Page 26

26

The night is starlit when I leave my healing chamber. In the distance, I can hear the sounds of revelry. Hào’yáng told me there would be a banquet to honor the murdered candidates and celebrate that the culprits have been caught. Music and laughter drift from the direction of the Banquet Hall, which is lit in the faint glow of lanterns.

The Temple of Tranquil Longevity is silent and dark, its long, open-air hallways connecting the individual empty chambers. Chrysanthemums sway in my wake, their fragrance filling the air with hope of the health and longevity they symbolize. A wind has picked up, masking my footsteps as I approach the last chamber of the temple.

I’ve left my jade pendant back in my chamber. This is the first time I’ve taken it off since my father gifted it to me. Its meaning has changed now that Hào’yáng holds the other half. Its weight against my heart has begun to feel more significant, and it took me a while to realize that what I felt earlier, when I begged Hào’yáng to let me see Yù’chén, was guilt. I don’t know what to make of it, other than that my path in life was always meant to lead to Hào’yáng just as a river flows to the sea—yet tonight, I went against his warnings.

But seeing Yù’chén again, perhaps for the last time, is a moment I wish to keep to myself. A moment I wish to experience alone for the first time, without the presence of my guardian in the jade.

My neck feels bare and too light without it, but I remind myself it is only until the moon rises to its highest point in the sky. Just a few hours.

Hào’yáng is true to his promise. There are no guards in sight as I draw up to the chamber where Yù’chén is being kept. When I press a hand to the door, testing for wards that may ensnare me, nothing happens.

I suck in a breath, slide it open, and slip in.

There are no lanterns in this chamber. Moonlight spills through a fretwork window, granting some degree of light. I feel the wards pulsing against the walls and closing over the doorway as soon as I enter. There will be no escaping from within.

Standing beyond a set of sheer drapes, gazing out the window at the moon, is Yù’chén. I catch the crimson of his cloak first, shimmering like blood. Yù’chén’s fingers absentmindedly caress the bottom-left corner.

He stirs now, as though from a trance. His eyes find mine across the room; shock ripples across his face. “àn’yīng?” He speaks my name in disbelief.

I don’t know what to say or do. I don’t even know why I’m here. I have no plan to save him, and I can’t—I can’t risk anyone finding out that Hào’yáng helped me get in here against the rules. I can’t tell the Eight or the High Court of my involvement with Yù’chén and jeopardize my standing in the trials and my mother’s only chance to have her soul back.

I have wished to be powerful my entire life, yet in the end, in the face of the most important moments, I am still powerless to change anything.

Yù’chén turns to me. He looks healthy again, his skin smooth and free of scales and dark veins. Beneath his cloak, he wears a fresh set of black robes.

He walks toward me and lifts the gauze curtain with one hand. The way he looks at me fills me with emotions I’m not meant to feel.

“Tell me this is real,” he says.

There are no words I can offer to make up for the wrongs I have done him. I have despised him on the basis of his birth, suspected him and doubted him time after time even when his every action was to help me, to protect me. I have accepted his help without consideration of the consequences for him as a half-mó—and I have sentenced him to death.

My vision blurs, and because my chest aches with all the empty apologies I can’t offer him, I speak his name: “Yù’chén.”

He crosses over to me in several brisk strides and reaches for me—then hesitates. We stand there for several heartbeats, his fingers lingering by my cheeks, and I realize I’m waiting for him to touch me.

Yù’chén swallows and slowly, very slowly, retracts his hand. He draws a deep breath and shifts his gaze to a spot behind me. “You shouldn’t be here.” His voice is hard.

“It’s my fault,” I choke out. “I asked you to help my sister—then the mó—and Yán’lù—”

“It’s all right,” he says. “I’ll be all right.”

“It’s not. You won’t. They’re not going to give you a fair trial, Yù’chén.”

Something settles on his expression: a resignation I have seen before. The same expression he wore when I confronted him about being a half-mó. When he asked me to see him as anything but. Finally, he looks at me again, his eyes as dark and as deep as the night.

“àn’yīng,” he says, and his voice is steady. “When we are born, we are set on a path to walk. One drawn by our birthright, our status, our blood. Some are born with golden crowns on their heads, beloved and made for a life of glory and dreams; others are less fortunate. That is fate, drawn and allotted by the Heavenly Order. I have known since the start what mine was meant to be. And if it should end here, I have no regrets.”

I clench my teeth, and this time, I cannot stop the tear that carves its way down my cheek. “I don’t know why you don’t hate me,” I whisper.

His expression softens. “You,” he says slowly, “are the first person who has treated me as if I’m…human. As if I am deserving of anything other than revulsion and disgust.”

I flinch. You disgust me, I once told him.

I steel the storm in my heart and meet his gaze. “Yù’chén, do you remember what you asked of me before we left to see my sister?”

He stills. “Yes.”

I reach out and press my palm to his chest, where his heart beats. “I see you.”

It is too little too late after all that he has done for me, where he is now, and what will happen to him tomorrow. But it is all that I can give him.

Yù’chén closes his eyes; a shiver passes through him, nearly imperceptible. When he opens them again, they are raw. They catch mine and they burn, and it’s as though they ignite something in my heart and in my very soul: a fire that has been there all along and that roars to life at his gaze.

“àn’yīng.” He says my name as if it is the most important thing in this world. His expression is careful as he beholds me. Slowly, ever so slowly, he lifts his hand from where it rests on the bottom-left corner of his cloak. Lifts it toward my cheek. He pauses. A question.

I don’t look away from him. An answer.

His eyes heat, and his fingers finally fall, coming to rest on my cheeks. His touch sends shivers of pleasure through my body. Yù’chén doesn’t move, just holds me, barely, his palm cupping the edge of my jaw. His gaze, though, roams my face, as if he is studying the map of my features, committing every line and shadow to memory.

Slowly, ever so slowly, I reach up to touch his jaw. My breaths quicken as I trace the sharp lines of him, all made for devastating beauty and destruction. There is something different to the way we interact with each other tonight. It is nothing like the clumsy, passion-fueled embraces of the hot spring or the hazy stupor of the flowers’ poison back in his passage. This time, we are both awake, our breaths taut, so carefully and painfully aware of what we are doing, of this new level of intimacy between us as we explore each other beneath the fragile light of the moon.

And perhaps it is the awareness of our time running out that makes me bolder, or perhaps it is the certainty of the feeling that has possessed me all along finally coming to light.

“Yù’chén,” I whisper. I ask the question that has been haunting me for weeks since that night at the hot spring. “What did you see in the forest?”

He hesitates, but he does not close off. No, there is only a weary grief to the way he pauses. His fingers are on the edges of my jaw now, sweeping over the sensitive crook to the back of my neck.

“I saw you,” he replies, and I shiver at his voice, at his touch, at the meaning in his words. “I saw you, dying, a demon drinking your soul.”

The Forest of Nightmares. I remember now, the way he froze at the sight of that blurred figure between the trees, the body lying within its clutches. The painted skins had manifested our worst fears. To Yù’chén, it had manifested my death.

He retracts his hand. The space it leaves behind is cold. “That was when I knew,” he finishes, “that if I continued down this path, there was only one way it would end.”

“So you pushed me away.” My voice is a whisper.

“I tried.”

“Yù’chén.” I move my fingers to his lips, soft and full and wide, remembering how easily he smiled in the days when we first came to know each other. And because I know I cannot, can never, and will never choose him, I say instead: “I see you. I’m sorry it took me so long.”

He draws a swift breath. “àn’yīng, you should leave,” he says, and his voice breaks. “Please. If you don’t leave now, I don’t know that I have it in me to let you go again.”

I can’t. I have known how our story would end since the very beginning. I have resisted, but I no longer wish to.

I press my other palm to his cheek. His hand comes up, his fingers lacing gently in mine, splaying my palm against his mouth. He presses a kiss there. I shiver. Slowly, he trails his mouth to my wrist, where he moves his lips into another kiss. He pulls up the silk of my sleeve, and the cold rushes in against my bare skin, but his mouth is hot as he traces up my arm. It is on his third kiss, at the crook of my elbow, that I realize I’ve stopped breathing.

He pauses at the straps that house my crescent blades on my upper arm, normally hidden beneath my sleeves. I feel his mouth curve into a smile against my skin. “Little scorpion.” He chuckles. “Never without your blades.”

I hold his gaze. Slowly, I draw out Poison. The talisman gleams, and the blade catches an arc of moonlight as I hold it out.

I drop it. The crescent blade falls to the floor in a clatter. Yù’chén’s eyes flick to it, then to me.

“Disarm me,” I whisper, and I pull him down to me in a kiss.

He inhales sharply, then his hands are on my cheeks and tangled in my hair, and he’s kissing me with barely restrained desire. We stagger back until I’m pressed against the wall and his body is hard against mine.

“Disarm me,” I repeat against his mouth.

He bends to press a kiss to my neck, and I shiver, feeling the heat of his hands as they trace up my other arm. Striker falls to the floor, and Yù’chén’s lips trace up my jaw to the outside of my ear. His hands pause on my left thigh, where Fleet rests. I feel the graze of his fingers against the silk of my dress, his desire clear in the darkness of his gaze, the way his body presses against mine.

I lace my fingers through his. Slowly, I guide his hands to the slit on the side of my dress. His eyes never leave mine as he pushes up my skirt, his palm sliding along the bare skin of my thigh. He unstraps Fleet, then his hand moves to my right thigh. Shadow is next.

He hesitates, breathing hard as he looks at my bodice, where my last two blades rest on either side of my ribs. “àn’yīng,” he says. Our heartbeats pulse in the air between us. “I can’t do this. I…” He swallows and draws back, his hands curling into fists at his side. “I will not live past tomorrow. I would ruin you.”

The earnestness, the honesty, in his voice and words crack me.

I catch his wrists, stopping his retreat. Then I push him backward. One, two, three steps…more, until he bumps against the end of the bed. I push him down, and he obeys, his eyes on me as though he is held by some unknown spell that I have cast over him. He could snap my neck in the blink of an eye, but instead, he yields to my touch as if I have all the power in the world.

I find that I love it.

He falls back on the silk sheets, his eyes widening as I slide onto his lap, parting my knees so I’m straddling him. My hair has come undone; still wound through with my white ribbon, locks of it curl against his throat, the collar of his black shift, as he looks up at me. His hands fall onto my hips, and I feel him strain against me as he sits, facing me, our faces inches apart, our breaths tangling.

I press my hand to his cheek. “Do you want me?” I ask.

Yù’chén tips his face up to me, baring the elegant curve of his throat. He swallows hard. “I’ve wanted you so much for so long, àn’yīng,” he says softly. “You have poisoned me, little scorpion, and I would gladly let you do it over and over and over again.”

I shift against him, and his grip tightens on me, his eyes darkening. “Then I want you to ruin me,” I say, and crush our lips together.

He pulls me onto the bed with him, and this time he kisses me with abandon, with a hunger and desperate desire that unravel something inside me.

“Disarm me,” I command again, and he complies, his hands traveling up my thighs and farther up, into the bodice of my dress. I feel his fingers against my ribs, feel cool metal as Healer falls onto the silks and, at last, Heart. My hands work at the buttons of his shirt, then the samite belt at his waist, just as he loosens my undergarments. His hands settle on my hips again, and I don’t break his gaze as I move over him.

He pauses, his kisses turning gentle and slow as he eases me onto him.

I squeeze my eyes shut as he holds me. His touch is agonizing, at once lighting a fire inside me and creating a thirst I can’t quench, too much and not enough. Yù’chén kisses me again with a tenderness that makes me shiver. When I open my eyes, he is looking at me, and I find my reflection in the dark of his eyes. My dress pools at my waist, silver in the moonlight as it connects us, as beautiful as a blossom in the night.

I remember what he told me in the passage of flowers, and my silence after, and I nod as I finally give him my response. “I want you,” I whisper—and that’s when I realize it’s not true. After all we have been through together, I am not certain want is the word that describes how I feel toward him, and that frightens me most of all.

His hands cup my cheeks. “àn’yīng,” he whispers, his voice raw. “I want you, more than anything in my life. More than anything I have ever felt. I…want you.”

And I wonder, too, if want is the word he means to use.

His hands grip my waist, pressing me tightly to him as he turns us around and sets me gently against the bed of silks without breaking us apart. His body covers mine, but he suspends his weight on his elbows so he does not hurt me. I tighten my legs around his hips and wrap my arms around his back, burying my face in the crook of his neck. I have the feeling I am falling into an endless night of stars with him holding me.

I find that I am no longer afraid. I capture his lips with mine and arch into him, running my hands down the contours of his back and feeling the ridges where he bore lashes to gift me my sewing box. I touch the hard planes of his stomach, the wound there healed from his fight with the mó outside my house and then with Yán’lù—all for me. An ache builds inside me as I think of all he has gone through for me, and all the times I have pushed him away because of what he is. The way he touches me now, the way his lips trail my skin and he holds me like I am his end, leaves me no doubt as to how he feels, as to why he did all that he did for me. And the least I can do is give him one last truth.

I dig my fingers into his hair and press into him, the closest I can be to him. “Yù’chén,” I gasp, and then I lose myself in him.

He shudders against me, a noise breaking from his throat, and I cling to him as I give myself over to him, to the knowing that from the very start, there was only one way this could end.

Yù’chén shifts to lie down beside me and draws me against him, pressing butterfly kisses to my cheeks, my jaw, my neck. But my gaze is drawn to the window behind him, the way the moon has climbed halfway into the starlit sky. Its light spills on Yù’chén, frosting him in a beauty that is impossible and impossibly cruel, because I know the moon worships him, and I know the moment it rises to its highest and I will have to leave.

“You’re thinking.”

I blink, pulled back to the present by Yù’chén’s voice. He watches me through those long lashes, like strokes of ink, his fingers absently tracing the curves of my lips. My throat knots at the way he looks at me, his eyes bright with joy.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” he says.

I brush my hands against his cheeks. “I’m thinking about you.”

His lips pull up in that grin, the one I remember from the very first day we met in that clearing in the mortal realm. He takes my hand, threads his fingers through mine, and brings it to his mouth. His lashes flutter as he kisses my palm, his touch sending shivers up my spine.

“àn’yīng,” he murmurs, his lips grazing my skin, his breaths hot on my hand. He hesitates, then lifts his eyes to mine. He is no longer smiling. “In any other life…if I weren’t mó…” He swallows. “Is there a chance that you would choose me?”

I tip my head back and search his eyes. No more masks, I realize; no more charm and flirting, cruel smirks and teasing. Beneath it all is a yearning that I know with my own heart, that all humans share.

Why is it in our natures to want that which we cannot have?

I know my answer. I’ve known since he risked his own life to protect me from that stray mó, or perhaps when he saved my sister from death by trading his own health…or perhaps even earlier. The debts I owe him run through my mind in an endless tally, and for a moment I can’t breathe against the waves of guilt threatening to drown me.

I want you to look at me and see me.

I touch a finger to the corner of his mouth, recalling the easy way it stretched into a grin. Trace my hand over the sharp curve of his cheeks, the long lashes and dark brows, and think of the charming young practitioner draped in red I met in the forest.

“Yes.” The word unfurls from me in the softest whisper, barely a sigh. He freezes, shock blanching across his face, and I sit up, unable to meet his eyes, because it is breaking me. “I have to go.”

“àn’yīng—wait—” He catches my wrist and pulls me against him, wrapping his arms around me so tightly that I feel the gallop of his heart against mine, hear its rhythm beat out all the words unsaid between us. He buries his face in the crook of my neck, and I feel his muscles coiled so tensely he’s shaking.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers hoarsely. “I’m sorry. I—I just…I just want to hold you for a few more moments.”

My eyes burn. I can’t, I think. I can’t. The fates have granted us a crossroads on the two paths we walk, paths that were never meant to meet. Maybe, under different circumstances, in a different lifetime, the stars would have been kinder. Maybe I could have loved him without knowing it would burn down the world.

But meeting the right person at the wrong time, the right love in the wrong life, is a tragedy written from the start.

Yù’chén exhales. He seems to be fighting something, fighting himself, and it seeps through the cracks as he untangles himself from me. “Go.” He smooths my hair and fixes my dress, button by button. He dresses himself, then picks up my two blades on the bed and hands them to me. “Go, and be happy, àn’yīng. Promise me you’ll be happy.”

In that moment, I’m not sure I can feel joy again without tasting this sorrow.

Yù’chén slides us off the bed. He picks up two more crescent blades. Kneels at my feet and slides them back into their sheaths at my thighs, then presses two light kisses on me there. When he reaches the final two blades, he slips them into the sheaths on my arms and draws back. We stand like this, gazing at each other, the distance between us an abyss as we race toward the end.

“Forget me, àn’yīng,” he says at last.

The words taste like ashes against my tongue. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t. I’m not worth it.” His eyes search mine, and something like shame, like resignation, crosses them. “àn’yīng, I want you to know…I’m so sorry for what the Kingdom of Night has done to your realm.”

I give him my last truth. “We’re going to fight back, Yù’chén,” I whisper. “There is a resistance brewing against the Kingdom of Night. Hào’yáng and Shī’yǎ have planned it and gathered allies in the Kingdom of Sky. We will return to the mortal realm to declare war, and Hào’yáng will fight to take the throne.” I press my hand to his heart. “I’m going to make a safer world, for mortals and for halflings alike. For you.”

So that, in your next life, you can have the right to fall in love with whomever you wish.

So that, in his next life, Fán’xuān can roam the realms as free as a bird.

So that, in their next lives, Lì’líng and Tán’mù won’t spend half their lives in a halfling show pen.

Yù’chén swallows. He reaches out to brush a strand of my hair behind my ears. His fingers linger on my cheek.

“Forget about me, àn’yīng,” he repeats gently, and that is when the moon shifts, and everything in the room glows as though there is magic spinning in the air.

It’s a sign, for me: that it’s time to go.

I press my palm to his hand, leaning into his touch for the last time. Then I turn around and slide open the doors to exit.

The problem is, there is someone on the other side.