Chapter 71 #2
He was dressed in the Tremorian way—charcoal grey layered over ivory and crimson, with a high-collared doublet edged in silver.
The sigil of House Wulfbane, subtle, was embroidered over his chest, gleaming in the morning light.
Xian Jun emerged from the shop behind him, transformed.
He wore his finest clothes, the fabric neat and freshly pressed.
His hair had been carefully bound, and even his boots shone, free of road dust.
The rest of the family, too, emerged to see them off.
“Have you memorized your speech?” MeiMei asked Alexander.
“I have,” Alexander said, then hesitated. “I think I have.”
The admission unleashed something in his stomach.
Queasiness crept up his throat. He tugged at his collar, suddenly aware that the perfectly fitted doublet felt half a size too small.
Was it the nerves? Or had he perhaps been indulging in X?en delicacies a bit too freely these past couple of weeks to maintain his usual warrior’s figure?
He shot a glance at Ru Rong, who only smiled innocently.
Su Lian stepped forward, her eyes gentle. “Don’t be nervous. When all else fails, speak from the heart.”
“Or,” Su Jiang added from the doorway, “say nothing at all and present the crystal.”
Ru Rong gave a gentle laugh and nudged his ribs. “You’ll triumph. You’ve worked hard for this, and for her.”
She attached a small charm to his belt. “Talharen charm.” She winked and stepped back. “For good luck.”
Xian Jun knelt briefly, pressing a kiss to MeiMei’s forehead. The girl wrapped her small arms around his neck in a fierce hug, then released him.
“Bring me something pretty,” she demanded.
Her father’s lips twitched. “I’ll see what I can find.”
They made their way toward the back of the queue, already curving like a dragon’s tail through the street.
Every eye tracked him. Tall as a figure from a northern saga, with sun-bright hair no dye could mimic and shoulders that strained the cut of his clothing, Alexander Wulfbane didn’t blend.
The stares were a pressure against his skin, but he had long trained himself to wear attention like an armour.
He wasn’t the first foreigner to seek an audience, but he was likely the first to come not as a diplomat, trader, or missionary—but as a petitioner. A man with no battalion, no weapon, and everything to lose.
The queue crawled forward at the pace of ice melting in the freezing rain. The sun climbed, then began its descent. Alexander’s collar chafed. Xian Jun stood beside him in patient silence, and together they watched the great gates grow from a distant outline to a looming presence.
Finally, after hours that felt like days, they reached the front.
Only one more step, but a guard in ornate armour blocked their path, his gaze sweeping over them. “Only one last petitioner may enter today,” he said, tone flat. “The rest will have to wait until next time.”
Alexander’s stomach dropped. “Next time? We’ve waited hours—”
The guard’s gaze slid past him, already scanning the crowd behind them, calculating. His hand lifted, as if to wave forward the next person in line and be done with this inconvenience.
Alexander stepped forward, protest rising hot in his throat—
Xian Jun’s hand closed around his arm. Firm. Steady. “Go.”
Alexander turned. “Xian Jun—”
“Go and get your wife.” Xian Jun’s dark eyes held no resentment, only certainty. “She’s waiting for you. I’ll find another way to meet my cousin.”
Alexander stared at this man who’d travelled days, dressed in his finest, waited hours, only to step aside at the threshold.
“I will find my wife,” he promised. “And I will ask her, or the emperor, to let you meet your cousin. I swear.”
Xian Jun nodded with neither fanfare nor self-pity, just the dignity of a man full of understanding. “Her name is Xian Rui.”
Alexander tucked the name safely in his mind, clasped Xian Jun’s shoulder, and walked through the gates. Behind him, the great doors groaned shut.
The line inched forward, a river of petitioners winding through passageways and courtyards he’d only ever imagined—pavilions with curved roofs painted dark jade, gardens where artfully arranged pines twisted like ancient calligraphy, walls carved with the twelve animals of the X?en calendar.
Every corner held intention. The weight of centuries pressed down from every beam.
Finally, they reached the entrance to the Hall of Celestial Appeals.
He stepped into the vast hall, its floor of polished jade, cool and green as deep water, reflecting pillars that rose toward a ceiling lost in shadow.
Limyerite veins spiralled up the columns—raw crystal catching the dimming sunlight, shimmering pale blue against the stone.
These pillars alone could have funded a small nation.
And they’d been paid for, one way or another, with her suffering.
A cold anger settled in Alexander’s chest as he looked around at the gilded prison where JingYi had spent her childhood.
Every exquisite courtyard, every glittering limyerite arch, felt like a monument to her pain.
He forced the feeling down, locking it away.
None of this mattered except getting to her.
The hall was full of people—officials in silk robes, nobles with painted fans, petitioners like himself stretched in a line that snaked toward the far end.
Hundreds of eyes tracked his passage, curious and cold, measuring the foreign lord who dared walk these stones.
At the end of the vast space, raised on a dais of pale jade, sat Emperor X?en ShunLi.
Alexander had seen him a handful of times in the Tremorian court—both of them youths, surrounded by music and wine.
A lifetime ago, before duty carved them into different shapes.
Now ShunLi was a ruler, and Alexander was here to ask for the one thing this new emperor might be most reluctant to give.
He watched as petitioners took their turns, voicing their troubles: land disputes, spring planting, missing kin.
The emperor listened, grave and still, speaking only to issue concise instructions to the chamberlains beside him.
Alexander studied each exchange, measuring the new emperor’s patience, his fairness, his tolerance.
This is not her father, he reminded himself. This was the brother who sent her away to keep her safe.
A hush swept the hall as his turn came. His footfalls echoed, a solitary rhythm in the vast silence.
Before the throne, he lowered himself into the kneel Su Lian had drilled into him: spine straight, forehead to the floor, arms outstretched, fingertips meeting.
An Alpha on his knees was a surrender of pride. His every instinct screamed against it.
But this, he told himself, was not surrender. It was the bridge he must cross to reach her.
When he lifted his gaze, the disciplined calm fractured. Two bamboo screens flanked the dais—one to the left, one to the right. Behind each of them, he knew, sat the High Princesses.
JingYi.
His breath caught. The entire plan, the crystal, the speech—it all condensed into a single, desperate point of focus.
Which one?
If they had bonded, he might’ve known. Might’ve felt her presence the way a tide pulls toward shore. But their bond had been left incomplete, so starved that it had withered and vanished.
Still . . . he wanted to try.
He closed his eyes and listened with more than his ears. He felt past the weight of ceremony and the hundred eyes upon him. Past logic. Just breath and heartbeat and the question that had lived in his chest since the moment she left: Where are you?
And then, soft as a snowflake, his heart pulled him almost imperceptibly toward the screen on the left. He opened his eyes and bowed again. This time not to the emperor, but to her.
The emperor’s gaze found him, and in the faint flicker of his eyes, Alexander saw the recognition.
“Your name?” the emperor asked in X?enguā.
He sucked in a breath and straightened. “Alexander Wulfbane of Blackwood-Veyrde, Tremore, Your Majesty.”
Murmurs erupted. Many of the nobles present, undoubtedly, recognized his name as Princess JingYi’s former husband.
“You have journeyed far to air your grievance, Lord Wulfbane.” ShunLi’s voice silenced the others. “Speak, then.”
“It is not a grievance I wish to speak about, Your Majesty, but a wish.”
“A wish?” The emperor shifted slightly, his expression unreadable for a moment before a slow, genuine smile touched his lips. It was the look of a man presented with a puzzle more interesting than the day’s petitions. “How intriguing.”
“May I address the High Princess JingYi directly?”
ShunLi didn’t answer immediately. He leaned back, the fingers of one hand tapping once, thoughtfully, against the arm of the throne. His gaze drifted briefly toward the right-hand screen. Then he inclined his head, a gesture of permission that was also a concession to his own curiosity.
“You may.”
Alexander bowed low in thanks. His spine straightened as he prepared to deliver the words he had rehearsed repeatedly on the journey here. Words he had rewritten in his mind a hundred times, agonized over each night in silence beneath the foreign stars.
And in that suspended heartbeat before the throne, he forgot every single one.
The silence stretched. His mind was a perfect, blank void. At the dais, ShunLi’s gaze held him, the emperor’s expression indiscernible save for a crease at his brow—a man torn between intervening and giving Alexander more time to sort this out.
His own heart thudded, a deafening drum. The great golden chamber, the nobles, the banners—it all dissolved into a blur, colours bleeding together. All that remained was a screen of bamboo slats.
When all else fails, speak from the heart.
The words returned to him not as a rehearsed speech. They rose unbidden, like bubbles breaking the surface of a still pond. His gaze locked on the bamboo screen to the left. If he could not see her obsidian eyes, then at least he’d imagine them steady on him.