“What?” Cold gripped Lan. She hadn’t seen either Dilaya or Tai since her shocking agreement to the imperial heir’s proposal. “Weren’t you with him yesterday, snooping around?”
“Yes. He and I were together the entire day, until he insisted he heard ghosts in the spring. I was going to entertain his truly bizarre notions and follow him to investigate, but that was when that little white fox spirit showed up.”
It took Lan a moment to discern who “that little white fox spirit” was, as most people became little fox spirits to Dilaya when she was annoyed. “Xue’ér?”
Dilaya’s mouth tightened as she nodded. “Of course, it was pointless for us to snoop around with her tailing us, so we agreed to return to our chambers and wait for the palace toquiet down before meeting up again. When I went to find Chó Tài, he was gone.” She moved to the shutters and soundlessly eased them open. “But I did find something. Come.”
Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, a warm desert breeze carrying the sweet scent of roses rolled in. Lan found it another of those aspects of Shaklahira that should have been pleasant but felt off. Deserts were meant to be freezing at night and blistering during the day, yet the Boundary Seal and the many other Seals pulsing across this place kept it wrapped in a shroud of its own.
The sky was tinged with the faintest blue from the sprinkling of stars over their heads. The color lanced across Crescent Spring and the whispering silver grasses that surrounded it and illuminated footsteps leading to the water.
They were clearly Tai’s—Lan had spent too long trekking in the desert after him not to recognize the print of his boots, the size of his feet. Dilaya cast Lan a look bordering on anxious.
Together, they traced the boot prints from the side doors leading out of Tai’s room in the palace to the edge of the spring. The prints followed the shoreline to the other side, away from the palace gardens.
There, they simply disappeared. As though Tai had vanished into the water.
Lan stared at Crescent Spring, which reflected the night sky as perfectly as a looking glass. She recalled carp darting around when they’d first crossed the bridge into the secret realm of Shaklahira, yet the waters were perfectly still now.
There was something else, though, directly ahead of where Tai’s footprints had ended. In the middle of the water was a cluster of lotuses, their pale petals catching the starlight. Curiously, the lotus seeds were golden, and as smooth as pearls.
The realization hit her: she’d seen them before.
“Hóng’yì takes these for his consumption,” Lan murmured.
“Looks like Ghost Boy took a sudden interest in them,” Dilaya said gruffly. “Damned flowers.”
“There must have been a reason Tai tried to get to them,” Lan mused, kicking off her straw sandals and hiking up the silks of her páo.
“What are you doing?” Dilaya, realizing Lan’s intentions, grabbed her friend’s arm. “Are you mad? There is awater demonin that spring!”
“Do you want to find Tai or not?” Lan retorted. Dilaya’s scowl darkened, but she let go.
The water was freezing. Even in the warm desert morning, Lan began to shiver as she waded in deeper. The surface of the spring was as black as ink; as she put one foot in front of the other, she could not see past her ankles, where the water swallowed her feet. Cold seeped into her veins, taking root: its yin energies seemed to thread over her core. A fog had begun to roll in, pressing in over the silver grasses until they were swallowed by gray. Only the lotuses kept their color, golden seeds full and shimmering like honey.
Lan reached out.
As soon as the tip of her finger touched the seed, qì rippled as though a great sigh had torn through Shaklahira and an invisible curtain had lifted. The surface of the water cleared, and Lan found herself staring into the face of a girl beneath the waves: pale, wearing an expression of terror.
Lan bit down on her tongue to stop herself from crying out. Around them, shapes were darting in the water: ghosts, their qì trailing, cold, behind them, their whispers filling the air with an eerie chittering.
The ghost of the girl reached out to Lan. The golden lotus seed brightened.“Help me,”the ghost said, her voice like the sigh of wind.“Don’t let him or his water demon consume my soul.”
The world tipped sharply out of balance. Lan’s thoughts were frozen; she couldn’t reconcile the reality of what she was seeing, hearing.
Far in the depths of the water, a great eye opened as the demon within Crescent Spring awakened and turned its attention to Lan. The ghosts underwater were streaming toward her, away from the demon, and she heard faint echoes of their distressed cries as they fled. Within her, the qì of the Silver Dragon stirred, sensing danger.
She palmed That Which Cuts Stars and her ocarina and braced herself, but the attack never came. Instead, the demon shifted, its attention caught by a strong wind gusting across the water from somewhere at the end of the bridge, where the Gate Seal to the outside world was.
It turned and plunged back into the depths of the spring. The last that Lan saw of it was the flick of its thick serpentine body, larger than a rowboat, as it vanished toward the other end of the bridge.
Lan craned her neck, trying to peer through the fog to see what had attracted the water demon’s attention.
A hand snaked around her midriff. The next thing she knew, she was being dragged to shore. Sand and grass obscured her vision; when she blinked again, the fog was gone.
“What did you see?” Dilaya’s eye was wide. Her hand went to the hilt of Falcon’s Claw. “What was that?”
“Ghosts,” Lan replied. She was soaked and shivering as her páo clung to her; she hadn’t even realized how deep into the lake she’d gone. “Souls, Dilaya—the lotus seeds. He sacrifices souls and consumes them to replenish his own core. That’s how he’s kept his sanity while being bound to a Demon God.” The image of the terrified ghost’s face came back to her; the thin keens of the spirits as they’d raced away from the water demon.
