Chapter 64 The Prince and the Crown
THE PRINCE AND THE CROWN
Terren attacked first. He kept two of his swords near him and sent the rest of them hurtling into the dragon’s body. It shrieked viciously as it thrashed in the air. The knives burst out the other side of the dragon, reversed directions, and sailed back for a second strike.
But they never reached the dragon, because the dragon struck back.
One claw—and it was the size of a house—knocked the swords out of the air; another crashed down towards Terren.
He leapt away in time, just barely, and instead of his bones it was the earth beneath that was crushed.
Dust and broken cobble spewed from where the claw had landed, making it impossible to see.
But from the earth-haze under the dragon’s shadow, a red sigil gleamed like a sun, and the knocked-away swords straightened in the air again and arrowed towards the Crown.
Around me, on the three layers of terraces wrapping around the arena, men cheered: a thundering sound that rose even above the howl of the wind.
The back and forth continued. As my uninked pen moved under my shawl, I watched as Terren wove his swords in and out of the dragon like sewing needles; I watched as the dragon lashed back at him with claw, tooth, and tail.
The beast was vicious and merciless in its fury, and I now understood, without the slightest shred of doubt, why the coronation was so dangerous.
Each slam of its claw could have crushed five or six swordsmen; each slam of its tail could have thrown twenty archers into the air.
Each gnash of its teeth could have torn into the armor of a war elephant and turned it to pulp like a mulberry.
But Terren was, without a question, its match.
Some of the dragon’s attacks he dodged, but the rest he parried with the sheer strength of his sigil magic. With the flat blade of one sword, he could hold back a claw; with two, crossed, he could beat away a lash of its gigantic tail. No wonder he only needed to bring eight of them.
I had known Terren was powerful, of course.
I had heard his tales of conquest in the north, and I had witnessed, in person, the way he could command ten thousand knives at once.
But even so, his power astonished me. Watching him fight the dragon—in a way that trembled sky and rumbled earth—was absolutely spectacular.
“He’s really doing it,” exclaimed Wang Suwen in awe, from the terrace below where I was sitting. The other concubines around her cried their agreements.
“If our prince defeats the dragon alone,” Liru Syra shouted excitedly, “he will be the first in all of history!”
Under the cover of my shawl, my pen continued to move subtly on the carpet. In the space hidden between where I was seated and the table, I traced one character at a time.
The West Palace was seated not ten paces away.
From their midst, Silian watched me closely, with her tea cupped in her hands.
There was a conspiratorial half smile on her face, as if she still believed we were working together.
Maro was in deep conversation with his friends and advisors, but I did catch him glancing my way occasionally.
Both of them, as they witnessed my hand move only slightly, would believe I was still writing the heart-spirit poem.
The poem that, once finished, would cross the barrier, find its way to Terren, and kill him.
A series of devastating booms thundered from the arena.
The dragon—now bearing a hundred, perhaps a thousand, blade wounds—was thrashing violently, thwacking its body against the barrier.
Boom. Boom. Salt poured out of the holes in its body like bonedust, scattering in the wind like a sandstorm, blanketing the ground in white.
Somewhere in the dust was Terren. I could not see him at all.
Remember who you are doing this for, and you will not be lost. I had thought about it the night before, and had made my decision. The decision to let him live.
It had not been an easy one. It was possibly the hardest I’d ever made in my life.
I had been fantasizing about his death for one and a half years, ever since the first night he had tortured me.
And every time he had cut me, drowned me, choked me, stabbed me, or hurt one of my friends, the fantasies had only grown more vivid.
The satisfaction and catharsis of finally ending his life—they had been such difficult things to relinquish.
And there was the matter of Tensha’s future, too, under the reign of the Dao sigil.
That had been a hard image to stomach. To picture Terren’s power amplified a thousandfold, to have war and conquest become his legacy—that frightened me to no end.
To think of cities pulverized by knives, the way that so many had been during the Winter Dragon’s northern campaign—that was absolutely terrifying.
But, I had bargained with myself, maybe it doesn’t have to be that way.
Maybe there did not have to be war, or conquest, or pain.
Because I would be Terren’s empress. Because I was going to sit on the throne next to him, keep close to him, guide him onto a better path.
Not the right one—that was overly ambitious, even for the best of us—but at the very least, a better one.
I had not become so wicked in my heart that I had stopped believing people could change. If a gentle child could turn into a monster, I thought, then surely a monster could become gentle again.
You and me, Wei, we can rule together for as long as I live.
An earth-shaking crash. The dragon had fallen onto its belly on the near side of the arena.
Salt had flooded the entire arena by now, dusting the smashed cobble in a coat of white—and I was reminded of the snow on my wedding day.
Still more was pouring out of its myriad knife wounds, as if the entire, unmoving length of it was a punctured sack of flour.
Amidst the settling dust, I spotted Terren again, limping towards the felled dragon.
Seven of his swords were still around him; he used the eighth as a walking stick.
His gown was tattered, his forehead covered in blood, and his back scored by a giant, raw slash. But he was still alive, had still won.
“Wei.” Silian had come to my table, her expression panicked. “It has been long enough by now for you to have cast it, has it not? Terren has subdued the dragon. He is going to tame it soon. We are running out of time!”
Around us, everyone else was too busy watching the arena to hear us. Their cheers were lost in the raging wind.
I slipped my pen back into my sleeve, stood to meet her eyes, and smiled. “No, you are.”
The characters I had been tracing on the ground were not my heart-spirit poem. They were not even poetry at all. They were just random words, words to make it seem like I was still going through with the plan.
At first she looked confused. Then the implication hit her, all at once, and her lower lip trembled with rage.
“Have you forgotten who you are? That night we met on Mid-Autumn, you were so afraid. So desperate. You were practically begging me to work with you, to help you kill the evil man you were bound to, to prevent him from seizing the throne with his bloodthirsty hands. Have you changed so much since then? Have you been so seduced by power?”
My smile never faltered. “Silian, you say it like it is a bad thing.”
I had thought it through the night before, and I understood now. Power was not always evil, the pursuit of it not always selfish.
Being able to help one’s family, one’s village—that was power.
Having enough provisions to dole out to starving farmers in the north—that was power.
Holding the authority to question the wicked owner of a pleasure house, to seek out the truth, to protect the innocent—that was power.
Remember who you are doing this for, and you will not be lost. What Silian didn’t know was that my decision to spare Terren was not so that I could become empress.
It was for me to become the Rice Wife. Someone in the palace who understood—viscerally—what it was like to languish in the famine.
Someone who could answer letters from places not on maps, and change edicts, and write spells to turn blanched wheat fields golden.
The expression of shock and betrayal on Silian’s face, at that very moment—that was also power. I broke into a grin. When Maro narrowed his eyes at us from where he was sitting beside his men, I grinned even wider.
Maro, I thought, how does it feel to have fought so long for nothing? To have betrayed your brother—and murdered your father—for absolutely nothing? It was a wicked thought, and it delighted me to no end. I was going to be laughing about it for years.
The crowd roared louder with excitement, and we turned back towards the arena.
Terren had made it to the wounded dragon and was kneeling before its head.
He produced a small silver dagger from his sleeve, plunged it into its snout, and kept his hand around its hilt.
A moment later, his sigil flared; a river of brilliant red light flowed from his palm to the dagger to the Crown.
He was really doing it. He was really about to tame the dragon all by himself.
Then, piercing above the cheering, one of Kiran’s men screamed, “The Crown is still awake!”
The dragon’s tail moved slightly. Terren, focused on channeling into the dragon, had not noticed. The shouts of excitement turned to shrieks of alarm, and a moment later, the tail whipped up with the speed of arrows and slammed into him.
He was thrown across the arena. A terrifying distance, bouncing across the salt-smeared ground. When his body at last rolled to a stop—all the way on the opposite side of the square—he did not get up. His swords, which had been hovering midair, all dropped to the ground like stones.
“No,” I gasped.
Silian started to laugh—a vulture’s shriek.
“Perhaps the nation did not need to rely on a lowly village girl after all. Perhaps the coronation itself shall be what kills the tyrant prince. After all, he is stupid enough to take on a whole dragon by himself.” The way her smile twisted her face then, I could not fathom why I had once admired it.
Why I had once believed her afraid of nothing.
“Stupid, also, is anyone depraved enough to support him. Did you really think the world could allow someone like him to live? Evil never wins in the end, Wei. Even children know this.”
With those last words, she went back to join those of the West Palace. I just stood there, too petrified with horror to speak.
Beneath the terrace, Terren was still sprawled on the ground, not moving.
The Crown bellowed, then raised itself—with great difficulty—onto its four claws. Its vicious eyes fell on the prince, splayed out on the far side of the arena, and it began to move towards him with slow, rumbling steps. I couldn’t breathe.
Terren, don’t die.
Not now. Not like this.
The West Palace already knew I had betrayed them. If Terren did not manage to tame the Crown, and it passed to Maro, I would be the first person the new emperor beheaded.
The dragon was close enough that the steam from its nostrils billowed the prince’s hair. It reared back, then threw its head forward, jaws snapping—
But not around Terren. He stopped it just in time, fast enough that I barely caught it happening: three of the swords on the ground shooting underneath the dragon’s chin, lifting—with a flare of the 刀/Dao sigil—the dragon by the bottom of its head, high enough that when the jaw did snap shut—a colossal snap that shook the balustrades and rattled the plates on the tables—it caught only wind.
And the swords didn’t stop there. They kept rising, and rising, until the dragon was near vertical—then they flung it back, and the entire enormity of it sailed across the air and smashed against the literomantic barrier with a sky-shattering boom.
The shock of it made an entire section of the balustrade crumble away, startling the men who had been leaning on it.
The dragon slid down the side of the barrier like it was glass. It landed on the ground and lay still. Even its wounds were hardly leaking salt anymore, as if whatever store within it had run out.
The audience rioted with awe and cheer.
On the far side of the arena, Terren tried to push himself off the ground—and collapsed immediately. He tried again, and managed to make it onto his knees but no further. There he stayed. Hunched over, with his head hanging, blood dripping onto his tattered gown and the salt-dusted arena.
He must have been exhausted beyond belief. That last use of magic—the one strong enough to hurl a dragon across the arena—must have taken everything he had. If something like it had been easy, he would have done it much sooner.
But he has still won, I thought, even as I felt my palms sweat. He is still to become emperor. The fight is already over, the dragon subdued. He only needs a moment to gather his strength, and—
“Prince Maro is going in!” someone from below shrieked.
I rushed to the balustrade with everyone else and looked down.
They were right. Amidst the chaos, the first son—in his gold-and-white splendor—had found his way to the arena.
He was pressing a palm to the literomantic barrier, and his sigil—of roads, of tunnels, of passageways—burned like the sun.
And then a moment later, he stepped through with a ripple, as if all that magic was only a curtain of water.
With cold horror, I remembered what he had pledged to Master Ganji after his failure in the peach garden.
I won’t fail you next time. I won’t let you down again.
Maro never had a chance to make good on that pledge—not until now, when Terren was on his knees, with his ward down, so gravely injured that he could not even stand, let alone defend himself.