Page 60 of The Dragon Wakes with Thunder (The Dragon Spirit Duology #2)

I intertwined our energies together. Just as I was deficient in earth and wood, Kuro lacked water and fire. Our metal was the strongest, both of us surging with excess. Together we cycled through our combined elements— wood, fire, earth, metal, water —and then I began to impel.

I drew on my own memories at first, finding comfort in the familiar. “ Remember yourself ,” my mother had told me. “ Remember your humanness, and you will be able to return. ”

Remember what you have to live for.

I was five years old again, spying on my mother instead of practicing my penmanship. Through the rice paper screen I watched as my mother bathed with her best friend, a woman she’d known since girlhood. The two were lovely together, contradictions of sharp angles and soft curves.

“ Let me braid your hair ,” said my mother, kissing the back of her neck. Her friend said something in reply, and my mother laughed, a sound like silver bells. Even in those early days, I rarely heard my mother laugh.

“ You have a talent for kung fu ,” Uncle Zhou was saying. I was thirteen and training with him in the woods behind our house. “ Yours is a rare, extraordinary gift. ”

My penmanship was crude, my embroidery an embarrassment, and my ability to play the erhu nonexistent. This was the first time I’d been told I was good at something.

I reached for my first meeting with Xiuying, but Kuro’s memories pressed at the edges of my consciousness. I let him in, and together we directed his memories toward the veil.

I felt his exhilaration as if it were my own, watching as he beat up the town bully, despite being the shortest boy in his class. Watching as he celebrated his thirteenth birthday, and at last began to grow. And grow.

“ What do you feed him? ” the neighbors asked his grandmother, as he grew five inches each year.

“ He’s destined for greatness, that one ,” his grandmother replied, puffing out her chest with pride.

I watched the day he met Jinya, when she beat him in a game of cuju, despite being half his size.

His initial scorn shifted into unwavering admiration.

From then on he followed her everywhere like a lost puppy, though she would not give him the time of day.

Even when other girls flirted with him, even when he won the affection of her sisters and brother, still she ignored him.

Late one evening Kuro was returning home from the fields when he heard sounds of a commotion. Never one to run from danger, he hurried toward the raised voices and caught sight of Jinya arguing with a big-city constable.

“If you’re hiding her here, you know that’s illegal,” the constable warned.

“It’s illegal for someone to hide in their own household?” Jinya shot back.

“You know very well she no longer belongs to that family. She is the property of the Rao clan now.”

“Then tell them to feed her! Even the pigs eat better than she—”

The constable tried to slap her, but she ducked, sidestepping him. “Why, you insolent child—”

Kuro darted between them, causing the constable to recoil. “My good man, how are you?” Kuro said jovially. Though he was only fifteen, his considerable stature often led others to mistake him for a grown man.

The constable sized Kuro up. “I’m looking for a runaway bride,” the constable explained stiffly.

“No runaway brides around here,” said Kuro, making exaggerated searching motions. Jinya rolled her eyes, her expression unapologetic. The constable glared at her, and she glared right back. Before things could escalate, Kuro stepped between them again.

“Sorry about my—my wife,” he invented, taking her hand.

He winced as Jinya dug her nails into his palm, hard enough to draw blood.

“Control your woman,” said the constable, “or the law will intervene.”

“Yes, sir,” said Kuro. “Best of luck with your search.”

Once the constable was gone, Jinya ripped her hand out of his. “Mind your own business,” she snapped.

“Why are you so angry all the time?”

“Why am I so angry all the time?” she demanded. “Why are you not ?”

“What do you mean?”

She stared at him, her chest heaving with exertion.

In the silence that followed, she waited for him to interrupt, to contradict her, to make a joke at her expense.

He only stared. There was something about her that drew him in, like a reckless moth mesmerized by flame.

No matter how destructive she would prove to be, he knew he needed to be near her.

To admire her, to draw warmth from her, and eventually, to burn with her.

“Do you actually want to know?” she asked, her voice tentative now, shy.

He nodded.

She took a step closer, pushing him into the shadows of the alleyway.

“The system is broken,” she told him, a clarity in her eyes he’d never known before.

“They tell us anyone can rise through the ranks and become a jinshi scholar, but that’s a lie they use to placate us.

No boy from our backwater town will ever pass the imperial exams, because our schools are simply not good enough.

Meanwhile, some noble’s son with half a brain will rise through the ranks to become magistrate—and claim the system is fair.

He’ll go to the capital, while you and your brothers toil over the fields for the rest of your damned lives, sowing the crops but never reaping the harvest. The nobles will take your grain and your profit, and you will never make more than just enough to scrape by.

“As for us women, our only hope is to marry well. The better we marry, the farther away we’ll go.

If our husbands are generous, they’ll let us return home once a year for the Spring Festival.

Then we’ll see our families, and we’ll weep, seeing them old and withered, knowing we won’t be there to hold their hands as they pass.

Knowing we belong to our husbands’ households now.

That is the best we can hope for—to be a servant in another’s home. And you ask me why I am angry.”

All this I channeled into the chasm—Kuro’s awe, his curiosity, his will to live another day, and another, and another.

Even his grief-tainted memories I fed to the rift, knowing this too was a deeply human emotion.

I gave the veil my delight at my mother’s delight, my pride and happiness at Uncle Zhou’s praise.

My first inklings that I could be good at something, that I could aspire to something more in this life.

I assumed the impulsion would be like water pouring from a breach in a dam; at first the memories might trickle in slowly, but gradually, the pace would increase, until no spirit could stop its momentum.

Instead, the veil welcomed our human memories, absorbing our qi like a long-lost friend.

It took and took and took, and still came back for more.

But as our qi slowly began to supplant its lixia, the veil began to resist us, as if not knowing how to balance itself against the changing composition of our realms. I fortified my impulsion, drawing strength from my memories.

“ Remember ,” I heard my mother’s voice say in my ears, “ there is so much to live for. ”

Beyond, I was distantly aware of fighting that had broken out in the human realm. Yet the sounds of bloodshed were like the cries of birds in the sky, and we were submerged deep in the sea. Only when I felt Kuro’s corporeal hand rip from mine did my concentration waver.

“Guard him!” Sky’s infuriated voice broke through the haze of the in-between realm.

I felt as though I were peering up at my former commander from a great distance, trying to make sense of a world that was not my own.

My body had been left unattended in the clearing, though I appeared at ease, merely sleeping.

Kuro lay beside me, one hand still joined with mine.

There was blood trickling down his chin. Blood?

Had Lei’s diversion failed? And yet these were not spirits fighting Sky’s soldiers, but other men. Adding to the confusion were their uniforms—which also bore the Anlai colors.

“Commander—behind you!” Captain Tong threw his spear at Sky’s attacker, grimacing as the soldier dropped. He seemed to recognize the fallen man.

And then a gray-haired warlord on horseback broke through the clearing, and I understood: Liu Zhuo had found us out.

The Anlai warlord dismounted and drew his sword, striding toward my defenseless body. “My greatest mistake was letting you go,” he snarled, as if he somehow knew I could hear him. “This ends now.”

But before he could get within a few feet of me, his son barred his path.

“Father,” said Sky. “This is my last warning. Call off your men.”

“You fool!” Liu Zhuo spat. “You think I’ll still name you my successor after this?”

Sky raised his sword. “I couldn’t care less what you name me anymore.”

His father had been an accomplished warrior in his time, but the years had not been kind to him.

His movements were sluggish and predictable, and his health was failing.

Beads of sweat rolled down his face as his sword clattered against his son’s, his two arms shaking against one of Sky’s.

Deftly, Sky drove his sword up to his father’s hilt, so that Liu Zhuo had no choice but to disengage.

That was his mistake. As he pulled his blade back, Sky disarmed him with a swift chopping motion.

His once-famous sword clattered to the ground, rendered useless despite all its former glory.

“Call off your men,” commanded Sky. “This is no longer your war to fight.”

His father glared at him, unmoving.

“For the sake of your honor I will not kill you,” said Sky, sword still raised. “But know—”

“Too bad I don’t particularly care about honor,” said a high-pitched voice from behind him.

My calm shattered as I recognized Lily’s small figure.

With the sword Lei had given her, and with the flying crane maneuver I’d taught her, she leapt across the clearing, a blur of light, and stabbed the Anlai warlord through the chest.

Sky faltered as if stabbed himself. He stared open-mouthed as his father fell to his knees, coughing up blood.

Lily smiled down at the warlord, surveying her work.

“Mingze was my brother,” she told him. My mind reeled, recalling the spirit summoner executed at the palace gates.

“And I promised him I would not die until you did.”

Assured in her victory, she lowered her arm so that her blade dragged in the dirt.

“ Never drop your guard on the battlefield! ” I wanted to scream at her, but I could not move.

Still choking on his own blood, Liu Zhuo seized her sword and wrested it out of her hand.

She tried to fight him but his sheer size overwhelmed her.

In one breath, he’d stolen her blade and beheaded her.

“ Lily! ” I screamed, or tried to, as her severed head hit the ground. The rest of her body lay crushed beneath Liu Zhuo’s massive corpse. He was so much larger than her that I could not see her in the fray.

Blood pooled on the ground, the silent marker of a life stolen.

How could Lily be gone? How could she be dead after everything—after scheming with me against the princes, after training with me every morning, after helping me escape the palace?

I owed her so much. Now I would never be able to fulfill those promises; I would never be able to watch her grow up, to witness the woman she would become.

She was sixteen. I had wanted more for her—a lifetime of freedom and dreaming, not one shaped by confinement and revenge.

I felt tears gather behind my eyes, tears that had no place to go. Thus the veil became my outlet, so that I fed it my sorrow, my grief, and my rage.

“Did you really think you could hide from me?”

Qinglong’s voice cut through me like a blade of burning ice.

Connected as we were, I felt my panic lance through Kuro, disrupting the flow of his qi.

I tried to calm us both, to continue channeling our life force into the veil, but the closer we came to sealing the rift, the more fiercely it resisted us.

“ I’m coming for you .” It was a threat and a promise.

“We have to hurry,” I told Kuro in the in-between realm. “Qinglong’s realized it’s a diversion.”

“It’s not enough,” said Kuro. “ We’re not enough.”

“But…”

I looked down at our joined hands and realized he was right.

Here in this liminal space made of shadows, the two of us had become just another silhouette.

Our life forces were nearly depleted, and our spirits fading.

Still the rift gaped over us, its mouth open as if laughing. Were all our efforts in vain?

My knees buckled; I was so weak already.

I would give all of myself, and still it would not be enough.

It wasn’t supposed to end like this; I wasn’t meant to sacrifice myself for nothing.

Deep down, I had foolishly believed there could only be two outcomes—the selfish one, where I sacrificed the world and saved myself, or the selfless one—where I sacrificed myself and saved the world.

But even after choosing the latter, my sacrifice had meant nothing.

A part of me died then—the part that believed the world could still be fair and kind.

This was how it would end. Our lives lost. Our stories forgotten. We had given so much, fought so bravely, and still no one would be saved. No one would remember.

“Neither of us wants it enough,” said Kuro bleakly. “Our will to live—it’s not strong enough.”

The war, it had altered us both. Our hope was not enough; our belief in this world and its people was not enough.

My vision darkening, I began to release Kuro’s hand.

“Then take mine.”

We both turned at the force of his qi; Liu Winter had joined us in the in-between realm.

Impossible. How could a human without a spirit seal find his way here?

And yet I recalled seeing Winter in my dreams, though I hadn’t known it at the time.

He’d always possessed a remarkable spirit affinity; even Sima Yi had known it.

He out of all of us was certainly destined to become a summoner of a Cardinal Spirit.

Even so, he’d refused the offer, because he’d loved his life as it was.

“Use me,” said Winter. “I know the cost, and still, I choose to pay it.”

There was no time to argue. I extended my hand, and he took it with grim trepidation. He understood the cost would be great.

I thought I did too. But in truth, perhaps none of us fully understood the price we were about to pay. If we had known, would we still have done what we did?

The three of us stood in a circle beneath the flickering light, as if peering up from the bottom of the ocean.

Winter’s qi, untarnished by lixia, was like a flowing river to our stagnating bodies of water.

Together we connected our elements, our spirits merging as one, and our combined qi blossomed into a force so immense, it rivaled that of a Cardinal Spirit.