8. HEAVEN DECIDES

He's of the South.

Just like when I died in Pumice Pass, my consciousness flees into a memory.

Memories.

I'm standing in Cicada's court on behalf of the North, and Crow is beside me.

I'm at the bottom of the boat; he's on top of me.

We face each other, across zithers; I'm Zephyr, then Lotus. The arrow strikes my shoulder, and it's not an accident.

At the very last second, I turned, covered for Crow, paid back the debt I owed him.

I should have let it hit him.

The memories come quicker, blurring, then focus on one moment. Crow—I'm watching him as he steps into my shrine. In it, he'll leave a peacock fan.

He steps out, and I'm following him up the mountain. Ordering him to turn around. He does, and I know what happens next.

I'll ask him the question eating me alive:

"Why are you really here?"

"I already explained to your lordess," he says, and I know that too; I was beside Ren when he said, I'm here to pay my respects to your strategist. I didn't believe him. Not fully. That couldn't be his only motive.

And it wasn't. He'd come west to help Cicada, his true lordess, testify that I was killed by the South, thus spawning their alliance with Miasma. My doubts have been proved right. I was always right.

Why, then, do I feel so wronged?

I turn away from Crow, eyes hot. Because I wanted to believe it. To be a fool, and have Crow be one with me. But had Crow actually been a fool—had he visited my shrine just to pay his respects—I wouldn't have been compelled to follow him this far up the mountain. He wouldn't bother me like a game I haven't won—can't win now that my time on earth has ended.

Well played, Crow.Well played. Except it doesn't feel well played at all. I want to see Crow one more time, and not just to watch Miasma kill him for being a Southern spy.

With my own two hands, I want to destroy him.

I come to prone on the floor, cheek pressed to an expanse of peach-and-turquoise agate.

Someone sits before me, cross-legged.

"Do you see now?" Crow. I scrabble up and surge for him—but then it's Cloud. Cloud, who was just kneeling with me, who will have to watch her swornsister die before her eyes. Her voice deepens, becomes the voice of twenty. The words echo through the hall as if spoken by a congregation.

"Humans may devise, but heaven decides."

"No." I shake my head. "I saved you. I saved her. Cloud. I took her place. I changed her fate."

"You changed nothing, Qilin." The Masked Mother transforms into Ren. "A swornsister of mine has been killed. I will still die—only now, it'll be in a war of vengeance against Cicada instead of Miasma."

"No. You—Cloud wouldn't let that happen."

"Are you so certain?" Ren becomes Miasma, and the prime ministress tsks. She leans close, bell tinkling. "He's of the South." Her whisper sears my face. "Did you think I would act on this intel?"

She pulls back, and cold air floods in. "I won't, but Cloud will. She'll carry your last words to Ren along with Lotus's head. She'll tell her lordess that it was Cicada and her spy who collaborated with Miasma to kill Lotus and, worse, that it was also Cicada who killed her little strategist, Qilin."

Cloud wouldn't. She knows we must have the South as allies. I told her. She listened to me before—

Barely, says a voice, stronger than my pride. Her first instinct will always be to tell Ren, and now you're not alive to stop her.

Zephyr. Lotus. They both died because of the South's deception, Cloud will say in a fit of emotion.

Miasma was just the executioner.

"Now, what were the names of the others again? Tourmaline and Sikou Hai? They will corroborate each of Cloud's claims. Ren will bring to Cicada a war like none other." Miasma grins, pale teeth in pale gums. "She'll die in it. No matter which way the river flows, it will always empty into the ocean."

She waves a hand, and her palace vanishes. A red sky looms above us.

A war cry rises in the distance.

"For Lotus!"

Even before I see the corpses, I know I'm back in my nightmares. But somehow, it's worse. The smell of viscera is more putrid. Blood dyes the mud—l and l of it.

We're in the Marshlands.

I look up and see Cloud and Ren, fighting. Winning. Southern banners fall and gongs sound, as Cicada orders her army to retreat and Ren regains the lost territory.

But then—fire. I don't see where it starts, just the chaos ignited by it. Cloud, when I spot her again, is downed. Killed. Ren is next—killed by the enemy and then—the scene pulses, resetting—killed by our soldiers as they defect to Cicada.

The scene pulses once more before I can recover, the marshes becoming a misty, forted city with the name Taohui on the walls. There, I see Ren on a bed, wounded but alive. "I'm sorry, Qilin," she whispers. "I couldn't finish our mission." She rises and orders our remaining soldiers out. When they're gone, she picks up one of her double swords.

She brings it to her neck.

"No—!"

Her blood sprays through my spirit.

And then I'm in the Library of Destinies again. A Scribe is rewriting all the scrolls I burned, the contents changing, but not the ending: Ren's mission dead from the moment Cloud lost Bikong.

This is how it was, how it is, how it will be forevermore.I hear the Masked Mother's voice in my head like Dewdrop's.

Fate will prevail, and you can't stop it.

"Or rather, fate will prevail, and you will have helped it," the Masked Mother says, out loud, the two of us back in her palace. I can no longer see her; I can only see the floor, my nose pressed to it. My head is buried under my arms; my breath leaves my mouth in small, wet bursts.

I doomed them.

I doomed them all to die.

I may not have told Ren about Cicada's betrayal, but I did tell the others. I feared the Rising Zephyr Objective would again be left without a successor, but no one knows better than I, its maker, that Ren can't win without the Southlands. My murderers or not, they must be our allies.

I should have taken their betrayal to my grave.

But then, my heart whispers, Crow would always think you were none the wiser to his deception.

He still does. Crow, who outsmarted me. Standing right there beside me, in Cicada's court.

Pretending, like I was, to be sided with the North.

Miasma doesn't kill him for it?

How can that be?

There must be a mistake. I uncover my head and raise my eyes to the Masked Mother's—hers now set in Nadir's face. "Send me back," I say to the facsimile of my sister.

I hate that the facsimile also has her voice. "Why should I, Zephyr?"

"Why do you do anything? You knew I was among the mortals, and yet you let me stay, unpunished. Why? Why haven't you banished me from the heavens for good already?"

"Do you want to be banished for good?" asks the Masked Mother, and it's cruel that she uses Nadir's voice to ask it—

Not cruel. She possesses no concept of hate or love, Nadir told me back when I had to reclaim my powers. She knows no emotion but that of others.

Whatever you hide, she will see.

Whatever you feel, she will use to test you.

This question feels like a test.

Do you want to be banished for good?

"Yes," I say, meeting the Masked Mother's gaze.

"What do you think permanent banishment is?" she asks, and I don't bother hiding my fear of the unknown, the vastness of all that I can't control.

"It's when you send gods to a place they can't return from."

In answer, the ground beneath my feet falls away. My stomach lurches, braced for more carnage, but a sea of clouds appears instead, the Obelisk of Souls the only structure in its midst.

"It's a great mystery, isn't it? Where the banished gods go." The Masked Mother turns her gaze to the Obelisk and I do too, seeing it anew from my unbound angle.

"Of course, none of these gods return to speak of the new world they call home," the Masked Mother says as qì skims up and down the structure's sides. Up go the souls of mortals released from the mortal realm. Down go the souls washed of their memories and stripped back to their primordial forms, to be repurposed or, in mortal terms, reincarnated. "Like mortals rinsed clean of their previous lives, none of them remember that they were gods at all."

Does that mean what I think it means?

The banished gods . . . are reincarnated into mortals?

"Yes, Zephyr. That is why your sisters fear this fate for you so. But it is what you want, isn't it? To be them?"

The Masked Mother eyes me knowingly, and I balk.

Y-yes.That's what I said. But when I try to visualize it—Ren and her camp marching victorious in the streets and I, a mere mortal without my memories, celebrating a victory I had no part in—my soul flinches. No. I don't want to be human. I want—I want—

"I want to be with them. With Ren's camp. If I'm human, I can't help them."

"Fascinating," muses the Masked Mother, "how you've made Qilin's fate your very own." She cocks her head. "Enlighten me, then, Zephyr: How will you change the mortal fates when you've failed to so far?"

"You are the heavens. You control the Scribes. You decide. So make an exception for me. Let me go back as I am, a god. I'll find my own body. Just give me a chance—a fair chance—to change fate, without the Scribes' interference."

"You ask for much."

"You can do whatever you want with me when I'm done."

"All for a chance to help these humans."

Save Ren; undo my mistake; win."Yes."

"Even if it costs you the ability to return to the heavens?" asks the Masked Mother.

I don't want to be in the heavens.But this time, I don't blurt out the words. My sisters are in the heavens, and when I hear Nadir's voice next, it's real and hers, the memory wafting through my mind like incense.

Why don't you come cultivate with me, Zephyr?

I'd been pooled on the bed, the sun warm on my back. "Don't feel like it." Cultivation was for strengthening one's powers, but I had no use for stronger powers.

Nadir stroked my hair. "I saw Nebula the other day. He's looking for apprentices."

"That old fart?"

"Zephyr!"

"I don't want to be his apprentice." His blacksmithing was pointless. A celestial weapon strike might strip a god of their powers, but powers could be recultivated, as it so often happened after the heavenly wars. The losers would reappear after a thousand years, powers restored, and rehash the same five conflicts. Suffice to say, I knew better than to bother with godly politics.

Chess was different. A game was a game. A win was a win.

Or had been.

"What about wéiqí?" Nadir asked, and I recalled how she'd found me the previous week: drunk, the board overturned on the floor, pieces scattered. Nadir had quietly picked up the white and black stones.

"Why don't we play?" she now asked, and I'd pushed my face into my pillow. Couldn't I languish in peace? Couldn't Nadir go away?

My memory of her does, as I face the Masked Mother.

Nadir and Dewdrop will miss me, but there was nothing to miss. I had no purpose. What good is an eternity with them if nothing I do makes a difference?

"If leaving the heavens is what it takes, I'll pay."

"And if it takes your existence?"

"Whatever the price, I'll pay it."