“They’re dead,” she blurted, her voice rasping, “all of them. You brought down the entire Elantian outpost.”
Flashes of memories: a sky licked with orange flames, a garden of flowers with dewdrops on the leaves, clear and red.
Why is the dew red?he’d thought, and then he’d looked down at Nightfire, stained crimson. The darkness had rushed back to him, slipping into his veins like the intoxicating pull of a drug. He’d given himself back over to the demon’s control again, because the realization of what it had done—whathe’ddone—was too painful to bear.
He’d slaughtered his way through the Elantian outpost. He’d killed all the soldiers.
And, along with them, the Hin they’d kept as prisoners.
“Your demon.” Lan’s voice grounded him to the present, the pine forest and shores and rushing river before them. He barely remembered using the last of the demon’s power to conjure the Gate Seal to transport them away from the outpost. “Where is it?”
“Gone.” The word scraped against his throat. A word he’d never thought he would speak for a bargain gone awry. Days after he’d bound the power of He With Eyes of Blood to him, Zen had set out for the Heavenly Capital, intending to destroy the Imperial Army that had ended the last of his clan.
Little did he know, he would arrive at the beginning of the Elantian Conquest, the collapse of the Imperial Court, and the fall of the mighty Last Kingdom. That he would be captured and studied, and his demon would lie in wait for twelve cycles, its payment unfulfilled.
Until last night.
There was the sound of sandals scraping against sand, the hiss of her páo as she stood.Leave,Zen wanted to beg her.You would not wish to see me like this.
Instead, her footsteps drew closer. He felt a brush of cold fabric against his hand.
Zen looked up. Those familiar eyes, as inquisitive as a sparrow’s, searched his face. “You made a bargain with a demon,” Lan said. Simple, as though she’d said,You bought sweet potatoes at the market today.
He closed his eyes. Nodded.
“So you ended your bargain? You made the payment?” She kept her voice soft.
Zen nodded again, reaching for that newfound emptiness inside him where the darkness of the demonic being had lain coiled for over twelve cycles.
Tonight, He With Eyes of Blood had saved Zen’s life—and taken its payment by consuming one hundred souls at the Elantian outpost.
“That’s good,” Lan continued, and he heard movement, the slosh of water, then felt the cold press of wet cloth against his forehead. When he opened his eyes, she sat cross-leggedbefore him, dabbing his face with the sleeve of her páo. It came away red. “We’re safe now. Just rest, and—”
“Stop.” His voice cracked. He reached up and shoved her arm away from his face. Her touch threatened to unmoor him; the gentleness to her tone was the furthest from anything he deserved. “Are you not afraid?”
She pressed her lips together for a moment. “I was, back there,” she confessed. “But not anymore, I don’t think.”
“Why not? I am a demonic practitioner. I lost control over one of those creatures. I could have killed you.”
She tipped her head, narrowing her eyes as she searched his face.
“But you didn’t,” she said. Her fingers still pressed against his face between the fabric of her páo, and he held very still, afraid one move would drive away her touch. “You’re Zen. You saved my life, many times over. You taught me practitioning, you gave me the chance to fight back. I was afraid of your demon but never of you.”
Her words broke something inside him. “Do you know what my bargain with that demon was?” He had no idea why he kept speaking. Perhaps it was the cycles of being told that he was a monster, of being equated with the demon bound inside him for most of his life. Perhaps it was the need to expose his sins, to prove himself unworthy of her forgiveness. “I found it one cycle after my entire family was killed, when I was seven cycles old. I swore that if it gave me power, I would give it anything in return. You know what it asked for?” He could hear that distorted voice even now, filling the blue skies with invisible clouds and making the yellow grasses tremble. “It asked me for a hundred lives. A hundred souls to feed it, the blood of a hundred bodies to quench its thirst. It carved our agreement into my hands: one scar for each soul I owedit.” He looked up at her at last. “Does that not terrify you? That a child seven cycles old could make such a bargain without a second thought?”
Something flickered on her face—something like recognition, before her expression cleared. “When the Elantians killed my mother,” Lan said, “I would have done anything in that moment. I would have given my soul to save her, brought down the Heavenly Capital for her life. I don’t think you did anything unusual at all. You were given shit choices, and you made the best of it.”
“I killed over a hundred people.” The words burst from him in a choked sob. “Most of them innocent. No matter what you say, there isno excusefor that, Lan.”
“Yourdemonkilled them,” she said. “That’s the difference, isn’t it?”
A memory surfaced. Standing at the bottom of the stone steps that led out of the dungeons, blood trailing him instead of chains. He remembered Nightfire feeling so heavy in his hands, his qì suddenly grown weak. In the darkness of the cells behind him, he could sense the yin energies of desperation and death. His demon had stopped to drink it all in.
Light had spilled from the doors at the top of the steps, casting a figure in shadow. Erascius had turned to Zen, and he hadn’t missed the glint of the magician’s cold blue eyes. The man had been smiling.
“I remember you now,” he’d said in his long, rolling language, the one that brought back memories of another interrogation chamber, a long table, from twelve cycles back. “You were the boy with a demonic binding we brought in during the first year of Conquest. You taught me that demons could be bound to serve.”
Zen had staggered forward, but his mind had filled with flashes of hunger and bloodlust—the demon’s, not his own.
