Jiang Wu did not bow when Ji Chen entered the prince's private study the next morning. He stood with his arms crossed and his considerable bulk planted directly in the doorway, blocking it as effectively as any door, and looked at Ji Chen the way a man looks at a debt he suspects will never be repaid.

"You're the sect dog they married him to," Jiang Wu said.

"I'm the disciple they married him to," Ji Chen corrected, mild as still water. "Dog's a bit much before breakfast, but I've been called worse."

"I've served His Highness since before that chair." Jiang Wu's jaw worked. "I watched him lead the western campaign with a fever in him so bad his own physicians begged him to retreat, and he didn't, because eight hundred men were behind him and he wasn't going to be the reason a single one of them died for nothing. I watched him come back from the hunting trip that took his legs and I watched him decide, in the space of one night, that the entire world had already finished grieving him so he might as well finish too. And now you walk in here in borrowed silk a week after marrying him for a treaty, and you smile like you've already decided you're going to fix him, and I want you to understand something before you go any further into this household."

"All right," Ji Chen said. "Tell me."

"He doesn't need fixing. He needs people to stop looking at him like something broken that requires repair. If that's what you're here for, if you've got some idea in your head about being the gentle sect husband who heals the wounded prince back into a man worth loving, you can pack your borrowed silk and go home to your sect right now, because that's not a marriage, that's a project, and he will smell it on you within a week and never forgive either of us for letting it through the gate."

Ji Chen was quiet for a moment, considering this with the same careful attention he gave everything, and then he said, "Can I tell you what I actually think?"

Jiang Wu's arms stayed crossed, but he didn't say no.

"I think you're right that he doesn't need fixing," Ji Chen said. "I also think you've decided I'm here to do that because it's easier to hate me for a plan I don't have than to admit you're frightened of what happens to him if no one stays. I'm not here to fix him. I've met exactly one prince in my life and he is, by every account including his own, magnificent and unbearable in roughly equal measure, and I have no intention of trying to sand the unbearable parts off him, because I suspect they're load-bearing. I'm here because I made a vow in a temple eleven days after meeting him for the first time, and because that vow meant something to me even if it meant nothing to the men who arranged it, and because I don't break vows. That's all. You can hate me for as long as it takes to prove it's true. I'm not going anywhere in the meantime."

Something in Jiang Wu's face shifted, not trust, not yet, but the particular recalculation of a man who has prepared for one kind of fight and been handed a different one entirely.

"His legs," Jiang Wu said, slower now, as if testing him. "You know what happened to them?"

After a slight moment of silence, Ji Chen spoke, "A hunting accident, the official report says." Ji Chen's eyes didn't waver. "I've read enough sect medical texts to know that nerve degeneration from a fall doesn't usually present the way his does. I'd like to examine him properly, with his permission, when he'll allow it. I'm not accusing anyone of anything yet. I'm saying I have questions the official report doesn't answer, and I intend to find better answers eventually, whether or not anyone here wants me to."

Jiang Wu studied him for a long moment, and then, finally, stepped aside from the doorway.

"He's in the garden," he said. "Hates being watched practicing his grip strength, so he does it where he thinks no one's looking. Don't tell him I told you where to find him."

"Wouldn't dream of it," Ji Chen said, and meant it, and went.

***

He found Yan Zhao in the eastern garden exactly where Jiang Wu had said, in the shade of a bamboo grove that hid the chair from the main pavilion's sightline, gripping a length of knotted rope between both hands and pulling with a ferocity that had nothing to do with the rope and everything to do with eight months of fury that had no other outlet. Sweat stood out on his temples. His knuckles had gone white. An orange cat, scrawny and battle-scarred, entirely unbothered by the violence of the exercise — lay curled on the seat beside his hip, blinking slow and golden at nothing.

Yan Zhao saw him approaching and did not stop pulling the rope. "Come to inspect your purchase in daylight?"

Without looking offended, Ji Chen said, "Came to ask if you'd let me look at your legs properly. Not the official report. Actually look, pulse points, qi flow, the kind of examination Qingyun Sect trains its medics to do that I don't think any palace physician has bothered with in eight months, because I think they decided the diagnosis was finished before they'd finished examining you."

The rope stilled in Yan Zhao's hands.

"My physicians are perfectly competent."

"I'm sure they are, for ordinary injuries. I don't think this is an ordinary injury." Ji Chen crouched, unhurried, to the cat's level rather than the prince's, a small mercy, not looking down at a man who hated being looked down at, and scratched behind the orange ears while he spoke. 

"I'm not asking to humiliate you or to play physician where I have no business. I'm asking because something about the way your hands shake after exertion doesn't match a fall injury, and I've spent enough years studying sect medicine to recognize when a pattern doesn't fit its supposed cause. If I'm wrong, you've lost an afternoon to a disciple's overconfidence. If I'm right—"

"And if you're right," Yan Zhao cut in, voice gone very flat as if very irritated, "what then? You think there's some miracle the sect's been hiding that the palace physicians simply never thought to try? You think eight months of competent men staring at the same useless legs missed something a branch disciple with borrowed court silk will catch on his first afternoon?"

"I think," Ji Chen said, meeting his eyes directly, unflinching even as the cruelty in Yan Zhao's voice sharpened, "that a fall from a horse doesn't usually present with the kind of slow-spreading nerve pattern your medical reports describe, and that there's a particular toxin family that does, and that I would rather be wrong and look like a fool in front of you than be right and say nothing because I was afraid of your temper."

The garden went very quiet. Even the cicadas seemed to hold their breath.

Yan Zhao's jaw worked once, twice, and Ji Chen watched as if there was an ongoing war behind his eyes, pride against fear, fury against the first flicker of something that might, eventually, with enough patience, become hope.

"Tomorrow," Yan Zhao said finally, low and rough. "Not today. I need—" He stopped himself before he could say time, before he could admit to needing anything at all, and instead said, with the particular brittleness of a man drawing his armor back into place, "I need to finish my exercises. You may go."

It wasn't a yes. It wasn't, Ji Chen thought, walking back toward the pavilion with the orange cat trotting unexpectedly at his heels as if it had decided, in the space of one conversation, that Ji Chen was now its responsibility, entirely a no either.

He'd take it.