“Correct.” He looked up, and she caught a glint of mirth in that ever-serious face. “Surely you do not believe the village folktales?”
“I didn’t,” Lan said, “but thenyouturned out to be real, didn’t you?” The practitioner gave her a flat look. “I’ve heard of the hauntings and demonic affairs that happen in villages out there.Someof them have to be true.”
He considered her for several moments. “You wish to know the truth of this world? To see the world of practitioning in lore and legend?”
She watched him, her hand instinctively drifting toward her left wrist. The answer was at the tip of her tongue. One so grand, so obvious, and so certain that she was afraid to speak it. Yet it had been given to her long ago, a door left open a crack with her mother’s dying breath.
A door to the questions Mama had left her.
Something flickered in Zen’s eyes. “If you want the truth…if you set out on this path, you must know that there is no way back.”
There never had been, not since the path to the future and the life she’d planned had been ripped from her twelve cycles ago. Since then, she’d walked a different path, carved out by a Seal-shaped scar on her wrist.
By a magician with the gelid eyes of winter.
By death and destruction.
She thought of Ying. Night had passed, and the nightmarethat was no nightmare remained with her, a bloodstain that could not be washed away by the light of day nor the passage of time. The pain came so suddenly that she held her breath and twisted her hands behind her back, digging her fingers into her palm.
What use are tears?Ying had murmured to her once, back when they had just crossed their twelfth cycle of life and the wounds of Lan’s losses still cut deep every night.The dead will neither feel them nor be called by them. Grief is for the survivors, and I think that, rather than living my life in pain, I would live it in laughter and love. To the fullest.
Lan lifted her face to Zen. He was watching her with that inscrutable look.
“Yes,” Lan said. “I want the answers. All of them.”
“Very well,” he said, with the slightest bow of his head. “In that case, I have decided: I would like to bring you to the School of the White Pines, the last of the Hundred Schools of Practitioning, to understand the Seal a former practitioner marked on your wrist.”
The words hung between them for several moments as the first rays of the sun cracked over the horizon, spilling a brilliant, fiery red over the land.
“Take your time to consider my request.” Zen stood, holding out a hand. Without thinking, Lan took it. He had slipped on his black gloves; his grip was tight as he steadied her by the elbows, drawing her close. Those eyes snapped across her like black lightning. “But I must warn you now that, should you refuse, I would have no choice but to kill you.”
The statement was so dramatic that Lan let out a laugh.
The practitioner frowned. “I do not jest,” he said.
“I did not take it as a jest,” she replied, all traces of mirth vanishing as she met his gaze. “You think I am afraid of death? I have died many times over already, watching the Elantianstake those I love one by one, knowing that I have no power to save any of them.”
How long had she spent as a caged bird in the Teahouse under Madam Meng’s thumb, forced to spin and smile and sing pretty songs? How many nights had she lain awake by Ying’s side, holding her best friend’s soft fingers and dreaming of a time when they would not be hungry or cold or afraid? How often had she stood at the edge of Haak’gong by the crashing waves, the seam between land and sea and sky, and wondered what else her life might amount to?
She had not been able to protect Mama. Nor Old Wei. Nor Ying—nor any of the others at the Teahouse. Yet fate had come knocking at her door and presented her with this chance.
She would take it.
She would no longer be the flower.
She would be the blade.
Lan pressed her palm against the practitioner’s. “I would cross the River of Forgotten Death itself if I could bring them back,” she said. “I have but one request for you. Teach me the art of practitioning. Teach me to be powerful, so that I will not have to watch another person I love fall to the Elantian regime.”
She saw it again, that flicker of darkness in his eyes—a wall of black flames. The dawn’s light was blood-red across his face, carving him into sharp angles and shadows. His hand tightened on hers briefly, then loosened, his grip fading to a light touch.
“Eat,” he said, “and let us be on our way. If you are to attend the School of the White Pines, it would do no harm to begin your instruction today.”
—
“Why must we travel on foot? I thought practitioners couldfly.”
“We cannotfly.We can direct concentrated bursts of qìinto our heels, propelling us to leap higher and farther than normally possible. That is a method of practitioning called the Light Arts.”
