Page 65 of The Blood Orchid

Empress Wu hanged in front of imperial palace after siege by private armies. Crown Prince Li Hong and concubine Fan Zilan reported missing. With no surviving members of the House of Li to be found, the future of the crown is uncertain. The Tang Dynasty may have come to an end.

Slowly, I folded the paper in half and tucked it into my bag.Everyone was staring at me, but I felt very far away.So this was why they were robbing this man, I thought.Their master is going to Chang’an to claim the throne because the Empress is... Yufei is...

Behind me, Zheng Sili shifted from foot to foot. “Are you...” he trailed off, the unasked question hanging in the air.

I felt like I’d fallen into a frozen pond, like the world around me was suspended in slow motion. Yufei was never someone I had to worry about. Out of the three of us, she knew how to protect herself the best. Leaving her had felt like the most logical decision, something none of us had thought twice about. But we’d left her to die alone.

“I need to get to the river,” I said, tightening my grip on Durian and shoving through the door.

If it hadn’t been too long since the Empress’s body was hanged, maybe I could still find Yufei at the river of souls and tether her there like Hong until we could reach Penglai Island. Yes, that was what I would do. Death was only temporary for a resurrection alchemist, after all. Yufei was only a little bit dead, and soon she would be perfectly fine once more.

But news traveled slowly across the country, even something as important as this, and I knew that unless Yufei had the mental fortitude to try to hang on, she would be gone within a day. I’d only just managed to tether Hong before he wandered off, and I’d done that only hours after his death. Surely for something like this to have been printed and reached the northern borders, days had to have passed.

I ran faster, ducking around families and merchant carts and old men while Zheng Sili hurried behind me. Up ahead, a cart turned sideways blocked the road, a crowd of people gathered like a dam in the river. I tried to shove my way through, but the crowd was too dense.

When I came close enough, I saw the wheels of the cart lodged in the mud, the horse trying futilely to pull it through. I shoved Durian into Zheng Sili’s arms and started fishing through my bag for stones.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” Zheng Sili said, his voice high-pitched and nervous. I ignored him, pulling out three earthstones and sinking my hands into the mud. With a warm pulse of orange light, the mud rose and swayed like ocean waves, lifting the cart out of the pit before solidifying beneath my palms. The horse raced forward at the sudden lack of tension, the crowd parting at once to not get run over.

I held my muddy hands out for Durian, who Zheng Sili passed me without comment, his expression pale. People were staring at us now, but I had never cared less about being a spectacle. My mind was already halfway in the river plane, writing Yufei’s name again and again across the sky. Once I was back in our room, with Wenshu as a conduit, I could save her.

I tried to force my way through the dispersing crowd, but a hand closed around my arm and yanked me to a stop.

“Let go!” I said, expecting Zheng Sili.

But I caught Zheng Sili’s startled gaze a few feet away, his bag of quail eggs clutched protectively to his chest. A man in a soldier’s uniform glowered over me, grip tightening around my arm.

“Most alchemists are a bit smarter these days,” he said.

Another man in the same uniform appeared beside him, shoving Zheng Sili into the mud.

“I doubt a stupid little girl like her can make life gold,” the second one said, “but we get paid either way.”

Stupid little girl?I thought, the words burning like a soul tag seared into my skin. Not because I thought they were wrong, but because I knew they were right.

Like the Empress said, I was only alive because I’d gotten lucky.

The grip on my arm tightened as the man wrenched my wrist behind me. My hair fell in front of my eyes, and I made no move to brush it away so no one would see me cry.

My sister is dead, and I can’t save her.

“Hey, hùnxie!” Zheng Sili shouted.

I looked up. Zheng Sili had cast his bag of quail eggs to the ground, and was shuffling three alchemy stones in his palm.

“Don’t!” I said.They’ll know you’re an alchemist too, I thought.

But Zheng Sili only rolled his eyes. “Get out of my way,” he said. “I need a clear shot.”

Then he reeled back and hurled the firestones at the guard. I jammed my elbow into the guard’s stomach and twisted myself out of his grasp a moment before the firestones hit his face, flaring into a bright ball of orange flame that gnawed through the top half of his uniform, as if he’d been devoured by the sun.

I tucked Durian under one arm and pressed my hand to the other soldier’s breastplates. The iron in my rings catalyzed the reaction, the metal of his armor bending into spikes that lanced between his ribs. He coughed and tumbled back into the other soldier, crushing him into the ground. I glared down at them, hands twitching with anger.

“Hùnxie—” Zheng Sili said sharply, but he never finished his sentence, because a third guard appeared behind me.

I ripped three firestones from my bag, whirling around to grind them into his face, make all the bones collapse into his brain, blast his teeth away into a thousand shards, make him swallow his own tongue, anything to get him out of my way, to get back to Yufei.

But my fingers stopped a breath away from his face, firestonesfalling from my limp fingers, lost to the mud.

---