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The light of the braziers felt bruisingly bright even through his closed eyelids, and Mei Changsu did not want to find out how much it would hurt if he opened his eyes. Judging by the lack of a nauseous pounding in his skull, he had slept off the worst of it, but his episodes always left him a few parting gifts.
His throat was too dry to even try cursing under his breath, and the skin of his lips felt parched and ready to tear at the smallest movement. If only there was a way of getting water without raising his voice and opening his eyes, or otherwise indicating he was still, regrettably, alive.
“Here, try this.” A voice that he knew in the very marrow of his bones, just as he knew it not to belong at Mei Changsu’s bedside, lanced through the groggy fog in his mind, and he felt the coolness of a porcelain cup touch his cracked lips.
It was a true testament to his ill health that Mei Changsu took three greedy gulps of the cool sweet liquid before he forced open his eyes and balefully stared Prince Jing in the face.
“Your Highness,” Mei Changsu said, not trying too hard to hide the accusation in his voice. “You should not be here.”
“Your doctor has informed me of that,” Prince Jing said, and implacably brought the porcelain cup to Mei Changsu’s lips again. “So have Li Gang and Zhen Ping, and about every other member of the Su household. You have given them very clear instructions for when you should find yourself thus indisposed. Were you expecting to catch a particularly contagious cold?”
“It’s not a common cold,” Mei Changsu said absently, and then silently cursed his tongue, rendered once again feverishly loose by his episodes, which on its own was a good reason to keep people away from his sickbed. To buy himself a moment to come fully to his senses, he took the cup from Prince Jing’s hands and drank it to the bottom in small, measured sips. The sweetened herbal tea tickled a little against the back of his throat, but didn’t provoke a coughing bout. Small mercies. Still, too soon the cup was empty, and Mei Changsu placed it back on the tray with extra care.
“I don’t remember this taste. Must be a new concoction,” he murmured to himself. “Lin Chen’s latest creation, designed to bring even someone like me back from the brink of death.”
He felt, more than saw, Prince Jing go so icy-still that the heat of the braziers seemed to have escaped the room. Wet tendrils of cold sweat brushed against Mei Changsu’s spine as he realized he had spoken his thoughts aloud. There were a number of reasons why Prince Jing of all people should not be allowed at his side in a moment of weakness, and the fact that this was not even the top of the list was of little consolation.
“I’m afraid I do not share the humour of the situation, honourable Sir Su,” the prince said, his back ramrod straight and his lips barely moving. “Unless you mean to tell me you have kept the truth of your condition a secret from me?”
“No!” Mei Changsu said so quickly that his breath caught in his throat. A blunder of a feeble body could be excused once, but words were his only weapons these days, and he’d damn well wield them as best he could — and he barely finished this thought when his mouth opened again and he heard himself say, “I absolutely did not mean to tell you that.”
Prince Jing stared at him in wounded and extremely judgemental silence. Mei Changsu turned his own gaze away, for fear that it reflected his abject horror. He wanted to bite his tongue to see if it, too, had been taken away from him and replaced by something useless and weak. “Your Highness must forgive me; my remark was in poor taste,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “I can only explain my lapse by my bedridden state.”
The remark was, perhaps, of limited use in this situation. Acknowledging his own frailty would do little except exacerbate Prince Jing’s attention to his person. Despite being scrupulously transparent that, as his strategist, Mei Changsu was nothing but a tool capable of any underhanded trick in pursuit of their common goal, the frosty disdain of their first encounter had been slowly giving way to Prince Jing’s natural stubborn desire to care for and protect those he deemed his own people. Prince Jing, despite Mei Changsu’s best efforts, was not easily dissuaded from any of his old habits, including this one.
But current circumstances appeared to warrant a change of plan. Mei Changsu was back to his senses, if not in full control of them, and he recognized a new limitation when he saw one. Whatever this new spell was, he’d factor it in as he got things back under control. He had his own stubbornness on his side, and Lin Chen’s efforts to buy him more time as well. The thought gave Mei Changsu strength enough to reach out for the teapot, placed considerately within an arm’s reach, but far enough not to spill on his bed by accident, but Prince Jing beat him to it. In contrast to his expression, still stoic and wounded, his hand was warm as it gently brushed over Mei Changsu’s own pallid, weak fingers to steer them back towards the fur covers. A new cup of the herbal remedy was poured and brought to Mei Changsu’s lips by the prince’s hand.
“You have lovely hands,” Mei Changsu said, at the same time as Prince Jing said, “You never tell me more than you absolutely have to, do you.”
“What?” Prince Jing said.
“That’s very true,” Mei Changsu said.
“What.” Prince Jing blinked at him.
They looked at each other, not one but two Water Buffaloes blinking water out of their eyes — the indignity of it. Mei Changsu considered toppling one of the braziers on the floor; setting fire to his residence seemed a small price to pay to cover up whatever this was.
“Is that true?” Prince Jing said. “And uh, which is it?”
“Yes and both,” Mei Changsu answered without hesitation, and hotly wished he had acted on his destructive instinct from a moment ago. No matter; every failure held a seed of a new victory. At least one thing was crystal clear now. Whatever the source of his new limitation, at least one thing became crystal clear: there was no doling out lies for Mei Changsu, until he figured out how to rid himself of this new nuisance.
Inconvenient. But if that was all, he could work with that.
Mei Changsu squeezed his eyes shut hard enough to let spots dance in his mind’s eye, then opened them and looked Jingyan straight in the eye.
“I definitely do not share the full truth with you, my liege.”
“Out of my own best interests?”
“Mostly out of mine,” Mei Changsu answered.
“I suppose you have your reasons for saying that,” Prince Jing offered, dubiously. He gave Mei Changsu another long look, and he could spot the exact moment when Prince Jing, the most awkward and honorable to a fault person in all of Da Liang, decided to gallantly ignore the other remark he had heard, on the account of his strategist having been reduced to a mumbling invalid.
In what had to have been a kindly decision to keep the conversation on political subjects, the prince said sombrely, “I do not approve of your underhanded methods, but in accepting your help to restore justice I have also made myself accountable for the consequences of your actions.”
“Over my dead body,” Mei Changsu said, voice flat.
The corners of Prince Jing’s mouth tugged downwards in an unhappy, hurt thin line. “What do you mean, again bringing up —” he started saying, but Mei Changsu cut him off by forcing himself into a coughing bout. His plan to discourage Prince Jing from talking to him by being moderately rude had backfired, and he had no faith that he could refrain from giving an answer if a direct question was asked. Since when was the thrice damned prince such an inquisitive conversationalist? Whatever happened to pouting and leaving the room, cloaked in his wounded sensibilities?
The measure was indeed desperate, because once the hacking cough started, it did not quiet down until it had clawed and torn through Mei Changsu’s lungs to its satisfaction, like a hungry bird of prey. Bent nearly double and braced against his own knees, he forgot for a moment that Prince Jing was in the room. It was a while before the cough subsided, leaving a rattling wheeze in his chest.
“I worry about your health, Sir Su,” Prince Jing said, all traces of offence on his voice replaced with concern. So much for attempts at rudeness, Mei Changsu thought with distaste; he’d grossly miscalculated their potential effectiveness was when weighed against Jingyan’s mother hen instincts. “Is there anything I could do for you? Call more doctors?” The prince offered him another cup of the herbal remedy, but Mei Changsu shook his head; he was going to rule out all new variables until he figured out what was causing his latest malady.
“I wish you would not care about me at all,” Mei Changsu said, plaintive. “Why do you always have to care such a stupid amount about people you care about at all? You’d think the past would have taught you better.”
Prince Jing pulled back as if slapped, pallor washing over his cheekbones like a shroud. “You are still feverish, and do not know what you are talking about.”
“Oh yes, I very much do,” Mei Changsu went on, his voice cracking much in the same way that a rock chipping off from the cliffside did, before it tumbled downwards into a foggy abyss. No more able to hold back the words than he was to ride ahead of an army on horseback, Mei Changsu watched his own fall with the distant fascination of an observer whose action or inaction was equally useless. “Have you not spent the last twelve years unable to stop mourning your loved ones?”
“What is Lin Shu to you,” the Prince said, with deadly venom, “that you feel you can drag him into this conversation?”
And just like that, the rock reached the bottom of the abyss, and shattered there, soundless and unseen.
With all the willpower left to him, Mei Changsu closed his eyes and took a plunge into the dusty corners of his mind where he’d stashed away all the unimportant, unusable information, and ransacked through them in search of a single true thing he could say that would protect him.
His attention snagged against something twisted and ugly, and he grabbed it like a lifeline, with both hands.
“I’m jealous,” Mei Changsu said, with great relief.
Prince Jing did not look like he shared Mei Changsu’s sentiment. He was as still as a statue carved out of white jade, which would not have been out of place in the imperial treasury, but his gaze was slightly unfocused.
“You are jealous of Lin Shu,” he said, carefully enunciating every syllable.
“From all accounts, he was a remarkable man,” rattled off Mei Changsu, now committed to his new course. “Just the fact alone that you agreed to walk the path to the throne against your will, just for a chance to clear his name, is a testament to that. An affection like yours could not have gone unnoticed, or unrequited. I’m sure that, given the chance, Young Marshal Lin Shu would have stopped at nothing to prove that.”
“Except come back from the dead,” Prince Jing whispered like a ghost, and Mei Changsu knew he needed to urgently turn the conversation away from the virtues of Lin Shu and towards his own humble personage.
“It would take someone extremely small-minded to begrudge that affection, and yet I find that all my wisdom has not prepared me to plan for it.”
The owlishness in the Prince’s expression only increased when his gaze focused on Mei Changsu once again. He was clearly struggling to reconcile his understanding of Mei Changsu the capable strategist with the present vision of Mei Changsu the man who was not in control of his own mouth.
“I did not plan for it, and I definitely did not want it,” Mei Changsu pressed on, eager to make the most of the time Prince Jing spent speechless. “It’s actually quite aggravating, to be in the same room with you when your every second thought lingers on Lin Shu, your gaze faraway on bygone days, and not to feel resentful.” Curses. Why was Mei Changsu circling back to Lin Shu again on his own? It was not like he was dying to talk about the man he had been, when all his energy was spent trying to be the man he now was in the time he had left. “He is not in the room, I am. I do not want to spend my time thinking about what you’d do if it was Lin Shu at your side, yet I do.” Stop. He had to stop it before loose rocks chipping from the cliffside became a landslide, threatening to bury more than just himself under its weight, but his words kept on clawing out of his mouth. “I plan to disappear, yet I long to be seen,” he said, the hoarse wheezing back in his voice. “How is that for a failure to plan?”
His chest was heaving and his throat raw, the blood thundered in his ears, and he resolutely pushed all of his thoughts aside in favour of one, pulsing in desperation: let this stop here, let this stop here, let this stop. Mei Changsu had so few wishes left these days, the gods surely could grant him this small, humble one.
“You did it again,” Prince Jing said, his exquisite eyebrows forming an unhappy frown. “Mentioned disappearing. Is there something you are not telling me?”
No mercy of the gods for Mei Changsu; he didn’t deserve it. Once again it was up to him to come up with something when they couldn’t be bothered to.
“Yes,” he said, vicious, grabbed a fistful of fabric by the Prince’s throat, and pulled him down for a kiss.
Mei Changsu did not flatter himself that he could have wrestled Jingyan to move an inch if he had put up any resistance at all. But either the sheer desperate need to shut the man up had given him more strength than he accounted for, or Prince Jing’s war-honed reflexes had not prepared him to react to surprises of this kind — now there was a thought that gave him a vicious flare of satisfaction — but the whole bulk of Prince Jing ended up spread awkwardly across the bed, looming over Mei Changsu. Their lips, briefly connected in a kiss, were now a hand-width apart, and Jingyan — it was getting increasingly impossible to think of him as Prince Jing, and Mei Changsu had to allow himself this one weakness, when all his power of will was being spent elsewhere — was frantically trying to find a one-armed balance without crushing any of Mei Changsu’s limbs, concealed beneath the furs. Mei Changsu’s chest hurt like a giant bruise, though nothing was pressing him down.
“Your weight is not going to be what kills me,” he hissed, and tugged at Jingyan’s collar again. Their faces were so close that Jingyan’s warm breath washed over Mei Changsu’s cheeks with every rise and fall of the prince’s chest. Jingyan’s gaze on him was serious and thoughtful, like he was slowly pondering a problem he had been asked to solve. What an unnerving thought; Mei Changsu would have to console himself that puzzles were never Jingyan’s strongest suit. “But your indecision just might,” Mei Changsu prompted. He freed his other hand from the fur covers, and snaked both arms around Jingyan’s neck.
Still, Jingyan refused to share the urgency of the situation. With the same slow thoughtfulness, he bent closer to Mei Changsu, and brushed their lips together — light like a feather, a gentle nuzzle rather than a kiss. His mouth left a warm trail along Mei Changsu’s cheeks, paused over the trembling eyelids, left a whispering trail of a kiss along the temples, and then moved away again.
“It feels to me that you are doing this to punish someone,” Jingyan said, with horrifying amounts of kindness. “And that someone is you.”
Mei Changsu locked in place, like a muscle cramped. What a pitiful man must he have become, if the only thing he could provoke in bed was a monologue on his character flaws.
“I was so busy scorning your lack of mercy for others that I did not notice your lack of mercy to yourself,” Jingyan continued to muse out loud. “For that, I apologize.”
“I do not need your pity,” Mei Changsu bit out.
“No, I don’t think so.” Jingyan nodded. “What do you think you need, then?”
“If I have to put it in words, then I need you to leave immediately,” Mei Changsu said, and counted it a small miracle that his unseen censor let the words leave his mouth as he intended, for once. It took another moment to let the implication sink in that he was plainly asking Jingyan to stay.
He could feel mortified on a later day; first, he had to survive this one.
With a small, satisfied hum, as if something had become clear to him, Prince Jing reached out a hand and cupped Mei Changsu’s face. Letting his thumb draw soft lines along Mei Changsu’s cheek, he looked thoughtful and determined, and not at all like anyone successfully seduced.
And then Jingyan kissed him, slowly, thoroughly, as if there was no hurry in the world, as if they were both doing it there and then solely because they wanted to. A small sob rose in Mei Changsu’s chest, stifled into a silent gasp before it could spill out.
Each slow slide of skin against skin robbed Mei Changsu of something hard and defensible, and replaced it with a jittery fire of a kind that no layers or hot drinks could ever build in him anymore. He clawed at Jingyan’s collar again, this time to sneak in a cold hand beneath the layers, and feel how warm the skin at the hollow of Jingyan’s throat was, where his heart beat so strong and steady. It took some maneuvering, with how little space there was now between them, but when he finally laid his fingers over Jingyan’s collarbones, and felt his pulse at his own fingertips, Mei Changsu felt warmer than he had in years.
“That’s better than I’d ever thought it would be,” he whispered. “And I never allowed myself to think about it at all.”
Jingyan covered Mei Changsu’s hand with his own, and gently pulled at it. Had he crossed some boundary? He didn’t know, beyond a certainty that this was not something Lin Shu had ever done.
Before his thoughts could spiral once again towards the ghost of a man who used to have and had deserved more than Mei Changsu ever would, Jingyan gently brought Mei Changsu’s hand to his lips. With painful slowness, Jingyan kissed each knuckle of the weak, useless hand that was barely good enough to hold a brush, and then pressed another kiss, longest and slowest of them all, at the heart of Mei Changsu’s palm.
“You have worn yourself down,” Jingyan said, his lips moving against the skin of Mei Changsu’s wrist. “You should let others take care of you sometimes.”
It was so typical of Xiao Jing, to misunderstand a situation so profoundly, Mei Changsu thought with equal measures of fondness and desperation. The man simply had no understanding or appreciation for what an extraordinarily unplanned eventuality this was. An emergency that needed investigating, and a hastily cobbled together plan to help him and his secrets last long enough to deal with it, and nothing more.
With every slow kiss pressed against his skin, a sensation of being unravelled threatened to overcome Mei Changsu. It was not at all like the soothing ebb of darkness that lapped at the edge of his mind during long sleepless nights, an old negotiation that Mei Changsu was used to having: not yet, not yet, a little bit more, you can have me later, all of me, whatever is left of me. That darkness was merciful in its indifference to Mei Changsu’s state; it would have him no matter how little of him would be left at the end. The insistent, stubborn warmth that radiated from Jingyan, however, made Mei Changsu remember he was made of bones, and skin, and a sliver of flesh, and this reminder was a shock to his whole system. He had gotten so comfortable thinking of himself as nothing but a guiding spirit.
“Your hands get cold as soon as I let them go,” said Jingyan, frowning, and Mei Changsu felt an absurd impulse to apologize. Before whatever possessed Mei Changsu’s tongue made him act on it, Jingyan straightened up and untied his upper robes in the quick, practiced moves of someone who had spent most of his adult life in war tents away from Jinling, unused to being fussed over. Mei Changsu only barely managed to prop himself up on one elbow to watch the heavy fabric pool unceremoniously on the floor, when Jingyan gently pushed him back into the pillows again. “Don’t get out— stay where it’s warm,” he said, and slid into the bed alongside Mei Changsu.
In wide-eyed silence, Mei Changsu allowed himself to be tucked in towards Jingyan’s chest. Slotted along the length of his body, with heavy furs covering both of them and their breaths mingling in the small pocket of space left for air, Mei Changsu felt positively drugged by how warm it was. Jingyan draped an arm over Mei Changsu’s body and started drawing slow circles along his spine, and Mei Changsu’s traitorous bones melted under the touch like butter left in the sun.
He opened his mouth to protest — something, he would definitely have come up with something true enough to say, given another moment — but Jingyan bent his head and silenced Mei Changsu’s protests before they could leave his lips, sealing them in another incongruously unhurried and generous kiss, which broke into a series of light, fluttering kisses along Mei Changsu’s jawline and neck, warm touches along the hairline and in the corner of his eyes, closed in helplessness.
Jingyan’s broad palms continued mapping the bony contours of Mei Changsu’s body through his robes, tracing the length of his arms, feeling the hollows under his shoulder blades, cupping his pitifully jutting hipbone as it went on to follow the line of his thigh. Mei Changsu’s robes were plain, chosen for comfortable bedrest; never before had their simple fabric felt so rough and scratchy, and so alien on his skin. It was a miracle the cloth didn’t fall apart under Jingyan’s relentlessly warm hands, unlike the rest of Mei Changsu.
Jingyan must have felt the tremble that was building up in Mei Changsu’s body, from all the things he was trying to suppress without looking too closely at any of them. “Are you still cold?” Jingyan asked. Nothing could have been further from the truth, but Mei Changsu’s headshake didn’t appear to have convinced Jingyan. With the same few compact, well-learnt motions that he had used earlier, he easily undid the remaining layers of robes between them, until there was nothing but his searingly hot, solid body pressing into Mei Changsu’s own.
Against his own wishes, Mei Changsu felt deliriously warm, and ridiculously corporeal, and gloriously alive. He could swim or soar, as long as he also stayed exactly where he was, and the contradiction didn’t bother him one bit.
And then Jingyan took both of them in his broad, callused hand, and started moving, and Mei Changsu forgot whatever complaints were brewing in his mind. The rhythm built up slowly, with aching tenderness and a string of warm, blind kisses that landed haphazardly on Mei Changsu’s face and neck. “It’s perfect,” he breathed, or maybe Jingyan did. “You are perfect.” Jingyan was perfect, he was steady and he absolutely refused to let go, and for once in their new, miserable lives, Mei Changsu did not find that in the least bit objectionable. When Mei Changsu’s back arched, and the heat that had built up in his body spilled in jittering, trembling movements, Jingyan remained there, his body anchoring Mei Changsu to this world, and Mei Changsu slumped into it, and did not shatter into any pieces at all.
He had not noticed falling asleep, nor did he have any idea how much time had passed before he awoke. The first thing he noticed was that his nose was still burrowed into the crook of Jingyan’s neck; the rest of the world was still hidden behind Jingyan’s broad, solid form.
“How are you feeling?” Jingyan murmured somewhere into Mei Changsu’s hair. When he didn’t get an answer, he cupped Mei Changsu’s cheek and turned his head so that their eyes met.
“Better than I have any right to be,” Mei Changsu said, trying and mostly managing not to sound too guilty or smug. “A bit annoyed that my strategy didn’t work as I’d planned.”
Jingyan hummed and tucked a strand of Mei Changsu’s hair behind his ear with the most gentle brush of his fingers.
“Would it be the same strategy as when you distract me from saying things that inconvenience or embarrass you?”
“Your Highness does not inconvenience or embarrass me,” Mei Changsu said smoothly, and felt a bolt of energy zap his mind, as the realization washed away the dreamy, content slumber in his limbs.
He was the master of his words once again. He was free.
A frosty feeling chased the tingling warmth away from his mouth, which remembered how to be bloodless and impersonal once again.
“But I have embarrassed myself in your presence. And I hope for your forgiveness in the face of my lapse, and that you will allow me to put it behind us, Your Highness,” he said, voice even and serious. “This was not something I am proud of, but I can assure you it is not an indicator of my capabilities as your strategist.”
But the stubborn, uncomplicated Prince Jing did not appear to have heard him. “I do not doubt your qualifications as my strategist,” he said, unbothered. “If anything, my regard for you has risen.”
Mei Changsu raised a sceptical eyebrow. “Regard, really?”
Prince Jing chose to give him an insufferably fond laugh in response. “Yes, regard, among other things. You have demonstrated you can be taken by surprise and pushed into honesty.”
“It won’t be repeated again,” Mei Changsu promised darkly.
The prince didn’t laugh this time, but there were fond crinkles at the corner of his eyes, and his hand lingered at the nape of Mei Changsu’s neck. “We’ll see,” he said simply. “I have it on good authority that I am a stubborn man.”
* * *
My precious, fragile plum blossom,
You were right, you insufferable man. The elixir you took was not wrongly administered or otherwise tampered with — the men of the Jiangzuo Alliance know their jobs too well to let that happen. I ran some tests, and it does appear that this new elixir has an effect that was not of my design. I observed that when the mandrake extract and moonlight ginseng in this elixir interact with your blood, they produce delicate fumes that are harmless for anyone — harmless, I insist, before you start accusing me of any convoluted plots to see you happily installed in your Prince’s arms; whatever gave you the idea that the Young Master of Lang Ya Hall has time for that? Before sending it to Jinling, I tested it against the combination of your pills and other unique but rather unfortunate substances you carry in your blood, of course, and ruled out any serious side-effects on your health. You will forgive me for not having thought to test for a hypothetical ability to blacken your tongue with honest words. I could not very well find another person like you to try to see if he is quite so full of — endless wisdom, as you are. Could you be persuaded to replicate the experiment on my next visit, for purely scientific purposes?
Stay safe, and listen to Doctor Yan, unless you want my visit to happen sooner than it has to.
Your friend,
Lin Chen.