His finger traced fluid strokes in the air. The motion was elegant and eerily similar to how her mother had written calligraphy. The air over the window, too, began to ripple and shimmer; with each stroke of his hand, those blazing trails of light appeared, and this time they appeared written into the glass. A different character, if Lan’s memory served, from the last one.
She watched, taking in the final stroke: an uninterrupted circle encompassing the unknown character. As soon as the end met the beginning, a shockwave seemed to pulse through the room.
The glass shattered, shards arcing through the air and falling around them like rain.
He turned to look at her then, and his eyes held command of her world in that moment.
“If you wish to live,” he said quietly, “you will come withme.”
If you wish to live.So obvious the choice seemed until, all of a sudden, it wasn’t. Lan thought of the crumpled body of her best friend, torn open from the inside out. Heard the screams coming from somewhere down the hallway, the songgirls dragged into this carnage, flowers swept into a winter storm—
Did she wish to live? How many lives was hers worth?
“M-my friends—” Her voice was small and pathetic.
Mama had told her once that she would grow up to protect the ones she loved.
She had let them all die instead.
The boy’s eyes were hard, unyielding, his grip on her waist unrelenting. “There is nothing more you can do for them,” he continued in that even, clipped voice. “They are dead.”
Footsteps pounding down the hallway.
The boy lifted his gaze to the door behind them. “We’ve run out of time,” he said, and with a decisive leap, swung onto the ledge of the window. They teetered on the sill, the streets below a distant current of auric lights and shadowed movement.
“Hold on.” The boy drew her close to him. His arm fell to her waist, his hand clasping her wrist, careful to avoid the wounds from the porcelain shards of the teacup. Lan stiffened against the memory of Teahouse patrons reaching for her with their wandering fingers.
The boy’s touch was light, courteous, his fingers warm against her skin.
Out of the corner of her eye, Lan saw a figure appear by the sliding doors of the Peach Blossom Room.
She twisted her head to look back. The last that she saw was the winter gaze of the Elantian Royal Magician piercing her with a promise.
He would find her.
And he would do to her what he’d done to everyone she’d loved.
The world tilted beneath her, and then they were falling.
Practitioners suspected of utilizing demonic powers in any shape or form by the banned practice of demonic practitioning shall be subject to interrogation, punishment, and death by the Imperial Court.
—Emperor Jin, “Second Imperial Decree on Practitioning,” era of the Middle Kingdom
Zen was not prepared for this.
Practitioning had begun as the gentle commune between the natural world, the spirits, and the ancient shamans of the Ninety-Nine Clans, each to their own. The myriad practices had grown and flourished with the union of the clans into the First Kingdom and its relative period of peace and economic prosperity; education had blossomed, and with it, the Hundred Schools of Practitioning had risen. The arts of practitioning had been taught to any born with talent to control qì, the natural flow of energies in the world that existed ubiquitously yet could be harnessed only by a select few to be wielded.
But throughout the Hundred Schools, with their wildly diverse branches of practitioning arts from all across the kingdom, one common thread had united its teachers and disciples: a practitioner was meant to work in tune with the flow of worldly energies around them and call upon them in times of need. Balance and harmony were key principles to the Way.
Practitioning was not meant to be used to harm.
Even as the Middle Kingdom sought to rein in the arts of practitioning under imperial control, even with the Last Kingdom’s eradication of the Ninety-Nine Clans and removal of practitioning from history, this way of thought had persistently shaped Hin culture. Perhaps that was why the remaining practitioners who served the Imperial Court and the emperor’s Dragon Army had lost so terribly and so easily to the Elantian Royal Magicians during the Conquest.
Zen considered himself a devout disciple of the arts of practitioning, but falling out of three-story buildings was not something one did on a regular basis, and it required improvisation.
Unfortunately Zen was someone who went very much by the book. He was not one for improvisation.
Air screamed past his ears, the girl was screaminginhis ear, and the sky and stars tumbled in a jumble over his head. He flung out a hand and pulled on the threads of Seal art ingrained in his mind from years of study and practice, weaving strokes into a Seal. This one tethered their bodies to the wood of the balcony above, and pushed against the earth rising to meet them below.
