Page 54 of The Scarlet Alchemist

“Is this your girlfriend?” she said.

The prince let out a stiff laugh. “Umm—”

“No,”I said, frowning. “Don’t sayummlike you need to think about it!”

“I just didn’t know what to call you!” the prince said. “You’re my...” He turned to his sisters. “She’s my... Well, we met—”

“I’m Fan Zilan,” I said, before he could waste more time. “I’m getting you out of here.”

I had so many questions about why the princesses were even here in the first place, but I knew we didn’t have much time before the guards put out the fire.

“You’re paying to replace all the stones I’ve used tonight,” I said to the prince, digging out three more metalstones and warping them into a key. I didn’t want to break the locks—hopefully, when guards realized the princesses had escaped, they would assume someone had taken their keys rather than used alchemy to blast free.

The doors swung open and the girls hurried out, crushing themselves against the prince. He wiped their faces with his sleeve and took one girl under each arm, ushering them to the door at the end of the hallway. By the time we emerged, the courtyard was completely shrouded in smoke.

The fire was mostly extinguished, but still smoldered warningly, embers flaring on what remained of the thatched roof. Guards and servants had spilled outside of the nearby houses to see what happened, so it wasn’t difficult to slip past them unnoticed and make our way back down to the vegetable cellar.

“Where are we going?” the younger girl said to the prince as he locked the gate behind us.

“The nuns at the eastern convent can hide you,” the prince said. “We can walk you halfway there, but then Zilan and I need to return before my absence becomes suspicious. It’s a straight line from the midpoint, anyway.”

“How long will we stay there?” the older girl said, clutching the prince’s sleeve so hard that I worried she’d tear Wenshu’s coat.

The prince didn’t answer at first, our footsteps clattering across wet stones. “I’ll send for you when it’s safe,” he said quietly. It wasn’t a real answer, and I was sure the girls knew it, because they didn’t ask again.

We hurried through the dark labyrinth for so long that I started to feel like I was sleepwalking, my numb legs shuffling forward on their own. When we reached a juncture of five tunnels, the prince pointed to the one farthest to the left.

“Continue straight until you see sunlight,” he said, bending down to hug the girls. After peeling herself from the prince, the younger one crushed my legs in an embrace, making me stumble backward.

“Thank you for helping us,” she whispered.

“I... Don’t mention it,” I mumbled, too aware of the prince’s eyes on me.

Then the girls rushed off, and it was only me and the prince standing alone in the heavy darkness. As their footsteps retreated, the prince made no move to turn back, staring off into the tunnel that had swallowed them whole.

“The last time my mother sent a family member to the dungeons, they came out in pieces,” he said, the words quiet. “Their body was chopped up and crammed into barrels of wine, which my mother served at a party. That’s what I was expecting.”

A weak wind shuffled leaves at our feet. I took a small step closer to the prince.

“You think your mother sent your sisters to the dungeon?” I asked.

“She’s the only one who could,” he said. He turned around, his expression tight, gaze focused sternly on the tunnel behind me. “My father is too ill.”

“But why would she—”

“Zilanxiaojie,” he said, his voice low, “if I tell you this, you cannot repeat it to anyone.”

Something about the graveness of his voice unnerved me. The gold flecks in his eyes had never looked quite so sharp. But it was far too late to go home and pretend I had no part in this. “We have enough secrets to bury the both of us,” I said. “What difference is one more?”

The prince nodded, letting out a tense breath. “There are things that I’m not supposed to remember,” he said. “I was very young when it happened, and everyone thinks I’ve forgotten. But I could never forget how it sounded. And the silence that came after.” He pressed his eyes closed, shaking his head. “They say that Yiyang and Gao’an are the traitor’s daughters. But I was there when my sister died, and their mother did not kill her.Mymother did.”

The traitorous words echoed through the tunnel and fell quiet again before I could even begin to understand, much less believe them.

“The Empress?” I said slowly. “Why would she kill her own daughter?”

“Because she wasn’t the Empress yet,” the prince said. “It was easy to blame it on my father’s other concubine. He had her jailed and married my mother, who became the Empress.”

I closed my eyes, already wishing he hadn’t told me. People had probably died to keep this a secret. I already had enough people wanting me dead—I didn’t need to add another reason.

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