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Nie Mingjue and Wen Qing would have been glaring at each other if they weren’t both so busy glaring at Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian instead. Lan Wangji’s face was as calmly blank as it ever was, practically daring them to question him. In contrast, Wei Wuxian offered them both a wide and cheery grin.
“What do you think you’re doing,” Mingjue stated. It was not a question. Mingjue might be the head of the Sunshot campaign but he was Sect Leader to neither of them. Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian were both highly skilled and feared fighters in the Sunshot campaign, but between battles they moved across the land as scouts and spies, often coming up with the most surprising results, which were to the campaign’s benefit but also really frustrating to try to plan around.
“We captured Wen Ning of the Dafan Wen for you, Sect Leader Nie! He’s your hostage.” Wei Wuxian repeated, still maintaining his sunny smile.
Wen Ning peaked nervously from where he stood behind the pair. He waved nervously and then ducked away again, clearly in a poor attempt to avoid his sister’s glare.
“I don’t take Wen hostages. I kill them.” Mingjue sounded significantly less threatening than he did tired of having to deal with this ridiculousness.
“You can’t kill Wen Ning!” Huaisang interjected. “He’s too adorable!” He took a moment to wave back at Wen Ning before ducking away himself, behind his fan rather than behind Mingjue, since Mingjue knew his brother well and had put a heavy hand on his shoulder to keep him firmly in place.
“What am I supposed to do with a hostage?”
“You can assign me to guard him,” Huaisang offered cheerfully. “I’ll keep him away from anything important!”
“And yourself away from anything important, too, I take it.”
Huaisang’s face made the attempt to communicate how that thought had never even crossed his mind. He was completely innocent. He would never use guard duty as an excuse to go bird watching and paint fans, and stay as far away as possible from any martial exercises or political records.
“Wen Ning is the eldest son of the Dafan Wen branch family and his older sister is Wen Ruohan’s personal physician. With him taken as a hostage to the Nie, surely his sister and the whole Dafan Wen village must follow.”
Since Wen Qing had been no more than fifty feet behind Lan Wangji, Wei Wuxian, and the purportedly captured Wen Ning, as they all strolled up to the gates of the Unclean Realm, it made the situation seem a lot more like a political ploy than an actual hostage situation.
“I don’t want the whole Dafan Wen village to follow.” Mingjue was not one to mince words.
“But you want to take them away from Wen Ruohan, don’t you? And it’s better to take them for yourself rather than just kill them all, right?”
Wen Qing went white, “Don’t…”
Mingjue wondered if he should be insulted. “I’m not going to slaughter a random village of peasants even if their name is Wen.”
“Wen Ruohan would.” Lan Wangji said, his first contribution to the conversation.
Wen Qing’s fists clenched by her side. Her brother and her village had been hostages against her good behavior for her whole life, but at least she knew Wen Ruohan. He enjoyed killing and enjoyed threatening her with her family’s lives, but he needed her services and he respected the Wen name, even if she was from a branch family. She didn’t know anything about Nie Mingjue beyond his reputation as a fierce warrior.
“Wouldn’t you?” She challenged him. Because she had to know. She had to know one way or the other.
“I’m not in the habit of killing peasants. Not least because it’s a waste of my time, when we are fighting your cultivators.”
“Those cultivators are not mine.”
“They’re Wen.” Mingjue pointed out, rather damningly.
“They’re Qishan Wen; Wen Qing is Dafan Wen,” Wei Wuxian pointed out, but was mostly ignored.
“My family are all doctors. We don’t kill.”
Wen Qing and Mingjue were back to glaring at each other.
“Which makes this a perfect opportunity for us all,” Wei Wuxian interrupted again. “An opportunity for the Dafan Wen to use their skills by healing the fighters of the Sunshot Campaign, and an opportunity for the Sunshot Campaign to remove such healing skills from the Qishan Wen.”
Mingjue broke away from his glare to consider Wei Wuxian again. “Your sister is managing the healing tents. You ‘captured’ this hostage. Why are you bringing him to me, rather than adding them to the Jiang Sect?”
That was apparently the right question to ask, because it made Wei Wuxian lose his bright smile for a moment and look solemnly at Lan Wangji. Huaisang had pointed out to him that as wild as Wei Wuxian was, when things were serious, he paused to check with Lan Wangji. It was a useful tell.
When Wei Wuxian looked back at him, he was serious. “If you don’t want to take on this responsibility, I won’t make you.” As if he thought he could. “Shijie would love to have Wen Qing’s assistance in the field hospital. And I hope that she will have her assistance, whoever takes ultimate responsibility. But Wen Qing is a great doctor who specializes in golden cores and the prevention of qi deviations. I think her skill set would be most valuable among the Nie.”
Wei Wuxian paused, even as Mingjue stilled. There was a long pause while they just stared at one another. People didn’t talk about the Nie Sect’s history of qi deviations. At least not to their Sect Leader’s face. Wei Wuxian didn’t flinch, though he did pause.
When he spoke again, it was to add with a grin, “Plus, Dafan Valley is a lot closer to the Unclean Realm than to Lotus Pier.”
Nie Mingjue considered the pair of young cultivators before him, not the Wen siblings, but Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian. They were as young as his little brother but already making a reputation as warriors and scholars and scouts, who could tease out more information than seemed possible about their enemies. How much information had they also managed to tease out among their allies...
“Why are you doing this?” he finally asked. He’d known since he was an adolescent that he would die of a qi deviation. Like his father and his grandfather and his great grandfather before him. He had known this was his future. He was resigned to it. Even if he wasn’t, they were in the middle of a war. They had more important things to think about than his eventual fate.
He could understand the value of a skilled doctor added to their side and removed from the Wen side. But this was more than that. This was Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian telling him that they had discovered a Nie Sect secret, a Nie Sect weakness, and they wanted to fix it. In the middle of the war.
Wei Wuxian looked at Lan Wangji again, just catching each other’s eyes for a moment before turning back to him.
“Wen Ruohan wants to destroy us all. If we want to truly win this war, we have to do more than just destroy him instead. We have to plan to live.”
Those words felt like a harder blow than any sword strike. Mingjue had been planning for his own death ever since his father had died. In the middle of a long and vicious war, it seemed all the more clear that he was courting his own death. He had plenty of plans to defeat the Wen Sect, and dreamed of the day he could finally kill Wen Ruohan. He had few, if any, specific plans for afterwards.
Huaisang was looking at him now, his fan both folded and lowered, and it was Mingjue who avoided his brother’s eyes this time.
“We accept,” Huaisang said, keeping his eyes on Mingjue’s face. “Thank you so much for thinking of us, brother Wei, brother Lan. Perhaps you could take Wen Ning and Wen Qing to the hospital tent to start doing the work they owe us in exchange for the Nie protection. I’ll come and find you later, after I have a moment to chat with my brother.”
“Of course, brother Nie. Have a good conversation!” Wei Wuxian smirked. Lan Wanji bowed a polite farewell and then herded the two Wen siblings off.
Huaisang had shifted so that he was now gripping Mingjue as opposed to the other way around. His little brother didn’t know about the Nie family fate of qi deviations, and Mingjue hadn’t wanted to tell him, but there were few people as dedicated to ferreting out a secret than Huaisang once he knew one existed. At least there was now a potential for treatment rather than simply a guaranteed early death.
Nie Mingjue thought that this was why he found the pairing of Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian so frustrating to account for in all of his plans. They were brilliant and capable and accomplished the impossible, but still left so much chaos in their wake. It was worth it, though, if they could all live.