The Witch in the Woods: The Transmigration of Hazel-Anne Davis-Chapter 363: Water

"Wine," the old Emperor tried again, as if the word itself carried all the authority he used to have. "Bring wine and we will speak of corrections."

"Corrections," Yizhen echoed softly, warm amusement barely there. "The empire has been correcting itself."

The old man’s eyes darted to the voice; then he seemed to hear the underworld on Yizhen’s tongue and decided not to beg there.

He turned back to Mingyu, his chin lifting the way men did when they remembered a throne that no longer existed.

"You always mistook patience for weakness," he croaked. "This—" he gestured with the empty bowl toward the straw and the bars, "—will teach you about men. Your way will fail you when these dogs want their own bones. They will eat you first."

Deming’s jaw ticked once; Longzi would have laughed if he had been the sort to spare breath. Yaozu stood like a door that had no handle on this side.

Mingyu kept his gaze level, not with cruelty but with the same attentiveness he gave a river he intended to cross.

He did not argue with corpses.

The old man touched the back of his wrist and seemed surprised to find it damp. A small bewilderment flickered across his features, then irritation, then the brittle arrogance of someone still explaining the board to a player who had already removed the pieces.

"I built this country," the hoarse voice insisted. "I placed every stone you walk on. I burned the map into the backs of the men who carry you through your own halls. You ride a saddle I bought. You breathe air I wrote law for."

"You allowed the Third Prince to take Xinying, even knowing that she was Mingyu’s wife. A wife that you gave him," Deming replied, his voice flat as ground glass. "You breathed that law into their lungs."

The old man’s mouth tightened as if lemon had reached him instead of ginger. "A prince learns with hard choices. She is a—"

Mingyu’s eyelids did not move, but the air changed, as if the lamplight had remembered a different angle was wiser.

The old Emperor’s tongue found the roof of his mouth and stayed there.

He lifted the bowl as if to ask for more and discovered that the tremor along his forearms had grown into something that reached his shoulders.

He tried to set the bowl down and almost managed it.

The clay kissed the floor and rolled, a soft knock against a straw bale. He gripped the bars. The fingers that had signed exile and conscription and taxation with equal indifference whitened along the knuckles.

"What is this," the voice in the cell sounded forced.

"Age," Yizhen answered, almost kindly.

"Fever," Yaozu added, his tone coming out authoritative, the sound a ledger made when a row filled and did not require another entry.

The old man’s gaze darted to the boy, then to the physician, and then back to Mingyu.

For a heartbeat that lasted longer than coin spends, something like hunting intelligence looked out through the eyes.

He wet his lips, perhaps to shape a curse, perhaps to remember a prayer he had always left for others to perform on his behalf.

"You dare," he tried, the words fraying. He wet his lips again, trying to get out four more words.

Mingyu shifted his weight a fraction, as if testing the plank of a bridge and finding it held.

He thought, briefly and without heat, of a winter morning years ago when an order had come through a screen for him to kneel to prove that obedience could still be used like a saddle girth.

He had knelt then; his knees had even found the right angle without scraping. Later that day he had learned the shape of rage well enough to put it down and keep only the part that worked.

"You dared to try and kill us first ," Deming observed, not bothering to sharpen the point. "You are simply late to your own lesson."

The old Emperor’s jaw hunted for a bite that would come.

His fingers slipped.

He tried to shape his shoulders into that old width again and found a smaller frame answering him. He lifted his chin and tried one last direction.

"Bring me out," he demanded, breath thinning. "Bring me up. You will watch the court kneel to me again. You will—"

But the body disagreed with the words passing through his lips.

A heat rose along his neck and flushed his cheeks with the kind of color courtiers admired on children.

He bent, not of his own will, and braced his forehead against the wooden bars of the cell.

The bars had been sanded years ago and then forgotten; they carried a faint sweetness of old oil. He breathed it like air after winter and did not understand why his knees did not hold.

Yaozu watched the time in his head and lifted two fingers by his side to mark the first stick.

The physician opened his case without the fuss of a man who wanted anyone to notice him and produced a sliver of paper with characters running up the margin like tiny fish.

He frequently wrote the character for imbalance on days when men insisted that balance existed. Tonight his brush knew the character for fever well enough to draw it without looking.

"Water," the voice in the cell tried, thin as silk thread. "There is salt in my mouth."

The boy glanced at Yizhen again. Yizhen’s hand found the boy’s shoulder.

"No," he murmured softly, and the boy accepted being part of a larger hand. He stepped back into the corridor and made himself less visible than the wall.

The old Emperor sagged to the straw.

His knees made small protests that had nothing to do with dignity and everything to do with age.

His hands sought the bowl again as if the clay might reverse a river. When his fingers could not grip it, his palm lay flat on the floor and pressed once, twice, in a gesture that had nothing to do with any ritual the palace had ever trained into him.

His breath came faster and then slower, as if the lungs had remembered their own work and decided to be careful so no one could complain.

Mingyu did not move closer.

He let the existing distance perform the mercy Yizhen had recommended for the hallways later.