Page 29 of The Nightblood Prince

Home was almost a week’s journey on horseback. I waited for more visions of bloodshed, but none came. I waited for news of Lan’s attack on Duhuan but heard nothing.

Perhaps the old lady was right. Perhaps by surrendering, they had spared bloodshed. Or had Lan’s soldiers killed everyone so that there were no survivors left to tell the story?

The thought nauseated me.

Demons, Lan Yexue raised an army of demons, stolen from the eighteenth level of hell, people on the road said.

How I wished I had let Lan Yexue die a quiet death a year ago.

Before I entered my village, I rebandaged the wound on my leg to make sure the gauze was tight and that no blood seeped through. A small injury from my many falls in Duhuan.

My parents already hated the idea of me traveling the lands alone in times like these, though the game I hunted helped defray the rising costs caused by the war.

After everything my stubbornness had cost us, they didn’t want to take me from one cage to lock me in another. Still, if Mother saw that I was injured, she would never let me leave the house again.

Since our exile, my family had enough to worry about.

The problem with small villages where everyone knew everyone was that when unfamiliar faces appeared, they were often treated warily.

We had tried our best to settle in. Father now taught at the school, though it didn’t pay much.

Mother sold her embroidery and food in the market with Fangyun to make up for the shortfall.

Despite neighbors who greeted us with polite smiles, we felt like outcasts. Life here was a far cry from our lives in the capital, where everyone from court officials to famed merchants groveled for my family’s attention, all hoping to have the future empress as an ally.

When I thought of Father’s weathered face, Mother’s failing eyes, and Fangyun’s hands, now hardened by manual labor, my heart ached.

I got what I wanted, but at what cost?

The village market was nothing compared with the festive bustle of Yong’An, or even some of the bigger cities I’d visited in the past year. This didn’t mean it wasn’t full of personality, the kind that only small villages had.

At this hour, Father was in class teaching the village children poetry and numbers. Mother was probably home, embroidering. I wasn’t ready to meet their stern gazes and hear their lectures about how I should have sent more letters, should have come home more often.

I went to find my sister first. The one person who was always happy to see me, no matter how often I disappointed her.

The village had changed in minuscule ways in the time I had been away.

Qing- ma ’s baby had grown into a toddler, with chubby cheeks and wobbly feet, beaming dimpled smiles at every passerby as his mother hawked small, stale winter fruits.

Zhangxi, a beautiful girl a year younger than me, was now married to the cowherd, her belly rounding, cheeks flushed with a motherly glow.

Her husband was a sturdy man, big-handed, small-eyed, preferred animals to humans, but doted on Zhangxi with love.

His face bloomed in awe whenever she was near.

Everybody in the village had known they would end up together.

A love match destined by the stars, a blessing so few girls could afford. Even in small villages like this one.

I wondered how Si—

I caught myself before I could let myself think of him again.

My eyes quickly focused on the nearest thing.

Lu- ma ’s back was beginning to hunch as she carried out bowls of noodles from her shop to eager customers.

She made the best beef noodles I had ever tasted, comparable even to the imperial chefs’.

Her face had weathered and wrinkled in the months since her son had gone to war and returned without one of his legs and three of his fingers.

However, now that her son was home, her smile had returned, enough to light up even the dreariest of days. “Li Fei! You are back!”

I smiled, too. “I am.”

“Did you bring me any decent kills this time?”

“I’m staying for a few days. I will go into the forest and hunt soon. What do you want?”

“Venison or wild boar would be great. I’ll give you free noodles if you give me a good deal.”

“Don’t I always?” I pretended to roll my eyes. “Have you seen Fangyun today?”

“She’s at her stall. I was just about to bring her a bowl of noodles. Poor girl, standing outside all day in the cold. Why don’t you take it to her? You know how my legs are; it will take me half an hour to walk from one side of the market to the other.”

“Just for her? Don’t I get a bowl?”

“I will give you one big bowl of noodles with two sets of chopsticks and a bowl of wontons if you bring me some wild boar meat.”

“You drive a hard bargain, Lu- ma. ” I took the bowls from her, my gloved fingers curling around their warmth. “I’ll see you later.”

“Don’t forget to bring back my bowls!”

I found Fangyun at the edge of the village, just as the delicious aroma of her scallion pancakes hit my nose. A smell I had always loved, but now it just reminded me of that old lady in Duhuan, and the stench of—

I flinched at the memories and quickly pushed them down. There is nothing you could have done, I told myself as my heart thudded like a drum. Someone was hunting the stargazer. I hoped she could outrun whoever this predator was.

“Fei?” Fangyun’s voice pulled me back to reality.

My sister stood alone in her stall, my mother nowhere to be seen.

Fangyun was mixing a bowl of batter in her arms, a basket of steamed buns at her side.

She was better at making sweet treats, like red bean cake, lotus seed cake, and tangyuan, but such ingredients were hard to find in times like these.

Her once-delicate face was sliced red by the winter winds, her skin dry and peeling at the cheeks, just like mine. Her eyes were also duller than I remembered. She looked older, too.

When she saw me, she flashed a smile that made me feel like I was home.

Because home was not a place. Home was the people who loved you, the people who waited for you, the people whose eyes lit up when they saw you.

Home was my sister and mother, and though he scowled at me more than he smiled, it was also my father. Home was Siwang—

I shook the thought away.

“You have flour on your face.” I kept my head down, blinking away my tears as I set the bowls on a table by her stall.

With me gone, Fangyun had to shoulder more responsibility than she should, taking care of both Mother and Father without complaint. If I hadn’t been so selfish, she would be married to a minister or a wealthy merchant by now, belly round like Zhangxi’s, dressed in silk and dripping in gold.

Guilt gnawed at me again. I absentmindedly touched the pouch of gold at my hip, my earnings from hunting. I had precipitated my family’s downfall. It was only fair that I make it up to them.

“Heavens, why didn’t you write letters like you promised?” Fangyun pulled me into a hug before I could say another word, then buried her face in my shoulder.

A muffled whimper at my ear. I felt her warm tears trickling down my neck, so I hugged her tighter, arms intertwined, pressing her to me so that she knew I’d missed her, too. So much. And in this moment, with my sister’s breathing and her milk-sweet scent enveloping me, everything felt warmer.

Even the washed-out winter colors felt a little brighter.

“Thank the gods I set those bowls down before I interrupted you,” I joked.

Fangyun shoved me away. For a second, I thought she was going to hit me. “Do you know how worried we were?”

I laughed. “I’m sorry, I forgot.” A half-truth.

“Don’t be sorry to me! Be sorry to Ma! And Ba! They have been worried sick! Do you know how white her hair is now because of you? Even Father’s hair is beginning to gray!”

“Fangyun, I’m sorry.”

“What were we thinking, letting you leave? Do you know how dangerous things are right now? There is a war going on, Fei! You’ve heard the stories of the Lan dynasty’s demons, right?”

I had. Everyone on the continent had heard of the war between Lan and Rong, and the ghost stories that drifted from the battlefield.

Twelve months was all it had taken for Yexue to transform the Lan Empire from a crumbling nation at Rong’s mercy to a semblance of its former glory, capable of rivaling the once-feared Rong Empire.

“How did Lan Yexue end up as Rong’s hostage for two whole years if he was capable of raising demons from hell?

” I joked, more for her than myself. Yexue had already brought Rong to its knees.

If the world found out about the magic he was capable of, it would bring our people’s morale to an all-time low.

When the war began, the emperor had promised that Rong’s sons would be home before summer. However almost a whole year had passed; our situation looked worse by the day. Lan continued to claim town after town, city after city, pushing our soldiers and villagers northward toward the capital.

Already I had heard too many stories of frontline deserters who would rather face the wrath of Rong than to stand face to face with Lan’s army.

“Demons don’t exist!” someone from the table next to us hissed.

I thought he was talking to us, until the man who sat across from him groaned.

“My uncle knows someone who saw them with his own eyes! The Prince of Lan raises them from the dead! They are impossibly fast, stronger than ten bulls, and feed on the blood of mortals! At this rate, if Rong’s armies don’t turn the table soon, they will reach Yong’An by summer. ”

“What about us? Do you think they will attack small villages likeus?”

The louder of the two men went quiet. “I don’t know.” He set down the bun he was picking at.

“I don’t believe in demons.”

“I don’t want to believe in demons, either….”

“Why don’t we ask Lu Bao? He just came back from the front lines!”

The second man grimaced. “What’s the point, even if he can tell us whether the rumors are true?

What can we do? People say the Prince Regent of Lan made a deal with demons to punish the Rong emperor for the humiliation he’d suffered as a ward.

But this war isn’t hurtingthe emperor; it’s hurting men like us. ”

“I’ve heard that this war isn’t about his time as a ward; it’s about the empress of all empresses,” the other man whispered, his eyes wide as if he were sharing some unfathomable rumor.

Too bad it was the same rumor half the empire had already heard.

“They say no one has seen the empress of all empresses for almost a year. Apparently she is sick, but the people in the palace think she has run away, and the prince regent is waging the war to find her.”

“Selfish harlot. All this for a stupid woman? I’ve told you: that empress of all empresses is a bad omen.

How many nations have tried to invade us because of her?

Now all the freshly claimed borderlands are rebelling because they think the crown prince will no longer become the emperor of all emperors. ”

My sister pulled my arm. “Don’t listen to them.”

I smiled. “I’ve heard worse.”

“Are the rumors true?” my sister quietly asked.

“That I’m a selfish harlot?” I teased, and she scowled at me. “The stuff about demons sounds like propaganda from Lan to scare us into surrender or from Rong to scare us into fighting harder—I can’t be certain. However I can confirm that Yexue is… different. ”

Fangyun’s face dropped at this, her eyes no longer looking at me. She then changed the subject: “Have you seen any beautiful scenery in the past few months?”

I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what I’ve seen.

What matters is what I’ve brought home.” I handed her my pouch of gold coins, then patted the bag over my shoulders.

“A snow fox’s pelt, to make Mother a scarf, and leather to make shoes for Father.

I’ve made enough money these past few months that we don’t have to worry about food anymore.

You don’t have to come here every day and—”

My sister’s hand covered mine. “I don’t care about the money, Fei. I just want you to be alive and safe. If this is the reason you keep disappearing for months at the time, then don’t. We—”

“I know.”

“Don’t leave again, sister. I’m scared that the war is going to reach our doorsteps soon. When it does, I don’t want to spend every day wondering where you are and whether you are safe.”

“I know.” I gently put my hand over hers. “Come on, the food is getting cold.”