The guards stayed at the gate longer than the work needed them. The servants kept to the walls. No one said aloud the thing they were all waiting on.
Wang Ben crossed the grounds to the main hall with his father, and the two of them found nothing to say on the way. He had counted on the Shens, and that was what he turned over as he walked. No word had come down from the Dragon Spine since the breakthrough, nothing from Shen Wuyan, nothing from Shen Ruoxi. The one power that might have stood over the delegation was beyond his reach, and the clan would meet the Bastion with what it had, which was itself.
The hall was full. Wang Ben took a place at the side with his father, among the younger blood. At the head sat the three who led the clan. Patriarch Wang Tiexin in the center, Grand Elder Wang Feng too large for his chair, and old Wang Hongwei, a grade under the patriarch and forty years stalled there.
Wang Tiexin did not rise. His voice was low and carried to the back of the hall without effort.
"You know why you were called, so I will be plain. The Crimson Bastion has made its demands, and it means to get rid of us. A clan our size cannot stand against a domain power and win.
"But the Prince has wanted our formation work for his war since before the delegation came. He speaks for the kingdom, and the kingdom stands above the domain. His claim on our work comes first, and it is the one thing the Bastion cannot take from us. A clan the kingdom needs is a clan the Bastion cannot touch. So I have made my decision. We give the Prince what he asks, and I go to the fortress myself."
A few faces darkened.
Grand Elder Wang Feng did not soften it. "Then you hand the delegation exactly what it came for." He brought his arm down from across his chest. "You are what keeps this clan whole, and there is no one to put in your place. The morning you leave is the morning the Bastion comes down on us. Send the clan's strength to the fortress. Do not send yourself."
Wang Tian spoke from the side, and it cost him to say it in front of the clan. "Send Elder Hongwei in your place. He is a formation master in his own right, and Redstone knows it. With the clan's younger hands under him, he can do what the kingdom asks of us."
"I will go." The old man said it before the sentence was done. "I am a grade under him, and I have not advanced in forty years. The fortress is the hardest formation work in the domain. Arrays raised under siege, broken, raised again, no two days alike. It may be the thing that finally lets me break through. And I am a master this clan can spare."
Wang Tiexin heard them out, and there was no edge in him when he answered.
"You are right." He looked from one to the other. "The problem is that we have nothing to bargain with."
Everyone in the hall knew what he had not said. A formation master who left for that fortress was not likely to come home.
Wang Ben spoke before he had decided to. "Then let me go with him."
The hall turned to him, the youngest of them by centuries. "The Prince came for our formation work, not for one name. He would take Elder Hongwei and enough of the clan's hands, me among them."
Wang Tiexin looked at his grandson a long moment.
"No." There was a great gentleness in it, and nothing that would bend.
He let the room hold that.
"It is decided. I will go myself. I am a grade-seven formation master and a core formation cultivator, and I will survive that fortress where any of you would not. While I am gone, Grand Elder Wang Feng will lead the clan. Elder Hongwei and Wang Ben will see to the clan's formation work, and with the rest of the clan, keep its affairs in order until I am home."
The room gave its assent without joy and with no argument left in it, the only road open and every elder in the hall knowing it.
Wang Ben walked out of the full hall into the hush of the estate. A clan too weak to make itself heard had no say in what was done to it. It bent to powers stronger than itself because it could not do otherwise, and today those powers were the Bastion and the Prince. There would be others after them, until the clan was strong enough that it no longer had to give way.
...
Wang Ben ran through the forms in the courtyard until his arms shook. It was that or pace the grounds like everyone else.
His grandfather had decided hours ago to go to the fortress himself, the one way out from under the Bastion anyone had found. Wang Ben had looked all afternoon for the flaw in it and found none. It left him in the dark.
He took his stance and began again.
The dead delegates were the reason the Bastion gave, not the reason it had come. Someone wanted the Wang Clan gone from Redstone, not punished but gone. Wang Ben had spent days reaching for whoever stood behind the delegation and finding nothing. He knew they were there. He could not see them, and that was worse than an enemy with a face.
Zhao Yu came across the courtyard out of the dark, a blade in one hand. He stopped at the edge of the lamplight and watched Wang Ben finish the form.
"That will not make the days go any faster," he said.
"It is better than sitting still."
"Everything is better than sitting still." Zhao Yu turned the blade once and let it hang. "Days now, stuck in these walls. I am learning the cracks in them by name."
"How are you passing the time?" Wang Ben asked.
"Badly." Zhao Yu almost smiled. "I have been helping my father at the forge. Every time I try to shape even a simple blade, I ruin the whole piece." He turned the blade over. "It is nothing new."
"It takes years," Wang Ben said.
"It took him a season, when he was a boy." There was no bitterness in it. "He and I were made for different paths. My talents are not at the forge. I have come to accept that I will never be the forger he is."
Wang Ben lowered his arms. "I have seen how you move in a fight, and the talent for it is as clear as your father's for iron. So stop grieving the forge. We both have to grow stronger now."
"It is the one thing." He said it plainly. He was not asking to be talked out of it. "Put a blade in my hand and a man in front of me, and no one has ever had to teach me anything. It is the only place my head and my hands agree."
"The last time I got stronger, it was in a fight, in the thick of one, two of them trying to kill me. I have not gained a thing since, sitting safe in here." He shrugged. "A real fight would do more for me than a year behind these walls. Strange thing to want."
They stood a while. Past the wall, a bell rang and the patrol changed.
"My father is the only one of us doing well in all this," Zhao Yu said. "Half of Redstone is arming itself for the war in the west, and every one of them wants good steel before they march. He is forging grade-eight work faster than he ever has, and still sending people away."
"He sent off a man last week. Fang Wei, the broker out of the Jade Mist, who wanted a vat built for medicinal baths, fine fittings, ready to pay double. My father told him to come back when the war was over." He shook his head. "A forge-master too busy for spirit stones. I did not think I would live to see it."
He took up the form once more, and Zhao Yu joined him, blade in hand.
It was not a thing he could put to his grandfather, or to Zhao Yu. He asked the System instead. The Crimson Bastion wanted them gone. Could the Prince's claim hold it back?
[ANALYSIS: Crimson Bastion intent sustained and hostile. Kingdom's claim currently opposes it, conditional on continued kingdom interest. Outcome cannot be determined. Deciding actors beyond Host's perception.]
The System knew more than anyone else in the clan. On the question that mattered most, it knew no more than he did.
He let it go. Beside him, Zhao Yu's blade rose and fell, and the two of them kept on, slower now, until the patrol changed a second time.