For a moment nobody in the hall moved, and Xuan spent it doing the only useful thing left to him, running the room for a way out that didn’t end with all of them cooling on the marble.
Tianlong took his time. He walked into the throne hall of his ancestors like a man come home to find squatters in his house, unhurried, half amused, his escort spreading out behind him along the back wall in a loose line of very still, very dangerous people. He took in the dead loyalists, and the beasts finishing their dying in the yard, and last and longest, his sister with her hand still on the arm of their father’s throne.
"You actually did it." There was something under the words that wasn’t quite anger. "You took the whole city. Walked in through a front door full of monsters and took it." He shook his head, slow. "I’ll be honest, little sister, I didn’t think you had it in you. I always had you filed under kind."
"You’ve been calling me soft since we were children, like it was the only thing worth knowing about me." Xinhua didn’t take her hand off the throne, and her voice held steady in a way that plainly cost her. "I killed a general on the steps of Northreach to get here. I turned a city’s monsters loose on your men an hour ago. Whatever I was in that cold palace, I’m not it now."
"No. I can see that." Tianlong’s amusement cooled by a degree. "Which is a shame, because it’s going to make watching this take longer than it needs to."
"Then tell me how you’re here at all." She said it like a woman who’d already guessed and wanted him to admit it. "Northreach is three days south. You were meant to be sitting on it with fifty thousand men."
"I was." And there it was, the thing Xuan had been waiting to hear, because a man like this couldn’t help but boast when he thought he’d already won. "I stood in my own command tent this morning and watched my army take that fort apart wall by wall. And then a rider comes up the line and tells me my kind little sister has strolled into Tianzhao with a handful of broke sects and a boy from a dead sword school, and is trying my chair on for size." His mouth curled. "So I left. Left the fort, left the siege, left the whole army standing in a field to finish a fight I’d stopped caring about. A man like me covers in a day what an army covers in a week. I was not going to sit outside a grain fort while you sat in my house."
Xuan filed away every word, because every word was a gift. The Second Prince had walked off his own siege. He’d left an army leaderless in front of a fort he’d bled a year for, and he’d done it out of nothing but pride, because the thought of his sister on that throne had been worse to him than losing everything he’d spent to reach it. A man who’d do that had already handed you the shape of how he lost. Xuan only had to live long enough to use it.
’Mira. How far above her, really?’
[ Far enough that she dies alone, and she knows it, ] Mira said. [ Upper Golden Core, and all of it real, no bluff in the weight. But he’s still Golden Core, Xuan. He’s a wall, not a mountain. Walls have a seam. You’ve spent this whole war finding seams. Find his, time it, and the four of you might turn a slaughter into a knife.]
"You want the chair?" Tianlong said, and the amusement went out of him at last, and something colder came up to take its place. "Come take it. But we both know how this ends. You were always half a step behind me, sister. In the training yard, in the old man’s eye, in every way that ever counted. You’re Golden Core Stage Two on a good day." He let his weight off the leash, and it rolled through the hall and pressed Xuan’s own qi flat in his chest, and even Yan Wuji rebalanced his stance under it. "I’m a great deal more than that. Being kind never closed the gap between us. Taking my city didn’t either. All you managed was to walk far enough that I’m the one who gets to end it."
Xuan felt the truth of it drop cold into the room. On her own, she couldn’t win this. Everyone in the hall could feel the size of him now, the way you feel a storm before it breaks, and it was bigger than she was. Fought one at a time, he’d kill them one at a time, and take his time enjoying the order of it.
So they wouldn’t give him one at a time.
Xuan didn’t have to say a word of it out loud. Qingyue had already drifted wide to steal an angle on the throne, Yan Wuji had squared his shoulders toward the escort by the wall, and Bo Ren had put himself between the doors and the princess. They’d stood at Xuan’s shoulder long enough to read the plan off the room and move before he asked for it. Xinhua would lead. It was her brother, her war, her chair. But she would not stand in that circle alone, and the moment her brother learned that a wall is only ever as strong as its one bad seam, Xuan meant to be standing exactly where the lesson could be taught.
Tianlong saw the shift. Of course he did. He looked at the four of them folding in around his sister, at the boy from the dead sword school stepping up at her flank, and the cold pleasure came back into his face like he’d been handed a present.
"Oh," he said, quiet. "You’re all going to try." He rolled his shoulders, and the weight in the hall narrowed to a single point. "Good. I was afraid this would be quick."
Xinhua went first.
She came off the steps at her brother with her plain sword and everything she had left in her, because it was her war and she would be the one to open it. And the wall she threw herself at took the blow like it had felt nothing at all.
Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!
Use arrow keys (or A / D) to PREV/NEXT chapter