It hadn’t been. Everything she’d thought of as impossibility was true. That her mother was—had something to do with—the practitioners of old. That she had died to protect a secret, to lock it inside Lan…and to suppress Lan’s connection to qì so the Elantian magicians would not find her.
And that the practitioners of old—those who had walked the lakes and rivers of the Last Kingdom in lore and legend—were still very much, impossibly, alive.
Lan leaned forward. “Can you tell me more about my Seal?” she asked.
“I cannot read it.” Gently, the boy lifted his fingers from her arm. The scar—Seal—on her wrist was still a dull sheenof silver, but the bleeding stopped near her elbow. There, among the twisted metallic protrusions of her veins, rested a new Seal: ink-black and wreathed with strands of cinnabar-red. It glowed faintly, and when she removed her gaze from it, it seemed to disappear. “The Seal I have placed on your arm will last approximately one moon. The silver will not progress farther into your bloodstream, and the necrosis of your arm will slow.”
“Necrosis?” she repeated.
“Yes. Without treatment, your arm will die.”
And with it, she thought, her Seal. Whatever was hidden in it.
The thing the Winter Magician had sought for twelve long cycles. That her mother had died for.
Lan opened her mouth, but her torrent of questions faded on the tip of her tongue when she caught sight of the practitioner. He’d leaned gingerly against a stalk of bamboo, and she suddenly saw how weary he was. Blood had clotted on the side of his head, and the stain on his shirt was still spreading. He closed his eyes. He was breathing hard.
He had saved her life. And he was the closest link she had to finding out more about all this—the Seal her mother had left her, the reason the Winter Magician was after her.
Lan ripped the fabric of her torn sleeve, separating it into long, thin strips, and knelt by the boy; he flicked a glance up at her in dull surprise.
I wish to live,she thought, and then in conjunction:I need you.
Lan had learned that nothing in life came without a price. This stranger had helped her this far, and it was likely he would not continue without something in exchange.
“Take me with you,” she said. “I can be of use to you. I can cook, I can sing, and I’m good with chores.”
The practitioner looked to the strips of cloth in her hands. Understanding shifted his features as she reached forward to pull his blood-soaked shirt from his black trousers, makeshift bandages in hand.
The knife wound in his side was raw and red; in spite of the cool winter rain, his skin was hot, as though he burned with a fire she could not see. His muscles tensed as she began to wrap the strips of cloth around his midriff.
The boy’s hand caught on her wrist. Lan froze.
“I do not require anything from you,” he said. “I am neither enemy nor trickster, nor a merchant well versed in the language of trades. But”—he drew a shuddering breath and released her—“in this moment, I would be infinitely grateful for your help.”
Something eased in her chest. She hoisted him straighter against the thick stalk of bamboo, and they were quiet as shedressed his wound, then dabbed the cut on his temple. She let her fingers rest on his skin for moments longer here and there to warm her numb hands, and in the silence and soft fall of rain against bamboo leaves, a new connection might have been forged between them.
Trust.
The practitioner spoke after a little while. “I seem to have forsaken my manners when we first met.” His eyes were still fogged with exhaustion, but his voice was pleasant again, imperial and commanding, as when they had first met back at the Teahouse. “My name is Zen.”
Zen.It was a monosyllabic moniker as ordained by the new Elantian laws—but it was something. A half-name, a half-truth…yet it would do for now.
Lan pulled her lips into the ghost of a smile. “I’m Lan.”
Meditation is the practice of complete detachment from the physical world, becoming one with the external and internal flow of qì and the constant harmony of yin and yáng.
—The Way of the Practitioner,Section Two: “On Meditation”
Lián’ér. Sòng Lián. It means “lotus,”Mama had once explained. She’d always had a voice like song bells.
A flower?Lián’ér poked out her tongue. She had seen the lotuses in bloom in their courtyard home. How easily they were picked, snapped at the stem without a second thought, leaving nothing but a scattering of petals in the wake of their short lives.
Mama had taken her hand.Yes, flowers. I, too, am named after a flower—méi, a plum blossom. Did you know, they are stronger than they look?
Lián’ér let her mother lead her outside, down the fanstone steps and over the small bridge that arced over the pond. The spring solstice had just breathed life into bloom, and winter’s colorless screen of snow had yielded to a shy blush of greens. On the jade-smooth pond rested a single lotus.
See how they bloom each and every cycle, without fail,her mother said.See how they can grow out of nothing but mud, how their resilience brings light and hope.
