“I will have medicinal stew brewed for you by the time you return,” Shàn’jun called cheerfully.
“Please don’t,” Lan muttered.
“Lots andlotsof healing caterpillar-fungus soup. May the winds be smooth on your journey!”
Tsomurejin was silent as they walked downhill. At the bottom of the mountain, beyond the Boundary Seal, a horse and carriage from the capital city awaited them. The carriage was engraved with intertwining flowers: plum blossoms and yellow chrysanthemums and pink peonies and blush lotuses—and at Lan’s personal request, snow camellias.
“Mama,” Tsomurejin said quietly. He had grown somber,with a small crease between his brows that reminded Lan, achingly, of someone else. “Each time I visit the capital and the city of Where the Flame Rises and the Stars Fall, people talk to me about Bàba. What if I can’t be as good as Bàba when I grow up?”
Lan slowed and bent slightly so that she was at eye level with her son. He wore his hair short, in the style that some Hin men had kept even after the Elantians had withdrawn their forces across the Sea of Heavenly Radiance. A lock had fallen over his face.
She gently tucked it behind his ear. “Is that what you’re worried about?”
Tsomurejin lowered his gaze, his eyelashes carving black crescents across his cheeks.
Lan pressed a hand to her son’s cheek. “Xan Tsomurejin,” she said. “Today, I will tell you the words your father once spoke to me. You must remember them.”
Tsomurejin’s eyes flitted up. He nodded, always eager to know more of the father he had never met.
Lan drew a steadying breath. Thought of the rainy bamboo forest where she had once lost everything and everyone she’d loved, where a boy had taken her by the hand and given her the will to live again. “He said, ‘You do not only live for yourself. You live for those you have lost. You carry their legacies inside you.’ ”
Thirteen cycles, and the pain had become a familiar one that she carried from day to day. It was a good pain: a reminder that she had once loved deeply, one that made the golden moments in this life seem sweeter.
“Your father gave his life for this kingdom,” Lan said, “so that we could choose to live as we would wish. He and I were born into a land where we had little choice.” She waved a hand around, at the schoolhouses nestled in the lush mountains,at the quiet sounds of meditation and lecture drifting from within. “Once, all this was banned.”
“Tài’shu taught us in History,” Tsomurejin said, but his eyes were wide and as curious as a bird’s.
“There was also a time,” she continued, “when our history could not be taught. When you would have grown up with a different name, and you would never have known of Bàba’s and Mama’s clans.” She touched her fingers to his chest. “So long as we live on, we carry inside us all that they destroyed. That is our triumph.”
Tsomurejin looked down at her hand. A deeply pensive expression had crossed his face, and that was how Lan knew his father’s words had taken root.
Gently, Tsomurejin took his mother’s hands and cradled them between his own. His lips curved in a grin, but Lan could see thoughts still swirling in his dark eyes as he turned and began to continue down the stone path. “That sounds horrible. I don’t know that I’d be able to endure a life without riding horses on the steppes.”
Tsomurejin adored the long-haired horses on the Northern Steppes. The summers he spent there at Stars’ Fall and the Palace of Eternal Peace were amongst his favorite times.
“No horses,” Lan confirmed. “No sweetened fermented milk, no weaving Seals from your flute.”
“Dogfart.” He sighed.
“No dirty words,” Lan chided, but she gave him a conspiratorial grin. “Bàba would disapprove. Now come. Let us visit the People’s Capital, and then we’ll be off to the Northern Steppes.”
Her son brightened at this. Together, they made for the nine hundred ninety-nine steps that led down the mountain. Before them stood the age-old boulder that denoted:Where the Rivers Flow and the Skies End.
A sudden brush of wind touched her cheeks. Lan had the strange sense that someone gazed at her from behind. When she turned around, there was no one: an empty courtyard strewn with plum blossom petals. The Chamber of Waterfall Thoughts had been vacated, Seals class dismissed for the day. Yet as Lan gazed into it, another breeze swept through the mountain, stirring the pines and the flowering trees that hung low over the schoolhouse. In a corner of the chamber, one of the gauze curtains rippled, shifting shadows and sunlight. And for a moment—just a moment—Lan thought two figures appeared in the shade, bent over inkpots and scrolls and tomes. The girl shifted, horsetail brush in hand, as the boy’s gentle fingers came to wrap around hers, guiding her strokes.
She blinked, and they were gone. The gauze curtains and lotus lamps flickered in the wind. A trick of the light, then.
Sòng Lián smiled.In the next life, Zen,she thought and, taking their son’s hand, walked out into the Kingdom of Ten Thousand Flowers.
