“I don’t have to do anything!” the empress cried. “Don’t you understand? You’velost! Just because I can’t stop you from talking to Xian doesn’t mean he’ll listen. I raised him to be an emperor before all else, and now, thanks to your sister, he’s failed his greatest responsibility. The ancient line of the Qilin isdead, and there’s nothing you can say that will bring it back.”
“You’re right,” Julius admitted, turning back to the Qilin. “I can’t change the past, but I don’t have to, because that’s not where we live. We’re alive right now, and if there’s one thing being Bob’s tool has taught me, it’s thatnowcan always be changed for the better.”
The Empress Mother looked baffled by that, but Julius had already put her out of his mind. He also banished the sick feeling of worry for Chelsie and Fredrick, whom he hadn’t seen since they’d been swept away in the flood that was still raging behind him. He let go of everything, focusing only on the dragon in front of him as he got down on his stomach in the cold mud so he could look at the Qilin face to blank face.
“Your Majesty?”
Nothing.
“Emperor?”
Nothing again.
“Xian?”
It was probably wishful thinking, but Julius would have sworn he saw the emperor’s golden eyes flicker at his name. It wasn’t enough to go on, but Julius took it anyway.
“Do you remember what I told you in the throne room?” he said softly. “Chelsie told you the truth today, and while you are the very last Qilin, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. You’ve been held prisoner by a power you can’t control for your entire life, holding everything in and making yourself miserable for centuries in the name of duty. But if misery is the price of the Qilin’s good fortune, then it’s not good fortune at all. It’s acurse. I wouldn’t wish your luck on my worst enemy, and I don’t thinkyouwould, either.”
He smiled. “Look at it that way, and this whole thing becomes a blessing in disguise. You haven’t lost an irreplaceable gift. You’ve spared your son from having to suffer as you have, and that’s more good fortune than your luck has ever brought you.”
He paused there, holding his breath, but the emperor’s face was still as blank as ever, and Julius sighed.
“Chelsie told me you always wanted children,” he said, trying a different approach. “Well, now you have twenty. Twenty-one, counting the baby. You’ve got Chelsie, too. She never wanted to cut you off. The only reason she lied was because she was afraid ofthis.”
He waved his hand at the destruction around them.
“But it doesn’t have to be this way. You can’t control your luck, but youcancontrol how you react to things, and this isn’t the catastrophe your mother claims. Yes, the Qilin line is broken, but you’re still emperor. You’ve still got your dragons and your lands, but now you have a family, too.Yourfamily, who needsyou. You already lost Chelsie once because of this. How much more are you going to let being Qilin take from you?”
As he said that last part, Julius felt the ground shift under his hand. When he looked down, he saw that the Qilin’s fingers had dug deep into the soft dirt. He didn’t know if that was because of him or not, but it was the first movement he’d made since he’d gone down. Julius was scrambling to think how best to build on that when Fredrick burst out of the water with a gasp.
The giant wave had passed while he’d been talking to the Empress Mother, but the flood was still raging. Julius was high and dry thanks to the lee of the fallen Skyway and the little hill the emperor had chosen to collapse on, but the rest of the lot, the street, and the buildings on the other side were consumed beneath several feet of violently churning brown water.
It flowed so fast, the water dragged Fredrick right back off his feet. He fought his way up again a second later, grabbing a chunk of the collapsed Skyway to keep his head above water as he looked around frantically. It wasn’t until he dove back into the flood, though, that Julius realized Chelsie hadn’t come up yet.
An icy stab of dread went through him, and he turned back to the emperor. “Please, Xian,” he begged. “Don’t let them use you like this! You’re not a weapon. You’re a dragon. An emperor! Who cares what your mother wants? You can still have everythingyouwant: Chelsie, your son, your children, your empire.You can have itall, but you have to come back right now and save it before—”
A splash interrupted him. When Julius looked over his shoulder, though, it was just Fredrick coming up for air. He looked panicked now, tossing his sword up onto the broken hunk of Skyway before diving back down. When he’d vanished under the swirling water, Julius turned back to the Qilin, grabbing the emperor’s head and forcing him to look.
“Your son is going to die,” he said, voice shaking. “He’s going to drown down there searching for Chelsie. She might be gone already. That’s a much bigger tragedy than losing the Qilin. You said you just wanted to be happy. Well your happiness is down there under that water, and if you want to save her, savethem, you need to snap out of this and gohelp your son!”
He was shouting by the end, clutching Xian’s blank face between his shaking hands. And nothing happened. The emperor didn’t blink, didn’t flinch, didn’t do anything. Then, just as Julius let go and jumped to his feet to go help Fredrick himself, a tiny voice whispered, “My son?”
Julius whirled back around. The emperor was still exactly as he’d left him, his eyes blank as a doll’s, but there was a strain in his muscles that hadn’t been there before. A tightness that quickly became violent shaking as he forced himself to move.
“My son,” he breathed, prying his curled hands out of the ground. “I have a son.”
“Yes,” Julius said, dropping back down to his knees so he could help the emperor. “You have ten sons and eleven daughters, one of whom is apparently the next seer. You can’t let her go through that alone! She needs you. They all do, but Fredrick needs younow, so come back. You said you’d be our emperor, but what emperor leaves his subjects when they need him most? If you really cared about your duty, you’d come back and do it. Come help us.Right now.”
He stopped there, holding his breath, but the dragon didn’t move. Behind them, the water splashed as Fredrick came up for air and went back down, but Xian didn’t even flinch. Then, just when Julius was on the edge of giving up, the emperor blew out a long line of smoke.
What happened after that came in painfully slow bursts. Julius didn’t know what was actually going on, but from the outside it looked like the Qilin was trying to force his body through a wall of cold, heavy clay. He came back in bits and pieces, his muscles straining and giving up then straining again until, all at once, the magic released him, letting go as fast as it had taken hold to drop him in the mud beside Julius.
“Xian!” Julius offered him his hand at once. The Qilin grabbed it, lifting his face—which, of course, was completely free of mud—to look around in confusion.
“What happened?”
There was no nice way to put it, but Julius tried anyway. “You did,” he said. “But that’s over now. It’s time to make things right, starting with Chelsie.”
