Page 69 of The Scarlet Alchemist

“I don’t understand,” I said. “I thought the court didn’t want people like us. They kept trying to make me lose.” I thought back to my first and second trials, the unfairness I’d been dealt at every turn, the messages from the capital that had mysteriously never reached Guangzhou.

The Moon Alchemist pursed her lips, looking past me as if considering her words. “The disadvantages at your trials were not meant to eliminate you,” she said at last. “They were meant to push you to be better.”

I tensed. “You knew?”

“Yes. Because they did the same thing to all of us,” the Moon Alchemist said. “The Empress instructs the exam officials to put anyone who isn’t a Hàn Chinese scholar at a disadvantage.”

“Why?”I said, my mouth dry. “Aren’t we at enough of a disadvantage already?”

The Moon Alchemist glanced over her shoulder, then back at me. We came to a stop in the shade of a small building with several locks on the door. “I will tell you what the Empress thinks,” the Moon Alchemist said, her gaze restless, as if she sensed others listening. “She believes that alchemy favors the ‘peculiar,’ thathùnxieand foreigners have a proclivity for it if they’re challenged.”

There’s a genetic component to alchemy, Wenshu had said, and I hadn’t realized until now how desperately I wanted him to be wrong. I had stayed up later than Wenshu and Yufei to study, had wanted to succeed more than them because they were already loved and valued and had nothing to prove.Thatwas why I was an alchemist, not because of my father, who’d abandoned me. I would sooner die than owe my success to him.

“I can see why the Empress would come to that conclusion, given how many of us become powerful alchemists,” the Moon Alchemist continued, “but she’s only half-right. Alchemy is not about what’s in your blood. It’s about what’s in your heart.”

I nearly laughed out loud, but didn’t want to offend the Moon Alchemist. Customers had called me heartless for years. “And what is that?” I asked. What was in my heart but greed and stubbornness?

“Alchemy is not something you can master just by studying,” the Moon Alchemist said. “Alchemists need to break themselves into pieces. They want to rebuild the world around them so desperately that they would give their blood, body, or soul. But people in power cannot fathom breaking a world that already bows to them. Alchemists are forged from pain.”

I frowned, thinking of my second cousins, who worked the sugarcane fields. Surely they knew more pain than I did. “The world is cruel to many people,” I said. “I’m hardly the unluckiest person in the empire. Shouldn’t all the farmers be the best alchemists, if that’s the case?”

“I’m sure many farmers would make great alchemists,” the Moon Alchemist said, “but we’ll never know, because the Empress lets them starve. They live and die in the fields, too busy surviving to study alchemy. The fact is, Zilan, this world was made for a certain kind of person, and it’s not you, or me, or anyone who was not handed greatness at birth.”

I lowered my eyes to the dirt. “I don’t like the idea that I’m only here because of things I can’t control,” I said. It somehow felt worse than if I’d won because of being rich and well educated. Like the prince handing me stale bread out of pity, except my prize was a dream that I thought I’d earned for myself. “I’m a good alchemist because I’m unlucky?”

“You misunderstand,” the Moon Alchemist said. “You are not an alchemist because you are ahùnxie, or a southerner, or a poor merchant girl. You are an alchemist because you traveled across the world to stand before the Empress while some men didn’t even leave their own wards. Maybe those born into greatness could do the same as you, but they’ll never have to, so most of them will never try.”

Then she straightened and turned back toward the houses. “Now, Scarlet, you’ve stalled for long enough. It’s time to begin your training.” She fished out a ring of keys from her pocket and slid one into the first lock with a heavythunk. “You are a good alchemist,” she said, “but I intend to make you a great one.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

At night, the palace breathed.

Jagged shadows rolled across the paper windows, formless specters whispering over the lattice. Far away, just soft enough that I couldn’t be sure if it was a dream, the sound of marbles clattering like hail echoed down the hallway.

My room in the inner palace had four locks. I’d checked them again and again before curling up in my bed, which I’d pushed to the center of the room, not convinced that the lattice was strong enough to keep anything out. I drifted halfway into dreams, jolting awake at every sudden sound. I dreamed that I was lying on the riverbank, my hand dipped into the warm waters, watching the current pull steadily onward, the ground growing moist and spongy under me, the river lapping up over the edge, filling my mouth.

From everywhere and nowhere all at once came the words of the imprisoned alchemist:Stay away from the royal family. They don’t want your alchemy. They want your soul.

I opened my eyes, shaking myself out of the dream. I grabbed a few firestones and lit a candle to scorch away the shadows and resigned myself to lying awake the rest of the night. The duck looked up from its box beside my bed, chirping faintly.

I still didn’t know what the imprisoned alchemist meant, despite uncovering so many of the royal family’s secrets. The Moon Alchemist hadn’t mentioned any soul-sucking component to my training. All she’d done was lock me in a library room with a pile of scrolls taller than me and told me to read. My role as a concubine seemed to be the more soulless job of the two.

When I’d first come back to my room after training with the Moon Alchemist, I’d found a maid who looked at me like I was a piece of rotten fruit while she laid silk dresses across my bed and stuffed my sleeping garments into a bag.

“These hemp clothes are garbage,” she said. “If you try to wear anything but silk, I will tear it off you no matter where you are or who’s watching.” She then gave me a “tour” of the concubines’ quarters by pointing to a common area and a garden, then alluding to several other rooms that she didn’t even bother showing me.

“So I’m just a concubine now?” I’d said. “I don’t need to be initiated or something? I just move in and put on a new dress?”

I didn’t want any sort of concubine ceremony or whatever strange affairs the royal family practiced, but it was oddly anticlimactic to just dump my bag onto a bed and suddenly begin a whole new life. I felt a bit like the prince had just smuggled me into the palace.

The maid squinted at me, gaze raking all the way down to my reed shoes. “You’re a concubine, not a wife,” she said slowly, like she didn’t think I could understand her dialect. “Your status is just barely higher than mine.”

“Oh,” I said, not sure how else to respond with the maid burning holes into me with her eyes. “So no one but the prince expects much of me?”

“You are expected not to embarrass the royal family, and to have the prince’s children,” she said. “Do you think you can manage that?”

“Umm, definitely the first one,” I said, my face suddenly hot.

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