Page 39

No betraying any fear.

“You waste your time with this,” the Death God advised, but the prince had already grabbed a rough fistful of his hair. Strange; such pains ought to be nothing compared to the sword impaling his chest, the weeping gashes on his wrists, the red-hot beads seared into his heart—another gift from two nights ago, and one of the prince’s more creative ideas. Yet the prickling sensation in his scalp was what wrenched something open inside him. It was the casual violence of it, the audacity. His mind went red at the edges with indignation, then entirely white with fury. If it weren’t for those cursed chains sapping the power out of him, he would have cut the prince’s hands off in a heartbeat and strung them up on the roof of this palace for everyone to see.

“Drink up.”

He clenched his teeth against the cold edge of the goblet, but then the prince’s sharp, forceful fingers were around his jaw, prying it open. The liquid was as foul as it looked, so bitter it made his eyes water. It burned his nostrils and tongue and he was most certainly going to throw it up, he did not think it possible to swallow something like this, but the prince used the same hand to clamp his jaw shut. He choked. Strained against the wall, spluttering. He felt like he was drinking fire; he could track its path of destruction as it spread through him, boiling all the blood in his body into poison. He gasped for air, but the second his mouth opened again, more of the black drink was poured down his throat.

“Drink it all,” the prince hissed, holding the goblet so high in his fervor that the excess liquid trickled down the Death God’s neck, soaking through the front of his robes. “It’s for the better if you die faster.”

Believe me, our goals are entirely aligned, he would say if he could speak. He wanted nothing more than to be one of the souls he collected, to float down the Yellow Springs, to be freed from this agony. He was burning, and there was no water in the world that could save him.

“I don’t want this either, you know,” Junyi said as he tipped the last of the drink into the Death God’s mouth. His eyes gleamed in the low torchlight. He watched the Death God cough and shudder the way a wild dog watched someone feast on a roasted leg of lamb, ready to pounce for the bone at the first opportunity. “But I have no other choice. This is the only way to save her.”

“You cannot,” he gritted out. Sweat dripped from his forehead and stung his eyes. The fire was everywhere in his body. The pain breathed inside him, a terrible, twisting pain that ate into his very veins. “I will survive, and she will die. You have nobody but yourself to blame. You should have known better than to fall for a mortal—”

“Be quiet,” Junyi snapped. “Don’t speak of things you know nothing about.”

But he had seen the glimmer of fear in the prince’s face, and he was eager to press down on the wound. “How long does she have left?” he asked. “Ten years? That is a mere ten days in the Celestial Realm. And here you are, spending them shouting at me and covering your hands with my blood, instead of savoring your final moments together with her. Do I truly mean so much to you? Perhaps I should be touched.”

A shadow fell over the prince’s face, sharpening the haunted look in his eyes, the desperation in his features. “With you gone,” he spat, “I will have an eternity with her.”

“She is a mortal,” the Death God repeated. His throat was closing, but he forced his next words out with as much finality as he could. “For mortals, there is no such thing as eternity, except in death. Accept it. I had been generous to give you warning. Be prepared to lose her.”

Something seemed to fissure in Junyi’s expression—the malice turned to a sorrow so intense that briefly, he looked not like a divine prince but a man at risk of breaking apart where he stood.

It was as unsettling as it was profoundly pathetic.

Junyi was wrong about almost everything, save one matter: The Death God did not know anything about the feeling that had clearly possessed the royal and eroded away his senses. A future paved in gold; a palace above the clouds; gods to love him, attendants to serve him, mortals to worship him. The crown prince had all of that, not fought for but handed to him on fate’s gleaming plate. What else could one ask for? It was the life he’d dreamed of once, as a boy with a name, before he drank from the rivers of the underworld and made a home out of the shadows.

For long before they’d ever exchanged a word, the Death God had watched the prince. Not in the same way those maids and newly appointed officials fawned over him, but attentively, hungrily, as one who had spent most of their life in darkness might stare at a golden horizon. He had watched, and he had remembered. Once, he and Junyi had fallen ill at the same time. His head was dull and fuzzy; he could not walk two feet from his bed without collapsing to the ground, and whenever he coughed, he choked up blood. His own father had gathered all the enchanted trinkets and precious herbs he could find in their house, then rushed into court, one of countless others, so eager to make a contribution. While he shivered alone and felt he might die from the cold in his bones, the palace had been crowded with gods carrying warm water and plush towels and scented cushions. It had taken Junyi only a day to recover. It had taken the Death God weeks, and nobody had even bothered to ask after him.

So he did not understand why the crown prince was behaving this way. He could not imagine ever being so terrified of losing somebody else that he would willingly lose everything he already had. Only the weak and foolish would fall to such misguided whims, let themselves be led by the nose by their own hearts.

“I thought I told you to stop talking,” Junyi said, his mouth twisting into a snarl. And then he reached for his other sword.

The Death God knew what was coming even before the blade slit his throat.

There was always the briefest moment where his body seemed to forget the fact of its immortality, and as the metal drew a sharp, searing line through his skin, his heart pounded as ferociously as if it were nearing its final beat. Of course, no such luck came. All the cut did was silence him while his blood gurgled in his throat like salt water and his flesh took its sweet time stitching itself back together. In a few minutes, the open wound would fade into a pale, silvery line to match the ones the crown prince had already made. But as he waited, the fresh pain pulsing in his neck, the liquid burning him alive from within, he thought of his mother.

It took him by surprise. He could barely remember what she looked like; in all his meager memories of her, her features were distorted, as if he were seeing her from underwater. Sometimes he doubted those were even real memories, or he thought it was his imagination doing its best to compensate for what had never existed. But it felt real. He could almost feel it now, if he closed his eyes: her long fingers smoothing out his hair, patting his back, even the warmth of her palm, the cool gossamer of her sleeves tickling his cheek like a blowing breeze.

Keran, she whispered, dredging up that cursed name of the past. My perfect Keran. My sweet boy.

It hurts, he wished to tell her. He wished to cling on to the hem of her robes, to rest his head against her shoulder, to cry. It hurts so much I want to die.

Please, just let me die.

But when he opened his eyes again, all he saw was the sword in the prince’s hand, the empty goblet, stained black, the suffocating walls of the palace. The only warmth came from his own blood as it trickled down his robes, spreading at his feet.

He had broken his rule.

He’d thought himself above uttering any sound, thought himself numbed to the prince’s many futile attempts to break him, but he could not stop the scream from clawing its way up his throat. He had tried to bite down on it, grinding his teeth together and swallowing back the bile in his mouth, and still the humiliating noise escaped him.

“Don’t be so afraid,” the prince cooed. Each time he returned, he seemed a little more desperate, a little closer to losing his mind completely, if it were not already lost. He had stopped combing his hair. Stopped sleeping, from the looks of it. The veins in his eyes were so dense that the whites had turned a deep crimson.

“I am not afraid,” the Death God said hoarsely, but as he stared, the fifth beetle had started to chew a hole into the skin just above his wrist, its tiny, sharp fangs working with sickening speed. Now the panic truly set in alongside the pain. He squirmed against the restraints, tensed all the muscles in his arm as if he could shake the beetle off. But the poisonous creature continued devouring his flesh until it was no longer visible from the outside, until he could feel it burrowing into his body at the same time as the others, all of them inching closer and closer to his chest. There was one working its way up his ribs. One crawling through his stomach. He thought he could even feel their legs scuttling along his veins, feel the needlelike nips of their teeth.

These beetles are special little things, the prince had told him when he first arrived. They’re found only in mass graves, and you might be impressed to find that they’re able to chew through anything. Stone. Wood. Jade. Even gold. See, they’ve developed a strong taste for heart’s flesh—to them, the heart of a god must be a feast.