Page 33 of The Nightblood Prince

A blade, whetted and sharp, safe in its sheath.

The conscription letter at his bedside. A bag of fresh clothes and dried meats, packed next to his thick winter coat.

Father was set to leave for the army in the morning.

Originally, he’d planned to leave earlier because the camp was far away, so the journey would be arduous for his legs.

But Mother had begged him to stay longer so that we could have one last New Year as a family.

At midnight, I would turn nineteen. A year ago, the emperor had suggested that Siwang and I get married on our nineteenth birthday.

So much had changed since then.

In the past days, I did the only thing I was good at: hunt.

I walked the snowy forest every day so that Father got to sleep full-bellied every night.

Beef stewed in fermented cabbage, pheasant roasted in cherry oak, a whole wild hog leg cooked with the eggplant and potatoes that Lu- ma gave me in exchange for the other leg.

We didn’t let the unused meat go to waste, either selling it to the villagers who were desperate for even a single bite after a long winter, or smoking it to keep for the following wintery months.

In this village far from the bustling markets of walled cities, fresh meat made even the coldest of neighbors open their arms to us.

On the last day of the year, we ate braised ribs and toasted my nineteenth birthday with the rice wine I got from Luyao, the cowherd. Luyao also gave me a bag of jujube seeds, which I ground into powder and poured into the cabbage-and-boar filling of our dumplings.

It was not only tradition to eat dumplings on New Year’s, but a tradition to eat them before a big departure. 上马饺子下马面 . Begin the journey with dumplings, and end it with noodles. In case anything happened on the journey, at least our last meal would have been a good one.

I also poured a little of the jujube powder into the rice wine. Then I filled my bowl with leftover braised pork and rice instead of wine and dumplings.

Even Mother, who’d drunk only one small cup, was falling asleep at the table before the midnight hour.

Once all three of them were lulled to sleep by the jujube seed, I helped them to their beds before taking our ancestral blade and the conscription scroll from Father’s bedside, then left a letter of apology in their place.

I was the reason we were here, the reason Lan Yexue was still alive. Perhaps even the reason he had waged this war. If anyone should go tobattle, it was me.

“Take care of Mother and Father when I’m gone,” I whispered to Fangyun, before placing a kiss on her cheek the way she used to kiss me goodbye.

I left the house just as a strike of lightning flashed across the sky, along with the fireworks that marked midnight.