Page 108 of The Scarlet Alchemist

There was no tablecloth.

I’d counted on the gold embroidery in the fabric to conduct alchemy, but this table was bare. I took a long sip of tea to hide my panicked expression and prayed the prince wouldn’t react too strongly when he noticed.

“How is your family, Scarlet?” the Empress asked.

I stiffened, nearly choking on my tea. I took a long moment to swallow before I felt controlled enough to meet the Empress’s gaze.

“My parents are dead, Your Highness,” I said, because that seemed safer than talking about my cousins.

“Yes, but you came here with family, didn’t you?” she said. “Are they well?”

She raised a napkin to wipe her lips, and my response died in my throat.

I recognized the embroidery immediately. Auntie So had always hemmed the edges of Yufei’s dresses with the same blue thread, the same tight stitches that had become looser over the years as her hands had grown stiff.

The Empress had made rags out of Yufei’s clothes.

“Zilan has been busy with her duties at the palace,” the prince answered for me when I took too long to speak. “She hasn’t had much time to visit her family lately.”

I swallowed, my throat dry already despite draining my teacup. The Empress was clearly trying to unsettle me, but I shoved her mockery out of my mind and honed in on what I knew—alchemy.

I needed a clean line of metal from me to her. The bare wooden table wouldn’t do, but once the table filled with dishes, perhaps I could use them somehow. It was risky to do alchemy on materials without knowing what they were, but everything about this plan was already risky. Maybe it was safer to just choke down dinner and try again another day. But then the Empress wiped her mouth again with Yufei’s dress and I clenched my fists under the table.

“I’ve requested a special dish for you, Scarlet,” the Empress said. “I hear they eat this where you’re from.”

Then the servants began filling the table with gold plates, soups and rice and vegetables. At the center of it all was a large bird, skin glazed red and crispy. I recognized the dish, but it was surprisingly large—usually leaner birds were used to make it crispier. I didn’t think I’d ever seen a bird this large, except...

Another servant placed a tray in front of the prince. Five duck heads, brown and crisp, sitting on a bed of lettuce.

The prince went very still, gaze shifting from the duck heads to the larger bird in the center of the table. “Mother,” he said, his words oddly delicate, “is this duck—”

The doors to the courtyard swung open, and a servant came in holding another fat duck by its neck. It flapped and made a choked honking sound. The prince leaped to his feet, but the Empress shot him a searing look.

“Don’t be a child, Hong. Animals need to eat too,” she said as the lion rose onto its front paws.

The servant stopped a careful distance away and tossed the duck at the lion, who snatched it out of the air, teeth clamping around one of its wings. The duck let out a scraped wheezing noise, its free wing beating frantically, but the lion crunched down on its bones and dragged it to the ground, then pinned it with its claws as it ripped the wing clean off.

The prince sank down to his seat, gripping the edge of the table and closing his eyes. The Empress petted her lion as it ate, the duck growing quieter, its dying sounds drowned out by the wet crunching and low rumbling of the beast.

“Are you going to cry?” the Empress said. “You, the Crown Prince, crying over a dead duck?”

“No,” the prince said, the quietest word I’d ever heard him say. He stared at his lap, refusing to meet her gaze. I clutched my gold chopsticks so hard that the soft metal warped in my hand, bending into a shallow curve. I slammed them on the table, ignored the flustered servants rushing to replace them, and tried to hide my treasonous anger by shoving a spoonful of rice into my mouth. It wasn’t enough for the Empress to destroy everyone in her path, but she had to make them suffer as well.

I forced down more rice and tried to focus on the arrangement of dishes, nudging my bowl closer to another plate. The dishes were packed together tightly enough that their gold rims almost formed a clear path to the Empress’s cup. The prince’s soup bowl was just slightly too far to the left, breaking the bridge, but I couldn’t exactly reach across the table and move it for him without calling attention to myself. I looked at the prince and wished he could read my thoughts, but he was sulking into his soup.

I took my soup bowl with both hands and poured it into my mouth. I didn’t know if it was rude to eat this way in the palace, but the Empress thought I’d grown up in the gutter anyway. I drained it dry, choking down noodles, then grabbed the prince’s hand and gestured for his soup bowl.

Without comment, he picked up his bowl and poured the contents into mine, then moved to set it back in place. I grabbed his free hand and gave it a sharp squeeze. He turned to look at me, eyes wide as if snapping out of his daze. He would only have a moment to figure out what I wanted before the silence grew too long, his hesitation too obvious, making the Empress suspicious. She was already watching us across the table.

I glanced pointedly at the plates before turning back to my soup, still wringing the life out of the prince’s hand in the hopes he got my point. I heard the sound of him setting the bowl down but didn’t look up right away to see where he’d placed it, in case the Empress could sense my thoughts.

Then the prince squeezed my hand back.

He understands, I thought, a strange warmth filling me that had nothing to do with the bucket of soup I’d just inhaled. In all my life, I’d always felt that even my cousins never had a clue what I was thinking, at least not beyond surcharging customers and scowling at men—nothing that wasn’t obvious on the surface. No one had ever tried to look deeper. But here was someone who knew me the way that sailors knew the stars, charting each constellation with reverence, looking for my light when lost at sea. Maybe he didn’t know my whole life story, but he knew where I was headed and would throw everything away to voyage there with me, something my family had never done.

The Empress reached for her teacup.

At the same time, the prince reached for his rice, ring clinking against the side of the bowl.

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