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“Jiujiu!” A-Ling wailed, waving a fat little fist.

He was cutting teeth. Babies after the first few months seemed to be at this constantly.

Jiang Cheng had honestly not expected to get the boy out here anything like this soon, with his sister dead and therefore not bringing her son for visits; it better pleased Sect Leader Jin to have Sect Leader Jiang obliged to go to him like a supplicant, if he wanted to see his nephew.

Well, and the worthier motive of wanting his remaining heir safe at home.

But Jin Guangshan was dead, too, following after so many others. It was impossible to grieve him—Jin Ling was frankly lucky not to have had the chance to know his paternal grandfather—but the presence of yet more death among the upper ranks of cultivators would have been a bit of a blow to morale all the same. Except that Jin Guangyao having a son of his own, and showing every sign of stepping in as his father’s full heir rather than establishing a regency, meant that Jin Ling might now be surplus to the Jin’s dynastic requirements.

And thus made his being allowed to stay with his maternal family, in the aftermath, a promising sign.

Having A-Ling here, sleeping safe at Lotus Pier, was something for which Jiang Cheng would happily have seen dead any ten fellow sect leaders. Aside from he supposed Lan and Nie, and a few of his own more reliable vassals. He might have been open to negotiation on most of those, though.

Except now, it turned out his nephew was in too much pain to sleep.

His front teeth were in already, small and wicked sharp, and he’d bitten his wet-nurse with them in frustration, to the point that Jiang Cheng had found the woman wearing frustrated tears, with spots of blood seeping through her hastily closed undershirt, when he’d burst into the nursery having mistaken the baby’s wails for some attack.

She’d looked frightened, and then mortified, on top of the rest of it, as she saw and then recognized him. “Apologies, Sect Leader Jiang,” she said hastily, saluting deeply, and then Jiang Cheng watched her struggle to follow that up with more pertinent words, the baby in her arms kicking and writhing and letting out increasingly exhausted ‘ah’ sounds.

“Give him,” Jiang Cheng had said, before she managed to come up with anything.

She was so clearly a Jin servant, used to being ignored and to therefore not having to produce anything more complicated than compliance for the judgment of her superiors. His Jiang Sect stood more on ceremony than his father’s had, but his servants wouldn’t struggle like this to understand him, and it irritated him that he had to have this woman here, if he wanted his nephew.

“What? Sect Leader…” She didn’t dare protest. She seemed like she didn’t get much more sleep than Jiang Cheng did—well, Jin Ling probably had other nurses in Jin Tower, but they’d only sent her. He’d assign a maid or two tomorrow. Hire a second nurse from the town. This was absurd.

“Give,” he repeated, stepping forward and reaching out. “If he’s old enough to draw blood he’s old enough to start weaning. Go get cleaned up.”

The picture of concern, she nevertheless did not protest, because she was a servant of the Jin, and if they taught nothing else, they taught deference to power.

Jiang Cheng had settled his still-whining nephew into the crook of his arm, tucked the blanket back around all those flailing limbs, and carried him off.

“Jiujiu!” the child repeated now, as they moved along the quay fronting the lake, reaching up to grab at Jiang Cheng’s face. He couldn’t quite reach his nose from where he lay, but made repeated attempts. Fortunately Jiang Cheng did not wear a beard, because it would have been yanked on with a promising degree of strength. “Owie! Jiujiuuuuuu!”

“Hush,” Jiang Cheng said. “People are trying to sleep.”

A-Ling screwed up his face at this and let out his best outraged wail, except he’d worn himself out so badly it wasn’t that impressive, and dwindled out over the lake. Might have woken a few people up, all the same.

Oh well. Their problem. Jiang Cheng gave his nephew one of his knuckles to gnaw on. There were teething toys for babies, right? Why didn’t A-Ling have any? Left behind at Jin Tower? He could make one out of scrap leather, probably. Babies probably weren’t that different from dogs.

Jiang Cheng let himself into the kitchen. It was abandoned at this hour, everyone gone to bed. Even the maid whose job it was to sleep in the kitchen and mind the fires had tucked herself and her pallet into the corner, and seemed dead to the world. He considered waking her. Decided against it.

If A-Ling woke her up, so be it, but he didn’t want to deal with any other people tonight if he didn’t have to.

He took his knuckle away from Jin Ling, who’d been more suckling at it than teething on it by this point, and who whimpered at the theft.

First of all, he found a basket full of lotus pods, dumped them unceremoniously onto a work-table, and then juggled A-Ling through the process of removing his own outer robe. This he folded, badly, one-handed, and lined the basket with until it was a suitable place to deposit a rather large baby.

This done, he turned to stir up the fire in the brick stove. He fed the embers until they were going strong enough to heat the stoneware vessel he found to hand. At which point, he caught A-Ling kicking his way free of the swaddling blanket enough to stage an escape from the basket and crawl off who knew where.

Jiang Cheng foiled the attempt, wrapped him up again more tightly, and when he went to dig out the jar of pork stock from the cold storage in the running water, he brought the basket down with him. A-Ling started grizzling again on the way, and he gave him his left hand to chew on some more. Jin Ling jammed his uncle’s knuckles into his mouth and gnawed down on his ring with the hard patches of gum at the corner, where eyeteeth were soon to erupt.

Well. He could hardly damage it. And if it was going to give him a shock, it would have by now.

Jiang Cheng had to take his hand away to pick up the stock jar, and A-Ling made outraged noises and seemed inclined to start screaming again.

“Shush,” said Sect Leader Jiang, tucking the jar into the basket so he’d have a hand free for doors. Jin Ling became absorbed in prodding at the cool, hard surface of his new bed-mate, which distracted him briefly, but he was all the more offended at having it taken away when they reached the stove again.

Being talked to seemed to calm the brat, so as he retrieved the pot, set it on the brick stove, and scooped gloppy cool stock from the jar into it, Jiang Cheng explained each step. Should he try to find leftover rice from the day? Jin Ling should be old enough to eat porridge.

There probably wasn’t any, he decided. Between the disciples and the servants, every scrap tended to get eaten up. Maybe the Lan strictures against meat were more thrift than principle!

Eventually, just as the stock had warmed enough to go liquid and he’d gone looking for where they kept the soup bowls these days, Jin Ling fell silent, and Jiang Cheng thought irritably he might have fallen asleep and wasted his trouble.

He glanced up, and then lunged, his heart in his throat, because A-Ling had in fact kicked his way free of the blanket once more, and gotten out, and was advancing on unsteady feet in Jiang Cheng’s general direction.

Which was to say, directly toward the mouth of the brick stove.

Only once he had his nephew safe in his arms again did Jiang Cheng take the time to get properly angry with himself for his carelessness, with Jin Ling for not knowing any better, and just in general about how fragile and ridiculous babies evidently were. He gave Jin Ling Zidian to teethe on again, and only then did he really notice that A-Ling had been walking.

He’d stood up a few times, hanging onto things, but if he’d been spotted taking steps before Jiang Cheng would have heard about it.

“You awful little boy,” he muttered, while his nephew gnawed determinedly at his spiritual weapon. What a moment for first steps! “You just needed a little motivation, hm? Am I going to have to break your legs when you get bigger, just to make you sit still?”

A-Ling made a firm grunting, cooing sort of sound, and bit down hard on Jiang Cheng’s finger with his sharp front teeth, so Jiang Cheng went to dish him up some warm pork broth. He kept a firm hold on the boy the whole time, including when he held a spoon to his lips and proceeded to do his best to negotiate more broth down A-Ling’s throat than onto either of their chests.

Jiang Cheng grabbed at the small golden figure dashing by, swinging him up on his hip, and only realized a moment too late that this was much too public a setting for the Jiang Sect Leader to manhandle an heir to the Jin Sect.

Jin Rusong’s murder meant his chances of legally absconding with his nephew had gone back to nil, and he’d had to make at least some show of stepping back; it would promote instability in the cultivation world and, more importantly, damage the Jiang, if people got the idea he and Lianfang-zun were at odds over control of their nephew, especially now.

Too late. Brazen it out. He swung A-Ling up off his hip and held him at arms’ length, with a firm little shake and the intent to deliver a brisk scold for such disorderly behavior in the main hall, little feet in their trim gold-embroidered boots dangling.

Jin Ling’s face was a blotchy, furious red mass of tears.

Never mind about appearances. Jiang Cheng tucked the child back against his side and moved to leave the room immediately. It wasn’t as though anything important was going on; this wasn’t even a proper conference, just one of the events on Jin Guangyao’s interminable social calendar. Most of the other guests were vassals of the Jin; if Lan and Nie hadn’t also been attending, Jiang Cheng would have had to seriously debate whether accepting the invitation for an opportunity to visit Jin Ling was worth letting the Jin give the appearance of authority over the Jiang. Nie Huaisang and Lan Xichen were good for that much, at least.

He found an empty chamber off the main hall, closed the door behind them, and set Jin Ling down on his feet.

“Now, why are you running around crying, ah? Don’t let people see such a face, they’ll take advantage.”

“Jin Chan said,” A-Ling answered, and then buried his face in Jiang Cheng’s thigh and mumbled.

“Speak up,” said Jiang Cheng. It came out angry, because he was angry, just with that little shit Jin Chan. He squeezed his nephew’s shoulder to make this clear.

“He said I’m lucky A-Song died.”

“That’s because he’s a stupid, dishonorable brat. Of course you’re not lucky your cousin died just because he was ahead of you in the succession. That’s just him listening to growups even stupider than him. It’s nothing to cry about. Focus on getting mad instead.”

It would be reasonable, of course, if A-Ling was crying because this callous remark, from a cousin who was going to grow up to be even worse than Jin Zixun had been at this rate, had brought up his grief for the baby cousin who’d been too young and sweet-natured to be horrible to him. But not in front of all those sect leaders.

“Because I’m an orphan,” Jin Ling mumbled wretchedly into his chest, not deterred.

“So what if you’re an orphan? You still have your jiujiu and your shushu.” And your shenshen, he might have said, but the gossip was Qin Su could barely be in the same room as A-Ling anymore, due to the weight of her grief.

“Shushu was going to kill me! They said!” Fortunately, this wail of misery was equally muffled, as was the yelp that got squeezed out of the boy when Jiang Cheng’s hand on his back tightened sharply. ‘They said’ reassured him after the first alarmed second; this was just more childish gossip.

“He was not,” Jiang Cheng returned firmly. “First of all, your shushu isn’t a wild animal, it’s very disrespectful of those Jin brats to speak that way of their sect leader. Second, I’d like to see anybody dare to go after my nephew.”

Jin Ling made a distinctly grateful sound and pushed his messy face harder into Jiang Cheng’s good robe.

“Third, even if Jin Sect had wanted you out of Rusong’s way to tidy up the succession, they’d have been better off sending you to Lotus Pier and making me pay through the nose for it. Even if Lianfang-zun didn’t care about you at all, and didn’t even care about having a strong cultivator in his sect later, he wouldn’t be stupid enough to hurt you. Those kids don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Jin Ling clung to him like a leech for about half a minute after this, sniveling, then pulled himself together and sat back, rubbing at the mess of his pudgy little face with the heels of his hands. “Thanks jiujiu,” he muttered.

“Don’t be so stupid as to listen to those little idiots anymore,” Jiang Cheng told him. “Next time they tell you nonsense, you tell me, instead of getting all worked up. Or some other sensible adult, if I’m not here.” Jin Ling nodded, but still looked downcast, so Jiang Cheng added, “Or you can just point them out to me and I’ll break their legs.”

Jin Ling let out a shocked, sharp little giggle. “Jiujiu! You can’t do that!”

“Can if I want.” He’d have quite the diplomatic fallout to worry about, but he could. Nobody could stop him, if he really wanted to break a horrid nine-year-old bully’s bones.

He’d been making more and more of a point of it, over the five years since—well, since the last big crisis. Not about assaulting children, but about being an important Sect Leader.

Who was going to stop him from doing as he liked? He was powerful. With Nie Mingjue’s death, the only cultivators alive who were still strong enough to make him worry about fighting them one-on-one were the two matched jades of the Lan sect.

And the Jiang wealth was by now fully restored, and showed promise of continuing to grow, with Jiang Cheng dedicating a great deal more effort toward making his investments give return than his father had ever deemed necessary.

None of the minor sect leaders even tried to get in his way, anymore, if he hunted a dangerous creature or demonic cultivator into their territory. Only Lianfang-zun held any strings on him, and he’d discharged enough debts now that even those were mostly through Jin Ling. He would never again let himself be in the position of letting outsiders dictate the internal decisions of his sect.

Jin Ling’s amusement faded quickly, and he heaved a heavy childish sigh. The weepiness seemed to have passed, but seeing him tearstained, with that profound melancholy—Jiang Cheng made a decision. Who, after all, could stop him?

He placed Jin Ling on the daybed and unpacked his travel writing kit, the one with the tightly sealed bottle of pre-mixed ink, and dashed off a quick note to Jin Guangyao. Servants were so thick on the ground in Jin Tower that he barely had to stick his head out of his room to find one. He handed the man his note, instructed him as to the recipient, and closed the door in his face.

The note said only that Jin Ling had had a fight with some of his cousins, so Jiang Cheng was taking him out of the tower for a bit to clear his head. He suggested Lianfang-zun have words with certain Jin inner disciples, which was the closest he felt he should come to committing that slander to writing.

Jin Guangyao had spoken approvingly of Jiang Cheng teaching their nephew before, as long as it didn’t interfere with his cultivation style—it was after all very important that his cultivation develop along Jin pathways enough for him to wield Suihua when he was older—so he called it a training trip. A-Ling was much too young for night hunts still, even as an observer, but a little walk outdoors and some Jiang woodcraft would do him good.

Accordingly, he took Jin Ling to a small house he owned in Lanling, less than half a shi away by sword. It was more or less a hunting lodge, although of course Jiang cultivators would not hunt in the heart of Jin territory without explicit invitation. It had been purchased before Jiang Cheng’s time, almost certainly to have a convenient place for exactly this sort of situation—that was to say, retreating from the Jin’s direct sphere of influence without being obliged to flee all the way back to Yunmeng, should difficulties arise in some diplomatic matter. Not necessarily for weepy nephews.

Jiang Cheng had it and places like it kept stocked with supplies, and made sure to visit them all once every year or two. It was very convenient to have such resources, after all.

This also meant that when Jin Ling was inevitably unable to muster much interest in what Jiang Cheng was trying to teach him about tracking, they could go back to the lodge and rest. Since there was no one to see out here, it was fine to let the boy be a little weak.

Sure enough, Jin Ling lost interest in tracking lessons less than a shichen in. He wasn’t even a brat about it, which told Jiang Cheng how bad he must be feeling, to be willing to pretend to be interested, just to make sure Jiang Cheng kept paying attention to him.

Also, he decided, the boy was probably getting hungry. They’d left before the meal was served at the conference.

Jiang Cheng took some lotus seeds out of his qiankun bag and handed every other one he shelled to Jin Ling, who gobbled them down. So yes, dinner time. He turned them back to the lodge, and surveyed its pantry.

The supplies were not on the whole very fresh or appetizing, the point of them being emergency rations more than recreation, but the lotus roots had clearly been only recently delivered, so he would start there.

He peeled them with quick passes of a well-whetted kitchen knife, not bothering to take his time to avoid waste, until he had a good stack of pale-stripped flesh. Jin Ling reached for the knife as he was still carving, and Jiang Cheng cuffed the back of his head. “Do you want to lose your fingers?”

“I want to try!”

Jiang Cheng set the knife down, well back out of reach of little hands, flipped over a slightly dusty washtub, and set Jin Ling on top of it, to bring his face a useful height above the work surface. “Watch close, then.”

Jiang Cheng sliced the lotus root thin, across its length, the neat symmetry of the holes pleasing in the same way as the symmetry of lotus flower petals. “You see?”

A-Ling nodded.

“Right. Now, what are you not going to do?” They had had this conversation several times, though usually about Sandu.

“Touch the sharp side,” A-Ling said with a sigh, not brazen enough to roll his eyes. Cooking knives only had one sharp side, so it was easier to trust a child to stick to the dull one.

“Good.” Jiang Cheng wrapped his nephew’s fingers around the knife handle, then set a lotus root in front of him. The careless approach he’d taken to peeling meant it had flat faces rather than being smooth and round, which was convenient, as it was less inclined to roll. Jiang Cheng still held the root in place with his left hand. He put his right over Jin Ling’s small one, covering it completely and extending up onto the back of the blade, and guided him through a single careful cut.

“Jiujiu!” A-Ling exclaimed, for no particular reason except general excitement at having cut something.

“Again,” said Jiang Cheng.

Each slice required a little less guidance and force from Jiang Cheng, until A-Ling was doing nearly all of it himself. For the last few slices, he lifted his helping hand away altogether, although he continued to hold the root steady. Jin Ling needed to bring his left hand in to get enough force to cut smoothly, but he braced it on the back of the blade in decent imitation of Jiang Cheng, and succeeded without injury.

“And you still have all your fingers,” said Jiang Cheng.

He’d set oil warming before he began, and now took up a pair of extra-long chopsticks. “Now this part,” he said, dropping rounds of lotus root in with a promising sizzle, “you are definitely too young to help with. Go sit down, you can help me eat them later.”

Sect Leader Jiang let his hand strike the surface of the table loud enough to be heard across the main room of the sparsely peopled teahouse. This was all that was necessary to bring the proprietor hurrying to his side.

“This is disgusting,” Jiang Cheng informed the host flatly, stabbing his chopsticks into his bowl, pointedly near the edge of true rudeness. “What is wrong with your cook?”

“Well, ah, she’s dead, actually.”

The man cringed so hard in admitting this that Jiang Cheng stared flatly at him for a full breath before clarifying: “You have a walking corpse making your customers’ food?”

“No!” the business owner yelped, his eyes flicking frantically around the room trying to see if anyone had overheard this remark. “No, no, that’s not it at all! No, I mean, Auntie Wong was found dead in her bed two days ago, and her replacement—that is—there aren’t so many cooks available to be hired in a small town like this one—well, we hired an old grandmother but it seems she’s lost her sense of smell in her old age…” He trailed off, looking wretched at having to confess.

Jiang Cheng scoffed. Ridiculous. Letting your whole operation rest on a single person. This Auntie Wong ought to have had at least two assistants trained in her recipes. “Pathetic,” he said. “My nephew can’t be expected to eat this.”

“Master Cultivator of course will not be charged,” the owner agreed, his mien profoundly mournful, his eyes lingering bitterly on Jiang Cheng’s silver embroidery and the gold worked into Jin Ling’s robe.

“I’ll do it myself,” Jiang Cheng said flatly. He got up. “Come on, Jin Ling.”

He strode to the kitchen of the little inn, with Jin Ling following with some mix of embarrassment and excitement and the host bobbing after them both like a sparrow, sputtering, and Jin Ling’s fluffy, ridiculous puppy gamboling at the back of the line, sniffing things as it went.

“You!” Jiang Cheng said as he entered the kitchen, pointing at the grandmotherly person he was certain was at fault for the inedible half-cooked soup dumpling he had just attempted to swallow. “Show me where everything is kept and then get out.”

“What?” the elderly and unqualified cook demanded, squinting, less intimidated by his person than the owner. Possibly she was too shortsighted to grasp immediately who he was. But everyone in town should know by now that the leader of Jiang Sect had come through, after solving their local ghoul problem, so she should be able to figure it out in short order.

She looked over at her employer, and whatever her squint allowed her to discern there made her decide not to fight him. Half blind and possibly somewhat senile, but not a total fool. The tour was brisk, and following it, she departed.

“You,” Jiang Cheng told the only other servant in evidence, a young man who had been peeling lotus roots. “Bring in enough wood to keep the stove hot the rest of the day, and then go make yourself useful somewhere else.”

He dismissed the owner with even fewer words, and set to work.

“Uncle?” said Jin Ling, once they were alone. His tone was wondering. He had knelt down to pet his puppy’s ears while Jiang Cheng was getting situated. “Are you really going to...cook?”

“You think I can’t?” It had been a few years since Jin Ling had seen him do so, but he wouldn’t expect him to have forgotten, and even if he had, wasn’t cooking easy enough? Why should he doubt him?

“Of course Uncle can! But...at an inn...isn’t it a little…?”

Beneath you, he wasn’t quite saying. Jiang Cheng felt his jaw clenching, in time with his heart. Jins! Not that Jin Ling wasn’t right, not that it wasn’t completely beneath his dignity to cook soup in an inn kitchen, especially if anyone besides Jin Ling wound up eating it. Still. He could almost see Jin Zixuan’s scornful face that day he had brought Jiejie to tears.

“If you can’t cook, you have no business owning an eatery,” he said flatly. “That man should be able to manage better himself than that old bat did, and if he can’t it was his responsibility to train subordinates to cover his weaknesses. As sect leader, you should be able to manage the basics of cultivator life for yourself, as well.”

He’d said something like this to his nephew before, but that had been about being able to care for your own sword. “It’s shameful to be at a loss in a crisis, just because you’ve always let everyone do everything for you.”

Jin Ling’s brow was furrowed, as he traced the line of this advice back and forth between the situation before them, which was merely soup, and what Jiang Cheng realized was more than he had meant to confide about some of the worst days of his life.

He had not been especially pampered, as rich young masters went; his father had not believed in making too much of rank, and his mother had not believed that softness did a child’s character any good. But he had never been prepared to find himself alone in the world.

“Finish peeling those roots,” he said, to break the silence. “And then slice them up. You remember how.”

“Of course, Uncle,” said Jin Ling, and then proceeded to massacre the lotus roots to a truly impressive degree, because peeling was a whole different skill set from chopping, and one Jiang Cheng had certainly not attempted to teach a five year old just mastering the skill of gripping a knife. Didn’t matter. Into the soup they went.

Jin Ling looked so proud, passing him the second platter of, by now, reasonably even slices, that Jiang Cheng would probably have lied and said it was excellent even if it meant the soup was ruined.

They did not share with any of the other customers, but Jiang Cheng graciously paid the cost of renting the whole teahouse for a night, to account for having taken over the kitchen. On the condition that the owner make sure his next cook had an able assistant, and not fail so thoroughly in his duties again. It was an embarrassment to all Yunmeng, when their cuisine was so poorly represented.

An unfortunate omen: less than a year into Jin Rulan’s reign as leader of the Jin Sect, there was plague in Lanling.

It was not a dreadful one, and thus Jiang Cheng was not terribly concerned by it. The death rate was middling, the full recovery rate quite good. As diseases of the lungs went, reports were that its virulence was not too extreme. Minor plagues swept across the countryside every year or so; the common people were vulnerable to disease. Bad luck that it should happen to strike Lanling in particular at this particular time, but he could only make that worse by seeming bothered by it.

That was, until he heard that Sect Leader Jin had retreated into closed-door cultivation.

He didn’t know how many people that had fooled—hopefully, most of them—but he knew his nephew. Which meant he was in Lanling the very next day, barging his way through Jin Tower and ignoring his nephew’s various relations, disciples, and other subordinates as he made his way directly for his goal.

Jin Ling had refused to move into the Fragrance Pavilion, the sect leader’s traditional abode for at least four generations, stating that Jin Guangyao had polluted it. Between lying there (albeit chastely) beside his sister as her husband for a decade and storing his various evil devices and horrible trophies in it, Jiang Cheng couldn’t even disagree—and on top of that, who knew how much disgusting shit Jin Guangshan had gotten up to there, the generation before?

He suspected Jin Ling’s motives were more tied up in the sensation of being haunted by his predecessor, despite his actual ghost being so very securely contained in perpetual torment with Nie Mingjue, than in ritual pollution. But it was such a good argument no one had resisted in the slightest.

After all, the move also worked as a symbol of getting a fresh start, something the Jin sorely needed.

So Jin Ling had been installed in the White Petals Pavilion, which had been his father’s residence for the few years of his adulthood. No one had moved in since, and there were still touches of Jiang Yanli and Jin Zixuan’s personal taste in the decoration, and their lotus pond lay in one of the adjacent courtyards. Jin Ling had in any case very much intended to move in there if allowed, when he turned fifteen, the very youngest age at which he could make a bid to be considered an adult and given an entire residence rather than a mere set of rooms. The move had only been a year and a half or so early.

He had lived there less than a year. His mother had only lived there about a year, before…

Jiang Cheng did not bother to knock. He barged in, ignoring the objections of yet another servant, and stood in the outermost gilt receiving room. “Jin Ling!” he bellowed.

There was a sound of hurrying, but it yielded only Fairy, in her latest jeweled collar. “Where is Jin Ling?” Jiang Cheng said, not bothering to feel ridiculous for talking to a dog. Fairy was a stupid and useless specimen of her breed, but she had still been bred for intelligence and cultivation senses; she could lead him to her master.

With a soft bark, she turned and nearly galloped away, Sect Leader Jiang in hot pursuit.

She led him to Jin Ling’s room—not his bedroom, but the room where he spent most of his limited free time, where he’d received Jiang Cheng on each of his necessarily brief visits since his nephew’s elevation. The door hung slightly ajar, and Fairy scratched politely for only a moment before shouldering it open and bounding in.

Jin Ling, a sun-yellow blanket trailing off one shoulder and tangled around one leg, as though he had gotten up from under it in a hurry, stood in the middle of the room.

He was pale, with bright patches of red on his cheeks, his eyes overbright with fever. Not well, but upright and alert, and more or less intact.

Jiang Cheng only realized how hard his heart had been hammering now that some of the furious tension had seeped out of him. All the fears that had been running through his mind, even as he refused to entertain them. “You’re not dying!” he barked.

The fear had inhabited him so intensely he had almost been able to see it before his eyes. Jin Ling in here, already dead. Jin Ling coughing out his last in a spray of blood just as Jiang Cheng came upon him, too late to help, too late. Jin Ling, burrowing in here to die like a wounded animal.

Jin Ling flushed even more than he already had been. “I know that, uncle! It’s—” He broke off for the length of a dry, frustrated cough. “It’s embarrassing enough I’m sick at all, you don’t need to rub it in.”

Jiang Cheng scowled. Yes, alright, it made sense. Jin Ling was a cultivator, and quite good for his age, though no genius. But he was still a boy. Not even fifteen. His body wasn’t yet immune to common maladies.

Especially if he had been neglecting his health again.

And of course, he’d had to conceal the fact that he’d caught it—his personal reputation would be damaged if everyone knew, because even though he was a child yet by any reasonable measure, he was a Sect Leader, and couldn’t acknowledge that he was weak.

And the bad omen would be confirmed. And an assassin might take the opportune moment to slip him poison.

“Jiujiu,” Jin Ling said slowly. “Were you...worried about me?”

“Who’s worried?” Jiang Cheng retorted. “Come here!” He crossed the floor himself instead, bullying Jin Ling back toward the abandoned daybed until he sat down, and taking one of his arms.

“Sorry,” said Jin Ling, letting him have the arm without any fuss. Jiang Cheng ignored this, because to accept the apology he would have to admit to having worked himself up over nothing.

Because it was nothing—his medical skills were extremely basic, but he could tell from Jin Ling’s strong pulse and the way his system accepted a donation of spiritual energy that his cultivation was fine, and his body was going to be. He was going to shake this coughing sickness off like a summer cold. There had been no reason to charge across the country like a hound that had caught a scent. No reason at all.

“Have you eaten?” he demanded.

Jin Ling shrugged. “Enough,” he said. The servants were presumably delivering him meals, although they wouldn’t have been ones intended for sickness, and from the disorder of the place he hadn’t been letting them inside to ‘disturb his cultivation’ and, undoubtedly, give him away through gossip.

That was no good. Well, it was good he’d thought that far and maintained security, even if it had more than likely looked like throwing a tantrum, but Jin Ling needed at least a few servants he could trust enough to expose his weaknesses to them; he couldn’t count on an uncle coming running every time.

Jiang Cheng snorted. Well, he was here this time, might as well do what he could. “Follow me.”

Of course, Jin Zixuan had had a finely appointed kitchen installed in his home for his precious wife. Jiang Cheng had seen it before—half a dozen times while she was alive, a few of them with Jin Ling in the room, in his arms or hers. Or, once, in Jin Zixuan’s excruciatingly careful grip while Jiang Cheng made a point of showing how to help her with her cooking properly, and she laughed.

He hadn’t seen it since Jin Ling moved in. He hadn’t come here at all if he could get out of it, had made an effort to meet with his nephew anywhere else, because being here where she had been so happy in those last months brought the grief back like a hammer.

It had been bad enough having to face his grief for her all over again without being able to bring his fury at Wei Wuxian up as a shield anymore; he knew when a task was beyond him. In this he had always failed to embody the ethos of Jiang.

In his fear for Jin Ling, he hadn’t even thought about it, until now, on the threshold of the room. Well. He could be brave. Ignoring the clench in his chest, he walked in and began.

Of course, the ingredients here were intended for the Sect Leader and no other, but they must be replaced regularly, and the most subtle poisons were all too expensive to waste on contaminating food that might be thrown away uneaten—or, more likely, since even the Jin were not entirely above economy, consumed by the servants, thereby giving away the presence of a plot against the Sect Leader. So Jiang Cheng performed basic checks, but wasn’t too concerned. He found nothing amiss.

He lit the granite stove, stoked it carefully with the ample supply of expensive high-grade charcoal better suited for forging steel than for a kitchen fire, and began to measure out rice.

By the time the soaking and simmering was nearing its conclusion, he had chopped up everything in Jin Ling’s kitchen that could plausibly be used to add interest to congee, and felt calm again. He turned to stir the pot, scraping carefully at the bottom, and heard Jin Ling shift position.

Jin Ling had sat in silence for the better part of a shichen, watching him make congee with frankly absurd levels of focus. Jiang Cheng’s first thought, when he realized Jin Ling was sitting still but hadn’t fallen asleep, was that he must have gotten terribly bored, closeted here alone with his mind too foggy to accomplish much cultivation or even reading, if he could actually be entertained by the sight of a man cooking rice.

Or maybe it had been long enough since he’d seen Jiang Cheng in a kitchen it was back to being a marvel.

Then he considered that the boy must also have been lonely, or might even have missed Jiang Cheng. They saw each other less, now that they were both so busy, and that Jiang Cheng had to be more careful not to undermine his nephew’s position.

No one had missed him since his sister died, besides Jin Ling. His disciples didn’t count; they couldn’t cope without him, that was a different thing. He tried not to fidget under his nephew’s attention, stirring briskly.

After a while longer Jin Ling said, abstractedly: “You cook congee just like Wei Wuxian.”

His body still flashed with something that felt like anger at the sound of the name, long habit, but it blew out like a candle in a gale into a great dull, aching resentment.

It’s congee, he wanted to say. Of course I do, what other way is there to do it? But in reality he knew that exactly because it was such a simple and common dish, that was why there were ten thousand ways to make it. Differences in measurements, in the timing, in the way you poured and stirred and even the way you tapped the spoon on the edge of the pot. All of them would work, more or less, because congee was so straightforward.

Jin Ling might not know that. After all, how many chances had he had to see anyone cook?

He said: “We both learned from your mother.”

“It was like this,” said Wei Wuxian.

Jiang Cheng glowered at him. Back from the dead by dint of dumb luck and no less high-handed and arrogant than ever! “It wasn’t,” he said flatly. “Get out of the way, I’ll show you how you’re supposed to chop the ginger.”

“Aiyah, Jiang Cheng,” Wei Wuxian sighed, but he did step aside—up to the soup pot, to stir it. Which was completely uncalled-for, since it was currently just boiling pork ribs.

“Watch,” Jiang Cheng said emphatically, and proceeded to slice peeled ginger root along its long axis as carefully as he had ever cut anything in his life.

“That doesn’t seem right,” Wei Wuxian said, with a pouting expression that would have looked ridiculous on his real face but fit naturally on this one, and was therefore about ten times more annoying. “If the ginger pieces are that long, they’ll be fibrous instead of tender.”

“Not,” said Jiang Cheng, “if you cook it long enough.”

Jin Ling, standing by, moved his weight from one foot to the other, which was a signal that he was considering intervening. He hadn’t had to do so yet. Jiang Cheng wasn’t really sure whether his nephew was signaling him deliberately or not, but it was working, dammit.

He drew a deep breath. “I don’t,” he said, “want your personal opinions about how to cook soup. I want what you can remember about how A-Jie cooked it. That’s why I agreed to this.”

As though Wei Wuxian had been the one to propose it. He hadn’t. But thanks to Jin Ling, neither had Jiang Cheng. Not really.

Wei Wuxian’s memory was unreliable, but it wasn’t bad exactly, had always been the problem. If he bothered to properly learn something, he might then be able to recite it word-perfect for years without looking at it again. But at the same time, the fact that he’d paid close attention to something was never any assurance that he’d actually recall it even the next day, never mind twenty years later.

The main reason Jiang Cheng had thought it might be worth asking him was that he hadn’t had twenty years of life to come between him and the memory of Jiang Yanli’s cooking.

Wei Wuxian, with no visible signs of stress, said: “Okay. I remember the pieces were smaller than that.”

“Okay,” said Jiang Cheng. “Thank you. Just the facts. Are you sure you don’t just think that because you shrank.”

Wei Wuxian sputtered, but there was a laugh in it. “I didn’t shrink that much! Jiang Cheng!”

“Short now,” said Jiang Cheng flatly, as he took up the knife and deliberately cut every slice of ginger in half.

“Jiang Cheng!”

Wei Wuxian used to be about a cun taller than him. He wasn’t sure exactly what the difference had been, by the end; they’d never measured again after the Wen came, and he thought they had both grown a little more during the war. Now, he was definitely shorter than Jiang Cheng.

The fact that it was also by only about one cun made no more difference now than it had then.

Pantomiming despair, Wei Wuxian sauntered over to poke the mushrooms.

They should have met up at Jin Ling’s for this. Jiang Cheng had volunteered the kitchen at Lotus Pier because memory responded to context, and in the same environment where they had seen her cook this soup they were most likely to be able to recreate it. But memory responded to context, and having Wei Wuxian here was doing nothing for Jiang Cheng’s composure.

He put the ginger into the soup.

“These should go in now too,” said Wei Wuxian, poking a dried mushroom some more. “I remember her adding them right after the ginger.”

It might have been too soon to add the ginger. Jiang Cheng hadn’t fully thought it through, he’d just done it, to keep moving forward. He could hardly admit that. He gestured for Wei Wuxian to bring the mushrooms over. He half expected Wei Wuxian to start sprinkling them in himself, but instead he put them down beside Jiang Cheng and let him do it. He’d been so prepared to be irritated by the overstep that somehow he was now even more irritated.

“Aren’t you going to do anything useful?”

“I’m only here to consult,” said Wei Wuxian, far too lightly.

Jiang Cheng’s teeth hurt. “If it wasn’t for you, this wouldn’t be called-for.”

It would be a lie to claim he hadn’t said it wanting to wound, but it would not be true either to say that he’d fully realized what he was saying before he said it. It was more as though he’d opened his mouth and his mother had come out, intent as always on blaming everything on Wei Wuxian. Just as he’d spent all those years blaming everything on Wei Wuxian.

As though anyone else’s failures could ever erase his own. As though there was any excuse for using his sister’s death like a cudgel in front of her son.

Yet-unfamiliar dark eyes snapped to him, intent.

And then just as fast Wei Wuxian’s stolen eyes sort of—skidded off him again. Half the tension went out of his body, and his expression smoothed out a bit, into something sort of cheerful, and sort of bland. Like a bleached-out, indifferent version of the way he’d looked at Wen Chao trying to bully him, all those years ago during the indoctrination sessions.

Jiang Cheng remembered the agony on that unfamiliar face, when he lashed out at Wei Wuxian in the family shrine, before he passed out; before the Ghost General exposed his secret. He’d had no idea those were the last moments he’d get to look at Wei Wuxian while feeling righteous, before everything changed all over again.

“Get angry at me, why don’t you!” Jiang Cheng growled. “Why won’t you get mad?”

Wei Wuxian turned that emptied-out look on him, and smiled a little, and said: “Jiang Cheng. Surely you don’t imagine that even I wouldn’t learn better than to lose my temper too easily, after dying like that.”

Jiang Cheng looked at him quite blankly. “You never had a bad temper in the first place.”

Wei Wuxian made a noncommittal noise.

Well, during the war. And after the war. He’d been easy to piss off then, sure, Jiang Cheng guessed, though he’d never gotten angry with him or A-Jie, that he’d noticed. Only the kind of people he’d always found annoying anyway. But one of the aggravating things about Wei Wuxian, when they were boys, had been how easy it was for him not to rise to bait; to only get angry when he was willing to. That was one reason Jiang Cheng had assumed all those outbursts of violence in those last couple of years, as his shixiong dug his own grave, were perfectly deliberate acts.

He hadn’t seemed to be acting very deliberately at Nightless City, at least not by the end, but at that point he’d been going mad, which was a separate problem.

“That was—that was your. Fucked up cultivation,” Jiang Cheng said. He’d called it ghost cultivation when he’d still been defending Wei Wuxian’s right to use whatever methods he saw fit as part of Jiang, and demonic cultivation ever since, and he really didn’t know what to call it now.

Wei Wuxian shrugged. “Maybe so. But I’m not going to risk messing around with such bad habits again.” He sighed. “Besides. I’m not mad at you.”

“You should be!”

Jin Ling’s mouth dropped open, and Wei Wuxian’s overlarge eyes widened. Jiang Cheng, mortified and furious, turned his back on them both and returned to the cooking knife. He found himself glad it was the blunt-ended kind, so there was no way to stab anyone with it, and any flashes of doing so that passed behind his eyes could be readily dismissed.

The shuk of lotus roots becoming even discs filled the room, blending with the soft bubbling of the soup pot.

“Jiang Cheng,” and there was still the wrong sound to his voice, even through the wrongness of the voice as a whole, but it sounded just a little more real somehow. “Are you…” The pause was very long. “Trying to tell me something?” It was a guess, not a challenge. Hazarded with infinite care. He must remember Jiang Cheng’s humiliating crying fit as well as everyone else who’d been there surely did.

It still made Jiang Cheng’s whole body flash cold and hot. If Jin Ling hadn’t been in the room, he didn’t know what he might have done. “Shut up! No! I fucked up! I let you down, I let A-Jie down, I. I am so mad at you.”

He realized, with the help of a change in Jin Ling’s face, that he’d started to brandish the cooking knife in a white-knuckled hand, and even if this wasn’t quite toward Wei Wuxian, it was pretty threatening. He lowered it onto the worktop. Forced his fingers open. Left it lying there.

“I know,” said Wei Wuxian, all weary patience, nothing like himself at all. “It’s okay. No one thinks you owe me any different.”

“Your corpse does.”

“My—oh. Wen Ning. Well, he doesn’t know everything.”

He knows he risked everything to save me, and you gave everything to save me, and I gave nothing for either of you, when you needed to be saved.

Jiang Cheng hadn’t dreamed of the corpse pile in the Lotus Pier courtyard more than once a year since Jin Ling had still been small enough to carry around with him. But ever since Wen Qionglin’s bloodless face had stared contempt at him up the line of Suibian, he’d dreamed it several times a month.

He didn’t used to dream about being part of the heap, but he did now.

The truth he couldn’t say: I think it. I can’t forgive you, but I can’t forgive myself either. My memory of Dad has been disappointed in me forever but I know now he’d never have forgiven me, not for any of it.

Or maybe he would have. You and A-Jie were always so much more like him, that way. But he’d have approved more of you and your stupid perfect excuses for all your shitty choices more than everything I’ve done all these years, and how is that right?

A-Ling was watching. He couldn’t say any of that, even if he wanted to. Even less could he say any of the things he’d thought over the years Wei Wuxian had been dead.

“I owe you,” he said finally, thick and bitter. It was different from sorry, and different from I forgive you. He didn’t want it to be true, but he’d always had trouble believing his own lies. Not trouble telling them to himself, maybe, but trouble getting rid of doubt once it crept in. He’d always resented Wei Wuxian about that, too.

“It’s okay,” Wei Wuxian said again.

“It’s not,” replied Jiang Cheng, even though A-Ling was watching, and he should let it go. He’d been planning to let Wei Wuxian go. A-Ling hadn’t allowed it. A-Ling was standing there, watching them with his mother’s eyes, but he wasn’t her. She could never again step in and make them stop rasping together, like dead trees in a high wind.

Wei Wuxian sighed. A windy sound, flat over his tongue and teeth, and because there was no voice to it, it sounded exactly like it had before. Like if Jiang Cheng looked around, he’d see the face he’d known. “It’s okay with me. I told you already.”

You don’t need to say sorry to me, he’d said, in that horrible temple. After Jiang Cheng had let himself be made useless trying to protect a Wei Wuxian who did not need it, because he never ever changed. But this wasn’t about saying sorry, or about their forgiving each other. This was about—ugh. About how all the things Wei Wuxian had done wrong were greater than the things he’d done right, but it wasn’t really true that he’d broken his promise not to betray Yunmeng Jiang. Not to betray Jiang Cheng. He’d failed. And if Jiang Cheng had believed a promise never to do that, well.

It was about the fact that Jiang Cheng had never promised not to betray Wei Wuxian, but that didn’t somehow mean he was entitled to do it.

It was about how they could never know how much it was Wei Wuxian’s fault, that the war had come so devastatingly to Lotus Pier.

It was about the fact that Jin Ling had dragged Wei Wuxian back here like he didn’t understand he was stabbing knives into his uncle by putting this person in this place, after everything.

“Shut up,” he spat. “Shut up! Am I so pathetic you think I need your forgiveness? I don’t need anything from you, Wei Wuxian!”

Wei Wuxian said, “I know!”

He wasn’t mad, exactly, but he was annoyed. Frustrated, anyway. The way he said it sounded almost like, obviously and maybe even that was the point. Jiang Cheng could have spit blood, hearing it.

It was yours to begin with, he’d said. He would give it all back, if he could, just as he had Chenqing. Everything Wei Wuxian had ever left him. He couldn’t stand being in debt to someone who had failed him so badly, couldn’t stand that he really would never measure up, not if he lived another hundred years.

“If you know,” he muttered.

And he realized that, for all the ache in his chest he felt calmer than he had before. Because Wei Wuxian didn’t sound, anymore, like none of it mattered and it had nothing to do with him.

He was so angry with himself, he found. That he didn’t know how to talk to Wei Wuxian without wanting to be given something. Even though he also never wanted Wei Wuxian to give him anything, ever again.

He picked up the knife, and kept cutting lotus roots.

After a while, Wei Wuxian spoke again, in a light voice.

“You know, A-Ling, when your uncle said my corpse had an opinion, I was scared for a second he’d found my original body and it was talking without me!” Wei Wuxian gave a little shiver, and Jiang Cheng’s eyes felt hot, and his throat so tight he couldn’t tell whether he wanted to scream or vomit.

Of course he’d never found his shixiong’s corpse. He’d watched it be ripped to pieces. He still didn’t know if Wei Wuxian had done that part on purpose.

“Shut up, Wei Wuxian,” he said. “What else do you remember about the soup?”

“We have to add peppers.”

“That is one ingredient about which I am accepting no input from you.”

Wei Wuxian pouted at him again, and it seemed less annoying this time. Maybe he was getting used to the new face, after all.

“Jiujiu’s right,” interceded Jin Ling firmly. “Even Lan Sizhui says you can’t be trusted with pepper.”

Wei Wuxian pouted at Jin Ling too, but heaved a sigh and said, “Well, if A-Ling and my radish both agree, I can only admit defeat. Jiang Cheng, it’s supposed to have chilis and Szechuan peppers, shijie always used both kinds.”

“I know that,” said Jiang Cheng, as he came to the end of the lotus roots. It wasn’t time to add them, yet.

He put the knife down.