Page 61 of The Blood Orchid
I was too breathless for harsher words, so I did my best to manhandle Wenshu upright with one arm, draping him over Zheng Sili’s back. He rose unsteadily to his feet, swaying into me. He took a few halting steps, then fell back to the ground with a pained sound.
“Did you fall off a horse too?” I said, glaring down at him. “What’s your excuse?”
“That your boyfriend’s body is stupidly tall, and therefore heavy,” he said.
“You made a big deal about how I’ll need your help when this happens, and now you can’t even carry him?”
“Yes, I said I couldhelp, not do it all by myself,” he said, managing to shrug Wenshu off his back, letting him flop down in the dirt. “I have never claimed to have that much physical strength. And need I remind you that I’ve been imprisoned for the last month while you were playing princess? How much do you think they fed us there? I’m not exactly in my prime here.”
“Then what good are you?” I said, the words angrier than I intended. Zheng Sili flinched at my tone. I had criticized him often enough, but I didn’t think I had ever sounded so furious, not since that time in the prison.
It wasn’t his fault that Wenshu was an empty shell, that we were out here in a destroyed watermelon field instead of running a kingdom, that everyone was dead. But if I didn’t yell atsomeone, I was going to explode like one of those watermelons.
“I’m an alchemist, not a wagon,” Zheng Sili snapped, reaching for his satchel and pulling out a few firestones. The light inhis gaze sharpened the way it always did when he had an idea. “Give me your arm.”
“Why?” I said.
He rolled his eyes. “It’s covered in blood, and I need something to write with.”
I looked at my sleeve, which I hadn’t realized was still bloodied from where the Arcane Alchemist had scratched me while clinging on.
“Before it dries,” Zheng Sili said, waving me closer.
I’d already learned that he wasn’t keen on explaining when he was in alchemy mode, so I sighed and knelt down beside him, holding out my bloody sleeve.
He grabbed it in his fist, wringing out some blood until his hand was coated in red. With his other hand, he rolled up Wenshu’s left sleeve on the arm without the soul tag. With his finger, he quickly painted two characters in blood.
?
?
Li Hong.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“We’re alchemists,” he said simply. “We shouldn’t be dragging a corpse around when he can just walk by himself.”
He cast a quick glance over his shoulder as if to check for witnesses, and then, before I could truly process the meaning behind his words, pressed the firestones to Wenshu’s chest.
Red light surged from between his fingers, like he’d grabbed handfuls of molten lava. Immediately, Wenshu gasped and sat up so fast he nearly smashed his forehead into Zheng Sili.
He whirled around like a caged animal, edging away from thered embers still clinging to Zheng Sili’s hands. When he turned to me, his eyes went wide.
“Zilan?” he said.
I opened my mouth to say something likeobviously, orthanks for deigning to walk back to the inn by yourself, but something about the look in his eyes stopped me.
The way he’d whispered my name sounded so scared, the way you spoke when you were afraid of what the other person would say.
“Is it really you?” he said, moving closer. The blood from the mark on his arm was dripping down his palm, but he seemed not to notice, raising a bloody hand to cup my face, looking at me with reverence, the way only one person had ever looked at me before.
You will never look exactly like this again, he’d said. I want to remember this moment forever.
“Hong?” I whispered.
He reached for me, but his fingers hesitated a breath away from my cheek. As if a door had slammed shut, all the reverent light in his eyes vanished.
He wrenched away, landing on his hands in the dirt, all the muscles in his neck taut, swallowing hard. His fingers curled, scarring marks into the dirt.