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“Because you’re beautiful,” I say.

He stops. For a second, he appears unsure what to do with himself. His eyes dart from me to the ground and back to me. Color blooms in his cheeks. The corner of his mouth twitches, and I watch in wonder as he attempts to suppress it, as it betrays him anyway, rising involuntarily into a smile. If I had been staring before, I am mesmerized now, unable to tear my gaze away. Stunned by the difference a simple change in his demeanor makes, like a frozen lake thawing under the sun, revealing the glittering waters underneath. I have been a god all my life, but it is only when he smiles at me that I feel truly immortal for the first time.

“Don’t be embarrassed.” I tug his sleeve again, drawing him even closer to me. He’s blushing still, and I wish there were a way to preserve this precise moment in time, to live inside it and stay. “Surely this is nothing new.”

“What is?” he asks, with what sounds like genuine confusion.

“You,” I say, gesturing up to him. “You must know how shockingly, unnervingly beautiful you are. From every distance, at every angle, with every expression you make. Even among gods, you put the rest to shame. You must be aware of it; plenty of people must have told you that before.”

He shakes his head. Opens his mouth. Closes it. “Nobody ever has,” he says at last, quiet. “Everyone who has seen my face has flinched from it or regarded me with fear and revulsion. Everyone, except you.”

An unexpected pang plucks at my chest. But of course. He is the Death God. A fact I keep forgetting. A fact I cannot bring myself to care about right now. I am far more shaken by the idea that he believes everyone sees him this way, that this is how he sees himself: an object deserving of others’ disdain and no more.

“Look at me,” I command, tilting his chin up with both hands. His eyes are pure black, but bright, his features smooth and gentle as jade. I let all the tenderness I feel for him show on my face. “The others are wrong. Whatever it is they think they see, whatever they say—ignore them. None of them know anything about you.”

“I don’t care if they revile me,” he says. Surprisingly, he sounds like he means it. “As long as you don’t.”

I swallow. The pang beneath my rib cage deepens and transforms into the ache of hard-won happiness. “I would never revile you, Keran.”

I am rewarded with another smile, and I wonder dimly whether it is better, after all, that he does not know the true extent of his beauty, or else he could turn it into something lethal. If he kept smiling at me like that, I would do anything he asked.

“Come on. We’re almost there,” I say, sliding my hand down and lacing my fingers through his. I register his subdued shock, the way he freezes, as if offering me the chance to regret it and pretend it never happened. But I do not pull away, and neither does he.

The trees thin overhead as we turn the corner and arrive in a small, secluded clearing. Upon first glance, it looks like nothing out of the ordinary: only wild emerald grass and poppies springing out from the dirt and pairs of yellow butterflies fluttering through the air. Yet before I have to point it out, he sees it.

A small shrine, peeking out through the overgrown weeds, no taller than my knees. I have placed the hand-sized statue of him in the center, where it will be sheltered from dust and rain. The knife work is rough, not even close to capturing the ethereal qualities of his face. In equally rough strokes, I have inscribed on the crimson-painted wooden panel above: The Death God. A porcelain bowl lies below, almost overflowing with fragrant mandarins and yellow pears and soft peaches, and an incense burner has already been lit, the sweet smoke wafting up to our noses.

“What is this?” Keran asks.

“I thought you deserved your own shrine,” I say, carefully watching his reaction. He has gone very still, his expression indecipherable. He hardly seems to be breathing. “Every god should have one,” I continue in a rush, worried now that I may have chosen the wrong surprise, that perhaps I have hurt him or offended him without meaning to and ruined this new, precious peace. “And if . . . if the others are too scared to come and pray to you, to light incense or bring you fruit—then I will. So long as you do not mind, that is. I’ll keep the shrine clean, and your statue standing, and I—”

My next words die down as he tugs me toward him, his arms wrapping tight around my waist, his chin coming to rest against the crook of my neck. I cannot register anything except him, his warmth, his midnight scent, the slightest tremor in his voice when he whispers into my ear, “Thank you, Rujia.”

The next beat of my heart is faster, almost painful. As I let myself sink into his embrace, I can hardly imagine why there aren’t thousands of gleaming shrines built all around the empire just for him.

Chapter Twenty-Five

He had done everything.

That was what Junyi kept repeating to himself as he followed the other pale-faced candidates through the impressive arches of the paifang into the vast courtyard, where the roll had finally been released. The idea filled him with equal measures of comfort and despair. He had done everything—he had studied under two of the most esteemed tutors in the empire, he had sacrificed any time he could spare, he had climbed to the shrines and murmured his prayers to the thin mountain air—so even if the results were not what he hoped, at least he had tried. But he had done everything, exhausted all his means, so if he failed this time, then there was no point trying again. He would apologize to Rujia and Keran and abandon his studies for good. Perhaps, if he was still too dull to become a teacher or a clerk, he would become a monk. He was admittedly quite attached to his long, shiny hair, but he supposed the point of monasticism was to rid himself of any attachments.

But what if he made a terrible monk?

He didn’t realize he’d voiced this fear aloud until Keran shot him a withering look.

“Before you start planning for a life of abject failure, why don’t you go look for your name?” he demanded.

“You never know what could happen,” Rujia added gently from his right.

Junyi swallowed the coin-sized lump in his throat. He tottered forward a few steps through the crowd, but he could barely see the wall where the examination results had been posted. There were too many heads blocking his way, and the line had been drastically slowed by those who’d discovered that they had failed, then rolled over like a sick donkey on the ground, beating at the dirt and wailing at the top of their voices. The scene before him was, in many ways, similar to the first day of the exams, but whereas the general atmosphere then had been suffocating, the candidates waiting around in orderly panic while guards loomed over them, those same candidates had now spent many moons tormenting themselves with every possible outcome. Their minds were frenzied, their bodies stretched thin, their hearts strained to the brink of collapse. Some looked like they had not slept at all in the days since.

Junyi had been sleeping, at least, but most of his dreams took bizarre, terrifying turns: in a recent one, an examiner had burst into the house and demanded that he drink an entire pot of ink to prove that his answers were really his. He’d woken up covered in sweat and gasping.

“Go on,” Keran urged him.

“I—I can’t,” Junyi said, bouncing up on his tiptoes. Even then, the other candidates swarmed across his vision, their bodies trapping him in. “There are too many people—”

Keran sighed, and—using only the tips of his fingers, it seemed—pushed away the four men squeezing and shoving their way around him, clearing a direct path to the wall. “There,” he said.