“It’s time to find another way to live,” she said to me. “One that does not draw strength from the weakness of others.”
I gazed at the spindly trees clinging to the mountain peaks, their branches buffeted by the wind. “There is no other way to live,” I protested. “That’s just the way the world works.”
Her fierce eyes caught mine. “Then imagine a new world.”
Epilogue
Dear brother, you wrote to me about the woman warrior as the woman you loved, and so I have thought of her in this way alone. But lately I have begun to hear stories apart from you, stories of her adventure and courage and cunning. It has made me wonder…why don’t I too learn to fight?
—Cao Rea, in a private missive to Cao Lei, 924
I surfaced from the spring witha ragged gasp, my body thrumming with adrenaline. In the distance the sun was setting behind the Red Mountains, casting a soft, plum-colored haze across the sky. The world was somehow both more and less lovely without the shadow of the spirit realm behind it. For without spirit power, I knew this life was fleeting. I was born and I would one day die, but that only made today more precious in its transience. My time here was short. But it was enough.
I wished to share these thoughts with another. And that made me realize he was not here.
“Lei?” I called, pushing myself out of the water. “Ming Lei?”
I scrambled upright, finding his discarded knife on the sandy bank, which was still tainted with his red, uncorrupted blood. “Lei?” I cried out, trying to keep the panic from rising in my voice.
“Took you long enough.”
I whirled around to find him striding down the hill, carrying our supplies and drying his wet hair with a spare tunic. My eyesskipped down to his bare chest, which was unmarked, as if we’d never fought at all.
“Zhuque was always my favorite,” he remarked, and I laughed, running toward him, feeling alive in a way I hadn’t for a very, very long time. That was the danger with addiction, wasn’t it? It crept up on you, slowly, until you began to forget what life before was like. But this was how it felt—to breathe freely, to laugh with abandon, to hold someone in your arms and tell him you loved him, without restraint.
Lei dropped our supplies and swung me in the air, ignoring my protests as my braids came loose and my hair spilled out of its ties. Setting me down on the grass, he ran his fingers through my wet hair.
“What’s my name?” he asked suddenly.
I rolled my eyes. “As if I didn’t just call it for the whole mountain to hear, Cao Ming Lei.”
He sighed with relief, crushing me to him. “You still have your memories,” he said. “What did the spring take from you?” he asked, as I’d told him the Ruan seer’s prophecy.
“My name,” I answered, with only a touch of sadness. I tried to shrug. “I guess history will forget me.”
Lei said nothing, a tendon in his neck rising as he swallowed. “I’ll remember,” he said at last, his voice low yet thrumming with power. “For as long as I live.”
I met his gaze, and it threatened to consume me whole. Whether the world remembered me or not, this was the legacy I’d leave behind: one of strength and weakness, vengeance and forgiveness. A girl who’d strived with all her might to obtain immense power, and then, rather than live and die by it, decided to give it all up.
I would have to find a new way to live now.
I touched his bare chest, perfect and unblemished. “I thoughtI’d lost you,” I told him, tears pricking the backs of my eyes. “I thought you were gone, and I’d never told you—I love you.”
His hands cradled my face, his thumbs caressing the arches of my cheekbones.
“My love,” he whispered. And then I kissed him.
I kissed him like I never had before—with nothing held back. With the certainty that my love was no longer a curse, that it would not poison him. That beyond ruin, there was hope. Beyond redemption, there was forgiveness.
As the sun dipped below the horizon, reluctantly, I pulled away.
“Will you come with me?” Lei asked, his finger idly tracing the shell of my ear. This close to him, I could track the rise and fall of his throat—his only tell. “To Tzu Wan?”
My smile slipped. I took his hands in mine, and at my expression, his own shuttered. No matter how guarded I was, he always could read me like an open book. “In the last moments before our connection was severed,” I told him, “I think the dragon was trying to tell me something.”
Through our connection, I’d felt a pang of unequivocal regret. I could not tell if the regret was directed at me, or at him, or at how things had ended between us. Yet with it, he’d sent me a final vision. A little girl, living in the wastelands of the Runong Desert. At her feet in the sand glowed the final cardinal seal, the Onyx Tortoise, the North Wind. I watched as she admired the flickering jade, tilting the stone to let it catch the light. “I’m going to keep you safe,” she told it, and the once-buried jade hummed happily in answer, lost no more.
“You promised me you would come with me to the eternal spring, and you did,” I told Lei. “I’m promising you now—I’ll come find you one day, wherever you are. This isn’t goodbye.”
