Lan ducked; she’d been waiting for this. She spun, stumbling across the floor; whirled back, whipped her arm out, the knife gleaming—
One of the soldier’s meaty hands came up and wrapped around her wrist, then twisted. A flash of blinding pain streaked across her forearm; her fingers spasmed, and the knife fell, slowly, steadily, tumbling through the air.
It clattered at her feet.
Donnaron’s hands clasped over her throat; he lifted her bodily so that her toes scraped the floor. A strand of his wheat-gold hair had fallen into his eyes.
She couldn’t breathe.
He was laughing. “I can’t wait to tell this to the lads. Abutterknife! I’ve half a mind to keep you after all, with the spirit you’ve got.”
He slammed her into the wall, and Lan saw stars. Dimly, she felt the press of his hips against hers, his hands roaming from her neck to her collarbone and continuing to trace lower. There was an ache building in the space between her forehead and her teeth, a strange kind of energy that felt different from any other headache she’d ever had. A hum in the air…that she’d felt only once before.
Then Donnaron’s right hand crushed her left forearm, and the pain exploded.
It was excruciating: a searing white burn that encompassed her entire world, expanding like the light of stars, a pale-jade moon. Out of that whiteness rose a great shadow, serpentine in the ways it twisted and coiled. Something rushed out from her and filled her at the same time, and Lan’s consciousness drifted.
She’d known this kind of pain only once in her life.
It was the day her mother had died.
The day her world had ended.
—
It was the winter solstice of the thirty-second cycle of the Qing Dynasty—the Age of Purity, it was called, before it all came crashing down. The Luminous Dragon Emperor, Shuò’lóng, sat on the throne eighty cycles after the Clan Rebellion, when his ancestor Emperor Yán’lóng defeated the dissenting clans and established peace upon the land, transitioning the Middle Kingdom to the Last Kingdom. The Hin had lived in a period of luxury with the success of the Jade Trail, and their fattening bellies had distracted them from the changes their new emperor made to their history. A history that many would begin to forget as time wore on.
Lan was six cycles old, bright-eyed and with her entire future ahead of her. Her mother had been away for the past two moons on a trip north, to the Heavenly Capital of Tian’jing—some squabble with foreign traders over ships and territory, apparently. The Last Kingdom sat comfortably among its neighbors, the linchpin to the foreign powers along the Jade Trail: the Kingdom of Masyria, which traded in glass; the great Achaemman Empire, across a sprawling stretch of desert; and so on. But contact with a nation across the Sea of Heavenly Radiance, once believed to lead to the edge of the world, was new. Mama had come back with stories of people with faces the color of snow and hair that looked to be spun of gold and copper. They had appeared over the skyline, ships of gleaming metal borne impossibly by ocean waves.Yi’lán’sharén,Mama had called them. Elantian people. They had been interested in all the natural resources the great sprawl of the Last Kingdomhad to offer, in the Hin civilization that had spanned thousands of cycles. They asked to establish trade relations with the Last Kingdom and learn from Hin culture at the Imperial Court in exchange for their strange metal inventions. And the Luminous Emperor, so confident in the greatness of his kingdom, had entertained them.
Lan remembered the exact moment she’d looked up from her sonnets, remembered the way the window of her study had framed a perfect portrait of her courtyard house: the larches and willows frozen in sheaths of white snow, the lakes still beneath a surface of ice so blue it reflected the sky, the gray-tiled roofs of her home jutting out and curving to the Heavens. A figure on horseback cut through the plumes of snow that fell like goose feathers, páo flashing in alternating black and red as she rode hard and fast. Lan thought of the heroes in her storybooks: the immortals and practitioners who crossed the lakes and rivers of the Last Kingdom and communed with thegods of old.
Yet today, the prophecy would not be a good one.
Her mother had ridden back on the tides of the end of their world as they knew it.
Later, Lan had hidden in the hot water vents beneath her study floor, trembling with fear. The snow outside had bloomed red, bodies of the household staff strewn like poppies in a field. Foreign soldiers in ice-blue armor pressed against the gates, spilling into the courtyard, thick leather boots trampling the snow, breastplates glinting with wings of white gold that encircled a crown. She heard them shout in a foreign language. Heard the sounds of swords slicing from scabbards.
She hadn’t known it at the time, but this had been the beginning of the Elantian Conquest.
Bile had coated her throat; fear pressed against her chest. She looked through the cracks in the floorboards and tookin her mother’s stance—as straight-backed and proud as that of any man serving in the Imperial Palace. In that moment, she expected her mother to do the impossible, the astonishing, like whip out a sword and slay these strange men who’d barged into their home.
What Landidn’texpect her mother to do was calmly pick up her woodlute and begin playing.
The first thrum of strings quavered through the air, and time seemed to freeze. The notes were an overture, lingering like a promise: this was only the beginning of the song.
A chill settled all around.
Three more notes.Do-do-sol.The last twisted artfully a half-note up, a tick of tension. For all the years that her mother had sat by her bedside and played her to sleep, Lan had never heard this melody before. The notes were staccato, wavering in the air with a twang that faded like the edge of a blade. There was something different to this song; it rippled through the air like an invisible wave, stirring something inside Lan that had lain dormant until now.
The foreign soldiers growled something. There was the silver arc of a sword.
Her mother’s song picked up in a sudden strum. The air broke like waters over a cliff, waves cutting and dancing in a frenzy beneath a storm-tossed sky. Lan couldseethe notes, knife-sharp and curved like scythes, slicing through the air.
And the most peculiar thing happened.
A soldier’s metal breastplate split. Blood spurted from the center of the crown insignia, the wings curling red.
The soldier stumbled back, and the floorboards obscured Lan’s vision so that all she could see was her mother as she riffed another chord.
