Page 10 of The Blood Orchid

My muscles still ached, but I could already breathe easier, the burning sweat on my face suddenly freezing cold. As soon as my vision cleared enough to see my palms sunken into the sand, I crawled to Wenshu and turned him onto his back.

For a moment, I saw the prince’s corpse.

Blue-lipped and pale and dead after the Empress slit his throat, burning blood beneath me.

But Wenshu was still breathing. At least, for now.

I shook my head, numb fingers fumbling for more red zircon, crushing the stones to Wenshu’s throat. His body twitched, and he let out a choked sound as I ripped the gold and venom from his veins. It splashed across my dress, stinging my hands. His eyes shot open, and he gasped down a loud breath, sitting up.

I withdrew my hands, palms blistered, nails split, fingers so cramped I could hardly move them. But I needed that kind of pain, I clung to it because it was so much better than being dead.

Wenshu touched the wound on his neck with a trembling hand, looking from the dried blood to my face. “Are you all right?” he said.

I looked down at my blistered hands. My muscles still twitched as if shot through with lightning, and the dunes still swayed unsteadily in the distance, making it hard to stay upright. But I knew what dying felt like, and this wasn’t it.

“Yes,” I said. “You?”

Wenshu blinked hard, cuffing drool and sand from his lips. “I think so,” he said. Then his unfocused gaze finally settled on me. “I think it’s safe to say that man was not your father’s friend.”

I laughed, a single sharp sound, too weak even to my own ears. Durian popped out of my bag and hopped across the sand, sitting down in my lap. I set my hand on top of him, but it trembled too hard to pet him.

“This is the part where you thank me for saving you and praise my quick thinking,” I said, trying to smile even though my lips felt papery and cracked.

“Did you get the real map?” Wenshu said, ignoring me.

I reached for my bag, a few feet away from me in the sand, and pulled out the paper with shaking hands. “Of course.”

“Then let’s see it.”

I placed it down in the sand, and together we leaned over the paper that the Sandstone Alchemist had tried to kill us to protect.

For a moment, we could do nothing but stare.

“This doesn’t make sense,” Wenshu said. “This isn’t...” He shook his head. “What are we supposed to do with this?”

I took the wrong paper, I realized, my heart sinking. With a new wave of dizziness, I worried that maybe the venom would kill me after all, if the shame didn’t. The paper below us wasn’t a map at all, but a single sentence penned in shimmering ink.

The dragon’s white eye, the faceless night,

The song of silver, the serpent’s bite,

The child of Heaven, the scarlet-winged tree,

Together at last, the shadow makes three.

“A poem?” Wenshu said, frowning.

I shook my head, hands tracing the silvery ink. “The Sandstone Alchemist wouldn’t hide a poem. This looks like a very old transformation.”

The Moon Alchemist had taught me that when alchemy was a new science, when even basic transformations had yet to be discovered, alchemists would encode their transformations so that other alchemists couldn’t steal them and present them to the Emperor as their own.

I turned to Wenshu. “You’rethe literature scholar. What does it mean?”

“I studied Confucianism, not poetry,” he said, frowning. “Surely it’s referencing alchemy stones in some way. Shouldn’tyouknow what it means, Miss Royal Alchemist?”

“I don’t use dragon eyeballs for transformations,” I said, rubbing cold sweat from my forehead. Even if we figured out what it meant, what good would it do? We needed a map to Penglai Island, not another alchemical weapon. Still, part of me wondered what the Sandstone Alchemist possibly could have prized more than a map to Penglai. Surely this transformation could rend the world in half, dry out the oceans, or flatten mountain peaks.

“Well, it’s not as if we can go back and look around again,” Wenshu said, glancing to the sand where the trapdoor had been. “Let’s just get as far as we can before he realizes what’s missing. There must be another map somewhere.”