Chapter Five

We left Lanzhou at dawn, tossing our bags into a creaky canoe that absolutely would not spring a leak and dump us in the Yellow

River, according to the fisherman who sold it to us. I patched a few questionable spots with moonstone before we left, and

by the time the sun rose, the river was drawing us north.

I read over the Sandstone Alchemist's transformation again once daylight broke, running my fingers over the words that would

save everyone.

Even if I didn't understand the whole transformation, I knew the first ingredient. Opals were expensive stones imported from

other continents, something we would never find in a desert village.

Baiyin, a day's boat ride to the north, was known for its copper and silver mines, so chances were good that stone trade there

would be more diverse.

Maybe in Baiyin, I could find scholars who could help me figure out the rest of the transformation. No one would openly admit to being an alchemist now that private armies were everywhere, but that was the beauty of a transformation hundreds of years old—no one would know for certain that it was a transformation unless they also knew alchemy. No one could turn me in without incriminating themselves. I wondered if the first alchemists had ever imagined that one day, alchemists would need to hide their transformations not to protect their ideas but their lives.

All I need is one good scholar, and I could be on Penglai Island by the end of the week , I thought as the river curved to the left and Lanzhou disappeared behind the trees. That ember of hope flared bright inside

me, filling me with warmth. Everything I'd destroyed could be repaired with only a few stones. It didn't matter what the Empress

was planning, because I would reach Penglai first and have all the power in the world at my disposal. I didn't realize I was

smiling until Wenshu told me to stop thinking about your stupid boyfriend .

The morning chill melted away, and as the sun rose over the Yellow River, we rode the current to the northeast, wide awake

from the fear of toppling overboard, since neither of us could swim. We'd grown up on the Pearl River, but had never ventured

past the shores—the children of clay merchants had no reason to go farther than the muddy riverbanks.

I steered us around patches of rocks and tall cordgrass, but no matter how I directed us, the waters drew us east, like it

wanted us there.

After a few hours, there was nothing but sparse trees on either side of the river and searing sun overhead, baking us alive

in the wooden boat. I'd set Durian on the seat beside me, but he'd stubbornly squirmed back inside my bag and fallen asleep.

Driftwood lay scattered across the banks, mixed with unsettled dirt and cracked Huyang trees. Villages like these—built too close to the river—were often swept away overnight in the summer floods, leaving behind nothing but ghosts and broken branches by morning. We passed through yet another shattered ghost village, the remaining trees creaking overhead, branches barely held upright by thin strips of split wood.

The quiet unsettled me. Even in the golden expanse of the desert, it hadn't been this silent, as if the world knew something

that we didn't. I paddled faster than Wenshu, steering the boat too far to the left.

Wenshu frowned over his shoulder. "Would you relax?" he said. "I'm going as fast as I can, but your boyfriend didn't exactly

have a ton of upper body strength."

"Don't say that like your body was any stronger," I said. Then, quieter: "This place feels strange."

"Well, we're leaving it. At a normal, sustainable pace," he said, turning the boat straight again. "Save your energy in case

we see an alligator."

"Is that a possibility?"

I couldn't see his face, but somehow I felt certain he was rolling his eyes. "No, Zilan, I'm sure all the river beasts in

the north are very polite and will step out of the water until we pass so as not to startle us."

Something thunked against the boat, rocking us to the side.

I jumped and yanked my oar out of the water, half expecting an angry alligator to chase after it, but the river was clear

and still, save for the ribbons of water rippling behind our boat. I peered over the edge, but saw no sharp teeth or yellow

eyes or muddy scales. Only a long, thin piece of wood embedded in my side of the boat, the end sparkling with gold fletching.

An arrow.

"Get down!" I said, grabbing Wenshu by his collar and yanking him backward to the bottom of the boat. He tried sitting up, but I lay down on top of him, jamming an elbow into his stomach and yanking Durian's bag off the seat beside me.

"What's happening?" he said, shoving my hair out of his face. "Is it the Empress?"

Something hit the opposite side of the boat, and a sharp pain bloomed in my ankle. We bumped into a cluster of rocks and the

boat spun sideways, cold water lapping over the sides.

"Would you get up and do something ?" Wenshu said, elbowing me in the ribs. "We can't sit here spinning in circles!"

"I like my body without arrows in it!" I said, shoving his face back down against the watery floor of the boat.

Do something sure sounded like a great idea in theory, but I'd only ever fended off archers with a bread basket, not with alchemy. How

had I been so fearless only a few weeks ago, shoving the prince out of an arrow's path? What had happened to that Zilan?

More importantly, who was shooting at us? Maybe the Empress had possessed an archer like she'd possessed Junyi. Or maybe it

was just bandits who had no idea who we were, and had only seen that we wore robes embroidered with gold. I burned up two

of my iron rings, thinning them into a sheet of metal that I used to shield my face as I peered over the edge of the boat.

A sea of silver glowed along the shore, shimmering metal plates made up of tiny scales sewn together like iron dragons. I

recognized the uniforms immediately because they were the same soldiers pacing the perimeter of Chang'an. What were they doing

this far north?

An arrow flashed past me, scoring a line across my cheek. I ducked back down and clapped a hand over my face, pressing down

against a bright flash of pain. At least it had missed my eye.

"Did they hit you?" Wenshu said, sitting up.

"Barely," I said. "Sit the hell down before—"

The words died in my throat as an arrow struck Wenshu's arm. Tiny sparks of blood seared across my face, the whole boat tilting

as the force drove him backward. I reached out for him too late, grasping a handful of air as he fell into the water.

I threw myself to the side of the boat to pull him back up, but my weight tilted the boat too far to the side. All at once,

the world flipped over, and I tumbled into the river.

I crashed into coldness and silence, flinching when the boat overturned on top of me. Sea plants tangled with my ankles, fish

racing away, a rock formation scraping my arm. My ankle twisted around the strap to my bag, and I reached for it with a jolt

when I remembered Durian was still inside.

I couldn't see Wenshu, but it wasn't as if I could have helped him when neither of us knew how to swim. I kicked toward the

surface, clawing at the water as if it were quicksand, weighed down by the scrolls in my bag. The river tugged me farther

away from the surface, and my back slammed into a rock formation, forcing the breath from my lungs. I inhaled without meaning

to, and the freezing water stabbed through my chest like daggers.

A hand closed around my arm, dragging me upward. It hauled me onto a jagged, pebbled shore, my wet hair blocking my view as

I coughed into the ground, cheek stamped into muddy gravel. I managed to swipe my hair out of my eyes and catch a glimpse

of feathered helmets and shining breastplates before one of the soldiers pointed at me.

"She's got alchemy rings!" he said.

The men closed in on me, blocking out the white sky. I used my last firestone ring to sear the face of the first man to reach me, but another man seized my arms and twisted my wrists so hard I thought they might snap. The pain stunned me long enough for the first man to slip a cloth sack over both my hands. He tightened it with some sort of scratchy rope, using the excess to bind my wrists together.

My bag fell to the ground and one of the men grabbed it, but I didn't dare make a fuss and let them know anything important

was inside. They'd probably roast Durian alive if they found him.

A few feet down the river, soldiers tossed Wenshu onto the shore, binding him up as he coughed and choked. The arrow in his

arm had snapped off, leaving a broken shard of wood embedded just above his elbow. The water had washed away most of the blood.

Another soldier yanked on the collar of my dress, forcing me to my feet.

"Do you have any idea who you're manhandling?" I said, trying to elbow him. I outranked every single one of them. What did

Yufei's soldiers think they were doing?

"No," the man gripping my collar said. "Why don't you tell us?"

"Don't," Wenshu said weakly before I could respond. "There's no insignia."

My gaze snapped back to the men. The shoulders that normally had golden cranes on them—the royal family's symbol for eternity—were

blank. These weren't Yufei's soldiers.

"A private army?" I said to Wenshu, whose grim expression was all the confirmation I needed.

I'd seen private armies in passing, but usually only saw their aftermath—the villages turned to driftwood and embers, the cities that wouldn't open their gates to anyone, even travelers, for fear of who they'd let inside. The imperial soldiers had done a decent enough job at quashing any private armies that entered Chang'an, but there were few—if any—soldiers in the rural villages far from the capital. I'd heard that private soldiers made far more money than imperial soldiers, so many were switching sides. Part of me couldn't blame them for that.

But a private army was bad news for a runaway alchemist like me. Telling them my name was the fastest way to get acquainted

with China's newest torture devices.

I groaned internally, remembering the fisherman who'd seen my rings when we bought his boat. There was a prize for turning

in alchemists, but I hadn't thought an army was close enough to catch up to us once we were on the water.

"He's not an alchemist," I said, nodding toward Wenshu. "Let him go."

The man behind me laughed, finally releasing my collar and grabbing my arm instead. "Sorry if I don't take your word for it."

He tried to drag me toward the path, but I dug my heels into the sand. Wherever they wanted to take us, it would definitely

be harder to break out of than this wide-open area. I grabbed fistfuls of fabric inside the bag around my hands and tried

to tear it apart, managing to loosen the fabric before the guard struck me across the face. I bit down on my tongue, tasting

blood as warmth rose to my cheek.

What a coward , I thought. He struck me with an open palm just because I was a woman. The Moon Alchemist had beaten me far worse than that.

I turned at the sound of Wenshu's sharp cry. A soldier had twisted the broken arrow in his arm, sending fresh blood streaming

down his sleeve. I went still, forcing myself not to fight back as a soldier tightened the sack around my arms and dragged

me up the incline. I would have to break away later, when Wenshu was safe.

They pulled us to an open-air cart, the kind that traveling merchants used to transport hay bales. A soldier shackled me to the baseboard with a short chain, then sat down beside me. I tried to scoot away from him, but five other soldiers piled into the cart, and I had no choice but to sit crammed between them. Across from me, Wenshu was squished up against a corner, trying with all his might not to touch the soldier beside him.

"Try to jump, and you'll be dragged under the wheels," the soldier next to me said. "We won't stop for you."

"Don't you need us in one piece to make all your gold?" I said, scanning the passing countryside for places to jump out without

dying. But there was a steep drop leading to a river on each side of the path, nowhere to run for cover, no forest or city

to disappear into. Even if I could unshackle us both before the guards could stop us, they would shoot us down with arrows

before we made it ten feet.

"We need you alive," the soldier said. "There's a difference."

The carriage descended into forest backroads, pulling us deeper into the hills and valleys of the northwest. As the trees

swallowed the river in the distance, the dream of Baiyin vanished along with it.

Slowly, the landscape began to unmake me. The air out here was papery dry, cracking my lips, pulling apart the seams of my

skin. I had grown up in a world that always felt like a rainstorm, but this part of the world stole moisture from your lips

and tongue, dried out your eyes, cracked the skin of your knuckles.

Wenshu looked like a drowned puppy across from me, mouth clamped shut, shooting me a dark look as if warning me not to talk.

It was probably a good thing that we were both drenched, because it would make it harder for anyone to recognize Wenshu as

the Crown Prince. My bag made a peeping sound, and I scowled at it until it stopped, begging Durian to be silent, lest he

end up on a skewer.

They were almost certainly taking us to a prison for alchemists, to be starved and tortured until we made life gold. They wouldn't care if Wenshu swore up and down that he wasn't an alchemist—surely lots of real alchemists said the same. Once they tossed us in with a mass of prisoners, when there weren't so many eyes on us, that was when we'd escape.

The world began to slope upward, tipping me against a disgruntled soldier who smelled of fish, closer and closer toward the

white sun. At last, the ground leveled and we arrived at a clearing among the tangled branches. A cracked clay building stood

alone in the shade, its white paint so scratched and chipped that it looked like a serpent shedding old skin. It was large

enough to be an aristocrat's summer house, if not for the disrepair and the perimeter of silver guards that watched us stonily

as the cart lurched closer.

Another cart passed as we entered, heading out into the forest with cargo draped in stained white cloth. As it rolled by,

I caught a glimpse of purpled hands and feet jutting out from beneath the fabric, long black hair drooping from the sides.

The bodies jolted as the carriage drove over uneven ground, a woman's corpse tumbling out. The cart dragged her behind it,

her long hair tangled in the wheels, her stiff limbs carving tracks into the mud.

Wenshu shot me an alarmed gaze, but I shook my head. We won't be here long enough for that to happen , I wished I could tell him. I won't let it happen.

The cart drew to a stop by the door, and the men unshackled us, pulling us onto solid ground. Wind raked through my wet clothes,

goose bumps rippling over my skin. I hated that I was trembling from cold, sure it made me look like a scared little girl

before the imposing guards.

Two of them opened the double doors as we approached, a dark, stale air wafting over us. They pushed us through, into a hallway of elaborately painted gold murals that had cracked into spiderwebs from the parched air, tiny paint flakes falling from the ceiling like a slow, golden snow.

We stopped before another guard, who grabbed me by the arm and tugged me forward, looked me up and down, then withdrew a knife

and, in one sharp motion, sliced the strings of my alchemy satchel from my sash.

"Hey!" I said, but the guard ignored me, dropping my satchel in a metal bucket. Another guard bent my arms up at a sharp angle,

twisting my wrists and removing the sack from my hands. My arms instantly went numb from the angle, and I couldn't stop them

as they wrenched the rings from my fingers, including the gold ring that Hong had given me before he died.

"Not that one!" I said, trying to twist out of their grasp. But they only laughed and released my arms, which felt like they

were made of lead. "That metal's too soft to even use as a weapon!" I said, but they ignored me, ripping out my hair clips,

running cold hands up my ankles, seizing my shoes from my feet.

When they seemed satisfied that they'd stripped me of every possible alchemy stone, they shoved me through another door into

a stone hallway. Wenshu shuffled close behind me, looking a bit like a disgruntled swamp creature, with his tangled hair hanging

over his face, since they'd taken his hair clips as well.

More guards shouldered past us and unlocked a wooden door at the end of the hall just as the one behind us slammed shut, leaving

us in a room of pure darkness. The guard knocked twice on a door I couldn't see, and another guard holding a candle opened

it from the other side.

The guard shoved me through the doorway into a hall that smelled of wet earth and salt. His candle cast pale light on rows of bamboo cells running along either wall, disappearing into the unseen darkness. White hands and dirty feet shuffled away from the bars as the guard drew closer, like cave creatures startled by light.

"You have room, right?" the guard from the last hallway said, lingering in the doorway.

The guard with the candle shrugged. "I'll make room."

The first guard nodded, then turned and shut the door. The remaining guard shoved me and Wenshu after the man with a candle,

a bruising grip on my forearm. My feet already felt numb from the frozen ground, and the air only seemed to grow colder the

farther we walked. I tried to peer into the cells, but in the darkness, the other prisoners were only jagged shadows pressed

to the far walls.

At last, the guard drew to a stop.

"This will do," he said. Then he unsheathed his sword and thrust it through the bars without warning. "Back up!" he shouted.

Luckily, he seemed not to have skewered anyone, for his sword came back clean. He pulled a key ring from his belt and jammed

one of the keys into the lock, swinging open the door with a piercing creak.

The guard shoved me inside, but I tripped over the lip on the doorway and fell forward, chin slamming into the ground with

no free hands to catch myself. Wenshu fell on top of me, crushing me into the dirt. The door locked behind us, the footsteps

receded, and all light vanished as they slammed the hall door shut.

"Get off me," I said, squirming as Wenshu tried to roll away without the use of his hands. I struggled to my knees, shaking my hair out of my face as my eyes adjusted to the ghostly faces of the other prisoners cast in darkness.

The other people in the cell watched us with dead eyes, slumped against the walls. Dirt and soot caked their faces, their

eyes red, lips split, hair knotted. None of them tried to talk to us, as if new prisoners weren't a noteworthy event.

"Are you all right?" I said to Wenshu, squinting to inspect his arm in the dark.

"Well, I'm covered in filth, but I haven't lost a dangerous amount of blood, and it's not like this arm would be particularly

useful right now, even if unpunctured," he said. "Though I'd feel better if you told me your brilliant plan to get us out

of here."

"Give me a minute," I said, looking away. "I'll think of something. I just hope Durian is okay in my bag."

" Durian? " Wenshu said. "I'm more concerned about us than your demon duck!"

"I'll get us out of here," I said. "I just need..." I trailed off, taking stock of the cell. The floor was a dusty gray

type of dirt that I'd never seen before. I bent down and tried to pinch it between my fingers as best as I could with my hands

bound behind my back.

"It's made of recycled paper scraps," said a small voice behind me.

I turned to a girl who couldn't have been older than ten, her black hair so matted with gray dirt that she almost looked elderly,

her lips chapped and colorless. How long had these people been down here, sleeping on the ground?

"There's no alchemy stones in it," she said when neither of us responded.

"How do you know?" I said. "Have you tried?"

The girl turned around, showing us her bound hands, wiggling her left hand, ring finger and pinky finger missing. "Each try costs you a finger if you get caught," she said.

Wenshu let out a wounded sound, thumping his head back against the wall. "We're doomed."

"We're not," I said. "I'll get us out of here." It was what he wanted me to say—what the Scarlet Alchemist was supposed to

say—but the words felt paper-thin.

This soundless cage wrapped in cool darkness felt like a stark antithesis to the alchemist I'd been. I'd once stood proudly

beside the Moon Alchemist in my crimson robes, having defeated the wealthy sons of scholars and been hand-chosen by the Empress.

Now I was trapped in a paper box in the dark, everyone that had once helped me dead, stripped of my alchemy while the kingdom

crumbled far away.

"I'll think of something," I said, more to myself than Wenshu.

"Keep quiet, would you?" called a man from the other side of the cell. "If the guards hear you saying that, they'll piss in

our water. Again."

I clenched my jaw, running through my options.

It was impossible to completely strip a room of alchemical potential, because alchemy was in our bodies—the iron in our blood,

the salt in our skin, the zinc in our bones. The problem was, most of it couldn't be used without a catalyst stone to activate

it.

I ran my palm across the smooth walls, coated in a papery substance that wouldn't break when I dug my nails into it, no discernible

stones inside. Whoever built this place must have consulted an alchemist.

"Back up!" a guard shouted near the door, nearly impaling Wenshu with his sword. Wenshu scrambled away and sat beside me as

the doors swung open once more.

The guards threw a man into the cell. He landed on his face, groaning and spitting out a tooth. Even with his hands bound, I could make out the crooked angles of his broken fingers, the purple flesh where fingernails should have been.

"Better luck next time," one of the guards said, laughing with the other as he locked the door once more. A few of the prisoners

helped the man sit up.

"Don't touch me," he said, twisting away from them. "I'm fine."

Even though his voice sounded parched, his words heavy with exhaustion, I would have recognized that voice anywhere. I stepped

forward to get a better look at his face.

Our gazes locked, and he squinted at me through one swollen, purple eye. I knelt in front of him, because I had to be sure.

"Zheng Sili?"