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The attendant leaned in cautiously, with all the timid air of someone unsure if they were about to receive a handsome reward or a death sentence. “Yes, Your Highness?”

“It’s very—” Yet before the word could form on his lips, he noticed the other figure on the far left of the mural. He could only assume he’d missed it because they had made her out to be even uglier than he was. There was no order to be found in her features; nothing remotely pleasing about the stretch of her lips or her oddly widened eyes. But her posture—he felt he had seen it somewhere before. The way she was plucking the guqin, her face turned a few degrees to the side, as if meeting the gaze of the onlooker and sharing a private joke with them . . .

His fingers quivered. Acid bubbled in his stomach. Maintain your composure, a voice warned inside his head. Not his voice, but the Celestial Emperor’s, closer and more present than his father had ever really been. On any other matter, he would have listened. But not this.

“Who is that woman supposed to be?” he asked sharply. He almost hoped, for their sakes, that he was wrong.

“I— We specifically requested that the painter draw her in, Your Highness,” the attendant stuttered, bowing low. “We found the embroidered handkerchief in your chambers and thought . . . Well, seeing as you are not married, we had no other reference for what kind of woman you might admire . . . So we traced over the embroidery while you were asleep and hoped it would be more fitting to your—your tastes . . .”

The very handkerchief the attendant spoke of unfolded vividly behind his eyes as he stared at the mural. He should never have taken it with him from the old palace. This, he accepted, was his grave mistake. He had experienced the briefest moment of weakness; he had been having difficulty sleeping, and he’d thought only to look at it a little longer before he blew out the candles at night. That was all. They should have never found it. They should have never had the chance to tarnish her image, to so much as attempt to capture her features. The woman they had drawn was an impostor, some vile, ghastly creature who would now haunt him, no matter where he turned.

They didn’t even realize who she was.

He felt a strong rush of violence: a violence that lashed outward, that craved to fling the pain they’d unknowingly inflicted on him right back at them until they did know exactly what they had done. He wanted to break something. Tear the mural apart with his bare hands. He wanted to scream at them and shake them so they felt the same skewering, corrosive, ever-expanding agony that he felt now. The intensity of it was such that the thin muscles behind his rib cage heated and convulsed, as if physically unable to contain its weight, its force.

Yet there was another part of him that wanted to hold on to the pain. To absorb it silently, like the end of a blade. To seal his suffering within him like a secret, as he had with every memory of her. Ever since they’d met, he had led two lives: the one with her, and the one without. The few instances where those lives had clashed had not ended well.

If he betrayed the real reason for his rage, he would be inviting them to trespass further on his memories.

“You are mistaken,” he said coolly, collecting himself again. His voice was light and smooth as the tip of a calligraphy brush gliding over parchment. How well he feigned indifference, as if his heart were not on the verge of disintegrating. He supposed he owed much of it to practice.

The sliver of the attendant’s face that was visible to him changed color. From down below, still in that deep bow, he whispered, “I’m sorry, Your Highness?”

“That woman on the handkerchief—” He pushed the words out through his teeth. “She’s not my preferred type. I only picked up the handkerchief after I saw it dropped on the ground somewhere in the gardens. I kept it on me in the instance I might run into its owner and return it to them.” He paused. It felt like someone had scooped out all the flesh and blood from under his rib cage, leaving behind only fragile skin and breakable bone. “While I do appreciate your thoughtfulness, you have perhaps given it a bit too much thought; what I see in front of me is merely a person I have no connection to. It wouldn’t bother me as much, but there is a high chance that the woman who has been so skillfully rendered here is the wife of the handkerchief’s owner, and I imagine neither of them would be very comfortable with this composition.”

There. Junyi breathed out slowly, tasting rust on his tongue. Even the sweetness of the hundred-face flowers was sickening, like rotten fruit. But he had done it. They would still think of him as their chivalrous crown prince, and they would have reason to paint over the mural. The faster, the better. Right this second would be best, though he knew that wasn’t possible.

In his peripheral vision, he saw the other attendants exchange frantic, nervous glances.

“My deepest apologies for the oversight,” the attendant stuttered. He made a quick, flicking gesture behind his back for the others to move, which they did at once, scrambling to pick up the cloth that had originally covered the mural. “We had no idea— We will fix it, Your Highness. Rest assured that we will fix everything.”

Junyi had no energy left to speak. He could only dip his head in acknowledgment, then leave them with it. He didn’t know where he was going. Perhaps the Pools of Serenity, though the bathhouse tended to be too full at this time of day. Perhaps the Celestial Gardens, which would be quieter, at least, but he was in no mood to admire the pretty scenery. Perhaps the secluded Yuelin Mountains, where gods went to clear the mind and cultivate their spiritual essence—except that would require sitting alone with his thoughts. He kept walking without any chosen direction. If only he were the god of something; he might be able to preoccupy himself with another task. Start a war, stop a famine, spoil someone with riches. What a shame. All that power and nothing to use it on. Nobody to save—not anymore.

Then he took an unthinking step through the borders of space, an instinctive movement, engraved as deep in his bones as the very act of breathing. The barriers to the Palace of Eternal Peace fell away with an easy wave of his hand. The air changed from the crisp, open warmth of the outside to the stale cold of a dark, abandoned room. The foul, fishy odor of heart’s blood floated up to him, tangled with the same sweet notes of the hundred-face flowers, only stronger, surrounding him. His heart thrummed faster, the muscles around it spasming, as if remembering the pain of the cut or dreading the pain of another.

He walked with ease over the thick, swelling mass of roots, over the cracked, uneven ground.

Of course he would end up here. For all the vastness of the Three Realms, where else could he really go? Where else, except to her?

“I’ve missed you,” Crown Prince Junyi said softly and knelt beside the corpse.

Chapter Six

The medicine is ready.

It has been ready since early this morning, the flower fully dissolved, the surface of the bowl coated by an iridescent violet sheen, like the interior of an abalone shell. My own magic simmers within it. Not enough magic to create a permanent cure, but still more magic than I had meant to use. As I had stirred and prepared the final remedy, I had been haunted by a vision of the Death God from last night, the desperation in his eyes, the pain in his voice—

Two sharp knocks at the door.

I quickly set the bowl down on the floor right as the door flies open. The Death God walks in, his gaze going straight to the medicine.

“It is done?” he asks curtly.

I stare at him, wondering if what I’d seen in his chambers had been a hallucination after all. A dream, perhaps, that becomes blurrier and more insubstantial the longer you are awake, the logic that feels so obvious fast unraveling in the face of reality. He seems unaffected in the cold, gray daylight, incapable of being hurt. Of feeling hurt. His stance is proud, arrogant, his robes smoothed out once again, rippling like dark waves behind him when he crosses the room and lifts the bowl.

At the same time, he throws a small vial at me.

I catch it in one hand. “What is this?” I ask, looking down. There is no inscription on the surface. Just the lovely flax flower–blue glass, in the same shade as my own clothes.