Well, she doubted that the crown prince would have the Godslayer sitting on a cabinet with a neat placard underneath. The best way to start when one needed information, Lan had always found, was through conversation.
A serving girl in the gardens led her to a pavilion, where a flock of servants immediately offered up an array of teas and qì-remedying herbal soups and sesame cakes. Lan’s cheerful attempts at making conversation went ignored.
“This is delicious,” Lan said, flashing the servants her sweetest smile. “Have all of you been here for a while?”
They only bowed and shuffled back.
“They don’t talk,” came a voice, and Lan was relieved to see Dilaya striding through the rosebushes toward her, sabers at her hips. Without waiting for an invitation, she sat and reached for a platter of honeymelons. “Trust me, I’ve tried.”
“Maybe that’s because you’re not very charming,” Lan said.
Dilaya flicked a melon rind at Lan, who dodged it. Immediately, one of the servant girls scurried forward to pick it up.
“Let me,” Lan said quickly. There was something uncomfortable about being waited on; she had spent too many cycles of her life on the other side of the screen, bowing and scraping for patrons at the teahouse. She reached for the melon rind, but her hand jabbed against the back of the girl’s hand andpushed up the sleeve of her páo. On the girl’s smooth skin, a pattern had been painted in cinnabar.
Lan’s lips parted. Where had she seen this mark before?
The girl blinked and cast Lan a glance. She snatched her hand away and retreated, all but fleeing with the melon rind.
Lan straightened. She had the strangest feeling that she was looking at a painting that wasn’t quite right, that was missing something. She glanced at a cluster of sand hibiscus, the blooms jarringly bright against the endless stretch of desert beyond. That was it: everything here was too beautiful, too perfect, from the neatly manicured gardens to the gilded palace.
None of it should have existed in the first place.
She leaned forward, speaking to Dilaya in an undertone and cutting straight to the point. “We need to spread out and search for the Godslayer—but first, we need to know what it is. Did your mother give you any clues?”
“I don’t even think they knew,” Dilaya replied.
“The immortal back in Nakkar told me it was a ‘tool of qì.’ ” Lan blew a strand of her hair from her face. “That could be anything imbued with energies.”
“Right.” Dilaya’s gray eye flashed. “Although we do have one point of leverage we should use to our advantage.”
“And that is?”
Dilaya smiled wolfishly. “Haven’t you noticed? Prince Hóng’yì has taken an interest in you. He could barely keep his eyes off you last night. I suggest you use your”—a lift of her eyebrows—“charmto try to squeeze some answers out of him, and to keep him distracted so that Tai and I can search this place.”
Lan glanced around at the endless sands, the greenery and rosebushes that bloomed from arid land, the glittering spring that led to the other side of the Gate Seal. All was so tranquil, without any hint of demonic qì. So why had the star map ofthe Crimson Phoenix pointed here? And would Hóng’yì even know about the Godslayer? The imperial heir was an enigma of his own.
One thing was certain: beneath the idyllic oasis and languid dunes were buried secrets.
Waiting to be uncovered.
“We need to understand what he wants,” she said. “He is the heir to the emperor of the former regime. A worthwhile ally, but I must first gain his trust.”
Dilaya’s jaw tightened. “Just be careful. That man’s ancestors are responsible for slaughtering my clan.”
Lan looked away.People are not their ancestors,she wanted to say to Dilaya, but then what of Zen, who had chosen precisely the same path of destruction that his great-grandfather had carved out in blood?
“I’ll be careful,” she said, and then switched topics. “Have you seen Tai?”
Dilaya scowled. “He always slept in till the hour of the snake, even back at Skies’ End.”
“The hour of the snake seems a good time to rise.”
Dilaya opened her mouth as though to bicker, and Lan wished she would. Quarreling with Dilaya might bring some semblance of normalcy to this strange, silent place. But then the spark in the girl’s eye died, and the shadow of their mission swept over her expression again, settling between them.
“I will find him, and we will see what we find in these golden halls,” Dilaya said. “In the meantime, see what information you can glean from the prince.”
Lan plucked a sand hibiscus from its bush and proffered it to Dilaya. “I never thought the day would come when you’d admit that my charm and wit have some use.”
