Page 3 of The Blood Orchid
“Yes, in my mouth would be ideal next time,” he said. “I’m not a frog who drinks through his pores.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“This isn’t even my real face!” he said. “You’re just insulting your ugly boyfriend.”
I shook my head. “Something about your personality just ruins his face,” I said. “Like adding rotten meat to a stew.”
Wenshu’s hood blew back again, sand pummeling his face. He spit on the ground, scrubbing his eyes with a sleeve that was only marginally less sandy.
I set Durian down on my skirt in a cloud of cottony fluff. His feathers were coming in, golden fuzz replaced with smoothwhite from his chest up to his face, but still a puffy cloud from the chest down. Most of the time, he sat in my bag with his head peeking out, occasionally letting out quiet peeps that annoyed Wenshu to no end. I’d tossed a few activated waterstones in with him to keep him cool, but he seemed wholly unbothered by the desert heat, which was more than I could say for myself.
I drew up some more water from the ground and cupped it in my palms, holding it out to Durian while Wenshu watched sourly.
“You care for that demon duck with more kindness than your own brother,” he said.
“Are you actually jealous of a duck?” I said, raising an eyebrow. “Did you want to sit in my bag too? Eat crickets from my hands?”
He rolled his eyes, hitching his bag higher on his shoulder, eyes red from sand.
“I could be in a palace right now pretending to be a prince,” he said. “Instead, I’m eating sand and getting sunburned while you insult me.”
“Consider it payment for resurrecting you twice,” I said, taking a long, glorious drink of water.
As the sun grew cooler and sharp red sunset sliced across the horizon, the sound of our footsteps began to change. Each step forward produced a low echo somewhere below, like the world had become hollow.
Wenshu must have noticed it too, slowing to a stop. He pulled out one of the scrolls from his bag and unfurled it. I spotted a tear in his sleeve near his shoulder and yanked him closer to me so I could fix it.
“Quit manhandling me,” he said, eyes still fixed on the scroll. I slipped my hand into my bag, gently nudging Durian aside as I pulled out a few pieces of opal—waterstones with healing properties—to repair the tear so Wenshu wouldn’t end up with a sunburn across his arm. I clasped the stones in my hands, then pressed both palms to his sleeve.
My hands grew cold as the opal melted away, the pain in my fingernails crescendoing to a sharp point before one of my nails split. The severed threads of Wenshu’s robe shivered like tiny snakes, twisting and knotting themselves back together. I shook the numbness from my hands and leaned over Wenshu’s shoulder to read the scroll.
We’d brought as many of my father’s notes as we could carry. The Moon Alchemist’s study had been full of them, and we’d spent the first few weeks after her death reading and trying to make sense of his language. My father and the Moon Alchemist had worked together, so her notes in Chinese had helped us translate some of his writing.
Many of his earlier scrolls were about perfecting the art of resurrection—old news to both me and the Moon Alchemist. But it seemed that my father had come to Chang’an for an entirely different project: the search for Penglai Island.
Back when people believed in gods instead of alchemy, they spoke of a mythical island called Penglai, home to eight immortal beings and their elixir of eternal life. They lived high up on a snow-white mountain in a palace made of gold and silver with trees that grew diamonds and rubies instead of fruit. They knew no pain, or hunger, or winter.
What a joke.
I knew, because of the rules of alchemy, that such a perfectplace couldn’t be real. Peace and happiness required suffering in turn.
But legends often sprouted from seeds of truth. At least, that was what my father believed.
In order for this island to exist, the most fundamental rule of alchemy would have to be broken, he wrote.
The creation of good without evil.
Though the legends have been diluted by superstition, if there is even a speck of truth to them, they describe alchemy without limits or consequences. The power to do anything at all.
The next few sections described his theories of how to find Penglai, but one page in the middle had been ripped out, and no matter how I tore apart the Moon Alchemist’s study, I couldn’t find it. Luckily, the surrounding notes made enough sense for us to at least begin searching.
A place like Penglai shouldn’t have been possible. It was the kind of thing that children dreamed about, a naive hope crushed by age as the years wore on. Maybe a wiser alchemist would have dismissed it.
But my father had believed in it, just as he’d believed in resurrection, which many had thought impossible as well. He did not fear alchemy the way others did. He saw the potential for greatness and seized it, no matter the cost.
Maybe he had been wrong, and all of this was nothing but a foolish dream. But I remembered the look on the prince’s face as the Empress slit his throat, the wound yawning open, waves of blood rolling down the steps, and I knew that somehow, it had to be possible. If I couldn’t fix this, then I didn’t deserve the second life I’d been given.
My father’s notes mentioned a map that would take us toPenglai Island, but even after poring through the Moon Alchemist’s study, secret drawers and all, we hadn’t been able to find it. He might have taken it with him the last time he left the palace, in which case we’d never find it.