“Go on,” he said. “Play me a little song.”
The world shrank to the ocarina, with its sleek mother-of-pearl outline of a white lotus inlaid into black clay. The magician’s pale hand twined around it, looking so out of place. And then, directly behind them, the fleet of needles hovering over Zen’s wrist.
Whatever it was that Mama had died to keep safe from the Elantians…it all lay within the ocarina.
“In case I wasn’t clear,” Erascius said, his voice soft with poison, “that was an order, not a question.” He lifted his hand, and before Lan could react, two more of the needles slipped into Zen’s wrist.
Zen made a sound that Lan never wished to hear again.
Lan reached out. Her fingers closed over the surface ofthe ocarina. She pulled it from the magician with only one thought roaring in her mind:Mine—this belongs tome—and that she would not let the Elantians take a single thing more from her.As she lifted the ocarina to her lips, she thought of Skies’ End, of Shàn’jun, of the Teahouse and Ying and the other songgirls, of the villages burned and razed to the ground, the memories of the past twelve cycles flipping through her mind like the pages of a book until she stopped at the beginning, at the scene of Mama’s death. She held on to that memory—and searched for the music within.
The song found her first. A melody pulled from her lips through the ocarina: something haunting, something that seemed to embody the passage of time, the flow of rivers intothe sea, the brush of wind against bamboo leaves, the drip of rain down gray-tiled eaves. Suddenly, she was in that liminal space between reality and subconsciousness she had found whenever she’d sung back at the Teahouse, and she knew, without knowing, how to play, where to touch her fingers to coax the notes from the clay.
The song unfurled from her like a half-forgotten dream. It was one she’d found herself humming as she’d done chores back at the Teahouse, one that she had never been able to place. Yet in this moment, as she traced through her memory, she found the tune winding through the hallways of her manor house when she was a child, drifting from the window of her mother’s study.
Then she was drifting upward, rising above her manor house—or, rather, the sky itself was expanding, drawing closer until she was apartof it, the stars glimmering like shattered crystals before her and all around her. The music flowed from her in dustings of silver, a stream winding upward until it settled between the stars. The silver glowed brightly in a snaking constellation.
Slowly, three other sets of colors settled into the stars. Nearby, a string of stars began to glow ice blue while, farther on, a set winked out and night poured into them, delineating their existence as an absence of light. Finally, in the distance, barely hovering over the curve of the western horizon, a fourth constellation flamed into crimson.
The music crescendoed, then slipped and jarred; a distant rumble sounded like thunder. The stars began to writhe, their shapes filling out, turning to her with eyes that gleamed against the dark.
Silver. Azure. Black. Crimson.
Dragon. Tiger. Tortoise. Phoenix.
She was drifting in an illusory night of her making, the song of her ocarina transposed into glowing constellations, weaving into reincarnated creatures that had existed only in legends and myths.
Lan lifted her head and looked into the eyes of the Four Demon Gods.
—
Shock held her in place; she had no idea how much time had passed before she tore her gaze away.
Like her, the rest of the chamber was spellbound. The light of the torches seemed to have dimmed, and above them were four quadrants of the night sky, each holding a set of stars.
Zen’s face was tipped upward, and it was his expression that broke Lan from her reverie. He watched the illusion with a mixture of hope and fear so ardent that she could see it burning in his eyes.
She was suddenly aware of Erascius gazing at the constellations, the stars reflecting in those cold blue eyes. Instead of hope and fear, however, greed was carved on his face.
He reached out his hands, and those metal cuffs on his forearms began to flow out, spiraling upward to the illusion. Within the blink of an eye, they’d molded themselves into four quadrants: a perfect replica of the night skies and Demon Gods from Lan’s ocarina, cast into metal. Then the metal sheets shrank and returned to encircle Erascius’s arms.
The magician wasstealingthe secrets from her ocarina.
Lan’s shock shifted to anger. She flexed her fingers, her mind sharpening over one lucid thought:Mine. They are mine. And you will not have them.
The energies spilling from her core turned.
The song changed.
Do-do-sol.
The notes stumbled from the ocarina, staccato, hesitant, broken, a memory resurfacing.
Do-sol-do.
The next chords came quicker, easier. And when she began the next line from the last memory she had of her mother, Lan felt as though the ghost of Sòng Méi had returned to play.
Qì stirred inside her, breaking through the dampness, darkness, and death pressing in around her. And somehow, her energies responded to the sound of her music, twining around the notes and flowing from the deepest parts of her.
