Chapter Seven

"Some thanks we get for setting everyone free," Zheng Sili said, glaring at the horizon. "They didn't even leave us a horse.

I swear, this is the last time I do a good deed."

"I doubt they knew we were inside," I said, shivering as a breeze ripped through the valley. We would need to head indoors

soon, before night fell and the evening chill latched on to our wet clothes. I had no more firestones to dry us out, and it

was a long walk to the next town.

I blinked hard, my vision still sparkling with gold flashes, the taste of blood still on my tongue. Even inside my own head,

I couldn't escape the Empress.

"What are you doing out here, anyway?" Zheng Sili said, standing up and stretching. "Shouldn't you be in the palace?"

"Great question," Wenshu said wryly, pulling out waterlogged scrolls from my bag and grimacing at their state.

"None of your business," I said.

Zheng Sili rolled his eyes. "Oh, I'm sorry, is this royal alchemist business? Second-rate alchemists can't know?"

"If you're going to betray me the second someone points a knife at you, then you don't need to know my plans," I said.

"That was weeks ago," he said.

I scoffed and turned back to Wenshu. "Just leave the scrolls," I said. "I can fix them when I get more waterstones. We need

to get to another town."

"With what horse?" Wenshu said, grimacing. "How do you—"

He trailed off, a strange look in his eyes, the words stopping as if his air had been cut off. Before I could ask what was

wrong, he folded forward, landing face-first in the dirt.

"Whoa," Zheng Sili said, taking a step back.

I swore and rolled Wenshu over, slapping him hard across the face. When that didn't work, I rubbed my knuckles across his

collarbone and yanked at his hair, but he still wouldn't wake.

"Is he dead?" Zheng Sili said from behind me, not sounding particularly concerned.

"Shut up," I said. "He's clearly not."

"Nothing is ever clear with you."

I sighed, trying to bite back tears because the absolute last thing I wanted to do was cry in front of Zheng Sili. I was so

exhausted that I would have slept right there on the muddy ground if not for the incoming cold that would surely kill me.

Now I had to drag my brother to the next town.

"Where were you headed?" Zheng Sili said.

"Baiyin," I said quietly, afraid he would hear the way my voice trembled if I said any more.

"Sounds like a good place to restock on stones," he said. Then he squatted down, yanked Wenshu's arm around his shoulder,

and hauled his limp body up, looking to me expectantly. "Are you going to help me or not?"

Stunned, I quickly tucked Durian into my bag and grabbed Wenshu's other arm.

"Why are you—"

" Zheng Sili, best alchemist in Lingnan, leaves the Crown Prince unconscious to freeze to death with his poor, helpless concubine ," he said. "That doesn't sound very heroic, does it? I would never find work again."

"He's not the Crown Prince," I said, tugging Wenshu's arm to force Zheng Sili to walk forward. "And I'm not helpless."

"Look, I know you think you're smarter than me, but I know the Crown Prince when I see him," Zheng Sili said.

I sighed. I supposed it didn't matter if Zheng Sili knew at this point. Who would believe him anyway?

"It's the Crown Prince's face but my brother's soul," I said.

Zheng Sili stopped walking. "And you were his concubine ?" he said, expression twisted with disgust.

" He wasn't my brother until a few weeks ago! " I said, my face burning. "There wasn't exactly a wide array of corpses to choose from after the Empress's monsters ravaged

the palace!"

"Corpses," Zheng Sili echoed. "So the prince is dead?"

I didn't answer, staring at my footprints in the mud. I hated saying it out loud. But Zheng Sili was perceptive, and my silence

stretched on long enough that it became its own answer.

"Wow," Zheng Sili said. "And I thought my family was complicated."

I bit my tongue, too exhausted to keep arguing with someone with the emotional intelligence of a brick. I focused all my energy

into putting one foot in front of the other as we headed down the incline alongside the river, following the current where

it would have carried our boat had the private armies not overturned it.

"You're trying to get him back, aren't you?" Zheng Sili said after we'd walked in silence for a while longer.

I said nothing, staring at the rocky riverbank. Maybe if I ignored him, he would take a hint and stop talking. The sun was sinking lower, and we were losing light fast. I shivered, shaking hair out of my face.

"You seem the type," he said, when I didn't answer.

"The type?" I echoed tiredly.

He shrugged as best as he could with Wenshu's arm on one shoulder. "The type who doesn't leave anyone behind." He said it

like an insult, lip curling. He turned his face to the sky, hefting Wenshu higher on his shoulder. "I suppose I could make

time to help you."

" Help me? " I said, nearly dropping Wenshu. "Who said I needed your help?"

" You didn't. Your brother who spontaneously turns into a limp sack of potatoes certainly implied it," he said, nodding to Wenshu.

"You don't seem surprised by this, which means it happens a lot. You already told me you stuffed your brother's soul into

the wrong body, I'm guessing with some very high-level alchemy that you yourself don't even fully understand, which means

you did a shoddy job and something went wrong, so this is going to keep happening. What would you have done if I wasn't here?

Or if this happened when you were fighting someone?"

I grimaced, biting back a thousand sharp words that would take more energy than I had to spare. I forgot, at times, that just

because Zheng Sili was rude, it didn't mean he was a fool.

"Why would you ever help me?" I said. "You hate me."

"I don't hate you," he said, raising an eyebrow and turning to me as if the thought had never occurred to him.

"You antagonized me at every round of the competition," I said.

"Yes, because it was a competition ," Zheng Sili said slowly, as if I was the one being illogical. "I would have looked pathetic if a peasant girl won instead

of me, and—lo and behold—I was right. When my father heard..." He trailed off, looking toward the sun, which had now burst

into sharp orange on the horizon.

"I have no home to return to," he said quietly, the words so soft, so unguarded, that it didn't sound like Zheng Sili at all.

"I went home after I escaped from the dungeons, but my father was so ashamed of me. He was very clear. I can return as a royal

alchemist or not at all." He nodded to Wenshu. "And once you bring the prince back, you'll get married and become the new

empress, won't you?"

"That's the plan," I said hesitantly.

"So you'll need a new crop of royal alchemists, won't you?"

I let out a sharp laugh. "You want to help me for job security ?"

"Who would you choose, if not the person who helped you bring back the prince?"

"Oh, I don't know, maybe someone who didn't try to rip my dress off the first time we met."

"Are we really keeping track of petty things like that?" he said. "You knocked my tooth out."

I sighed, tightening my grip on Wenshu's wrist. "I'll think about it, okay? I'm so tired I can barely see straight. I'm not

making any promises of employment at the moment."

Zheng Sili scoffed. "You're the most impulsive person I've ever met, and yet you're waffling over the easiest win-win situation

that has ever been presented to you."

Suddenly, Wenshu twitched. He gasped down a sharp inhale and wrenched himself out of our hands, falling to the mud. He rolled over at once, looking up at me and Zheng Sili with wild eyes. He turned, looking at the river and the distant horizon, then sighed deeply, hanging his head.

"You couldn't have carried me the rest of the way to Baiyin?"

Just before nightfall, the land began to slope downhill, beginning the bridge between the desert and the mountains. Parched

sand gave way to stony dirt.

The Yellow River curved through the city, the air wetter and plants more vibrant than in the golden sameness of the desert

from where we'd come. In the distance, the jagged mountains captured the glow of the setting sun, a prickly row of golden

spikes just beyond the flat waters of the river.

The city was named for its metal industry— báiyín meant white silver —and was a center for alchemical stone trading. At least, it had been before the private armies started rounding up alchemists.

We arrived at the outskirts of the city, all three of us shivering, nearly dead on our feet. I would have liked nothing better

than to stumble into the closest inn and sleep for the next day and a half, but I forced myself to trudge to the town center

until I found some stone merchants. I had fewer than ten stones to my name, and I didn't want to be caught unprepared again.

I gave Wenshu some coins to find food, then started filling a tray with my stones, keeping an eye out for clear opal.

"I'm a jeweler," I announced to the stone merchant in Lanyin dialect, just in case he was thinking of turning me over to the

private armies for suspicion of alchemy. It was one of the only things I'd learned to say in that dialect before we left Chang'an.

"I use these to make bracelets."

But the merchant only waved his hand like he couldn't care less. I had been a merchant once, so I knew that as long as people paid, there was little reason to pry into their business.

As I turned to the second row of stones, I tripped over Zheng Sili's foot.

"Quit standing so close to me!" I said, shouldering him back. But instead of stepping away, he only followed after me like

a lost sheep.

"It would probably be wise to get me some stones as well, if you want my help," he said quietly.

I stared at him blankly, and it took me a moment to realize what he was implying. He doesn't have any money. I rolled my eyes and jammed a hand back into my bag, passing him a handful of gold. He caught it with both hands, frowning.

"That's it?" he said. "Aren't you spending the prince's money?"

" Shut up! " I said in Guangzhou dialect. "We just got out of jail. You want to go straight back there? And that's plenty to buy what

you need."

"Are you being stingy, or do you actually think this is a lot of money?"

I rolled my eyes. "If you want more stones than that can buy, go dig some up by the riverbank," I said, slamming my tray down

in front of the merchant. I caught a glimpse of opal behind the counter and held up three fingers, pointing to it. The merchant

wrote down a number on a piece of paper and spun it around to show me.

It was nearly three times higher than what I'd expected.

"Are you serious?" I said before I could stop myself. The merchant must have understood the capital dialect, because his expression

slid into a frown. I'd purchased alchemy stones for over ten years, and I knew how much something like this should have cost,

even with inflation, which seemed to have evened out after the production of life gold ceased. "How much is the opal?"

"Everything is seventy-five apiece," the merchant said.

I clenched my jaw. He probably saw my clothes and thought I was some aristocrat from Chang'an who would toss her coins over

unquestioningly.

"Look," I said, "I understand marking up the price for tourists, but this is robbery."

His frown carved deeper into his face. "I am not trying to swindle you," he said, "I'm making sure I'm not out of business

by the end of the week. Same price for everyone. In a few days, my wife and I are melting down our gold and trading it for

its weight in silver. That value has always held stable."

I blinked, taken aback. "That's... quite a risk," I said.

"The risk is trusting that gold will have more value than dirt by summer's end, with what's happening in the capital."

I went still. "What's happening in the capital?" I said quietly, careful not to reveal the apprehension in my voice.

"Riots," the merchant said, shrugging. "All of Chang'an's rich have pooled their money and are paying men from all over the

country to knock down the palace walls and oust the royal family. We're standing at the edge of a new dynasty, and I'm not

going to be sitting here helpless when gold loses its value again. My grandfather told me how it was when Taizong came into

power."

So that's where all the men in Baiyin went , I thought. I'd assumed they'd been hired to draw out alchemists in hiding, but apparently the rich had given up on making life gold and were ready to take matters into their own hands. Yufei still had her army and a few alchemical traps I'd left behind at some of the palace doors, but would that be enough? She had always seemed so strong and unyielding, but then again, so had the Moon Alchemist. I could still see her lying on her back, skin sickly gray, teeth painted with blood while she begged me to let her die.

"Do you want the stones or not?" the merchant said. "I have other customers."

My hands felt numb as I dug into my satchel and pulled out more gold. It wasn't as if I had a choice. I passed him the gold

and hurriedly filled my satchel, not waiting for Zheng Sili to follow. Hopefully I'd at least bought the right kind of opal—only

the thought of reaching Penglai made that much money seem insignificant.

I found Wenshu at the end of the block, squatting by a corner, trying to wrangle Durian back into my bag.

"Jiějiě might be in trouble," I said.

"Yufei is trouble," Wenshu said. "Can you get your duck back in here?"

I snatched one of the apples from the bag in his other hand, bit off a piece and spit it into my hand, then held it out to

Durian, who snatched it at once and finally sat still in the bag.

"There's a private army heading for the palace," I said. Wenshu hummed, his expression unchanged. "You're not worried?" I

said after a moment.

"Am I worried about Yufei, who has never so much as let a man breathe in her direction if she didn't expressly allow it, who

has an entire army and fortified palace? No, Zilan, I'm a bit more worried about us, seeing as all we have is a demonic duck

and a failed eighteen-year-old alchemist to defend us. Yufei can hold her own."

I wasn't quite as certain, but there was little point in arguing with Wenshu when we couldn't do anything to help Yufei anyway. Maybe Wenshu truly couldn't comprehend the worst-case scenario in the way I could, simply because he had never been around for it. He had always waited by the river for me to resurrect him and clean up the mess I'd made. He wasn't the one whose failures were printed on flyers spread across China, whose name conjured shame and fear.

"If we go now, maybe Zheng Sili will get lost and never find us again," Wenshu said.

"I can only hope," I said, tightening the straps on my bag and heading down the street.

Zheng Sili did, unfortunately, catch up with us a block away, clutching a bag of stones in a green silk satchel. Together,

we hurried to the first inn we could find.

The innkeeper looked at us for just a moment too long, giving away her suspicion. All three of us were still wet, with Wenshu

and me wearing silk from the capital while Zheng Sili was so thoroughly caked in mud that it looked like he'd just climbed

his way out of the tar pits of hell.

Wenshu shoved Zheng Sili out of the way and approached the innkeeper first. "Our servant overturned our boat," he said, glaring

at Zheng Sili. "Please tell me you have somewhere we can stay for the night."

"Your servant ?" Zheng Sili said in Guangzhou dialect.

I grabbed him by the ear and yanked him down to my level, forcing a sharp whine out of him. "Yes, because you're the one who

bathed in mud," I said in Guangzhou dialect, already getting a fairly good idea what Wenshu was thinking—it didn't make sense

for two men to share a room with a woman unless one of them was a servant, and we didn't want innkeepers to wonder what our

story was. We didn't want them to remember us at all.

The innkeeper shot us one last look before telling Wenshu the price. He paid and waved for us to follow him upstairs. As soon as the door shut behind us, Zheng Sili crossed his arms and glared at me. "My father is a first-ranked magistrate in Lingnan, and I just had to pretend to be a slave," he said.

"A servant is not the same as a slave," I said, locking the door and wishing with all my might that we'd lost him in the town

square. "And does your father's status really matter that much if he disowned you?"

Zheng Sili rolled his eyes. "At least my father didn't give me a servant's name."

I glared, but couldn't bring myself to disagree. Zǐlán meant purple orchid and was the kind of name more common among servants than scholars. The children of aristocrats had names that were virtues

or dreams, carefully chosen characters that destined them for greatness. Sīlǐ meant to think of manners —a name for a man who diligently studied texts and applied their wisdom to his life. Zheng Sili was born to be a scholar,

and I was born to be no one, and somehow we had both failed at our destinies.

Wenshu sat down heavily on the floor and pulled back his sleeve, grimacing at what remained of the arrow embedded in his arm.

I knelt down in front of him and slapped his hand away. There was still a piece of wood lodged inside, so I pinched it between

my fingers and yanked it out, then pressed three moonstones to the wound to heal it.

Wenshu gritted his teeth but otherwise didn't comment until I was done. He mumbled thanks, then rushed off to find somewhere

to scrub the mud from his skin and clothes.

Zheng Sili was still hovering awkwardly by the door, so I dug out soggy handfuls of scrolls from my bag and dropped them on

the ground in front of him.

"Make yourself useful," I said, gesturing to the wet paper. He wasted no time digging waterstones out of his bag and repairing the scrolls with a flourish of wholly unnecessary and ostentatious blue light. I repaired another handful, and at the cost of only a couple bruised fingers, my father's notes and the paper from the Sandstone Alchemist were once again dry and whole.

"This is one old transformation," Zheng Sili said, frowning at the Sandstone Alchemist's riddle. "What is this supposed to

be?"

I tugged it away from him and rolled it up quickly, despite his protests. "Nothing that concerns you."

"Well, pardon me for reading what's right in front of me," he said, standing up and crossing his arms. "Have fun staring at

your poems. I've been eating peasant food for months and need something of substance."

He stormed off and slammed the door behind him, finally leaving me alone.

I looked back to the scrolls, turning over my new opals in my hands. I held one up to the window, and as it caught the lamplight,

I imagined the white eyes of dragons surveying the seas, looking down on this tiny bridge between the desert and mountains

and all the lost souls inside of it.

It seemed that most of the city closed down just after nightfall. Though there were no wards in Baiyin that would lock us

inside like in Chang'an, most of the shops were dark by the time Wenshu and I had both changed and headed into town. We left

Durian sleeping on the bed and ventured farther and farther from the inn in search of light. Zheng Sili hadn't returned yet,

and maybe, if we were lucky, he never would.

Baiyin clearly had not been spared by the raids. Half the buildings at the outskirts were little more than splintered wood

and shattered clay spilled over cracked dirt. Instead of thatched roofs, only scorched black reeds covered the skeletons of

houses, each gust of wind stirring up clouds of ash.

The center of the city had been more thoroughly repaired, a heart of golden light and loud voices that wiped away the unease of the ghostly outskirts. That was where we found a pub with candles still burning, the sounds of laughter rattling the lattice windows. It sat alone at the edge of one of the destroyed streets, boards hastily repaired with clay wires, cloth tarps thrown over the roof.

"Too noisy?" I said to Wenshu.

He shook his head. "I'm too hungry to be picky," he said, already heading for the door.

Wenshu attempted to buy us some congee while I claimed the corner of a long table, trying to make myself small in the large

crowd. People this far from Chang'an probably had never seen the face of the prince or the royal alchemists, but I didn't

like to stake my safety on a probability. I only wanted to inhale a bowl of soup, cram some food in my bag for Durian, and

head back to the room to sleep until I felt less like a resurrected corpse.

The man at the bar must not have spoken Chang'an dialect, because I saw Wenshu pantomiming eating with a spoon as I sat down.

He passed the man a few gold coins and crossed the room, sliding onto the bench beside me.

"I did my best, but I have no idea what he's going to give us," he said.

"As long as it's not life gold, we should be fine," I said. We'd eaten weeds and duck eyes and entrails that no one else wanted,

after all. Anything served in a restaurant couldn't be that bad.

We waited in silence, the dim lighting and warm murmurs around us not at all helping me stay awake. I leaned into Wenshu and

closed my eyes for what I swore would only be a few moments, but jolted at the sound of bowls hitting the table.

A server had placed two bowls of congee in front of us.

"Your pantomiming must have worked," I said, sitting up straight and grabbing my spoon. No matter how far from home we traveled or what delicacies we could have afforded, I always wanted congee when I was cold and tired. It made me feel like I was standing in the kitchen with Auntie So once more, back when I was too small to peer over the lip of the pot and could only smell the rice and marvel at the steam as I clung to her skirts.

"I think it's more likely that the word for congee is similar here," Wenshu said. "But maybe I'll have a career as an actor when this is all through."

I smiled and scooped up a heaping spoonful, blowing on it once before raising it to my mouth.

I hesitated, the spoon just barely grazing my lips, the white steam spiraling before me, shrouding my vision.

This didn't smell right.

There was a metallic undertone beneath the rice, brought forth in the steam. I had melted many metals down before with alchemy,

so I knew the scent.

I knocked Wenshu's spoon out of his hand, spraying congee across his shirt.

" Fan Zilan! " he said, jolting back. "What are you—"

"Don't eat that," I said.

He tensed. "Why not?"

I leaned over the bowl and took a deep breath. The steam made my eyes water, and there it was, more pronounced—the metallic

scent knifing up my nose. When I clasped the bowl in both hands, alchemy hummed through the ceramic, numbing my palms.

"There's an activated alchemy stone in here," I said in Guangzhou dialect. I'd tried to feed the Empress an activated stone once... in the hopes of exploding her organs from the inside.

Wenshu sat up straight, trying to subtly glance around the room. "Who would do that?" he whispered.

"Maybe someone found out I'm an alchemist and told another private army," I said. "Maybe Zheng Sili sold us out for new shoes

or something."

Wenshu sighed. "I really don't want to be punctured with any more arrows today."

I shook my head. "I don't want a fight either." I'd hardly slept at all, and my first meal in a day had just been snatched

away. Another fight with a private army wasn't going to end well for us, alchemy stones or not.

"Shall we slip out quietly and run like cowards?" Wenshu said.

"It's a tactical retreat, not cowardice," I said.

"Of course," he said, nodding quickly. "You go first."

I cast one last sad glance at the bowl of congee that looked delicious if not for the likely poison, then pushed out my chair

and headed for the door.

I had almost made it when a man wedged himself between me and the doorway, arms crossed. Another man appeared behind him,

yanking the door shut and slamming down a wooden bar across the beams so no one else could enter. I took a startled step back,

looking between them.

"Fan Zilan," the first man said, grinning darkly, "you're not going anywhere."