The Untamed Princess

Chapter Thirty: The Impending Summit

The month before the planned summit passed quickly for both royal houses.

King Huìwén had received Ming Yue's message and made arrangements to send his eldest son, Crown Prince Wang Wei, on his behalf.  To his great surprise however, his youngest son, Prince Zhixing had also insisted on attending.  Zhixing had taken little interest in matters of politics to date, spending most of his time training with the military and reading about the exploits of Jin's greatest generals in wars long since past.

Still, the king was reluctant to refuse his third son, and this trip could mould him into a reliable right-hand man for Wang Wei if all went well.

Of course, King Huìwén had no idea that his only daughter was now so highly thought of by the second prince that there was no question of her not attending the summit as part of the Han delegation.  After all, she had only been able to send very brief messages, so any information not directly related to her mission had, inevitably, failed to reach his ears.  To his mind, the princess was still operating well below the radar as a lowly maidservant.

As for Han Kingdom, Weisheng had been busy with constant preparations.  In order to ensure everything went smoothly, he had been meeting with his father and the senior court officials on an almost daily basis.  He could tell that some of the ministers were not particularly thrilled with the idea of the summit, but they kept their views largely to themselves, knowing that if they made too many objections this would raise considerable suspicion about their motives.

Also, some minor skirmishes in the south had required his attention recently, sometimes taking him out of the palace for days at a time.  Consequently, he and Ming Yue had barely had an opportunity to be alone over the course of the last few weeks and, when they had, she had been completely preoccupied with preparing for the summit which, rather surprisingly, she seemed even more invested in than Weisheng.

It wasn't that his small attempts at intimacy – a touch on the hand here, or a private smile there – had seemed unwelcome.  In some cases, they had even been returned.  It was just that she had made no effort at all to address the unspoken questions remaining between them.  Now, with the day of the departure for the summit drawing near, Weisheng's resolve was crumbling, and all he could hope for was that the long trip would give them some time to talk properly, even if he had to initiate the conversation himself.

Finally, the day of departure arrived, and the prince said his farewells to his father, his mother, and his younger brother.  His older brother was nowhere in sight, and had been suspiciously absent for the last few weeks, but Weisheng couldn't pretend that his overwhelming response to this hadn't been something akin to relief.

The party of travellers this time was much larger than the group that had journeyed to the northern provinces some months previously.  After all, this was a formal meeting between two neighbouring kingdoms.  In addition to a large number of guards and servants, the prince's group also contained Minister Shen, Minister Xie, Minister Deng, Luo Jian, Eunuch Wang, Doctor Xiao and, of course, Ming Yue.

The journey to the chosen location at the border would take three days as, given the size of the convoy, travelling at speed was not an option.  This time, however, they were travelling with their own accommodation, and at the end of the first uneventful day of the expedition, the guards and servants hurried around a large patch of open ground, setting up a number of the less grand tents which formed part of the supplies for this very purpose.