This time, something hit the floor with athud.
Another soldier yelled and charged, a blur of silver betweenthe cracks in the floorboard. Music thrummed. Red splattered against the lines of the floorboards like music notes.
Lan was frozen in time, her reality fractured between what she could and couldn’t see. Her mother, sitting there, playing the lute. And blood, crimson as cinnabar, splashing like notes of a red, red song on the wall.
Then a shadow fell. The tides of the battle shifted.
Lan had felt it in a force that rippled through the soldiers. They parted like the waves of the ocean. A man walked through, and she immediately knew that this one was different. His eyes were a winter’s blue, his skin the noncolor of ice. He carried no weapons, but when he lifted his hand, there was the glint of silver across his wrists.
“Give it to me.”
She hadn’t understood his words, then—only the sounds falling from his mouth, echoing perfect and pristine in her memory throughout the long nights in the coming cycles. She’d held on to them until she’d understood the Elantian language enough to decipher the last words her mother’s killer had said.
Mama’s words, though, Lan had known with a sense of dread.“Never.”
Lan would never forget the smile frozen on the Elantian soldier’s face as he brought his fingers together.
Click.
The strings of her mother’s woodlute snapped. It was the sound of a bone breaking.
Click.
Just like that, her mother reeled back. When Lan blinked, the man’s hands were red. Clutched between his fingers, like some nightmarish prized gem, was a still-beating heart.
Cycles later, she’d regret that blink. In the space of one flutter of her eyelids, the Elantian man had done the impossible. Perhaps if she hadn’t blinked, her mother would still be alive.A magician,Lan thought numbly.A magician who has brought winter with him.
Her mother crashed onto the floor right above her. Lan tasted her blood on her lips. Warm, copper-scented, and so undeniably human. The heroes in her stories had never bled.
She opened her mouth to scream, but her mother made a sudden motion—a gesture with one of her hands—and suddenly Lan had found her throat clamped shut, the cry buried in her chest. Her mother’s eyes, wide and gaping, moved to meet hers.
Whether it was magic or simply the strength of a woman with unfinished will, her mother had taken a long, long time to die that day. By the time Lan had crawled out of the vent, the Winter Magician and the soldiers were gone, leaving only a trail of screams and scarlet in their wake. There, lingering in the air had been the unmistakable scent of burnt metal.
There was a growing, thrumming pressure in her forehead, as though something inside were trapped, waiting to be let out. Tears tracing the curve of her cheeks, Lan crawled across the wooden floor to where her mother lay dying. She took Lan’s hands between her shaking fingers, holding on to her entire world with the last of her strength.
At that moment, her mother had turned to her, eyes brighter than all the silver stars in the night. Eyes that had beenglowing.
And then she’d pressed a finger to the inside of Lan’s left wrist, and Lan’s world had exploded in a blinding burn of white light.
—
Slowly the light receded. The world filtered back again, the lacquered panels of the Teahouse, the scarlet loveseat, the faint thrum of noise from outside the windows. The dullache pounding through her head, the buzz of something in her ears and the taste of bile and something like metal on her tongue.
There, sprawled on the clean sandalwood floor between her and the loveseat, was the corpse of General Donnaron J. Tarley.
Kind lies can kill kingdoms.
—General Yeshin Noro Surgen of the Jorshen Steel clan,Classic of War
A scream was working its way from her chest to her throat, she was sure, but Lan only stared at the body. Watching itas though it would move again if she looked at it hard enough.
Just as her mother might not have died had she not blinked.
But as the dull pounding of her heart echoed in her ears and a sharp bout of laughter from Madam Meng rose between the floorboards, the reality of her situation filtered back. She looked at the corpse then, trulylooked,taking in the unnatural bend of its neck, eyes still open and mouth still curved in that grin. There was only the slightest hint of surprise, a shadow if she tilted her head and observed. But to a bystander it might have seemed that he had simply fallen to his death—an unlucky accident, perhaps, resulting from a frivolous bedmate.
Don’t be stupid.An Elantian Angel found dead in the company of a Hin had only one possible outcome. Would it be the gallows for her? A public execution? Or a painful, torturous death at the hands of one of the magicians?
The torrent of morbid thoughts was interrupted as footsteps sounded down the hall, soft as wind creaking against the old walls of the Teahouse.
