Page 48 of The Blood Orchid

I ignored him and turned to Wenshu. “If we can cut off the Empress and keep her in the river plane—”

“Our lives will become a whole lot easier,” Wenshu finished. “But this flyer isn’t exactly descriptive. How do you expect to find him?”

Zheng Sili shrugged. “Alchemists aren’t typically good at being inconspicuous. But I have a few tricks we can try out.”

“We need to find him,” I said, digging a map out of my bag and unfurling it close to the firestones. It looked about a day’s ride north, the farthest from home I’d ever been. To think that I’d once thought I’d live and die on the southern coast of Guangzhou, and now I was a world away, sweating in the northern deserts.

“AndIneed to sleep unless you want me to be hungover tomorrow morning,” Zheng Sili said, kicking the corner of my map away with a blanketed foot.

“We don’t want you to be here at all,” Wenshu said.

Zheng Sili only rolled over, tugging his blanket. “Yeah, and people in the seventh layer of hell want a ladder.”

Wenshu looked like he might keep arguing, but I shook my head. For once, Zheng Sili wasn’t wrong—we needed rest. Tomorrow, we were going to find the Arcane Alchemist, dead or alive.

Chapter Ten

Early in the morning, we set off for Zhongwei.

Wenshu and I packed up the tent while Zheng Sili pretended to help but mostly folded and unfolded fabric, then the three of us rode toward the horizon, shivering from the early morning air that cut through our too-thin desert clothes.

At night, I’d dreamed of the Empress’s hand at my throat, the two of us tangled in crimson thread. I woke long before the others and stared at my three opals for hours, imagining the beauty of Penglai. The opals’ perfect clarity and smoothness somehow felt like mockery, because on their own, they were useless.

I’d tried clutching them and thinking only of Penglai while alchemy fired through my veins, but I couldn’t conjure even a weak transformation. Clearly, something was missing, and the answer was probably encoded in the rest of the transformation. Perhaps another alchemist could help me figure it out—even if the Arcane Alchemist wasn’t the Empress’s pawn, maybe he’d know what the other lines meant.

But something told me a man on a wanted poster wouldn’t be that benevolent.

About an hour into our ride, Wenshu slumped forward in the saddle. He started sliding off the horse before I could stop him, and when I grabbed on to his robes, I only managed to throw myself off with him, both of us crashing into the sand.

My shoulder hit the ground first, and Wenshu landed heavily on top of me. I curled into myself, trying to shield my face from hooves, my heartbeat thundering through my bones. I had already had my face smashed in once by a horse, and I didn’t trust Zheng Sili to put me back together the right way if it happened again.

I heard the horse’s steps slowing and tentatively sat up, wincing at the stiffness in my shoulder. I turned Wenshu over and frowned at the cut on his forehead, but it didn’t seem that deep. Durian peeped and poked his head out of my bag—luckily we hadn’t squished him in the fall.

Zheng Sili turned back and dismounted, hurrying toward us, our other horse lingering nearby.

“This is a very inconvenient place to crack your skull open,” Zheng Sili said, squatting beside us and looking between me and Wenshu. “Can you still ride?”

“Give me a fucking minute,” I said, rubbing my shoulder. My fingers felt numb, so I fumbled through my satchel with my left hand, pulling out a few moonstones and trying desperately not to think about how dangerous it would be for us to keep riding horses with Wenshu like this. It had only been a day since he had last collapsed. Normally we had more respite from the episodes. I pictured the holes in the fabric of his soul tearing wider, his soul wandering farther and farther from the river.

The cut on Wenshu’s forehead had already stopped bleeding, so I turned my attention to my arm instead and pressed three moonstones to my shoulder. The pain ebbed instantly but didn’tcompletely vanish, a muted current just beneath my skin. My fingertips grew colder, so numb I could hardly even feel them.

“You need to pop it back in first,” Zheng Sili said, like it should have been obvious. “You’re trying to heal something in the wrong place. It’s like mending a cut on a severed arm.”

“Excuse me?”

He pointed to my shoulder. “You can tell because it’s lower than your other shoulder. You always had bad posture, but now it’s even worse.”

I grimaced, looking down at my shoulder, which did slope down a bit more sharply than it probably should have. I swallowed, nauseous, glad I’d at least numbed the pain before Zheng Sili pointed it out.

“I’ll do it,” he said, standing up.

“Absolutely not,” I said, scooting back.

He sighed. “We have places to be, hùnxie. You’re bad enough at riding with both arms. If you fall off again, then you’ll have two useless arms instead of one.”

He reached for me again, but I kicked sand in his face.

“You’re not touching me,” I said, not really because of propriety but more because I didn’t like the idea of being in pain in Zheng Sili’s arms. “Wake my brother if you want to help so bad,” I said. “He can do it.”

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