Lin Kai’s head moved a fraction. He lifted his face from the mud and the rain went into his open mouth and he closed it without registering the cold.

What he received from looking up was a wider picture than he had let himself receive in the last twenty minutes.

To the right, his father — Patriarch Lin Zhen — was finishing a man whose face Lin Kai had been told stories about as a child, the nose-less Blood Fang elder his father had cut in White River fifteen years ago. The story he had grown up hearing as a cautionary tale was now playing out three carriages away from his own knees.

At the back of the pass, Elder Ren was holding his side with a hand that was missing the other arm above the elbow.

The Skyedge guards were down to fewer than half. Han Liang’s body had been the first he had registered earlier. There were others now too. He had grown up with most of those names.

The Blood Fang disciples — forty of them when the lightning had lit the rim — were moving in three coordinated wedges across the road. They were attacking everyone in plum-violet’s path.

Everyone except him.

Everyone except his mother.

The Blood Fang were passing him at arm’s reach and going around. They had been told.

’Oh no.’

The second question came up. The harder question.

’My father has never treated us differently. Not once. I have known this since I was eight. I have just chosen to forget it because it was easier to forget than to look at it. He has loved Xuan and me the same. He has corrected Xuan harder because Xuan was the one being readied for the seat. I have known.’

’Why are the Blood Fang attacking the convoy?’

’Why are they avoiding me?’

’Why are they avoiding my mother?’

A long, cold inhalation through his nose. The rain into his lungs the right way for the first time in the hour.

’What has my mother done?’

’Why are Skyedge elders attacking us. Why is any of this happening at all.’

’It is not because of Xuan. It cannot be because of Xuan.’

’I have hated him from the cliff. I took advantage when they crippled him. I watched that bright face fade into ruin across two years and I told myself it was the universe putting the right son in the right place.’

’And now he is back. Not just like before. More brilliant than he had been before.’

’And the universe is not the one doing any of this to him. My mother is. My mother. My mother has been doing it to him from the start.’

The thought repeated itself three times because the truth of it kept slipping off the surface of his head and refusing to be held. But the third time, he held it.

He held it.

Lin Xuan moved with Cloud Step — a pace that became air. Where his foot had been on the wet stone, a silver point of light the size of a coin held itself a hand’s height above the ground, lit with the small unhurried glow of something that had no intention of going anywhere.

First star.

He moved again. Four paces in a diagonal that Mei could not follow because Mei was still holding the last-card posture and the last-card posture did not permit lateral mobility. The second silver point appeared a hand’s width off her right hip.

Second star.

Third behind her left shoulder. Fourth at the crown of her head, completing the cup of the dipper.

Mei understood what he was doing on the fourth.

Her face changed. The face of a woman who had read the right scrolls in her father’s library at sixteen and knew that the Seven Stars of Beidou was a technique you survived only if your own card was bigger than the constellation.

She could not stop preparing her own technique. If she dropped it now, she had nothing.

Fifth star a step in front of her chest. The handle began.

Sixth at the throat.

Seventh two paces past her, suspended in air a finger’s height above the wet stone.

The air between the seven points filled. Hairlines of silver light crossed point to point, painting the dipper above and around her in the exact pattern of the constellation people had been looking up at for as long as people had been looking up.

"Beidou," someone said in the back of the pass — one of the disciples — recognising it the same heartbeat a name became a description.

Lin Xuan brought Plain Steel across in a horizontal arc at the height of the lowest silver thread. The blade crossed the first thread.

The other six activated simultaneously.

Seven cuts arrived in Madam Mei from seven angles in the time of one heartbeat.

She released her own card in the same instant. There was no name to the technique. It was simply every last reserve she had left inside her body discharged outward in a radial wave of dense air — a shove that did not cut, did not pierce, only pushed, in all directions at once, with the full furious despair of a woman who was not going to be ended by a constellation if she could help it.

The seven Beidou cuts entered her body.

Her radial wave hit Lin Xuan square in the chest and threw him six paces backward.

The silver stars began going out one by one.

He landed on his side in the mud near the carriages, Plain Steel still in his hand, the air gone out of his lungs in a flat punched-out breath.

Three Blood Fang disciples — the leading edge of a wedge that had been charging the line beside him — were already in motion above his head, blades coming down.

Lin Xuan did not rise.

From where he lay, he swept Plain Steel horizontally across the level of three pairs of ankles.

The cut crossed all three sets of bone at once. Three pairs of feet separated from three pairs of legs. The three Blood Fang fell sideways with a single coordinated sound that was less a scream than a collective gasp of bodies that had not finished understanding what had been taken from them.

Lin Xuan rolled into a crouch. Plain Steel rose. Three short strokes — neck, neck, neck — and the three of them were finished before they could begin to bleed on their own time.

He came up onto his feet.

He turned toward where Madam Mei had been.

And she was not where she had been.