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Is that the fate which awaits me now?

To have finally escaped from Death’s clutch, only to be subjected to a life worse than death itself? To move from one grave into another? To be scorned and hated, known henceforth by the other gods not as the healer, but the traitor, the one responsible for the loss of their crown prince? Is this where I must bow my head, concede that I cannot control anything that happens from here? Is this where the path ends?

My fists tighten.

Another strange thing about fear: It cannot expand forever. There must come a point where it has eviscerated every channel through which it can flow and overwhelmed every point in the body until it eventually transforms back into an eerie calm. In these moments, everything is sharper. The deep blue sky opening up where the ceiling has caved. The collapsed columns with mother-of-pearl inlay. The faces staring back at me, their variations of cowardice and concern and contempt. The Death God, who turns around and absorbs the full, heated intensity of my stare without flinching, who stares back, dark eyes swimming with something too delicate for me to hold.

The path forward.

“It will not happen,” I tell the Celestial Emperor, my voice clear and resolute, ringing through the dust. “I will personally ensure that His Highness survives his tribulations and returns in all his glory. I swear to the Heavens and everything under it.”

The Celestial Emperor regards me in silence, then reacts exactly as I had anticipated. “Very well. I will give you this one chance,” he says in such a brilliant show of generosity that a bystander might be moved to believe it. But it is not generosity at all. To him, I have just made myself into the perfect scapegoat. If I succeed, he will have the heir back. And if I fail, he will have further reason to blame everything on me. Witnesses to say that he had been just, that he had given me this opportunity to redeem myself. “Find the crown prince. Bring him home.”

I lower myself all the way to the floor once more, as if the weight of the Heavens has been dropped onto my shoulders. Yet the deeper I sink, the more my insides burn. It was not meant to be this way. Everything that has happened—it can all be traced back to one god. I had healed him, I had defended him, I had believed him, and in return, he has left me with the rage of the entire realm. My fingers curl tighter and tighter into my palms, aching with the desire to strike at him, to seize him by the collar and shake him. Once the other gods are gone, I vow inside my head, holding myself perfectly still, my back bent, the tension in my neck running down to my knees, he will answer for what he has done.

But when I raise my head, he is nowhere to be found.

Part

Two

The Death God

Is Dreaming of Her

Chapter Fifteen

For once, the Death God feels no relief upon stepping into his chambers.

He does not even have the time to delight in the lifting of his curse, to bask in his powers, restored at last. How quickly one pain is replaced with another, like those many-headed serpents from the legends. The instant you sever one, two more grow in its place. As he settles into his black lacquer throne, twisting the gleaming rings around his thumb, his mind runs through everything that has gone wrong. How absolutely maddening that the crown prince has fallen into the Mortal Realm. It is too easy a fate. Now he will be weak and useless; he will not even have the strength to pick up a sword with his fragile mortal arms, much less go down in battle, in agony, as the Death God had planned. Where is the satisfaction in torturing a man who cannot withstand a few lashes to the chest? A man who will drop dead on his own within a mere sixty or seventy years? It would be like crushing a leaf, kicking over a mud castle, stepping on an ant. An entire century of waiting, of suffering, and this is what he ends up with?

Then there is the matter of—

His mind tenses, resisting the very shape of her name.

He pinches the bridge of his nose, the coolness of his rings brushing against his skin. He ought to have taken her back with him. No, he ought to have killed her right there, or even before he’d left for the Celestial Realm. She has served her purpose and healed him. He has given her the one month of life she’d asked for, and more. Any debts between them have been cleared; any favors returned. They do not owe each other anything anymore. The only thread that remains, connecting her to him, is the silver thread of her life, ending in his hands. But something had made him hesitate when he contemplated severing that thread for good. What was a few more days, he’d thought to himself, when she had already taken so many? Perhaps it was unnecessary to dispose of her immediately. Perhaps he could let her live a little longer and focus first on the crown prince.

And then she had complicated everything.

He’d explicitly warned her not to follow. The fact that she had ignored him and done so anyway—that, he can at least understand. When has she ever listened? When has she ever bent her head to another’s wishes if they do not align with her own? She reminds him of those thorned flowers you find growing in the deep wild, unnervingly bright against the darkness, determined to survive against all odds. But why had she defended him? Not only that, but she’d defended him from the gods of the Celestial Realm. Those hypocritical, spineless officials she had been dying to return to. He would have brushed it aside as a hallucination if the other gods had not also claimed to witness it. Then—why? Why did she care? What did she gain from it?

He turns the question over and over like the obsidian rings on his fingers. He tries to replicate that moment exactly in his head, sparing no details. His powers had allowed him to see everything, even as far away as he’d been standing: the little crease between her brows, the worry widening her eyes, her black hair lashing her face. Nobody has ever looked at him like that before. And there was the way her whole body had been angled in his direction, arm outstretched, her back turned to the others . . .

No.

Stop.

He gives his head a firm shake. Even if she had been so moved as to care about his well-being for that split second, she would not anymore. Before he left the Celestial Realm, he had seen the betrayal burning in her gaze. Her rage, her hurt. Whenever he thinks about it, he experiences this odd prickling sensation deep inside his chest, like pouring steaming water over frozen flesh. So he tries to stop thinking about it completely.

This works, until it does not.

Her scent lingers in the halls: the soft, sweet scent of flowers and the salt of the sea. A scent like spring, everything forbidden and foreign to him.

One morning, he finds himself wandering into her room. He does not know what he is doing, why he is there. Perhaps some part of him expects to hear her goading laughter, her endless stream of words, which can be ruthless as arrows one second and enticing as peonies the next, always surprising him. Every time he has arrived in this room, he has found her sitting upright or waiting by the window, as if she has been anticipating him. But the room is empty now. The bed is still unmade, one of the doors to the cabinet left ajar. He presses his palm gently to the cold sheets, the way one might check for a pulse, and feels only the dull thud of his own heart. He closes his eyes. Releases a deep, shuddering breath.

Then he rips his hand away, sick with shame, stomach roiling with horror. Truly, what is he doing? He hurries out of her room and slams the door shut behind him with a flick of his fingers, barring any further entry. His jaw tightens. He will lock every room she has drifted through, if he must. Clear out all the space she has taken up.

Yet even if he can control his thoughts in his waking hours, he cannot control his dreams.