Page 28 of The Scarlet Alchemist

I pressed my lips together. It certainly would have been a long and difficult journey, especially for a child.

“Maybe you can see the future,” Yufei said, between bites. “Wouldn’t be the weirdest thing you’ve done.”

I supposed not. But I hoped that wasn’t the future, because whatever I’d seen was not just the streets of Chang’an, but pain and darkness.

Wenshu wouldn’t let me stand until I’d eaten an entire orange and my stomach felt ready to explode from food. Once he was satisfied, we headed back down the main street with the intention of finding a place to stay, though that plan was quickly derailed by Yufei trying to sample food from every single cart we passed.

There were more people here than I’d seen in my entire life in Guangzhou. I’d never really felt small before, but the scale of everything in Chang’an was immense—the rammed-dirt walls twice my height, the bamboo buildings with clean thatched roofs bound together with gold twine, the red-and-black pagodas in the distance stabbing into the pale sky. At every intersection, we passed a police post with stone-faced guards and bridges sloped over drainage ditches carved deep into the ground like the city’s wet veins. I’d expected a big city to stink, but Chang’an smelled mostly of elms and junipers and other fruit trees that lined the streets, probably to keep people from toppling into the ditches.

We wandered toward the eastern wards, where Yufei charmed a guard into buying her tánghúlu. He didn’t even flinch when she ate the hawthorn berries whole—seeds and all—and handed him the skewer to throw away as she told him how far we’d come to take our second-round exams.

“I should escort you to the dinner, then,” the guard said, inching closer to Yufei. “It’s almost time.”

“Dinner?” Yufei said, grip tightening around his arm. “What dinner?”

“For the arriving scholars,” the guard said. “The royal family is welcoming all the candidates tonight at sundown. You didn’t know?”

I shared an uneasy glance with Wenshu. We’d received almost no instructions from the Guangzhou magistrate other than the date and location of our next exam. It might have been a miscommunication, since we’d left for Chang’an quite soon after the first exam and mail from the North to the South was slow. But I also knew that the local school hadn’t been thrilled that one of their dropouts and his unschooled sisters had passed while some of their paying students hadn’t.

“What will they serve us?” Yufei said, pressing closer to the guard. “It’s real food, not gold, right?”

He tipped his head back and laughed, slipping an arm around Yufei’s waist. “No, the royal family won’t share gold that easily. But if they like you enough, they’ll keep you around to serve them forever.”

Forever, I thought. So much for retirement.

The guard led us to another eastern ward, this one lit with white paper lanterns painted with gold cranes, casting the paved courtyard in warm light as the sun sank behind it. We crossed a bridge over a silvery pond where golden carp shimmered beneath the water—was everything the rich owned made of gold, all the way down to their fish?

The guard left us at the gates and tried to kiss Yufei on the cheek, but she laughed coyly and ducked away. The smile dropped off her face as soon as the guard turned to leave.

“I’m surprised you tolerated that,” Wenshu said.

Yufei lifted a small red satchel from her pocket. “I took his money.”

Wenshu’s eyes widened. He spun around, making sure the guard was gone. “He’ll come back for you!” he whispered in Guangzhou dialect, eyeing the other guards in the courtyard.

“He’ll assume he dropped it,” Yufei said, stuffing it into her pocket.

Wenshu turned to me, as if I was the one pickpocketing. “We can’t do that here! Who knows what their jails are like!”

I nodded. “Yeah,Jiejie, that’s probably not the best idea.”

“Thank you,” Wenshu said.

“You should let me do the stealing next time,” I said. “I can put holes in their pockets so it’s easier to believe they dropped it.”

Wenshu sighed but didn’t bother arguing as we walked closer to the building. Muffled voices and laughter echoed across the yard, the smell of salt and garlic and pork carrying across the lake on the gentle breeze. If being a royal alchemist meant attending feasts, maybe I could get used to it.

Another guard waited at the door, a scroll in one hand and a sword tucked into his belt. He frowned as we approached, unmoved by Yufei’s soft smile.

“This meal is for scholars,” the guard said before Wenshu could even open his mouth.

“Wearescholars,” Wenshu said. “We’ve come from Guangzhou.”

The man’s gaze shifted across the three of us. “Guangzhou?”

“It’s in Lingnan,” Wenshu said, his words tight. “The south,” he continued, when the guard’s expression didn’t change.

“The south?” the man said. “I heard that southerners stuff baby mice with honey and let them scurry across the table for guests to catch and eat raw.”

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