The cat, which had been Yan Zhao's for several years before the poisoning ever touched him, had no official name and the servants simply called it the orange cat, a scrappy, golden-furred thing that had attached itself to the prince with the same absolute confidence it now showed lounging across his lap with total disregard for propriety.

It was Ji Chen who finally gave it a proper name, one evening over a meal Yan Zhao was picking at with more attention than usual.

"He reminds me," Ji Chen said, scratching behind the cat's ragged ear with the careful affection of someone used to handling difficult creatures, "of a cat I saw once outside a garrison on the border. Same color, same attitude, utterly unbothered by anything, completely certain of his right to exist exactly as he pleased. That cat's name was Huang Jin, and when I look at yours, I keep thinking of him. May I call him that? Huang Jin?"

Yan Zhao considered the orange cat, which purred with the supreme indifference of something that cared nothing for his approval either way. "He's currently shedding on my robes."

"He's currently deciding you belong to him," Ji Chen replied, "which is different from shedding, though I admit the symptoms overlap."

Yan Zhao looked down at the cat, who looked back up at him with golden, unbothered eyes, entirely unintimidated by a glare that had once made seasoned commanders reconsider their battle plans. "He has terrible judgment."

"He has excellent judgment," Ji Chen said. "He's just selective about who gets to see it."

Yan Zhao said nothing to that, but his hand, slowly, almost without his own permission — drifted down to rest against the cat's spine, and Huang Jin began, immediately and shamelessly, to purr.

It was Ji Chen who broke the quiet, voice gone softer, more careful than its usual easy cadence. "Can I ask you something?"

"You're going to regardless of my answer."

"Probably," Ji Chen admitted. "Why the army? A prince of the blood doesn't need to earn his place through campaigns. You could have stayed in the capital your whole life and wanted for nothing."

Yan Zhao's hand stilled on the cat's fur. For a long moment he said nothing at all, and Ji Chen, to his credit, did not push, only waited with the same patient stillness he brought to every silence Yan Zhao had tried, so far, to wall himself behind.

"My mother," Yan Zhao said finally, voice gone low and careful, the tone of a man handling something fragile, "was a concubine of minor rank, valued for exactly as long as it took her to produce a son and forgotten the moment she had. I grew up watching her fade into irrelevance in a palace that only remembers what's useful to it. I decided, very young, that I would never be allowed to fade. The sword was the only thing I had that the court couldn't take from me by simply ignoring me into nonexistence. I made myself essential because the alternative was disappearing the way she did."

"And now?"

"Now I have no sword arm worth speaking of, no legs, and a court that has already begun forgetting me precisely the way it forgot her." His voice didn't waver, but something underneath it did. "I am becoming exactly the thing I spent my whole life trying to outrun."

Ji Chen was quiet for a long moment, and when he spoke, his voice carried none of the easy diplomacy Yan Zhao had grown almost suspicious of, only something rawer, more direct. "You're not fading, Yan Zhao. You walked into a betrothal hall and rewrote your own marriage contract in front of three hundred witnesses out of sheer will. You faced down a Second Prince's calculated insult without so much as blinking. You are, without question, the least forgettable person I have ever met, and I include in that comparison several sect elders who can level mountains with a single technique. Whatever the court has decided about you, I'd encourage you not to mistake their narrowness for the truth of the matter."

It was the first time Ji Chen had used his given name rather than his title, and Yan Zhao noticed it the way he noticed everything — sharp, immediate, lodging itself somewhere he couldn't easily dislodge it from.

"You shouldn't say things like that to me," he said quietly.

"Why not?"

"Because I am beginning to believe them," Yan Zhao admitted, the words dragged out of him by something that felt entirely too much like trust, "and I don't know what to do with a husband who makes me want to believe good things about myself again."

Ji Chen's expression, in the lantern light, went unbearably gentle. "You don't have to do anything with it," he said. "You can just let it be true."

The cat, sensing the particular weight of the silence that followed, chose that moment to climb fully into Yan Zhao's lap and settle there with the absolute confidence of a creature who had never once doubted its welcome, and Yan Zhao, for the first time in eight months, let himself simply sit with the warmth of it, the cat's weight, his husband's steady gaze, and did not immediately reach for the cold armor that had carried him this far.

It frightened him more than the fall in the corridor ever had. He let it happen anyway.