Chapter 13 Àn’yīng
àn’yīng
Palace of the Aurora, Kingdom of Night
A gentle blush light pulses before me in the dark. I cannot see, but all around me is a rushing sound and the distant echo of voices, as though I am submerged beneath water. I can’t make out the words—like the speakers linger just beyond and I listen through a veil.
Then I hear a name. A familiar voice, one that conjures the sun and the sea. Calling to me.
àn’yīng, wake.
—
When I open my eyes, it is dark. Above me, a silken drape hangs between four bedposts—and beyond that, a ceiling enchanted to resemble a night sky. I lie frozen, unable to place where I am and how I got here.
Yet when I inhale, the unfamiliar bed yields a familiar scent. Soft, dark sheets cool against my skin, smelling of midnight and sharp pine, petals on a breeze.
“àn’yīng.” A most beautiful voice from both my dreams and nightmares speaks.
I’m on my feet in a heartbeat, reaching for my crescent blades—but they’re not there, and I’m not in my normal white dress.
The shadows rearrange themselves into the figure of a man. He steps out into a pool of moonlight filtering in from an open-air pavilion. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust, another for me to recognize him without his red cloak.
Yù’chén watches me from across the room. He’s in a set of black robes, stitched through with small silver stars that form the shapes of dragons. It’s transformed him into someone new. Someone I barely recognize.
In a sudden and violent rush, my memories filter back.
The wedding. The hellbeasts. My lotus sword, shattering into a million pieces.
Hào’yáng, slipping through my fingers.
I make a choked sound, stumbling back until my shoulders hit the bedpost. “You,” I gasp. “How—what did you—”
Yù’chén is silent, eerily still in that mó way of his. His expression is inscrutable.
Fear kicks my old instincts into high gear. But when I flex my fingers, my hands draw up empty instead of grasping the familiar grooves of my crescent blades’ hilts.
I feel naked. Violated.
“Give me my blades.” My voice shakes.
Yù’chén blinks slowly. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Realization after realization hits me, knocking the breath from my lungs.
Hào’yáng is dead.
My village is burned.
I don’t know if my family, the villagers, and Lì’líng and Tán’mù and the rest of our allies are alive.
Even if they are, I don’t know where they would be or how to reach them.
And as I turn to take in my surroundings—this unnatural night, the cold obsidian floor and gnarled trees out on the pavilion, all imbued with a twisted and terrifying foreignness…
I realize with a bone-deep knowing that this can’t be anywhere in the mortal realm.
Which means…
I’m in the Kingdom of Night.
“àn’yīng,” Yù’chén begins, but I’ve fallen to my knees, the floor before me spinning. When I blink again, he’s kneeling by my side, his hands on my shoulders to steady me.
I strike out. The slap echoes across the chamber; the force of it sends him sprawling backward.
Slowly, Yù’chén straightens and looks at me again. Three vivid slashes of red streak across his cheek. When I look down, my nails are coated in his blood.
“Get away from me,” I gasp.
Yù’chén wipes at the blood dripping down his face. Then he inclines his head. “As you wish.”
Without a word, he turns and walks away, vanishing into the dark.
I wait until I’m certain he is gone before I slump against the wall, drawing my knees to my chest. Everything that happened over the past day hits me like a tidal wave: the insurmountable weight and irreparable cost of my failures.
I press my palms over my mouth to silence any sounds I might make as my tears come.
—
It’s been minutes, or hours—I can’t tell, for there is no sun here, only an eternal night. I’m alone in the dark, the cold beginning to settle into my bones and making me shiver.
I’ve thought through endless ways out, and each plan I’ve discarded.
The chamber is sprawling, the pavilion outside like a maze of eerie, barren trees and a cold spring.
Yet the rocky crags of the pavilion end at a sharp drop.
Beneath is only darkness, with mist clinging to sharp cliffs and jutting mountains.
When I reached a hand out toward the ledge, I encountered pressure, as though the air itself resisted me. It eased when I backed away.
Wards. I’m being kept here as a prisoner.
I look everywhere, but my three remaining blades are gone. They must have been removed along with my wedding dress. A scorpion without a stinger, I think—but there is a chance they haven’t been discarded yet.
A chance I can still get to them.
My lotus, though, is a different story.
In the dark, the memory of its last moments flashes through my mind. Its glow as, in the form of a sword, it arced through the air toward the hellbeast, the shock on my face reflected in its blade as it shattered. Glimmering fragments, flickering like embers, swirling onto my skin.
I hold my hand out before me, turning it to examine my skin. There is no remaining trace of the lotus’s glow, and I have no answer to the question of how an immortal’s vessel could simply shatter and vanish without a trace.
I sense his presence before he appears: a shift in the shadows, a knowing in my bones.
He stands in the corner of my vision, halfway across the vast chamber.
I don’t know where he has come from—I’ve searched every corner of this room, but the doors have remained locked and warded and there are no other exits.
Yù’chén approaches, stopping far enough from me that I can’t strike him again.
He sets something on the floor before me.
“Drink it,” he says, and then with a touch of wryness: “And before you say anything, one: no, it’s not poisoned—if I wanted you dead I wouldn’t have gone through all this effort—and two: if you want me to poison-test it anyway, you only have to ask. Nicely.”
It’s a cup of dandelion tea. The smell is a painful reminder of home. Of the time I made him this exact tea in my kitchen. Allowed him near Méi’zi and Mā.
I hurl the cup at him with all my strength. He reacts too fast, making a sharp gesture with his hand, and the teacup explodes in midair, hot liquid and shards of porcelain clattering to the gleaming obsidian floor in a violent mess.
Yù’chén raises an eyebrow as he surveys the damage. “Good thing I didn’t use my favorite cup.”
I activate the talisman for swiftness I’d drawn during this moment of distraction. In a spurt of spirit energy, I charge him, snatching up one of the jagged pieces of teacup from the floor. I swipe at his throat—
His fingers close around my wrists. It’s disconcerting how effortless he makes it seem to hold me off. His eyes are blazing crimson, his jaw tight, as he studies my face.
“Would it please you to hurt me, àn’yīng?” he says. “Would you feel better if you cut me and drew enough blood to turn my floors red?” His hands slide away from mine, and he opens his arms. “Go ahead.”
I’m too surprised to react for several heartbeats.
But my anger returns at the hint of a smile playing on his lips, the cocky way in which he tips his head back, baring his throat for me.
He can’t die from being cut by a piece of teacup, and he knows I know this.
I’ve seen the way his skin stitches itself back together with his dark magic, leaving no scars behind.
I curl my hands into fists. “I won’t be satisfied until I watch you die before my eyes,” I snap, driving every ounce of vehemence I feel into those words.
Yù’chén laughs. “You break my heart,” he says, pressing a palm over his chest in a way that makes me wish I’d tried to slit his throat after all.
He clears his throat, fixing me with an inscrutable gaze.
“But I didn’t come only to ask to be stabbed by you.
I bring news.” His tone prompts me to look up at him.
I’d thought him impossibly beautiful once, in the mortal realm—but here, the shadows worship him.
Darkness pools at his feet, kissing his black cloak, the silver threads on the fabric gleaming like constellations. “Your family is well.”
Instantly, the fight drains from me. Every nerve in me stretches taut as I say, “You can have your way with me, but please”—my voice cracks—“don’t play with me on this.”
“Always assuming the worst of me,” Yù’chén says, and twirls his fingers. A familiar black feather appears as though he plucked it from the shadows, its edges shifting from light to dark. An illusory memory from his shadowcrane.
He releases it. Like before, the feather dissolves, reshaping itself into a rippling surface, so that I have the impression that I gaze at a scene on the other side of a clear spring.
Sunlight pours through, as golden as syrup. In a forest of red-and-gold camphor trees, a small group of people cluster around a fire and a girl serving broth.
Méi’zi.
The fight goes out of me as I watch her chatter with Fú’yí.
My mother is seated just several steps behind her, a weary but hopeful smile on her face.
Then there’s Lì’líng, slurping merrily from a bowl, steam wafting in her face.
Leaning against a tree just beyond, Tán’mù stands with her arms folded.
“Méi’zi,” I whisper. “Mā—”
Tán’mù straightens suddenly, her gaze snapping toward me. For a giddy moment, I think she’s heard me—but as she draws her two-pronged spear, I remember that this is a memory, perhaps from earlier in the day when Yù’chén’s shadowcrane happened upon them.
The vision shifts as the shadowcrane turns to take flight, and then the scene fades until all I’m left with is the echo of laughter and their faces seared into my mind.
“This was near the border to the Western Province,” Yù’chén says. But instead of giving me comfort, fury surges in me as I remember whose forces attacked my village and tore my loved ones away from me.
“What are you going to do to them?” My voice shakes.
He blinks. “Nothing—”