Page 77 of The Scarlet Alchemist

The prince shook his head quickly, releasing my wrist. “It’s a mild sedative,” he said. “She’s done it to me before. Let’s get you some more water and you’ll be fine.”

“Fine,”I echoed, staying rooted even when he tugged at my sleeve. Did he truly not see how horrific that meal had been? I could suffer through being treated like a pet by the Empress, but when I looked at the prince’s face, all I could see was the lingering stain of gold on his lips.

“You’ve known all your life that the Empress was like this,” I said. “You watched her kill your entire family. But you only came to Guangzhou for my help when you realized your own life was in danger. No one else mattered enough.”

“I won’t let her hurt you,” the prince said. He reached for my face, but I slapped his hand away.

“I’m not talking about myself!” I said. “Why did you ask me to resurrect you in the first place? Did you want to come back and stop her, or just play dead while she destroyed the rest of China?”

He looked away, jaw tense as he stared out across the garden. Both of us knew the answer.

“What am I supposed to do?” he said at last. “You really think I can stop my mother?”

“Have you ever eventried?” I said.

He flinched, still refusing to meet my gaze. “I never asked to be who I am,” he said. “I can’t—”

“Stop talking about what you ‘can’t’ do!”I said, shoving him back against the banister. I was too loud for such a quiet night, but I didn’t care. “You are the Crown Prince of China! Don’t you dare tell me that you’re powerless.”

I turned to leave, but he grabbed my wrist. “Zilan, please,” he said. “You can hate me if you want, but please don’t run off alone. The monsters—”

“As ifyoucould ever protect me from any monster!” I said, twisting my wrist out of his grip. “You can’t even protect yourself.”

I took a step back, waiting to see if he would argue.Tell me that you would try to save me, I thought. But he only dropped his shoulders and stared at his feet—the same way he looked away from everything that mattered. Like always, he would let me leave, knowing exactly what he could say to make me stay.

My eyes watered. I took another step back, only starting to realize how badly I’d wished I was wrong, how much I didn’t want him to be like the other rich men who only cared for themselves. But I should have known from the first day we met, when he’d tried to buy my dreams from me. He would never fight for me because the rich never fought. They turned and ran away.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The prince wasn’t foolish enough to call for me the next few nights, so I tried my best to forget he existed. During the day, the Moon Alchemist kept me busy doing almost everything but alchemy. Studying for the imperial exam seemed easy compared to the mountain of scrolls she stacked in front of me every day and the questions she’d ask me afterward to make sure I’d understood.

“What element is spessartine?” she said.

I didn’t lift my forehead from my scroll. “Fire,” I said.

“No.”

“Isn’t it orange?”

“Yes, but it’s a desert stone, so it’s Earth.”

I peeled my forehead from the desk. “But diamonds are desert stones, and they’re considered metal.”

“Desert diamonds are Earth stones. Mountain diamonds are metal.”

“But aren’t mountains part of the earth?”

The Moon Alchemist shot me a cold look. “Arguing about it doesn’t change what it is.”

I sighed, flopping back onto the table. I’d spent the whole morning going back and forth between scrolls on stone types and scrolls on the history of alchemy. Most of them traced the source of alchemy back to Penglai Island, a place in my father’s notes that I’d thought was only a myth. But I didn’t see how any of that was supposed to help me make gold. “I need a break. I can’t fit any more stones into my brain.”

“You’re distracted,” the Moon Alchemist said.

I shook my head. “It’s just that all of this is theoretical. I like actuallydoingalchemy.”

“The kind of alchemy you’ll be doing is dangerous,” the Moon Alchemist said. “Handling these stones needs to be as easy as breathing to you.”

I doubted making gold would be the most dangerous thing I’d done. If only the Moon Alchemist knew about my cousins, the walking corpses, courtesy of my sloppy childhood resurrection. I hadn’t gone to see them in a few days, too caught up in my training.

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