“Sonam?” calls a gruff voice.
Shakily, I look up, confused to find my father looking down at me, a notch between his brows. He’s still dressed in his flowing golden robes. My elder brothers are also here, staring at me with matching confusion. The palace shamans stand just to my right, bowls of ritualistic burnings still in hand from when we banishedYue to Hell. It’s as though we never left the mortal realm in the first place.
“How—how long were we gone?” I rasp. My throat is shredded. I’ve screamed myself raw.
It’s the king who speaks. “But a blink of an eye. One moment you were falling, and the next, you reappeared here.”
My heart rails against my rib cage. Overwhelmed. Disoriented. What were we running from, again? What urgent news sits so heavily on my tongue? My thoughts are scrambled, nearly impossible to decipher.
“Demons,” I mutter. And then, in a breathless whisper,“Yue.”
“What’s he blathering about?” one of my brothers, Zhong, says, raising an eyebrow from above his large silk fan.
I struggle to my feet, desperate to have my father hear me. “You must prepare your soldiers. There’s an army of demons coming from Hell. They’ll eat everyone in their path if we don’t stop them here and now.”
“He’s lost his mind,” one of the palace advisors scoffs loudly.
“You dare make demands of His Majesty?” snaps Han, my second-eldest brother. With Jun gone, he’s the one who now holds the title of Crown Prince, destined for the throne.
“Listen to me!” I hiss. “I was down there. I saw them with my very eyes. They’re coming in the thousands. Sooah and Wen know it to be true!”
They both nod furiously, just as eager as I to get the message across.
What starts as unnerved chuckling in the courtyard erupts into incredulous laughter.
“He’s gone completely mad!”
“Has Hell scrambled your brains, little brother?”
“An army of demons? Do you intend to return to the Jade Palace as court jester?”
“There isn’t any time for this!” I shout. “Yue won’t be able to hold them off for much longer.”
“Yue?” my father says. “Who is this Yue you keep speaking of?”
I can’t breathe. Every time I try to inhale, the air is so cold it slices its way through my lungs. “The nine-tailed fox,” I wheeze. “She’s the one who—”
Who sacrificed herself for us.
For me.
This is as cruel as it is unfair. They’re not only laughing at my efforts, but Yue’s, as well. If it weren’t for her, we might never have made it out of Hell. They don’t understand that she’s the only one who’s given humanity a fighting chance—a chance I won’t allow them to squander.
“We need archers at every post,” I say. “And we must evacuate the city. The demons will wear masks to appear human. If they manage to escape into the population, it will be impossible to tell friend from foe.”
“Someone call the palace doctor,” my brother Sìzi chides with a grating over-importance. “Thecaptainneeds his head checked.”
My frustration gets the better of me. I charge at him, punching my brother with such force that I feel the pain lance through my knuckles and up my arm. It feels good to finally shut him up. If I can force him and all the rest into silence, perhaps then they will finally take heed.
But then guards surround us, dragging me off my sniveling brother. He spits out a few of his teeth, the gaping holes in his grimace bringing me only a sliver of satisfaction.
“Throw them in the dungeons,” the king commands. “Their time in Hell has clearly driven them mad.”
“You have to listen to me!” I scream at the top of my lungs. “They’re coming!They’re coming!”
If they expected this jailing to go smoothly, they should have done the smart thing and knocked me out beforehand.
It takes five of them to hold me down, face pressed against the damp floor of the palace dungeons, as one of them hastily pries my weapons off my person. They even take my hunting log and my paintbrush, removing any possibility of me having an object to beat them senseless with.
