Page 44 of The Scarlet Alchemist

“No,” I said, bending to put on my shoes so he couldn’t see my face.

“If it doesn’t hurt, that means the nerve beneath your tooth has died, and we need to fully extract it,” the healer said.

I bit back a curse. “It hurts a little,” I said.

The prince frowned. “Do you want—”

“No,” I said, before he could offer me anything else. I bowed in thanks to the healer, hurried to slip my shoes on, and left the room.

I heard the prince shut the door, his footsteps rushing to catch up with me. “The fastest way out is this way,” he said, pointing to my left.

I pushed open the door, expecting another training compound, but froze at the sight of a garden. Two glassy ponds lay in the center of the pale dirt yard, perfect circles in mirror image of each other. Lily pads and yellow flowers speckled the flat surface, the waters rippling as the largest ducks I’d seen in my life rushed to the edge at the sight of us.

“How many people do those feed?” I asked, incredulous.

The prince’s face crumpled. “They’re notfood,” he said.

“What, the prince of China is too good to eat duck?”

He glanced at the birds as if they might eavesdrop, then whispered, “I’ve eaten duck in the past, but not these ones.”

“Then why are they so fat?” I said. “What have you done to them?”

He grinned. “Let me show you. Wait here.” And with that, he hurried across the garden, disappearing into an adjacent building. I considered leaving, desperately wanting to go home and not deal with whatever nonsense the prince was up to, but I wasn’t sure how to find the way out from here.

I sighed and squatted at the edge of the pond. All the bloated ducks stared as if judging me.

After a moment, a door slammed open, and the prince reappeared with a basket in both hands, loaves of bread spilling over the top.

“This garden is right next to the kitchens,” he said as he jogged toward me. “The cooks give me the stale bread.” He knelt beside me and set the basket down, then tore off a piece and tossed it into the pond, where the ducks all converged.

“That one is Shu,” he said, pointing to the closest bird. “That one is Cong, that one is Huluobo—”

“You named all of your ducks after vegetables?”

He shook his head. “After their favorite foods.”

I pressed a hand for my forehead. Of all the reasons to not be passed out in my bed right now, this was the most ridiculous. The prince was certifiably a child.

“Bread is bad for ducks, you know,” I said. “You’re going to kill them.”

The prince’s eyes went wide, bread falling from his hands.“What?”

“There’s no nutrients in it, and soggy bread can make them sick. In all your expensive classes, they didn’t teach you that?”

The prince looked so horrified that I almost regretted speaking. “What am I supposed to feed them?” he said.

What am I, your personal duck farmer?I thought, but the prince seemed so genuinely devastated that I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud. “Auntie used to feed them seeds and lettuce,” I managed.

Without another word, the prince stood up, abandoning the bread and heading for the door.

“At least show me the way out!” I shouted, but he was already gone. I sat heavily in the dirt, but thankfully the prince returned quickly this time. He had a head of lettuce in each hand that he all but hurled into the pond, startling the ducks away with a massive splash.

I stifled a laugh. Maybe the heat and dehydration had really fried my brain beyond repair if I actually found him amusing. “Here,” I said, fishing one of the lettuce heads back toward me with a stick and peeling off some leaves. “They like it better this way.”

The prince watched with rapt attention as I threw the leaves into the pond. I handed him the lettuce head and he quickly copied me.

“My cousins ask me about the secret life of the royal family,” I said. “Now I know that it’s just overfeeding ducks.”

---