BOOK 11: CHAPTER 57: THAT WOULD BE TRUE MADNESS

Sen stepped back into the galehouse after returning a semi-catatonic Zhi to her amused mother. The girl had been worn out by a combination of excitement, food, and non-stop chattering. He found Falling Leaf sitting in a chair he didn’t recognize with Ai curled up and sound asleep in her lap. He paused for a moment, firmly fixing the peaceful sight in his memory before he walked over and gently picked up his daughter. She mumbled something about treats in a groggy voice before sinking back into unconsciousness. After spending so much time in the large, impersonal halls of Lu Manor and the palace recently, being in the galehouse felt like pulling a warm, familiar blanket around himself.

He tucked his daughter into bed and just let himself watch her take slow, steady breaths. There was always a low-level feeling of dread in the back of his mind that something would happen to her. It was a foolish notion. He doubted there was much that could be done to possibly make his daughter safer. Auntie Caihong alone would be enough to fend off almost any attack, and that was before considering the presence of the Falling Leaf, Long Jia Wei, and the rest of the sect. If something terrible ever did befall his little girl, it would only happen after mountains of corpses were made and a poisoned wasteland had been created. Even knowing all of that, seeing her sleeping peacefully let something inside of him release its awful grasp. The feeling would return. It always did. But he could be free of it for at least one night.

He left her door slightly open, mostly so he could keep listening to her steady breathing. Then, he put himself to the task of cleaning up. Falling Leaf silently joined him as he used qi techniques that had once seemed miraculous to him to idly clean dishes. She would take the clean dishes and put them away. It was an old routine, but one they fell into without so much as a single missed step. The galehouse was soon a tidy space again, although he wondered how this work was done when he wasn’t there. He supposed that they would have had to clean the bowls and pans the old-fashioned way, with hot water and soap.

“How long will you stay?” Falling Leaf asked, breaking the prolonged silence.

“Not long,” admitted Sen. “No more than a few days.”

“You don’t seem pleased to be here.”

“I am. Believe me, I am. I just worry that I’m being selfish. That my being here and leaving again will make things harder for Ai.”

“Perhaps,” said Falling Leaf. “Perhaps not. She misses you a great deal. I think she’ll be happy with any time you can give.”

“I hope so.”

“After this, you mean to begin your true war against the spirit beasts?”

Sen grimaced at the reminder but nodded.

“I do. I have to. I’ve probably put it off longer than I should already.”

Falling Leaf nodded with a thoughtful expression before she said, “Then, I’ll prepare to leave as well.”

That comment left Sen in stunned silence for several seconds before he said, “What?”

“What, what?” she asked.

“I mean, what are you talking about? Why would you be leaving?”

“Why wouldn’t I be leaving? There is to be fighting. Of course, I will go.”

Sen’s mind felt like it kept slipping on ice he couldn’t see. He’d never intended for Falling Leaf to join him in this war. The risks would be insane. She’d be a constant target for the spirit beasts and under suspicion by every cultivator who pieced together what she was. It was unacceptable.

“No,” said Sen. “Why would you ever want to do that?”

“You expect me to rely on the humans to protect you? That would be true madness. We both know they cannot be trusted. They will betray you if given the opportunity. With enemies on all sides, you need someone to watch where you cannot.”

“You don’t know that they’ll betray me,” said Sen, not believing his own words for even a moment.

He was confident that they would, in fact, betray him if they thought there was a chance of success and surviving the fallout. It would need to look like an accident or some kind of misfortune on the battlefield. Otherwise, Master Feng and Uncle Kho would slaughter them all. Let an opportunity to kill him unnoticed arrive, though, and he was sure the betrayal would come swift and fierce. But those were the cultivators and the nobility, not the mortals who were just trying to find some way of surviving from one day to the next while the world fell apart around them. Those were the people he meant to save. The kind of people he would have been if his life had taken a different path.

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“Of course, I know,” said Falling Leaf. “They’re humans, which is enough reason to doubt them. Their loyalty is as fickle as the wind. But all fear power, and you are powerful.”

Sen let that argument go, knowing that it wasn’t going to sway her. He’d had too many similar thoughts to make that argument in good faith. It also wasn’t the real reason he didn’t want her to go. Here, she would be far from the fighting and beneath the direct protection of Auntie Caihong. It wasn’t true safety. There was no true safety anymore, but it was the next best thing. There were so few people he considered family, and he loathed the idea of any of them being in more danger than necessary. Going with him would mean nothing but danger, all of the time.

“I don’t want you to fight,” said Sen, lifting a hand to prevent an angry response. “The spirit beasts would be trying to kill or capture you all of the time. I know you can take care of yourself, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss having you there. It would be a comfort to me, but who will watch your back while you’re busy watching mine? There will be spirit beasts who are more powerful than you on at least some of those battlefields. Maybe even most of them.”

Sen could see that his words hadn’t done much to quench her anger. He also knew why. This was as selfish as his decision to come home and see Ai. Falling Leaf wanted to protect him. He wanted to protect her. The difference was that he’d made it clear that he considered his want more important than hers. I’m lucky she hasn’t done something violent to me, yet, he thought. Ꞧά𐌽ȏꞖÊṣ

“And will you stop me from going?” she asked in a dangerously flat voice.

There it is, he thought. They could argue in circles all night. As long as they were arguing, no lines would truly be crossed. He hadn’t done anything as stupid as trying to order her to stay. He’d been trying to convince her. If she decided on her own that staying was the better idea, then everything was fine. With that question in the air, though, he had to make a decision. Just how much damage to their relationship was he willing to accept to get his way with all of this? He thought of Lo Meifeng and the shambles of a relationship she had with her brother. He’d seen how much it had pained her. Could he stand to have something like that happen between him and Falling Leaf? Could he endure that?

The answer was simple.

“No,” he said. “I won’t stop you.”

Falling Leaf stared at him in uncomfortable silence for a long time before she nodded.

“That is wise of you,” she said.

Sen glanced at the partially open door of Ai’s room. It was clear to him that Falling Leaf and his daughter had grown closer in his absence. He wasn’t sure how well she would handle having both him and Falling Leaf leave. Let alone how she would handle the prospect of them going off to fight and maybe even die. Falling Leaf followed the line of his gaze and frowned.

“It is a hard lesson that all kits must learn eventually,” she said. “Sometimes those we love must fight. Sometimes, they do not return.”

“I’d hoped to spare her as much of that as I could.”

“You cannot spare her from life,” said Falling Leaf. “Truth will not hurt less because it was delayed.”

“I suspect that’s true, sometimes. Other times, I think it might hurt a little less if we understand a little more.”

“That is only true if you can delay the truth by years. You don’t have years. Neither does she.”

“I know,” said Sen, his hands closing into fists. “And I hate it. None of this should be necessary.”

“This was always going to happen. If it didn’t happen now, it would have happened later. Maybe at a time when you and the Feng wouldn’t be here to force the humans to work together. Would that be better?”

It wasn’t an idle question. Not with the inevitability of his ascension looming ever closer. Would it have been better if this had happened after he’d ascended? He didn’t know if there was a good way to answer that question. All he could really know was that it would have been different, but his intuition told him that it wouldn’t have been better. Worse, it might have happened within Ai’s lifetime. He wasn’t sure he could have lived with it if he were to ascend only to discover that she’d died to the claws and teeth of some spirit beast when he was literally unable to do anything to save her. Slumping a bit, he shook his head.

“I just—” he started. “This isn’t the life I wanted. I just want to cultivate and be a good father. A good friend. A good student. That sort of man can be kind when he wants to be kind. Instead, I have to be a tyrant, and tyrants are cruel. And I can’t have both lives.”

Sen wanted to say that it wasn’t fair, but he knew as well as anyone that life was rarely fair.

“You’re right. You can’t have both. But you can also make a world where she’ll never face the kind of threats in front of us. How many would trade everything for a chance to do that?”

“I expect most would,” said Sen.

He would have done it gladly when he was slowly starving on the streets and lived in fear of the winter. Of course, the only thing he really had to trade then was his life. Now, he was being asked to trade other things, things he cared about much more than his own life. He thought that there was probably some irony in the idea that the closer he got to immortality, the less he valued that same life.

“I saw your Grandmother Lu earlier,” said Falling Leaf. “Why is she not here?”

Sen let out a brief laugh and said, “I think she’s planning on keeping Ai all to herself tomorrow. So, she stayed away to let me have Ai today.”

“What will you do tomorrow, then?”

“Deal with the sect,” said Sen with a groan.