Page 21 of The Blood Orchid
“That’s not an acceptable answer for a royal alchemist,” she said. “Should I go looking for that boy with a mustache? I bet he’d know.”
“No,” I said, closing my eyes, trying to push away all other thoughts. “I just need a minute. I need...” I trailed off, because my hands were sinking into the paper, the table turning to porridge beneath my palms. I realized too late that it was mud, and when I opened my mouth to speak, river water rushed down my throat.
I reeled back, my head smashing against someone’s chin. Their grip on my hair loosened for only a moment before they pushed me back down again, the slap of cold water stinging my open eyes.
“Well?” the Moon Alchemist said.
The study was filling with water, a shallow pool of silt staining my skirts, but the Moon Alchemist seemed not to notice.
“Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of the dragon kings,” she said.
I picked up the teacup and emptied the rest of it into my mouth, but the tea only tasted like mud. Somewhere far away, I sensed the someone forcing me deeper into the water, the edgesof the memory wavering, but I took a deep breath and tried with all my might to cling to it.
The dragon kings of the four seas were legendary weather gods who no one had believed in since the rise of alchemy. Auntie So had talked about them on occasion, but only as lost dreams from another world.
“The dragon kings are lords of theseas,” I said carefully, “sothe dragon’s eyerefers to a waterstone?”
The Moon Alchemist nodded. “Solve the problem like an alchemist,” she said. “Find a theory and test it.”
A sharp pain clamped at my throat. Water spilled past my lips and splattered over the parchment, but the Moon Alchemist didn’t acknowledge it, so I gripped the edge of the table and kept talking, pressing my eyes closed.
“There’s a golden fruit called dragon’s eye,” I said hesitantly, slowly recalling the words I’d once said in this other life, before everything had gone wrong. “Is gold—”
The Moon Alchemist shook her head. “Too obvious. Try again.” When I didn’t answer immediately, she sighed. “Dragons are pure yang energy, which means heat, light, courage.”
I pinched at the fabric of my dress, desperately wanting not to disappoint her. The water had risen over my knees, sticks floating past me.
Most stones had either yin or yang energy, a power that was soft and dark or sharp and bright. Everything in the universe fell somewhere on that spectrum, but for alchemy stones, the strength of that energy mattered. Jade could have yin energy if its color was light and clear, but yang energy if its shade was dark. Both could be wielded by a skilled alchemist, but you needed to know what you were dealing with, how much power you held in your hands.
“If it’s pure yang energy,” I said slowly, the water spilling onto my lap, splashing onto the edge of the table, “it’s potent and volatile. A waterstone that can be wielded for both destruction and creation, white like a dragon’s eye.”
The Moon Alchemist went very still, her eyes sharp and bright. “Such as?”
The hand on my neck ripped me from the water, slamming me back against crooked roots and jagged stones. I was staring up at the endless dark, the shadowed figure leaning over me dripping murky water onto my face.
I coughed, trying to sit up but feeling like a rotten piece of driftwood. A hand pressed down on my throat, the touch gentle now, almost reverent, but the threat of violence still clear.
“This isn’t your river!” I said, shoving the hand away. “Leave the Moon Alchemist alone!”
The hood cast my assailant’s face in shadows, but I could clearly see the two golden stars of their eyes.
Of course it was the Empress. I didn’t know what she’d done to the Moon Alchemist’s qi, but somehow she had bound her here against her will. The Empress never freed her alchemists, even in death. Once she chose you, you belonged to her forever. The Empress was probably keeping her around just to torture me, or maybe as a backup plan in case I wouldn’t make her life gold.
I surged up and tried to grab her throat, scratch her eyes, anything at all. But her hand seized me, holding my wrist an inch from her face. The moonlight through the trees fell in strips across us both, as if slicing us into ribbons of alternating light and darkness.
As the moonlight fell over the Empress’s hand, I stilled.
The hand closed tight around my wrist did not belong to the Empress.
It was too large, the knuckles too pronounced, veins too bright, nails too short. It looked more like the hand of an alchemist, nails split and knuckles bruised. I tried to peer past the shadows of the hood, but could see only darkness and gold.
I seized the sleeve, trying to yank the figure closer to me, but the person reared back, and I was left with nothing but a thin gold thread that had snagged on my ring.
The sight pulled me back to that morning, when I’d repaired the threads in Wenshu’s sleeve.
Quit manhandling me, he’d said, while I pulled out three waterstones from underneath Durian. It was a stone with great healing properties, but also destructive ones, depending on your intentions. It was full of yang energy, bright white.
The dragon’s white eye.