With a rallying cry, her army set out, led by Chó Tài. The palace was like a maze, but with insider knowledge, they made quick work of it. They found the high governor, court officials, and another handful of Royal Magicians barricaded in the great throne room. The demons swept through the chamber, incapacitating the magicians.
Dilaya stepped forward. The great throne of the Hin emperors had once sat here, its gold threaded through with red: the imperial colors of the Last Kingdom. The Elantians had painted it silver and woven blue into its patterns, but it was really one and the same: encrusted with jewels and corrupted with the stench of power.
Dilaya had many times attempted to picture the kind of man who might govern their kingdom under the direct command of an Elantian king from a distant land across the Sea of Heavenly Radiance.
The man staring at her from the seat of the throne, shielded by several of his non-magic-wielding officials, was nothing like the god she’d once imagined. He was a pale, wrinkled man of average height and build, sweating like a pig.
Falcon’s Claw trembled in her hand as she stared down at him. Here was the man who had fed on the suffering of the people, who had drained her land of resources, and who had attempted to wipe out the Hin as though they were vermin. Here was the man whose magicians and army had marched upon her home, slaughtered her masters…and killed E’niáng.
Grief and fury surged in her. She lifted her dao.
And hesitated.
This man was no more guilty than the emperors who had sat upon the throne before him throughout the eras this land had seen. He was no worse than the Royal Magicians who spilled Hin blood without batting an eye. He, and men like him, waged wars like playing games while the common folk of her land suffered.
No more.
It was time for power to return to the people, at last.
The land of ten thousand flowers.She could almost hear her mother’s voice, see that rare, stern smile that had always meant the world to Dilaya.
Yeshin Noro Ulara’s final words, spoken beneath the thick fall of rain, came to her.You will one day lead a clan, a people….
Dilaya lowered her dao. Stepped forward. And pointed the tip of the blade at the high governor’s neck.
Capture the general and win the war.
“My name is Yeshin Noro Dilaya,” she said in the Elantian tongue, lifting her chin. “Matriarch of the Jorshen Steel clan. I am here to negotiate the surrender of the Elantian Empire to the people of the Last Kingdom.”
And the goddess of the moon drifted back into her celestial palace of ice and snow, to gaze upon her lover from the light of another world.
—“Goddess of the Moon,”Hin Village Folktales: A Collection
When Lan came to, it was cold, the stone beneath her hard and digging into her back. She gazed at the sky for a moment, taking in the gray, roiling clouds and the white specks that drifted from them. They fell on her cheeks in pinpricks of momentary cold.
It was snowing.
She sat up, marveling at the lightness of her being, at the silence of the world. The wound in her abdomen was closed, and touching her hand over it, she felt qì like a handprint of night and flame, weaving a Seal to staunch her bleeding and heal the flesh beneath.
Zen.
Lan snapped her left wrist up. Her breath caught as memories flooded back.
A boy, his black páo draped in moonlight, reaching up to touch the night.
A beam of light unwinding, curving into a long, serpentine shape with glittering scales.
A horned head, eyes like the ice of northern mountaintops, bending to his will.
A flash of white light, and then darkness. Just like the day Mama had seared the Silver Dragon into that Seal on her wrist and everything had been set in motion.
It hadn’t been a dream: the mark of the Dragon’s bargain was gone from her arm, the skin there unblemished, as though it had never existed at all.
Say yes, Lan. One word. You usually have so many.
He had promised the Silver Dragon so many more souls—souls of the Elantian army, souls of his demonic practitioners. In the end, Lan knew the terms of the bargain would not matter, for the Godslayer would unwind all that had been made in the demonic bargain. The souls consumed. The power accumulated. The gods corrupted.
All would be released back into the natural qì of this world—as was meant to be.
