He had not crossed the threshold of the eastern wing in years.

Two of those years had been spent on a sickbed. The months since had filled themselves with one emergency after another, until he could not honestly say when he had last been a son inside his own father’s residence rather than the boy carrying the sect across his shoulders.

The corridor was the same. Lacquered wood. The faint smell of pine resin from the floor polish someone still kept up to standard. A pair of doves cooing in the courtyard outside the latticed windows.

A maid in grey met him at the side of the inner garden, eyes widening for a half-second before her face composed itself.

"Young Master."

"Tell them I’m coming, if they need a beat to prepare."

She bowed and vanished ahead of him.

By the time he reached the receiving room she had the sliding door already open and was stepping aside.

Two women looked up from a low tea table.

Madam Yu, second wife, posture straight, robe a soft pearl grey. Her face moved only at the eyes when she registered him.

Madam Lin Hua, third wife, lighter blue, younger, half-rising before she remembered her own dignity and stayed where she was. Her smile arrived before her words did.

"Xuan."

"Mother Yu. Mother Lin Hua."

He inclined his head to each. Lin Hua waved a hand at the empty cushion across from her.

"Sit. The tea is fresh."

On the rug under the window, a small figure had gone very still mid-arrangement of wooden animals.

She was perhaps as tall as his knee. Two messy buns on the top of her head. Round cheeks. A nose that had clearly been involved in something dusty very recently. She was holding a carved wooden tiger with one paw missing.

She stared at him with the open, undisguised assessment of a five-year-old.

He sat across from Lin Hua. Lin Hua poured tea into a third cup and slid it toward him.

"You came."

"I have two weeks before I leave. I should spend some of them here."

Madam Yu’s voice arrived low and measured. "It has been a while, Xuan."

"Too long. I owe both of you a proper visit."

The little one on the rug made the decision she had been making since he walked in. She stood up. She walked across the room with the absolute purpose of a person twenty years older than she was. She arrived at the edge of the table. She presented the wooden tiger with both hands.

"Brother. This is the tiger. He bites the bad ones."

He took the tiger with the same gravity she had offered it.

"He looks like a serious tiger."

"He is."

"Does he bite all the bad ones, or only the worst ones?"

She thought about it. Her face did the small frown of a child making policy.

"All of them. But the worst ones he bites twice."

"Sounds like a good tiger to have around."

He turned the little figure over in his palm. A paw missing on the back left. Someone had tried to glue it on. The glue had given up.

"What is his name?"

"He doesn’t have one." She tilted her head. "Do you want to give him one?"

"You give him one. He’s your tiger."

She thought again, very hard.

"Xiao Hu."

Little Tiger. Xuan kept his face professional.

"Strong name."

She nodded once. He had passed whatever test she had been administering. She climbed onto the cushion beside him without asking, in a way that made it clear she had decided he was now part of the seating arrangement, and began to line up the rest of her animals along the edge of the table.

A wooden bear. A wooden horse. A wooden bird that might have been a duck before someone broke its beak.

Lin Hua watched her daughter without saying anything for a heartbeat. The look on her face was the one Su Han had described to Lin Zhen weeks ago, when Lin Zhen had quietly agreed with him: a parent’s feeling for a daughter ran on a different rail.

It was Lin Hua who opened the next subject. Soft, but no hesitation in it.

"Xuan. About your trip."

He looked up. The wooden bear in his hand paused mid-stride along the table edge.

"Looks like father has been telling you."

Madam Yu’s voice arrived clear.

"Your father does not hide these things from us, Xuan. He knows we are discreet, he also knows we care about the sect, truly."

He nodded. He had expected nothing less and he liked hearing it confirmed anyway.

Lin Hua leaned a hand on the table.

"Is it dangerous?"

He weighed the version of the answer they deserved.

"It is. That mine has been in Blood Fang hands for two years. Whatever they have built inside it, they have built it to keep. But we are well prepared. Father comes with us. If we get one of the two mines they took from us back, the sect can breathe again."

Yu held his eyes a beat longer than polite required.

"Your father trusts you. He does not say that easily."

"I know."

Lin Hua set her cup down. The cup rang very quietly against the wood.

"Then come back safe, Xuan. That is all we are asking. Come back. And bring your father back."

"That is the plan."

Yu exchanged a look with Lin Hua, the look shared between two women who had agreed in advance who would say the next thing. Lin Hua took the weight.

"There is one more thing. Before you go."

He had a feeling he knew what it was. He waited anyway.

"Lin Kai. He has not come out of his room. He will not eat. He speaks to no one. I have gone to his door three times. Madam Yu has gone twice. Each time we have asked him to open it. Each time he has told us that we are not his mother and that we should leave."

Yu took the rest, gently.

"We do not know what else to do, Xuan. He is not our son in blood, but he is not a stranger either. We have raised him in the same house since he was small. We are asking you to try. We do not think he will open the door for us again."

On the cushion beside Xuan, Yueyue had paused the wooden bear mid-step. She was looking at her mother. Five-year-old eyes are very accurate. She had understood that the room had become a different room.

A small voice.

"Brother Lin Kai is going to be okay?"

The room held its breath.

Xuan turned to her. He came down again to the level she was at. He set the wooden bear carefully on the table. He put his hand on the top of her head and smoothed the hair where the bun would not catch it.

"I am going to go talk to him, Yueyue. Don’t you worry. He is going to be okay."

She studied him for the length of a careful breath. Children read adults better than adults give them credit for. She decided. She believed him. She smiled — small, complete — and went back to her wooden animals.

Xuan straightened.

"I will go to him before I leave," he said to the table. "You have my word."

Yu inclined her head.

"Thank you, Xuan."

He finished his tea. He stood. Yueyue, without looking up, lifted the wooden tiger and waggled it at him in a small salute. He gave her two fingers back.

"Stay close to your mother, Xiao Hu."

The little snort she made could have meant anything.

He left the room.

Outside, in the corridor, he did not turn west toward Lin Kai’s wing. Lin Kai could wait one more night. There was a piece of the plan that could not.

He turned for the upper paths.

The climb up to Silent Peak loosened his shoulders. By the time he reached his own pavilion the lanterns were lit along the eaves and the bamboo on the slope was breathing in the evening wind.

Wei Tianming was on the practice platform. Short hair. Pale blue eyes. Grey training robe, sleeves rolled. He was running the third form of the Nine Dragons breathing catechism on his own count.

He stopped mid-cycle when he saw Xuan come up the steps.

He inclined into the half-bow he had not yet stopped feeling the need to give.

"Young Master. You need me?"