He seemed to realize he was staring at her. Clearing his throat, he turned and began to shrug off the tatters of his páo.
Lan drew a sharp breath. Two angry red welts cut down from his shoulder blades to his waist—yet that wasn’t all. Beneath, the flesh was riddled with scar tissue, pale and shining.
Lan leaned close, dabbing at the fresh wounds as carefully as she could. She had been around plenty of men, had flirted with them boldly for a tip of one or two extra wén, yet none of that had made her this nervous. Blood rushed to her face, she hardly dared breathe, and her heart was pulsing against her rib cage so hard that she was certain Zen could hear.
“These scars,” she said, and brushed the tip of her finger against a particularly long one by his spine. “Do they have a better story than the others?”
He tensed slightly beneath her touch. “No,” Zen said. “Those were also from the Elantian interrogators.” She regretted asking, but he went on: “They tortured me for information on demonic binding. The way it works is…once a demon makes a bargain with you, its interests become aligned with you. It will do anything to keep you alive in order to ensure that it receives its end of the bargain. And so…I couldn’t die, no matter how much I wished it.”
There was no emotion to his tone, yet she somehow found that more difficult to bear. Gently, she traced the towel down his wound again. She could think of nothing else to say but “Why do demons enter into bargains with practitioners?”
“In most cases, to strengthen their power,” Zen answered. “As demons are formed out of malevolent pools of yin, there is always the danger that that energy will weaken and disintegrate and return to the flow of the qì in the greater universe over time. The demons’ vitality is strengthened by death, destruction, and decay—which is why most stories speak of demons’ ravaging villages and killing its inhabitants. Some have realized that entering into a bargain with a human is the easier way.”
The blood was gone, the wound cleaned, but Lan continued to trace gentle strokes on Zen’s skin. “And did the child making the bargain with the demon at seven cycles of age have any idea of all this?”
Zen held very still. When he spoke at last, she felt his voice thrum in his chest beneath her fingertips. “Yes. But he had lost everything—his family, his home, and his world. He thought acquiring a demon’s power could help him exact revenge upon those who had taken it all from him.” A pause. “He was a fool.”
The water sloshed as Lan wrung it from the towel. “He was a child.”
“And how would a girl without any prior knowledge of practitioning be able to wield qì through a musical instrument?”
Zen had turned to face her, and his gaze was startling, arresting.Imperial,she thought, remembering the first impression she’d had of him. She had been accustomed to the sleazy, wine-blurred glances of the patrons of the Teahouse that were so easy to slip between. Yet when Zen looked at someone, he trulylooked,as though nothing else existed in his world at that moment.
Lan found herself leaning forward. Heart in her mouth, she pressed the cloth to his cheek, wiping away blood from a cut. His eyes fluttered, but they did not leave her face. “My mother,” she said, the confession unfurling from her in a whisper. “The day the Elantians invaded our courtyard house, she fended them off with nothing but a woodlute. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I think…I think she was practitioning with music.”
Zen drew a breath, and she watched the crease between his brows smooth as his eyes filled with some understanding she was not privy to. “You should know that practitioning through music is no regular feat.”
“I know. Tai told me.”
“Did he tell you anything else?”
She could not look away from his gaze. “He asked if my mother was a member of a clan. I said I did not know.”
“Practitioning through song is a lost art. I have come across mentions of it in the texts I have studied, yet the historical records remain few and far between. The Imperial Court did a thorough job when they wished to bury information.” The disdain in Zen’s expression softened with his next words. “Most lost arts of practitioning originated from the clans. Many faded to obscurity throughout the Middle Kingdom, when clansbegan to hide their bloodlines in efforts to escape the court’s crackdown.”
She stared at him as he spoke, but her mind was far away, flipping through the same memory like the pages of a book. Her mother, snow falling, music slaying, blood spraying.
“Clans are—were—held in such high regard,” Zen continued. “The arts of practitioning unique to each could be passed down only through their bloodlines. This is why they were either killed or brought to the Imperial Court to serve during the Last Kingdom.”
I know,Tai had said to her right before she’d left.I know now.Of course—he’d recognized it because he had belonged to a clan. Because he’d been brought up in the Imperial Court.
Was that what he’d been about to tell her?
“My mother.” The words forced themselves from Lan’s lips. “She served the Imperial Court.”
Suddenly, a memory found her: one she hadn’t understood before, that she’d filed away only because it was a puzzle she could not yet figure out. She’d been in the study copying works of the famous poet Xiù Fuwhen her mother had entered, dressed in that beautiful, powerful Imperial Court hàn’fú. Lan had shot up, the horsetail brush dropping from her hands as she ran to embrace her.
When I grow up, I’ll serve the Imperial Court just like you, Mama,she’d said happily.
Her mother’s smile had vanished. She’d pried Lan’s hands from her waist and bent, eyes quickly sweeping the empty study.No, Lián’ér, you will not,Sòng Méi had said quietly.When you grow up, you must serve the people.
“Lan,” Zen said, his voice pulling her back to the present. He was still watching her, water clinging in beaded drops to his black hair, his long lashes, his corded chest. His gaze finished his question:Do you understand now?
She squeezed her eyes shut. The answer had lain before her all along.
Mama had been part of a clan—something Lan had believed to be the antagonistic force in all the history books she had read, all the tales she’d heard from the lips of townsfolk and villagers. In all the stories, the Dragon Emperor, Yán’lóng, had been the hero in gold-plated armor, the sun haloing his head as he slayed the rebelling clans, uniting the land and bringing peace and prosperity to the people.
But not all the people.He had sacrificed the freedom and will of the minority, made them puppets in his own court, in order to bring the illusion of harmony.
