Page 26 of The Blood Orchid
“He’s not an alchemist,” I said, nodding toward Wenshu. “Let him go.”
The man behind me laughed, finally releasing my collar and grabbing my arm instead. “Sorry if I don’t take your word for it.”
He tried to drag me toward the path, but I dug my heels into the sand. Wherever they wanted to take us, it would definitely be harder to break out of than this wide-open area. I grabbed fistfuls of fabric inside the bag around my hands and tried to tear it apart, managing to loosen the fabric before the guard struck me across the face. I bit down on my tongue, tasting blood as warmth rose to my cheek.
What a coward, I thought. He struck me with an open palm just because I was a woman. The Moon Alchemist had beaten me far worse than that.
I turned at the sound of Wenshu’s sharp cry. A soldier had twisted the broken arrow in his arm, sending fresh blood streaming down his sleeve. I went still, forcing myself not to fight back as a soldier tightened the sack around my arms and dragged me up the incline. I would have to break away later, when Wenshu was safe.
They pulled us to an open-air cart, the kind that traveling merchants used to transport hay bales. A soldier shackled meto the baseboard with a short chain, then sat down beside me. I tried to scoot away from him, but five other soldiers piled into the cart, and I had no choice but to sit crammed between them. Across from me, Wenshu was squished up against a corner, trying with all his might not to touch the soldier beside him.
“Try to jump, and you’ll be dragged under the wheels,” the soldier next to me said. “We won’t stop for you.”
“Don’t you need us in one piece to make all your gold?” I said, scanning the passing countryside for places to jump out without dying. But there was a steep drop leading to a river on each side of the path, nowhere to run for cover, no forest or city to disappear into. Even if I could unshackle us both before the guards could stop us, they would shoot us down with arrows before we made it ten feet.
“We need you alive,” the soldier said. “There’s a difference.”
The carriage descended into forest backroads, pulling us deeper into the hills and valleys of the northwest. As the trees swallowed the river in the distance, the dream of Baiyin vanished along with it.
Slowly, the landscape began to unmake me. The air out here was papery dry, cracking my lips, pulling apart the seams of my skin. I had grown up in a world that always felt like a rainstorm, but this part of the world stole moisture from your lips and tongue, dried out your eyes, cracked the skin of your knuckles.
Wenshu looked like a drowned puppy across from me, mouth clamped shut, shooting me a dark look as if warning me not to talk. It was probably a good thing that we were both drenched, because it would make it harder for anyone to recognize Wenshu as the Crown Prince. My bag made a peeping sound, and I scowled at it until it stopped, begging Durian to be silent, lest he end up on a skewer.
They were almost certainly taking us to a prison for alchemists, to be starved and tortured until we made life gold. They wouldn’t care if Wenshu swore up and down that he wasn’t an alchemist—surely lots of real alchemists said the same. Once they tossed us in with a mass of prisoners, when there weren’t so many eyes on us, that was when we’d escape.
The world began to slope upward, tipping me against a disgruntled soldier who smelled of fish, closer and closer toward the white sun. At last, the ground leveled and we arrived at a clearing among the tangled branches. A cracked clay building stood alone in the shade, its white paint so scratched and chipped that it looked like a serpent shedding old skin. It was large enough to be an aristocrat’s summer house, if not for the disrepair and the perimeter of silver guards that watched us stonily as the cart lurched closer.
Another cart passed as we entered, heading out into the forest with cargo draped in stained white cloth. As it rolled by, I caught a glimpse of purpled hands and feet jutting out from beneath the fabric, long black hair drooping from the sides. The bodies jolted as the carriage drove over uneven ground, a woman’s corpse tumbling out. The cart dragged her behind it, her long hair tangled in the wheels, her stiff limbs carving tracks into the mud.
Wenshu shot me an alarmed gaze, but I shook my head.We won’t be here long enough for that to happen, I wished I could tell him.I won’t let it happen.
The cart drew to a stop by the door, and the men unshackled us, pulling us onto solid ground. Wind raked through my wet clothes, goose bumps rippling over my skin. I hated that I was trembling from cold, sure it made me look like a scared little girl before the imposing guards.
Two of them opened the double doors as we approached, a dark, stale air wafting over us. They pushed us through, into a hallway of elaborately painted gold murals that had cracked into spiderwebs from the parched air, tiny paint flakes falling from the ceiling like a slow, golden snow.
We stopped before another guard, who grabbed me by the arm and tugged me forward, looked me up and down, then withdrew a knife and, in one sharp motion, sliced the strings of my alchemy satchel from my sash.
“Hey!” I said, but the guard ignored me, dropping my satchel in a metal bucket. Another guard bent my arms up at a sharp angle, twisting my wrists and removing the sack from my hands. My arms instantly went numb from the angle, and I couldn’t stop them as they wrenched the rings from my fingers, including the gold ring that Hong had given me before he died.
“Not that one!” I said, trying to twist out of their grasp. But they only laughed and released my arms, which felt like they were made of lead. “That metal’s too soft to even use as a weapon!” I said, but they ignored me, ripping out my hair clips, running cold hands up my ankles, seizing my shoes from my feet.
When they seemed satisfied that they’d stripped me of every possible alchemy stone, they shoved me through another door into a stone hallway. Wenshu shuffled close behind me, looking a bit like a disgruntled swamp creature, with his tangled hair hanging over his face, since they’d taken his hair clips as well.
More guards shouldered past us and unlocked a wooden door at the end of the hall just as the one behind us slammed shut, leaving us in a room of pure darkness. The guard knocked twice on a door I couldn’t see, and another guard holding a candle opened it from the other side.
The guard shoved me through the doorway into a hall thatsmelled of wet earth and salt. His candle cast pale light on rows of bamboo cells running along either wall, disappearing into the unseen darkness. White hands and dirty feet shuffled away from the bars as the guard drew closer, like cave creatures startled by light.
“You have room, right?” the guard from the last hallway said, lingering in the doorway.
The guard with the candle shrugged. “I’ll make room.”
The first guard nodded, then turned and shut the door. The remaining guard shoved me and Wenshu after the man with a candle, a bruising grip on my forearm. My feet already felt numb from the frozen ground, and the air only seemed to grow colder the farther we walked. I tried to peer into the cells, but in the darkness, the other prisoners were only jagged shadows pressed to the far walls.
At last, the guard drew to a stop.
“This will do,” he said. Then he unsheathed his sword and thrust it through the bars without warning. “Back up!” he shouted.
Luckily, he seemed not to have skewered anyone, for his sword came back clean. He pulled a key ring from his belt and jammed one of the keys into the lock, swinging open the door with a piercing creak.