Page 5

5

It is when the sunset lights the clouds and treetops aflame that I think of home, of Méi’zi and Mā.

The Immortality Trials began with the invitation we received two days ago. The First Trial listed on it is deceptively simple: arrive at the Temple of Dawn by sundown on the third day.

Thanks to Yù’chén’s healing talismans, my ankle has mended. The Way of the Ghosts has been eerily peaceful. The cathaya forest seems to extend endlessly, yet I know that, far off to the northeast, our realm ends and the immortal one begins. The legends say the border is marked by a great waterfall that pours into the Four Seas, and overhead, beyond a wall of clouds, is the Kingdom of Sky…and the Temple of Dawn.

The red-cloaked practitioner—Yù’chén—and I have formed a routine. We travel by day and sleep by night, alternating watch shifts. Sometimes I hear screams pierce the night or wake certain that a red-lipped shadow watches me from the darkness between the trees. But we have yet to run into danger. It is as if the forest holds its breath. The calm before the storm.

Sunsets are the only time I have to myself. As I slip away from Yù’chén to bathe, the tension falls from my body in the certainty that he won’t follow me. The practitioner is disarmingly charming, and more and more, I find myself lowering my guard around him against my better judgment.

I slip out of my silk dress and carefully set it, along with my crescent blades, on the outcropping of rocks on the banks. I’m still in my shift as I lower myself into the burbling stream. I mislike being completely naked and defenseless, so I do not go far. My blades have never been more than an arm’s length away since my father handed them to me.

I close my eyes as the rush of water envelops me, and I think of home. Méi’zi must be cooking at this hour—she’ll be making congee, her best dish, with a neat sprinkle of scallions. It is as though I am there with them: I see her stirring the pot over the clay stove, hear the clatter of wooden spoon and bowls. She’ll sit next to Mā and feed her. Mā has always taken better to Méi’zi, like an animal sensing gentleness and innate goodness.

An ache grips my chest so hard that my throat locks and I cannot breathe. I am glad to sink beneath the water, where my tears leave no trace.

When I surface, I know something is wrong. The chatter of golden pheasants and brown-tailed sparrows has fallen silent. Between the cathaya trees, where the sun’s golden beams had been filtering through, a shadow grows.

Something within it moves.

I measure the distance. I’m about twenty paces from whatever is materializing, and I’m well hidden behind the rocks on the banks. Any sounds I make are swallowed by the rush of the stream. There is a chance I can wait this thing out—but if not…

I need my blades.

I slice through the water, careful not to make a sound, slow enough that my movements won’t be seen. When I reach the rocks and the cranny where I’ve hidden my things, I peer over.

Out of the darkness steps a thing that sends fear ratcheting through my body like lightning. This beast is massive: hair draping its bulky human body with distorted, abnormally long arms; an unhinged, gaping maw dangling from the gleaming-white bone of an ox’s skull with four great horns.

Like every practitioner back in the day, my father had owned a copy of the Classic of Mountains and Seas : a record of all mythical beings and legendary monsters known to exist across the realms. I’d flipped through it as a child, in turns fascinated and frightened by the illustrations of beasts both beautiful and terrifying. After Bà died, I’d studied the book because my life depended on it.

I recognize the beast that fits this description: áo’yīn, an ancient being that the mortal practitioners classified as one of the Ten Fearsome Beasts from the Kingdom of Night. It loves the flesh of mortals more than anything.

The hellbeast huffs as it scents the air. It turns its head toward me, its eyes mere pricks of demonic red in those hollow sockets, and I flatten myself behind the outcropping of rock and pray the water carries my scent away.

Slowly, I reach for my crescent blades, taking one in each hand. I watch the creature’s great shadow darken the rocks, its reflection appearing in the stream, dappled by the water, the currents breaking around its body.

It lets out a low, chittering sound, and I ready my blades. Just as I’m prepared to lash out, a clump of bushes several paces away rattles.

A large huff of air as the beast shifts its head in the direction of the sound. The putrid smell of rotting flesh hits me and I resist the urge to gag. Then its shadow and its scent vanish.

I draw a swift, silent breath.

Thank the skies.

That’s when I hear the whimper. It locks me in place, crawls down my chest, and twists my heart, rooting out a memory I have buried deep. Méi’zi, shaking and eyes wide, nails digging into my arms as she listens to the sounds of the Higher One drinking my father’s life from him, then tearing his heart from his body.

Trying to steady my breathing and the tremor in my hands, I peer around my hiding place.

áo’yīn has lumbered over to a crop of cathayas. Where it goes, an unnatural darkness follows, as though the Kingdom of Night itself spills from its essence.

Mere steps from the beast, crouched in a bush of camellias, is a girl. She is small—shorter than me, her frame made scrawnier by the oversized white shift she wears. Her hair is done up in two buns, and from what I can see, her face is childlike in proportion, wide-set eyes fearful even as she bares her teeth at the beast.

What is a child doing in the Way of Ghosts?

áo’yīn’s teeth flash. Faster than I can fathom, it pounces at her, a skeletal claw seizing her legs.

The girl gives another muffled cry. She scrambles forward and trips, her ankle held by the beast. As she turns onto her back, her skin shifts. It seems to morph with her dress, the silk and skin fusing into white fur, her feet and hands replaced by claws. By the time the beast drags her back to it, she’s no longer a girl but a small white fox.

Realization clicks in. Not a girl, not a fox…but a yāo’jīng. The term comes to me from the tales of old: malicious spirits and monsters that roam the mortal lands, haunting human villages and stealing newborns. Some will lure mortals into traps, creating halfling offspring who inherit a mix of human and monstrous characteristics, yet fall into the same classification as their yāo’jīng parents. They are rejected by human society and, if not killed, are left to prowl the wilds with the monsters.

This girl must be a halfling child of a human and a fox spirit.

Disgust coils in my stomach. A thing like that has no place in our realm. It’s said that the gods laid down a set of rules across all the realms before the beginning of time: the Heavenly Order, which governs the fates of humans and demons and immortals and all mythical beings. To separate the weak from the strong, the prey from the predator, the gods forbade love between mortals and mythical beings—even the monsters and spirits residing in our realm.

Still, halflings exist within the mortal realm. These creatures wander the fringes of this world, abominations under the Heavenly Order.

As I watch the creature struggle, however, I am unable to block out how its snarls turn into soft, desperate cries. Its fox form has fallen away, its body reverting to that of the willowy girl, terror widening her eyes as she fights for her life. And I find that I can’t stop thinking of Méi’zi. Of how they are similar in size and build. Of how, in spite of whatever else it is, the creature is half-human. Blood wells up from the gashes áo’yīn’s claws pierce in the halfling girl: red and glistening, just like mine.

If I let this yāo’jīng die…I can’t help but feel I am letting go of what makes me human.

I know it in my heart before I register that I am moving. I hoist myself onto the bank, my bare feet on the silvergrasses, my crescent blades in my palms.

I whistle at the hellbeast.

áo’yīn stops what it is doing. Those red pinpricks in its empty eye sockets come to focus on me. With another strange, chittering sound, it discards the yāo’jīng like an unwanted doll and turns to face me.

Bile rises in my throat, but I force my mind to steady. I’ve studied the notes of mortal practitioners—the handful of accounts from rare survivors of encounters with áo’yīn near the borders of the demonic realm. Qióng’qí prefers to devour victims smelling of fear, which is why Yù’chén found a way to ease my fear.

What is áo’yīn’s weakness?

There was a practitioner’s account of a boy who, in the face of certain death, chose to sing. He explained that he had sung of all the joys in his life, for those were the memories he had wished to carry with him beyond the Nine Fountains into the realm of death.

He lived to tell the tale.

Joy. áo’yīn is repelled by joy.

I do not think I have sung since my father died. As áo’yīn lumbers toward me, I think of my mother, of the way she hummed when she sewed. I hold on to a memory: a summer morning, sunlight pooling like honey through the fretwork shutters, spilling on Mā so that she appears like spun gold. She has a silk scarf in her hands, her needle flashing like a silver fish darting through iridescent blue waves, but to me, she might as well have been making magic.

I think that is the moment I fell in love with sewing—because, with nothing but my fingers and needles and thread, I could weave the world around me.

I blink and I’m holding knives instead of needles; my hands are coarse and callused, my palms a tapestry of mud and blood. Shadows wrap around me like living, breathing things; I feel hot puffs of breath in my face that smell like rotting flesh.

But when I look up, áo’yīn has stopped. It towers over me, arms as thick as tree trunks and capable of snapping my spine like a twig. Its jaw, all glistening bone and saliva, hangs open as it gapes at me. Strips of flesh dangle from those rows of teeth, and they clack together in that bizarre chittering sound as the beast lowers its face to mine—almost inquisitively.

It inhales deeply.

I conjure the thought of me defeating this hellbeast, of winning a spot in the trials and Mā taking the pill of immortality. Of that honey-sunshine afternoon, sitting by my mother’s lap and listening to her sing again.

Then I plunge Striker upward into áo’yīn’s maw.

I do not even know if mortal steel is capable of slaying mythological creatures from the Kingdom of Night—but if my crescent blades can defeat mó, then I reason they can at least maim a legendary hellbeast enough to slow it.

What happens next, I cannot explain.

Striker begins to glow. The glow comes from within the blade, growing sharper and brighter, as if it has drunk all the light of the stars in the skies and forged it into molten steel. As I watch, that light shoots into áo’yīn’s open jaw. Spirit energy sizzles in the air like lightning as the light begins fissuring áo’yīn’s form, as if it is cracking open from the inside out.

The beast’s scream of anguish rattles my teeth, reverberates in my skull. I cannot hear myself think, cannot feel anything but its pain in those moments—that and the crescent blade’s hilt, which has begun to burn in my hands. And when I look down…

Light shimmers beneath my skin, pouring from my flesh and veins into the blade. Striker is still aglow, but I cannot pinpoint the source of the light. I only know that the blade and I are connected, golden light fracturing from the cracks that have spread through áo’yīn.

áo’yīn howls as its form collapses, turning to smoke and ichor like the mó I have slain. Within heartbeats, the shadows are gone, and I am kneeling in the cathaya forest with my crescent blades in my palms and the ichor of a hellbeast on my fingers.

My head is spinning. I lift my hands, but they are normal now. The light writhing beneath my skin…I must have imagined that. When I lift Striker, there is no trace of light on the flat steel blade; I see only a sliver of my own reflection, eyes wide with fear, hair slicking the sides of my face.

The ichor on my skin is beginning to sting. Quickly, I wipe it off in the grass around me, but a burning sensation spreads through my fingers.

Movement in my peripheral vision pulls my attention. I tense, Striker out and Fleet in my other hand.

It’s the yāo’jīng. She’s back in her full human form, watching me from where áo’yīn had her in its clutches. She’s panting slightly, crouched in unnatural stillness reminiscent of a small animal—a little fox, perhaps. A deep gash on her cheek bleeds.

I’ve never seen a halfling child before; so rare and despised are they that even the stories and paintings don’t acknowledge their existence. The depictions of yāo’jīng I have come across are all twisted, vicious monsters, eerie in their humanlike appearances.

There is an ethereal, nearly inhuman beauty to the girl’s face: the sharp angle of her jaw, the perfect smoothness of her skin, the distance between her angled eyes. It is only when she blinks that I realize her eyes are a deep amber.

She blinks again, then does the strangest thing.

She inclines her head to me.

Then she’s gone. I am alone in the cathaya forest that spans the Way of Ghosts. The sun has set, its last rays of fire receding from the sky, yielding to the deep blue hues of twilight and true night. Wind threads through the branches, bringing the coo of a bird…and the crunch of leaves.

I spin, lashing out with Striker before I catch a blur of red. The curve of my blade comes to rest against the exposed crook of a throat, steel to skin. And I lift my gaze to meet a familiar one.

Yù’chén’s breathing hard, one hand raised in a placating motion. Slowly, he uncurls his other from the hilt of his sword and raises it, palm out to me. Completely weaponless.

“I heard the screams,” he says calmly. His throat moves against the edge of my blade.

I swallow, but I cannot bring myself to lower my blades despite the ache flaming up my wrists from áo’yīn’s ichor.

“It’s all right now.” His eyes narrow, taking in our surroundings before coming back to focus on me. He’s speaking to me in a low voice, as though I am a wild animal to be scared off at any moment. And I realize how tightly I am wound, how quickly my heart races. “It’s all right now, little scorpion.”

It’s that infernal nickname that brings me back.

I loose a breath and shift my crescent blade away from his throat. My hands are beginning to spasm with pain, the skin turning red. I know ichor is poisonous to mortals, and I’ve never been this careless as to get it on myself before—but I’ve also never fought off a legendary hellbeast.

The hilts of my crescent blades burn against my palms. I can’t help it; I let my blades drop.

“Let me see,” Yù’chén says, and after a pause, I hold out my hands.

Yù’chén lifts his gaze to mine. “Does it hurt?” he asks.

I look away. I don’t want to say yes. I don’t want to admit to weakness. And I don’t want him to see the tears welling in my eyes.

What happens next is something I would never have expected.

Slowly, Yù’chén lowers his mouth to my knuckles. I suppress a shiver at the warmth of his breath as he presses two fingers to my hand and writes out a talisman. He blows on it, golden life energy streaming like sunlight from his lips to my skin.

I can only stare at him as the pain dulls. I’m not used to kindness in this dying world, where I’ve been surviving on my own for so long. That must be why his gentle touch inspires another emotion in me, fluttering in my chest like a trapped butterfly. Something akin to the fear and the thrill of when one starts to fall.

“I saw you defeat áo’yīn,” he says quietly, moving to perform the talisman on my other hand. “What did you do to it?”

“I stabbed it.” Skies, my voice sounds so horribly thin. I suddenly feel exhausted, as if I could sink onto the silvergrass and sleep for days.

“You stabbed áo’yīn?” Yù’chén echoes. He straightens and his hands on mine tighten momentarily. “How?”

I have no idea how to describe to him the light, the glow, the rush of power I felt as I carved the blade up. Even if I could, I don’t know that I want to. So instead, I mimic angling my blade up and make a stabbing sound with my teeth.

Yù’chén chuckles, which sends a strange warmth shooting through my stomach. The healing talismans glow with his life energy across my knuckles, working on their own now, though he doesn’t let go of my hands. And I don’t pull them away. “Do you have any idea how lethal that beast was?”

I shake my head. “Do you?”

“I’ve studied all facets of practitioning extensively. áo’yīn is one of the ten most feared beasts from the demonic realm. And you just fought it…and lived.”

I don’t know what to make of everything that just happened, so I say nothing.

Yù’chén is watching me closely. His voice is different when he says, “You saved the yāo’jīng.”

I close my eyes. With the pain receding now, my exhaustion begins to kick in. The world sways slightly, and I fear I will pass out.

Hands at my elbows, warm and steady. When I open my eyes again, my red-cloaked ally fills my vision. “Why?” he asks.

I don’t understand why it matters to him. Most mortals view yāo’jīng with disgust. They are like us but not; they are unwanted by whichever other realm created them, and so we do not want them, either. They are not extraordinarily powerful, but they are different…and I think that terrifies us.

Yet, looking at the yāo’jīng’s face, at her utter terror and helplessness, I was reminded of Méi’zi. Of myself, on that sunny afternoon, kneeling on my kitchen floor and watching my father die.

“She was a life,” I find myself whispering. My thoughts tumble in the darkness of night; the combination of fatigue and fading adrenaline fogs my mind. “She, too, had a beating heart.”

I realize how much of a fool I sound. There is no place for sympathy at the Temple of Dawn—in this nightmare of a world we now live in. I could have been hurt, or worse, I could have died. Then how would Mā regain her soul? Who would take care of Méi’zi—kind, gentle Méi’zi, whose hands are soft from her silks and needles?

I am suddenly so angry with myself. In a moment’s sympathy, a moment’s weakness, I jeopardized my family’s lives.

Yù’chén is so close to me, I feel the heat radiating from his body. He is watching me with a look I cannot read, one that is different from the amusement with which he typically beholds the world. No—in this moment his gaze is intimate, searing, as though he sees right through the cracks in my armor.

His lips part, and his gaze trails down my body. Suddenly, I see what he sees: my skin through the wet silk, the way my dripping hair curls over my breasts, how my shift barely covers my thighs. I think of the words he spoke to me when we made our alliance: What can you offer me, little scorpion?

I’m shivering, my blades glimmering on the grass at my feet—out of reach. Bile rises in my throat. I have no disillusions that I will find a great, epic love like those the ancient poems sing of. But yielding my body to a stranger for survival is a line I have not crossed.

Yù’chén releases my elbows. Before I know what he’s doing, he bends and sweeps up my crescent blades from the ground. Carefully, he places Striker and Fleet back into my palms. Then there is a swirl of red, a flutter of cloth, and his cloak settles over my shoulders, draping me in warmth, his warmth. His fingers barely scrape my collarbone as he fastens the knot. Gently, so gently, he smooths out the wrinkles in the fabric and tucks the collar under my chin.

The gesture reminds me so much of the way my mother used to dress me when I was a child.

I have not been touched like this in over nine years.

I look into Yù’chén’s eyes. He holds my gaze. Slowly, he pushes a lock of wet hair out of my face, his fingers grazing my cheek.

I know fear well: living as the prey in a world dominated by my hunters has taught me the feeling. Your pulse races, your breathing turns shallow, and there is a tightness in your chest and a dizziness in your head. But I have learned to live with it. I have sharpened it into a weapon, let it make me steadier, faster, crueler.

Now I feel all those sensations. My heart tumbling. My breaths quickening. My head spinning. As though I stand at the edge of a cliff, and with one wrong step, I will fall.

Only this is different, somehow.

Yù’chén breaks the moment first. He takes a light step back, dragging his hand through his hair. “We’re nearing the edge of the forest. If the accounts are correct, we will arrive at Heavens’ Gates before nightfall tomorrow.”

I am glad we are talking again, of concrete plans, of actions. He’s right: the Heavens’ Gates mountain range is the seam between the mortal and immortal realms. If we reach it, we will have survived the Way of Ghosts…and arrived at the border of the Kingdom of Sky.

“We’ll take it at a run,” Yù’chén continues. His face is tipped eastward, his brows furrowed as he considers this plan. His hair is wind-whipped and wild, but it suits him. He pauses to look at me.

“I’ll be fine,” I say shortly.

“I know,” he says. His lips curve in a smirk, but I do not find it insulting. “I would not question the Slayer of áo’yīn.”

No, I find that I like it.

“Back to camp,” Yù’chén says, gesturing in its direction with his head. “Though I did nothing as impressive as killing a mythological monster, I did shoot a pheasant for dinner. This way.”

I realize I am smiling. Quickly, I turn and retrieve my dress and remaining blades from where I left them by the river, then hurry to catch up with him. “Your cloak,” I call. “You can have it back.”

He is in a tight shift and pants, all black, fitted to his sculpted muscles. He throws me a glance over his shoulder and says drolly, “I’d rather you return it to me when you are decent.”

My face heats. I can’t think of a clever response to that.

“You needn’t show your stingers at all times, little scorpion,” he continues. “Learn to rely on other people. It can be nice.”

I watch his retreating back blend into the darkness of the trees.