She did not like seeing him like this: lips parched and cracked, sweat drenching his face and clothing. Lan reached for the gourd among their belongings. It was empty. “I’m going to get some water,” she said.
Zen didn’t answer. A look of peace had descended upon his features, which she’d come to learn meant he’d sunk deep into meditation. He’d taken off his gloves and boots, planting both feet in the soil—a method for restoring his qì by grounding as much of his body in the elements as possible, she’d learned.
Lan rose and headed for the stream nearby. Her body was still warm, yet nowhere near as feverish as earlier, and the fog of lightheadedness was beginning to clear from her mind. A morning mist had risen, threading between the golden larches, rendering their pine leaves a feather gray. She heard the burbleof the brook before she found it nestled between mossy banks.
Lan squatted by the stream and dipped the water gourd beneath its surface, letting the currents cool her hand. The forest was unusually quiet at this time of the morning, devoid of the whistles of brown thrushes and the scurryings of grouses and other small animals through the brush. In fact, Lan thought, pausing as she lifted the gourd to drink from it, there was a tension to the silence like the air before a storm. As though the forest itself held its breath.
She took a swig of water—and froze.
First, she noticed the thick, oppressive feel of metal in theqì.
Then, she saw them.
Across the stream, between the ghostly silhouettes of the golden larches, were flashes of movement. Not shadows, butlight—the gray of the sky reflecting against silver. Slivers of pure blue, winking in and out of sight. A sigil of a crown with wings.
Ice cracked up her veins.
Elantians.
Impossible.
How could they behere? Zen had told her the central region of the Last Kingdom was safe, that the Elantians had notyet managed to conquer this vast, wild piece of land. Here,where the pines grew gnarled and sprawling and free,there were no flat concrete roads tearing up the land. Here, where the mountains reigned beneath the unbroken sky, there were no Elantian strongholds of metal and marble.
Here wastheirland, the Hin’s, the last of it.
And now the Elantians had found it, too.
At once, the memories of the past week traveling under the protection of the bamboo and pine forests and learning about the ancient arts of her kingdom fell away like a distant dream. Her limbs numbed; the gourd in her hand slipped. Lan caught it by its neck and ducked behind a bush. She watched as one of the soldiers peeled away from the formation, pausing to scour the bank of the stream where she hid. When she was certain he’d looked away, Lan began to back up slowly.
She had almost reached the safety of the treeline when it happened.
A rabbit shot out from the underbrush, ramming into her heel. Lan stifled a cry, but too late: she fell forward onto her hands, the gourd cracking beneath her.
Across the stream, the Elantian soldiers looked up. Their eyes pinned her like a butterfly to a corkboard.
As shouts rose, Lan abandoned all caution. She turned andran.
Her pulse thundered in her ears, the crisp wintry air cutting her lungs like shards of glass. Elantians—there were Elantians here, deep in the safety of the forest, in the Central Plains. Yet again, they had found her; yet again, they had invaded this land of her ancestors, a private space in the kingdom that had only moments ago belonged to only her, Zen, and her people.
Something whistled past her ear. An arrow lodged in the trunk of the larch before her, shaft juddering to a stop. It was made completely of metal, polished and smooth and unnatural, so unlike the pinewood shafts and goosefeather fletching of arrows of the Hin army. The metal gleamed as she darted past it, the tip buried in the flesh of the larch.
To think she’d started to feel that danger was but a distant memory. She should have known better—that as long as the Elantians existed, danger was the shadow they cast over her entire world.
Her hands fisted as she ran, tears of fear turning to tears of fury, choking up her throat and spilling over.
When would she be completely free, completely safe?
She knew the answer.
When I am powerful.
Lan burst into the clearing where she’d left Zen. He looked up, startled. Lan sank to her knees, pain erupting again in her arm and her sides, breath burning in her lungs. She gasped out one word.
“Elantians.”
Yin and yáng, evil and good, black and white, demons and humans—such is the Way the world is divided. What does not belong on the Way of practitioning must be annihilated.
—Emperor Jin, “First Imperial Decree on Practitioning,” era of the Middle Kingdom
