I was the first to ever admit his humanity, to make him feel worthy of who he is.
I am a life, he said to me.I, too, have a beating heart.
I reach out, and I touch the spot where his heart might be. My fingers fall through shadows, but I look up and hold his gaze.
It’s the most—and the least—I can give him.
Yù’chén lifts a hand. Presses it to my cheek. He can’t touch me, yet somehow, a ghost of a chill rushes through my skin. He gazes at me wordlessly for a long time—it might have been seconds, or minutes. Or forever.
“Àn’ying,” he says, and I feel the ache of tears rising in my chest from the way he speaks my name, the way he looks at me. “Loving you in this lifetime has felt like sliding a blade into my heart, inch by inch. I don’t have the strength anymore to wait for the day it stops hurting.”
And then he’s gone, and I am left standing alone in a chamber of phantoms stirring in the wind and shadows.
28
Àn’ying
Kingdom of Sky
Goodbye, Àn’ying.
The weight of Yù’chén’s words fill every corner of my chamber, my thoughts as scattered as the blossoms in the garden outside.
He knows. He knows I’m preparing to retaliate against the Kingdom of Night. In a way, perhaps this was the kindest gift he could give me: a parting of the two people we were when we met each other in that bamboo forest at sundown…and a knowing that we now fully stand on opposite sides of the war, with only one way this can all end.
I gather myself, reining in the pounding of my heart and the ache deep in my chest. Then I take out the lotus hairpin from within my sleeve.
At my touch, it warms briefly and begins to glow. When its light settles, it has changed back into its true form of the lotus sword—as though it anticipates what I’m about to ask.
I glance at my hand again. The little bracelet of magical fungus that Cai’hé made for me gleams with strings of spiritual energies, but my skin beneath looks healthy.
I reach into my core and gather my spirit energies, watching my skin begin to glow as I channel them to my fingertips and into the lotus sword.
I need to summon my mother’s army.
The thought streams from my mind into the spirit energies pouring into the sword.
The sword reacts. Where my fingertips touch the blade, the metal ripples, its light growing warm, like dawn reflected in water.
Within, silhouettes begin to take form: immortal warriors, one sweeping into the next: ageless, beautiful, and powerful, dressed in the same white-and-gold lamellar armor Hào’yáng once wore as a guard at the Temple of Dawn.
As they flicker past, a running tally of soldiers, the blade of my sword breaks apart into glowing lotus petals. Each is inscribed with golden characters spelling out a warrior’s name. The petals stream out into the night, brighter than stars, scattering in all directions. And just like that, my spirit vessel has released my call to the warriors of my mother’s—now my—army.
The jade-green hilt of the sword pulses softly in my palm.
I place it back on the bed by my pillow.
Then there is nothing for me to do but wait.
—
Before dawn, I dress in the white gown gifted to me by the Realm of Dragons. I’m armed with my last two crescent blades, Fleet and Poison, and I hold the hilt of my lotus sword. Likethis, I stand at the doorway to the pavilion outside my chamber. Waiting.
They arrive one by one, at first light—my mother’s battalion of immortal warriors, led by several dozen generals whom I identify by the emblems on their helmets. Hào’yáng prepared me for this during our time together in the Dragon Realm: He taught me their names, their functions, the units they command, and each unit’s specialties.
With each new arrival, a lotus petal returns to me, fitting itself to the hilt of my sword until the blade is whole again. Spirit energies roll off the warriors and their weapons like sunlight, and they look every bit the legendary immortals from the storybooks and myths I grew up with—ones I never thought I would set eyes upon, let alone find myself having to command.
You fought and clawed your way here, comes a voice in my mind.You have the secret to victory. Do not diminish the strength of your heart.
