But mortals cannot perform enchantments with dark magic.
Movement in the bushes to my left. I pivot, thoughts scattering, just as a blurred figure shoots out and lunges at me.
I raise my hands to parry my attacker’s blade. But it’s not aimed at me.
Snip.
As though time has slowed, I see my attacker’s sword cut through the sash that ties me to Yù’chén. I hear Yù’chén yell as though from a distance, and I understand now—too late—what he was trying to save me from.
“I told you I’d be waiting for you,” Yán’lù snarls and slams his heel into my chest. I stumble backward. One, two steps. On the third, my foot treads on empty air.
This time, I fall.
8
It takes me a long time to fall. The wind screams in my ears, and the world around me is a blur of gray clouds. Shapes within them haunt me, forms appearing and disappearing in the gray. But in the moments before I die, I do not see the ones I love.
I see the ones I need to kill.
I see Yán’lù’s despicable sneer. I see the red-lipped Higher One, smiling at me from the shadows outside my window. I see Yù’chén in all his impossible beauty, turning to me in the forest glade the first time I met him.
No,I think numbly, fumbling for my blades. No, I cannot die yet. I cannot leave this life with people like them here, in the same world as Méi’zi and Ma.
My crescent blades are still strapped to me. I palm my eighth blade, Healer.
Come on,I think desperately, jamming my palm into the hilt and sending a spark of spirit energy into the talisman. Itactivates and I hold on to it against the shriek of wind in my ears, the nauseating tumble of free fall that I am in.
But even Healer cannot prevent the certain death rising up to meet me.
The clouds end abruptly, the skies yielding to an expanse of deep blue water glittering like diamonds.
I slam into the sea, and I’m struck with the acute pain of every single bone in my body breaking.
—
When I was eleven, I nearly drowned. It was my first time seeking out the light lotuses for Ma by a pond in the bamboo forest north of our village. It was a winter’s night, the forest floor a maze of glittering ice, yet I could not risk bringing a lantern for fear of attracting mó.
I slipped and fell into the half-frozen pond.
I remember my chest constricting, my muscles ceasing to move as the cold slid like daggers into my bones. The darkness and pressure were overwhelming as I sank into certain death.
A voice, and the water itself, saved me that day.
—
There is a light in the darkness. A glow, softly pulsing, flickering like the embers of a fire. It winks above me like the beat of a heart. Growing stronger, lighting up the ocean currents around me like strokes of golden ink.
I am here.
There is a voice in the silence. Faint at first, but growing clearer.Àn’ying,it calls, gentle, firm. Familiar.Àn’ying, wake up.
Something in the periphery of my vision flashes. At first, I think it is one of my mother’s silver needles. In the shiftingwaters, I imagine her warm brown eyes, the smile she used to wear so easily, which Méi’zi inherited. Their wavy hair, the way they brimmed with music and sunlight.
I hear their voices now, echoing from somewhere distant.
I am here,they tell me.
I am no longer sinking. Currents wrap around me like the arms of a lover, cocooning me. That flashing, weaving silver comes closer, curling and twisting like a ribbon. Something twines around my body, long and serpentine and gentle, and I feel myself drawn upward…toward a pair of large, liquid brown eyes, like those of a snow-pelted deer. Antlers, teeth that flash silver…and scales like moonlight.
