Lian and Wei were both still asleep on their benches.

Lin Xuan watched them with the small fondness of a man who had not yet decided whether to wake them. The carriage rocked gently. The rain on the roof had become a constant, almost a thought. Outside, the road carried on doing whatever the road was doing.

His mind drifted somewhere it had not visited in weeks.

A rainy afternoon in another country. A blanket. A windowpane streaked with water. A novel open on his knees, one of those novels that infuriated him in the small particular ways the wrong novel infuriated a particular kind of reader — sloppy worldbuilding, lazy protagonists, female characters written by men who had never met one — and which he kept reading anyway out of the mean little habit of needing something to be irritated by while the rain ran down a windowpane.

He had read more xianxia in his last two years on Earth than he liked to admit in mixed company. Living inside one had not improved his opinion of the genre.

’Being a professional hater on the internet,’ Lin Xuan thought, mostly at nobody, ’is not a job for amateurs. You earn that title. Effort. Dedication. A small private spreadsheet of grievances.’

Mira’s panel arrived at the edge of his attention, flat and unamused, the way her panel arrived when she had been listening to his entire reverie with the silent professionalism of a system who had already catalogued his Earth nostalgia approximately seven thousand times in two months.

[ Xuan. I have registered one — apologies, several presences around the carriages. They are along the rim of the pass on both walls. We are surrounded. ]

The reverie evaporated in the time of half a breath.

’So Madam Mei really did do something. Should I be worried? How bad is it?’

[ Not great. I recognize three of them. Strong enough to ping. You have already met them. ]

’Names.’

[ Skyedge sect elders. The Mei-faction. Bao. Shan. Wu. ]

Something close to a laugh climbed up Lin Xuan’s throat and did not have the energy to finish itself.

’Oh. The three who have spent every council session of my political life finding new ways to vote against my father and me. Almost poetic if you tilt your head.’

He let that breathe for a moment.

’What is the play? Killing me alone would be a small target for an operation this loud. Three elders means somebody is reaching for the seat of the sect itself.’

[ Possible, Xuan. But Madam Mei’s wick has been violet for a long time. The order could just as easily have come from a hand outside her own, and these three could be the price of a longer game. The probabilities are on both. ]

He drew the Soul Lamp out of his inner robe.

The lid lifted on its own — the lamp had started doing that since the night it had begun heating itself in his pocket. Inside the bronze, seven small flames burned in their row.

Five of them were red.

Lian. Wei. Lin Zhen. Elder Ren. Lin Kai — even Lin Kai, the flickering crimson of his stepbrother’s wick steadier than yesterday, but no less red for the steadiness. Five lives lit in the colour of warning.

One violet — Madam Mei, deep and patient, the contented violet of a piece on the board nearing the square it had been carved for.

One gold — Su Qingyue, somewhere on her own road across the continent, untouched, unaware.

The lid eased shut. The bronze went back inside his robe.

He turned to the bench across from him.

His left hand closed around Lian’s wrist. Her eyelids parted slowly, the way they parted on a maid who had been sleeping in stolen fragments since before Yuncheng. Her mouth began to shape a Young Master. Lin Xuan brought his free hand up and pressed two fingers across her lips, the other index lifting to his own. Lian’s mouth closed. She nodded. Her right hand found her sleeve without needing further instruction; the kitchen knife she had been carrying since the morning of the alley slid an inch into her palm.

He turned to Wei. The boy woke at a touch on the shoulder, the breath posture he had collapsed into still holding his hands palms-up across his knees. Wei understood the room before the room had to explain itself. His palms turned over. His sword came into them.

Lin Xuan kept his voice low, the volume of a man who had already accepted that the next ten minutes were going to be expensive.

"We are about to be under attack. Not yet — but we are surrounded. This is going to fall apart in minutes. Listen to me. Wei. You stay inside this carriage with Lian. You do not leave. I am trusting you with her."

Lian opened her mouth.

He cut her off before the syllable arrived.

"You are not only my maid, Lian. You are an alchemist with a Pure Jade Water Root and a body that Master Fu has been quietly elevating. Your life is worth something to the sect now in a way it was not before Yuncheng. Stay inside. That is an order."

Lian closed her mouth around the half-syllable. Bowed her head a fraction. Nodded again, slower this time.

Wei’s face had set into the firm, slightly pale composure of an apprentice receiving his first real instruction in the middle of his first real war. The young master who had pulled him out of a village had asked him to guard a life, and that was a sentence Wei was going to honour with the whole of him.

Plain Steel left the carriage wall and arrived in Lin Xuan’s hand without his consenting to the movement. He pushed the door open.

The rain came in.

The world outside had rearranged itself in the time he had spent inside the lamp. The carriages had all stopped. The fifteen sect guards riding flank had taken the defensive arc of men who had not yet been told what to point at but had decided to be ready when somebody finally did.