Lu Tianyang leaned back in his chair and let the hall do what halls like this always did, which was fill itself with the sound of important men performing importance at each other.
He turned the jade cup slowly between his fingers and watched.
The voice that broke the rhythm was Minister Zhou's, stepping forward with his scroll held across his chest like a man carrying his own credentials into battle. His tone was polished to a high shine. "Your Highness, perhaps you would care to offer your thoughts on the northern border deployment."
A challenge dressed in courtesy. The classic shape of it.
Lu Tianyang let the silence stretch a moment before he turned to look at the man. "The northern border," he said, with the mild interest of someone trying to remember whether they had visited the place. "Tell me, Zhou. How many soldiers are we currently discussing?"
Zhou hesitated, caught slightly off-balance by being asked rather than answered. "Five thousand, Your Highness."
"And your recommendation?"
"Seven thousand. Perhaps more. The mountain tribes have been pressing the northern prefectures with increasing aggression, and the current garrison cannot hold if they push in force."
Lu Tianyang nodded slowly, as though working through the logic step by careful step. He tilted the cup, watched the light move across the jade. "Seven thousand," he repeated. "So your solution is to add two thousand men to a position you've already told me is insufficient." He paused. "I want to make sure I understand the proposal before I respond to it."
Zhou's composure shifted slightly. "That is the general outline, yes."
"And where would you place them?"
A beat of silence. "Along the garrison line, to reinforce the existing—"
"The garrison line that sits in a valley." Lu Tianyang's voice stayed level, almost gentle. "Hemmed on three sides by terrain that funnels wind and sound, where a force of any real size moving at night would go undetected until they were already inside effective range." He set the cup down quietly. "Zhou, if you place two thousand additional men in that valley, you will not have reinforced the garrison. You will have given the mountain tribes a larger target in a worse position, and they will know exactly how to use the terrain before your scouts finish their first rotation."
The hall had gone still.
Zhou's mouth opened. Closed.
"I don't say this to embarrass you," Lu Tianyang continued, in a tone that suggested he was at least partially lying. "I say it because ghosts make poor allies, and the northern prefectures have lost enough men to bad geometry already."
The silence held for another moment. Then the room exhaled into murmur.
He registered the reactions without appearing to look for them. The Second Prince's hands had stilled in his lap, the smirk gone somewhere complicated. Elder Feng's gaze had moved from the floor to Lu Tianyang's face, and the expression there was unreadable in a way that suggested it was hiding something specific. The Cold Sword Princess in the gallery above had leaned forward in her seat, not dramatically, just the subtle shift of someone whose interest had been caught against their expectations. Nearby, the alchemist girl's brush had stopped moving entirely, hovering above the page.
Lu Tianyang rested one arm on the chair. "Send scouts north before anything else. Light, fast, experienced with mountain terrain. Get an accurate picture of enemy movement and numbers. Then we discuss deployment. Numbers mean nothing without placement, and placement means nothing without information. This is not a complicated principle, but it seems to have been skipped."
Zhou swallowed. "Yes, Your Highness."
"So." The Second Prince's voice came in sharp from across the hall. "Your recommendation is to wait."
Lu Tianyang looked at him with the patience of a man who had expected this and found it only mildly interesting. "My recommendation is to know what you're walking into before you walk into it. If that sounds like waiting to you, I would gently suggest that the problem is not my strategy."
A few younger officials exchanged glances. Someone near the back made a sound they quickly converted into a cough.
The Emperor had not moved throughout any of this. His gaze sat on his third son with the steady, particular quality of a man running a long and private calculation.
Lu Tianyang picked up the jade cup again and resumed his slow rotation of it. First test, he thought. Adequate enough.
Then a voice came from above, quiet enough that it wasn't meant for the hall.
"Why are you so calm?"
He tilted his head up. The Cold Sword Princess was watching him with the direct, unapologetic attention she had been pointing at him since he walked through the door. Up close, or close enough, her expression was not unreadable, exactly. It was more that she was reading him and not bothering to conceal it.
"Curiosity," he said, quietly enough that it didn't carry. An honest answer, which surprised him slightly.
She held his gaze for a moment longer than necessary. Then she settled back in her seat without a word, which told him more than words would have.
He turned back to the hall.
The morning was still young. Minister Zhou was whispering urgently to the man beside him, who was whispering back with the energy of someone who had just revised an opinion. Somewhere in the back rows, a junior official was watching the exchange with the careful, hungry attention of a man who had not yet decided whose side he was on.
Someone in this room was carrying something they did not want found. He could feel the shape of it without being able to name it yet, the specific quality of stillness that appeared in people who were working very hard to seem like they had nothing to work hard about.
He would find it eventually. He had nowhere else to be.
Lu Tianyang leaned back, turned the cup, and waited with genuine patience for the court to show him the rest of what it was hiding.