Page 79 of The Blood Orchid
We ran through the back door, where Wenshu had already untied the horses. He grabbed Durian off the ground and stuffed him into a bag, then struggled to climb onto a saddle. Zheng Sili shoved him upright with one hand, then easily mounted his own horse and held out a hand for me. Before I could argue that I wanted to ride with Wenshu, he’d grabbed me by the wrist and hauled me halfway onto his own horse. Our horses took off, and I clung to Zheng Sili, afraid I would fall off at this speed.
“She’ll come after us if she lives,” Zheng Sili called at Wenshu over his shoulder.
“I cut the other horses loose,” Wenshu shouted back. “She can chase us on foot if she wants, but she won’t catch up.”
I glanced over my shoulder at the mansion as we rode into the countryside, then down at the rings on my hand, my whole arm stained with the Silver Alchemist’s blood.
Once, I’d thought my cousins heartless for wanting to leave even a single soul behind when we could have helped them. But the Silver Alchemist had saved my life and I had robbed and killed her. And yes, she had killed people, but so had I. Yet I was the one riding away, pretending to be a hero while she bled out on her kitchen floor.
My hand felt numb from the weight of the two powerful rings, my skin stiff from dried blood. Just like the first time I’d put on a silk gown to dine with the Empress, I felt like a child playing dress-up. But this time I wasn’t pretending to be an aristocrat, but a great alchemist who deserved to carry such important stones. As soon as we found the third ring, everyone would expect me to do a transformation that would split the seams of the world and carry me to a mythological island—something I wasn’t sure that even the Moon Alchemist was capable of.
Yet somehow, no one had asked me if I could actually do it.
They still believed in the Scarlet Alchemist who had seized her dream at all costs, and I couldn’t bear to tell them that she was dead.
I turned my gaze to the approaching horizon and slipped the red zircon ring off my finger, examining it in the light of the setting sun. The zircon was a vibrant, bloody scarlet with deadly sharp facets, trapped red light pulsing within the stone like the slow but steady beating of a heart.
Chapter Fifteen
At first, I thought I couldn’t find Hong because I was too distracted.
I stood on the river plane, my skin rubbed raw after Wenshu had scoured the Silver Alchemist’s blood from my face. I’d used moonstone to absorb the blood from my clothes and carefully polished both rings until the bloodstains grew faint, but they still felt oddly warm on my fingers, like the Silver Alchemist’s ghost was clutching my hand. I could still hear the sound of the cleaver slicing down, the snap of bone, the wet gush of blood.
I should have been happy to see Hong. I should have rushed through the forest to brag that I now had two of the three rings, that I would bring him home any day now.Only one more ring to go, I thought.
But the feeling that hummed in my chest was not something I wanted to share with Hong. I thought of the Sandstone Alchemist’s transformation and felt like a bird that sensed the teeth of winter closing in, an unnamed longing toflee and never look backdeep within my bones. Maybe all of my strength until now hadcome not from inside me, but from the other royal alchemists, who couldn’t protect me anymore. I would have to find Penglai by myself.
My next step forward sank into wet ground, cold mud swallowing my ankle and numbing my toes. I’d been distracted and wandered too far from where Hong was supposed to be. I took a steadying breath and pictured his face, the way he always felt like the soft blur of dawn, pale colors and latent moonlight. I wanted him to soften all my colors, smooth away the bright flashes of worry that I couldn’t seem to shake.
I trudged through the mud until grass whispered around my ankles once more, and at last, the fog parted, revealing the broad tree with Hong’s rope around it.
I called his name and circled the tree, peering through the white fog, but Hong wasn’t there. I clenched my teeth and swallowed down my panic, feeling for the end of the rope, praying I wouldn’t find frayed threads and a severed end.
My fingers closed around the rope and traced it up, straight into the sky.
I craned my neck, looking into the misty canopy of dying trees overhead.
“Hong?” I called.
No one answered.
I rolled back my sleeves and lifted the hem of my skirt, then jammed my foot into a low branch and hoisted myself up into the tree.
Branches scored across my face, scraping lines into my forearms, wet and sharp beneath my fingers as my grip pulled away rotting bark. I climbed higher and higher, the air growing thin, the mist denser, until at last I found him.
Hong was pressed up against the trunk, straddling a thick branch and staring off into the distance, face turned away from me.
“Hong?” I said, edging carefully onto the branch below him.
His gaze snapped down toward me, as if he hadn’t heard my undignified struggles to climb up. He reached down and grabbed me by the wrist, his rings burning against my skin. With strength I hadn’t known he had, he hauled me easily up onto the branch, straddling him, then wrapped his other arm around me and pulled me close.
“Hong, what—”
“Something is down there,” he whispered against my throat.
The words shivered across my skin. His hands trembled where he clutched my back.
“Something?” I said. “Like what?”