Untitled

Lan Wangji made an agreeing noise, but his face suggested he was not comforted.

Jiang Cheng, that demon, snickered from where he was sitting at the front of the boat. “He’s terrified,” he said gleefully. “I can’t blame him, either – Auntie is terrifying.”

“My mother is not terrifying.”

“She ate a battalion of Wen sect cultivators when they tried to attack the Lotus Pier.”

“There’s no proof she ate them,” Wei Wuxian argued. “Just because the bodies were found with a few pieces missing and with bite marks doesn’t mean she ate them. She could’ve summoned something to do the eating for her!”

“She had a stomachache for days afterwards that she said was due to the rotten Wen sect.”

“She was joking.”

“Was she?” Lan Wangji asked. He sounded serious as ever, and Wei Wuxian rolled his eyes, unable to stop a fond smile.

“She’s really not that scary,” he assured him. “I mean, she’s a bit scarier than my dad –”

“One of the most fearsome front-line fighters the Jiang sect has ever produced,” Jiang Cheng adds, unhelpfully.

“– but she has a great sense of humor –”

“You mean you share it with her,” Jiang Cheng said. “That doesn’t make it great. Lan Wangji, watch out for pranks.”

Lan Wangji paled by at least two shades.

Wei Wuxian glared at Jiang Cheng. “Stop trying to panic my boyfriend.”

Jiang Cheng looked smug as a cat.

“Seriously, don’t listen to him,” Wei Wuxian told Lan Wangji. “He’s like that because he’s Mom and Aunt Yu’s favorite child.”

It had taken a long while before Madame Yu had unbent enough to allow him to call her aunt, but Cangse Sanren had decided it would be cute and no one stood in the way of what Cangse Sanren wanted for very long.

“Hey, you were Dad and Uncle Wei’s favorite!”

“And who favored your older sister?” Lan Wangji asked.

“Everyone!” Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian chorused.

Lan Wangji looked slightly amused.

“You’re right to pick her, though,” Jiang Cheng opined. “If she’s around, she can save you.”

“Probably true,” Wei Wuxian admitted. “Jiejie is very brave, even if she’s not much of a fighter - I’m still glad she wasn’t around when the Wen sect attacked the Lotus Pier…”

It could have gone very badly if it wasn’t for Cangse Sanren and Wei Changze. Wei Wuxian had never been happier that his parents had come to ground in the Lotus Pier to finish the last few years of his education.

He couldn’t even imagine how it might have gone.

People might have died, and then he would have been far too busy seeking vengeance to hunt himself down a boyfriend, and that – that truly would have been a shame and a pity.

Lan Wangji had thought the same thing, in fact, and nodded in appreciation for Jin Ling’s summary, far more concise than the rambling they had just endured for far too long. He would naturally not allow Lan Sizhui go to face a threat of this magnitude by himself; just because his blood might be required to apply the finishing blow did not mean that they couldn’t assist…

“That isn’t the relevant part!” Wei Wuxian exclaimed. “The relevant part is what the threat is!”

Lan Wangji frowned. “The remains of a corrupted Qiongqi,” he said, a little puzzled at why Wei Wuxian seemed to be finding this so funny. “Much in the same way as the corrupted Xuanwu we encountered when we were younger –”

“You’re not allowed to mention that anymore,” Jin Ling reminded him. “It makes Wei Wuxian go all misty-eyed and talk about things that traumatize the younger generation.”

The fact that Jin Ling could now speak as an equal to the senior generation due to his sect leader status was, Lan Wangji reflected, rather annoying.

“Can we please stop ignoring the main issue!” Wei Wuxian was waving his hands. “And the main issue is that it’s not merely the remains of the Qiongqi – trust me, the Yiling Patriarch, to know about remains, I don’t mind remains, remains are fine – but the fact that it’s apparently the reanimated remains that Wen Mao turned into a giant drum!”

That was true, yes, but why that was relevant, Lan Wangji didn’t see –

“If only,” Lan Jingyi said solemnly, and that was never a good sign. “If only old Wen Mao had thought about the re-percussions of his actions.”

Oh no.

“We have to take this seriously,” Jin Ling agreed at once. “After all, what happens if Lan Sizhui and Wen Ning can’t beat it.”

“Beats me,” Ouyang Zizhen chimed in. “But whatever it is, I’m sure it’ll be…drum-atic.”

Dignity did not permit Lan Wangji to put his head in his hands, but he really, really wanted to.

Wen Ning coughed lightly, and Lan Wangji was momentarily hopeful that he would help put an end to this before it went too far.

“I don’t think that’ll be an issue,” he said softly, almost apologetically. “I’m sure we’ll be successful…not to beat our own drum or anything.”

That traitor.

Lan Wangji glared at him.

“You could really say,” Wei Wuxian said, grinning wildly, “that the entire thing is a conundrum –”

That was it. Lan Wangji was taking nice, polite Lan Sizhui to fight the creature and leaving all of them behind. They would deserve it.

“I don’t know,” Lan Sizhui finally spoke up. “I agree with Senior Wen. I think you’re all making it out to be a bigger deal than I think it will be.”

“Oh?”

Jin Guangyao looked down at where he’d filled his teacup to overflowing. “Ah,” he said, and put the teapot down, reaching for a piece of cloth to clean up the mess on the table. “Forgive me, I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing…I’m sorry, er-ge, did you say that da-ge was marrying? And you – told your uncle about it, for some reason?”

“Well, there wasn’t much of a choice,” Lan Xichen sighed, sitting down and accepting the cup of tea that Nie Mingjue slid over to him instead. “Since one of his brides is going to be my brother.”

“Your brother? You mean – Wangji? And - one of his brides…?”

“He only has the one brother; who else could he mean?” Nie Mingjue pointed out, and Lan Xichen shot him a glare to remind him to behave – it wasn’t Jin Guangyao’s fault that he probably had more siblings than he could count on both hands and feet, after all.

“Yes,” he said, turning to Jin Guangyao. “Forgive me, A-Yao, I entirely forgot you weren’t at the Unclean Realm when this was all being discussed at the start. As it stands now, Da-ge will be taking two brides to share the position of first wife, one of which is my brother.”

Jin Guangyao was blinking very rapidly, clearly attempting to process the information and just as clearly having some difficulty. Possibly at the idea of Nie Mingjue getting married at all, much less in a cutsleeve marriage – in fact, Lan Xichen wasn’t sure he’d ever mentioned to him that Lan Wangji was a cutsleeve. 

Did Jin Guangyao maybe have some lingering prejudices? It seemed unlikely, given what Lan Xichen knew of his personality, but such issues were more often seen among the common people…

“I see,” Jin Guangyao said. “And…who’s the other one?”

“Wei Wuxian,” Nie Mingjue said, and he looked so incredibly pleased about it that Lan Xichen reluctantly shelved the idea of scolding him further. A smile from Lan Wangji, a smile from Wei Wuxian, a smile from Nie Mingjue – anything that caused this many smiles was bound to be a good thing.

Even if poor Jin Guangyao’s smile did look a bit strained…

-

“He’s what?!”

Jin Guangyao held his hands apart as if to indicate he had no idea how it had happened either, and Jin Zixuan thought that for once in his life his duplicative half-brother might be completely and utterly sincere. “He confirmed it himself.”

“Wei Wuxian,” Jin Guangshan growled, having apparently decided to skip over shock in favor of paranoid theorizing. “Of course – all this time, Nie Mingjue pretended to disdain the Stygian Tiger seal, looking down on it, but in reality he was seeking his own means of obtaining it –”

Jin Zixuan didn’t think that was especially likely.

He’d fought with Nie Mingjue during the war as one of his lieutenants. Even though his father had insisted that the Jin sect fight under its own banner, it’d quickly become obvious that none of the generals his father had appointed had the slightest idea of what they were doing, unlike Nie Mingjue; to keep his people from enduring another slaughter, Jin Zixuan had forced himself to swallow his pride and ask Nie Mingjue for advice.

The other man had never once lorded it over him, even though Jin Zixuan was in the weaker position – his letters had been straightforward and to the point, answering his questions without any judgment, and when they worked together in person, he was the same.

Jin Zixuan had spent entire nights worrying about his motives, and a shamefully long time to realize that the reason Nie Mingjue was acting the way he did was because he was just – like that. Honest and forthright and disinclined towards scheming, the way everyone said he was; a man who was righteous in the sense that he did what he thought was right, not in the sense of flattering himself to think he was better than others.

(Somewhere along the line, Jin Zixuan had shifted from choking down his pride to choking down guilt at thinking that Nie Mingjue was a better leader than his father – and that he’d probably have been a better father, too, no matter how Nie Huaisang had ultimately turned out. He thought, though he did not know, that if he had not adopted some of Nie Mingjue’s straightforwardness in pursuing Jiang Yanli, she might not be his bride today.)

“ – why didn’t any of us think of that?” Jin Guangshan was demanding when Jin Zixuan tuned back into the conversation, and it made him nearly choke. “A-Xuan! What sounds are you making over there?”

“Nothing, father,” Jin Zixuan said, coughing a little to clear his throat. “Merely – admiring how unorthodox Chifeng-zun’s thinking must have been.”

Jin Guangyao’s lips twitched. It was only a second, there and gone, but Jin Zixuan had still seen the little glimpse of humor. It was truly a pity, he reflected, that his brother wanted his position more than his friendship; they might have been good friends, in another world. Of course, that was the way things went in Lanling, with each person out for themselves, but ever since he’d married Jiang Yanli, he’d started to think that perhaps the greedy, grasping, conniving world his father had cultivated around him wasn’t the right way to lead a sect.

He used to think that the Jin sect was better than everyone else because of the way they thought – that only they were honest enough to acknowledge the frailties in human nature and to make use of them, rather than pretending that people could really be brave and righteous and true, that friendship was a real thing rather than another name for allies of convenience, that love was anything more than a momentary lapse, a weakness – but he didn’t any more. The other righteous sects might be naïve in their belief in righteousness, but believing in righteousness encouraged righteous behavior; even if it was done only as a façade, for most people, the façade would eventually turn into truth after it became enough of a habit.

For most people, anyway.  

Jin Zixuan had done his best to like his new brother – upstanding war hero that he was – but he couldn’t quite manage it. He was too familiar with people who came to him with gentle smiles that hid daggers, and his mother, while far too vicious, was unfortunately right that those who shared his parentage all seemed to have their eyes fixed firmly on his position.  Jin Guangyao might pretend that he didn’t, but some of the moves he’d made were a little too obviously meant to be consolidations of power: courting the Qin girl, being friendly with certain dissatisfied factions…

Jin Zixuan heard that Jin Guangyao had once been Nie Mingjue’s deputy, wearing a façade of righteousness, and their current enmity had been birthed once the other man had seen what he was really like.

It seemed like a bad trade to him, scrabbling for scraps in Lanling instead of being respected as a man in Qinghe, but he supposed he was in no position to judge. He’d had all the advantages in the world given to him at his birth, and he’d still taken so very long to figure out that righteousness was actually worth something by itself.

His father was still ranting about Wei Wuxian, with his half-brother indulging him with nods and questions that didn’t achieve anything other than making his father feel good about himself for having guessed right, and eventually Jin Zixuan was sick enough of it to feel the need to divert the conversation.

“Whatever his motives may be for marrying Wei Wuxian,” he said, “surely those reasons don’t apply to Hanguang-jun, who possesses no secret power to be obtained. It’s not as though the Nie sect needs a connection to the Lan sect – Chifeng-zun is already sworn brothers with Zewu-jun.”

He paused, deliberately, then added, as if in afterthought, “And A-Yao, of course.”

Jin Guangyao might have mastered the ways of the mistress, sweetness and support and indulgence to win favor, but Jin Zixuan had grown up with a mother that had never allowed an infamously straying husband to bring home a single concubine – if Jin Guangyao thought a few tricks were enough to get his position, he was only dreaming.

Jin Zixuan would help him wake up.

-

“Do you think it’s that he doesn’t like A-Xian enough to marry just him?” Jiang Yanli asked, biting her lip, but her husband shook his head with a laugh.

“My father couldn’t think of a reason either,” he said, looking arrogant and smug in that charming sort of way he had when he was happy. “The only thing he could come up with after hours and hours was that he might be some sort of pretty flower vase meant as a consolation for having to marry the Yiling Patriarch.”

“But you don’t think that.”

“Of course not. Chifeng-zun is a good man, and even if he wasn’t, he’s old friends with Zewu-jun, who would never allow anything like that.”

Jiang Yanli conceded the point, but that still didn’t explain why. She’d known, of course, of Jiang Cheng’s desperate gamble to protect Wei Wuxian and keep him in the Jiang sect in some manner – technically not, since he’d be under the protection of the Nie sect going forward, but this way at least made sure that he’d always have his family backing. She’d even hoped, based on some things Jiang Cheng had said to her, that Wei Wuxian was happy with the marriage, looking forward to it.

But why would Nie Mingjue take a second wife – no, another first wife – at the same time? Wasn’t that looking down at her brother?

“Personally, my theory is that he just didn’t want to get cuckolded,” Jin Zixuan said, playing with her hair. “So he took precautions against it.”

“Cuckolded?” she asked, and she could feel him turn red – her husband was sensitive about such things, a remnant of his unhappy childhood. He was terrified that she might start to suspect him of crimes he hadn’t yet committed (as if he wasn’t a terrible enough liar that she’d know at once anyway if he’d really done anything), and he usually avoided any discussion of infidelity like the plague. She wasn’t letting him off this time, though, not if Wei Wuxian’s happiness was at stake. “What do you mean? A-Xian wouldn’t betray someone he’d sworn himself to.”

Not without a good reason, anyway. The way Wei Wuxian had been behaving recently towards Jiang Cheng – towards the Jiang sect generally, especially after the business with the Wen sect remnants – could almost make her think terrible things, and only the fact she loved her brother as blindly as she did could make her unswerving in her faith that there was some purpose behind his seemingly cruel behavior.

“Probably not,” Jin Zixuan agreed. “But I mean – come on. I didn’t notice it when I was younger, because I was an idiot back then –”

He said it, not her.

“– but Wei Wuxian chased after Lan Wangji the entire time we were at the Wen indoctrination camp together. Same way I chased after you, actually.”

“With no grace or tact or knowledge of women?” she teased, and he blushed and rubbed his cheek against hers.

“Well, yes,” he said. “But I got you in the end, didn’t I?”

That was a good point.

Jiang Yanli hadn’t seen them interacting enough to really judge – convention separating men from women the way it did – but Wei Wuxian had spoken of Lan Wangji rather a lot after his time studying in the Cloud Recesses. It was certainly a plausible guess.

“So you think Sect Leader Nie married Hanguang-jun for what reason?” she asked. “To keep A-Xian from pursing him?”

“Common wisdom in Lanling says that if it’s not to create connections, then there’s only two reasons for a man to take a concubine,” Jin Zixuan said with a shrug. “One is to keep the man company – the other’s to give company to his wife.”

Jiang Yanli’s eyebrows shot up. “Company for his wife?”

“Why not? Men and women move in different circles – if a man is worried his wife might be thinking of looking for company outside, it’s better to get her someone who will be by her side all the time, isn’t it?”

Jiang Yanli covered her mouth to hide her laughter. “I suppose so,” she said. “Please don’t get me company in the future, though; I’m quite capable of making friends on my own.”

“And I,” her husband said, perking up at once, “of keeping you too busy to even think about other company –”

-

“You really think it’s all right?” Jiang Cheng asked Jiang Yanli. He trusted his sister’s judgment, but he was still worried. “I don’t want Wei Wuxian to think he has to suffer in silence –”

Jiang Yanli patted his shoulder. “A-Cheng, think about what you’re saying. I’m not saying A-Xian wouldn’t suffer, but – in silence?”

“If he thought it might hurt one of us he would,” Jiang Cheng said stubbornly. “This was my idea, and you know he’s worried about messing up your relationship with Jin Zixuan by starting too much trouble, especially with the Jin sect being the first one to jump down his throat about it. And anyway, he wasn’t chasing after Lan Wangji! He was – he –”

He frowned. He’d always thought that they disliked each other – certainly Lan Wangji’s constantly cold expression didn’t suggest he enjoyed Wei Wuxian’s teasing, although Wei Wuxian did spend an awful lot of time planning out pranks centered around Lan Wangji in specific. Or even, as Jiang Yanli had pointed out, just talking about him.

Which he did. A lot.

“What if Lan Wangji doesn’t like him back?” he asked, suddenly consumed with a brand new worry. “If Chifeng-zun goes to all that trouble for Wei Wuxian, and gets his hopes up, and then it turns out that Lan Wangji really doesn’t like him –”

“I’m sure Sect Leader Nie must have thought it over carefully before he took any action,” Jiang Yanli said. “A-Xuan tells me that he’s a good person, a good leader, and a good general – he must have a plan. Don’t you think?”

“Well, he is all that,” Jiang Cheng admitted. He wouldn’t have been so confident in his plan to marry Wei Wuxian into the Nie sect if Nie Mingjue hadn’t been as righteous as his reputation. But still…

“Why don’t you see what Wei Wuxian thinks about it?” she suggested, quite reasonably. “And anyway, he’ll still need a chaperone for their next visit, and the seasonal floods are over – you could go supervise.”

Jiang Cheng brightened. His older sister always had the best ideas. “What would I do without you?” he asked, leaning over to kiss her on the cheek.

She laughed. “Starve, probably. Would you like some more soup?”