She listened to her own ragged breathing and felt the boiling heat of the seams in her soul, where dress and girl were bound. What she did not do was obey immediately. Disrespectful. It would have been Mother's right to chastise her harshly.
The radiance enveloped her, shining and without any more force than its mere presence conveyed. She was a bent and cracked doll. With Mother's simple words, she could not deny the truth that had been explained to her. Not so easily.
Truth seared. The cascade of self-recrimination for her internal lies it had released did not stop. She was a frightened, uncertain girl, grasping at the threads of the world, and trying to make sense of them. She wanted, desperately just once to have genuine kindness from the woman before her. An insipid and childish yearning, she should have long grown passed it. Her steel, as always needed yet more polish. But, so too was she Cai Renxiang, and if pain and hurt and disappointment could stop the hands of the clock then she would have ground to stillness long before now.
Dirt and gravel scraped under her feet as she straightened, and a grinding metallic whine echoed across the cliff as she dragged Cifeng's scabbard out of the rock.
Mother, she decided, looked far more absurd than usual. As if to contrast the way Renxiang herself had changed, Cai Shenhua's gown was a flowing and dense wrap of many layers, of lace and fluttering ribbons, her dark hair drifting about her head in countless thin, smooth braids like black silk, shining from within from her light, like a lady of the imperial courts magnified to a towering loom.
Except of course the deep slashes separating the sleeves from the chest, exposing muscular arms, the high cut up the side of the gown, exposing ankle and calf, and high riders heels as sharp and long as daggers.
She fixed her eyes on lips painted the color of fresh blood, not trusting herself to look higher still, even now.
"The summit achieved full success. In tandem with the Emissaries of the Polar Nation, the bones of peace and negotiation were laid down. Though we suffered the attack of a traitor, which I must assume my honored Mother knows far more than I."
"Amusing summation," Mother chuckled. "Indeed. My visit to the fens was informative. Perhaps I shall tell it to you in time, daughter. But it is not like you to dodge. You were always a straightforward girl."
"I merely organize my thoughts," Cai Renxiang said slowly. Because they were still struggling and scattered, seared of the clinging shadows preconceptions she had not even recognized."
"The Polar Nation has a great potential danger to the Empire. Their ways of organization and thoughts on authority are alien to us, much more than they seem on the surface. I cannot clearly see how conflict may be completely avoided in the long term."
"Hoh? You too regard this as a ruse to buy time for us to deal with the troublesome folk under our feet then?" Mother asked.
She focused and circulated qi to keep her eyes from watering, from sizzling under the light.
"I do not see it. But the eyes of those I trust do.," Cai Renxiang said.
A single, long fingernail pressed against her forehead. Prickling at her skin, but no more. "Do explain."
"...Their order is immersed in the submission of self to the aggregate. I have heard words of those thinking there are similarities… the focus on written law and codified tradition, but I find this cosmetic. They find cultivators such as Mother a viscerally repulsive thing."
She did not know that they were wrong.
"Hoh? How interesting. It seems there is some wisdom among these frozen folk," Cai Shenhua mused, tapping her chin. "Still… a fragile belief. The man who chooses to set aside the sword may only live so long as no foe chooses to run him through. I am curious as too how this persists… and what blades have protected them, such a deep belief, persisting for so long, cannot be mere naivety."
Cai Renxiang did not reply, for she could not find anything useful to add to her mother's words. Even without plunging into her mind, Mother took so much more than the words she spoke aloud from her.
"Can dialogue persist when one side is so fundamentally unsettling to the other? My retainers believe so, through constant social maintenance and dialogue," Cai Renxiang continued instead. "In this, I believe that it is my vision that is lacking. If we can codify our interactions as the Empire does, if we may arrange regular low-level contact, if we may maintain investment in the south being a quiet place…"
"For a cultivator's generation, two or even three, but as beards grow long and the flesh spun over dantians grow thin... So long as the memory of Ogodei remains, such a vision can be sold, made a truth," Cai Shenhua said idly. "Longer… hah."
"My retainer once said a master diviner once told them that any who claim a vision of such far removes are charlatans or fools."
Mother made a small amused sound. "That one is still scribbling things in the margins of fate's book? Unsurprising, but amusing indeed."
The pressure and intensity of the light only grew, and Cai Renxiang's breath hitched in her throat before it subsided.
"The future cannot paralyze the present, this I grant. Continue your thoughts Renxiang."
She breathed out harshly. "My doubts only rise under your light. I have haggled law with their emissaries and traded points on the minutiae of documentation. No different than I have with other scholars. If this business breaks down, if it fails, it will be from the chaos of individual actors, not some inherent difference. This was the correct action…
And even beyond it, the southern Emerald Seas was able to present a unified image, it is small, but the cooperation among them will grow with time and the focus on the mountains."
And the conflict with the Cloud. She knew that troubled Ling Qi. She agreed in principle, that war and death were wasteful investments, best avoided, but she was also heir to the Emerald Seas, its people were her priority in all things. She was by her privilege, responsible for every attack, every raid, every death.
"I see," Mother said, withdrawing the finger pressed to her forehead, her mother strode past her, looking out over the mist-filled vales as Cai Renxiang had.
"These foreigners, you got some of that strange answer from them, didn't you? Bound… explain these words more clearly. I will hear them."
She swallowed thickly, fear rising in her heart again. "The Thrones of Heaven are impure and unjust. Heaven is wrong. These are your words, Mother."
Cai Shenhua gestured for her to continue, the radiance of her eyes burning away the mist wherever her gaze roved, exposing the valley to pitiless light.
"I do not see a path by which all who rule can be made virtuous," Cai Renxiang said slowly. "Encouraged, educated, given every chance to virtue, and people… people will still sin."
She had truly believed otherwise, but she had grown less sure. She was certain her path was still the one that best minimized this.
"So if those who would sit those thrones cannot be guaranteed to virtue, they must be bound to it, as intrinsically as time takes all in the end."
"And who wields those strings which bind them, darling? Do you foolishly dream that it is anything but their lack of reach that makes weak men any less cruel than strong ones?" Cai Shenhua asked, lax and languid, as if she was making a careless joke.
She did not yet have an answer for that. This was something she had only just begun to mull.
The beat of silence stretched between them.
"Well if you had been quick to answer, I might have had to check your stitching despite your squirming," Mother chuckled. "Do be diligent daughter. I will look forward to seeing what strings you spin for yourself."
