Lan’s mother had once told her that she was destined for greatness; that the kingdom would be her duty, and that she would protect her people.
Lan threw up her hands and shouted, “No! Ying, stay back!”
It was the moment that cost her.
The Royal Magician raised his arms, those metal cuffs gleaming, and Lan screamed. She had the sensation that something had speared through her veins and frozen her from the inside out. The feeling was so foreign, so agonizingly violating. She was burning. She was freezing. She was cracking like aporcelain vase, and there was a searing white light emanating from the fissures between all the shattered pieces ofher.
Then, with painful abruptness, it stopped.
Breath in, breath out. Ribs grinding, lungs swelling, rosewood beneath her bloodied fingers. The unbearable heat of a fire flickering out, leaving her insides raw and red.
A voice rang out, clear as a spring, cutting through the mist of her pain.
“Stop!”
Later Lan would recall lying on the floor, blood filling her mouth, the world flipped upside down so that the alchemical lights and lanterns hanging from the ceiling looked as though they would fall onto the familiar face that appeared over the threshold of the stairs. A face gentle in its beauty and fierce in its love, blazing from round black eyes.
Lan had felt fear like this only once before in her life.
Ying stepped forward. She had nothing; she shivered in her scanty performance outfit of silks and gauze, hair unbound like skeins of black silk. She spoke in a trembling voice, the Elantian language clumsy on her tongue. “Please, my lord…please leave her alone!”
The Winter Magician’s gaze was flat as he beheld the girl. He lifted his hand. The next sequence of actions happened slowly, very slowly.
Lan sensed a tremor in the air—an invisible energy, almost like the whistle of a whip, extending toward Ying.
A red gash appeared on Ying’s body, neck to belly. Red began to weep from her, spilling down her gown and pooling at her feet. The girl’s lips parted in surprise.
Slowly, like the last petal on a blossom tree, she fell.
The Winter Magician turned back to Lan.
There was a sudden rush of wind, bone-cold. A shadow fell over her.
Someone stepped over where she lay, his coat whipping behind him like night incarnate. Midnight eyes, harder than obsidian.
He lifted a hand.
Plucked off his black glove.
And light exploded from the tips of his fingers.
—
It was him—it was the Hin courtdog. The one she’d smashed with a teacup.
A drastic change seemed to have overcome him. Whereas earlier his moves had been subtle, smooth as a song, they were now bladed, burning, sharp as a sword.
The Hin swiped his hands across the air. The move resembled a martial arts pose. She blinked; time seemed to jump again as her mind struggled to catch up, and the next moment flames erupted from the Hin’s hands, sweeping over the landing and obscuring everything: the Royal Magician, the pandemonium of the Teahouse, and Ying, Ying’s lifeless body—
The Hin turned to Lan, and she caught a glimpse of his face: beautiful, terrible, furious as a storm-tossed night. A trickle of blood wound down the side of his face. He was saying something to her, his lips moving quickly, urgently, but the words slurred in Lan’s brain. She was looking at something else.
Glowing in midair before them was a foreign character that almost—almost—resembled a Hin word, but not. And around it, blazing like a trail of fire, was a sealed circle. The wall of flames seemed to pour from it like molten lava, licking across the floor and growing from nothing.
The sight brought forth memories of snow falling like ashes, a red beating heart bleeding to the tune of a broken lute. An impossibility.
He scooped her up, his hands looping around her waist and supporting her elbows, and then she was half-stumbling, half being dragged down the corridor, the Hin boy at her side, the world slipping as though she’d downed one too many cups of whitefire liquor.
They burst into the Peach Blossom Room. The Hin boy slowed and turned his palm to the windows. This time Lan did not blink.
