What would Mama say? What wouldDé’zitell her? Lan closed her eyes. She would give so much for their guidance in this moment, to tell her whether she was making the right choice.
But Mama andDé’zi, too, were gone.
“I never wanted this either,” Zen said quietly. His head was bent and from this angle, she could see only the dark crescent moons his lashes carved against his cheeks. “Given another chance, I would not choose to walk this path.” A flash of a humorless smile, and when he spoke, it was as though to himself. “In the worst moments, especially on nights when the influence of the Black Tortoise becomes unbearable, do you know what I hold on to? I think of the life I might have had, had there been no war, no conquest, no Demon Gods. I think of the life I would choose if I could relive this one, and it is a good life. A life devoted to the path of the Way, as a master of a school of practitioning. And in every iteration of my imagination, Sòng Lián, I am with you.”
She knew they thought of the same memory, of that boy and that girl in a misty, rain-soaked mountain village, lying together in a barren room.
“Don’t say that,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “You have no right to say that to me.”
They were knee-to-knee, her hand still raised from when she had slapped him. The faint moonlight that stole through the paper shutters coated his hair as though with pearl dust.
Lan leaned down and kissed him. He made a noise in the back of his throat, stiffening with surprise before he thawed, his hand coming to cup her face. His lips were salty, her tongue sweet with plum wine, and he kissed her back with barely restrained hunger so different from the courteous, distant Zen she had always known.
She loved him. She had loved him once, and then she had hated him, yet tonight as they’d lain beneath the stars and he’d spoken of his homeland and the family he’d lost with heartbreaking yearning, she had fallen in love with him all over again.
Perhaps that was what led her to pull away, voicing a thought that had formed in her mind a while back, one so selfish she hadn’t even wished to admit it to herself.
“There is something I haven’t told you about the Demon Gods,” she whispered.
He blinked. Sometime during their kiss, his hands had found their way to her waist. “Tell me.”
“I think there is a way to break a bargain.” And Lan told him of the memory she had seen in the crown prince’s mind. “The Phoenix said the bargain could be broken and the binders’ souls released, so long as there was mutual agreement. If there is another binder…if our Demon Gods agree…” She swallowed.
Zen’s eyes searched hers, and his face softened with understanding. His hand pressed against the small of her back, drawing her closer to him. The other went to her face again, caressing her hair. “We could break our bargains, let someone else take our places before casting the Godslayer?” he said gently. “If it were possible, could you live with yourself, with me, knowing the choice we made?”
Her eyes heated until he blurred; she knew the answer already.
She felt Zen’s warm thumb against her cheek, wiping the wetness from her face. Then his breath against her hair as he pressed his lips to her skin, kissing away the tracks of tears. Just as he had once before, in that mountain village of mist and rain.
She was crying in earnest now. This small gesture was proof, proof that the boy she’d fallen in love with was still here, that it had all been real. And it only made everything hurt more.
“Please don’t cry,” Zen whispered. “If I have only this one night with you, Sòng Lián, it would still be better than a lifetime without you.”
Lan met his lips with hers, thread her fingers through his hair. The world rocked slightly as she sought balance, placing one knee on the chair between his; he caught her shoulders to steady her. Then his hands traveled down her body to her hips, settling there as she slid onto his lap.
She felt his sharp intake of breath. They had been this close before, but not in a way this bold, yet as she caught his lips in hers, relishing the taste of him, she found that she no longer cared. They had spent so much time—time they didn’t have—believing they were on opposite paths when, really, they had been reaching for the same goal. When they had been two sides of the same coin.
Zen made a sound low in his throat, then clasped her arms and pulled back from her. “Lan,” he said, his voice ragged. “Do not tempt me into dishonor.”
She swiped a hand at his sleeve, then held up the amulet with the red cord. Zen blinked; he had not even caught the moment she’d stolen it from him. “If you want a lifetime with me, Xan Temurezen,” she said, “then make me a vow tonight that you will find me again in our next lives.”
His eyes were dark moons as he shifted his hand to clasphers, covering the pendant he had once gifted her. It was the only token he’d had from his clan, meant to be given to the person he chose to spend his life with. The red cord represented the threads of fate that tied two souls together across worlds, across lives. So long as they were bound, they would find each other again, no matter how long it took.
Zen took the pendant from her and wound the cord over her hand. Then he slipped his fingers between the threads so that they were palm to palm, hands clasped, bound by the red thread. He tipped his face up to her. “I love you, Sòng Lián, more than anything else in this world. And I would wish to follow you into the next life and ten thousand more.”
Lan looked at their hands, at the red thread of his pendant dangling from between their interlocked palms. They had no family, no masters, no elders to confer blessings upon them…no one but themselves in this moment, and that would be enough.
She reached out with her other hand and tugged on the cord, wrapping it fully around their hands until they were inextricably bound. “In this life and the next, and ten thousand more, I would choose you,” Lan said, and spoke his name—his full name. “Xan Temurezen.”
Gently, she swept a lock of his hair from his eyes and trailed a thumb down the length of his jaw. Tried to imagine, in a different time, a different world, the courteous young man dressed in sleek black whom she’d met in Haak’gong knocking on the doors of the courtyard house to call upon her. How they might have discussed philosophies and histories and music over a pot of steaming chrysanthemum tea, with teacups she would not have smashed into his face.
How they might have dressed in red before their families and friends and exchanged vows, hers as red cords and his as silver pendant earrings.
Lan held on to that image, in this barren little room of nothingness, and smiled as she pressed her lips to his again. He responded, his restraint falling away to pure desire as he pressed her closer against him and twined his other hand through her hair. His lips trailed down her jaw, placing kisses against her chin and then her neck in a way that made her shiver.
She clung to him with one arm, and with her heart in her throat, pulled loose the sash at her waist. Gooseflesh pricked her skin as her páo fell from her shoulders and the cold swept in. Zen’s eyes widened at the sight of her bare skin. His lips parted in a rush of air as he looked at her.
Lan had heard stories from the older girls at the teahouse, had stolen their “court flower books” on lovemaking. For all the ways she had been taught to charm and flirt with customers, she had never known love. The notion had terrified her: girls being dragged upstairs against their will, then either disappearing forever or being cast out like used rags afterward. She had thought the feeling of a man’s fingers on her would nauseate her.
