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“Yangdong,” said the biggest of the men.

“A’du,” offered another.

“Da’sha!”

28

The armory was next to the stables. When I passed, a familiar shadow caught my attention.

Midnight-dark mane, finely groomed like a sheet of glimmering silk as if someone had cut a piece of the night sky and molded it in the form of a horse. There was a single splash of white between his eyes, kind of like my phoenix’s mark—something the noble sons used to joke about.

“Beifeng?”What was he doing here?

The horse must have recognized me as well, because he dipped his head forward, as if asking to be petted.

I approached with slow, cautious steps. In case he didn’t remember me the same way I remembered him from when I was a different girl, in a different place, dreaming of sprouting wings.

Some wistful longing pulled me toward him. Beifeng was Siwang’s favorite steed, and—

Before I could touch him, a rough hand caught mine.

“??!” the voice snapped.How dare you!

Memories fled, dropping me back into the present. I was no longer Lifeng Fei. The empress of all empresses died the day I annulled my betrothal to Siwang. I was now Li Fei, an insignificant soldier, a girl pretending to be a boy to protect her father. A peasant like me had no right to be near a royal steed, let alone touch it.

“This is the Crown Prince’s steed; can’t you read the mark on its stall?”

That voice…

Caikun, who wore the last year around him like a warm, golden halo. He was so much taller than I remembered. Jaw sharper, eyes darker, yet those pillowed lips had remained the same throughout the withering months. The very same lips I’d once dared to kiss me when we were both five years old, crouching between stone statues in the imperial garden.

He looked me over, and I was met not with recognition but a soft pity. “How old are you, boy?”

“I just turned nineteen,” I said, keeping my head low so that he couldn’t get a good look at my face. After that kiss, Caikun had refused to look at me. He always looked the other way whenever I was near. Perhaps my childhood recklessness would save me from being caught?

Caikun frowned. “Are you sure you are old enough to enlist?”

As a girl, I was once among the tallest of the palace kids. Until my thirteenth summer, when Caikun and Siwang and almost every boy who’d studied in the imperial lecture halls sprouted like trees.

Now I was forced to arch my neck for the boy with whom I’d once stood shoulder to shoulder.

“I’m scrawny for my age,” I said, beating Caikun to his own conclusion.

“You don’t look a day over fifteen.”

“Fifteen is just old enough to enlist,” I corrected him. Newly implemented. The original age was eighteen. Since the war with Lan erupted, many things had changed.

“Third Battalion, Fourth Company?” His eyes fell on the military tag at my waist, and he sighed. “I told them to send me men, not boys who can barely lift a sword. Being able to do farmwork doesn’t count as being a man. You won’t last a day on the battlefield.”

“It was this, or let my ailing father come to war,” I retorted.

“You think you’re protecting your father by putting your neck on the chopping block like this? You are not protecting anyone. You’ve condemned yourself to die by playing hero in a war that has never shown mercy to anyone, no matter how young they are and how bright their future may seem.”

“I would rather condemn myself to die than my father,” I countered. “He’s old, his legs are weak, and his heart won’t be able to take the training, let alone go to war. At least if I can learn, I can try. I’m willing to die in this war if it means my father gets to live out his fulllife.”

It was not my job to save the world, but it was my job to save my father.

Caikun shook his head. “You think yourself so noble and filial by coming here, don’t you? Let me guess, you stole his conscription notice and came here without telling him? Do you know how you’ll break his heart if anything happens to you? You’ve never witnessed a father losing his son, have never seen what grief does to a man, have you?”