Night had not lifted yet.

Lin Zhen had stabilized his son in a small back room of the Skyedge residence, the kind of room a sect kept for emergencies that did not need witnesses. The bleeding had stopped. The pulse had stopped wandering. The boy himself had not moved.

In the room beside it, with the same single oil lamp and the same stretch of pine-board floor, Su Qingyue had moved.

Her head turned a quarter on the pillow. Her hand opened against the blanket. The breath she drew in was deeper than any she had drawn since the sweet incense had come in through the air of an alley she did not entirely remember. Her eyes opened.

The first thing they found was a low ceiling. The second was a small lamp burning low on a bedside table that did not belong to a Frostmoon residence. The third was a boy in a bed three paces from her own, lying on his side, breathing slowly, with a strip of clean cloth wrapped around his ribs and the dark traces of dried blood at the corner of his mouth.

Lin Xuan.

She sat up.

The dizziness arrived a beat later than it should have. Her body had been told to sleep, and her body had slept, and waking up had cost her the next fifteen seconds. She braced one hand on the edge of the mattress and held the room in place until the room agreed to hold itself.

Then she stood up.

There was a chair beside Lin Xuan’s bed. A folded cloth across the back, a cup of water on the small table, a basin on the floor. Someone had been keeping watch from it until shortly before she woke. She picked up the cup, dipped a fresh corner of the cloth, and wiped the dried line of blood from the edge of his mouth before she let herself take the chair.

She tried to put together what she remembered.

A lane that bent strangely. A wall that should not have been there. A sweetness in the air that had not come from a kitchen. A weight against her shoulder. Someone’s voice saying her name low and close. An arm under her shoulders that had lowered her against a brick wall.

After that, a long stretch of nothing.

And then a bed, and Lin Xuan three paces away, alive.

The fragment that stayed sharp was the voice. He had said her name. He had moved her out of the line of something she would never know the shape of.

She wiped the second corner of his mouth with the cloth.

"You stupid man," she said, very quietly, and her tone carried something closer to a small private laugh than to a complaint. "You are going to need to tell me the rest of it when you wake up."

She drew the chair an inch closer to the bed, set the cloth down, and stayed.

———————————————

Two rooms down, on the other side of the residence, Lin Zhen had not slept either.

The room was small and clean. A low table between two cushions. A pot of tea between the cushions. A scroll bearing the city’s official seal half-rolled at the edge of the table. A second man across from him in a robe of pale Frostmoon blue with the cracked-ice clasp at the collar.

Su Han, Patriarch of Frostmoon Ridge, drank slowly.

The two of them had been across from each other for most of the night. The notice had been drafted in the first hour. They had signed it together, sealed it together, and sent it to the office of the tournament before the lamp had needed its second wick. The semifinals were postponed. The official explanation was an "unexpected indisposition affecting two principal contestants," which was the line the Yuncheng tournament office had asked them, very politely, to keep to.

The image of a host city was a thing the imperial functionaries protected the way a man protected his own face, and an attempt against two principal representatives in the middle of a Six Sects Regional was the sort of news a host city did not survive without losing imperial favor for a decade. The dates had been moved. The first principal combat of the new schedule was Lin Kai against Yan Wuji.

The other bracket would wait until both contestants could stand.

Su Han set his cup down without quite letting it touch the wood.

"Did you see anything before I arrived, Lin Zhen?"

Lin Zhen kept his hands flat on the table. "I am sorry to say I saw nothing. Four bodies in the alley, all of them men I had no name for. My son on the cobble. Your daughter against the wall. The screen of illusion at the entrance had already dissolved by the time I crossed the lane. Whoever had set it had cleaned the thread before they went."

"Mhm."

"What worries me is the question itself." His voice stayed quiet, the way Lin Zhen’s voice rarely went anywhere else. "Who would dare to move against a Young Master and a Young Mistress of two regional sects in the middle of a tournament. And what are we missing about the answer."

Su Han turned the cup between two fingers.

"Could it be the capital."

The line arrived flat.

Lin Zhen did not pretend to misunderstand it. He breathed in once, slow, and shook his head a fraction.

"It would not make sense. The candidates to the throne need every piece of leverage they have inside the capital walls right now. None of the factions can afford to send resources outside the city for a side operation. They are using all of their attention to position themselves for what is coming. Anyone who moves a piece outside the walls right now lets the others gain ground inside. None of them will accept that trade."

"You are sure of that?"

"I am as sure as a man can be of something he is reading from this distance. I am also aware of what you said before you said the line, Su Han. You know what happened to my house in the last two years. The reading has cost me something to learn."

Su Han inclined his head a fraction. The acknowledgment did not need words.

"You know I cannot let this rest, Lin Zhen. My daughter was inside the work."

"I know. My son was in it as well. Which is why what I cannot understand is that the only thing in the alley by the time we arrived was the four bodies. There should have been more. Whoever sent them did not stay to claim what they started, and the men they hired do not look like the kind of men a serious operation leaves behind without scrubbing the trail."

Lin Zhen’s fingers shifted once against the table.

"What does your daughter remember?"

Su Han did not answer at once. The cup turned between his fingers, slow enough that the tea inside barely moved. "Not enough. A lane that bent where it should not have bent. A sweetness in the air. Your son’s voice, close to her. An arm under her shoulders. She remembers being lowered against a wall. After that, nothing until the room."

Lin Zhen’s eyes lowered for a breath. "Then Xuan’er is the only one who saw the rest."

"So it seems."

"He has not woken yet."

Su Han finally set the cup down. This time it touched the table.

"When he does, I will need to hear it from him directly. We need to know what happened there."

"You will."

"And until then?"

"Until then, we hold the line given to the tournament office. Unexpected indisposition. Two contestants unable to stand. Nothing more."

Su Han’s mouth did not move into anything like a smile.

"That excuse will not hold forever."

"No. But it only needs to hold until our children wake."