“She was the most beautiful dragon I’d ever seen,” the Qilin went on. “And she was the daughter of the infamous Bethesda, whom even we’d heard rumors about. Anyone would be intrigued. But that was just what caught my attention at the beginning. What held it was Chelsie herself. She was…” He trailed off, scowling in frustration. “I don’t know the word in English. It’s what animals are.”
“Wild?” Julius suggested. “Scary?”
“Unworried,” the Qilin said, his golden eyes bright. “The Golden Court is a place of tradition and status. It can be intimidating and cruel to outsiders, especially ones like her. Many of my dragons considered her an ignorant barbarian and treated her accordingly. But where anyone else would have taken offense, and rightly so, Chelsie didn’t care. Quite the opposite. She used their disdain as an excuse to do whatever she wanted.”
“My sister doesn’t tolerate nonsense,” Julius said, smiling at the absurdity of a court full of stuffy dragons trying to intimidate Chelsie. “She must have caused quite a stir.”
“Like nothing else before or since,” the Qilin said proudly. “My mother disapproved greatly, of course, but I wouldn’t allow her to send Chelsie away.”
“Because you already liked her?”
“Because I loved her.” The smile slipped off the golden dragon’s face as he looked back up at the painting. “From the first moment I saw her, I loved her. I know it’s foolish, but I was young, and she was just so…”
“Beautiful?”
“Free,” he said wistfully. “In a way I could never be. I understood that, but I still wanted my share. I wanted to forget with her. To laugh and not care, even if it was only for a little while.” His jaw clenched. “I was a selfish fool.”
That was the same thing Chelsie had said when she’d told Julius her extremely truncated half of this story, and now, as then, he heaved a frustrated sigh. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be happy.”
“Maybe not for you,” he said. “But I was,aman emperor. I have a duty to my family, to my clans and my land. I knew that, and I still allowed myself to become infatuated with someone who was utterly unsuited to be empress.” His lip curled in disgust. “I ignored my obligations to satisfy my desires. That is the definition of selfishness.”
“It doesn’t mean you were wrong,” Julius said angrily. “And in what world is Chelsie unsuited to be empress? She’s the most competent, hardest-working dragon in Heartstriker. But even if she wasn’t amazing, which sheis, that shouldn’t have mattered if you loved her.”
“My feelings were never in question,” the emperor said. “I was willing to make her empress no matter what the others said.Shewas the one who did not care.”
Julius flinched. He hadn’t known it was possible for a voice to change so much in a single sentence, but by the time the Qilin finished, he sounded like a completely different dragon.
“I was a fool,” he said again, the words quivering with rage. “I lived with your sister for a year in stupid, ignorant happiness. Over the months, my mother tried to warn me several times of your family’s reputation, but I did not want to listen. I thought I was different, that the viper of Heartstriker would not bite me.” He clenched his fists. “I was anidiot, a mouse transfixed by your treacherous snake of a sister, and I would have lost everything to her if my mother hadn’t intervened.”
This wasn’t going to be good. “What happened?”
The Qilin looked down at the floor. “Reality,” he said bitterly. “I thought I’d kept our affair a secret, but I was sloppy. By the time six months had passed, all of China knew what was going on. They pretended not to because I was emperor, but behind my back, the clans whispered that I was the Heartstriker’s puppet. My mother told me what was going on and warned me to break it off before I did irreparable damage to our reputation, but I was too infatuated to listen. I thought Chelsie and I were greater than the rumors. That together, we could beat anything. She said so, too, but it was all a lie. She told me exactly what I wanted to hear, and then, one spring morning a year to the day after I found her in my garden, Chelsie vanished without a trace.”
Julius blinked in surprise. “Vanished?”
The emperor nodded. “Naturally, I was upset. I thought something had happened, that she’d been hurt or killed. It didn’t even occur to me that she would run away until my mother caught her.”
“She ran away,” Julius repeated, incredulous. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” he said, growling deep in his throat. “But she was on a boat to Russia when my mother’s guards cornered her. She nearly killed one of them before they subdued her and dragged her back.”
This story made less sense by the word. “Why did they drag her back?” Julius asked. “You going after her makes sense, but I thought the empress would have been happy to see Chelsie gone.”
“She would have been,” the Qilin agreed. “But I told you, I wasupset.”
He said that the same way someone else would say “berserk,” and a cold chill ran up Julius’s spine. “What happens when you get upset?”
The golden dragon walked away, moving to the small, paint-splattered table beside the easel where all his art supplies lay neatly arranged. He fidgeted with them for a moment, rearranging the brushes and dropping the dirty ones into the tin cup of murky rinse water. Then, just as Julius was reaching the end of his patience, he answered.
“The Qilin is the heart of the empire,” he said quietly, keeping his back to Julius. “When he is serene, good fortune favors everything his presence touches. When he is not, the opposite happens.”
His shoulders hunched tighter under his golden robes with every word, but Julius wasn’t paying attention. His mind was back in the desert this morning, to the strange pressure he’d felt building like a storm after Chelsie had vanished, ready to crush them all. “I see,” he said at last, voice shaking. “Your luck goes bad.”
“It goes far worse than that,” the Qilin said, finally turning to face him. “My mother would have endured anything to pry me free of your sister, but not that. She has always been an empress first, and so long as I was being selfish, the empire needed Chelsie. She hated every second of it, but she tolerated my indiscretion for the sake of harmony. When Chelsie ran away, I was…”
He trailed off, rubbing his hands over his face. “I was not myself,” he finished at last. “I was out of control, a danger to my empire, and so my mother, ever the dutiful empress, bent all her resources to bringing Chelsie back to me by any means necessary. What we didn’t yet know, though, was that Chelsie hadn’t just been running. Bethesda’s Shade had also reached out to her clan, calling in her mother to aid her escape and then, after she was caught, to beg on her behalf.”
Julius had a very hard time believing that. No matter how bad the situation, he couldn’t imagine Chelsie asking theirmotherfor help. Ludicrous as it sounded, though, here again, Chelsie and the emperor’s stories matched up. She’d told him herself that Bethesda had begged for her, and their mother had held a life debt over her head for it every day since. But even if this was all true, “What could Bethesda do?”
