The hall had settled into the particular quiet that follows a room being surprised by someone it had underestimated. Ministers spoke in low tones, papers were shuffled with unnecessary attention, and no one looked directly at the Third Prince, which meant everyone was watching him.
Lu Tianyang noticed all of it and gave them nothing in return. He turned the jade cup slowly between his fingers and let the silence do its work.
Something in the back rows had been pulling at his attention since before Zhou's little performance ended. Not a sound exactly, more an absence of one. A whisper that had stopped too quickly when his gaze drifted that direction. A hand that had gone very still on a scroll it had no particular reason to be holding. Small things. The kind that meant nothing individually and everything together.
He didn't move toward it. He didn't need to. He watched Minister Zhou lean toward the man beside him, exchanging words too quiet to carry across the hall, and noted the slight stiffening in Zhou's posture when someone nearby glanced at them. Noted the way the other man's eyes moved to the door and then deliberately away, the practiced quality of someone reminding themselves not to look at the thing they were thinking about.
Lu Tianyang murmured, barely above a breath, addressed to no one in particular: "Someone in this room believes they are being very careful."
In the gallery, the Cold Sword Princess tilted her head. The alchemist girl's brush slowed without quite stopping, as though her hand had made the decision to keep writing while her attention went elsewhere.
From the back of the hall, a voice came forward. Young, carefully modulated, trying for casual and landing somewhere adjacent to it. "Your Highness, forgive the interruption, but perhaps the northern prefectures might also benefit from fortified watchtowers along the upper mountain passes. A secondary line of observation, to supplement the garrison."
A minor suggestion. Technically sensible. The sort of thing that could have been raised during the main discussion without requiring a separate, quieter moment to deliver.
Lu Tianyang let his gaze move to the speaker. A junior minister, perhaps twenty years old, standing with his chin slightly lowered and his eyes directed at a point somewhere around Lu Tianyang's left shoulder.
"An interesting proposal," Lu Tianyang said. "Tell me, why would the construction of watchtowers need to be raised quietly, at the edge of a session, rather than during the deployment discussion that just occupied us for the better part of an hour?"
The young minister's neck went red from the collar upward.
"I only thought—"
"You thought correctly that watchtowers have strategic value. That part I don't question." Lu Tianyang set the jade cup down on the armrest with a soft sound. "I question the timing. And the volume. And the fact that you have glanced at Minister Zhou three times since you started speaking, which suggests this proposal did not originate with you."
The silence that followed was the kind that made people aware of their own breathing.
Zhou had gone very still.
Lu Tianyang did not look at him. He kept his eyes on the junior minister with the mild patience of a man with nowhere else to be and all the time required to wait there.
In the gallery, the Cold Sword Princess leaned toward the alchemist girl and said something under her breath. The alchemist girl's pen stopped entirely.
After a moment, Lu Tianyang leaned back and retrieved the jade cup. "The watchtower proposal has merit and should be formally submitted through the infrastructure ministry with full documentation, including the names of everyone who contributed to its development." He said this pleasantly, with no particular emphasis. "I look forward to reading it."
The junior minister bowed low and retreated. Zhou examined his scroll with the focus of a man trying to disappear into it.
A page appeared at the side entrance, crossing the hall with the careful speed of someone delivering something on instructions they didn't fully understand. He bowed and extended a folded letter, wax seal unbroken.
Lu Tianyang took it without hurrying, turned it once in his hand, broke the seal, and read.
He read it again.
His expression did not change. He folded it with the same deliberate calm, tucked it into his sleeve, and looked out at the assembled court with the mild, observational quality he had maintained since walking through the bronze doors.
Someone had made a move. A real one, not the half-formed gestures of junior officials delivering borrowed suggestions. Something with weight behind it, placed carefully enough that it had taken until now to surface.
He had been in this palace for less than two days, and already the threads were visible. Zhou and his arrangements. The junior minister and his assignment. The letter and whoever had sent it. Each one connected to the others in ways that the room had not yet realized he was mapping.
He turned the jade cup slowly.
Above him, the Cold Sword Princess watched with her arms folded and her expression giving nothing away except, perhaps, a fraction more interest than she had arrived with.
The court thought it was showing him a performance. It was, in fact, showing him everything.
He intended to remember all of it.