The betrothal hall smelled of crushed peonies and old incense, and Mu Yan Zhao decided, somewhere in the cold center of himself, that he hated both.

He sat where they had placed him at the edge of the dais, in the lacquered wheelchair Jiang Wu had built him with hands shaking from grief he refused to show and watched his father read out a marriage contract that was not his.

"...the Princess Mu Yan Xi, beloved daughter of the Emperor, to be wed to the disciple of Qingyun Sect in accordance with the treaty of alliance sealed three generations past..."

Across the hall, his sister knelt with her spine very straight and her hands very still in her lap, and Yan Zhao watched her knuckles whiten around a fold of her own sleeve. She had told him, two nights ago, in the dark of his chamber where she still came to sit with him because no one else did anymore, that she did not want to marry a stranger from a sect three days' ride from everything she knew. She had said it lightly, the way she said everything that mattered, as if lightness could disguise the weight.

He had not forgotten it.

The Emperor's voice rolled on, ceremonial and distant, and Yan Zhao let his gaze slide to the man kneeling at the base of the dais steps — the groom, the disciple, the price of an old alliance the throne could not afford to break.

He was younger than Yan Zhao had expected. Built like a soldier rather than a court ornament, shoulders wide under plain sect-grey robes that had clearly been re-tailored at the last moment to look more presentable for the palace and had not entirely succeeded. Golden-brown waist length hair, a face that should have looked nervous, would have looked nervous, on anyone with sense but instead wore an expression of careful, polite attention, as if he had decided that whatever happened today, he would meet it standing.

Kneeling. He would meet it kneeling, technically. But there was nothing kneeling about the way he held his head.

Yan Zhao felt something shift in his chest that he did not have a name for and did not want one.

"Wait."

The word left him before he had finished deciding to say it. The hall's susurrus of breath and silk went still all at once, three hundred court officials and a dozen consorts and his own father turning to look at the cripple prince in his wheeled chair as if he had grown a second head.

His father's face did the thing it always did now, that flicker of distaste quickly smoothed into practiced patience, the look of a man examining a damaged piece of furniture he hadn't yet decided whether to repair or discard. "Third Prince. You forget yourself."

"I forget nothing." Yan Zhao's voice came out flat and hard, the voice that had once turned twenty thousand soldiers silent on a battlefield, and it still worked, even from a chair, even from a body that could not stand. He watched the satisfaction of that settle into his own bones like a coal. "I object to the terms."

"There are no terms to object to. This is a treaty obligation three generations old—"

"Then let the obligation be honored by a prince who can still be of use to this empire." He did not look at his sister. He did not dare. "Not by the one whose only worth was ever a sword arm, and who no longer has even that."

The silence in the hall went a different kind of quiet.

He heard, very distinctly, his sister's breath catch.

"I will take the contract in her place," he said, before anyone, least of all himself, could talk him out of it. "Mu Yan Xi is the Emperor's beloved daughter and should be permitted to choose her own husband, in time, as befits her rank and her use to this house in matters of true alliance. I am a broken general sitting uselessly in a chair my own father can no longer look at without flinching. Let the broken thing be spent on a marriage no one of consequence will ever care to examine closely. It costs the throne nothing it has not already written off."

It was the cruelest thing he had said about himself in eight months of being cruel about himself daily, and it landed exactly as he intended - like a blade laid flat on a table, undeniable, impossible to argue against without admitting the truth everyone in this hall already believed.

His father's jaw tightened. Calculation moved behind his eyes.

Yan Zhao watched it happen, watched the cold arithmetic of a man deciding that yes, actually, this solved several problems at once: the inconvenient daughter kept close, the inconvenient cripple son disposed of cleanly, the treaty honored, the optics of nobility and self-sacrifice handed to him gift-wrapped by the very son who'd embarrassed him by surviving his own poisoning instead of dying with dignity on some battlefield where his uselessness could have been mourned instead of witnessed.

"If the Third Prince wishes it," his father said, slow, testing the room's reaction and finding only stunned silence to work with, "and if Qingyun Sect's representative has no objection—"

All eyes went to the kneeling disciple.

Yan Zhao looked at him directly for the first time. Up close, closer than the length of the hall, he could see the man's eyes were a warm brown, startled wide for exactly one breath before something settled in them. Not fear. Not the offense Yan Zhao had half-expected, half-wanted, some flinch he could use to justify the contempt he'd already decided to wear like armor for whatever marriage came next.

Just attention. Steady, open attention, fixed on Yan Zhao like he was the only person in the hall worth looking at.

"This disciple has no objection," the man said, and his voice was clear and unhesitating, pitched to carry. "Qingyun Sect's treaty was sealed with the throne of Great Yan, not with any one prince or princess by name. I am honored to serve the alliance in whatever form it takes."

Diplomatic. Smooth. The kind of answer a sect elder had probably drilled into him before he ever set foot in the capital.

And yet, Yan Zhao caught it, the way you catch a blade's true edge under torchlight, a fraction of a second before someone shows you its flat — there was something underneath the smoothness. Something that looked, absurdly, like relief.

As if being chosen by the broken prince instead of the beloved princess was not the insult everyone in the hall assumed it to be.

As if he had wanted, for reasons Yan Zhao could not begin to guess and refused to waste time wondering about, exactly this.

"Then it is settled," the Emperor said, already moving on, already speaking of dates and dowries and the optics of a swift, quiet wedding before court gossip could turn the substitution into a scandal rather than a triumph of princely self-sacrifice. "The Third Prince Mu Yan Zhao will wed the disciple Ji Chen of Qingyun Sect, in accordance with the treaty…"

Ji Chen.

Yan Zhao turned the name over once in his mind, filed it away with the same flat efficiency he'd once used to memoize troop positions, and told himself it meant nothing.

Across the hall, his sister was looking at him now, finally, helplessly - with an expression he did not have the strength to meet, gratitude and grief tangled together so tightly he couldn't have separated them if he tried.

He looked instead at his own hands, folded uselessly in his lap atop legs that had not moved on his own command in eight months, and thought: there. It is done. Let them think it cost me nothing.

It had cost him everything he had left to give, which was, he reflected with the particular bitterness of a man auditing his own ruin, very little to begin with.

He did not look again at the disciple kneeling at the base of the dais. He told himself that too meant nothing.

He was already lying to himself less than an hour into his own engagement, and some small, distant part of him, the part that used to plan battles, the part that had not yet entirely gone quiet under the weight of his disability and humiliation and eight months of being looked at like a problem rather than a person — noted that this, too, did not bode well.