Every eye in Thousand Willows Manor converged on Wang Yu's table.
Set against what the Taihua Sect was to Hangu Prefecture, or the Great Vajra Temple to Daxing, the Westguard Manor's standing in the pure martial world ran a step lower — but the late prince Zhao Zheng had swept the northwest with one Fire Cloud Saber while holding fifty thousand troops, and the Manor was the de facto head of the three northwest prefectures all the same.
Zhao Zheng was dead; the arithmetic wasn't. A master was moving against Thousand Willows Manor — a dependency of the Westguard Manor. Did the Westguard Manor stand up for its own, or didn't it?
All the more so with the reigning Westguard Prince sitting in the hall in person. If he couldn't shield a vassal at his own table, men's hearts would start leaving the Manor by every gate.
Qianqian flicked one glance at Ding Jianshen; killing intent crossed her eyes and was gone.
Li Yunxiu's eyes narrowed a fraction. Thousand Willows Manor had just been entered into her little black book.
Zhao Yingjie's face simply fell. He knew what the couple behind that girl could do — the small taste he'd had suggested nothing less than his own father's level, and his father was the only Innate expert the Westguard Manor currently possessed!
So he pushed back his chair, rising to cut the Westguard Manor loose from the whole affair.
Before he got a word out, Wang Yu's raised hand stopped him. "Sit down. No hurry."
Pressing Zhao Yingjie back into his seat, Wang Yu nodded to Ding Jianshen and drawled, in his grandest manner: "Rest easy. While this prince sits here, no one bullies the Ding family."
Ding Jianshen's heart soared. He clasped fists, all solemnity: "Our thanks, Your Highness!"
Wang Yu nodded — and pitched his voice out over the courtyard. "The Dings eat their rice under this prince's hand. So long as the Dings sit straight and walk upright, whoever means to trample them steps over the Westguard Manor's threshold first!"
The wedding crowd thundered its approval.
"Of course," Wang Yu continued pleasantly, "privilege squares with obligation. If it were to turn out that the Dings had, say, conspired with bandits to butcher a household — made themselves enemies on purpose and then borrowed the Westguard Manor for a shield — well. The Manor keeps blades of its own, and they cut just as well."
The courtyard went very quiet.
Only Wang Yu kept smiling, and turned the smile on Yuan Feifei. "Just now you claimed the groom conspired with brigands, destroyed your family, and drove you off a cliff — and the Dings deny every word.
This prince is the Ding family's friend. Naturally I trust the Ding family's character. If you cannot produce proof, I shall have to treat your accusation as slander — spoken into the wind."
Yuan Feifei's voice came back cold. "And if I can produce it?"
Wang Yu's chin lifted, arrogance itself. "The Westguard Manor sits over the northwest: we govern three prefectures, we guard the trade road, and the Qishan Bandits and the desert raiders are our sworn enemies. If someone under my hand has been conspiring with bandits — you won't need to lift a finger. This prince cleans his own house."
Ding Jianshen's pulse was hammering now. "Your Highness — don't be taken in by her babbling! Thousand Willows sits in Longshan; how would we reach across to the Shanhe Circuit to conspire with the Thirty-Six Forts of Mount Taiheng? My son's martial arts are modest — where would he find the power to wipe out a household?!"
"Relax! I believe you!" Wang Yu waved at him soothingly. "It's because I believe you that she must be allowed to speak. Condemning her unheard would stain your good name.
When she fails to produce proof, Thousand Willows stands washed clean before a hundred witnesses; the Manor takes her lawfully; and your son carries no whisper of 'bandit-friend' or 'household-killer' to his marriage bed."
Ding Jianshen stood with his mouth slightly open, entirely unable to determine whether the prince truly believed in the Dings — or was digging their grave with a silver shovel.
The wedding guests, for their part, had suspected the Dings from the first sentence — but they were the Dings' friends, they'd never met this Yuan Feifei, and whatever the Dings had done had not been done to them. So they stood with the Dings, or at worst stood neutral. Not one leaned her way.
By rights, Wang Yu should have read it the same at first glance.
But the prince was young — and his reputation out of the capital was, well, what it was. Perhaps he genuinely was this much of a straw-stuffed fop.
Ding Jianshen wavered, caught his son's panicking face, hated it with all a father's heart, and cracked him across the back of the head — then forced his own composure. "Your Highness speaks justly. The Dings have done nothing to fear a knock at midnight. Let her show this proof — I should like to see it myself!"
That steadied Ding Xian too.
Yes — exactly. The alliance with the Taiheng greenwood, the extermination of the Yuans, the cliff — he'd shown his face for none of it, left not one trace. What proof could she possibly hold that pointed at him?
The thought put the smile back on his face, and he turned to comfort his bride.
The bride who had been at his elbow all this while... was gone.
Where—?
And from the courtyard, Yuan Feifei's voice, colder than ever: "You worked cleanly, I'll grant it. No tracks anywhere. But you moved against my family because you wanted something — and no tracks or not, the RESULT you kept.
My family's heirloom qin — Icespring's Cry — is sitting in your house!"
The hatred in her eyes had honed itself into twin sword-points. "Your Highness may search the Ding residence at leisure. Icespring's Cry has come down a hundred years: ice-crackle grain and water-ripple figure in the lacquer, a voice cold and clear as a mountain spring. One look is all it takes!"
Ding Xian's head snapped around. "Father—!"
Ding Jianshen's eyes were skittering. "The girl runs her mouth, Your Highness! That qin — I bought that qin half a year ago, on business in the Hexi Circuit — a chance find! She has caught wind of it somewhere and built this slander on top! I beg Your Highness to see clearly!"
The words were still coming when a chain of ear-splitting notes shrieked out of the rear compound.
"Well, well. The gentle and refined Madam Ziyu — creeping into someone's back court to burgle their valuables." The voice was honeyed, amused, and adder-mean. "And here I wondered what was groping about back here in the dark. A pity, a pity — Mei Yanqiu was a great mistress of her age, and look what the Thousand Sounds Sect has come to since she died."
A second voice answered — measured, gracious, and cold. "Rong Qingying. You are past fifty. Dressing up as a bride to gull a boy — does the shame truly not reach you?"
The honeyed voice snorted — and then came music that was neither quite human voice nor quite instrument, sound that slid hooks under the mind and pulled: joy, rage, grief, each emotion plucked like a string.
Around the courtyard, guests with shallow internal energy found their own faces betraying them — grinning, snarling, welling up — while the handful with real cultivation locked their minds and rode it out.
Then three qin notes — zheng! zheng! zheng! — broke the melody's spine.
"Gutong and Ziyu — body and shadow, as ever," the honeyed voice spat. "Two against one. Where's the skill in that?"
Yan Ziyu's reply carried a smile. "My husband merely declined to let you drag a courtyard of innocents into it — he has yet to raise a hand against you at all. Shall we dance the full three hundred exchanges and see?"
"Pah! With your man standing sentry? Come to the Thousand Sounds Pavilion and try me there, if you dare!" Rong Qingying's fury somehow stayed silk-soft to the ear.
"That," Yan Ziyu said pleasantly, "I would never dare."
In the next instant a red shadow crossed the sky — half the manor in a blink — and vanished over the western wall.
And then a woman in violet stood at Yuan Feifei's side, an old qin cradled in her arms: ice-crackle grain, water-ripple figure. She looked at Ding Jianshen without expression.
"Master Ding. Icespring's Cry was the qin of Yuan Shanggui himself — a master of his age, a hundred years gone. Since his death it has never left the Yuan family's keeping." Yan Ziyu's voice stayed level. "Where, exactly, did you say you bought it?"
Ding Jianshen had no answer. His heart had gone through the floor of the world.
Gutong and Ziyu. Names the whole jianghu bowed to — Zhao Zheng himself, alive, would have given them three parts of face. Their word was the proof. What could he say against it?
What was there to say? It was all true.
Zhao Yingjie gave his own cheek a soft slap and clicked his tongue, muttering, "Master Gutong and Madam Ziyu. Of course — I should have known!"
Wang Yu nodded once, and asked the air pleasantly: "Conspiring with bandits. Deceiving the Manor. What does that carry?"
Zhao Yingjie's answer came out cold. "Death."
"Let's not overreach ourselves," Wang Yu said mildly. "This is a jianghu grievance, and the Dings struck first. Give them to Miss Yuan."
Zhao Yingjie assented at once and clapped his hands. Four figures vaulted the courtyard wall into the main hall — two closing on Ding Xian and Madam Ding, two on Ding Jianshen.
Ding Jianshen's right arm snapped straight; a willow-leaf saber slid from his sleeve into his hand, and one flick of his wrist opened a screen of blade-petals that held all four plainclothes guards off him at once. He wheeled on Wang Yu, voice cracking: "Spare my family, Your Highness — the whole of the Ding estate goes to the Manor! Everything!"
Even now. Even NOW he was digging pits.
Because that offer was a bear trap with silk over it: refuse and let the family die, then absorb the Ding holdings afterward, and every small power in Longshan would shiver in its bed — today the Dings, tomorrow us? — and the Manor's name would rot exactly as if it had murdered them for the money.
Wang Yu's eyes had just begun to narrow when Li Yunxiu spoke from beside him, unhurried as an afternoon stream.
"Set your mind at rest, Master Ding. Guilt does not touch the innocent. The Ding properties will be conveyed intact to your collateral branches — your life's work will not fall to strangers."
The moral high ground, occupied without a shot. As for whether a collateral branch could actually hold Thousand Willows Manor — or would quietly sell it for a song and move somewhere far away — that, of course, was another question entirely.
Ding Jianshen's face went gray. Twice now he had lifted this young prince onto the fire, and twice the prince and his consort had stepped down off the flames and handed the coals back.
If he still didn't understand that the "trusting" Wang Yu had been digging his grave from the first kind word — then his decades in the jianghu had taught him nothing at all.
Nothing left. He knew it. Ding Jianshen loosed one roar, drove the four guards back a step — and lunged at Wang Yu, the willow-leaf saber opening into a whole drifting curtain of leaf-shaped light: the finest stroke of his life.
Even now, the stroke held back of its edge. He wanted Wang Yu alive and in hand. A hostage was the last road out for his family.
Wang Yu didn't move. Li Yunxiu didn't move; Qianqian didn't move. Zhao Yingjie didn't even move.
"Tsss—!"
A vicious whistle of split air, and a locust stone met the willow-leaf saber square — and snapped it in half.
A figure materialized behind Ding Jianshen; one hand closed on the center of his back; a pulse of internal energy sealed his acupoints; and the same motion flung him bodily out of the hall, to land in the courtyard dust at the feet of Yuan Feifei and Yan Ziyu.
The Manor's two hidden guards — one a master of darts, one of seizing-hands; first-rate men by any jianghu measure. Against a Ding Jianshen with his mind in pieces, it was hardly work at all.
Behind them, the other four put down Ding Xian and Madam Ding with a tap apiece and deposited them beside the patriarch.
On one side, Gutong and Ziyu, names that rang across the realm. On the other, the northwest's own ruling house. The two aligned — and the manor went silent as snowfall. The Dings' oldest friends examined their wine cups and said nothing at all.
Yuan Feifei looked to Yan Ziyu. Yan Ziyu nodded.
Then the girl wasted no more words. She drew her longsword and, one stroke each, put Ding Jianshen, Madam Ding, and Ding Xian to death where they lay.
She watched the father and son stop breathing — then flung the sword away with a sound that was half shriek, half sob, and collapsed into Yan Ziyu's arms, weeping as if her ribs would crack.
Wang Yu rose, gestured at the three empty places at the head table, and cupped his hands.
"Tonight's feast was laid for a Ding wedding. It appears to have become the feast of Miss Yuan's vengeance fulfilled — but a feast of celebration either way. Won't the three of you sit? We are, after all, celebrating."