Chapter Text
When Zhuzhi-lang returned from the mortal realm, he went straight to Su Xiyan’s bedroom and reported that his search had come to naught. Shen Jianhong was missing, he said: and so was his son, Shen Yuan.
“Missing?” Father said hollowly. “What do you mean, missing?”
Beside him, Mother’s lips had turned white. “Since when, Zhuzhi?” she asked. “Is he—is he dead?”
“The house was empty when I reached it,” Zhuzhi-lang explained. “I couldn’t smell Shen-yisheng, or Shen Yuan, so I took on a human form and visited the woman who lived next door. She told me that Shen Jianhong left his home with Shen Yuan five years ago, and that she and the rest of the villagers thought that Shen-yisheng had moved to open a new clinic somewhere else—but she has heard no news of him since he left, and I could find no trace of either of the Shens within three hundred li of Tangshan.”
“This is ill news,” muttered Tianlang-jun. “Did the woman know why he left so suddenly?”
Zhuzhi-lang shook his head. “According to the lady, he simply announced that he meant to quit Tangshan one morning and left the village head some money for the maintenance of the house before departing. No one was surprised when he went, I think—for there were two new physicians in Tangshan that year, and it was expected that Shen Jianhong might leave to seek his fortune elsewhere.”
Mother and Fuhuang exchanged troubled glances. “Keep looking,” Tianlang-jun said at last. “He left money for the house-keeping, so that must mean that he plans to return—or that he wanted the house to be ready for Shen Yuan, if the son wished to live in Tangshan again.”
Zhuzhi-lang nodded and took his leave. He departed again later that night; and for the next half-month, there was no further news of him.
Binghe’s parents seemed to grow more tense by the day. His mother was nearing the end of her third month of pregnancy: and though her spirits were somewhat better than they had been before she decided to turn to Shen Jianhong, Su Xiyan was frequently too ill to leave her bed. Hour after hour, she swallowed down the tonics given to her by the increasingly-frantic Lan-daifu, and did her best to eat small snacks whenever her nausea abated; but even so, she looked thinner with each passing day, until Physician Lan nearly lost his wits from fear.
“Before long, it will be too late for me to safely remove one of the fetuses,” he said one morning, wringing his hands. “Once you reach the fourth month, it cannot be done without risking infection—and if it is tried later, it is unlikely that even one can be safely carried to term. Your Majesty, I pray you—”
“Give me five days,” Su Xiyan replied. She was trembling from head to foot, though whether from fear or weariness Binghe did not know; and when he put his head close to hers, he heard the soft sound of his mother’s teeth chattering behind her lips. “Only five days: and if Shen Jianhong cannot be found by then, we shall do as you say.”
At that, Fuhuang went out into the hall and cursed Shen Jianhong for a full ke without stopping for breath. Mother did not hear it, for she was already busy trying to comfort Luo Binghe; but her son, with his keen demon’s ears, heard every last word.
Afterwards, there was nothing for Luo Binghe to do but wait. Physician Lan had given his mother five days: and on the first day, he went down to the palace kitchens with his nurse and begged her to teach him how to cook.
“Let it be something that Mother can eat, even when she feels queasy,” he pleaded, when Shu-ayi reminded him that his mother wanted him to continue studying with his tutor despite the fact that she no longer had the strength to supervise his lessons. “I can’t concentrate like this, Auntie. If I could cook a meal that helped Mother gain a little strength back, at least that would be something.”
Shu-ayi relented in the face of Luo Binghe’s imploring eyes, as she always did where he was concerned; and two hours later, he brought his mother a bowl of black congee boiled with the roasted tail of a biting reed-lizard. She ate every bite, laughing as she noted how closely the taste of the lizard resembled chicken; and she did not scold when she learned that Binghe had skipped his lessons that day, though she had never permitted such a thing before.
That night, Luo Binghe curled up at the foot of his parents’ bed, so full of apprehension that he could scarcely close his eyes.
In the morning, Zhuzhi-lang came to the door to speak with Tianlang-jun; for though he had searched the mortal realm within a thousand miles of Tangshan, there was no news nor any sign of Shen Jianhong. He was off again before noon that day, stopping only to eat a fire-spitting goat from the palace stables and pay his respects to Su Xiyan; and Luo Binghe was left to wander the palace alone, for he had asked his nurse—who was gentler than most of the palace maid-servants—to accompany his mother until the worst had either been averted, or come to pass.
The second day was much the same. Su Xiyan ate, bathed, and left her bed for a careful walk around the palace gardens, accompanied by her husband and the ever-fretful Physician Lan. Luo Binghe walked by her side until she went back indoors: and then he stood in the corridor outside her bedroom, and listened to the soft sound of her breathing until she fell asleep.
His father stood beside him, staring at the opposite wall with empty eyes. His mother had ordered him from the room, insisting that it made her uneasy to have him fussing over her all day; so he told the maids to alert him if she felt ill again, and went out to join Luo Binghe.
“Now you know why we are so few,” he said at last, after a full ten minutes of silence. “Our kin are prone to death by heart-break; and those heavenly demons who chose mates from other races are most susceptible to it, for humans and the lesser demons are shorter-lived and more delicate than we are. If anything should happen to your mother, I—”
His throat closed, as if he could not bear to voice the thought. He opened his mouth and closed it again, refusing to meet Luo Binghe’s eyes, and then:
“I am sorry,” he said thickly. “Heavenly demons make poor parents, Xiao Binghe, and I am no better than my forefathers. I cannot live on without her, not even for you.”
Luo Binghe blinked and wrapped his cloak more tightly about his shoulders.
“I know,” he said honestly. “I never expected otherwise.”
"She would be different, if anything ever happened to me. But I cannot do it. I only endured under Mount Bailu because I believed she had betrayed me—that she had never loved me, and won herself endless wealth and renown by condemning me to ruin—but if I heard of her death, even then, I…”
“Fuhuang should not talk this way,” Luo Binghe frowned. And then, rolling his eyes: “If Mother hears, you won’t have to worry about enduring for my sake. She’ll send you on ahead herself.”
Tianlang-jun barked out a short, startled laugh; and Luo Binghe withdrew to his own chambers, feeling better in spite of his father’s declaration that he would permit himself to waste away in grief if anything happened to Mother.
When the third day dawned, Su Xiyan ate a hearty breakfast and said that she felt well enough to go to court. Her daily audiences had fallen by the wayside since her pregnancy began, and she was eager to return to her work: so an announcement was hung up by the palace gates, and petitioners began to trickle into the audience hall by midmorning.
Luo Binghe stood at his mother’s left hand, while his father sat at her right. He did not listen to the visiting demons as they came in, for their requests were all the same—one wanted Tianlang-jun to intervene on his behalf in a land dispute, another begged Su Xiyan to consider his daughters ( three of them!) as concubines for Luo Binghe himself once he was old enough for such things—and so, he noticed nothing at first when the servants set up an outcry on the ground floor.
A moment later, Su Xiyan held up her hand and rose from the smaller throne beside Father’s.
“Something is wrong,” she said. “The door-wardens—”
And then the high double doors burst off their hinges, for Zhuzhi-lang had barrelled straight through them in his serpent form. His body was so wide across that it scratched the stone frame as it went, slithering up the length of the audience hall with such speed that the petitioners fell flat in fear and let him pass over them; and then he stopped before the dais where the thrones were set, and spat a large, white something onto the floor at Su Xiyan’s feet.
The creature fell out in a tangle of pale arms and legs, groaning as it slipped from Zhuzhi-lang’s jaws. It lay where Zhuzhi-lang had dropped it, stunned, and then Zhuzhi-lang shifted back into his heavenly demon body and bowed before the twin thrones.
“We were looking in the wrong place, Junshang,” he said hoarsely. “I spent weeks searching the mortal realm, when all this time—”
At this, the white lump on the floor groaned again and looked up.
If not for the sound of the blood rushing in his ears, Luo Binghe could have sworn that his heart had stopped beating.
The thing at his mother’s feet was a human man—a young one, so far as humans went; he could not be more than nine or ten years older than Binghe himself. His skin was luminous and soft under the light of the torches, and his eyes were an arresting shade of leaf-green, slanting upward at their corners like the wings of a bird in flight; and the furious glow within them could have brought a lesser demon to his knees, if he did not prostrate himself in wonder and beg the human youth to take him as a vassal on the spot.
Those eyes met Luo Binghe’s, seething in wrath: and in that instant, Luo Binghe was lost. But then the young man’s gaze dimmed in bewilderment; for he had clearly expected that Zhuzhi-lang meant to eat him, and could not fathom what to make of being spit out at the feet of Tianlang-jun and his human queen.
He looked at Luo Binghe again, and at the apologetic (and now rather less-fearsome looking) Zhuzhi-lang; and then he knelt before the dais and pressed his brow to the ground.
“May Junshang and her Majesty the Empress reign for ten thousand years,” he said. “This servant, Shen Yuan, offers his greetings.”