They had killed Mama without even touching her.
“I couldn’t sell that spoon,” Lan lied. “No one’s taking anything metal these days, and it’s more trouble than it’s worthif an Elantian officer catches me. Not to mention Madam Meng’ll have my skin if she finds out I stole it. Just use it to get some ginseng for those old lungs, will you? It chafes my ears to have to listen to you cough like that.”
“Right,” Old Wei said slowly, still peering at the silver spoon as though it were made of jade. The remainder of her proffered payment—a sack of ten copper coins she’d earned from her day of sales—lay untouched. “Possessing any metal can be dangerous these days…best leave it with me…” His gaze sharpened suddenly, and he broke into a toothy smile. He leaned over to her and whispered, “I think I’ll have somethingreallygood for you next time. Source of mine’s introduced a Hin courtdog to me, and he’s in the market for—”
The shopkeeper stopped and drew in a sharp breath, his gaze darting behind her to the paper screens he’d thrown open to let in the cool evening breeze. “Angels,” he hissed, switching to the Elantian tongue.
The word sent terror spiking through her veins.Angelswas short for White Angels, the colloquialism that Elantian soldiers used to refer to themselves.
Lan spun around. There, framed in the fretwork of Old Wei’s shop windows, she caught sight of something that made bile rise to her throat. A flash of silver, the gleam of a white-gold emblem with a crown and wings, armor colored in winter’s ice—
No time to think. She had to move.
Lan cast Old Wei a frightened look, but something in the old shopkeeper’s expression had steeled, his mouth pressed into a resolute line. He caught her hand as she reached for the scroll. “Leave it with me, ya’tou—don’t let them catch you with something like this on the eve of the Twelfth Cycle. Come back for it when it’s safer. Now go!” In the blink of an eye, the scroll and silver spoon had vanished.
She tipped her dou’lì low over her head just as the bell over the entrance rang, a toll now sharp with menace.
The air thickened. Shadows fell over the floor, long and dark.
Lan made for the door, glad for her rough hemp duàn’da, a loose, cheap garment that concealed most of her figure. She’d worked long enough at the Teahouse to know what Elantians could do to Hin girls.
“Four Gods preserve you,” she heard Old Wei mumble to her. It was an old Hin saying based on the belief that the Four Demon Gods would watch over their motherland and their people.
But Lan knew, with cutting clarity, that there were no gods in this world.
Only monsters in the form of men.
There were two of them, burly Elantian soldiers dressed in full armor, their steps clunking as they passed her. Instinctively, Lan’s gaze darted to their wrists—and it was then that she loosed a breath. Bare wrists—no glint of metal cuffs wound so tightly that they seemed fused to their flesh, no hands that could summon fire and blood with a flick of pale fingers.
Just soldiers, then.
One of them paused as she passed him, the door just paces away, a sliver of cool evening air already brushing her face. Her heart lurched like a rabbit’s beneath an eagle’s gaze.
The Angel’s hand darted out, fingers closing over her wrist.
And that seed of fear in her stomach bloomed.
“Say, Maximillian,” the soldier called. With his other hand, he flicked up the rim of her dou’lì. Lan stared into his eyes, the youthful green of a summer’s day, and wondered how a man could make a color look so cruel. His face might have been cut of the marble statues of the winged guardians the Elantians erected over their doors and in their churches: handsome, andutterly inhuman. “Didn’t think I’d find such afinespecimen of flea in this kind of a place.”
She’d learned the Elantian tongue—she’d had to, to work at the Teahouse—and it never failed to strike ice into her veins. Their words were long and rolling, so different from the sharp-cut, dragonfly-touch characters of Hin speech. The Elantians spoke with the slow, unhurried slur of a people drunk on power.
Lan held very still, not even daring to breathe.
“Leave the thing be, Donnaron,” his companion called, already halfway to the counter, where Old Wei bent at the waist and bobbed his head with an obsequious smile. “We’re on duty. You can have your fun when you’re done.”
Donnaron’s gaze roved over Lan’s face, down her neck, and lower, and she felt violated with that single look. She wanted to scratch out those youthful green eyes.
The Angel shot her a wide grin. “That’s too bad. Don’t you worry, my pretty little flower. I’m not letting you go so easily.”
The pressure on her wrist increased slightly—like a promise, athreat—and then he released her.
Lan stumbled forward. She had one foot out the door, hands pressed against the handle, when she hesitated.
She looked back.
Old Wei’s silhouette was small between the hulking Elantians, a shadow in the setting sun. His rheumy old eyes flicked up to her—just for a single moment—and she caught the tilt of his nearly imperceptible nod.Go, ya’tou.
Lan pushed through the door and ran. She didn’t stop until she was well clear of the stone parapets that marked the entrance to the evemarket. Ahead stretched an expanse of darkness that was the Bay of Southern Winds, glittering crimson as it caught shards of fading sunlight in its waves. Here the winds were sharp and briny, rattling over the wooden jettiesand whistling over the old stone walls of Haak’gong as though they wished to raise the land itself.
