He takes a sip from his own cup, then sets it down. “The whole truth,” he says, and his face settles into that look of concentration I’ve seen so often on him. “Last time, I told you the story of your father pulling me from the rubble of my home and taking me to the immortal realm.
“I arrived broken, lost, a shell of who I’d been. I’d just watched my family die before my eyes, and I had failed my people and my realm. I had no idea what my future looked like—if I even had one at all. The loss and the shame of it all nearly killed me. I remember sitting down for my first meal in the Kingdom of Sky, dressed in fabric woven from the clouds and glinting with sunlight, surrounded by the immortals I had heard of instories, beings I’d only dared hope I would glimpse once in my lifetime…and I wanted to disappear from this world. The real cruelty of death is the suffering it causes the living.”
He stares at a spot on the table. I want to reach back out through time and hold his hand—the hand of the young heir who had lost his kingdom and the child who had lost his entire family.
“Then one day, Lady Shi’ya brought me something: a broken jade pendant with jagged edges. She told me that inside was a little girl who would need my help, and that I had to stay strong for her.” A smile flits across Hào’yáng’s lips. “I thought she was lying to me, that she had made up some silly story for my benefit—so I threw the pendant across my chambers and left it there.
“That is, until one day, I heard a voice speaking from the other side.”
A shudder breaks through me. I can hear myself as though it were just yesterday; I can see the wink of my pendant in the moonlight, smell Méi’zi’s hair as she dozed curled up against me, taste the fear and despair pressing against me in those early days as Ma lay unmoving on our couch.Help me, I whispered to the stone, because I had nothing else to hold on to and no one else to ask.Please. Someone.
“I picked up the pendant, certain I was hallucinating—but there you were.” Hào’yáng smiles. “You were so thin, and so pale in the moonlight. You were nine or ten, just a year or so younger than me—but you looked as though you had survived a living nightmare. The way you gazed into the pendant…it was as though you were looking into my soul. Pleading for myhelp.
“I spoke to it, but I realized you couldn’t hear me—so I didthe only thing I could think of. I picked up my brush, and I wrote back. I wrote the first thing that came to mind.”
“ ‘I am here,’ ”I whisper.
“ ‘I am here,’ ” Hào’yáng echoes softly. “And then you continued to talk to me. I realized that, though I could see you and hear you, you could only read the words I wrote back to you.
“I felt something I hadn’t in a long time: A sense of purpose. And a knowing that I was fortunate to be safe and alive and fed in a realm away from the nightmare that mine had become. That countless others—my people—were suffering and struggling to stay alive.
“You saved my life that night. I realized how much of a coward I’d been, how selfish and weak. So I began to train. I spent every waking hour training with the Kingdom of Sky disciples. I promised myself that even as a mortal, I would become the best warrior of them all.”
“And you did,” I say softly. “You became captain of the guard.”
He doesn’t match my smile. “Because of you, Àn’ying. Everything I did was because of you. Because I told myself that one day, I would be strong enough to return to my kingdom, that I would find you, my girl in the jade, and I would liberate our realm.”
I’m breathless with this confession. This truth, this affirmation, that I’d been seeking from him for so long.
“And somewhere along the way,” Hào’yáng continues, his gaze soft, sunlit as it finds me, “I fell in love with you. From telling you how to fish and hunt to laughing when you slipped and fell in the pond…teaching you to spar and use your blades and draw talismans…I fell in love with you. With your bravery, your protectiveness, your loyalty, and your ferocity.
“When the light lotuses began to die and you were strong enough, I told you about the Immortality Trials. I was almost ready to return to the mortal realm and claim the throne by then; Lady Shi’ya had planned this with me early on, to save your family and enlist your help once more. But a part of me longed to see you for entirely selfish reasons, more than anything else I have ever wanted in this lifetime.
“When you fell in the ocean at the Immortals’ Steps, I broke a sacred rule of the Trials and flew with Meadowsweet to save you. And when I first met you, at the edge of the Celestial Gardens, I felt as though I had been waiting for that moment for half my lifetime. I wanted to tell you everything then—all be damned, I wished to break every rule of those nonsensical trials for you. But Lady Shi’ya had asked me to first ensure that youwantedto help us. So I needed to get close to you without revealing who I was.
“But I heard the candidates speak of rumors that you had a lover among them.” His gaze falls to the sand. “I also knew that the entire reason you were there, the reason your family was torn apart and you needed the pill of immortality that was the prize in the trials…was because of me. I had taken your place in the Kingdom of Sky, I had grown up safe and healthy while you were out there fighting for your life each day, and I realized I didn’t deserve you. I told myself that so long as you were happy, you should be with whomever you wished, live your life however you wanted—and I would be content with watching you from the side, keeping you safe, and loving you in silence.” Finally, he lifts his eyes again to meet mine. “And that still holds true.”
The rest of the world has faded. The sun, the water, the trees,the flowers…nothing else exists in this moment but me and my boy in the jade.
Hào’yáng is the sun in my life. The golden strokes on my jade pendant, always there, always steady and reassuring and offering me comfort and warmth. Until the day he nearly vanished forever, I never realized how much of my life he had touched.
I hold his gaze. “I think,” I begin, and he goes very still, watching me with an unwavering gaze, “that I have been searching for you my entire life.”
Hào’yáng’s lips part.
“And I think I realized too late,” I continue, “the night I almost lost you, that I cannot bear to live in a world without you.”
He exhales sharply. His eyes flicker with a torrent of emotions that I know he buries beneath that cool exterior, and I see Hào’yáng, the boy in the jade and the man I have come to love, rather than the captain or the guard or the heir.
“You saved me when I was most broken and in need of a light in the darkness,” I whisper, my voice cracking now at the memory of those dark days. “All along, you were there for me, expecting nothing in return. You have been my friend, my guardian, and the one closest to my soul.”
“And I always will be,” Hào’yáng says, and presses something into my palm.
“My handkerchief,” I breathe. The silk is soft in my hands, slightly worn, yet an inexplicable sense of comfort and hope knots in my throat. “You kept it.”
“Àn’ying.” The way he speaks my name makes me look up at him. “I’ve never said any of this because I was afraid to put pressure on you. Afraid that it wasn’t what you wanted. Buttoday, I’m going to be a selfish man.” Hào’yáng’s gaze suddenly churns with the strength of an ocean, sweeping me into it without hope of resisting. “You told me the night after your first hunt, after you swapped your needles for your blades, that you’d always dreamt of seeing the ocean. Of seeing the rest of the realm and embroidering it.”
I nod, my throat tight. I don’t trust myself with words rightnow.
