Page 15 of The Blood Orchid

“I don’t know why you bothered borrowing apeasant’sbody,” I said, “but you know as well as I do that you have no authority in any body but your own. No one will obey a farmer from Lanzhou who claims to be the Empress.”

The Empress rolled her eyes and applauded melodramatically. “Well done, Scarlet. You could have been a first-tier scholar with that deduction. Luckily, I know for a fact that my body was one of the few that you didn’t feed to pearl monsters. Shame about your friends, though.”

My mind flashed to Yufei, alone in the palace. Wenshu had made sure she was surrounded by a ridiculous number of guards and made her swear not to leave the palace, but it was hard to dissuade Yufei from doing what she wanted, no matter how risky.

“You’re not getting your body back,” I said.

I pulled my second knife from my left sleeve and tightened my grip on it. The Empress wasn’t worth wasting my last few stones on, and I doubted she knew much about hand-to-hand combat. I struck at her throat, but she dodged and wrenched my arm behind my back, forcing me to the floor. Even with no real skill in fighting, the Empress was wearing the muscled body of someone who worked in hot fields, taller and heavier than me, and she crushed me into the floor easily.

“You’re not going to kill me,” I said, as her weathered hands crushed my face into the tiles. “You still need someone to make life gold.”And deliver you my sister’s body, I thought, but didn’t want to say it out loud in case she didn’t actually know that Yufeiwas currently wearing her corpse like a dress.

“I’m not going to kill youyet,” the Empress agreed, pulling my hair back and running a delicate finger across my throat, as if imagining all the blood that could spill.

I leaned down and bit her fingers.

I’d meant to snap them clean off, but only managed to break skin before her other hand yanked my hair and forced me away. I reached for my knife, which had skittered into the corner. The Empress lunged for me but froze as I pointed my blade between her eyes.

“Nine hundred and ninety-nine to go,” I said.

She let out a sharp laugh. “Go ahead and kill me,” she said. “Add me to your death toll, Scarlet. Along with all your friends.”

My hand trembled around the blade, but I tightened my grip, determined not to show the Empress that her words could hurt me.

“You think this is the only body I have?” she went on.

I froze, my gaze dropping to the soul tag on her wrist. “You can’t be resurrected into more than one body at once.”

“Youcan’t,” the Empress said, a dark smile twisting Junyi’s features.

I should have asked more questions, but she was leaning forward, brushing my blade away, and I couldn’t stand the thought of her hands on me again.

I slammed my knife into the soul tag on her wrist, pinning her to the floor.

With a sharp gasp, her muscles tensed. Then her eyes went gray and she fell over limp in the dirt. Her robes had come untied in the fighting and loosened enough that I could see a wound in Junyi’s stomach, crisp with dried blood. He must have died recently, probably in the raids.

Someone had come through this village and resurrected him for the Empress. But who?

I ripped my blade out of his arm, wiping it clear on a nearby rag. My white outer robe was stained with blood, so I balled it up and shoved it into my bag, even though it left my arms bare. Durian peeped in protest from under the fabric.

I stumbled back into the main road, retracing my path with numb feet until I found Wenshu, one hand covering his mouth as the other villagers skinned one of the desert goats.

“We’re leaving,” I said in Guangzhou dialect.

“What?” Wenshu said through his hand. “I helped kill a goat, and now you—”

“Now,” I said, grabbing his arm. He clamped his mouth shut and followed me past the bewildered villagers.

“We have a problem,” I said, as we walked back out into the lonely desert, the cold and borderless sea. “The Empress is back.”

We walked all night across the silent desert, dunes painted gray and blue by nightfall. We didn’t dare stop walking, for we needed to keep warm. My mind still hummed like it was full of sand flies as I remembered the Empress’s eyes. Even wearing another’s face, her gaze had held the same knife’s edge of cruelty.

I didn’t often feel dead, but at times like this, my mind was so loud and my bones so numb—the Empress had that effect on me, stripping away the colors from the world, the warmth from the sky. I thought of the faces of my friends, of Hong, of my cousins, whose real faces I hadn’t seen in so long. All of them had died so that the Empress’s reign could end. If she was still here, then they’d died for nothing at all.

She’d named me the Scarlet Alchemist, and now it nolonger felt like an honor but just another one of the Empress’s cruel jokes. Because when it was over, I’d stood alone in a palace drenched in blood, having destroyed everything while the Empress laughed.

The memory of her voice kept me awake as the hours wore on, even when I could hardly feel my limbs anymore.

We arrived back in Lanzhou when the sky burst orange across the horizon. Wenshu was so tired he probably would have given the innkeeper all the money we had left in exchange for a few feet of empty floor to lie down on, so I took the coin purse from his pocket and called the innkeeper myself.

---