Mei had used the seconds Lin Xuan had spent against the three Blood Fang to do something he had not anticipated.

She had crossed the road and reached her son.

She was kneeling at his level in the mud, the silvered blade pressed against her own thigh for support, the seven cuts of Beidou painting her robe in colours her body did not have enough left to lose. She had lowered her free hand and placed it against the side of Lin Kai’s face. The hand was warm against his cheek through all of it.

"Lin Kai. Son. Look at me. Look at me."

Lin Kai brought his face up.

For the first time in the entire combat, he saw his mother.

For years, she had been the fixed point of his world. The person who told him when to stand, when to bow, when to hate, when to smile while hatred sat behind his teeth. He had mistaken that certainty for love because children did not have better names for chains when the chains are warm. Now she was kneeling in the mud, bleeding through silk, and asking him to become the last blade in her hand.

"Listen. We don’t have time. Your father is hurt, Elder Ren has lost an arm, the Blood Fang are about to break the line. If you stand up now, son — if you cross the road, just one cut — we still leave this pass with the seal. One cut for your mother. Help me, Lin Kai. Help me." Her free hand moved from his cheek to the back of his neck, the hand pulling him gently toward her shoulder the way a mother gathered a child. "Help me. Help your mother."

Behind her words, the second round of the arithmetic finished landing inside Lin Kai’s head.

’Why was I not enough? Why was an adopted son in the seat where I was supposed to be?’

’It was not love.’

’It was control. She has wanted Skyedge from before I was born. Father was in the way. Xuan was in the way. I was in the way too — until I could be made useful enough to swing a blade in the right direction at the right hour.’

’She has been raising me as a weapon. The entire time.’

His right hand — the hand she had brushed at the wrist when he was four to teach him how to hold a spoon — moved down through the mud beside his knee. It closed on the hilt of the sword she had given him on his fourteenth birthday. The Mei family heirloom from the southern branch. The only sword he had ever owned in personal name. The gift she had presented across the council table with both hands.

Mei was still talking.

"...we leave through the side road, the carriages cannot follow, my brother’s people will meet us at the third inn south of the river, you will not need to lift a sword again, I have arrangements for everything, all I need is that one—"

Lin Kai lifted the gift sword.

He placed it through the centre of his mother’s torso.

The blade went in with the small wet ease that all true cuts went in with when the man holding the hilt had been practising against straw posts since he was six. It found the space between her ribs the way her own breath would have found the same space if she had still been alive enough to take it. It travelled forward through her heart and exited an inch from her spine.

Mei kept talking for half a heartbeat — the body did not yet know. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

Then the body knew.

Her face lowered. She saw the hilt in her own chest. Her eyes lifted to her son’s face, and what she found there was not the boy she had been raising for twenty years to be her weapon. What she found was a young man who had finally caught up to the truth she had been building around him.

"...son."

Lin Kai held her at the shoulders with his free hand. His voice came out quieter than the rain.

"I’m sorry, mother. You’ve had bad years. It’s better that you rest now." He kept the sword where it was. "I cannot kill my father. I cannot kill anyone for you. I think you have done this wrong."

A small inhalation through his nose, the kind a child made before saying something they had been holding inside for a long time.

"I am sorry for disappointing you these years. I hope you find peace in the heavens if they open for you."

She opened her mouth. Nothing came out of it but blood.

Her body lost its control. She fell forward, the full weight of a dying woman, against the chest of her own son, her arms going slack at her sides, her head landing in the hollow of his shoulder, her hair empty of every grand calculation it had been arranging for twenty years.

Lin Kai held her there.

The sword she had given him stayed inside her, the hilt still in his hand.

Lin Xuan crossed the wet stone toward them.

He did not run. He walked because he knew that running would not help anything anymore. Plain Steel hung at his side, the tip touching the mud in a thin trail.

He arrived three paces from where Lin Kai was sitting.

He did not come closer than that.

He did not speak.

He did not place a hand on his stepbrother’s shoulder.

Madam Mei lay against the chest of her only son. Her hair was dark with the rain and dark with what the rain was carrying out of her.

The Blood Fang formations had broken across the pass. The remaining Skyedge guards were finishing the disciples who had not yet finished dying. Lin Zhen had gone to one knee with his long sword in the mud. Elder Ren was holding the brachial line of the arm he no longer had.

The rain kept falling.