Chapter 71
ALEXANDER
Su Lian’s older brother, Su Jiang, was a master of his craft, and he knew it well. His reputation, as the sister had proudly proclaimed, was not simply for beauty, but for soul. His pieces breathed.
When he learned their late father’s beloved limyerite crystal—long kept in a glass case—was finally going to a new home, he’d been thrilled.
To shape it, to be the one to transform its sleeping potential into something lasting and luminous?
It was the kind of commission artisans prayed for.
He’d even praised Alexander’s quick sketch, running a thumb along the parchment with a grunt of approval.
“Not bad for a noble,” he’d said, with what might’ve been a smile. “You want elegance. Clean lines. Symbolic, not gaudy. Hn.”
Then, Alexander revealed the deadline.
“A fortnight?” Su Jiang squawked.
He looked from Alexander to Su Lian as if they’d both gone mad and reached for the nearest broomstick.
“Not possible!” he bellowed, jabbing the handle in Alexander’s direction. “Not possible at all! A piece like this takes weeks. Months, even. You want it cut, polished, set—blessed, I assume—all in fourteen days?”
Alexander opened his mouth.
“Don’t even answer,” Su Jiang snapped. “My soul is too fragile.”
Su Lian coughed discreetly into her sleeve. Alexander clasped his hands behind his back and raked his mind for what he could say to persuade the craftsman.
“Master Su, I understand it’s ambitious. But it would mean a great deal. Not just to me, but—”
“—to the gods, the ancestors, the spirits of the stone, I’m sure,” Su Jiang said darkly, folding his arms. “You nobles always want miracles. Well, I’m no spirit medium. I’m a man with one pair of hands and a mountain of unfinished commissions.”
Su Lian leaned in and whispered, “Lord Wulfbane, I’ll speak to him.”
With a confident smile, she approached her brother and murmured something swift and sharp in his ear.
Whatever she said, it produced the desired effect.
Su Jiang froze mid-rant, the sketch still trembling in his hand.
His brow twitched. Then, slowly, his expression shifted.
Indignation melted into reluctant interest, then something dangerously close to excitement.
He cleared his throat with performative gravity. “Leave this with me. I will begin tonight.”
When Su Lian returned, Alexander arched a brow in question.
The woman’s whisper was laced with triumph, “I only told him what all great craftsmen long to hear: His creation will be admired by many when High Princess X?en JingYi, Lady Wulfbane, wears it to court. Not just here in X?en-Sarai, but in Tremore as well.”
The days unfolded in a blur of language, ink, and crystal dust. He moved himself out of Scholar Wen’s house and into the back of the Su family shop. There, he had no time for idle longing or self-pity, not with the Su and Xian households sweeping him into their current like a boat in spring flood.
Mornings began with language lessons on the back terrace, where MeiMei tutored him in the structure and the six tones of X?enguā, while her father sat nearby, correcting his pronunciation with dry, unflinching precision.
“Again,” he would say, without looking up from his own ledger. “You’re calling her a steamed bun, not a flower. Not many women will find that a compliment.”
MeiMei giggled good-naturedly every time he slipped.
Ru Rong would supply corrections while trimming pots of miniature trees in the courtyard.
Su Lian, ever the helpful bridge between worlds, alternated between encouraging translation and slyly slipping in cultural blunders he ought to avoid—like not complimenting someone’s slippers if they were white. It meant mourning.
By the third night, the block of clear mineral, once rough and uneven, began to gleam under Su Jiang’s tools—shaved, smoothed, inlaid with impossibly fine channels of gold filigree. The craftsman had stopped protesting the time constraints and started humming while he worked.
“It’s still not possible,” he grumbled once, not looking up. “But it will be done.”
One week passed. It felt like a blink and a lifetime. He didn’t speak of JingYi often, but everything he did carried her memory.
He learned how her people steeped herbs—that bitterness in a brew often meant it was working, that healing rarely tasted sweet.
He studied the plants she’d once touched, their names written in her hand beside tincture recipes.
Every day, he was in awe of her. He could learn for years and barely scrape the surface.
He no longer clung to the conviction she would return simply because he showed up. He let go of the belief that love alone could be enough. Still, he stayed—to understand the soil that shaped her. To become someone who could tend to her roots, not pluck the flower.
It would begin with the offering of crystal. Cut from Tremore’s earth. Reshaped by X?en hands. And, perhaps, worthy of both.
So—no, he didn’t speak of her.
But everything he did now, he did for her.
Later that night, after the shop had closed, dinner had been enjoyed, and tables and chairs had been wiped clean, Alexander sat with Xian Jun in the courtyard.
The night breeze carried the scent of jasmine and woodsmoke, stirring the lantern light into shifting patterns on the stones.
MeiMei leaned against her father’s arm, small face slack with sleep, one hand curled trustingly into his sleeve.
Alexander watched them for a moment, the peace of it, and felt something ache in his chest. He looked away.
Xian Jun blew a stream of smoke from his pipe. “I’ve decided to accompany you to the Appeal.”
Alexander arched a brow. “You have something you’d like to ask the emperor?”
The man didn’t speak for a moment. The pipe glowed in the darkness.
“The late emperor’s soldiers took my Omega cousin from her village.
She was nine years old.” His voice was steady.
Impassive, even, but something beneath it made the night air feel colder.
“I’d like to ask His Majesty to let me see her. ”
Alexander stilled.
Nine years old. He looked at MeiMei—her small chest rising and falling, lips slightly parted, utterly trusting in her father’s protection. That cousin had been no older than MeiMei was.
His stomach roiled.
Jing Yi’s voice surfaced from memory, speaking words that felt like a lifetime ago in Blackwood-Verde’s forest: “Once the Omegas are retrieved, they are sent to the Imperial Palace of a Thousand Suns and added to my father’s harem.”
He’d heard the words then, understood them. But sitting here, watching a sleeping child beside a man who had spent years wondering what became of his own young cousin—the words took on an entirely different weight.
“I will support you,” he said.
Xian Jun nodded his thanks. The silence between them was heavy but not uncomfortable. Two men carrying different losses, sharing the same night.
The silence also brought forward another memory—his first meeting with JingYi. The shock of her face beneath the veil. The panic he’d felt during the bandit attack. The long, slow journey from that moment to this one, where her voice lived in his mind like a ghost he didn’t want exorcised.
Bittersweet. Brutal in its honesty. And yet, somehow, it curled a small smile onto his lips.
“How did you meet Madam Su?” he asked.
Xian Jun’s dark eyes flashed with tenderness, rare for so practical a person—a glimpse of a younger self. He adjusted his hold on MeiMei and pointed with his pipe toward the shop front, to the staircase leading up to the second-floor gallery.
“I was standing right there. I’d come to sell pearls from Aethonia to her father. I looked up, and there she was, looking down at me from the second floor.”
Alexander chuckled softly. “Love at first sight, then?”
“First sight or not, it turned out to be love.” Xian Jun’s expression softened, then turned somber.
“It is rare for a X?en city-dweller to allow their daughters to marry a Talharen. We are travellers, never staying in one spot for long. But Old Master Su gave permission almost immediately. He knew the political situation in X?en-Sarai would worsen.” A pause.
“The marriage was a way for his daughter to escape into freedom.”
Alexander absorbed this. A father, giving his daughter away not in rejection but in love. Not to a cage, but to a door. He thought of JingYi’s brother, who had done something similar—sent her across the sea to a stranger, not to be rid of her, but perhaps . . . to save her.
The world was full of men who failed the women in their lives. But here and there, in the quiet spaces, were men who had tried.
He hoped, when his own moment came, he would be counted among the latter.
The night breeze stirred again. MeiMei murmured in her sleep and nestled closer to her father. Xian Jun’s pipe glowed and faded, glowed and faded.
Alexander let the silence hold them both.
The groan of ancient hinges rolled through the city, like the past waking up to a new day.
Crowds had gathered since dawn, huddled against the chill, cupping warm bowls of soybean milk while vendors called into the air.
Under the late emperor, these gates had opened for no one but nobles and servants.
Only a sovereign’s death earned the people entry—to pay final respects.
But after the coup, that mourning never came. The gates had remained silent.
Until now.
Alexander stood in front of the shop, the polished box tucked under his arm. Inside it, the limyerite crystal waited—Su Jiang’s masterpiece, months of skill compressed into two weeks of relentless effort.