“Find them. Kill the heir and bring me the girl.”
6
Àn’ying
Xi’lín Village, Central Province, Kingdom of Rivers
We have only hours before the sun vanishes and the long night takes over.
I can’t recall seeing this much activity in the village since the early days of the war. There are provisions to be packed: dried meats and salted vegetables that will keep for weeks on the road. The weapons left behind by the soldiers and practitioners from our village who once fought against the Kingdom of Night—their daggers, longswords, and armor—must be distributed among the villagers.
Hào’yáng and I, along with Lì’líng, Tán’mù, and three more of our most trusted warriors, will make for the Kingdom of Sky—or whatever is left of it.
I’m grateful for the constant action that keeps my mind moving, distracted from the revelation I overheard earlier.
One I do not know how to approach.
What I do know, with certainty: Hào’yáng is avoiding me. I catch glimpses of him speaking to our soldiers, yet he is always gone before I can reach him.
I focus on packing the most important items in my room. I run a hand over the shelves of practitioning tomes from which my father learned his arts, and through which he taught me in the early days of the war before he died. How many days and nights did I spend curled up against these books as my mother and sister slept, yearning and yearning for his return—to hear the whistle of his sword outside in dawn’s light as he practiced his fighting and realize this was all simply a long nightmare?
And when the nightmare did not relent and you realized this was the new normal, whispers a small voice in my mind,who did you turn to?
Even touching the jade pendant—Hào’yáng’s jade pendant—sends a jolt through my fingers. I turn the stone over, careful and hardly daring to breathe as I examine its smooth surface; the jagged edges from when it was broken off from mine. I imagine him sitting in the Temple of Dawn, writing to the mortal girl a realm away.
For all of nine years.
“…Àn’ying?”
I startle and scramble to my feet as my mother appears in my doorway. She’s swaying, leaning heavily on the walking canes the carpenter’s daughter fashioned for her as she regained use of her legs.
“Ma!” I exclaim, rushing to her. She trembles as I lower her into a chair; her clothes and forehead are sticky with perspiration. She holds up a hand as I grab a cloth to clean her face with.
“I’m fine,” she says. She looks up at me and beams, herwinter-tinged cheeks flushing pink. “I just wanted a few moments alone with my daughter. Come here, Àn’ying.”
She opens her arms, and suddenly I’m a child again, folding myself into her hug after a long day at the village school. I close my eyes and breathe in her scent of soap and chrysanthemums, and the faint, homey smell of cooking lingering in her hair.
“Àn’ying. Àn’ying?” Ma strokes my hair. “Don’t cry.”
“I’m not,” I whisper, but my cheeks are warm and wet, and my voice shakes. “I just…I don’t want to leave you again.” I swallow, but the words pour out, the most shameful and selfish and vulnerable truths I have hidden away all these long years. “I don’t want this. I just want to be with you and Méi’zi and Bà, right here, in our home.”
“Oh. Oh, my heart, shh.” My mother caresses my hair in the way she did when I was little and had trouble sleeping. Her voice washes over me in waves as she murmurs, “I won’t coddle you with any promises, Àn’ying. But if you have made the choice to fight in this war, then I need you to honor that, and I need you to be brave.” She pauses. “If you find you cannot live up to the promise you made, you need to let Hào’yáng knownow.”
“No!” I shake my head. I’ve made my choice already; so much of this war depends on me and my ability to claim Lady Shi’ya’s title and army.
The lotus weighs heavy in my dress bodice.
“It’s not that, Ma,” I say. “It’s just…I don’t know what will happen in the after, when all this is over.” I lean back, holding my mother’s hands as if they are anchors, gazing into her eyes as if she will have the answer for me. “Everything will have changed. I’m marrying the future emperor of this realm, and I…” I swallow, and I finally speak the truth aloud between us.“I am Lady Shi’ya’s heir; I hold a piece of her legacy in the immortal realm.” My grip tightens. “I don’t know that anything can go back to how it once was.”
My mother tips my face up to hers. Her thumb, rough with her seamstress’s callouses, strokes my cheek. “Such is life,” she says softly. “Àn’ying, you cannot live your life chasing the shadows of the past—whether it’s your father’s dying wishes or the days in the sun with me and Méi’zi. You must look to the future, my daughter, and choose how you wish to shape it. Your sister and I will always be here, and we will always be a part of you.” She gathers me in her arms again, holding me so, so tightly. “No matter what you choose, who you become, and where you are in these realms, Àn’ying, you willalwaysbe my daughter.”
I hear the words she does not speak; I feel, then, a strange untethering, an ending and a beginning, and a revelation of the hints Méi’zi has given me over the past few days.
I have been fighting for so long to return to those golden, hazy afternoons with my family beneath our plum blossom tree. But that past is long gone.
You can let go of us now, Àn’ying.Méi’zi’s wide eyes come back to me.
“There is one thing,” my mother says softly, drawing back, “that I would like to ask of you.”
