Patriarch Lin Zhen stood three paces ahead of his carriage already, the long sword half drawn at his hip. Elder Ren was at his shoulder, posture old and patient and entirely unsurprised.

Lin Zhen’s voice arrived at the volume of a patriarch who had decided this conversation was going to be on the record.

"Elders of the sect. What is the meaning of this. I cannot read in your faces the welcome that brothers owe their patriarch on his return, and I have not heard the courtesy of an escort. Speak."

A voice answered from the road ahead.

The figure who had been waiting at the mouth of the pass since the carriage had first slowed walked forward into the open. The hood came down. The robe of Skyedge, the trim of senior elder threaded across the collar, the pin at the shoulder.

Elder Bao.

"Patriarch." His voice carried the soft rust of an old man who had been rehearsing this sentence in private for a long time. "We have decided that, for the good of the sect, things must change. From the day you left in pursuit of a cure for that bastard, everything has been in decline. Can you not see it? It is all your doing."

The word bastard dragged across the rain like a knife along a wet stone.

Lin Zhen did not give Bao the satisfaction of a flinch.

"Wu. Shan. Do you stand with Bao on this?"

Two more figures detached from the slope where the rain had been hiding them. Elder Wu, smaller and drier, the elder who had argued against Lin Xuan’s elevation in the council chamber. Elder Shan, broader, with the broken-knuckled hands of a man who had cultivated his way through politics and not through combat.

Neither of them answered.

The silence each of them maintained said everything the other two had not needed to.

Elder Ren stepped forward beside his patriarch. His voice came lower than Lin Zhen’s, colder, and carried the particular bitterness of a senior elder who had eaten meals at the same table as the three men in front of him for thirty years.

"How dare you. The three of you. I called you my brothers in council for longer than half a generation. I have prayed beside you when the sect was sick. I have gone hungry beside you when the sect was hungry. And this — this — is what you put on at the end of it?"

The Mei-elders did not answer that either. The robes they wore answered for them.

A thick ground-shaking bolt of lightning came down outside the pass — one of those fat strikes the high country threw in the bad weeks of the rainy season — and lit the rim of the slopes above the road in a single white instant.

In that white instant, the rim of the slopes filled in.

Forty disciples in the dark plum-violet robe of the Blood Fang Sect, red collar at the throat, crouched along the ridge in the practiced posture of skirmishers waiting for a signal.

And at the front of them — already on his feet, already smiling without the use of any part of his face that had once been there — Cao Yan.

The flask of wine was gone. The slouch was gone. The man who had sprawled across a couch in a brothel three weeks earlier and complained about the patience of imperial errands was wearing the operational posture of a Foundation Establishment cultivator who had not been allowed field work in fifteen years and was about to be paid in something more useful than coin.

Lin Zhen’s eyes did not widen.

"Cao Yan."

The patriarch had not seen the man in fifteen years. Fifteen years had not improved either of them in the other’s estimation.

"So the pigeon arrived after all."

Madam Mei stepped out from behind the second carriage at the exact angle of a piece moving into the square it had been placed for. The hood she had been wearing for two days came down. The rain found her hair within a breath, and the polite first-wife mask she had worn for the entirety of the journey did not survive contact with the first drop.

What replaced it was calm. Not triumph. Which was worse.

"It seems," she said, addressing the rain and not her husband, "that it did."

Lin Zhen watched her for one whole breath. The disappointment that arrived across his face was not the bright disappointment of a betrayal newly discovered. It was the older, slower disappointment of a man who had been carrying the proof of this conversation inside his sleeve since before they had left Yuncheng, and who had hoped, all the way to the rim of this pass, that he would be allowed to be wrong. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

He had not been wrong.

The door of the second carriage opened.

Lin Kai stepped down onto the wet stone. The heirloom blade was at his hip. The rain found his shoulders the moment they cleared the carriage roof. His face was the face of a young master who had not understood until this exact second how many of the conversations of his life had been rehearsed by somebody other than him.

He brought his attention to his mother. Voice flat. Voice cracking down the middle of the flat.

"Mother. What are you doing?"

Madam Mei turned to him then.

For the first time since she had stepped into the rain, the calm on her face softened into something maternal. It reached her mouth, touched her voice, and died before it could become warmth.

"Lin Kai," she said, gently enough that the rain seemed louder around the name. "With this, everything will be right again. Your mother will guide the sect. The men who bled Skyedge dry will be removed. You will stand where you were always meant to stand, and you will no longer need to worry about that bastard who came into our house from nowhere and stole what should have been yours."

Lin Kai stared at her.

The rain ran down his face. He did not wipe it away.

"You are going to kill Father?"