Page 1 of The Blood Orchid

Prologue

The Empress’s blood tastes of light.

When she dies in my teeth, when I feel her heartbeat slowing through the arteries tangled around my tongue, I learn the taste of death.

Everyone thinks that I’ve forgotten that moment.

They never speak of it because it was for the greater good, because I survived, because all people want is a victory. They don’t want to know what it cost.

But I’ve felt tendons snap and recoil between my teeth like zither strings. My tongue has scored the Empress’s spine, my teeth have peeled back her white powdered skin. It is not a taste that one easily forgets.

The moment plays again and again in my dreams. Every night, I hold her face still, keep her quiet, keep her mine, drink the gold from her withering veins.

But some nights, she does not die.

Instead, she reaches out and clasps my jaw with her bloody hands, burning red qi on slick pearl. She turns my face toward her, and I obey because she is my Empress, because when yousee something beautiful, you can’t look away.

Then she leans close to my ear and whispers words I know are not a dream. They are a memory.

Whatever power you think you have is an illusion.

Whatever your dreams are, they belong to me.

And wherever you run, I am already there waiting for you.

She sinks her nails into my cheek.

A crack ripples across my face, a single jagged line of darkness that begins beneath my right eye and races across my body. I am a daughter born from clay, I am a glazed porcelain doll on a shelf, and with a quiet sparkle of sound, I fracture apart.

She cradles me in her arms even when I’m nothing but fine white dust and jagged shards, and even then, she won’t release me. My thoughts scatter like faraway stars, but all I can think is that her bloodless, blue-tinged skin is a beautiful contrast to the scarlet running down her throat. She is the first bright light of morning that slices across the horizon, peeling it open. She is my Empress.

And then at last, she dies. Not because she is weak, or because I’ve truly defeated her, but because she made me a promise.

Wherever you run, I am already there waiting for you.

A resurrection alchemist should not fear death. But now I do.

Because I know that on the day that I die and wake up in the river of souls, the first thing I see will be a pair of bright, golden eyes.

Chapter One

Year 775

Lanzhou, China

My brother and I were very good at pretending we weren’t dead.

Out in the desert, the harsh sun pulled redness to our cheeks and drew sweat from our skin. We gasped down breaths like we’d nearly drowned and had only just clawed our way to the surface of this golden sea—a convincing imitation of life, in my opinion. I worried a bit that people might recognize us as the Crown Prince and the last royal alchemist, but I didn’t worry that anyone suspected we were reanimated corpses.

The ground whispered with snakes, thepat pat patof tiny rodent footsteps, the sigh of sand dunes shifting slowly in the distance. The sky was the color of parchment, choked with sand.

In the north, they called this desert the Borderless Sea. The dunes around us swayed, the desert alive and flowing as much as any ocean I’d ever seen, though it could have been an illusion from the heat waves, or my slowly melting brain. All I knew was that I’d once stuck my hand inside my uncle’s kiln back inGuangzhou and felt heat that I was sure would boil my skin right off—this heat was like I’d stepped fully inside of the kiln and locked the door behind me.

Wenshu and I had left the palace in Chang’an a week ago on horseback, but we’d reached a part of the world so parched that it would have been cruel to bring horses any farther—their hooves would sink into the heavy sand like mud. We’d sold them in Lanzhou for an amount of gold that we once would have marveled at, but now it was only added weight in our bags that I briefly considered dumping in the desert.

But even this relentless heat was better than staying at the palace in Chang’an.

In the weeks since the other alchemists had died, I’d hardly slept. Whenever I lay down at night, shadows flickered just past my windows, shivering away when I opened the door. Whispers slipped through the cracks in the wood-paneled walls, entered through the keyhole, contorted themselves to the diamond shape of my lattice windows to slither through and invade my dreams.