The moment my fingers close around the handle, the air shifts. Frost crackles up the trees. Their petals turn sharp, the branches extending to form jagged bars of ice. I stumble back behind a tree, biting my tongue as I nearly slip on the now-frozen ground.
In my hand, gripped so hard I can feel the grooves of the engravings in the hilt digging into my palm, is Fleet.
“As the tale goes, the fair maiden beloved by the prince was no flower…”Xisenyin’s voice rings out from all around, amplified and melodious. “…but instead, she was…a scorpion with a stinger.”
Her voice hardens, suddenly coming from behind me in a puff of cold air. Too late, I spin around and look straight into a pair of white eyes.
Xisenyin’s grin exposes rows of teeth, all sharpened to points. Her fingers have transformed to ice, frozen and jagged as they seize my arms in a viselike grip.
“Be still,”she croons, and her dark magic creeps over my body, cold threatening to sink into my bones.
I stop struggling.
Xisenyin leans into me and inhales. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch her mouth widening and her face morphing, saliva dripping down the gleaming points of her teeth…
She bites down, and I swallow a scream as pain sears through my shoulder. But I leverage the distraction to wrench myself free from her, my spirit energies flaring and pouring into my defensive talisman to resist her magic.
I twist and jam my porcelain shard into her eye.
Xisenyin screams, a horrid, inhuman sound, and I snatch thehilt of my second blade from between the folds of her gown: Poison.
I fight another wave of pain as Xisenyin pulls her teeth from my shoulder. Blood splatters like rose petals on the frost-covered ground, but I follow her as she stumbles back, covering her face with her hands. Frost snakes up her pale skin, wreathing her wounded eye. The ichor leaking from it hisses, and my porcelain shard clatters to the icy ground as she begins to grow a new eye.
I leap forward and plunge Poison through her ribs, its spirit energies pulsing between my fingers.
Xisenyin lets out a snarl, and the shock wave of power that explodes from her slams me into the ground.
There’s a ringing in my ears as I crawl unsteadily to my feet. But in my hand, I hold my third—and final—blade: Striker, which I snatched in the moment she was distracted by my attack.
I slip the blade into my sleeve and look up.
Xisenyin has straightened. Ichor leaks from her side, drifting upward like black smoke. Poison will be spreading through her veins now, with the jab I just gave her.
“How—” Xisenyin’s face is twisted in the first genuine surprise I’ve seen her display as she realizes I’ve slipped through her magic.
I turn and sprint for the pear trees. Blood, hot and thick, wells up in the wound on my shoulder, soaking into my dress. Behind me, Xisenyin shrieks commands; her dark magic sinks into my limbs, pulling me back.
I channel more of my spirit energies into my shield talismans and barrel into the maze of pear trees standing between me and the alcove where Yù’chén should be waiting. Their lights bluras Fleet pushes me forward faster than humanly possible—yet still not fast enough. Ice crackles beneath my feet as Xisenyin’s voice rings out:
“Little flower, skin soft as petals, flesh sweet as fruit…Won’t you slow down so I can taste you?”
I run out of the maze of trees, and for a moment, I’m disoriented: Colors and lights swirl around me, movement and motion in flurries of silk and skin, music and drums thrumming through the night.
I’m not back where I left Yù’chén, I realize with horror. Xisenyin conjured a passageway of flowers and altered the path, dropping me somewhere in the middle of the revelry. As I stumble through the crowd, blood soaking my sleeve and dripping onto the ground, the mó begin to take notice of me.
I grip my blades and slow, lowering my stance into a defensive crouch. I’m growing lightheaded from blood loss, and I’ve exhausted all my spirit energies fighting Xisenyin.
But I have my blades, and I will go down fighting on my own two feet.
I will not be prey.
When the first mó springs at me, I’m ready. One slash of Poison opens a wound in their neck. With the next, a gash on their ribs. And a third, a stab to their shoulder.
I feel myself slowing with each strike. More come at me, crowding closer, either at the scent of blood or to watch the spectacle.
At one point, I miss. And a mó’s teeth sink into my arm, bringing me to my knees.
An explosion of dark magic ripples across the glade. The mó on my back shrieks and disintegrates in a cloud of ichor.
