Page 4 of The Scarlet Alchemist

“You can leave the body in the pigpen,” I said. “Come back after dark with the money.”

His eyes narrowed, the gold flecks knife-sharp. “I’m not leaving my brother in a pigpen.”

“Oh, then let’s prop him up to greet customers,” I said, rolling my eyes and standing up to move behind the counter again. “I’m not the one who dragged a corpse here at midday with nowhere to put it.”

“Can you not help menow?”

“My cousins are busy, and I need their help,” I said. “Besides, you haven’t paid me yet.”

“What is it with you Fans and money?” he said. “Have you no compassion?”

“None,” I said, taking another sip of tea. I was used to people berating me for my prices.

“That’s why your family is so unlucky, you know,” he said, hefting the sack onto his shoulder once more. “You all have bad karma.”

I made sure not to change my expression, not to show him that his words affected me. He was probably talking about my parents. Guangzhou had been smaller back then, and every—one had heard about the girl foolish enough to marry a foreigner who left her on her deathbed. Or maybe he meant Auntie and Uncle, whose poor health was no secret. But our bad fortune had nothing to do with our prices, and everything to do with gold guzzlers like old man Gou.

“Buddhist morals don’t apply to an alchemist,” I said, draining my teacup and setting it heavily on the counter, “and the devas will abandon you for this. If you want your brother back, then I’m your new god.”

Old man Gou scoffed. “Imagine,” he said, shaking his head, “someone like me on my knees praying to someone like you.”

That could have meant a thousand different things, but in the end, it didn’t matter. China had long split into a great chasm, with Gou’s family on one side and mine on the other.

“I don’t want your prayers,” I said. “I just want your money.”

CHAPTER TWO

I found Wenshu sitting on the floor of our bedroom among dozens of unfurled scrolls. His eyes tracked up and down the text, not bothering to look when I appeared in the doorway. I could have set the roof on fire and he probably would have kept reading until his skin started to bubble.

He went outside far less than me or Yufei, so his complexion nearly matched the white of his hemp robes. Yufei and I joked that he would make a better bride than either of us because he was wispy as a stalk of silver grass, had soft hands, hair that never tangled, and bathed so often that he perpetually smelled like soap beans.

“Gege,” I said. “We have—”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “I’m concentrating.”

His gaze stayed locked on the parchment, reading faster than I could ever dream of. He had an irritatingly good memory, and it was probably the fifth or sixth time he’d read the same scroll, so I didn’t feel too bad about grabbing one of Yufei’s stray socks from the floor, balling it up, and throwing it at his face.

The sock bounced off his forehead. He finally looked up, his expression flat. “I’m studying.”

“It’s tax day,” I said. “Come with me to the tax office and buy more tattoo ink on the way. We have a job tonight.”

“Ah.” He looked down at the scroll before him like a lover he couldn’t bear to part with, slowly rolling it up. He’d gone to school for a few years, but ever since business declined, he’d had to split his time between the shop and studying on his own. Though he wasn’t the most patient teacher, he’d managed to teach Yufei and me some basic characters, and the rest we’d learned for ourselves.

At some point that I couldn’t remember, we’d all joked about passing the civil service exams together and moving to the capital, Chang’an, as government workers, where we could send Auntie So and Uncle Fan enough money to buy ten new houses. Then one day, as we studied with only the light of the thinnest slice of crescent moon coming through the paper windows, we realized it was no longer a joke. We’d spoken it aloud and slowly it had taken shape, gone from the soft haze of a dream to something with hard edges and sharp corners that we could hold tight in our hands. Now, in two weeks’ time, we’d take our exams and see if our studying had amounted to anything, or if the dream would pour through our fingers like sand.

So, whenever we weren’t working, Wenshu and Yufei studied Confucian classics for the bureaucratic exam, while I studied for the alchemy exam to become one of the royal court alchemists.

I’d read every alchemy book in Guangzhou that I could find or borrow or steal. I’d learned how alchemists were masters of the five elements, using all kinds of rocks and minerals as catalysts to reshape the world. At first, the earliest alchemists’ only goal had been to create an elixir of immortality. They had managed to kill five emperors with their toxic concoctions before they finally succeeded for Empress Wu—over one hundred years old and still fresh as a pond lily.

Now, with their greatest dream accomplished, there was little that modern alchemists wouldn’t attempt. They could rend mountains in two, change the course of rivers, boil the oceans, raze cities to ashes—nothing was impossible if you had the right stones and were willing to pay the price.

My first text had been my father’s notes on alchemy—the only thing he’d left for me, besides my ridiculous flowery name. My aunt said he’d heard that alchemy was more advanced in China than in the West, so he’d traveled along the Silk Road with the hopes of learning our secrets. He came from the other side of the world, from a small country called Scotia that spoke a strange language called Gaelic, where they still thought of alchemy as pseudoscience and myth just because they’d never mastered it. Auntie So said my father was tall, pale, and pinkish like uncooked jellyfish, with coppery hair and watery blue eyes. I still remembered the soft line of his smile, but after ten years, my memories had grown tattered at the edges.

Because of him, I would be a great alchemist one day. Not to make him proud, but to spite him. Because when my mother got sick, he’d simply left and never come back. I could still feel her stiff, withered hands in mine while she said,Your father has gone to get help. He’ll be back any moment now. But there was no help beyond our local healers, and as the moon grew thin and dark in the sky, I knew he would never return. My mother, who had never hurt anyone, who braided my hair with orchids and picked the peppers out of my soup for me and sang to me every night until she died, had believed in him until her last breath.

So I had taken his notes as my own, because it was the least he could give me after dumping me on Auntie So. His research was the only advantage I could hope to have over the schooled alchemists. He wrote half in Chinese and half in Gaelic, which Wenshu had helped me decipher, saying it had roots in the Slavic languages that were used along Western trade routes.

It was obvious that the Scotians really had no idea what they were doing with alchemy. My father’s notes described unstable and overly ambitious transformations mixed with rants about a magical elixir hidden in a mythical Penglai Island. Sometimes, that ambition had led him to questions that would have gotten him jailed if he’d said them in Chinese.

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