She sank to her knees with a well-timed gasp.
The Hin courtdog moved as though to help her. He crossed the room remarkably quickly, a shadow outlined against the red lantern. “Are you—”
He never finished his sentence. Lan gripped the handle of the teapot and, with all her strength, swung it into his face.
In the split second before contact, she felt something in the air shift.
The teapot shattered in an explosion of noise, porcelain, and cold tea. Instantly there came the pressure of warm fingers, tight across her wrist. Looking down, she saw shards of the teapot strewn everywhere, liquid dripping across Madam Meng’s beautiful rosewood floors.
Lan looked back up. The boy’s face was utterly unmarred, not even a splash of tea on those smooth cheekbones.
Impossible,she thought, taking in the wreckage all around their feet. She hadn’t even seen him move.
The courtdog’s expression was not amused. His mouth was pressed into a thin line as he held her arm. “You’ll have to try a lot harder than that if you want to run.”
“Got it,” Lan said, and with her other hand, smashed her teacup into his face.
She didn’t wait to see what happened; the pressure on herwrist loosened, and by the time she registered the sharp pain that seared across her palm, she was already at the sliding wooden doors, ripping them open. The hallway was empty;she careened past gauze screens and lacquerwood doors. Any second now and the courtdog might come after her—she needed to get as far away from this Teahouse as possible—
Blood splashed onto the floor, dotting the white canvas of her dress like red blossoms in the snow. A steady trickle was winding its way down her arm. Lan tucked her injured hand into her sleeve as she swerved onto the staircase. The Teahouse unfolded beneath her, a blend of Elantian blue-and-silver, ebony-colored tables, and fluttering songgirls. She was three steps down the stairs when movement at the doors caught her attention.
There, through the filigreed screens erected between the entrance and the main dining room, an Elantian man stepped in—and all of Lan’s blood rushed from her head. He was dressed in pale armor from head to toe; the only spots of color on him were the blue of his cloak as it caught an evening breeze and the winter’s-ice color of his eyes.
No. No, this couldn’t be. She was dreaming—shehadto be.
Then the man shifted and she caught the glint of something on his wrists. As his cloak slid back, Lan saw a series of metal cuffs lining his forearms in different shades of gray, gold, and rust-red. Different types ofmetal.
Everything inside her froze. A single word snaked into her mind, the cut of silver across a snow-tinted landscape.
Magician.
Madam Meng was making her way to him, lips already peeled back in a dazzling smile, eyes bright with the promise of gold from the pockets of an Elantian Royal Magician.
That was before the magician twisted his fingers and split her torso right down the middle.
Time seemed to slow in that moment, and Lan felt as though she were trapped in a memory of twelve cycles past, watching blood spill down her mother’s robes, trying toreconcile the image of the magician holding a live, beating heart with the hole in her mother’s chest.
It was him.
It was the monster of her nightmares.
The Winter Magician, who had slaughtered her mother twelve cycles ago, was standing right here, in her Teahouse. His eyes, with the accuracy of an arrow sailing across a battlefield, fixed on her, and reality snapped back in a rush.
Madam Meng fell.
Someone screamed.
And pandemonium erupted.
Lan clung to the balustrade. Her brain screamed at her to do one thing but her heart another. The magician was cutting a warpath straight for the stairs, straight forher,and yet she trailed her gaze across the dining room floor, searching for a girl in a blush-pink páo.
Ying…Ying, where are you?
She spotted her best friend crouched by a screen, a shattered tray by her side. Ying’s gaze followed the magician, sweeping along his route until she found Lan.
Their gazes met. It took Ying a moment to connect the dots.
Then she sprang up and ran for the magician.
