Archive of Our Own

     Xie Lian has been keeping vigil in the upstairs hall since midnight. It is an old habit of gods, and he wears it the way he once wore incense smoke: his back against their son's door, a cup of tea going cold beside his knee, and the stillness of someone who has out-waited centuries.

     Hua Cheng finds him there a little before two. The house is new to all three of them. Half the rooms are still bare, the hall smells of fresh tatami, and the boy asleep behind the door has lived here for nineteen days. The adoption papers call him Suo Hayato. At home, he still answers to Sun Fei.

     Moonlight from the window at the end of the hall lies across Xie Lian like a second length of silk. Hua Cheng, who has crossed burning cities and graveyards to reach him, sits down beside his husband on the boards and takes his freezing hand.

     "He had the dream again," Xie Lian murmurs. "Around eleven. By the time I got up here he'd gone quiet, so I didn't go in. He hates being seen after."

     "I know."

     Xie Lian turns the teacup idly on the floor with his free hand. "I keep thinking about the temple. He came nearly every month for three years, San Lang. I gave him dried plums and told him to listen to his teachers, and he told me about the carp in the pond behind his uncle's house. Then he stopped coming. I thought his family had moved away. I thought he'd outgrown visiting a shabby little temple, and I was a little sad about it, but I kept sweeping and granting what wishes I could and put him mostly out of mind." His voice drops. "They had stopped letting him out. All those months I was sweeping the steps, they had him, and I didn't go and look."

     Hua Cheng has seen what is under the eyepatch on the boy's nightstand. It sits in him like a live coal he hasn't yet decided where to throw. He turns Xie Lian's hand over and laces their fingers together.

     "Eight hundred years," Xie Lian says, "and I still haven't learned to go look for people when they matter to me."

     "I didn't look either."

     "He was seven. He was seven, and he had to come and find us!" Grief chokes Xie Lian, and his thumb digs into the back of Hua Cheng's hand hard enough to hurt a man with a heartbeat.

     "When I was small," Hua Cheng says, "someone caught me once. Then he went on with his life. He never came looking for me, because he had no idea there was anyone to look for." Xie Lian's fingers go still in his. "It took me a long time to get back to him. In all those years, I never once wished he'd come looking. I only hoped that when I finally reached his door, he would open it."

     "San Lang…"

     "You opened the door, gēge."

     Xie Lian makes a small, wrecked sound and presses his free hand over his mouth.

     "He ate two bowls of rice tonight," Hua Cheng goes on, quieter. "He asked to stay in the room with the window over the garden, and you said yes before he'd even finished the question. Tomorrow he'll want something else, and we'll give him that, too."

     "That isn't how forgiveness works," Xie Lian says, laughing wetly into his palm.

     "He doesn't think there's anything to forgive. Ask him when he's older. He'll look at you as if you've gone mad."

     Xie Lian tips his head onto Hua Cheng's shoulder, and some of the tension goes out of his spine. At some point his knee knocks the teacup over, and Hua Cheng mops up the spill with his sleeve rather than let go of Xie Lian's hand. Hua Cheng doesn't need sleep; the dead have no use for it. He has kept far longer vigils than this one. Xie Lian naps against his shoulder, and Hua Cheng counts the boy's breathing through the door while the window at the end of the hall goes from inky to grey, then gold.

     A little after six, the door at their backs slides open, and Xie Lian topples backward into the room.

     Suo stands over them in his pajamas with his hair flattened on one side and the eyepatch already tied. He looks from Xie Lian, flat on his back on the tatami, to Hua Cheng, still sitting against the doorframe with a tea-stained sleeve.

     "Were you … guarding me?" he asks.

     Xie Lian opens his mouth to make an excuse.

     "Yes," Hua Cheng says plainly.

     Suo considers this for a moment. "Okay," he says, and steps carefully over Xie Lian's legs to go brush his teeth.

     Xie Lian stays on the floor and stares at Suo's retreating figure until Hua Cheng pulls him to his feet and tugs him downstairs toward breakfast.

     A year after Suo comes to live with them, Xie Lian knows where everything in the kitchen is, not that he's allowed to use any of it most of the time.

     Setting the table is as close to the stove as anyone lets him get. He lays out three bowls, three pairs of chopsticks, and the little dish of black vinegar that has graced the table at every dinner for months. Hua Cheng carries the red-glazed pork in from the stove, glossy and nearly black at the edges, and Xie Lian takes a piece before anyone else has picked up their chopsticks, because he has been smelling it since four o'clock and is hungry.

     It's sharper than he remembers.

     The star anise is there, and the dark soy, and the fat still melts on his tongue, but the sweetness that used to arrive first has thinned out, and something bright and sour sits underneath it. Hua Cheng has made this dish for him since the first winter they lived under one roof, always sweet enough to make Xie Lian close his eyes, and Xie Lian could pick it out of a hundred bowls.

     "You changed it," he says.

     Hua Cheng lifts a piece onto Suo's rice. "Less rock sugar. A little black vinegar."

     "Since when?"

     "March."

     It takes Xie Lian a moment to count back to spring, surprised he hasn't noticed sooner. But then, the timeline makes sense.

     "Xiao Fei scrapes the glaze off," Hua Cheng adds.

     Suo stops with his chopsticks halfway to his mouth. "I don't!"

     "You push it to one side of the bowl and eat the rice from the other. I don't mind, you know."

     Suo looks down at his bowl, where some of the glaze sits in a neat pile against one side, and turns pink. "It's very good," he says politely.

     Now that Xie Lian is looking, he finds it everywhere. The dumplings have had more ginger and less leek since the summer. The sweet bean buns that used to appear every other week haven't been made since Suo came to live with them, and the dish of black vinegar always seems to end up beside Suo's bowl by the end of a meal. Hua Cheng noticed what their son left on his plate and cooked around it for months without a word to anyone. He changed recipes that have stayed the same for centuries, for a boy who would never have thought to ask.

     Xie Lian has to put his chopsticks down.

     "Did you change it for me, too?" he asks, a little thickly.

     Hua Cheng slides over a small lidded dish that Xie Lian had taken for extra sauce. Inside, the pork is lacquered dark and sweet, exactly as he likes it. "Gēge's has extra sugar."

     Xie Lian beams and takes a piece from each. Then an idea strikes him. "I could do that with my buns. A little less sugar, a little vinegar—"

     Suo's chopsticks stop again.

     "Gēge's cooking cannot be improved upon," Hua Cheng says.

     Suo looks between them, opens his mouth, closes it, and opens it again. "It could be a little bit improved," he says shyly.

     Xie Lian gasps, betrayed, before breaking into giggles. Hua Cheng puts another piece of pork in Suo's bowl as a reward for honesty. The boy needs to eat more, and if he can associate food with reward, that'll do just fine. They'll reward him endlessly.

     On school days, Xie Lian and Hua Cheng have until ten past three.

     Suo goes through the school gate at a quarter past eight and turns to wave once before he disappears inside. Xie Lian waves back until there is no sign of his son. Then Hua Cheng walks Xie Lian around the back of the convenience store across the road and tosses a pair of dice against the wall.

     Two sixes. The wall vanishes into a yawning cavern that opens onto a ridge in the mountains far to the north where the air whips across the crevasses fast enough to sing, though there's usually no one close enough to hear it.

     They come out here twice a month, and more often than that when someone has been sniffing around town for them. Demons (and worse) find gods, and they find gods' children too. Xie Lian and Hua Cheng would both rather be vigilant, verging on skittish, than put their son at risk.

     Suo knows that his parents aren't ordinary. He has watched Xie Lian call up a breeze to lift a kite out of a tree, and he has watched Hua Cheng walk home through a typhoon without blinking. However, he has never seen the man who loses to him at weiqi every Sunday slice a mountain through with a sword, and Hua Cheng would like to keep it that way. Suo spent his early childhood around men who could hurt people and liked showing that off. He doesn't need to learn that his fathers could hurt more people than all of the Chanpuru gang put together. He only needs to know that they're strong enough to defend him if there's trouble.

     Xie Lian draws Fangxin and comes at Hua Cheng without a word.

     Hua Cheng catches the first slash on E-Ming and feels it all the way to his shoulder. Xie Lian is smiling, the same smile he wore on a parade float a very long time ago, when a small boy fell off a city wall and he caught him. It hasn't aged a day, and neither has the sword arm behind it.

     They go at it for an hour, and the mountain pays the price. Ruoye snaps out and wraps around Hua Cheng's ankle, and he lets it pull him, turning the fall into a swing that carves a trench through the frozen earth. Xie Lian's kick sends him back through the trunk of a cedar, and the tree comes down with a groan that echoes off the next peak. Fangxin splits a boulder cleanly in two. Every time E-Ming swings toward Xie Lian's throat, its eye rolls toward him and goes soft, and the blade drags itself an inch short. Hua Cheng would scold it, but he'd be a hypocrite.

     Some small part of Hua Cheng never leaves the school. It hasn't since Suo's first day: a thread of himself left knotted to the gate. When a boy trips in the yard during morning break, he knows about it before the boy starts crying. It isn't his Xiao Fei, so he lets Xie Lian knock him into the snow.

     Afterward, they lie in the trench they've made while the disturbed snow drifts back down over them, Xie Lian's head pillowed on Hua Cheng's arm. Two beings who have toppled heavens talk, like any parents anywhere, about Suo's report card, the leak under the sink, and whether Suo is old enough for a bicycle. Xie Lian's sleeve is torn from elbow to cuff. He pokes a finger through the hole and wiggles it at Hua Cheng, who promises to buy him a new one. (Xie Lian protests, and Hua Cheng agrees to mend it instead, knowing full well that Xie Lian is better with needle and thread and will have to take over halfway.)

     At twenty to three, Hua Cheng rolls the dice again.

     Suo comes out of the gate at ten past three and looks for them first. He scans over the crowd and spots his parents, his face lights up, and then his gaze moves from Xie Lian's sleeve to the cedar needles in Hua Cheng's hair.

     "Where did you go today?" he asks.

     "For a walk," Xie Lian lies smoothly.

     Suo looks at the sleeve again. "… did the walk win?"

     "Not yet," Hua Cheng replies.

     Xie Lian bursts out laughing in the middle of the sidewalk. Suo takes his hand for the walk home and lets Hua Cheng carry his bag.

     It has been a long month for all three of them. Suo's cold turned into a fever and a week off school, and missing class for so many days left him with a stack of homework that Xie Lian ended up helping with at the kitchen table every night. Xie Lian can't remember the last evening he and Hua Cheng had to themselves.

     So when Hua Cheng comes into their room after the house has gone dark with a brush and a sheaf of yellow talisman paper, Xie Lian, who had been folding laundry on the bed, assumes that something has followed Suo home.

     "Is something wrong?" he asks.

     "No." Hua Cheng paints a character (messily but well enough to function) on the first strip, and the ink drinks in the lamplight as it dries. He presses the paper to the corner above the door, then moves to the next corner, and the next. "It's so we don't keep him up."

     Xie Lian looks at the talismans, then at Hua Cheng, who has started to loosen the collar of his robe, and feels his face go hot.

     "And so he doesn't come asking what the noise was," Hua Cheng adds.

     "There won't be any—"

     The corner of Hua Cheng's mouth lifts. "Gēge."

     Xie Lian sets down the shirt in his hands. "If he calls for us—"

     "Nothing gets out of this room. Anything can still get in." Hua Cheng presses the last strip above the window, and the room goes unnaturally quiet from the outside, as though a shroud has closed been draped over it. "If he calls, we'll hear him."

     Then he crosses the room, takes Xie Lian's wrist, and brushes his lips along the inside of it, just above the silk. Ruoye unwinds itself, slides off the bed, and coils up on top of the dresser, out of the way.

     Xie Lian laughs, and then he stops laughing, because Hua Cheng has swept the clothes off the bed with one arm, using his powers to drop them in a pristine pile by the desk, and is kissing him fiercely. Xie Lian has missed this so much that it aches: the hand spread at the small of his back, the low voice saying gēge against his throat like a prayer only one god has ever been allowed to hear, the solid weight of Hua Cheng pressing him down into the quilt. His sleep robe slips off one shoulder, and he lets it.

     He has just gotten Hua Cheng's sash undone when someone pounds on the door.

     "Diē? Bà! Are you there?"

     Xie Lian nearly falls off the bed. Hua Cheng is on his feet before Xie Lian has finished flailing, his robe retied and the talisman strips already peeled off the walls and crumpled in one hand. Xie Lian hauls his own robe back over his shoulder, yanks the sash tight, and opens the door.

     Suo is in the hall in his pajamas with a flashlight, pale and breathing too fast. "You were talking," he says. "I could hear you talking, and then it went quiet. Not quiet, gone. I couldn't hear bà's voice, or you laughing, or anything at all." He swallows. "I thought you … left."

     Xie Lian is on his knees in the doorway with his arms around Suo before his brain has even decided to move. The flashlight digs into his ribs. "We're here," Xie Lian says into Suo's hair, trying to stop the boy from shaking. "We're right here, Sun Fei."

     Hua Cheng crouches beside them and cups the back of Suo's neck. "We always come back, Xiao Fei. Even when it's quiet."

     Suo nods against Xie Lian's shoulder. After a while, his breathing slows, and he lifts his head, and his eye goes past Xie Lian to the crumpled yellow paper in Hua Cheng's fist.

     "What are those for?"

     "Keeping the noise down," Xie Lian says, and immediately regrets it.

     "What noise?"

     "Your diē snores," Hua Cheng says.

     "I do not."

     Suo studies Xie Lian's face. "… okay." His voice is devastatingly small.

     He sleeps between them that night, curled on his side with the flashlight under his pillow and his cold feet tucked against Xie Lian's shins. Xie Lian lies awake for a long time listening to him breathe.

     "Next time," Hua Cheng murmurs over Suo's head, "I'll let some of it through."

     "Some of what?"

     "The noise. Enough that he knows we're here."

     Xie Lian buries his face in the pillow in embarrassment at the thought and keeps it there until morning.

     There is a day in late autumn that Xie Lian dedicates to the ones he remembers: the people he regrets letting go, the people he has helped move on, the people he loves even now because he never learned how to stop loving someone, no matter how much it hurts.

     By the time they move to Makochi, the day has a dedicated routine. He gets up before dawn, washes, and goes into the cedar room at the back of the house, where the memorial tablets stand on a small altar, and he slides the door shut behind him. Hua Cheng leaves breakfast on the table for him, and it inevitably goes cold. (He'll remake it, as always, though he can't help but hope that Xie Lian will be able to recover from grieving a little faster this year.)

     When Suo comes in at nine with a cup and the old teapot on a tray — the pot mended with seams of gold — and heads for the cedar room, Hua Cheng steps into the hall in front of him.

     "Not yet."

     Suo stops. "He hasn't eaten anything. He has been in there since five."

     "I know."

     "Who are the tablets for?" Suo asks, more quietly. He has seen them through the doorway: two elaborate wooden pieces have gone dark, worn smooth by the repeated press of gentle fingers along the engraved lettering; a long row of plainer ones hangs beside them, almost equally treasured.

     "His mother and his father." Hua Cheng takes the tray, since the lid is rattling on the pot. "The others are people he knew a long time ago. Soldiers, servants, his teachers, a city's worth of people whose names he still remembers. He is still the Flower Crown Martial God, but he was a proper prince once, Xiao Fei. His country is gone, and he's the only one left who mourns it."

     "Not you?"

     Hua Cheng was born in that city. He can't think of a single person in it that he would have mourned, except the one behind that door.

     "I'm not the one who lost them," he says.

     Suo looks at the shut door. "He shouldn't be by himself."

     "He isn't. He's with them." Hua Cheng waits until Suo looks back at him. "If you go in now, he'll smile at you. He'll wipe his face and ask if you've eaten, and he'll spend the rest of the day looking after you instead of them. He has spent a very long time putting everyone else first. One day a year, we let him put them first."

     Suo's jaw works. His fingers curl and uncurl at his sides.

     "Even if he's crying?" he asks.

     "Especially then."

     "… can I leave the tea for him?"

     Hua Cheng hands the tray back to Suo. "Yes. He'd like that."

     Suo sets it down outside the cedar room without a sound. He doesn't knock. He sits on the floor across the hall with his knees drawn up, and after a moment, Hua Cheng sits down beside him.

     A little before noon, the door slides open just wide enough for a hand, and the tray disappears inside. Suo holds his breath until the door slides shut again.

     He spends the afternoon doing his homework on the floor of the hall. Xie Lian comes out a little before dusk with his eyes swollen and the empty cup held in both hands, and Suo is on his feet at once, and then he catches himself in the middle of the hall and waits with his hands clasped.

     Xie Lian opens his arms, and Suo goes into them readily.

     "Thank you for the tea," Xie Lian says into his hair. "It got cold, but I drank it."

     "It's not my fault that you took so long to open the door," Suo mumbles.

     Xie Lian smiles, a wet laugh caught in his throat, and holds his son a little tighter. Suo doesn't complain.

     On Saturday mornings, Xie Lian mans the shrine, and Suo, in his second year of middle school, comes with him.

     It sits at the edge of Makochi: a small thing with a straw roof patched in mismatched colors, a torii whose red paint has gone slightly ashy, and worn stone steps that Xie Lian sweeps every week whether they need it or not. On a good week, five people in this town still pray to him. Three of them are past seventy, and one is a high school girl who tells him about her exams. The fifth is Kubo, who collects scrap metal with a handcart, found the shrine by accident while hunting for copper wire, and has come every Saturday since. (It seems fitting. Xie Lian once held the same occupation, after all.)

     Suo sits on the top step with his math homework open on his knees and a bento from Hua Cheng beside him. Xie Lian has told him more than once that he could spend his Saturdays with friends from school. Suo has told him more than once that he likes it here, and at some point Xie Lian decided to believe him.

     Kubo's cart rattles up the path a little after ten. He leaves it at the bottom of the steps, climbs them with one hand on his knee, drops a coin in the box, and claps twice.

     Let my knees hold out till spring, he prays. And the wheel too. It has been sticking, and I can't afford a new cart.

     The prayer slips into Xie Lian's head, clear as speech.

     Most of Xie Lian's blessings come out of his hands. He walks down to the cart, crouches by the wheel, and works the sticking axle with a rag and the can of oil he keeps behind the offering box for exactly this purpose. By the time Kubo has made his way back down, the wheel turns clean. Xie Lian keeps a palm on the frame while Kubo takes the handles, and he lets a little warmth run out of him, up the handles, and into Kubo's knees.

     Kubo thinks Xie Lian is just the caretaker here, but that's fine. "You're a good boy," Kubo tells him, and pats his head. Xie Lian might be centuries older than him, but he allows it with a smile.

     When Xie Lian climbs back up to the shrine, Suo has refilled the water cup on the offering box and is frowning at his notebook. "Diē, does this look right to you?"

     Xie Lian leans over his shoulder. It's an equation containing four variables represented by letters in two different languages (neither of which he knows properly), and he can't make much sense of it. "… It looks very neat?"

     "So … no?"

     While Xie Lian is still squinting at the equation, a voice arrives in his head, crisp and exhausted. Your Highness. The Mid-Autumn assembly is in twelve days, and your merit report is four months overdue. I'm begging you to reply.

     I'm working, Xie Lian projects back to her. I'll do it later.

     You said that every month this summer too.

     Suo is watching his face. "Is someone talking in your head again?"

     "Ling Wen."

     "Did you tell her you're working?"

     "I did."

     Suo nods and goes back to his equation. Before he packs up, he gets to his feet, drops a coin in the offering box, and claps twice with his head bowed and his eye closed. Please let my diē have a day off. No Ling Wen, no official duties, no more prayers to answer, just some time to rest with us.

     Xie Lian has been prayed to for victories, for rain, and for revenge. Nobody has ever asked him to take a day off.

     Suo opens his eye and looks at him with perfect innocence.

     "Granted," Xie Lian says softly, a little unsteadily, eyes threatening to water.

     He locks the offering box, leans the broom against the wall, and carries Suo's empty bento box back into town. Ling Wen tries to contact him once more on the way. Xie Lian tells her that he is taking the day off by special request and closes the array.

     Hua Cheng looks up from the stove when they come in. "You're early."

     "Someone prayed for me." Xie Lian smiles. Hua Cheng's expression softens, gaze immediately flitting to their child.

     Suo goes to wash his hands without making eye contact. They spend the afternoon on the veranda with the weiqi board, the three of them, and, after dinner, Xie Lian looks up the equation online and helps fix Suo's homework.

     By Suo's second year of high school at Furin, Hua Cheng has quietly been keeping threats away from him for seven years.

     There was a hungry thing that followed Suo home from school when he was nine, and disintegrated before it touched the gate. There was a man who sat on the bench across from the elementary school playground for most of a week and was never seen again, and a woman from the family that raised Suo before them who came asking at their old house and forgot that Suo ever existed. In their first spring in Makochi, a drowned thing in the canal wanted a child and thought Suo would be an easy target. It was wrong.

     Suo remembers that spring for the cherry blossoms on the water. His bà remembers a half-dozen failed abduction attempts.

     Hua Cheng has help, of course. There are silver butterflies all over Makochi, invisible to most but occasionally spied by those who care to find them: one folded on the canal bridge railing, one in the eaves above the station kiosk, one on the shrine's bell rope while Xie Lian greets people beneath it. They are slivers of him, as the creeping crystals of frost are slivers of winter, and whatever they sense, he knows too. Neither Xie Lian nor Suo has ever slipped out of their sight.

     At dusk, he watches as Suo crosses the canal bridge on his way home. Sakura Haruka walks on his right with both hands jammed in his pockets, arguing about something while Suo laughs at him. That boy is the only one in Makochi who has gotten this close to Suo that Hua Cheng occasionally watches him with a butterfly too.

     A foreigner gets off the last train on a Tuesday and asks at the station whether anyone knows a boy with an eyepatch, seventeen or so, who used to go by Sun Fei. The butterfly in the eaves hears every word, and Hua Cheng knows about the inquiry before the man has even pocketed the change from the newspaper he bought. Hua Cheng only lets him continue to ask around because he wants to know who sent him before he decides what to do with him. By that night, he has the name of the man who sent him, and the name of the man who that one worked for too.

     He meets the man at midnight on the road past the last streetlight, where the town gives way to rice fields. The fields lie black on either side, and the frogs stop singing when the Ghost King approaches. The visitor wears a cheap suit with an old photograph of a seven-year-old in his breast pocket.

     "Who the hell are you?" the man demands, annoyed at having his path obstructed.

     "His father."

     The man laughs. "The kid has debts. His real family—"

     "I am his real family," Hua Cheng says, and draws E-Ming from his scabbard.

     It takes comically little time to reduce the man to shreds, and the frogs don't start croaking again until Hua Cheng walks away. The other two names take him a little longer — three throws of his dice and a handful of threats that they take very seriously because no one waltzes past their security effortlessly like that without being genuinely dangerous — and then he's back over the canal bridge before the clock strikes five.

     Suo will finish the year with the same friends, the same seat by the window, and the same adoring boy beside him, he thinks. Nobody will dare to come ask about Sun Fei again.

     Hua Cheng walks back up the hill as the sky starts to pale, and the butterflies drift down out of the dark to settle on him like sparks returning to a fire. There's a light on in the kitchen.

     Xie Lian is at the table with an old teapot and two cups (one full and steaming, the other empty and waiting) when the front door slides open. He woke several hours ago when the house began mourning Hua Cheng's absence, and he has kept the tea hot as he faithfully waited for his husband's return.

     Hua Cheng comes in without a hair out of place, the red bead swinging at the end of his braid and the night still cold on him.

     Xie Lian fills the other cup and holds it out. "Welcome home."

     Hua Cheng sits down across from him. "Nobody's coming."

     "Good."

     The hour between Hua Cheng coming home and Suo's alarm belongs to the two of them. It's a small hour, as hours go. They have had centuries together, and this is still the one they guard most jealously. They spend it with their ankles hooked together under the table, sharing their tea, their breath, their existence in full while the window over the sink goes from grey to gold.

     At half past six, the alarm goes off upstairs, and Suo comes down a few minutes later in his uniform, tying on the eyepatch. He stops in the doorway. "You're both up early."

     "Couldn't sleep," Hua Cheng says.

     Suo has known for years that Hua Cheng doesn't need sleep and almost never indulges in it. He hums noncommittally and goes to make toast.

     That evening, Sakura comes to dinner, as he often does now that he and Suo are dating. Feng Xin and Mu Qing show up too, uninvited.

     The doorbell rings while Sakura is setting the table. Xie Lian answers it and finds two of his oldest friends on the step. Feng Xin, who was once his bodyguard, is now scowling in a black jacket. Mu Qing, who was once his attendant, stands beside Feng Xin in a long grey coat with his arms folded. Both are gods of war in their own right now, and Xie Lian is proud of them.

     Mu Qing skips the greeting. "Six weeks. You've ignored the array for six weeks, and Ling Wen is threatening to resign or have you deposed or both."

     "I am hardly of a rank that warrants deposition," Xie Lian chides. He doesn't tack anymore onto the end, but the relevant people know that it's there.

     "Who is it?" Sakura isn't familiar with this new voice and comes up the hall behind Xie Lian with a stack of bowls. Suo follows him.

     Xie Lian turns around, all smiles. "Sakura-kun! These are my friends from college. From, ah, when I was in college."

     Feng Xin's jaw sets so hard that a vein rises at his temple. Mu Qing briefly closes his eyes, expression pinched.

     "Same college as last time?" Mu Qing mutters out of the side of his mouth.

     Sakura looks at Xie Lian, then at the two men on the step, then back at Xie Lian. "You went to college?"

     "… Yes?"

     "What'd you study?"

     "Archery," Feng Xin says, at the same moment that Mu Qing says, "Economics."

     Sakura waits.

     "It was a liberal arts college," Mu Qing says flatly. "Double majors everywhere."

     Behind Sakura, Suo makes a small noise into his sleeve that might be a cough. "Are you staying for dinner? Bà is making dumplings."

     "We have somewhere to b—" Mu Qing starts.

     "We're staying," Feng Xin cuts him off. He has always tried to insert himself between Xie Lian and Hua Cheng, and he's not about to stop now. It hardly matters that they're married; Feng Xin is convinced that Hua Cheng is part of the reason that Xie Lian is abandoning his duties.

     (Neither the fact that Hua Cheng doesn't like him so he wants to take advantage of forced hospitality nor that the Ghost King cooks incredibly well are factors in his decision, of course not, why would you even think that?)

     Xie Lian takes his friends out to the back veranda, away from prying ears. Hua Cheng still has dumplings to finish preparing, so Xie Lian has a few minutes before they all reconvene for dinner.

     "Do you know," Mu Qing says, as soon as the screen door is shut, "how humiliating it is to be your 'college friend'?" Feng Xin grunts in agreement.

     "I'm sorry," Xie Lian says, with an apologetic bow that is painfully genuine. "Thank you for going along with it."

     Mu Qing sighs.

     Feng Xin grimaces. "Ling Wen told me that she has sent you forty-one messages. The Mid-Autumn assembly came and went without hide or hair of you. Pei Ming is circulating a petition to have your title reviewed for absenteeism, and half the court thinks the Ghost King has finally eaten you!"

     "Only half?" Xie Lian chuckles.

     "This isn't funny," Feng Xin says. "Show your face at one assembly. One. They'll shut up for a century and stop trying to send us to mediate."

     "I answer every prayer I'm sent. I keep my shrine. I'm not neglecting anything that matters."

     "The court matters," Mu Qing says.

     "The court managed without me for most of eight hundred years. It can manage until my son graduates," Xie Lian says serenely.

     "And after that?" Feng Xin demands.

     Xie Lian considers it. "Well, he might want to go to college."

     Mu Qing stares at him. "College?" His tone says Is that relevant?

     "Yes, a liberal arts one like ours." The corners of Xie Lian's eyes crinkle with joy.

     Feng Xin makes a noise like a kettle coming to the boil. Through the screen door, Sakura yells that the food is ready and will get cold if they don't come in.

     Dinner is loud and crowded. Feng Xin sits beside Sakura, and the two of them scowl sideways at each other over the last dumpling but are otherwise civil. Mu Qing eats with perfect manners, criticizes the objectively faultless dough, and takes a third helping anyway. Hua Cheng sets the black vinegar beside Suo's bowl without looking, and a small lidded dish beside Xie Lian's, and Xie Lian doesn't need to lift the lid to know how sweet the contents are.

     The array chimes in Xie Lian's head. Your Highness—

     Xie Lian closes it without a second thought. He takes the dumpling Hua Cheng has just put in his bowl and sneaks it into Suo's with a smile. Around the table sit the people he cares about most in the world: two old friends who hound him endlessly out of as much love as duty, a peerless husband who would destroy universes to find him again, a son who brings him more joy than he ever thought possible, and a young man who brings his son enough joy to earn every ounce of kindness that Xie Lian has to give.

     The Flower Crown Martial God once had thousands of temples that worshipped him. He wouldn't trade this table for any of them.