The wedding took place eleven days later, which was, by the standards of the Great Yan court, indecently fast, a fact several consorts made certain to remark upon within Yan Zhao's hearing, in tones pitched to sound like sympathy and land like knives.

"How efficient," murmured Consort Lin Yue, close enough that Yan Zhao could smell her perfume over the wedding incense, as the procession assembled in the outer courtyard. "One imagines the Crown Prince wished the matter settled before anyone had time to ask why a war hero's marriage merited such haste, rather than such ceremony."

Yan Zhao did not turn his head. "One imagines the Crown Prince had nothing to do with the timing at all, given that I requested it myself, to spare the court the burden of pretending to celebrate something it finds embarrassing for longer than necessary."

Lin Yue's smile thinned. She moved on.

He sat in his wheeled chair at the head of the procession, they had draped it, against his explicit wishes, in red silk and gold thread, trying to disguise the thing for what it visibly was and watched the gates open onto the long avenue toward the ancestral temple, and felt nothing so much as the particular, familiar exhaustion of being made into a spectacle for other people's comfort.

Ji Chen walked beside the chair rather than ahead of it, which was not, strictly, where wedding protocol placed the secondary party in a procession headed by royalty. Yan Zhao noticed this. He noticed everything; it was the one faculty that his disability had not managed to steal from him, however much it had taken everything else.

"You're out of position," he said, without looking up.

"I noticed," Ji Chen said cheerfully. "I decided I didn't care."

Yan Zhao did look up at that - sharp, assessing, the look that had once made junior officers stammer through their reports twice. Ji Chen, in wedding red that suited him far better than it had any right to, in a sect-cut robe traded hastily for court fashion that still didn't sit quite right on his soldier's shoulders, met the look without flinching and without the careful diplomatic blankness he'd worn at the betrothal ceremony.

"You are not my superior officer," Yan Zhao said. "You don't get to decide what you care about regarding my protocol."

"No," Ji Chen agreed. "But I am apparently about to be your husband, and I'd rather walk beside you than in front of you, so that when people look at this procession they see two people getting married instead of one prince being followed by his prize. Call it a personal failing."

It was, Yan Zhao thought with a flicker of something he refused to examine, an unexpectedly clever answer. He said nothing, which was as close to acknowledgment as he intended to give, and let the procession move forward.

The ceremony itself passed in the blur he'd expected.

Incense, vows recited in the old formal cadence, his father's face arranged into the satisfied mask of a man who has solved several problems with one stroke, his sister's eyes wet and fixed on him from the front row with an expression he still could not meet directly. He spoke the words required of him in a voice that gave away nothing. Ji Chen spoke his with a warmth that made the temple priest's eyebrows rise, fractionally, as if warmth were not the expected register for a political marriage to a crippled prince.

By the time the wine cups were exchanged, Yan Zhao's hands had begun, faintly, to shake, the residual tremor that came when he'd been upright too long in the chair, spine fighting a body that no longer obeyed it, and he hated it, hated it with a heat that had nowhere else to go, so he turned it, as he always did, outward.

"You'll forgive me," he said, low, as Ji Chen lifted the second cup to his lips on his behalf, since his own hands could not be trusted with it before the assembled court, "if I find it difficult to summon gratitude for a husband purchased by treaty rather than chosen."

Ji Chen's hand did not pause. He tipped the cup, let Yan Zhao drink, set it down with the same easy care he'd shown all ceremony. "You don't owe me gratitude," he said, quiet enough that it didn't carry past the two of them. "I didn't marry you to be thanked."

"Then what did you marry me for?"

Something moved behind Ji Chen's eyes: quick, complicated, gone before Yan Zhao could name it. "I'll tell you," he said, "when you've decided you actually want to know the answer, instead of just wanting to win an argument with it."

Yan Zhao felt his jaw tighten. No one spoke to him like that. No one had spoken to him like that in eight months, they spoke around him, over him, in the careful, pitying tones reserved for the ruined, and he had grown so used to the particular cruelty of being managed that this, being met - landed like an insult precisely because it wasn't one.

He decided, with the flat finality of a man drawing a battle line, that he disliked this disciple intensely, and that he would make certain Ji Chen understood it before the night was through.

.

.

.

The wedding chamber, when they finally reached it past midnight, was lit low with red lanterns and smelled of the same crushed peonies that had haunted the betrothal hall, and Yan Zhao wheeled himself through the doorway under his own power before any of the attendants could offer to help him, because if there was one thing eight months of paralysis had taught him with brutal clarity, it was that he would rather struggle alone than be assisted in front of witnesses.

Ji Chen closed the door behind them both and then simply stood there, in the low red light, looking at him with an expression Yan Zhao couldn't immediately categorize and therefore distrusted on principle.

"You can stop performing now," Yan Zhao said. "There's no one left to perform for."

"I'm not performing."

"You smiled at every consort who insulted me through her teeth tonight as if she'd paid you a compliment. You walked beside a chair instead of in front of it to make a point about optics. You drink wine like a man raised to know which cup matters at which ceremony, when your sect papers list you as a branch disciple of common stock. Everything about tonight was a performance, disciple, and I am tired, and in no mood to watch another act of it in private when there's no audience left to impress."

Ji Chen's expression didn't change, exactly, but something in his shoulders settled, like a man putting down a weight he'd decided he no longer needed to carry. "All right," he said. "No performance. You want honesty, here it is: I think you're the loneliest person I have ever met, and I think you have decided being cruel to me is safer than finding out whether I'd stay if you weren't."

The words landed somewhere under Yan Zhao's ribs with a precision that frightened him more than any blade ever had.

"Get out," he said.

"This is my wedding chamber too."

"Then I will get out." He was already turning the chair, already reaching for the wheel rims with hands that still trembled faintly from the day's exertion, already preparing to wheel himself into whatever adjoining room would put a door between himself and a stranger who had looked at him for one evening and somehow seen straight through eight months of carefully constructed ice—

A hand caught the chair's frame. Not his arm, never his body, never anywhere that might read as restraint or pity - just the chair itself, steadying it without stopping it, without forcing anything.

"I'm not trying to win," Ji Chen said quietly. "I know you think everyone in this palace is playing some game with you, Your Highness, and most of them probably are. I'm not. I just wanted to say one true thing to you before we both went to sleep on opposite sides of a room neither of us chose, because I don't think anyone's said anything true to you in a very long time, and I thought you deserved one true thing on your wedding night even if you hate me for it."

Yan Zhao's hands stilled on the wheel rims.

"You may sleep on whichever side of the room you like," he said finally, voice rough in a way he despised. "I find I am too tired to argue further tonight."

It was not gratitude. It was not warmth. It was the smallest possible concession a man like him could make, and Ji Chen, infuriatingly, perceptively seemed to understand exactly what it cost him to make it, because he only nodded, and said nothing further, and let Yan Zhao wheel himself to the far side of the chamber in a silence that was, for the first time in eight months, not entirely unbearable.

He lay awake long after the lanterns burned low, listening to the quiet, even breathing of a stranger who had married him for reasons he hadn't been given, and told himself, as he had told himself eleven days ago in a hall full of peonies and pity, that none of this meant anything at all.

He was, he was beginning to suspect, becoming quite a poor liar.