Page 25 of The Blood Orchid
An arrow.
“Get down!” I said, grabbing Wenshu by his collar and yanking him backward to the bottom of the boat. He tried sitting up,but I lay down on top of him, jamming an elbow into his stomach and yanking Durian’s bag off the seat beside me.
“What’s happening?” he said, shoving my hair out of his face. “Is it the Empress?”
Something hit the opposite side of the boat, and a sharp pain bloomed in my ankle. We bumped into a cluster of rocks and the boat spun sideways, cold water lapping over the sides.
“Would you get up anddo something?” Wenshu said, elbowing me in the ribs. “We can’t sit here spinning in circles!”
“I like my body without arrows in it!” I said, shoving his face back down against the watery floor of the boat.
Do somethingsure sounded like a great idea in theory, but I’d only ever fended off archers with a bread basket, not with alchemy. How had I been so fearless only a few weeks ago, shoving the prince out of an arrow’s path? What had happened to that Zilan?
More importantly, who was shooting at us? Maybe the Empress had possessed an archer like she’d possessed Junyi. Or maybe it was just bandits who had no idea who we were, and had only seen that we wore robes embroidered with gold. I burned up two of my iron rings, thinning them into a sheet of metal that I used to shield my face as I peered over the edge of the boat.
A sea of silver glowed along the shore, shimmering metal plates made up of tiny scales sewn together like iron dragons. I recognized the uniforms immediately because they were the same soldiers pacing the perimeter of Chang’an. What were they doing this far north?
An arrow flashed past me, scoring a line across my cheek. I ducked back down and clapped a hand over my face, pressing down against a bright flash of pain. At least it had missed my eye.
“Did they hit you?” Wenshu said, sitting up.
“Barely,” I said. “Sit the hell down before—”
The words died in my throat as an arrow struck Wenshu’s arm. Tiny sparks of blood seared across my face, the whole boat tilting as the force drove him backward. I reached out for him too late, grasping a handful of air as he fell into the water.
I threw myself to the side of the boat to pull him back up, but my weight tilted the boat too far to the side. All at once, the world flipped over, and I tumbled into the river.
I crashed into coldness and silence, flinching when the boat overturned on top of me. Sea plants tangled with my ankles, fish racing away, a rock formation scraping my arm. My ankle twisted around the strap to my bag, and I reached for it with a jolt when I remembered Durian was still inside.
I couldn’t see Wenshu, but it wasn’t as if I could have helped him when neither of us knew how to swim. I kicked toward the surface, clawing at the water as if it were quicksand, weighed down by the scrolls in my bag. The river tugged me farther away from the surface, and my back slammed into a rock formation, forcing the breath from my lungs. I inhaled without meaning to, and the freezing water stabbed through my chest like daggers.
A hand closed around my arm, dragging me upward. It hauled me onto a jagged, pebbled shore, my wet hair blocking my view as I coughed into the ground, cheek stamped into muddy gravel. I managed to swipe my hair out of my eyes and catch a glimpse of feathered helmets and shining breastplates before one of the soldiers pointed at me.
“She’s got alchemy rings!” he said.
The men closed in on me, blocking out the white sky. I used my last firestone ring to sear the face of the first man to reach me, but another man seized my arms and twisted my wrists so hard I thought they might snap. The pain stunned me longenough for the first man to slip a cloth sack over both my hands. He tightened it with some sort of scratchy rope, using the excess to bind my wrists together.
My bag fell to the ground and one of the men grabbed it, but I didn’t dare make a fuss and let them know anything important was inside. They’d probably roast Durian alive if they found him.
A few feet down the river, soldiers tossed Wenshu onto the shore, binding him up as he coughed and choked. The arrow in his arm had snapped off, leaving a broken shard of wood embedded just above his elbow. The water had washed away most of the blood.
Another soldier yanked on the collar of my dress, forcing me to my feet.
“Do you have any idea who you’re manhandling?” I said, trying to elbow him. I outranked every single one of them. What did Yufei’s soldiers think they were doing?
“No,” the man gripping my collar said. “Why don’t you tell us?”
“Don’t,” Wenshu said weakly before I could respond. “There’s no insignia.”
My gaze snapped back to the men. The shoulders that normally had golden cranes on them—the royal family’s symbol for eternity—were blank. These weren’t Yufei’s soldiers.
“A private army?” I said to Wenshu, whose grim expression was all the confirmation I needed.
I’d seen private armies in passing, but usually only saw their aftermath—the villages turned to driftwood and embers, the cities that wouldn’t open their gates to anyone, even travelers, for fear of who they’d let inside. The imperial soldiers had done a decent enough job at quashing any private armies that entered Chang’an, but there were few—if any—soldiers in the rural villages far from the capital. I’d heard that private soldiers madefar more money than imperial soldiers, so many were switching sides. Part of me couldn’t blame them for that.
But a private army was bad news for a runaway alchemist like me. Telling them my name was the fastest way to get acquainted with China’s newest torture devices.
I groaned internally, remembering the fisherman who’d seen my rings when we bought his boat. There was a prize for turning in alchemists, but I hadn’t thought an army was close enough to catch up to us once we were on the water.