"Husband, the lily chicken is excellent — try it."
"Brother Yu, the Yellow River carp is Chef Liao's signature dish. The back is the tenderest part. Have a piece."
Wang Yu sat at the head of the table, Li Yunxiu on his left and Qianqian on his right, Fang Shaobai in the guest's seat, Zhao Rong attending at the side. Zhao Yingjie didn't rate a chair at this table at all.
Eight cold dishes and eight hot stood between them, a maid behind every chair to pour wine and serve, so that no guest's place ever held cold leavings.
Not that Wang Yu needed the service. Li Yunxiu and Qianqian between them were keeping him magnificently attended.
Nor did he stand on any ceremony about it — the real Zhao Yu certainly wouldn't have. One consort bestowed by the emperor, one fiancée arranged by his father: wasn't waiting on their prince simply their job?
Whatever the two women put in his bowl, he ate, and between bites debated Western Regions grape wine with Fang Shaobai.
Host and guests parted from the noon banquet thoroughly pleased with one another.
Except that directly after it, Fang Shaobai announced his departure.
"Stay a few days at least!" Wang Yu caught his hand to hold him.
"Stay for what, exactly?" Fang Shaobai towed Wang Yu off to one side and dropped his voice, grinning. "To sit front-row while you run a two-women-fight-over-one-man opera at me?"
"Don't misread the situation," Wang Yu said serenely. "It isn't two women fighting over a man. They're both my wives."
Fang Shaobai: "..."
"Now that's the bearing of a Westguard Prince!" He barked a laugh, then sobered. "Your father's not long gone, and you've been ten years away — the Manor will bury you in business for a while. I won't add myself to the pile.
We're both northwest men now; there'll be time and plenty to drink in." He paused, remembering something. "Besides, odds are I'll be back out this way before long anyhow."
"Oh — and one more thing," he added. "Whenever you decide to move on the Qishan Bandits, send word to Taihua. I'll bring people and help fill out the field for you."
"Then I won't be polite about taking you up on it!" Wang Yu said.
"Polite? I should be thanking you." Fang Shaobai made no secret of it. "The Qishan Bandits shelter disgraced disciples from half the sects alive — including a certain wayward martial-uncle of mine."
Ah, Wang Yu thought — so that's why so many masters ended up as bandits. Warmth in numbers for the exiled. The Qishan Bandits were this world's Valley of Villains.
***
Fang Shaobai took a fine horse from the Manor's stables and rode off at a canter.
After that, Zhao Rong sent Zhao Yingjie to walk Li Yunxiu and her maid on a tour of the grounds — and led Wang Yu, alone, to the great main compound at the Manor's rear.
"Your father did not die of illness." Zhao Rong stood with his back to him, and his first sentence split the sky. "He was murdered."
Wang Yu's pulse jumped. "By whom?"
"By the late emperor." Zhao Rong didn't draw it out. He turned. "You remember what happened ten years ago?"
Wang Yu's cheek tightened. "Ten years ago my father sent me to the capital as a hostage. His actual reasons, he never told me."
Zhao Rong sighed. "You were too young. Telling you would have served nothing — and might have drawn eyes we couldn't afford.
Thirty-some years ago, your grandfather — my adoptive father — rode the northwest at the head of an army and carved out his own ground. The court had settled the empire by then, but it could not say with any confidence that it could crush us."
He lifted his gaze to the clouds stacked at the horizon, remembering. "So the court made him the Westguard Prince, hereditary in perpetuity, and signed over three prefectures — Longshan, Qing'an, Fengming. Officials of our choosing. Taxes at the Manor's disposal.
In name, the Manor submitted to the court and held the northwest for it, a shield against the desert Qiang. In fact — power, money, army, all our own; answering summonses, never orders. A state within the state.
Fifteen years ago the old prince went to his rest, and half the world assumed the Manor would wither. Instead your father erupted out of nowhere — one Fire Cloud Saber carried across the whole desert, the northwest at his stirrup; he led the army out through the passes and broke the Qiang in open war. The youngest Innate grandmaster of his generation, and for a while no name under heaven rang louder. Even the court measured its words around him."
Zhao Rong's voice had taken on worship, and his eyes shone with it.
The light died quickly. "But ten years ago, he went south to the Xingxiu Sea. And everything changed."
"The battle with the Xingxiu Elder's disciples," Wang Yu supplied.
"Just so." Zhao Rong nodded. "The world knows he fought two at once and won — took Star-Plucker's arm and Star-Chaser's leg. What the world does not know is what it cost him. He came home with internal injuries of the gravest kind.
And our Westguard Manor's foundations were too shallow to heal him. There was no help for it: he sent you — his only son — to the capital as a hostage, to trade for the secret medicine the Buddhist and Daoist orders refine for the imperial house alone: the Hundred Spirits Yang-Restoring Pill.
Sending you was already a bowed head, as plain as one can be bowed. And still it wasn't enough for that old emperor. He had a single extra ingredient folded into the pill!
One ingredient. Outwardly your father seemed whole, year after year. In truth the wound in his dantian never closed — and the true qi in him burned hotter and hotter, like a fire feeding on itself!"
By now Zhao Rong's face had twisted. "If he stopped cultivating, the wound gained on him. If he kept cultivating, he walked the razor's edge of qi deviation!"
"So my father died of qi deviation."
"He did!" Mockery flashed cold through Zhao Rong's eyes. "The old emperor thought he'd take the Westguard Manor without bloodying a blade. He never reckoned your father would outlast him — he ran his northern campaign into the ground, watched the southwest rise, and died first.
And now the times are ugly, banners going up in half the provinces, and the new emperor dares not touch us either. Push the Westguard Manor into open revolt and the whole realm tips over at once."
"Which is why the emperor had to let me come home. But he couldn't give up the board either — so he married Li Yunxiu to me and reached for the Manor through her." Wang Yu arched an eyebrow and laughed softly. "Seen that way, my luck's been rather good."
"It has." Zhao Rong sighed. "Perhaps your father saw exactly this path — perhaps that's what let him finally close his eyes."
Wang Yu kept his face smooth. Your sworn brother didn't see all of it, he thought. He never imagined there was a man alive with his son's exact face.
"So understand this: our Zhao line and the imperial house hold a blood grudge." Zhao Rong looked at him. "Now tell me — how am I supposed to treat Li Yunxiu as anything but a thief inside the walls?"
Wang Yu nodded. "As you should."
Zhao Rong's eyes glinted, and a killing intent thick enough to touch spread out from him. "Better yet..."
"She cannot be killed!" Wang Yu said instantly.
"Why not?"
Wang Yu's mind spun through it at speed. "Because the realm hasn't tipped yet. Kill Li Yunxiu and we've slapped the emperor across the face in front of all under heaven. If that goads him into making the Westguard Manor his target — what then?"
Zhao Rong turned it over briefly, then nodded. "Sound."
Wang Yu let out a careful breath.
The real Zhao Yu might well have said yes. So long as the Manor never raised its banner, there was room to bargain; the emperor wouldn't necessarily strike first. The math could survive her death.
But Wang Yu could not say yes — because Wang Yu was a fake.
If Li Yunxiu, dying, spat out the secret — if the capital then produced the real Zhao Yu — with his martial arts still half-grown, he'd simply die alongside her, one act later.
Their two lives were tied to one rope now. Saving her was saving himself.
"Then we lock her in the Manor," Zhao Rong said. "House arrest. Not one step past the gates."
"Also no." Wang Yu refused again. Boxed in and useless, Li Yunxiu would only work through him instead — better to kill the whole problem now.
"Why not?" Zhao Rong was lost.
"Same reason. The emperor has shown us goodwill — until he turns the table over, we don't flip it first." Wang Yu's face went sober and grave. "The family's vengeance can wait for its day. The Westguard Manor carries three prefectures of common people and fifty thousand soldiers. It cannot be allowed to fall."
Zhao Rong stared at the young man wearing that heavy, willing-to-bear-it expression, startled and moved in equal measure. He drew a long breath. "Young Master... you've grown up."
Wang Yu's heart skipped once — then his mouth curled into a sly grin. "Besides. This Li Yunxiu play of the emperor's may not be the masterstroke he thinks. We can borrow his own force and throw him with it."
"How so?" Zhao Rong asked.
"Li Yunxiu may be a woman, but at statecraft she is genuinely first-rate."
"You'd let her into the administration of the three prefectures?"
"Every official in those three prefectures is ours. The better she governs them — the stronger the Westguard Manor gets. Whose strength is that, in the end?" Wang Yu spread his hands. "When the day actually comes, do the three prefectures answer to me — or to her?"
"To you, of course," Zhao Rong said, before he'd even thought about it.
And then he caught the whole shape of it. "She has no troops and no faction of her own! However deep she reaches into the three prefectures, everything she does stands on the Manor — on the consort's title. Every scrap of power she wields is power you handed her!"
Wang Yu lifted his chin, magnificently arrogant. "What I give her is hers. What I don't give, she cannot take."
Watching that smug, glittering grin, Zhao Rong found himself nodding along. Overbearing to the bone — there was the Zhao Yu he knew.
And perhaps it was age, or perhaps his father's death: on top of the arrogance the boy had learned to think — had even made a friend of Fang Shaobai.
Zhao Rong could finally, truly, set the Westguard Manor in his hands. "Tomorrow the Manor holds your father's memorial rite. After that you move into the main compound and take the Manor's seat in form as well as fact."
Wang Yu privately exhaled. Scraped through again.
Then Zhao Rong added, "And once your year of mourning is done, I'll see the weddings held — you, Li Yunxiu, and Miss Qianqian."
Wang Yu stopped short, and raised the question once more. "About Miss Qianqian. What exactly is her story?"
"Your father brought her home himself. The daughter of an old friend, he said." Zhao Rong shrugged slowly. "Which old friend, he never told me — he never even told me her surname. All he said was: once she marries into the Zhao family, she is Zhao family.
I assumed a girl that soft-natured would be bullied within a month. Instead her mind is steel and she reads people like ledgers — inside half a year the whole staff respects her. You saw her cross wits with Li Yunxiu today: silk outside, needles inside, and she gave up not one inch."
Wang Yu nodded along. So — the fabled green tea. The white lotus in the flesh.
Zhao Rong chuckled. "Works out neatly, though, doesn't it? Let Miss Qianqian hold the ring against Li Yunxiu. Keeps the consort's hands pleasantly full — she can spare some attention from the three prefectures' government for a consort's proper duties."
And he tipped Wang Yu a wink — which answered, once and for all, the question of where Zhao Yingjie's walking-around supply of passion incense and bliss powder came from.