Page 16 of The Blood Orchid
After a moment, he came out from behind a curtain and said something in Lanyin.
“Do you speak the capital dialect?” I said, putting down a few coins so he would understand my purpose if not my words.
He glanced at the coins, then looked between me and Wenshu. “Visitors from the capital?” he said in Chang’an dialect, already swiping my coins off the counter.
“Not from the capital, just passing through,” I said, eyeing Wenshu warily where he was falling asleep leaning against a wall. “Do you have any rooms?”
“I have nothing but rooms,” the innkeeper said. “You’re about the only people heading this far north right now. Everyone else is going the other way.”
“Where are they going?” I said.
“Chang’an,” the innkeeper said, marking something on a sheet of paper and fishing a key out of a drawer. “Some sort of commotion at the palace.”
“Commotion?” I said too loudly, startling Wenshu awake. “Why is there a commotion?”
The innkeeper shrugged, holding out a key. “My guess is it’ssomething to do with another private army,” he said. “You want the room or not?”
I thanked him and took the key, grabbing Wenshu by the arm and leading him upstairs. I didn’t like the thought of a large private army congregating in Chang’an. It was one thing when local uprisings tried to draw out their own alchemists, but clearly someone wanted more manpower than what they could find in Chang’an alone.
There was little I could do about it from here. I could write to Yufei, but had no return address to give her, so there hardly seemed to be a point. I would have to trust that she was safe with her army behind the palace walls, and finish up this business with Penglai as quickly as possible so we could return to her.
I unlocked the door to a small room and found a single set of blankets folded up in the corner. Wenshu shook one out and checked it for bugs, then spread it on the ground and dropped onto it, face-first. I threw another blanket over the lattice window, blocking out the morning sun. I set Durian down on a windowsill, where he started pecking at a spider.
“I need to do something before you sleep,” I said, tugging at the corner of Wenshu’s blanket with my foot.
Wenshu groaned, brushing his hair back and exposing his scar as I knelt down beside him.
“Can’t I sleep while you do it?” he said into the blanket.
“It might be fine, or you might never wake up again,” I said, shrugging. “Your choice.”
He grumbled something indecipherable. “Just hurry up. I’ve lost enough sleep because of your stupid boyfriend.”
I knelt down and brushed a few more strands of his hair back, running my fingers over the glossy, gnarled skin.
?
?
?
Fan Wenshu.
Weeks ago, I’d carved the name onto the prince’s body to bind Wenshu inside of it. The wound had healed, leaving raised pink scar tissue that didn’t show any signs of fading. Wenshu had yelled at me the first time he saw it, saying,Your handwriting is so bad that you almost resurrected someone named Fan Wénhùa!
The fact that I’d been half dead at the time wasn’t a good enough excuse for him, and he’d forced me to practice my stroke order until he was satisfied I wouldn’t bind strangers to his dead body in the future.
I chose not to remind him that he was the one who taught me to write in the first place. I sensed that my handwriting bothered him far less than the realization that I’d chosen him over the prince.
Fans were not accustomed to sentimentality. We were the children of merchants, who were the children of farmers, who were the children of slaves. Sentimentality was for royal court poets and painters who could stare in longing at the night sky and contemplate the depths of their love, render their feelings in sumac tree sap and silk canvases. None of us knew how to accept grand gestures of love, because we simply didn’t need them. We loved as we poured our uneaten soup into each other’s bowls, as we stood in the sun to let the other rest in the shade.
But what I had done for Wenshu went far beyond that, and I was sure he knew it. I was equally sure that it was the only reason he was entertaining ideas of a mythical island on my behalf.Whatever his reasons, he was here with me now, and I wanted to finish this up before he lost patience.
I steadied my breath, fingers pressing into the scar, and closed my eyes.
The sounds of the river rose slowly. At first, there was only a distant whisper of rushing water, its coolness numbing my fingertips where they touched my brother’s scar. Then the water began rushing faster, its roar wiping away the sounds of the road just beyond our window and the low voices beneath the floorboards until there was nothing but the river’s song.
When at last I felt the tepid water around my bare feet, I opened my eyes to the blank cage of sky above me.