Chapter Two

The world thumped beneath my cheek as the trapdoor swung shut. Now it was only me and Wenshu, choking into the sand, the sun

burning half our faces, far from anyone who could help us. I couldn't even turn my head to see him as lightning fired through

all of my veins, my breath thin and choked, lungs seizing. Durian was making a high keening sound, trapped in my bag beneath

my leg, but I couldn't roll over to let him out.

I clapped a trembling hand to the wound on my neck, drawing out some of the blood with my iron ring, but it made no difference.

The venom was everywhere in me, and I couldn't simply drain all my body's blood to extract it. I didn't know how to separate

the snake's toxins from my own blood, because I had no idea what the venom was made of.

How long did it take to die from viper venom? There were snakes in the south that could kill you in ten minutes, but others

took hours. Judging by how my vision was already fractured, this wouldn't take long.

I turned my face to the sun, its bright halos searing across my vision, breaking it into hazy shapes. Was this really how I would die? Withered like dried fruit in the sun, felled not by a great monster or the Perpetual Empress but by a snake that ate rats and prairie dogs?

I wondered if they'd strip my title in death. Royal alchemists died fighting for the House of Li, not out alone amongst the

tumbleweeds, swallowed by the desert.

My father's words buzzed in my ears, the low voice that always seemed to come to me when I was dying, too many times to count

now. I saw the words of his notes painted in the sky.

If there is an elixir of eternal life, I will find it.

I will never stop until I can return to them.

He'd been talking about me and my mother, but the words might as well have been my own. Had my father died in this same desert,

his flesh pecked away by rodents, his bones crumbled to dust, mixing with the same golden sands now filling my mouth and scraping

my eyes? The heat waves in my vision spiraled, and the world churned like an ocean of gold, the ghostly white silhouette on

the horizon shimmering closer.

Get up, Zilan , he said. But I couldn't, and in the next shimmering heat wave, the silhouette vanished.

In the dance of lights in my fading vision, I thought of the viper's eyes, the same golden glare as the Empress. The Sandstone

Alchemist had caressed its golden scales like it was some sort of mythical dragon, not a common pest that lurked in tall grass.

Ever since the fall of the palace, I'd thought that the last thing I'd see would be golden eyes, but not those of a snake.

My eyes shot open, my fingers clawing into the sand.

The Empress's eyes were not naturally gold. They were the consequence of a century of eating life gold made by alchemists. The snake's eyes and scales were probably not natural either. The Sandstone Alchemist seemed to care greatly for his viper, so perhaps he'd fed it life gold.

Life gold filled your body, turned you to a jewel on the inside, impervious to aging. But it also meant that your blood ran

gold... and the same was probably true for venom.

I clamped my hand down harder around my neck, drawing all my concentration into my firestone ring. It was red zircon, a firestone

from Champa that I'd peeled from the prince's wall before setting off, the kind of stone meant for destroying. It was dangerous

to turn destruction alchemy on my own body, but what choice did I have?

The alchemy surged through my veins, searching for every trace of gold in my bloodstream. It sensed the foreign substance,

tangled up with another caustic chemical, something I'd never worked with before. I clenched my fingers and let the firestone

break me apart.

Destroying was so much easier than creating. That was another one of alchemy's central tenets. It took great skill to create

something new, but destruction only required rage.

My veins screamed as the firestone stung through them, wrenching gold from blood, forcing the current of my heart in the wrong

direction as the gold raced back toward the wound. A pressure rushed up my throat, then a stream of gold and something that

stung like acid poured from the wound at my throat, sizzling as it blotted the sand.

My muscles still ached, but I could already breathe easier, the burning sweat on my face suddenly freezing cold. As soon as

my vision cleared enough to see my palms sunken into the sand, I crawled to Wenshu and turned him onto his back.

For a moment, I saw the prince's corpse.

Blue-lipped and pale and dead after the Empress slit his throat, burning blood beneath me.

But Wenshu was still breathing. At least, for now.

I shook my head, numb fingers fumbling for more red zircon, crushing the stones to Wenshu's throat. His body twitched, and

he let out a choked sound as I ripped the gold and venom from his veins. It splashed across my dress, stinging my hands. His

eyes shot open, and he gasped down a loud breath, sitting up.

I withdrew my hands, palms blistered, nails split, fingers so cramped I could hardly move them. But I needed that kind of

pain, I clung to it because it was so much better than being dead.

Wenshu touched the wound on his neck with a trembling hand, looking from the dried blood to my face. "Are you all right?"

he said.

I looked down at my blistered hands. My muscles still twitched as if shot through with lightning, and the dunes still swayed

unsteadily in the distance, making it hard to stay upright. But I knew what dying felt like, and this wasn't it.

"Yes," I said. "You?"

Wenshu blinked hard, cuffing drool and sand from his lips. "I think so," he said. Then his unfocused gaze finally settled

on me. "I think it's safe to say that man was not your father's friend."

I laughed, a single sharp sound, too weak even to my own ears. Durian popped out of my bag and hopped across the sand, sitting

down in my lap. I set my hand on top of him, but it trembled too hard to pet him.

"This is the part where you thank me for saving you and praise my quick thinking," I said, trying to smile even though my

lips felt papery and cracked.

"Did you get the real map?" Wenshu said, ignoring me.

I reached for my bag, a few feet away from me in the sand, and pulled out the paper with shaking hands. "Of course."

"Then let's see it."

I placed it down in the sand, and together we leaned over the paper that the Sandstone Alchemist had tried to kill us to protect.

For a moment, we could do nothing but stare.

"This doesn't make sense," Wenshu said. "This isn't..." He shook his head. "What are we supposed to do with this?"

I took the wrong paper , I realized, my heart sinking. With a new wave of dizziness, I worried that maybe the venom would kill me after all, if the

shame didn't. The paper below us wasn't a map at all, but a single sentence penned in shimmering ink.

The dragon's white eye, the faceless night,

The song of silver, the serpent's bite,

The child of Heaven, the scarlet-winged tree,

Together at last, the shadow makes three.

"A poem?" Wenshu said, frowning.

I shook my head, hands tracing the silvery ink. "The Sandstone Alchemist wouldn't hide a poem. This looks like a very old

transformation."

The Moon Alchemist had taught me that when alchemy was a new science, when even basic transformations had yet to be discovered,

alchemists would encode their transformations so that other alchemists couldn't steal them and present them to the Emperor

as their own.

I turned to Wenshu. " You're the literature scholar. What does it mean?"

"I studied Confucianism, not poetry," he said, frowning. "Surely it's referencing alchemy stones in some way. Shouldn't you know what it means, Miss Royal Alchemist?"

"I don't use dragon eyeballs for transformations," I said, rubbing cold sweat from my forehead. Even if we figured out what

it meant, what good would it do? We needed a map to Penglai Island, not another alchemical weapon. Still, part of me wondered

what the Sandstone Alchemist possibly could have prized more than a map to Penglai. Surely this transformation could rend

the world in half, dry out the oceans, or flatten mountain peaks.

"Well, it's not as if we can go back and look around again," Wenshu said, glancing to the sand where the trapdoor had been.

"Let's just get as far as we can before he realizes what's missing. There must be another map somewhere."

I doubted it, but I wasn't keen on having my veins ripped open from venom twice in one day. We helped each other to our feet,

stumbling to the outskirts of the desert. I cast a glance over my shoulder at the shifting sand dunes that had already erased

our footprints.

This had been our only lead.

Penglai Island was difficult to research because most people didn't believe it was real. Even my father had scarcely written

anything about it, other than his intention to find it. The more time we spent withering away in the desert, the more it seemed

that Penglai Island was nothing but a lost dream that had swallowed my father whole in his desperation, and now had come to

devour me as well.

But I would rather have been lost in a dream than head back to Chang'an and pretend to be part of the royal court again. Even

if I hadn't sworn to bring the others back, I'd already noticed certain... complications to cramming my cousins' souls

into the wrong bodies.

Night was falling quickly, the desert temperatures dropping, frigid wind blowing straight through our thin silk robes. Durian kept up a constant song of peeps from inside my bag, probably hungry by now, but he'd already eaten through the stash of bugs and grass I'd packed, and I had nothing else to feed him.

We followed a distant light until we arrived shivering at a small outskirt village. We'd entered the desert near Lanzhou,

but after navigating the Sandstone Alchemist's tunnels, I had no idea where we'd ended up.

The village had only bamboo stakes instead of clay walls, the buildings thatched together with thin sticks. Goats with twisted

horns meandered out across the dusty plains, gnawing at wild onion flowers striped white and purple. Some of the store signs

were written in Arabic script in bright gold, a more common custom along the western borders.

As we drew closer, the goats limped toward us, bleating and nudging their horns at our legs. The sand turned to gray dirt,

tracked with deep footprints, splattered with rusty brown stains. We passed through the bamboo gates and entered an empty

village where wind sighed between the slats of the thatched houses, our every footstep shatteringly loud.

More and more villages were becoming ghost towns, ever since Yufei had eliminated life gold.

None of us had thought the aristocrats would be pleased that they could no longer buy eternal youth made from the blood of

peasants, but we hadn't anticipated the lengths they'd go to just to keep their life gold.

In the last few weeks, the wealthy had begun hiring private armies to ravage every city and village they could find, kidnapping

aspiring alchemists and jailing them until they agreed to make life gold. It didn't matter that the Empress had killed every

alchemist who knew how to make it. Everyone but me.

The things you want are only childish dreams , the Moon Alchemist had warned me. It had seemed so simple back then: life gold is made from the blood of unwilling peasants,

so we can't produce it anymore. But abolishing it hadn't created peace. It had only created more bloodshed. Now innocent people

were dying to protect their alchemists, and alchemists were being tortured in jail.

This was yet another town stripped bare by private armies—I could tell from the shattered doors and crumbling fences, walls

splashed with blood, hungry and untended livestock.

Well done, Scarlet , I could imagine the Empress saying. This is the new world that you lost everything for.

I told myself that this was part of razing the world and starting again. You couldn't build a new dream on shaky old foundations,

after all. This country would have to pay before we could rebuild. That was the hope I had to cling to.

Something struck the side of my face.

I whirled around, only to see an old man slumped against a wall, a small pile of rocks in his lap. His clothing was torn,

scraps bound around bloody limbs as if barely holding the pieces of him together. He shouted something at me in a dialect

I didn't understand. When I didn't respond, he threw another rock, which I swatted away. Why was anyone left in this corpse

of a village?

The old man turned his head to the side, shouting something at the broken window behind him. A younger man appeared, wearing

an embroidered cap, clutching a knife in one hand. The older man pointed at us, and the younger man turned to glare.

"We're just looking for a place to sleep," I said in Chang'an dialect.

"Not here," the younger man said, his words accented but close enough to Chang'an's dialect that I could understand. "There's nothing left for you to take."

"Take?" Wenshu said.

The man's gaze raked up and down our clothes, the wind blowing back my white cloak to reveal the silk dress underneath. "You

can't fool me. You're rich people from the capital," he said.

I barely held back a laugh. I'd been treated like a peasant while in Chang'an, but apparently I passed for a true northern

aristocrat now. I didn't know which was worse.

"We're not from the capital," Wenshu said, stepping forward before I could speak.

This was another thing we made sure everyone knew, because everyone in the country was looking for us.

The last alchemist who could make life gold and the last heir to the throne of a crumbling kingdom. They would torture both

of us until "the prince" permitted the production of life gold, or until I taught the other alchemists how to make it.

"My cousin and I are scholars from Lingnan," Wenshu said.

I hated to hear him call me his cousin and not sister, but with him borrowing the prince's body, we looked even less alike

than before. "We came to Chang'an to study, but our ward was burned in the raids. We only want somewhere to sleep."

The older man said something to the younger man, who stepped around Wenshu, glaring at me.

"Your rings," he said.

I kept my expression still, fighting the urge to cross my arms and hide my rings, which would only look more suspicious. "Yes?"

"You think we don't know what alchemy rings look like?" he said. "You're an alchemist."

"I'm not," I said, too quickly.

"So the two of you survived in the desert and managed to crawl here from Chang'an on foot, without alchemy?" the man said.

More people peered from the broken windows of their houses now. It seemed the village wasn't as dead as we thought, only dormant,

tricking travelers—or private armies—into walking away.

I doubted I could argue my way out of this one—the man was already convinced of what I was. I could have subdued him easily

enough, but if I did, we certainly wouldn't be able to sleep here. That was, unless I also killed every survivor we came across.

But I'd hurt enough people with my mistakes. I would rather stay out in the desert and pray I didn't become viper food in

my sleep.

"We don't want any trouble," Wenshu said.

"And we don't need any more alchemists here," the man said, stepping forward.

"She's not an alchemist," said a voice somewhere behind me.

The three of us turned around.

A young man leaned against a withered tree, arms crossed. His coppery, sun-scorched hair fell in his eyes, tossed and twisted

from the desert wind. Sun had turned his bare shoulders and forearms golden, but also stolen the color from his clothes, now

only an echo of what I guessed had once been blue and green and yellow.

"I met her the last time I was in the city," he said, smiling at me. "She's just an aristocrat's daughter running away from

an arranged marriage."

I carefully controlled my expression before responding. I was certain I didn't know this man, which meant he was lying for

me. People only lied for others if they cared for them, or they wanted something in return.

I glanced at Wenshu, whose skin was still tinged gray from the remnants of venom, his hands trembling beneath his long sleeves. As far out as I could see on the horizon, there were no other villages, and the temperature was dropping swiftly. This place was our only hope of resting tonight.

"I'm running away from my father," I said at last, dropping my gaze as if ashamed. "He's already sent people after me twice."

The first man sighed, mumbling something to the old man on the ground.

"Fine," he said to the man by the tree. "They're your problem, Junyi." Then he turned to Wenshu. "You want to stay? Help us

skin a goat for tonight."

"I don't know how to do that," Wenshu said, his voice wavering as he backed up into me. But that, like everything else about

us, was a lie. Wenshu had once chopped up a man and shoved his severed limbs into a pillowcase. But he wasn't supposed to

be Fan Wenshu the merchant's son coated up to his elbows in blood, he was a rich boy running away from Chang'an.

"We'll teach you, pretty boy," the man said, waving for Wenshu to follow him back out into the fields of onion flowers.

I didn't want to be separated, but normal rich girls didn't typically volunteer to help skin goats. They got their meals already

skinned and cooked, arranged on golden dishes with fresh scallions and daylilies.

"I'll show you where you can stay," the man—Junyi—said to me.

I cast Wenshu a quick glance before turning and following Junyi. For now, this was as much good fortune as we could hope for—the

armies were unlikely to come through a village they'd already raided, and we would have shelter and food for the night.

Junyi led me farther back into the desecrated village, into a clay house with no door, scattered sticks and boards leaning against the front wall as if they'd been torn away. There was only one window on the western wall of the house, no doubt to keep out the rays of the setting sun. The tiled floor glowed warmly around my ankles, still clinging to the heat of the afternoon.

"What do you want?" I said, the moment I stepped inside. "Money?"

Junyi laughed, reaching for a pot on a high shelf, twisting in a way that would definitely injure his back if he wasn't careful.

What kind of farm boy could be so reckless? "There are more important things than money," he said, setting the pot unevenly

across the stove.

"Hardly," I said, frowning as he lifted a bucket of water from the floor and struggled to pour it into the pot. He set the

bucket down heavily, water splashing over the sides, then tried to strike a match by rubbing it too slowly against his sleeve.

"You're going to set yourself on fire," I said, stepping forward and grabbing the bag of matches from him. I struck one against

the clay front of the stove, tossing it into the woodpile, where it caught fire at once. I shoved the pot back to the center

of the stove for good measure. "Have you never made tea before?"

He laughed stiffly, tossing two tea cakes into the pot, which was more than necessary for two people. "Forgive me for being

a bit nervous in front of a royal alchemist," he said.

I drew back against the wall, one hand in my satchel. There it is , I thought. He probably wanted me to make life gold for him and keep it a secret from the rest of his village. "I'm not—"

"Do you really think no one knows who you are?" he said, breaking up the tea cakes with a wooden spoon. "The only surviving

alchemist of the massacre, the hùnxiě girl from the south, tall like silver grass. You're kind of hard to miss."

"Then you should know that I could kill you easily," I said. I didn't exactly want to get kicked out of this village for murder, but I wasn't about to let a stranger push me around just for a couple hours' rest either.

The man didn't even turn around, staring into the water that was slowly starting to steam. "Of course," he said, "but you

wouldn't do that. You don't kill people without a reason."

"Not wanting to be turned over to a private army is a pretty good reason," I said.

"What, those peasant boys with borrowed swords?" Junyi said, rolling his eyes. "Why would I waste you like that?"

He slammed two cups on the table, ladling murky water into them. He hadn't let the tea steep for nearly long enough. It was

such an unimportant detail, but something about it only amplified the sense of wrongness that surrounded him. Something about

Junyi made me feel like I was one foot into a dream. Someone who had grown up in this village should have known how to lift

heavy objects, how to strike matches, how to make tea, but he seemed more like one of the clueless aristocrats I'd met in

the capital. I kept my back to the wall, hand still clenched inside my satchel.

"Is there a problem, Scarlet?" he said. Something in his words paralyzed me far worse than viper venom.

"Don't call me that," I said.

"Pardon," he said, nudging the cup closer to me and taking a deliberate sip of his own. "Not poison, I promise. Come on, there

isn't much water out here, and I've used some of it just for you."

Stiffly, I stepped closer and knelt in front of the table, picking up the lukewarm teacup but not drinking it.

Junyi took another sip, staring past me out the window at the empty paths. "My village is gone," he said, his voice low. "My mother used to do all of this ." He gestured to the teacups. "So I'm sorry if I seem... unpracticed, but I never thought I'd have to learn, and then

it was too late."

My fist unclenched in my satchel. I supposed that made sense. Maybe I was too used to looking for danger everywhere I turned.

I laid my hands in my lap, staring at my reflection in the teacup. Did he know this village had been destroyed because of

me?

"You're all that's left of the best alchemists in the country," Junyi said. "You're going to stop the private armies, aren't

you?"

I looked away, his gaze too earnest. "It will take time," I said. "I'm not fighting armies single-handedly."

In truth, I no longer trusted myself to devise political schemes. Just plotting one person's death had wiped out nearly everyone

in the palace. There was no way I could defeat several private armies all at once with only me and my brother. I needed the

other royal alchemists with me, but their souls were still trapped in the river plane.

They were trained resurrection alchemists, so they knew to stay by the river as long as they could, to wait for someone to

bring them back. But the river plane had a way of scrubbing your mind clean until your life was nothing but a hazy dream.

They couldn't wait for me forever—soon they wouldn't remember why they were waiting at all.

Junyi leaned closer across the table, shifting out of the shadows of the shelves. The setting sunlight caught his eyes, a

deep and warm brown with tiny—almost imperceptible—flecks of gold.

"How will you do it?" he said. The words were a reverent whisper, as if the question was a dark secret.

I thought of the Sandstone Alchemist nearly killing me for mentioning Penglai Island. I certainly wasn't going to broach the subject with a villager I'd just met.

"You don't need to know that," I said.

"Tell me, and I can help you," he said. "I'm strong. Surely I'm more useful to you than that cottonweed trailing after you."

"That's my cousin," I said, frowning.

Junyi went still, hands tight around his teacup. "Your cousin?" he said. "Not the Crown Prince?"

I clasped my hands under the table, regretting my words. I hadn't thought any villager this far from the capital would recognize

the prince's face.

"How interesting," Junyi said, leaning back. "And what have you done with the prince?"

"I haven't done anything to him," I said, standing up. But the man stood up at the same time, casting a dark shadow over me.

"Yet you're dragging his body around with you as a... souvenir? A memento?"

I turned for the doorway, but Junyi got there first, blocking my path.

"Move," I said. "I'm not here to hurt you."

"Oh, I get it," Junyi said, ignoring me. He tilted his head to the side, inspecting me. "You're going to resurrect him, aren't

you?"

I drew my knife from my sleeve, pointing it at the man's throat. He didn't move at first, as if he doubted I'd actually use

it, but I drove my elbow into his sternum and backed him up against the shelves, the blade digging into his skin and drawing

a whisper of blood that trickled down his throat.

"Resurrect him?" I said. "Who said the Crown Prince was dead?"

But the man's sharp smile only widened, and then I was certain that this was not a normal boy raised in a desert village.

As far as the public knew, the palace massacre had been nothing more than a failed coup. All the royal alchemists had sacrificed their lives protecting the House of Li, and Emperor Gaozong had tragically died from his illness during all the chaos. Officially, Empress Wu and the Crown Prince were alive and well. How could they not be, when their bodies were so clearly walking around the palace?

There were only four people besides me who knew that the prince had actually died that day.

My siblings, who had borrowed the royal family's bodies.

Zheng Sili, the alchemist who'd tried to resurrect the Empress—last I'd heard, he'd run home to Guangdong, and this certainly

wasn't him.

And of course, the Empress herself.

The man who called himself Junyi seized my wrist, but I held tight, digging the blade harder into his throat in warning.

That was when I saw it.

His sleeve slid up as he gripped my wrist, revealing two jagged characters branded into his forearm.

武

瞾

Wu Zhao.

The Empress.