Chapter 266: Burial in a Borrowed City

The Empress buried the dead like a woman paying a debt she meant to be seen paying.

She could have done it small. A quiet plot outside the walls, a marker, a line in a record no one would ever read. That was how the empire usually treated the people who died holding it up, and Xuan had half expected it, because grand gestures cost coin a new throne could ill spare. Xinhua spent the coin. She had the ground cleared on the great processional avenue that ran up toward the palace, in the open, where every citizen coming back into their reclaimed city would have to walk past it, and she put her fallen there.

Bo Ren went into the first ground broken. There was an argument about that, briefly, from a court official who thought a guard commander belonged further down the order of precedence, and Xinhua ended it in about four words that left the man studying his own shoes. Bo Ren had held the anchor. Bo Ren went first. She did not explain the second sentence, and the official had the sense not to ask what anchor.

Xuan stood at the graveside and did not speak, because he’d already said the only thing he had to say to Bo Ren, up on a terrace, with the man still warm. What he did instead was watch the guard the old commander had led fold in around the grave without being ordered to, men who’d followed him into a dead city and out the far side, and understood that a certain kind of loyalty outlives the man who earned it. That was Bo Ren’s real monument, standing there in worn armor with their jaws set. The stone would come later. The men were the eulogy.

They put Luo down beside the Pavilion’s other three, whose bodies had been sent for and brought in, so that the four of them lay together the way they’d lived, and the Pavilion buried its own with its own rites, which were old and spare and had a great deal of silence in them.

Yan Wuji spoke over them. Xuan hadn’t expected him to, and half wished he hadn’t, because there is nothing harder to watch than a man that empty finding words anyway.

"I keep wanting to apologize to them," Yan Wuji said. He wasn’t looking at the graves. He was looking at his own hands. "That’s the stupid thing. Not grieve. Apologize. As if I owe them an explanation for still breathing." He turned one hand over. "Shen recruited me. Did you know that? I was an arrogant little disaster and he was the only elder who thought there was a swordsman in there worth the trouble. Fang taught me the forms I beat you with. Jin used to lose to me on purpose at cards so I’d stop sulking after a bad training day, and he thought I never noticed, and I never told him I did." His voice held level by a thread. "Luo just followed me. Everywhere. Since we were boys. I told him this war would make our names."

He stopped. Nobody filled it.

"It did, I suppose," he said finally. "It’ll make theirs. Carved in a stone, like she promised. That’s a name." He let out a breath that shook once and steadied. "I’d have preferred them loud and useless and alive. But nobody asked me."

Xuan put a hand on the back of his neck, brief, the way you’d steady a man on bad ground, and Yan Wuji let him, and that was the end of it. There was nothing to fix. Some things you only stand next to.

The rest of the burials went through the day, sect by sect, each with its own rites, Thunder Lotus and the Phoenix Mirror and Frostmoon laying their dead into the same open ground so that the fallen of five sects went into the earth of a capital none of them had been born in, side by side, which was its own strange kind of unity. Ru Zhao wept openly and unashamed over his two elders, a big man undone, and nobody thought less of him for it. Su Han did not weep, because Frostmoon didn’t, but he stood over his own for a long time with his eyes closed, and that said the same thing in a colder language.

Lin Zhen found Xuan in the middle of it, drew him a little apart, and looked at him with the flat assessing worry of a man who’d raised him.

"You’re grey," his father said. "Not tired-grey. Wrong-grey. I’ve seen enough cultivators wreck themselves to know the difference." He didn’t make it a question. "What did you do to yourself up there?"

"Something I’d do again," Xuan said. "And something a healer should probably look at before I promise you it’s fine."

"Then we find a healer, and we do it now, before you fall over at a funeral and give the court something to gossip about." Lin Zhen’s tone did not leave room. "You’ve spent this whole war spending yourself and telling everyone you’d settle up later. Later’s here. Sit down and let someone count the damage."

Xuan didn’t have the strength left to argue, which was answer enough on its own.

The healer was the best the palace had, an imperial physician with decades in her hands and no patience for a patient’s pride. She had Xuan sit, and she worked over him with qi and with touch and with a long, narrowing silence that Xuan liked less the longer it went. Lian stood at the wall with her arms folded and did not pretend to be anywhere else, because she’d nursed him through worse and had no intention of being managed out of the room now.

"Well," the physician said at last, sitting back. "You’re alive, which given the state of your meridians is closer to an insult than a comfort. What did you channel? And don’t tell me a sword art. I’ve seen sword arts. This is what’s left of a man who ran a Nascent Soul-grade release through a Foundation frame more than once."

"That’s about the size of it," Xuan said.

"Then you should be dead, and you’re not, and I’m going to be professionally annoyed about that until I understand it." She pressed two fingers below his sternum, and Xuan kept his face still through it. "Here’s the part you won’t like. Most of this heals. Rest, good pills, time, and you’ll cultivate again clean. But there’s a channel here, deep, that tore in a way channels aren’t meant to. That one doesn’t come back. You’ll carry it."

"Carry it how," Xuan asked.

"You’ll feel it in weather. You’ll feel it when you overreach. And there’s a ceiling on how hard you’ll ever be able to push that particular kind of power again, because the road it used to travel is scarred shut." She said it plainly, a professional delivering a professional truth. "You’re young. You’ll adapt around it. But you asked what it cost, and that’s the honest answer. You spent something up there you don’t get back."

The room was quiet a moment. Lian’s arms had unfolded at some point, and her face had gone carefully blank in the way that meant she was upset and refused to hand anyone the satisfaction.

"Fair trade," Xuan said, and meant it. "I know exactly what I bought with it."

"They always say that." But the physician’s hard mouth softened a fraction. "Rest. I mean actual rest, not the version where you rest by taking on a slightly smaller catastrophe. I’ll leave pills and a regimen with your maid, who looks like the only person here you’ll actually listen to."

"He won’t listen to me either," Lian said, from the wall. "But I’ll make him take the pills. I’ve got years of practice getting things into him he doesn’t want."

The physician left. Lian crossed the room, took the folded paper of instructions, read it once, and put it away, and looked at Xuan with an expression he’d known most of his life, the one that had watched over a dying boy and decided he wasn’t allowed to die.

"A scarred channel," she said. "You couldn’t have come out of this with a limp like a normal person."

"Where’s the fun in normal."

"I’ll thank you not to make jokes about it." She said it lightly, but her hands weren’t quite steady folding the paper away, and they both let that go unmentioned. "Take the pills. Sleep. You’ve earned a stretch of doing nothing, and I intend to see you do it badly and complain the whole way."

"You always did know how to sell a holiday."

That got the ghost of a real smile out of her, and it was worth the effort it took to reach for it.

When she’d gone, and the day’s burials were done, and the great avenue held its new dead under a sky that had gone back to being ordinary, Xuan sat alone again with the quiet in his own head and tried the door he kept trying.

’Mira. They told me today I tore something that doesn’t grow back. Thought you’d want to know before some panel does it for you. You always liked delivering the bad news yourself.’

Nothing answered. The silence had a shape by now, familiar and wrong, a held breath that had gone on too long to still be a breath. She’d been under since the seal closed, and every hour of it wound the worry in his chest one turn tighter, because Mira was never quiet, and quiet from her had only ever meant one thing, and he did not want to learn what that thing was.

He sat with it. There was nothing else to do but sit with it. And Xuan, who had buried good people all day and been told he’d carry a wound the rest of his life and taken both of those better than the silence, waited on a voice that would not come, and did the only thing left that felt like keeping faith, which was to refuse, entirely, to give up on it.