The girl was scrambling to rise again, but the man towered over her, as giant as Pangu from the early myths, his shadow spreading beneath the sun. He closed in, one boot stamping down hard on the corner of her threadbare tunic. She was pinned to the ground, a bird with an arrow pierced through its wing.
“Little thief,” he spat, the Wu accent obvious in his words, in the way he crushed the syllables between his teeth. “Did you really think you could take the pear from right under my nose and get away with it?”
The girl’s face was white and stark as bone, but her eyes, when she turned them to her attacker, seemed to burn from within. “It was justonepear.”
“It’s mine. Everything here,” the man said, gesturing to our village and beyond, to the sloping blue mountains, the capital city, all of the Yue Kingdom, “belongs to us now. Don’t forget.”
The girl responded with a series of expletives so foul I could only wonder where she had learned them from—
“Enough,” the man barked, and drew his sword.
The sharp, metallic hiss cut through all noise. I had heard the Wu were masters of metallurgy, just like we were; that their swords were so fine they could slice into rock and would remain sharp even after centuries. With great despair, I saw firsthand that it was true. The blade glinted in midair, the sun split open on its lethal tip. One swift strike, and it would sever bone.
I jerked free from my horrified daze. There came the thought again, louder:Do something. Save her.
Don’t fail again.
My fingers groped the ground wildly and closed around a loose stone. No bigger than an egg, but solid in its weight, with a jagged edge. The man wasn’t watching me; his gaze was only on the cowering girl. In the split second before the sword swung down, I threw the stone at him. What I hoped to achieve then, I do not know. I like to think that murder was not at the forefront of my mind, that I only wished to distract, rather than to hurt. But when the stone struck the man’s nose with a loudcrunch, and he staggered backward, yelling, hands flying to his face—
I will admit to feeling a small, sharp curl of satisfaction.
Yet fear rapidly surged up to take its place. The man had turned his full attention to me, and even if murder had not beenmyintention, I could tell it was his. His chin was smeared with thick blood, and as he stepped toward me, more blood trickled from his nose into his mouth. He turned and spat. Wiped at his face with his left sleeve. In his right hand, his sword gleamed, pointed directly at me.
“In the Wu Kingdom,” he said, “we have a saying about people who can’t mind their own business: They often die unpleasant deaths.”
My throat tightened.
I knew then, with a certainty that sang through my very bones, that I was going to die right there on the riverbank, where the water met the sky, and where my mother waited less than a mile away for me to come home. The man’s footsteps crunched over the pebbles, closer. In my panic, my mind skipped to absurd places, pulled up flimsy, half-formed protests. That I was too young, that surely I had done nothing so bad as to deserve this, even if I did not always finish my rice or fold my sheets; that I had yet to fall in love, to see the sea, to set foot on land beyond my village.
Yet all my protests went unheard by the vast universe. I flung another stone at the man, desperate, but he was prepared now. He dodged it easily, and the next one, his lips pulling back to reveal blackened teeth. Again, he raised his sword. I felt the coolness of the metal as if it had already collected my soul, kissed my flesh.
No, I thought nonsensically.Not yet, not yet, not yet—
A bright flash across my vision.
The clang of metal against metal. I blinked. An unnatural wind fanned my veil, and it took me a moment to understand what had happened. Another sword had shot out and knocked the man’s weapon off its trajectory before it could reach me. But where had the other sword come from?
I twisted around, searching, and the answer soon revealed itself to me. A tall, lean figure strode forward across the banks with all the eerie grace of a lynx, the sun blazing behind him, his features blurred by light. I wondered faintly if this was someone sent by the heavens, a warrior from the legends—or if perhaps I were already dead, and had dreamed the scene up.
But no, this was real. Nothing had felt more real in my life. Icould taste the rich salt of the river, mingling with the blood from where I’d bitten down too hard on my own tongue. Then the figure turned a few degrees, and the light changed, illuminating the planes of his face. I was surprised to find that it was the face of a young man, and a beautifully refined one at that. All the angles were clean, sharp, harmonious, the natural curve of his lips almost arrogant; together, they were too intimidating to study for long.
“Who areyou?” the Wu man cried, though his question came out a rough gurgle, thickened with blood. “Where do you people keep coming from?”
“You have no right to speak to me,” the stranger replied calmly. His voice was like his appearance: cold and quiet, but only in the way a blunt sheath conceals a deadly blade.
The Wu man’s face twisted. He lunged for his sword where it had been knocked astray into the grass, then made a violent stabbing motion at the stranger.
“Look out!” I cried.
I need not have spoken. The stranger crossed his hands behind his back and swerved easily out of the sword’s path. His expression didn’t even change. He wore that same cold look, his eyes dark and intelligent, the corner of his mouth lifted contemptuously, as if this were all an annoying inconvenience.
The quick movement threw his attacker off-balance. The man’s arms flailed wildly as his body weight teetered, following his empty swing. Panting, he steadied himself and tried again, this time aiming straight for the stranger’s exposed neck. But no sooner than he’d shifted position, the stranger did too; a most subtle change, one you might miss if you blinked. And so it continued, back and forth. The Wu man striking, pouncing, charging like an enraged bull until he was bright red in the face, and the stranger gracefully sidestepping, dodging, ducking without so much as lifting a hand.
“Who are you?” the Wu man repeated, but there was a note of real fear in his tone.
The stranger did not reply. Instead, he lifted his leg a fraction just as the Wu man came charging once more. With a noisy crash, he went sprawling on all fours, his sword flying free from his grip. Before he could try to retrieve it, the stranger paced over, picked up the sword between two slender fingers, and tossed it ever so casually into the river’s depths. The water rippled outward.
In the silence, only the defeated man’s harsh, frustrated grunts could be heard.
