Cold clutched Zen’s stomach.Northeast,he thought, and the image of his star map came to him. Lan had told him Erascius had cast those star maps in metalwork magic back at the outpost; with the Elantians’ superior resources, it wasn’t impossible that they had already tracked down the location.
“Smart boy,” he heard Lan say, pinching the child’s cheek.
The boy looked up at Lan in half fascination, half fear: the expression of a child who did not yet understand the horrors this world could afford. At eight cycles old, he would have grown up post-Conquest, his life confined to this small village, knowing nothing of the outside world. Where once traveling merchants might have roamed the Last Kingdom, peddling wares and trading stories across the land, and imperial messengers might have arrived on horseback to collect taxes and bring news of the outside world, those lines of communication had long gone cold in the era of the Elantian Conquest.
“Jie’jie,” he said, “Older Sister, what will they do if they come here?”
Lan’s smile widened as she brushed a smidge of dirt from the child’s cheek. “Nothing, because those stupid eggs won’t get here,” she replied. “Jie’jie will protect you.”
“Is jie’jie a powerful fairy?” the child asked.
Lan winked and pressed a finger to her lips, yet the smile slipped from her face as she turned and stepped back into their landlady’s courtyard. The fall of night was almost complete;the dying sun cast her face in shadows. “What do we do if they come for the villagers?” she said quietly.
They won’t,Zen thought.The village means nothing to them. They are headed northeast, to the location of the first Demon God.
Of course Lan would think of the lives of the villagers first while Zen—Zen thought of himself and his goals.
He was saved from answering Lan by the sound of the courtyard door closing. They turned to find the old landlady of the house watching them.
“You are those, are you not?” she asked, her voice thin as a drift of smoke, and Zen did not need to hear her next words to know what she meant.“Practitioners.”
Something in him tightened. The landlady was old—much older than the Elantian Conquest, yet still not old enough to have known the days when the warriors and heroes walked the rivers and lakes of the First and Middle Kingdoms, fighting evil and protecting the people.
“No need to say,” she said. “My family was once saved by one of you from a demon. That practitioner had no wish to disclose what they were, but I knew. There is anairto you that is different.” A shadow crossed her face. “Now, my husband and my son are dead in the war we lost to the foreigners. Only this village remains unchanged. I have long felt we have been waiting…for what, I did not know. Now I do.”
The landlady knelt. The motion jarred Zen; he rose at the same time as Lan, both of them seizing the elbows of their elder.
“Grandmother, don’t—!”
“Please, grandmother—”
“Save the children, I am begging you,” the landlady whispered.
Zen looked to Lan. Where his expression would be carefully controlled and reined in as always, her face changed withher moods like a summer sky. Heartbreak glinted in her eyes, along with the sparks of a new resolve. As they helped the landlady back to her feet, he saw Lan grip her ocarina, hand fisting around it.
“Nai’nai,” she said. “Grandmother. Leave it to us. Go inside.”
The old woman’s plea remained with Zen long after she’d slid her frail wooden door shut. He and Lan returned to their room and stood, side by side, before the open window. By now, utter darkness had fallen, and the air had quieted with a terrible stillness. The moon shone bright and clear, yet Zen could sense a shift in the qì around them pressing down like an encroaching storm cloud. And then, as he tuned his senses to the weave and weft of energies in the air, he found a dark, solid mass razing through the gentle streams of qì in the mountains and forests around.
Metal.
Elantians.
A river,the child had said, and Zen understood now as he observed the movement of the metallic mass, cutting through the qì. An army—and not just the scouting squad he’d fought off at the outpost. A real, sprawling army. Erascius had not only survived; he had returned with ten times as many forces. Zen closed his eyes, feeling the world swim around him.
He had traded an outpost for the wrath of the Elantian Empire.
And now he had no demon to fight with.
“We have to protect the village,” he heard Lan say, a slight tremor to her voice. “We still have time. We can hold them off while the villagers run—”
“They will never outrun the Elantian army.” Zen felt hollow as he spoke. The words seemed to be pulled from someone else’s throat as he watched from far away.
“Then, what? Leave them to their deaths? We arepractitioners,Zen. Even I know the stories—we were given this power to protect those without. Remember?” She seized him by the front of his shirt—the new one the landlady had gifted him after seeing the torn state of his páo. It was black, stitched with silk patterns of clouds and flame. He had wondered why a stranger might gift him something as precious as silk. Now he understood.
Zen closed his eyes, hating himself, hating everything. After all this time, after everything he had been through and all the cycles spent training, he was still not enough. His power had come from his demon, his prodigious practitioning abilities enhanced by its qì; without it, he was nothing. An ordinary practitioner who might be able to best a mó or a yao, earn the veneration of common folk, yet naught but an irritation in the face of the might of the Elantian Empire.
“We are but two practitioners against the strength of the Elantian army,” he said flatly. “And I no longer have my demon bound to me. There is no scenario in which we can win.”
