Page 103

“Fei!” Siwang cried. “Catch her!”

I was out the door before his guards had time to react.

Outside, the camp was quiet; our numbers had dwindled in the time I’d been gone. There was no way these men could survive a battle with Yexue and his monsters. Even if Siwang’s plan succeeded and he killed a portion of Yexue’s vampires by setting fire to Changchun, it wouldn’t matter. Yexue could always make more.

“Fei!” Siwang cried. I could hear the shuffle of his guards after me as I bolted for the campfires where most of the soldiers would be at this time.

“Siwang is lying to you!” I shouted when I was within earshot of the fires. “Lan has offered us a peace treaty, but Siwang won’t take it! We have to stop! We are going to lose this war!”

A group of the soldiers turned to look at me with confused stares. “That’s Little Li.”

“I thought he had died…”

“Siwang is lying to you!” I bellowed as loudly as I could, holding the peace treaty as high as possible. “He is—”

Someone tackled me, knocking the air out of my lungs and sending me colliding against the field of mud and slush.

“Are you trying to cause hysteria in camp?” It took me a moment to realize that the person who had caught me was Caikun. He shoved my face into the mud until I couldn’t breathe, his hand firm on my neck, choking me. “Traitor! My father died for rats like you! My brothers died for rats like you!”

“Caikun, stop!” Siwang shouted in the background, but his voice was muffled and distorted.

Caikun pulled me up and punched me across the jaw, then again, finding the edge of my cheek this time, then again, and again, but his fists were no longer finding my flesh. He was pounding the mud beside my head. “You should have died! Cowards like you are the reason we are losing this war!”

By the time someone pushed Caikun off me, black spots were already filling my vision. I tried to stand, but I only fell deeper into darkness.

“Get him out of here,” I heard Siwang say in the background. “Li Fei has done enough for Rong. I hereby honorably discharge him. Send him home to his family.”

52

“Someone…,” I croaked, my throat dry, “someone, save them….”

53

In darkness, I dreamt of fire.

Of Changchun, a walled fortress stretching as far as eyes could see, half buried under sand, half drenched in blood.

In my dream, a symphony of screams melted into a roaring buzz, just like on the battlefields.

The city erupted into wild flames ignited by the fire powder strapped to the Rong soldiers who pretended to be defecting refugees seeking asylum in Lan’s unsuspecting arms.

Under their cries for help, the world was painted scarlet by the inferno that grew redder and redder until it blinded my sight.

Against the violent light, shadows leaped from the city walls in their last attempts to flee. When their bodies crashed against the still winter-hardened soil, they sounded like limp cuts of meat hitting a butcher’s slab.

I heard their bones break, shuddered when the force of the impact shattered their bodies into crimson puddles.

I smelled the stench of death in the air, felt its icy breath at my neck.

In my dreams, I screamed. Until my throat went hoarse, until my voice had been sanded to a husk.

My master told me once, a long time ago, that you are our best hope of a better tomorrow. Of peace. Your fate is the answer to everything. It will either bring the ruin of the continent, or save it.

Did I have to conscript myself to a life trapped behind palace walls for such a future to exist?

54

I woke in the back of a rattling carriage. Everything from my eyes to my limbs was heavy.