Page 111 of The Scarlet Alchemist

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

I remembered being eight years old when old man Leoi had caught me and my cousins climbing on his roof. Yufei and I had run away, but Wenshu hadn’t been able to climb down on his own, and old man Leoi had dragged him home, face covered in snot and tears and nervous vomit.

Auntie So had apologized to old man Leoi, then shut the door and spun around, not to Wenshu, but to me and Yufei.

You don’t leave your brother behind, she’d said.Come back together, or not at all.

But Mama, he’s so slow, Yufei said, crossing her arms and pouting. Yufei’s stubbornness was usually enough to exasperate Auntie So and make her move on to an easier problem, but this time her eyes went dark and she shook a soup ladle at us.

We have nothing without each other, you understand? Our house, our shop—all of it can burn down tomorrow. Fans don’t leave each other behind.

Now, as I stared into the candle the Moon Alchemist had given me—marked with red notches that would tell me the hour as the candle burned down—I couldn’t help but wonder what Auntie So would say about me now. I was kneeling in the bedroom of the Crown Prince, wearing a gold-embroidered dress, while Wenshu and Yufei were probably choking on mold spores, shivering in some lightless dungeon.

Fans don’t leave each other behind.

But I’d left them, because I wasn’t a Fan and I never really had been. We’d come to Chang’an to save our parents, but when it mattered the most, I’d only managed to save myself.

When the candle melted down to the last line, the other alchemists would feed the Empress’s blood to this week’s crop of monsters and release the imprisoned alchemists. The Moon Alchemist had tasked me and the Comet Alchemist with finding the Emperor and keeping both him and the prince safe while the monsters ravaged the palace around them.They’re the last of the House of Li, she’d said.One of them needs to live, or there will be another war for power.

The prince came into the room as the candle was reaching its last notch, his expression nauseous. He locked the door and lingered in front of it for a breath too long.

“What is it?” I said. “Has something happened?”

He avoided my gaze and came to sit on the bed beside me. “Durian has been pulling at your dress,” he said, tugging at a loose gold thread on my sleeve. “What if it snags on something when you’re running?”

I reached over him and grabbed a spool of thread from the drawer, the same one we’d used to try to trick the Empress.

“Somehow, I don’t think that will be my undoing,” I said, as I threaded a needle and wound it through the loose thread to knot it back into the fabric. “Do you want to talk about what’s actually bothering you?”

“There’s nothing bothering me,” he said, far too quickly. “I just worry that if you pull at the wrong thread, the dress will fall apart, and we don’t want you undressed. I mean, not in public at least. Maybe we need to get Durian something else to chew on? I think—”

“Hey,” I said, threatening to poke his leg with my needle, “what’s going on?”

The prince met my gaze, then sighed and dug into his pocket, took my hand, and slapped a cold piece of metal into my palm.

“What is this?” I said after a moment, holding it in my palm like a dead thing.

“A ring,” he said.

I turned it over in my hand, feeling its cool, smooth edges. My alchemy rings were rough and sharp, made with haste. They were never polished or beautiful like this. “Thank you, but I use iron rings for alchemy. Gold is a weaker metal, so it’s less practical.”

“I know,” he said, shifting from foot to foot. “This isn’t for alchemy.”

“Then what is it for?”

“Well,” the prince said, “I figured there would be too much excitement afterward to really talk about this for a while, what with, you know, all the corpses we’re probably going to have to clean up tonight, and there’s probably a lot of paperwork that goes along with a change in power, so this seemed like a good time—”

“Li Hong,” I said, frowning, “why are you giving me this?” It didn’t take an imperial scholar’s mind to sense that the prince was hiding something, but I didn’t understand what was making him so nervous.

He scratched the back of his neck, looking anywhere but at me. “I just think that, when I’m Emperor, the court may look down on us if my wife only wears iron jewelry. Not that it matters tome, but it gives the impression that I don’t treasure you, and—”

“Your wife?” I whispered, the ring suddenly a thousand pounds in my hand.

The prince nodded quickly, his face pink. “If you prefer bracelets, or necklaces, that can be arranged, but I thought a ring might work better with your alchemy, even if it’s not as good as iron.”

I slammed the ring down on the bed like it was made of fire, startling Durian awake. “You can’t marry me,” I said.

“Oh,” the prince said, his shoulders drooping, all the light sapped out of him. “Well, I intended to ask you rather than tell you, but words get away from me sometimes when I’m around you.”

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