Autumn shook her head. “I don’t—” Her words were lost in the quake. She screamed as the ground slid out from beneath her, and the room split in two. The Tzu Wan palace, built on the cliffside, began to surrender to gravity.
“Take my hand!” he shouted, reaching for Autumn. But she was already slipping off the edge, the sea roaring hungrily beneath her.
“Meilin.”
That voice. It was one I never thought I’d hear again.
“Meilin. Tell me where you are.”
His command burned me to my core, waking me from a long winter of hibernation. I felt the ice around me thaw, the chains I’d perceived as immovable dissolving into dust. My will was my own.
You have so much to live for.
With every ounce of willpower I possessed, I tried to answer. My mind, sluggish and cold, struggled beneath the dragon’s claws. But I thought of my mother, seeking the eternal spring. It had been too late for her.
Let it not be too late for me.
“The Dian River,” I gasped. “I’m at the Dian River.”
The dragon reached for Lei but found he could not touch him. With a snarl of frustration, he satisfied himself with my anguish instead. Relentlessly, he hurled loss after loss, death after death. Every sorrow, every despair, every torment—it was all my fault. There could be no redemption for someone like me.
And yet Lei’s voice had broken Qinglong’s grip on my mind. Itwas not reality he was showing me, I realized, merely a distorted reflection of one. Just as I had compelled so many others, so too had he compelled me.
Ours was a two-way street, and what he did to me, I could do to him. I began channeling his core elements—matching his water and metal—in order to penetrate the crevices of his mind.
Qinglong’s mind was like no human’s. He was at once everywhere and nowhere. His memories were multitudinous yet shallow, without human emotion and depth.
I saw Diaochan’s sisters searching for her, interrogating soldiers, putting up posters, sending out letters. I saw them praying every night at her shrine.
I saw Xiuying backed against the wall of our sitting room, surrendering to the spirit’s demands. “I’ll accept it,” she was saying. “Don’t take him. I’ll accept your bargain.”
But behind Plum, a tall figure burst into the sitting room. Xiuying gasped—looking up at her childhood friend from Huang Ju.
“Yu Xiuying!” Sparrow shouted, using her maiden name. His first love, he’d once told me. I had forgotten—forgotten that he had lived a life before, one beyond the bitter final acts that had shaped my hatred for him.
He grabbed the possessed man by the shoulder. “Take me,” he said. “Take me instead.”
“Sparrow—” Xiuying began, but Sparrow did not heed her. He seized the glowing jade, and the spirit subsumed him.
I did not know if he lived or died.
I followed the trail of blood to the outskirts of First Crossing, where Lei battled men and spirits alike. Amid the bloodshed and violence, he was backed into a corner, alone, kneeling without sword or spirit power to call upon.
“Kowtow,” Zihuan was saying.
Lei obeyed.
Zihuan signaled to his guard, who came forward with an executioner’s blade, long and slender. Rea thrashed wildly, sobbing, her movements berserk as she fought against Zihuan. With helpless rage she flung her head back and screamed, and perhaps it was this sound that called her dogs to her. They came. Tearing through the streets, all two dozen of them, fur soiled and matted, paws raw and bloodied. Zihuan eyed the approaching horde with contempt, until one—the smallest of them—bit him in the leg.
Zihuan howled with pain as Rea wrenched free from his grasp. One dog gnawed through the ropes binding her, while the others attacked at her command. And then she was free, and sprinting toward Lei, and he was on his feet, fighting, mowing through Zihuan’s guards in an effort to reach him.
He wanted to deliver the killing blow, but Rea’s dogs got there first. Zihuan tried to call upon his spirit power, but the dogs were myriad, and they were hungry for blood. Just as Lei’s mother had once been dragged by dogs, so too was Zihuan’s corpse.
I left First Crossing, searching for Autumn, for the memory at the Tzu Wan palace, but Qinglong ripped his consciousness from my grasp. I surfaced at the Dian River as Qinglong breathed a dense fog over me. In the mist, I went still, listening for him.
There.I whirled around, only for him to catch me first. I tried to strike him, but he ripped my sword from my hands and pinned me to the rock, trapping my neck between razor-sharp claws.
“There is always a cost to power,” he hissed. “This is yours.”
