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Before she enters the tent, the Dowager Empress Jing has a word with the soldiers standing guard, once they recover from the first shock of seeing her.
They all know her, of course, if only from a distance, but they have never seen her in this guise. Gone are the immense headdresses and flowered robes; gone is the Empress, and in her place is a lowly physician, free to wander the country for a week or two. Free to wander even into an army encampment, since a doctor is always welcome anywhere, but especially on the field of war. Of course she still has an entourage. Jingyan insisted; she has sent them to work in the field hospital, where they may be of more use than following her here.
The soldiers bow to her, clearly unsure if they should prostrate themselves or not. She smiles, asks after their health, and gives a little packet of tea to the one who serves as cook, judging from his stained sleeve. “This will do him good,” she says, and the soldier tries to bow again, but she stops him.
Then she enters, unannounced, alone, silk robes whispering along the rush matting on the floor.
When she wears her white embroidered silks, she knows it makes people uneasy. It makes them keep their distance, and their eyes flit away as if she were a ghost. At court, it was a way for her to protect herself.
She hasn’t needed to wear white silk since Jingyan rose to the throne, but today, she is wearing six layers of it. Too rich for a funeral, but embroidered sparingly, on the bottom hem alone.
Mei Changsu notices immediately, of course. His eyes don’t flit away; his eyes scan her, and a single blink is all that he allows himself.
“Are you well?” he asks her when the formal greetings are done with and tea has been served, in his soft voice that barely carries any inflection, as if he’s asking for politeness’ sake.
She smiles at him, but not fully. Not quite her true smile, the one she reserves for intimates. “Oh, yes,” she says, and watches Mei Changsu pour her tea with a beautiful languid gesture. A trained courtesan could not have done better. “And you?”
He gives her one of his best bland-faced looks. “Oh, yes.” He doesn’t look terrible, all things considered. And there are so many things: the snow, the wind, the battles, the immense effort of directing an army this size, the poison still running rampant in him, and the stubbornness of his will to live. It is that last thing she is counting on.
The tea falls into the cup with a sound like rain.
“I wish I could say the same for my son,” she says, at the precise moment when the teapot descends from its elegant trajectory to meet the table. The teapot is cast iron, and it hits the table with a thunk.
Mei Changsu stares at her. Pale, he is always pale, but now he is bleached bone-white. “I’ve had no reports—”
She picks up her cup and sips delicately of the chrysanthemum tea she brought. It is cooling and calming. She doesn’t need calming, but Mei Changsu might. She is about to administer a medicine that the patient will find disagreeable.
The patient looks fevered, at the moment. “What is wrong with Jingyan?”
His eyes are wide and pleading, and his hand scrabbles at his sleeve. He looks like the nephew she lost and regained, in this moment, even if his features are nothing like. Distraught, overset, and taken off guard enough that he’s letting her see it. Jingyan, not His Majesty.
“A mortal wound,” she tells him plainly.
The tent is large, but hardly soundproof. When Mei Changsu makes a sound like a dying swan and collapses against his low chair, it is Fei Liu who hurtles in first, followed by several guards, who stumble to a halt in the middle of the room, looking startled and then obscurely disappointed, as if they expected there to be more blood.
Mei Changsu waves them away without looking at them, but Fei Liu wraps himself around him and looks up into his face worriedly. “I’m—all right,” Mei Changsu whispers, though he looks grey as willow bark.
“Su-gege?” Fei Liu tugs at his sleeve, insistent.
Mei Changsu’s lips compress tightly. “Go play.”
Fei Liu looks mulish, but he leaves the tent at last, his shoulders rounded and his feet dragging. He throws her a wary look over his shoulder, the first time he has paid any attention to her, and she smiles at him. Maybe she can bring him some pastries, later. She could always tell from the disarray left behind that it was not Mei Changsu who emptied the boxes.
She sips her tea and listens to horses neighing outside. When she returns her gaze to Mei Changsu, she catches him in the moment where his wits return to him.
“You have never been cruel,” he says, pitching his voice low. “If Jingyan were ill, you would not come to me like this. You would not make me ask.”
She smiles. “I thought the same of you, once upon a time.”
Another sip of tea to let him absorb that. She looks around the tent, at the racks of weaponry, the armor on its stand. “You promised him you would return,” she says mildly. “You said you were only going to war as a strategist, not as a warrior on the battlefield.”
He sputters, following her gaze. “I’m sharing the tent with General Meng, his belongings—”
She watches him over the rim of her cup. “Yet the soldiers are calling you Field Marshal.” Beneath his immense fur cloak, folds of white linen peek out at his neckline—the simple dress of a soldier, to be worn under armor for ease of movement.
Mei Changsu swallows his next words, tugs the cloak higher, and looks at her in a baffled outrage that reminds her so suddenly, so strongly, of the boy she knew that it takes everything she has to keep still. To keep herself from reaching out to him.
At last he says, “There is nothing wrong with Jingyan, is there.”
She sips her tea, and lets him wait.
“Is there.”
“Not yet.”
He is on his guard, now. He doesn’t ask what she means by that, but his hand strays to a loose thread on his sleeve and pulls at it.
She sighs, looks down. “There are wounds that even the best medicine cannot reach.” She looks up again, slowly, inexorably, and meets Mei Changsu’s gaze. One would almost expect to hear the sound of swords clashing. In the end, he looks away first, as if he already suspects what is coming.
“I spoke to Lin Chen,” she tells him.
Mei Changsu blows out an exasperated breath. “I should never have let him enlist. What did that madman tell you?”
“He says he could keep you alive, if you chose to let him. For years, maybe decades.”
Mei Changsu shakes his head. “There are more important things than clinging to life at all costs. When we ride out tomor—” His hand begins to sketch a figure into the air.
“You can win this battle, I know.” She interrupts him mid-word, mid-gesture, and he blinks. He is probably not used to being interrupted, especially not by court ladies with calm manners and a tranquil temperament. And yet he should know that the mild, scholarly types are the ones to be wary of. “You can win it as a strategist, not from the vanguard. It isn’t worth spending your life on a single victory.”
“I spent thirteen years of my life on the Chiyan case,” Mei Changsu hisses. “Isn’t that enough? Can’t I make one choice to please myself? Spend my life how I choose?”
“Of course you can. You can please yourself by going out in a blaze of glory,” she agrees. “And in doing so, deal Jingyan a grief so large that he will never recover from it. An easy trade.”
Mei Changsu looks spitting mad, now, enough to abandon all his hard-won graces, all his whisper-quiet stillness. “Of course he will recover—he recovered the last time I died, didn’t he?”
In the silence that follows, she lets him listen to the callous echo of what he just said, and he dips his head in shame.
“He did not,” she tells him. “I lost my son, then. Only in the past year have I seen him come back to life.”
The silence is longer, now. He watches her face, clearly trying to detect a lie, an exaggeration, and failing. Struggling with it, but not denying her truth.
“This mother knows her son,” she says, so softly. Aware of the painful echo, of the words Prince Qi spoke before he died. “You have not seen him in all those years, but I have. He was like a frozen lake, where the ice goes all the way down into the deep.” Here in the North, surrounded by icy winter, she hopes the words hit home. “If he loses you now, he will never thaw again.”
Mei Changsu wipes a hand over his face, as if wiping away all feeling, but she can see it brimming in his eyes, in the tension of his mouth. He swallows, and it looks painful. “I can’t promise—”
“You promised my son you would return to him,” she says. “Lin Shu would keep his word, and the Divine Talent would find a way out of this war.” She levels him with a look. “I think you can do both. Honor both.”
Wordless for once in his life, Mei Changsu—Lin Shu—bows his head.
She smiles, and this time it is the real thing. This time she smiles at Xiao Shu, her darling headstrong nephew, who always wanted to have the last word and the biggest pastry.
“I’ll have to change all my plans,” Lin Shu mutters under his breath. “The battle order, the field dispositions—” He takes a distracted sip of his tea, and stares at his cup. “This isn’t my oolong.”
“Drink up,” she says sweetly. “It’s good for you.”