Three weeks after Lord Baek filed the inquiry, the Emperor invited us to dinner.
Not a summons. An invitation. The distinction was one that everyone in the capital noted and no one discussed openly, which was itself the loudest possible signal that everything had shifted. A summons meant command. An invitation meant calculation. And calculation, in the language of the court, meant the Emperor had decided that the cost of force exceeded the cost of courtesy.
Kaien read the invitation twice. Then he set it down on the table with the careful precision of a man handling something that might, under different circumstances, have been a weapon.
"He's moving toward negotiation," he said.
"He's moving toward the least costly version of an outcome he can no longer prevent," I said.
"That's what negotiation is."
