Lan shielded her eyes as she squinted into the distance. Sand dunes. Sand duneseverywhere.She’d had enough sand for a lifetime. For multiple lifetimes.
“Time to call it a day.”
Yeshin Noro Dilaya’s shadow fell over Lan as the girl came to a stop by her side. A few days under the blistering sun had darkened her skin from a pale northern shade to sandy brown. She’d traded her initial gauze veil for a less transparent one that obscured her entire face—and for good reason. With her eye patch, Dilaya was too recognizable, since she’d been one of the three Hin practitioners to best a high-ranking Elantian Royal Magician and the entire Elantian army was likely searching for them.
Lan braced herself for the pain that inevitably came whenrecalling the battle that had occurred at Skies’ End. The wound was still fresh, the pain a lake of sorrow to drown in. Less than one moon past, the Elantian army had finally discovered the clandestine location of the last school of practitioning. Two masters had taken the disciples—children and adolescents, barely half trained in practitioning—and fled; their whereabouts were still unknown. The remaining eight masters, including the grandmaster, had stayed to fight.
It had been a massacre.
Lan blinked away the faces of ghosts.
It was during the fall of Skies’ End and the School of the White Pines, in the grandmaster’s final moments, that Lan learned that her mother, Sòng Méi, had once been part of an underground rebellion that sought to end the cycles of power struggles the Hin and the clans waged over the Four Demon Gods. After the fall of the Ninety-Nine Clans and the Elantian invasion, the Order of Ten Thousand Flowers had continued to operate in secrecy at the school, working to track down the locations of the lost Demon Gods…and the weapon that would return the cores of their essence back into the qì of the world.
The Godslayer, once meant to serve as a balance to the endless power the Four Demon Gods held, had been hidden away for dynasties by the imperial family as they sought to control all four. The imperial family had built a secret palace to store their most sacred possessions: Shaklahira, the Forgotten City of the West. Its location and form had been kept so secret throughout the ages that now it was believed to be nothing more than a myth.
Only one place in the Last Kingdom remained where all the myths and legends of these lands had been preserved: the City of Immortals, whose inhabitants had served as their guardians. Once ruled by the fabled Yuè clan, rumored to have cultivatedthe secrets to immortality, the city was said to house ancient tomes of history in a magical library that appeared once every full moon. If there was a map or record of Shaklahira to be found, it would be in the City of Immortals.
Most important, the city had withstood the trials of time, war, and regime shift. Today, it remained standing in the Emaran Desert as a trading post on the Jade Trail, known to the locals as Nakkar. And it was heavily guarded by Elantian forces.
Lan cast her gaze up the trail they followed. It was nearly empty at this hour, save for a few distant caravans, their shadows stretching long fingers across the unbroken dunes. Trudging along behind her, dressed in a purple turban and a black desert tunic they’d bartered from one of the Achaemman traders, was Chó Tài. Tai had learned of the Forgotten City from none other than the crown prince, as they had grown up together in the Imperial Palace. There, Tai had been raised to serve the emperor as their Spirit Summoner—for as a member of the Chó clan, Tai specialized in communing with ghosts and hearing whispers of the dead.
This was evidenced by the small silver bell that hung from his belt. It was no ordinary bell but a family heirloom from the clan of Spirit Summoners. Tai’s bell chimed only in the presence of supernatural qì.
“Hurry up, Chó Tài,” Lan called. “Why did your mother gift you with long legs if you’re not going to use them?”
They’d made the decision to stick to the Jade Trail and take on the disguise of traveling merchants in order to blend in with the ebb and flow of traders from all corners of the eastand west. Yet whereas trade caravans gladly stopped to rest andreplenish supplies at the trade checkpoints, Lan, Dilaya, and Tai had avoided the checkpoint towns, going off-trail to sleep under the stars, huddled beneath the cloth pallets they carried. There was good reason for this: though the Elantian militarypresence rested heavily on the eastern coast of the Last Kingdom, soldiers guarded the gates of all towns along the Jade Trail to monitor the pulse of activities out west. Stopping at a checkpoint meant potentially attracting the attention of Elantian patrols—or worse, Royal Magicians.
Traveling along the Jade Trail also meant that they could not use the Light Arts to travel faster, for using any form of practitioning risked giving away their locations and identities to the Royal Magicians. Though Hin practitioners used a different branch of practitioning from Elantian metalwork, each had the ability to sense the presence of the other’s magic, all of which used qì. This meant Lan had not been able to wield her two most precious possessions: a black clay ocarina inlaid with a mother-of-pearl lotus, and a small dagger that glinted like stars.
Lan’s throat was scratchy with thirst as she watched Tai struggle up a dune.
“Did I”—the Spirit Summoner panted—“did I give you permission to call me by my truename?”
He then promptly collapsed onto the sand.
Lan crouched next to him. “Conceit’s a little difficult for you to pull off, given your current circumstances.” She plucked at his purple turban, which had been knocked askew. “Though I have to admit, this color suits your gold-gray eyes. Quite becoming on you.”
“Becoming. I am becoming a sand spirit,” mourned Tai.
Over the past few weeks, the Spirit Summoner’s sarcasm had slowly returned, almost as though he were back to his former self. Yet there were moments when Lan caught him staring into the distance toward the east, and she knew whom he thought of: Shàn’jun, the gentle Medicine disciple he loved.
An ache tightened Lan’s chest at the thought of Shàn’jun.The last time she’d seen him, he’d been kneeling in the rain, attempting to revive their grandmaster.
Her father.
Whom Zen had murdered.
Zen.
Lan’s breath hitched as a visceral pain seared her heart: torrential grief and burning fury. And beneath it all, a bitter self-loathing that she had once trusted him, loved him, and he had used that to betray her. He had made a bargain with the Black Tortoise, bartering his mind, body, and soul in exchange for its unfathomable power—a most dangerous, dark form of practitioning that had almost torn apart the Last Kingdom.
With it, he had killed the grandmaster, who had raised him.
In a memory that haunted her waking moments and made her nightmares, he stood before her, rain lashing them in a storm of demonic qì, his eyes utterly black and his face devoid of emotion. Beautiful—Zen had always been beautiful. Terrifying.
Demonic.
I have chosen my path. If you are not with me, then you are against me.
