“Shi’zu, do not close your eyes,” she heard Shàn’jun say, but she was still leaning over the grandmaster, searching for the truth in his face. For who he was, and how he fit into her story.
“Zen,” the grandmaster panted. Sweat beaded his temples; his face was white as bone. “…something you must…know about him. His truename…is…Xan Temurezen…”
Xan Temurezen.The name struck like lightning. Crackled through her veins. Roared in her ears.Xan.
Zen’s words rang in her head.I remember the day the Hin emperor came for my clan,he’d told her one night back at theVillage of Bright Moon Pond.I was out herding the sheep when I heard the screams.
Dé’zinodded at her expression. “Last of the Mansorian clan…great-grandson and heir to Xan Tolürigin…the Nightslayer. Binder of the Black Tortoise.”
Lan felt as though she were listening to an ancient tale spun by the poets and bards, of kingdoms and bloodlines and Demon Gods. Yet as she collected pieces of her memory, they fit between the lines, weaving together into a story that she had failed to see all along. Zen’s face, drawing tight at the mention of the Nightslayer. The conflict in his eyes when sheneedled him about demonic practitioning; his resolution to use the Demon Gods to fight the Elantians.
His binding to the Black Tortoise, of all Demon Gods.
It all came together perfectly.
“Shi’zu!” Shàn’jun said suddenly, dropping the needle and thread he had been using for sutures. “Shi’zu, stay with us—”
Lan looked at the dying man before her and realized that everything had come too little, too late. She had ten thousand questions left to ask him, and only seconds left.
She seized the only one that didn’t matter—yet that held her entire world. “How did you know my mother?”
The pain left Dé’zi’s face. He smiled, looking suddenly like a young man again. “I loved her,” he sighed, and his gaze lingered on Lan’s face. “And I will go into my next life…grateful…that I spent my last moments with you…my child, Lián’ér.”
He spoke her name on an exhale, and his eyes shut as his lips stilled.
A great breeze swept the forest, drawing clouds over the moon and rattling the pines and ginkgos all around. The earth trembled, and then a flash of light cleaved the worldinto monochrome. Time seemed to stop, the clouds stifling the sky, the leaves frozen in a flurried dance, the first droplets of rain suspended in the air, shimmering like tiny, tinted glass jewels.
And then they fell.
—
By her side, Shàn’jun, whose hands had not stopped moving since he’d knelt by the grandmaster, had gone utterly still. His fingers were red with blood, running in rivulets around them with the downpour and staining his practitioner’s robes.
Lan felt very far away, as though she were still snared by the grandmaster’s last words, trapped in those moments of truth.
My child, Lián’ér.
She had wondered, as a child, who her father might be. That curiosity had been abruptly ended with the Conquest. She’d needed to survive and to decipher what her mother had burned into the scar on her wrist. Yet now, realizing that thepossibility of a father had been right in front of her for the past moon, she had the sudden urge to scream.
She looked to Dé’zi’s face, serene even in death. To the blood that wept into the soil and drenched her páo. Since when had he known? She searched through her memories. It had to have been after she’d used her song to knock out Dilaya and rescue Zen; he’d found out from Tai, of all people.
She hadn’t known him well enough to feel anything other than numb shock in this moment. That, and the possibilities of the paths that had ended with Dé’zi’s life.
The chance to defend Skies’ End.
The chance to defeat the Elantians.
The chance for her to have a father.
In the distance, there came the tremor of qì through the air: a dark, corroded energy filled with yin and the wrath and fury of a demon.
Of aDemon God.
“He’s let it loose,” Shàn’jun said suddenly. “I was there eleven cycles ago, when the grandmaster brought him to my master for help. He was more demon than child. Whatever was inside him had nearly taken full control of his mind.” In the falling rain, Shàn’jun’s face was pale. “We must…we must stop him. We cannot let him lose control again.”
Lan thought of Dilaya’s empty sleeve, the patch over her eye. The hundreds of lives—both Elantian and Hin—back at the outpost. Those incidents had occurred with the power of a regular demon. Lan did not wish to imagine the consequences of Zen unleashing the full power of his Demon God here, so close to Skies’ End. A god with no care as to who lived or who died.
The yin around them crescendoed. The rain fell relentlessly; the wind around them shrieked.
