Did I stop you when you went to war and left me to hold the empire together? And then, when you lived after all, what did I do?"
Lin Shu's mouth presses into a taut line. Jingyan didn't ride across half the empire to quarrel with him, but he is past denying himself. He sat on the throne for ten years. There's grey in his hair and his beard, and burdens on his mind Lin Shu knows nothing about.
Unless, he supposes, Mu Nihuang shares everything she learns with her husband.
"You let him heal," she says, iron under her mild tone, and puts a bowl of congee before Jingyan. "Whether he used it as an excuse to hide is another matter."
Lin Shu's voice is barely audible. "Nihuang. You know I couldn't."
"I accept that you thought so." It is strange: Jingyan always thought Lin Shu was the centre he and Nihuang orbited around, but the way these two balance has changed in his long absence. "Right now, you can stop glowering in the doorway. I get enough of that from your daughter. Jingyan, please eat. You've had a long journey."
He might indeed be out of his mind. He left his son, whom he loves like a child of his body, and his empress, whom he always tried to treat with kindness, if not love. He saw to their safety and success best as he could, so he could chase a shadow and a dream.
If only for the way Nihuang looks at him, steady and warm and piercing, he eats, and finds he has an appetite at least. He did set out at the barest blush of dawn. Once the bowl is empty and Lin Shu has deigned to take a seat next to his wife, Jingyan straightens his back again. He's knelt before his father's throne without flinching; he's stood before enemy generals and demanded their surrender; he can face his two oldest friends.
"I built the court with every lesson you taught me. The empire is at peace. Our vassals are loyal, our people content. I can't see the future, xiao-Shu, but short of that, I did what you asked."
"What I asked," Lin Shu repeats, as if that finally penetrated the wall of his umbrage. "You did not do that for me."
"Didn't he?" Nihuang puts in. "Did I not guard the Chu border for Qing-er and my mother? Didn't everyone that went with you to Meiling the second time do it for you?" The turn of her head hides her face from Jingyan. "Did you not, if I may presume, return from that campaign for me?"
Lin Shu reaches for her hand and she lets him clasp it, leaning towards him with a comfort that makes Jingyan's throat feel thick. He was not there when they married, with his gracious leave. They've forged a happiness between them, and he didn't even get to witness it.
Lin Shu inclines his cheek to Nihuang's temple. The breeze from the open door intermingles strands of their hair. Jingyan almost tears his eyes away, as if the wordless affection between them were something too private for him to see—and maybe it is, old friendship or not. He was not here.
"That was underhanded," Lin Shu says, somehow both sharp and tender, against her hair. "I can't say it was undeserved."
Nihuang sits back from him, her ankles crossed: a soldier's pose, rather than a woman's. "The realm deserves peace, but I've never seen anyone govern well out of selfless regard for strangers. You—" she gestures at Jingyan "—are the best man I know, and I won't believe for a moment you did it to be worthy of the histories, past or future."
Jingyan gapes at her. He cannot help it. Fortunately, he isn't alone in his consternation.
"My own wife," Lin Shu huffs, trying to keep his voice level, "raining blow after blow upon my character! The best man she knows, indeed. After I clawed my way out of death to honour our betrothal."
It isn't indignation that is making his voice tremble. It's laughter, quiet, contrary mirth that is slipping the seams of his facade.
"Is that how we're telling the story now? I remember shouting at you in the courtyard of Langya Hall for quite a while before you chose to abide by that promise." Nihuang shines with the same amusement, dashed with what can only be love, soft and common as the clean summer air. "Be that as it may, sincere admiration should not be concealed, no? Can you argue he is not an extraordinary man?"
The desire to join in their laughter nearly overwhelms Jingyan, somewhat at his expense though it may be. They are at the midday of their lives, no longer children giggling at some delightful mischief, but there is no one under Heaven who ever understood him the way these two did, no one that swept him along in their joy and sorrow both.
Until they had a decade to slowly twine together, and he was not here.
"I cannot," Lin Shu says, abrupt, his merriment gone. "Jingyan, you—" A question almost wrenches free, fluttering like a marsh-light in his eyes, before another smothers it. "You came alone. What happens now? To the empire?"
That is what Jingyan spent that cold, lonely decade solving. He brings his thoughts to stillness. His hands—no longer the emperor's hands, which are never allowed to shake—settle on his thighs. "My son will rule. I hand-picked his ministers. He has his sworn brothers by his side." As Jingyan was supposed to have Lin Shu. "Empress Liu was granted all the privileges of an empress dowager, and will live in comfort for the rest of her days. We never—as Nihuang knows, I have no other children."
Once, selfishly, he wrote to her of this manifold grief, and later regretted sending the letter. Lin Shu's expression tells him that those passages, at least, were shared with him.
Jingyan can't tarry there. "The succession was uncontested. Shall I ask for the official records to be sent, so you may review them yourself, xiao-Shu?"
Sir Su would sit more familiarly at the end of that sentence. The same mercurial mind that brought Jingyan to power is now turning over his withdrawal from it, detail by detail, working out the scheme in play.
"And Consort-Dowager Jing?"
Then go, my dear. Show me I was wrong.
Nihuang busies herself with pouring more tea; Jingyan's cup of water has cooled, untouched on the table. Her hands are broader than his mother's, bare of bangles and marked with old violence, with scar and callus both. He still tumbles back to his last meeting with his mother, when he told her he was leaving.
To be emperor is to be alone, Jingyan. No one can stand beside you now.
I have been alone, Mother, for all my life. Ever since the battle at Meiling.
She wept, and so did he, into her arms like a boy, but his sorrow was not a child's simple heartbreak. He's carried this wound ever since he was nineteen and his best friend didn't return from the north. Over the years, affection and regard for others have grown around and over the loss, and in that Jingyan counts himself blessed, but he is not a boy anymore. He knows himself as a man does.
He knows the price his unbending, steadfast heart exacts. There are shapes carved out of him that only their matching pieces will fit.
"She told me to go." The words breach the control that sheaths him like a suit of armour. Twelve years. A lifetime. Underneath he is nothing but raw, tempestuous feeling that seeks any fault in his shell to escape.
He couldn't answer Nihuang's last letter. He kept the imperial palace in the dark for as long as he could; mostly for pragmatic reasons, partly so he wouldn't have to face his own terrifying desire.
Lin Shu frowns, clearly unbalanced by his answer. "She... told you? To leave?"
In another moment, it would be amusing. He can't argue against his aunt as he can against Jingyan himself, especially as she is away in Jinling, cloistered in the palace, like Jingyan is meant to be. There, Lin Shu put him in his mind, in the place Lin Shu built for him with the last of his life. There, he was supposed to remain, untouchable in his power, beyond anyone's reach, helping the empire be reborn.
In this moment, it rends through Jingyan's defences.
"To leave," Jingyan says, and it punches out of him like a dying breath, "so I could come to you."
Earthenware clinks, too loud, as Nihuang replaces the tea pot on the tray. Her hands hover, and again Jingyan traces the arc of her gaze to Lin Shu.
Lin Shu rises with a stiffness that echoes of Jinling a decade ago, the sudden chill of winter, the pain he bore in his failing body. It isn't pain this time: his shoulders draw together as he turns away. One hand squeezes into a fist under the hem of his sleeve.
He stands, taut and motionless. Jingyan can't recall ever making him speechless. Lin Shu, the boy with a hero's daring. Mei Changsu, the man scaling Heaven with nothing but his wits and his will. Lin Shu, whoever he is now, turning away from him without a word.
Deep down, Jingyan is still a soldier. You cannot ride into war certain of the outcome, and this was a clash of arms like any other. He calculated the risk and took it. He fought his passes.
The empty hours of the journey hum in his ears, roaring into a gale. They can't fill the silence in the room.
He never belonged in the capital. Once he was happy there, under his eldest brother's watchful eye, beside his friends, but that life collapsed into ashes twenty-five years ago. He's grieved Lin Shu longer than he ever had him. Looking at Nihuang, wide-eyed next to her husband, he blisters with the knowledge that she's had years with him while Jingyan attended to the endless concerns of the realm, the petty rivalries of the court, the unrest and corruption in the provinces.
He moves without awareness of himself other than an ingrained instinct that says, You must never tremble. You must never be weak where others can see.
The emperor's hands must never shake. They hold the world.
He remembers walking out of his father's audience hall, his hand still wet with poisoned wine. The brush of cool fingertips as he took the cup from Mei Changsu's hand. The chime of the cup as it struck the floor. His father's towering rage, dwarfed by the epiphany that engulfed him. You know him. You are not mad. You are not mad. He is xiao-Shu, back from the dead.
The same fugue takes him now. His body moves as if in battle, touching upon sensory cues. Wooden planks under his feet. The floor. The veranda. The stones of the yard. He doesn't know this house, but there were horses grazing at the far end of the walled grounds. His mounts will be there.
Show me I was wrong. The unbearable hope in his mother's voice carried him this far.
This is the end of the road. His plan crashes away like a river over the lip of a waterfall, into mist and air.
The first call of his name splinters away. He keeps walking.
Dew-damp branches whisper across his sleeve. The garden is dense, fragrant, a beckoning maze. The imperial palace suffocated him; here, he could breathe sweet and free if not for the stormwind rush of his lungs. This is a haven, but he does not belong here.
"Jingyan!"
Running feet. The strangest thought, an old caution, as if time had looped in upon itself, He is ill. He must not exert himself.
As Jingyan tangles in that, fingers close around his wrist. The touch lands on his bare skin harsh as an impacting arrow. He stalls and is spun, gasping, to face Lin Shu, who grips not his robe but his hand with remarkable strength for his still-thin frame.
To touch the emperor without permission is to court death. The dream of that hand upon him was sometimes the only thing that kept him sane.
"Let go of me." It comes out too hoarse to be an order. He can't look up past their hands.
Young Marshal Lin did not plead: he schemed and teased and talked circles around half the court. Mei Changsu spun politic fictions and affected humility, but only ever to further his own aims.
There's an entreaty in Lin Shu's voice now. "Jingyan."
How dare you, Jingyan almost bursts out, the torrent inside him carving a new, hungry channel, how dare you call me that now, after turning me away—
"Tell me again. Why are you here?"
It would be in his nature to simply answer the question. So it always was between them. Whatever xiao-Shu asked for, Jingyan gave.
This is not a conversation for a garden path, with servants and workers about, but the only sound is the breeze in the boughs. They're alone in the green morning.
"You know why." As he pulls his hand away, Lin Shu yields it. He smothers the urge to clasp his hand over his own wrist, as if to trap the fading heat of the touch. "But I see I was wrong to come."
A noise escapes Lin Shu, soft and wounded. He didn't mean to make it. In spite of himself, Jingyan is aware of him, his long limbs in the loose robes with their skirts trailed through the wet grass. They may not have stood this close since they were young, free to jostle and grapple and fall together in the easy intimacy of friendship.
"No," Lin Shu says. "No, never, but I cannot, you must understand, I was never supposed to—"
"To what?" The question slips free before he can think twice.
"To be here." Lin Shu takes a step back, also gauging that shivering distance. "I lived, and I did not know how."
"So there is something the Qilin Talent cannot master?" It's a low blow. Lin Shu's breath hitches, and Jingyan is tugged one way by guilt and another by a dark satisfaction. "Yet here you are."
"Through no merit of my own, I assure you. If you wish to praise someone for it—"
Nihuang. Lin Chen. Feiliu. A-Xiang. A wealth of names could fill that sentence, and Jingyan is grateful and envious of all of them.
"Don't." He raises his hand a fraction, a gesture learned in the court, where it commanded absolute obedience. That isn't what he wants here, no, but the instinct remains. "Do not lie to me. I—I accept you wanted to die in Meiling. I accept you only told those who wouldn't, ultimately, try to stop you. Not even Nihuang. You tore her in two, sending her away to the Chu border, but she let you go."
"It was a near thing. You know, I once promised her I had a decade to live. It's been twelve years now. So, she made a liar out of me after all."
The jasmine sways behind Lin Shu's shoulder, white against the fallow linen of his outer robe. That is as close to his face as Jingyan can look, even with the fevered emotion brimming in him.
"She made a liar out of you? Here's what I will not believe: that you did not want this." Jingyan spreads an arm at the garden, at the house, at the clement, stubborn summer that surrounds them. "Since you're here, it's your own effort that made it so. Heaven may have willed it, but you saw it through."
"And how do you know that?"
"Because it is how I am here." The emperor weighs life and death in his palm, upon his word: the weal and woe of the realm. But even the emperor is a man, with a man's desires and agonies, and so his own life is also upon the scales.
"Please understand." Lin Shu's voice dips, a thin, wisping thing. "I may have lived, I may have some of my strength back, but I'm not as you remember."
"Good." It's only as he speaks that he feels the brunt of the word. "Last I saw you, you were dying. Before that, I thought you were dead. This, right now, is a great improvement."
"I swear to Heaven and Earth—" For one reeling heartbeat, Jingyan thinks Lin Shu is about to sweep away again, turn his back like the moon receding from the sky. Then his fingers instead burrow into Jingyan's arms, blunt points of pressure through his sleeves. The look on his face is, rather, the look of a man knocking on the gates of King Yama, but his eyes lock with Jingyan's and do not flinch away.
Surprise freezes Jingyan where he stands. His hands fumble for anything to steady himself on.
Lin Shu swallows. "I am not your xiao-Shu. He is gone, Jingyan. We will never—you and I and—and Nihuang, we had our time, we had the world, but we can't go back. We gave it up for duty and justice and the empire, and it—it is better this way."
The only thing Jingyan can grab on to is, of course, Lin Shu. His palm closes, more gently, around Lin Shu's shoulder, and the grip startles him quiet.
Jingyan allows himself to feel that: the warm, living proof of his presence, the cracks in his composure that run through his breaths. "So honour and loyalty are enough now? Where has the great scholar of the rivers and lakes left his brain, that he should speak such nonsense?"
"What?" A muscle flickers under the grim set of Lin Shu's jaw.
"It isn't virtue alone that makes the empire well." Jingyan lowers his other hand before he does something reckless like stroke away that throb of tension. "Nihuang knows this, and in that she's wiser than you. And people can't be folded away like clothes and shaken out when you want them again. They'll go on living, whether you see it or not."
Lin Shu's hands slide down, and Jingyan lets his own arm drop, as long fingers pass lightly over his knuckles and away. Before he can guard against it, longing stabs at him, sudden and elemental, like it did when he first saw Nihuang at the door.
When Lin Shu calls her name, Jingyan almost thinks his searing thought has somehow slipped between them. However, she stands up from the veranda at the far end of the garden path. She must have been there a while. Her apparent ease might fool a casual observer, but the acuity of an old soldier on watch shines through.
Lin Shu holds a hand out towards Jingyan even as he speaks to his wife, as if Jingyan might attempt another hasty exit. "My love, would you? The sandalwood box in the bedroom, under the desk."
With a nod whose meaning Jingyan can't entirely gauge, Nihuang vanishes through a door.
The air, weighed with fading dew, feels too tender to breathe. Lin Shu has taken hold of the moment, but Jingyan yields to it, shores up his trust.
Lin Shu tilts his head. "Come. We should take this back inside."
Another snow-girded memory: the two of them, ensconced in Mei Changsu's study, waiting for news of Wei Zheng's rescue, their recent schism still winding up the silence. The tension between them isn't the same, but still Jingyan thinks of that day in Jinling. Now, as then, something is happening that is beyond their control.
He sits down at the table that's been cleared in their absence. A bowl of ripe plums sits on the corner. Lin Shu's hand twitches towards them, then drops in his lap, a flash of nerves.
What are you playing at? Jingyan's old temper would demand. What is the ruse, the scheme, this time?
These are his father's suspicions, his mother's fears, clouding his mind. Show me I was wrong.
"Shu-lang. Jingyan." Nihuang slips through the door, cradling a plain box of polished wood under her arm. At Lin Shu's small nod, she places it on the table and kneels beside him, but her eyes dwell on Jingyan.
Dread, narrow as a needle, pierces him against his better intentions. "What is this?"
"I went on living," Lin Shu says. "You wrote to Nihuang, so sometimes, I knew your mind. Some few of pieces of it."
"I may have been a poor interpreter, but I hope you'll forgive me for it." She smiles at Jingyan, quiet, like the last slow light of dusk. "You've been here often, between the two of us, before you ever came."
"Forgive you—" He has no capacity for offence in the first place, not when he's just been struck by the rest of what she—they both—said. What they are saying.
"These are yours." Lin Shu stops like the words had sliced his tongue. He puts his hand on top of the box, his fingers flickering. "Or, they are for you. Pieces of my mind, if you will. I know they come very late."
"You wrote to me." Jingyan knows this without ever touching the box. "And then you never sent the letters?"
Lin Shu—his marvellous, infuriating friend—flinches like a boy caught at mischief. "Most often, I was going to burn them. I never quite could."
The litany of impeccable excuses as to why these letters are unsent runs long: An obscure, common-born scholar would hardly have any business writing to the emperor. Lin Shu is not a name one could sign under a letter. The imperial correspondence is never truly private, and the emperor is seldom truly alone. Jingyan wants to grab the box and shake it until the actual reason tumbles out.
You've been here often, between the two of us.
"What do they say?"
"You won't read them?" Something in Lin Shu unravels. As he begins to pull his hand away, Jingyan moves, without deliberation, and catches it, palm to palm, his other hand closing over it.
"I would," he says, going for firm and falling short, "but I came to tell you something."
"Oh?" Lin Shu seems to have a similar aim; he also falters in the attempt. "Something besides that you broke a thousand years of dynastic tradition and gave up the throne for—"
"What kind of scholar are you, if you don't recall that abdication in favour of a worthy successor was the first ideal, in the earliest histories? Of course I checked for precedent." Jingyan knows he's won something when Nihuang laughs in a glimmer of delight.
"Have mercy on my poor husband. He woke expecting a report from Zhen Ping, and perhaps news from Feiliu, not his heart's desire at our door."
"Nihuang." Lin Shu swings to her, half in horror, half in wonder.
Jingyan glances from him to her and back again, and understands that the truth he bore across half the empire, the secret he fed with every letter that came from the south, is already loose in the room.
"I told you I wouldn't lay the road you must walk," she says to Lin Shu, "but you're not the only one with an interest in this matter. You know this."
For most of his journey, Jingyan did his best to exist only in the day, in the hour. He measured the distance to the next bridge, the next town. He weighed his rice and the horses' grain and did not consider the heft of the choice he'd made. At any crossroads, he might have followed his fear back to Jinling instead.
He did not. That is, perhaps, the one thing he excels at.
"Those letters," Lin Shu says then, "would make more elegant work of this, but between you two, what hope do I have of dignity?" His fingers fold into Jingyan's, cool and restless, but there. "Very well. Listen. I've thought of you every day since the Chiyan Army rode north. When I woke in Langya Hall, only half alive. When I went into the jianghu to plan retribution. When I came back to Jinling and pretended I was a stranger to you. They were dark thoughts, sometimes, and... I hated myself for them."
His breath in his throat, Jingyan shakes his head in helpless denial. Nihuang has a hand on Lin Shu's arm, tracing a slow path from shoulder to elbow.
"Whatever you thought," Jingyan murmurs, "it will not change my heart."
"That is what I feared. That you'd look at me as I was, and still see your friend."
"Xiao-Shu." Jingyan doesn't know if Lin Shu will resent him for that, but it's the only name Jingyan has for him. "I didn't know you in Jinling, and I bear the blame for that. But even then, you were my friend. Even then, I loved you. That is what endures."
"It was never your fault." Lin Shu's brows cinch. "Oh, Jingyan. Do not carry that. Not after all this time."
"It's what you gave him to carry." Old sorrow, if not guilt, shades Nihuang's voice. "I still carry the fact that I kept your secret, even when every instinct told me to trust Jingyan. We are not in Jinling anymore, though. You wrote to me from Langya Hall, and I came to you."
"So you think it was only ever a matter of some letters?" Lin Shu's fingers curl into a fist, but they don't break from Jingyan's grasp. The placid mask he wore as Mei Changsu seems to no longer come to him. His face is his own again, and a host of emotions swarm across it. "If I'd only sent them, he'd have cast aside the empire and come to... to me. To us."
"No, because you put a man with a good heart on the throne, and somehow, he still has it. But he would've known yours."
She reaches her hand onto Lin Shu's wrist. It is a matter of a few hesitant inches for Jingyan to cover it with his own, too, so both their hands are nestled between his palms. Her thumb hooks under his.
"What would be the use of him knowing, Nihuang?" Lin Shu whispers. "What grief would be spared? What would have changed?"
Having listened in quiet awe as understanding trickles in, Jingyan cuts him off.
"It doesn't matter," he says, sticking to his resolve, before Lin Shu can dispute him. "I came to tell you, both of you, that I—" He cants towards Nihuang, the strength in her grip, the tether she was to him against the storms of the court. "I've held the world in my hands, and still they were empty, because I could not hold you."
"Jingyan." Lin Shu's voice is a rasp. "Jingyan."
He is not sure who moves first. The table jerks sideways as Lin Shu's hands fly from Jingyan's, but only so he can clasp his face, his shoulder, pulling him close around the corner of the table. Jingyan grunts with the sudden lanky bulk of him, but his arms open and drag Lin Shu into something too raw to be an embrace. They collapse together: Jingyan buries his tears in Lin Shu's hair, caught between cheek and neck as Lin Shu cradles his head, his hand unsteady but his grip steadfast.
The faint scrape of wood makes Jingyan blink his eyes clear. Lin Shu breathes shallow and sharp, evidently as overwhelmed as Jingyan, and turns together with him to look up at Nihuang.
She has stood and gone to close the sliding doors to the garden. The translucent paper panes sieve the sunshine into a rosy half-gloom. Her hands dwell on the door even as she meets both their eyes. The corner of her mouth curls up a notch: not a smile, but the intimation of one, a gentle question laced in it.
"Oh," Jingyan says, abruptly puzzled as to why she is over there. His mind has come loose of all its gnarled knots, like the pressure in the air lifting as a thunderstorm finally breaks. "A-Huang, come here."
It doesn't escape him that she does not look to Lin Shu first. Slipping under Jingyan's offered arm, she tucks herself into the space they make for her, her fingers pressing into his back. It is not as fraught to gather her in, and Jingyan sighs, from deep in his ribs, against the top of her head. As Lin Shu wraps an arm around her, his shaky tension melts at last, leaving him resting against Jingyan.
Jingyan strokes an idle hand through Lin Shu's hair. Nihuang brushes a thumb over his damp cheeks, her eyes soft with what he can only call fondness.
"I suppose"—there's a dash of mischief in her obvious relief—"I can ride down to Mu Estate tomorrow. Perhaps the day after."
"Mm-hm," says Lin Shu, half smothered against Jingyan's shoulder. "Why would you—ah, yes. A-Xiang." He rights himself without dislodging Jingyan's arm from around him. "I do not make a habit of forgetting our daughter. Today rather took a turn."
Jingyan chuckles, a touch ragged. "I should've written ahead, hm?"
Lin Shu seems to measure the question, rhetorical though it is. "You're here. That is what matters. I don't know the full meaning of that yet, but what is your plan now?"
"Is he still like this all the time?" The amusement lingers. "With a contingency plan for every overturned cart on the road? Informants on every distant relative?"
"Entirely." Nihuang presses her temple into her husband's shoulder, and the ease of that gesture still takes Jingyan's breath away. Since he arrived, she's called him by his plain name, and he's allowed her presumption. Neither she nor Lin Shu censored themselves from small affections even when they all sat, tense and uncertain, at the table earlier. "You may want to get used to it. It is how he loves, frustrating as it is sometimes."
At that, Jingyan extracts himself, as gently as he can, from both of them. The sitting cushions are a mess, shoved here and there by their scramble to embrace.
"You were surprised to see me," he begins, folding his legs under him properly, "but you'd hoped for it, too."
Lin Shu sharpens, not with a strategist's calculating mien, but an almost pleased glint in his dark eyes. "Yes. I told you so."
"You did not. You've spent most of this morning trying to tell me as little as possible."
"Which part of I've thought of you every day of my life is unclear to you, Xiao Jingyan?"
"The exact nature of those thoughts, for one." The light in Lin Shu's gaze might drive him to reckless things. The impulse is not helped by the delicate, amused curve of Nihuang's mouth. "The involvement of your honoured wife in them, for another."
She shut the doors. As Jingyan pauses to listen, the only noises he can hear are the animals in the yard and the wind in the trees. The house servants are conspicuously absent.
"What does my honoured wife think?" Lin Shu asks, as if this were a grave conundrum.
"I think," Nihuang says, with equal tones of profound musing, "that I'm very tired of fruit metaphors. I'm a soldier, Shu-lang, not a poet, and I'd rather not talk about plums quite so much ever again."
The plums blossomed well, her last letter said. It'll be a good year for them—though every year, the trees seem to bend further to the north. It is a strange thing.
Jingyan laughs. It takes him by surprise, that swell of mirth, ringing through him like a bell struck after years of silence. Nihuang, always liable to rush in headlong, joins him first, but the low peal of laughter from Lin Shu is what patters like spring rain against his heart.
Still, it feels right to draw her in first, their heads rested together. "No more figures of speech, then. I am here. Without you, I might never have come."
"Good." She drops her cheek against his shoulder, her sigh warm on the skin of his throat, and he feels some hidden strain leach from her. "My husband will have another thousand questions, and you must answer them in due course, but I only have one."
Before she can continue, Lin Shu says, as if in a shared breath, "Will you stay?"
He is smiling—an older, more tender reflection of the young man that rode away to war, never to return, in a face that isn't the same but belongs wholly to him again.
In Jingyan's arms, Nihuang begins to laugh again. "You are fortunate I cherish you, you impossible man. That was my only question, and you stole it right from my mouth."
"You'll find new things to ask him." Lin Shu's hand finds Jingyan's face, and Jingyan's mouth parts on a gasp, a tremor of awareness that both soothes and stirs him. "I remember you having quite the list, my love. Some of them were even fit for daylight."
"Yes," Jingyan says, before their repartee pulls him irrefutably along. He wants everything they intimate: drowsy mornings in the golden eastward light, days of rambling conversation to bridge the years, nights where they all whisper even a fraction of their unquiet dreams into being. "I will. For as long as you'll have me."
"Then you must know, Xiao Jingyan," Nihuang says, with the kind of contentment that comes from work well finished, "that you need never leave in this life."
Lin Shu glances down at her, a silent agreement, and then up at Jingyan, with the steadiness of a promise. "For however long we have, stay. Tell me everything I missed. Stay with us."
With sure hands, Jingyan holds them both.