“Let me guess. Mine isn’t readable because I’m only half-mortal.”
My head snaps up. Yù’chén watches me with that crooked smile.
“No,” I lie. “It’s just hard for me to see in the dark. Here—” I spin us, lifting his hand to catch the moonlight. “Better.”
Gently, I press one finger to a long line I don’t recognize, running from his thumb to his index finger. “This is your life line. It’s long, and jagged at the start…but grows smooth. See?” I trace the tip of my finger across the crease, buying time as I search for my next lie.
I find a crease curving down, then slowly rising. “Your fortune and fate,” I continue, and track my finger across it as I speak. “It begins low but rises.” I glance up at him, and I find his gaze pinned to mine with such intensity that for a moment, I’m unable to speak.
“Go on,” he says quietly.
“When we are born, we are set on a path to walk. That is our fate.” The words are familiar; he once spoke them to me under the monochrome night of a distant realm. “But I’ve come to realize that it is how wechooseto walk that path that becomes our destiny.” I brush a thumb to the rising half of the crease. “Your fate changes because of the choices you make in this life.”
His eyes roam my face, flickering with an emotion I can’t quite decipher. “You’ve never been a very good liar, Àn’ying.” The words, spoken softly, huskily, feel more like a lover’s whisper. “Tell me something true.”
Again, I feel as though I am falling into a night without stars. “Your heart line,” I whisper, and finally, bring my fingers to it. The one line I recognize in the utterly foreign map of his palm. “One straight, true line without an end.”
The words unfurl from my lips in a plume of cold breath. The stars above us spin, the bone moon witnessing this moment that suddenly feelsreal. We stand before each other, his palm in mine, the heart line curving toward me—a single line, dividing us with the weight of realms. A lifetime of a fate missed.
Yù’chén lifts his other hand to my face. Hesitates, then touches my cheek with a single finger. “Thank you,” he says quietly.
I don’t move away. We remain like this in the night air, and everything stretches taut between us. Me holding his palm, him cradling my chin.
Yù’chén swallows. “Àn’ying,” he whispers, and he’s silent, his chest rising and falling, as though weighing the words inside him, deciding whether to speak them out loud and break this fragile peace we seem to have reached.
Yù’chén traces my jawline with his thumb, so gently that I shiver. His palm comes to rest against my neck as he draws a deep breath. “Àn’ying,” he says again. “Can I…Can I kiss you?”
The blood rushes from my head. I stare at him, and everything else—the stars, the wind, the water, the ground—falls away.
But in this moment, it isn’t him I see.
It is Hào’yáng. Hào’yáng, so steady, so warm, so full of life and light. The golden strokes of his brush as he wrote to methrough the jade over the years, for half my lifetime. I think of him, seated at my kitchen table, the late afternoon sun painting him and my mother like a dream as he quietly confessed:For all of nine years.
Letting go of Hào’yáng would be akin to carving out a piece of my heart and setting it to the stars.
But I didn’t realize how heavy this grief I carry in my chest is. I got so used to the pain, it numbed me and trapped me under its cold, black waters.
Perhaps I no longer want it to hurt so much. And perhaps, I think as I’m pulled back into the present, back into Yù’chén’s dark, wide gaze as he awaits my answer—perhaps it’s time for me to set down my grief and focus on the path forward. To be at my best and at my sharpest, to fully focus my attention on fighting for what’s left of my world, I first need to stop drowning.
Maybe the answer is right in front of me.
I know what I felt in the past for Yù’chén. And I’m afraid to face it, to bring that dark thing back out into the light. Because loving him, however briefly, had cost me everything.
I wanted to hate him, because it was easier.
But if I am to be his ally, if I choose to dedicate myself to the Kingdom of Night in order to save my realm, I need to let go of the grief and anger drowning me.
Maybe, just maybe, I need to heal myself, too.
Even as I close the gap between me and Yù’chén, that ache flares in my chest. My eyes heat, and I can’t stop the tears that blur my vision, spilling from that dark and drowning place inside me, as I lean forward and press my lips to his.
20
Yù’chén
Palace of the Aurora, Kingdom of Night
As her lips meet mine, she breaks my heart. Her eyes fall shut; in the moonlight, I catch the silver of her tears as they slip down her cheeks, taste the tang of salt on my tongue as she begins to cry.
