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“I’ll stay,” I said. “Just for tonight.”

The prince nodded, wringing his hands, gaze twitching around like his room was suddenly a foreign country. “You can have the bed, of course.”

“Can we skip the part where I pretend to offer to sleep on the floor out of politeness?” I said, and when he chuckled softly, I waved for him to turn around while I shed the outer layer of my dress.

“I wouldn’t make you sleep on the floor,” he said with his back to me.

When I slipped onto the bed, I practically melted into it. “This is like Heaven,” I said. “How do you ever get out of bed?”

The prince glanced over his shoulder, turning fully around when he saw I was already under the covers. “The constant fear that I’m going to be murdered in my sleep is pretty motivating.”

“Well, if someone comes to kill you tonight, you’re on your own,” I said.

Something shifted in my discarded dress on the floor and I remembered the duck in my pocket. I leaned over and fished it out, setting it on top of the covers. The prince all but threw himself to the ground, reaching out a trembling finger to stroke its head.

“This is my alchemy duck,” I said. “Freshly made.”

“Youmadehim?” the prince said, cupping his hands and letting the duck hop into them. “I shouldn’t be surprised. Of course you can make ducks at will. Have you named him yet?”

I raised an eyebrow. “My brother will probably want to dissect him.”

The prince tensed, holding the bird close to his chest. “Over my dead body.” After a moment, he raised it to his face, mouth pinched in concentration. “He looks like his name is Durian,” he said at last.

“Does he smell that bad?”

“Not the smell, the color,” the prince said.

I shook my head. “You are objectively horrible at naming animals.”

“Well, what would you call him?”

I shrugged. “Lunch.”

“Fan Zilan, I will have you executed,” he said, far too sincerely.

I yawned, turning over in bed. “That’s not my name anymore,” I said. “Now, I’m the Scarlet Alchemist.”

The prince didn’t respond at first, and I let my eyes fall closed. Sleep descended over me alarmingly fast, like it had been waiting for me to lie down so it could sink its talons into me and drag me to the bottom of a dark sea.

Warm hands brushed my hair back with reverence, a finger smoothing across my jaw, the shell of my ear. But I would never know if it was really the prince or the hands of sleep. And when someone whispered,I knew you could do it, I would never know if the words were real, or just what I’d wished for years that someone would say.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I threw open the door to my cousins’ room and tripped straight over Wenshu, tumbling inside. He let out an indignant sound and knocked a pot of ink over his scroll, black bleeding across the floor.

“Sorry, sorry!” I said, soaking up the ink with my sleeve and quickly using alchemy to put it back in its pot as the bewildered guard appeared in the doorway behind me. Yufei, who was lying on her side in bed, raised an eyebrow and sat up.

“Zilan,” Wenshu said warningly, frowning at his ruined scroll.

“Please don’t murder me,” I said. “Last night, I was—”

“We know, a messenger came to tell us where you were,” Wenshu said. “Yufei almost stabbed him.”

Yufei shrugged. “It was too late for visitors.”

“Though he didn’t tell us what you were doing,” Wenshu said, crossing his arms. “Nothing dangerous again, I hope?”

“I passed!” I said, because if anything could distract him, it was this.