Page 90 of The Blood Orchid

“Gaozong took the ring,” I said, breathless. “When Taizong was on his deathbed, Gaozong took it. He must have known what it was.”

Zheng Sili groaned. “Great. Another dead guy?”

“A fresher corpse this time, at least,” Yufei said. “Maybe his river won’t eat us alive?”

I looked back out across the black expanse of Taizong’s life, flashes of it rushing through me in tiny shocks. The world hummed, somehow delighted in my discomfort. After all, I wasn’t supposed to be here.

“We can try tomorrow,” Yufei said hesitantly.

I thought of Hong sitting up in the trees, too scared to sleep. It didn’t matter how tired I was—he hadn’t slept in weeks. I shook my head. “Let’s go while we’re already here.”

“Are you sure?” Zheng Sili said.

I stood up on legs that I could hardly feel. My nails were cracked and black, my skin prickled with goose bumps, like I’d been stabbed with a thousand thin needles. “The hardest part is over,” I said.

Yufei held my hand, and Zheng Sili stood close beside us. I took a deep breath, thought of Gaozong’s name, and led us forward into the darkness.

The ground began to hum. The sound of wind picked up as the trees rushed past me, the world breathing us into our new destination. The cracked earth softened beneath my feet, my shattering footsteps now barely a whisper. The wind began to quiet down, and slowly, I drew to a stop and opened my eyes.

We stood before a racing river. The sky had brightened from a murky darkness to a hazy morning gold. Fish glinted down the stream like diamond shards in the perfectly clear water.

Normally, when I revived the dead, I had to walk around the barren riverbank until I found the dam where their qi had stopped. The only time I’d visited a flowing river was when I tapped into my own qi, or my brother’s.

I turned to Zheng Sili. “Were you thinking of Gaozong?” I said.

“Obviously,” he said, frowning. “I’m not illiterate.”

I knelt down by the river and stuck a finger in, at once shocked through with the burst of light and life like a solid slap across my face. I wrenched my hand back, frowning in disbelief at thesilvery fish rushing through the waters, the endless torrent, the swaying kelp and whispering sands just beneath the surface.

“What is it?” Yufei said, drawing closer. “What’s wrong?”

“The rivers of the dead dry up quickly,” I said, “but this one is still flowing.”

Zheng Sili frowned. “What does that mean?”

I stared at my own distorted reflection in the churning waters, mockingly clear. “It means that Gaozong is still alive.”

Zheng Sili turned to me, expression pale. “Are you sure?”

“Look at the river,” I said, sitting down heavily at its edge.

“He had a public funeral,” Zheng Sili said, shaking his head and backing away. “Who did you bury if it wasn’t the Emperor?”

“The corpse of one of the guards,” I said, shrugging. “We never found the Emperor’s body.”

“Then why the hell did you think he was dead?”

I started to answer, but the words died on my lips when I realized how foolish they would sound:

Because the Empress said so.

“Why would the Empress lie about this?” I said, my fingers clenched in the dirt. “She didn’t want Gaozong to die until he changed the line of succession to put her first, and he never did. Doesn’t his fake death make her life more difficult?”

“Maybe she doesn’t know?” Yufei said.

I grimaced. I’d learned the hard way how dangerous it was to assume that the Empress was ignorant about anything at all, especially something happening right under her nose.

There was little the Empress didn’t know, but every now and then, someone deep in the palace managed to surprise her. When I’d eaten the pearl and torn out her throat, and when the Moon Alchemist had smuggled the princesses out through thetunnels, saving the last of the House of Li. So maybe someone had rescued the Emperor from the brink of death and smuggled his corpse away?

---