The first formal court audience after the wedding fell eight days later, and Yan Zhao had known, with the cold certainty of a man who'd spent a lifetime reading rooms before they finished deciding what they thought of him, that it would be an exercise in humiliation dressed as ceremony.

He had not expected it to involve quite so many people staring at his husband's hands.

"They're rather large, aren't they," Consort Shu Fang said to Consort Lin Yue, in a voice calibrated precisely to carry to the dais without technically being addressed to anyone on it. "One does wonder what use Qingyun Sect imagined a disciple with a soldier's hands would have, married into a household with no battles left for him to fight."

"Perhaps he's meant for entirely different exertions," Lin Yue murmured, and the ripple of suppressed laughter that moved through the nearest cluster of attendants made Yan Zhao's hands curl, slow and deliberate, around the arms of his chair.

Beside him, Ji Chen who had been kneeling in proper court position this time, since the formal audience permitted no exceptions even for a husband determined to walk beside chairs rather than in front of them and did not so much as blink. His expression remained the same pleasant, attentive mask he'd worn at the betrothal, and Yan Zhao found himself, despite every effort not to, watching for the crack in it.

There wasn't one.

"Third Prince." Second Prince Mu Yan Bo's voice cut smooth and pleasant across the hall, performing concern for an audience that knew precisely how little of it was real. "We are all so pleased to see you recovering enough to attend court again. Your new consort must be a tremendous comfort, given his... particular talents." 

A pause, exquisitely timed. "Though I confess, brother, I had always understood the Qingyun Sect to be selective in which disciples it dispatched on matters of state. One wonders what criteria led them to send a branch disciple of common birth for a prince of royal blood, rather than someone of more suitable pedigree."

It was, Yan Zhao understood immediately, not really an insult aimed at Ji Chen at all. It was aimed at him, at the fact that he, once the most celebrated general in the empire, had been deemed worth only a lowborn substitute husband, that even the sect entrusted with sealing an old alliance had apparently judged him not worth their better-bred disciples.

He felt the old fury rise, sharp and familiar, and for the first time in eight months it found a target that wasn't himself.

"Qingyun Sect," he said, before his father or anyone else could answer for him, "is selective, Second Brother, which is precisely why they sent me a disciple capable of holding his own in this court without flinching at venom dressed as pleasantries — a quality I notice in distressingly short supply among those of more suitable pedigree presently surrounding this throne."

The hall's susurrus died entirely.

"My consort's birth," Yan Zhao continued, voice gone low and cutting in the register that had once commanded armies, "concerns no one in this room half so much as his competence, which several of you would do well to study, given that he has navigated eight days of this court's casual cruelty with more grace than I have seen from nobles raised in it their entire lives. If anyone present wishes to question Qingyun Sect's judgment, I invite them to question it to my face, rather than to my husband's, since I assure you I have considerably less patience for it than he does."

He did not look at Ji Chen as he said it. He could not have explained, in that moment, why the words had come so easily, why some old reflex from his years of command, protect the ones under your banner, especially the ones the enemy thinks are weak, had reached out and claimed Ji Chen as his to defend before he'd consciously decided to defend anyone at all.

The Emperor's gaze flicked between his sons with an expression Yan Zhao couldn't read and didn't try to. "Let the matter rest," he said, mild and final, the tone of a man closing a ledger rather than settling a dispute. "We have treaty business to attend."

The court moved on. The audience proceeded through its tedious litany of grain reports and border petitions, and Yan Zhao sat through all of it with his spine rigid and his jaw set, very deliberately not looking at the man kneeling beside his chair.

***

It was only afterward, in the corridor leaving the hall, with Jiang Wu pushing the chair and the orange cat, who had, against every rule of court protocol, smuggled itself into the audience inside Ji Chen's sleeve and emerged now blinking and unrepentant, riding along on Ji Chen's shoulder, that Ji Chen finally spoke.

"You didn't have to do that."

"Do what."

"Defend me. I've had worse said to my face by sect elders who actually outranked me. I wasn't going to crumble over a court consort's idea of cleverness."

Yan Zhao kept his eyes fixed ahead, on the corridor's long red columns, on anything that wasn't the warm, searching look he could feel Ji Chen directing at the side of his face. "I wasn't defending you," he said. "I was reminding this court that insulting anything that belongs to my household is an insult to me directly, and I do not tolerate insults to myself with any particular grace. You happened to be standing in the path of a lesson I intended to teach regardless."

It was, he knew even as he said it, a transparent lie — the kind of lie that fooled no one, least of all the man it was aimed at.

Ji Chen, walking beside the chair where he always insisted on walking, made a small sound that might have been a laugh held carefully in check. "Of course," he said. "How fortunate for me, happening to stand exactly there."

The cat, perched on his shoulder, made a small chirping sound of its own, as if it agreed entirely, and Yan Zhao found himself, for one disorienting moment, fighting down something that felt dangerously close to the urge to smile.

He did not smile. He had not smiled, genuinely, in eight months, and he was not about to start in a palace corridor over a sect disciple's needling and a stray cat's opinion.

But he thought about it, the whole way back to his chambers, longer than he was willing to admit.