Redstone City had looked smaller than Wang Ben left it, the morning he came down out of the mountains, and in the month since it had only drawn tighter.
Yucheng had brought them up the mountain, and he brought them down again, though not by the road they had climbed.
Going up, the path had been the clear one he knew, and Shen Wuyan had watched over them, so no beast came near. Going down, that watch was gone, and Yucheng took a harder path of his own, burning a handful of grade-six concealment talismans along it to keep the slopes' beasts off them.
The silent attendant did it without a word, and Wang Ben and his grandfather, worn thin by the nights at the sanctuary, came down behind him with little to say.
Wuyan's watch had not lifted like a guard whose duty was done, but like a man called away to other business, and Wang Ben did not yet know what to make of it.
This morning the thing the clan had braced for sent its envoy ahead of it. They had expected it since the City Lord's inquiry, when the matter went up to the Bastion and out of Redstone's hands. A man waited in the main hall, his cultivation suppressed, in formal robes that belonged to no one of Redstone, come up the valley road ahead of the rest.
"An envoy," Wang Tiexin murmured. "Official. And ahead of others, by the look of him."
...
The clan had given the envoy a cup of tea and nothing else.
Wang Tian met them at the inner door. The look that passed among the three of them was the thing none of them would speak of with an outsider in the hall. "He has waited for you," Wang Tian said, low. "Said nothing to anyone else."
Wang Tiexin crossed to the head of the hall and took the seat that was his, and the long years showed on him only as patience. "Then we will hear what the domain capital has sent to our gates," he said, and turned a hand toward the envoy. "Continue."
The man had the unhurried delivery of someone who had given the same speech in several halls. Domain Lord Tie Wushan, he said, had taken notice of Redstone.
The Wang Clan's rise since the clan war, a demonic attack the clan should not have been strong enough to beat back, and the Xue Clan's survivors fallen to the demonic path soon after their defeat, at a time that served the Wang Clan well.
A delegation from the Crimson Bastion would reach Redstone within days, to meet the Wang Clan regarding matters of mutual interest. Cooperation, the envoy was instructed to add, would be noted favorably.
Wang Ben kept his face still and read it. The words were a verdict, for all their courtesy.
Matters of mutual interest meant demands. Noted favorably meant the alternative was noted otherwise. A delegation that sent its envoy ahead, the rest only days behind, wanted those days spent in dread. He had every line of it.
He also had a grandfather at the head of the hall whose work this was, and so he kept the reading to himself and let the patriarch's slow, measured questions do their work.
Wang Tiexin received the envoy's courtesies, returned the clan's, and saw him out. Then the hall held only family.
"Sit," the patriarch said. "All of you. We have watched this gather for a month, and we are not caught unready. What is left is to choose our footing before they sit across from us, and I would rather weigh it aloud, with the people I trust, than alone."
Grand Elder Wang Feng came in from the side door; word had already reached him. Wang Tian took the long bench, and Wang Ben the second, where the younger of the clan were placed, and the patriarch let the room go still before he spoke.
"A Bastion delegation does not come to a frontier city to ask after trouble a clan has already put down on its own," Wang Tiexin said. "We will hear the reasons they give when they arrive, and none of them will be the true one. The true one is older and simpler.
"What we have is not only what we make. We hold our place at the mouth of the Blackwood, and that is worth more to some hands than anything they could carry out of here.
"This delegation does not mean to bargain us down. It means to be rid of us, and to seat a clan here that will hold what we hold and ask none of the questions we would ask."
"Then we refuse them." Wang Feng's arms were folded. "Whatever they name, we are within our rights to..."
"We are within our rights to refuse, and we do not have the strength to make a refusal mean anything." The patriarch said it without heat. "A clan that cannot stand behind a refusal should not make one. So we will not. We can only turn what we have to our advantage."
He turned his cup on the table, once, the way Wang Ben had watched him turn over a formation problem.
"The Bastion is not the only power that has lately found a use for this clan. Ever since Prince Huo Zhanlong arrived in Redstone, he has lingered, waiting for something. What he does once he sees the Bastion's delegation move, I cannot say, and so we must tread carefully between the domain's delegation and the kingdom's prince."
The patriarch turned his cup once more, slowly, with the deliberation of a man setting weights on a scale.
"Two powers want the same clan. We give each enough and neither too much. Useful to the kingdom, not worth the Bastion's trouble. A narrow road, and the only road we may walk and come out a clan at the end of it."
"Grandfather. The kingdom already knows what we are worth, and it would not stand by while the Bastion took us apart."
The patriarch inclined his head, the small acknowledgment he gave to something worth saying. "Just so. We do not have the strength to be safe. We may yet have the value to be inconvenient to destroy." He set the cup down. "It will be my hand on it, and your father's, when the delegation sits across from us. Not yours."
He said the last gently, and met Wang Ben's eyes as he did.
Wang Ben bowed his head, and found that he was glad of it. It was more of a relief than he had expected, to put what he saw into hands that could act on it.
"There is a danger in it," Wang Feng said. "A clan valuable to two powers is a prize they may come to fight over."
"So it is," Wang Tiexin said. "Which is why we make ourselves useful enough that the kingdom would keep us, and not so great a prize that the Bastion would fight to take us. We begin now, before the delegation arrives."
...
Evening came before Wang Ben had a moment alone with his mother.
She had been watching him since he came down from the mountain. He had felt it all month, at the edges of meals and across the courtyard, a mother's attention that asked nothing and missed nothing. Tonight, in the sitting room of his childhood, she let him feel it plainly.
She did not ask what weighed on him. She never had. But he could see her turning it over in silence, the way she always did, wondering whether it was the array work that kept him late, or the powerful people who kept learning his name and would not let it go, or everything the city had done to them, the war, and what had been made of Xue Feng when there was no one to stand for him. And under all of it, the fear she would not say aloud, that her son had learned to be afraid of being seen for what he was.
She was not wrong about any of it. She was only watching the wrong one of them.
Because he had been watching her too. All month, while she read him, he had been quietly reading her, the still, even flow in her meridians he had never been able to name, the cold that had lived in her hands for years. And in the month since the mountain, that stillness had stopped holding. Her body had begun to strain under a cultivation it could not move past, and the wrongness he had never named had grown sharper. Something was badly wrong in her, and getting worse, and he did not yet know what it was or how to set it right.
But he would. He was as certain of that as he had been of anything. He had rebuilt his father's ruined meridians when no one thought they could be saved. He had read what an old and powerful cultivator could not read. Given time, with a winter's worth of learning to see and his father's hands beside his own, he would find the way through this too.
He looked at her hands, the cloth still wrapped around fingers the cold had never left, and said the thing he had carried down the mountain.
"Mother. When the delegation has come and gone, and the clan is steady again." He chose the words with care, because a promise made twice was one he had to keep. "I want to look at your meridians. Properly. With Father, with everything this winter has taught me. I told you once that I would, and I meant it then. I have learned things since that I did not have when I said it."
Li Mei's hands went still in her lap. "You have looked before. Your father has looked, for years."
"I know. And I am not promising you that I can mend it." He held her eyes. "I am promising you that I can read it. Truly read it, the way I have learned this winter to read other things. Reading a thing truly is not nothing, Mother. It is where every mending has to start."
For a long moment she said nothing. Then her composure slipped, brief and unguarded, and she reached across and pressed his hand once, the wrapped fingers cool against his.
"After the delegation," she agreed softly. "I will hold you to it, Ben."