“It is improper,” Lan Xichen said, closing the letter and setting it down on the table. He already knew that he would not win the argument, but nonetheless he retained a certain stubbornness, a fundamental intractability that no one had ever quite succeeded in beating out of him. “I should be the one to administer Wangji’s punishment. I’m his sect leader, his older brother. For me to not even attend—”
“Xichen.” Lan Qiren didn’t raise his voice. It wasn’t necessary.
Xichen snapped his mouth shut and looked down at the floor. The varnish on the floorboards was still fresh in places: dry enough for rugs and feet, but lacking the mellow touch of age. When he had knelt in this very room—at least, in a room of the same dimensions, in a house of the same floorplan, built on the same plot of land—to beg his uncle not to send him away when the Wen attacked, there had been a knot in one of the planks to his right, sanded flat by builders several generations before he was born but still visible in coloration. The new planks were perfectly uniform, unblemished.
He tore his gaze away in disgust and looked out the window instead, at the bamboo swaying in the breeze. The thin young shoots were another reminder of how much had changed here, but at least they were living, breathing, stretching towards the sky.