The city had been muted since Huailing. Its streets were swept too clean, its lamps too obedient. The gates opened for me without cheering, without banners, without the drums that usually greet a prince who returns with victory.
Only a eunuch waited at the palace threshold, thin as a shadow. He bowed, voice dry as paper.
"His Excellency requests your presence."
Not the court. Not the ministers. Not even my sister's empty throne. Just the Lord Protector.
I followed the eunuch down the colonnade where the wind smelled of cooled iron. Soldiers saluted but did not meet my eye. Fear, when it is well-grown, bends necks without words.
The private council chamber was lit with two braziers. Father stood at the far end, his silhouette framed by the banners of our house. His shadow seemed too large for the room, as if the walls remembered when he had ruled from here without rival.
"Shut the door," he said.
The wood closed behind me with the sound of a verdict.
"You made a spectacle of Huailing," he said without turning. "You butchered men who had already surrendered. You left the streets running."
"They followed Wu Kang," I said. "They kept his gates shut until I opened them with fire."
He turned then, and his eyes were not sick anymore. They were the eyes that had sent men to die at the border and never apologized.
"You think I care that you opened the gates?" he said. "I care that you salted the earth behind you. I care that my house will now have to garrison a city full of widows and starving sons who dream of knives. Do you know what rebellion smells like? I do. I have fought it in five provinces. I buried a thousand rebels and fed the crows until the sky was black, and still I did not kill enough to keep their children from sharpening hoes into spears."
His voice cut like a sword through soft armor.
"You are not here to rule by fear, Wu An," he said. "You are here to keep the North breathing until the Emperor can sit the throne again."
I did not flinch.
"The Emperor is gone," I said. "You know it. The court knows it. Only Wu Kang knows where he sleeps. Until he wakes—or until we find him—I will not let this house look weak."
"You think slaughter makes us strong?"
"It makes us remembered," I said. "The South is watching. Zhou is watching from beyond the passes. If we let Huailing think rebellion has no cost, every city between here and the Boundary will weigh their chances. I burned Huailing so that no one else would try their luck."
His jaw worked once, the way it does before he strikes a table. But he did not strike.
"You sound like a man who has already lost the roof," he said.
I stepped closer. "Better a roof that leaks than one that caves and buries us all. If blood buys us a season, then I will spend until the ledger is satisfied."
For a moment, silence pressed against us. The brazier hissed.
"You have changed," Father said. "I sent you south to harden you, not to hollow you out."
"Perhaps both were necessary," I answered.
We stood facing one another, two iron stakes driven into the same ground. He looked at me as if weighing whether to strike me down now, before the thing inside me grew too large.
At last he turned away. "Wu Kang will be paraded tomorrow," he said. "Alive. The court will see that treachery is punished, but not by fratricide. Do you understand me?"
"Yes," I said.
But the thing under my ribs did not agree. It had been listening, patient as winter, and I could feel it shift as though tasting the thought of my brother's death and finding it sweet.
I left the chamber before my father could look into my face too long and see that I was not all the way his son anymore.
The night air tasted of ash. Shen Yue waited at the corner of the corridor where the moonlight pooled. Her expression was taut, her hair still bound from the campaign.
"What did he say?" she asked.
"That I am reckless," I said.
"Was he wrong?"
I looked past her to the courtyard where the cages of prisoners waited for the morning. "If he is wrong," I said, "then the city will thank me when it still has walls by next winter."
Her jaw tightened. "And if he is right?"
"Then the city will fear me enough to keep breathing."
She touched my arm once, then withdrew. She did not argue further. Perhaps she no longer knew whether she wanted to convince me or pray for me.
Later, I went down to the cells.
Wu Kang sat unbound, his wrists raw where the cords had rubbed, but his posture was easy. He smiled as I entered, a bloody grin that had nothing of brotherhood left.
"You've come to see whether I'll beg," he said.
"No," I said. "I've come to see if you'll speak."
"About the Emperor?" He laughed softly. "Even if I told you where he is, you wouldn't believe me."
"Try me."
He leaned his head back against the wall, eyes half-lidded. "He sleeps where no bell can wake him. When he rises, you will wish it had been my hand that woke him, not yours."
The silence under my ribs stirred. Not afraid. Curious.
"You talk like a priest," I said.
"I have had time to pray," he said. "Do you know what I prayed for? Not my life. Yours. That you live long enough to see the thing inside you take everything you love, one name at a time."
I said nothing.
He smiled wider, even as the blood dried at the corner of his mouth. "It has already started, hasn't it? You feel it when you close your eyes. That weight, that hunger."
I stepped closer until the torchlight cast both our shadows as one against the far wall.
"When the Emperor wakes," I said quietly, "you will be the first name the roof remembers to crush."
He did not stop smiling.
I left him there, laughing softly in the dark.
When I reached the courtyard, I stood alone under the moon until the chill sank through my armor. The silence inside me settled again, satisfied.
Tomorrow, the city would watch my brother marched in chains. And after that, we would begin to tear the land apart, brick by brick, until we found the Emperor — or until the roof fell.