As they reached the steps down the mountain, Zen paused. He glanced back at Skies’ End, taking in the rugged mountains that reached for the sky, the pale temples nestled within like gems against a sleeping dragon. In several hours, the wakingbell would ring clear and bright, cutting through sleepy tendrils of mist; disciples would awaken for their morning chores, Taub would begin cooking in the refectory, and the masters would emerge for their morning classes.
Zen turned his back on the place that had been his home for the past eleven cycles. When he and Lan reached the bottom of the nine hundred ninety-nine steps and crossed through the Boundary Seal, Lan turned to him.
He hesitated. They needed to perform a Gate Seal to put any form of distance between them and Skies’ End…only he did not have the strength.
Shame, along with the hateful feeling of helplessness, wrapped a chokehold around him. Had his demon still been bound to him, he would never have become so weak from a single flogging.
But instead of waiting for him, Lan announced, “I’ll do the Gate Seal.”
This drove away his other thoughts. Zen frowned at her. “You cannot have learned it.”
He caught the white flash of her eyes rolling. “I’ve watched you do it about fifty times.”
Impossible. No—improbable.He thought of her ocarina, of the Seal on her wrist. Of how she held the star maps, the secrets to the Demon Gods. How bright her qì flowed, how she had fought Erascius with nothing but a musical instrument.
He closed the distance between them. His shoulders throbbed slightly as he reached to brush the hair back from her face, as though the answers might be written there, in her eyes.
Who are you?
“Hold on,” Lan said, and lifted the ocarina to her lips. Song flowed from her, and Zen again felt the qì in each note, threading together as the melody interlaced and interweaved.Around them, the landscape began to shimmer. As Lan closed her eyes to concentrate on wherever she was taking them, Zen cast a last glance back at Skies’ End.
Then darkness swept in like a tide, washing away his home as though it had never existed.
And the Old Matchmaker of the Moon said to the lovers, “This red thread I bestow upon you. It may stretch and it may tangle, but it will never break. Across cycles and worlds and lifetimes, your souls are now destined.”
—“The Red Threads of Fate,”Hin Village Folktales: A Collection
They came upon the village near the break of dawn. It emerged like a miracle in the rain, silhouettes of clay-tiled roofs curving gently upward at the ends. Ditches of muddy water formed in fields of crops carved into the mountainsides. An old wooden pái’fang announced a rain-soaked welcome to the Village of Bright Moon Pond.
The fifth door they knocked on opened. The white-haired woman accepted a copper wén from Zen’s storage pouch as payment for food and lodging and led them to an empty room across the yard. The paper on the windows was torn in some places, but the room was habitable, with a single kàng bed and a pile of old cotton blankets. The cold drafts leaking through the doors and walls stirred the candle that Lan lit, sending shadows dancing frenetically around the room.
As the landlady went to heat water for them, Zen sank against the walls with a grateful groan. Lan threw open the windows. Their room overlooked a steep cliff and an unbroken expanse of undulating mountains. Far in the distance,beyond the storm clouds, the sky had begun to catch fire with the light of the sun. The singing of village children herding water buffalo threaded through the mountains.
She breathed in deeply, savoring thedrip drip dripof rain from gray-tiled roofs, the view of a land free of Elantians, free from conquest.
“I didn’t know there were still unoccupied villages,” she said softly. “In the early days of the Conquest, almost every village I ran to had signs of Elantian invasion.” Metal plaques bearing their strange, horizontal language nailed to pái’fangs; road and street names for the larger towns and cities changed to incorporate the names of the Elantian king and queen.
“Because they were along the coast, were they not?” Zen’s voice was barely above a sigh. She turned and caught him looking out the window. The sunrise beyond the storm reflected in his eyes. “Much of the central Last Kingdom remains free of the Elantians’ grasp. It is mostly empty and undeveloped compared with the power of the eastern coastline, but it is all that we have left.”
All that we have left.It was difficult to reconcile the tranquility of a rain-drenched mountain shrouded in fog and cloud with the violence of the Elantian invasion; it felt as though she was trying to bring two utterly different worlds together.
The landlady returned with a wooden bucket, two tin kettles of hot water, and a bamboo basket of steamed mántou buns. Lan tucked into hers while she washed up as much as she could before turning to Zen.
He had fallen asleep against the wall. A sliver of his chest, pale and corded, showed through his torn páo, rising and falling gently with each breath. His jaw cut a sharp line, his brows knitted under strands of his wet hair even as he slumbered.
Lan brought the bucket and kettle over to him. Rinsing offthe rag she had been using, she dipped it in the steaming water and pressed it to his face.
His hand snapped over her wrist with startling speed; she cried out at the sudden pain. His eyes were open, and for a moment, she imagined she saw black filling the whites again. Then he blinked, and the sharpness to his expression softened. He let her go as though he’d been burned.
“Forgiveness.” His voice was husky with exhaustion. “Habit.”
“Well, you should have known I wasn’t going to attack you,” Lan said, raising the hot water kettle to pour more water into the bucket. “This isn’t a teapot.”
Through the steam rising gently between them, she caught his smile. Warmth rushed through her, and not only from the water.
“Your back,” she said, trying to maintain nonchalance. “Let me clean it for you.”
Zen’s smile flickered, along with something else in his eyes. They were suddenly so close, so dark.
