Song of Silver, Flame Like Night

Book 1: Song of the Last Kingdom

by Amélie Wen Zhao

Genres: YA Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

In a fallen kingdom, one girl carries the key to discovering the secrets of her nation's past – and unleashing the demons that sleep at its heart. An epic new fantasy duology inspired by Chinese mythology.

Once, Lan had a different name. Now, she goes by the one the Elantian colonizers gave her. She spends her days scavenging for remnants of the past. For anything that might help her understand the strange mark burned into her arm by her mother, in her last act before she died.

No one can see the mysterious mark – until the night Zen appears at the teahouse and saves her life.

Zen is a practitioner, one of the fabled magicians of the Last Kingdom, whose abilities were rumoured to be drawn from the demons they communed with. Magic believed to be long lost. Magic to be hidden at all costs.

Both Lan and Zen have secrets buried deep within. Fate has connected them, but their destiny remains unwritten. Both hold the power to liberate their land. And both hold the power to destroy the world.

A ferocious tale of romance and fate, SONG OF SILVER, FLAME LIKE NIGHT is a gift to those seeking adventure with a mythological twist.

Perfect for fans of DAUGHTER OF THE MOON GODDESS by Sue Lynn Tan, THE FINAL STRIFE by Saara El-Arifi, and IRON WIDOW by Xiran Jay Zhao.

Release date: January 3, 2023

Publisher: Delacorte Press

Print pages: 480

Sample

Chapter 1

Power is always borrowed, never created.

— Dào’zǐ, Book of the Way (Classic of Virtues), 1.1

Elantian Age, Cycle 12

The Black Port, Haak’gong

The Last Kingdom had been brought to its knees, but the view was mighty fine from here.

Lan tipped her bamboo hat over her head, parting her lips in pleasure as the cool evening breeze combed through strands of her silky black hair. Sweat slicked her neck from the afternoon’s work of hawking wares at the local evemarket, and her back ached with the beating she’d received from Madam Meng for stealing sugarplum candies from the kitchens at the Teahouse. But in rare moments like this, when the sun hung ripe and swollen as a mandarin over the glittering sea, there was still a shattered-glass beauty to be found in the remnants of a conquered land.

The city of Haak’gong unfurled before her in a patchwork of contradictions. Red lanterns were strung from curved temple eave to gray-shingled rooftop, weaving and wending between pagodas and courtyards wreathed in the halo of night bazaars and evening fairs. On the distant hills, the Elantians had settled on higher ground, building their strange architecture of stone, glass, and metal to watch over the Hin like gods. The skyline glowed a dusky auric from their alchemical lamplight that spilled through stained-glass windows and arched marble doorways.

Lan rolled her eyes and turned away. She knew the story of the gods—any gods—to be a big, steaming bowl of turd. Much as the Elantians wished to pretend otherwise, Lan knew they had come to the Last Kingdom for one thing: resources. Ships full of powdered spices and golden grains and verdant tea leaves, chests of silks and samites, jades and porcelains, left Haak’gong for the Elantian Empire, across the Sea of Heavenly Radiance, each day.

And whatever was left over trickled into the black markets of Haak’gong.

At this bell, the evemarket was in full bloom, merchants having filed in along the Jade Trail with jewels that gleamed like the light of the sun, spices tasting of lands Lan had never seen before, and fabrics that shimmered like the night sky itself. Haak’gong’s heartbeat was the clink of coin, its lifeblood the flow of trade, its bones the wooden stalls of marketplaces. It was a place of survival.

Lan paused at the very end of the market. She took care to lower her dǒu’lì—her bamboo hat—over her face lest any Elantian officials prowled nearby. What she was about to do could very well earn her a spot on the gallows, along with other Hin who had broken Elantian laws.

With a surreptitious glance around, she crossed the street and made for the slums.

This was where the illusion of the Last Kingdom ended and the reality of a conquered land began. Here the cobblestone streets carefully constructed by the Elantians after the Conquest faded to dust; the elegantly renovated facades and shiny glass windows gave way to buildings crumbling from disrepair.

The trading house sat in a derelict corner, its cheap wooden doors chipped and faded with time, paper windows patched with grease yet sagging with the humidity of the south. A wooden bell tinkled somewhere overhead as Lan stepped inside.

She shut the doors, and the hubbub of the outside world fell silent.

The interior was dim, dust motes swirling in the late-afternoon sunlight that spilled onto cracked floorboards and shelves crammed with an assortment of scrolls, tomes, and trinkets. The entire shop looked like an old painting left to fade in the sun, smelling of ink and damp wood.

But this was Lan’s favorite place in the world. It reminded her o

f a time long past, a world long gone.

A life wiped from the pages of the history books.

Old Wei’s Pawn Shop dealt in odds and ends of goods left over from the evemarket after the Elantians had their pick, purchased by the shopkeeper at wholesale and sold to Hin buyers at a thin margin. The shop escaped the notice of government inspectors, for secondhand goods held no interest to the colonizers as long as they weren’t made of metal.

This was why the shop had also become a hub for contraband. The wares Old Wei had on display were innocuous enough: reels of wool, hemp, and cotton, jars of star anise and bay leaves, scrolls of cheap paper made from pounded dried bark. But hidden somewhere inside the shop, Lan knew, was something for her.

Something that could cost her life.

“Old Wei,” she called. “I got your message.”

Silence for a moment, and then: “Thought I heard your silver-bells voice. Come to bring me mischief again?”

The old shopkeeper announced himself in a shuffle of feet and a hacking cough. Old Wei had once been a teacher in a northeastern coastal village, before his family was killed and he’d lost everything in the Elantian Conquest twelve cycles ago. He’d fled to Haak’gong and used his literacy to pivot into the trading business. Constant hunger had whittled him to a stick, and the damp air of Haak’gong had afflicted him with a permanent cough.

That was the extent of what Lan knew of his life—not even his truename, banned under Elantian law and reduced to a monotonous single syllable.

Lan gave him her sweetest smile from beneath her dǒu’lì. “Mischief?” she repeated, matching his northern dialect, the tones harsher and rolling compared to the sweet, singsong southern tones she’d become used to. It was a rarity to speak either these days. “When have I ever brought you mischief, Old Wei?”

He grunted, casting her an appraising look. “Never brought me fortune either. And I still let you come back each time.”

She poked her tongue out. “Must be my charm.”

“Hah,” he said, the word cracking through a thick layer of phlegm. “Any gods watching would know what lies beneath that charm.”

“There are no gods watching.”

It was a point she often liked to debate with Old Wei, who was a stout worshiper of the Hin’s pantheon of gods—in particular, his favorite, the God of Riches. Old Wei liked to tell Lan he’d devoutly prayed to the God of Riches in his childhood. Lan liked to remind him that the God of Riches must have a twisted sense of humor to have rewarded him with a rundown contraband shop.

“There are,” Old Wei replied. Lan raised her eyes heavenward and mouthed the words along with him—words she had heard a hundred times: “There are old gods and new gods, kind gods and fickle gods—and most powerful of them all are the Four Demon Gods.”

Lan preferred not to believe that her fortunes lay in the hands of some invisible old farts in the skies—no matter how powerful they were meant to be. “Whatever you say, Old Wei,” she replied, leaning over the counter and cupping her chin in her hands.

The old shopkeeper wheezed a few times, then asked, “Evemarket again? What, is the Teahouse not feeding you enough?”

They both knew the answer to that: Madam Meng ran the Teahouse like a glass menagerie, and her songgirls were her finest display. She fed them just enough to keep them dewy and ripe for the picking, but never enough so that their bellies grew full—gods forbid they become lazy or fat.

“I like it here,” Lan said, and she did. Out here, hawking alongside other vendors and pocketing the coin she made into her own pockets, was where she felt some semblance of control over her life—a taste of freedom and free will, if only temporary. “Besides,” she added sweetly, “I get to drop by to see you.”

He cast her a shrewd look, then tsked and wagged a finger. “Don’t try your honeyed words on me, yā’tou,” he said, and bent to the cabinets beneath his counter.

Yā’tou. Girl. It was what he’d called her since he’d found her, a scrap of an orphan begging on the streets of Haak’gong. He’d taken her to the only place he’d known that would welcome a girl with no name and no reputation: Madam Meng’s Teahouse. She’d signed a contract whose terms she’d barely been able to decipher, and whose length only seemed to swell and swell the harder she worked.

But at the end of the day, he’d saved her life. Gotten her a job, put a stable roof over her head. It was more kindness than one could ask for in these times.

She grinned at the sour old man. “I would never.”

Old Wei’s grunt turned into a bout of coughing, and Lan’s smile slipped. The winters down in the south had none of the biting cold that she’d grown up with in the northeast. Instead, it encroached with a damp chill that sank into bones and joints and lungs and festered there.

She took in the state of the battered old shop, the shelves that stood fuller than usual. Tonight, on the eve of the big festivities for the Twelfth Cycle of the Elantian Conquest, security had been tightened around Haak’gong, and the first thing people tended to avoid in those circumstances was a shop trading in illicit goods. Lan couldn’t afford to dally either: soon the streets would be crawling with Elantian patrols, and a lone songgirl in their midst was an invitation to trouble.

“Lungs acting up again, Old Wei?” she asked, running a finger over a small stained-glass dragon figurine on the counter—likely a prized trade from one of the Jade Trail nations across the great Emaran Desert. The Hin had not known glass until the era of the Middle Kingdom, under which Emperor Jīn—the Golden Emperor—established formal trade routes reaching all the way west to the fabled deserts of Masyria.

“Ah, yeah,” the shopkeeper said with a wince. From the folds of his sleeve, he drew what must once have been a fine silken handkerchief and patted his mouth with it. The cloth was sodden and graying with grime. “Ginseng prices have shot up since the Elantian farts learned of its healing properties. But I’ve lived with these old bones all my life, and they haven’t killed me yet. Nothing to worry about.”

Lan drummed her fingers on the wooden counter, polished with the comings and goings of so many others before her. Here was the trick to surviving in a colonized land: you couldn’t show that you cared. Every Hin you came across would have his share of sob stories: family slaughtered in the Conquest, home pillaged and plundered, or worse. To care was to allow a chink in the armor of survival.

So Lan asked the question that had been brewing in her chest all day. “Well, what do you have for me?”

Old Wei gifted her a gap-toothed smile and bent beneath his counter. Lan’s pulse began to race; instinctively she pressed fingers to the inside of her left wrist.

There, imprinted into flesh and sinew and blood, was a scar that only she could see: a perfect circle encompassing a character in the shape of a Hin word that she could not read, sweeping strokes blooming like an elegantly balanced flower—blossom, leaves, and stem.

Eighteen cycles she’d lived, and she had spent twelve of those searching for this character—the only clue to her past that her mother had left her before her death. To this day, she could feel the searing heat of her mother’s fingers on her arms, the hole in Māma’s chest bleeding red even as the world erupted in blinding white. The expensive lacquerwood furniture of their study darkened with blood, the air filled with the bitter scent of burnt metal…and something else. Something ancient; something impossible.

“Now, I think you’ll like this one.”

She blinked, the images dissipating as Old Wei emerged from the dusty shelves and placed a scroll on the counter between them. Lan held her breath as he unfurled it.

It was a worn piece of parchment, but even with one look, she could tell that it was different: the surface was smooth, unlike the cheap papers made of hemp or rags or fishnet common these days. This was true parchment—vellum, perhaps—singed black in the corners and smudged with age. She’d known the feel of it intimately, once a world ago.

Between the wear and tear, Lan could make out faded traces of opulence. Her eyes raked over the sketches of the Four Demon Gods in the corners of the page, barely visible but present nevertheless: dragon, phoenix, tiger, and tortoise, all facing the center of the scroll, frozen in time. Swirls of painted clouds adorned the top and bottom margins. And then…there, in the very center, ensconced within a near-perfect circle: a single character, blooming with the delicate balance of a Hin character, yet with nothing recognizable. Her heart jumped into her throat as she leaned over it, barely breathing.

“I thought you’d be excited,” Old Wei said. He watched her carefully, eyes glinting with the prospect of a sale. “Wait till you hear where I got it.”

She barely heard him. Her pulse thundered in her ears as she traced the strokes of the character, following every line and comparing it to the character she’d memorized well enough to know in her dreams.

Her excitement faltered as her finger stuttered over a stroke. No…no. A line cut too short, a dot missing, a diagonal slightly off…Minute differences, but all the same—

Wrong.

She slumped, letting out a sigh. Sloppily, she rotated her wrist, finger tracing a loose circle to finish up the character.

That was when it happened.

The air in the shop shifted, and she felt as though something inside her had snapped into place—an invisible current that rushed from her fingertips into the shop. Like a static shock in winter.

It was gone in half a second, so quickly that she must have imagined it. When she blinked again, Old Wei was still watching her with pursed lips. “Well?” he asked eagerly, leaning forward over the counter.

He hadn’t felt it, then. Lan touched the tip of her fingers to her temples. It hadn’t been anything—a momentary lapse in focus, a trick of the nerves, brought on by hunger and exhaustion. “It’s a bit different,” she replied, ignoring the familiar disappointment that curdled in her stomach.

It had been so close…and yet it wasn’t.

“Not what you’re looking for, then,” Old Wei said, clearing his throat, “but I think it’s a start. See here—the syllabary seems to be composed in the same style as yours, with those curves and dashes…but the circle outside is really what caught my attention.” H

e tapped two calloused fingers to the page. “Everything we’ve seen with a circle around the character has been there only for decoration. But see how these strokes bleed into the circle? They were written in a conjoined line—a clear beginning and end.”

She let him drone on, but really, her mind reeled with a crumbling realization: that she might never understand what had happened the day her mother died and the Last Kingdom fell. That she might never know how it was possible that her mother had reached up, fingers trembling and slicked with red, and, with her bare skin, burned something into Lan’s wrist. Something that had remained after all these cycles in the form of a mark visible only to Lan.

A memory that existed between dream and imagination—the faintest spark of hope for what shouldn’t be possible.

“…hear anything I just said?”

Lan blinked, the past swirling away like smoke.

Old Wei was giving her the stink eye. “I was saying,” he said with the peevishness of a teacher who’d been ignored by his pupil, “that this came from an old temple bookhouse and was rumored to have originated at one of the Hundred Schools of Practitioning themselves. I do know that the practitioners of old wrote in a different type of script.”

Her breath caught at the word. Practitioner.

Lan curved her lips into a smile and slid forward, propping herself on one elbow on the counter. “I’m sure the practitioners wrote these, alongside the yāo’mó’guǐ’guài they bargained their souls to,” she said, and Old Wei’s face dropped.

“ ‘Speak of the demon and the demon comes!’ ” he hissed, glancing around as though one might jump out from behind his cabinet of dried goji berries. “Do not curse my shop with such portentous sayings!”

Lan rolled her eyes. In the villages where Old Wei was from, superstitions ran deeper than in the cities. Stories of ghouls haunting villages in forests of pine and bamboo, of demons eating the souls of babies in the night.

Such things might have sent shivers up Lan’s spine once, given her second thoughts about walking in the shadows. But now she knew there were worse things to fear.

“It’s all just folklore, Old Wei,” she said.

Old Wei leaned forward, close enough that she could see the tea stains on his teeth. “The Dragon Emperor might have banned such topics when he founded the Last Kingdom, but I remember the tales from my grandfather’s grandfathers. I have heard the stories of ancient orders of practitioners cultivating magic and martial arts, walking the rivers and lakes of the First and Middle Kingdoms, f

ighting evil and bringing justice to the world. Even when the emperors of the Middle Kingdom attempted to control practitioning, they couldn’t hide the traces of evidence across our lands. Tomes written in characters that are indecipherable, temples and secret troves of treasures and artifacts with properties inexplicable—practitioning magic has always been ingrained in our history, yā’tou.”

Old Wei was one of those ardent believers in the myths of folk heroes—practitioners—who had once walked on water and flown over mountains, wielding magic and slaying demons. And perhaps they once had—long, long ago.

“Then where are they now? Why haven’t they come to save us from…this?” Lan gestured at the door, at the dilapidated streets. At the old man’s hesitation, her lips twisted. “Even if they did once exist, it was probably centuries and dynasties ago. Whatever folk heroes and practitioners of old you believe in are dead.” Her voice softened. “There are no heroes left for us in this world, Old Wei.”

Her friend gave her a penetrating look. “Is that what you truly believe?” he said. “Then tell me, why is it that you make your weekly visits down here, searching for a strange character on a scar only you can see?”

His words cut like a blade to Lan’s heart, pinning the smallest flicker of a spark she hadn’t dared utter—had never dared utter:

that, in spite of all she told herself, what she had witnessed on the day of her mother’s death…had been something like magic.

And the scar on her wrist held the clue—the only clue—to the truth of that day.

“Because it lets me hope that there’s something else for me out there. Something other than this life.” The dust motes before her swirled, stained red and orange by the setting sun, like the dying embers of a fire. Lan set her hand over the slip of parchment. Perhaps there was something to be learned in the inscrutable strokes of that character. It was the closest she’d gotten in the past twelve cycles, after all.

“I’ll take it,” she said. “I’ll take the scroll.”

The old shopkeeper blinked, clearly surprised at this development. “Ah.” He tapped the scroll. “You be careful, eh, yā’tou? I’ve heard too many a tale of marks created by dark, demonic energies. Whatever’s on your wrist inside that scar…well, let’s just hope it was left by someone with a noble cause.”

“Superstitions,” Lan repeated.

“All superstitions must come from somewhere,” the shopkeeper said ominously, then crooked his fingers. “Now, let’s see the payment. Nothing comes for free. Got rent to pay, food to buy.”

She hesitated only briefly. Then Lan leaned over the counter, brushing aside a small sack of herbal powders Old Wei had been weighing, and placed a ragged hemp pouch on its surface. It landed with a clink.

Old Wei’s hands darted out, pawing through its contents. His eyes widened as he drew something out.

“Ten Hells, yā’tou,” he whispered, and drew his old paper lamp closer. In the light of the flames, a sleek silver spoon glistened.

The sight of it brought a stab of longing to her heart. It had been her prize find, accidentally thrown out with the broken dishes in the back alleys of the Teahouse. She’d been counting on selling it to buy off a moon or two from her contract at the Teahouse. The thing would clearly fetch a small fortune, for metal—any type of metal—was a relic of the past. One of the first things the Elantians did when they took over was to monopolize the supply of metal from all over the Last Kingdom. Gold, silver, copper, iron, tin—even a small silver spoon was a rarity these days. The Elantians had stopped short of seizing all the metalware in the Last Kingdom; Lan surmised that a few spoons and some coins and prized jewelry were hardly enough to build weapons of resistance for a revolution.

Lan knew where all the metal was going: to the Elantian magicians. It was said they channeled magic through metal. That Lan could believe. She had seen, with her own eyes, the terrifying

power they held. They had brought down the Last Kingdom with nothing but their bare hands.

They had killed Māma without even touching her.

“I couldn’t sell that spoon,” Lan lied. “No one’s taking anything metal these days, and it’s more trouble than it’s worth if an Elantian officer catches me. Not to mention Madam Meng’ll have my skin if she finds out I stole it. Just use it to get some ginseng for those old lungs, will you? It chafes my ears to have to listen to you cough like that.”

“Right,” Old Wei said slowly, still peering at the silver spoon as though it were made of jade. The remainder of her proffered payment—a sack of ten copper coins she’d earned from her day of sales—lay untouched. “Possessing any metal can be dangerous these days…best leave it with me…” His gaze sharpened suddenly, and he broke into a toothy smile. He leaned over to her and whispered, “I think I’ll have something really good for you next time. Source of mine’s introduced a Hin courtdog to me, and he’s in the market for—”

The shopkeeper stopped and drew in a sharp breath, his gaze darting behind her to the paper screens he’d thrown open to let in the cool evening breeze. “Angels,” he hissed, switching to the Elantian tongue.

The word sent terror spiking through her veins. Angels was short for White Angels, the colloquialism that Elantian soldiers used to refer to themselves.

Lan spun around. There, framed in the fretwork of Old Wei’s shop windows, she caught sight of something that made bile rise to her throat. A flash of silver, the gleam of a white-gold emblem with a crown and wings, armor colored in winter’s ice—

No time to think. She had to move.

Lan cast Old Wei a frightened look, but something in the old shopkeeper’s expression had steeled, his mouth pressed into a resolute line. He caught her hand as she reached for the scroll. “Leave it with me, yā’tou—don’t let them catch you with something like this on the eve of the Twelfth Cycle. Come back for it when it’s safer. Now go!” In the blink of an eye, the scroll and silver spoon had vanished.

She tipped her dǒu’lì low over her head just as the bell over the entrance rang, a toll now sharp with menace.

The air thickened. Shadows fell over the floor, long and dark.

Lan made for the door, glad for her rough hemp duàn’dǎ, a loose, cheap garment that concealed most of her figure. She’d worked long enough at the Teahouse to know what Elantians could do to Hin girls.

“Four Gods preserve you,” she heard Old Wei mumble to her. It was an old Hin saying based on the belief that the Four Demon Gods would watch over their motherland and their people.

But Lan knew, with cutting clarity, that there were no gods in this world.

Only monsters in the form of men.

There were two of them, burly Elantian soldiers dressed in full armor, their steps clunking as they passed her. Instinctively, Lan’s gaze darted to their wrists—and it was then that she loosed a breath. Bare wrists—no glint of metal cuffs wound so tightly that they seemed fused to their flesh, no hands that could summon fire and blood with a flick of pale fingers.

Just soldiers, then.

One of them paused as she passed him, the door just paces away, a sliver of cool evening air already brushing her face. Her heart lurched like a rabbit’s beneath an eagle’s gaze.

The Angel’s hand darted out, fingers closing over her wrist.

And that seed of fear in her stomach bloomed.

“Say, Maximillian,” the soldier called. With his other hand, he flicked up the rim of her dǒu’lì. Lan stared into his eyes, the youthful green of a summer’s day, and wondered how a man could make a color look so cruel. His face might have been cut of the marble statues of the winged guardians the Elantians erected over their doors and in their churches: handsome, and utterly inhuman. “Didn’t think I’d find such a fine specimen of flea in this kind of a place.”

She’d learned the Elantian tongue—she’d had to, to work at the Teahouse—and it never failed to strike ice into her veins. Their words were long and rolling, so different from the sharp-cut, dragonfly-touch characters of Hin speech. The Elantians spoke with the slow, unhurried slur of a people drunk on power.

Lan held very still, not even daring to breathe.

“Leave the thing be, Donnaron,” his companion called, already halfway to the counter, where Old Wei bent at the waist and bobbed his head with an obsequious smile. “We’re on duty. You can have your fun when you’re done.”

Donnaron’s gaze roved over Lan’s face, down her neck, and lower, and she felt violated with that single look. She wanted to scratch out those youthful green eyes.

The Angel shot her a wide grin. “That’s too bad. Don’t you worry, my pretty little flower. I’m not letting you go so easily.”

The pressure on her wrist increased slightly—like a promise, a threat—and then he released her.

Lan stumbled forward. She had one foot out the door, hands pressed against the handle, when she hesitated.

She looked back.

Old Wei’s silhouette was small between the hulking Elantians, a shadow in the setting sun. His rheumy old eyes flicked up to her—just for a single moment—and she caught the tilt of his nearly imperceptible nod. Go, yā’tou.

Lan pushed through the door and ran. She didn’t stop until she was well clear of the stone parapets that marked the entrance to the evemarket. Ahead stretched an expanse of darkness that was the Bay of Southern Winds, glittering crimson as it caught shards of fading sunlight in its waves. Here the winds were sharp and briny, rattling over the wooden jetties and whistling over the old stone walls of Haak’gong as though they wished to raise the land itself.

To be so free, and to be so powerful—what might that taste like? Perhaps one day she would know; perhaps one day she would be able to do more than gift an old, ailing man a slim silver spoon and run when danger knocked on the door.

She tilted her face to the skies and breathed, massaging the part of her wrist where the soldier had grabbed her, wishing to scrub the feeling of his fingers from her mind. Tonight was the winter solstice, marking the Twelfth Cycle of the Elantian Conquest; with the highest Elantian officials in the land gathering for the festivities, it made sense that the government had increased surveillance and patrols across the largest Hin cities. Haak’gong was the Southern Elantian Outpost, the jewel of trade and commerce of Elantian colonies, second only to the Heavenly Capital, Tiān’jīng—or, as it was now meant to be known, King Alessandertown.

The Twelfth Cycle, Lan thought. Gods, has it been that long?

If she closed her eyes, she could remember exactly how her world had ended.

Snow, falling like ashes.

Wind, sighing through bamboo.

And the song of a woodlute weaving to the skies.

She’d had a name, once. Her mother had given it to her. Lián’ér, meaning “lotus”: the flower that bloomed from nothing but mud, a light in the darkest of times.

They’d taken that from her.

She’d had a home, once. A great courtyard house, green weeping willows sweeping stained-glass lakes, cherry blossom petals coating fanstone paths, verandas yawning to the lushness of life.

They’d taken that from her.

And she’d had a mother who loved her, who had taught her stories and sonnets and songs, who had nurtured her calligraphy stroke by stroke across soft parchment pages, fingers twined around hers and hands wrapped around her entire world.

They had taken her mother, too.

The long, booming tolls of the dusk bells echoed in the distance, cutting through her memories. Her eyes flew open, and there it was again, the empty sea looming so lonely before her, echoing with all that she had lost. Once upon a time, she might have stood here, at the precipice of her world, and tried to make meaning of it all—how it had all gone so wrong, how she had ended up here with nothing but broken memories and a strange scar only she could see.

But as the bells’ sonorous tolls continued to sound across the skies, reality washed over her. She was hungry, she was tired, and she was late for the evening’s performance at the Teahouse.

The scroll had been promising, though…. She brushed a hand over her left wrist again, each stroke of the strange, indecipherable character burned indelibly into her mind.

Next time, she told herself, just as she had for the past eleven cycles. Next time I’ll find the message you left me, Māma.

For now, though, Lan tipped her dǒu’lì over her head and dusted off her sleeves.

She had a Teahouse to return to.

She had a contract to pay off.

She had Elantians to serve.

In a conquered land, the only way to win was to survive.

Without another glance back, she turned to face the colorful streets of Haak’gong and began making her way up the hills.