Page 110 of The Blood Orchid

For a moment I said nothing. I had never considered home to be anywhere but Guangzhou. But here and now, with Hong’s arms wrapped around me and the wordhomeechoing across the darkness, I realized it had never felt more true. This was my home—with Hong, with my family.

I took a steadying breath and pulled back gently.

“I have to go help Zheng Sili,” I said.

“Of course,” Hong said, releasing me. “See you soon?”

I nodded, taking a step back that felt like a thousand miles, and opened my eyes.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Wenshu wouldn’t show me Zheng Sili’s body.

He and Yufei had found it floating in the pond below the window of the throne room, but by the time I made it out there, nothing was left but red water and stained dirt. I stood at the edge of the pond and stared at my crimson reflection, the surface oddly frothy.

“Where is he?” I said, sensing Wenshu lingering behind me.

“Yufei handled it,” he said quietly.

But that wasn’t what I’d asked. “Tell me where you put him,” I said.

Wenshu grimaced. “Zilan, there’s no point. You would have needed a whole new body to bring him back.”

“You’re not an alchemist,” I said, clenching my teeth. “You wouldn’t know.”

I’d expected anger, but his expression shifted into something pale, almost pitying. “Zilan,” he said, “please trust me on this one.”

I wanted to argue further, to demand that he bring me to him. Didn’t he know I’d handled half-melted corpses with rotfoaming from their mouths before? I wasn’t a child who needed to be shielded from anything, and how dare he treat me like one? But my throat closed up and my eyes felt traitorously wet, so I said none of it. Instead, I turned away, staring back at the scarlet pond.

“You can just add him to your tab when you get to Penglai,” Wenshu said. I knew he was trying to sound lighthearted, but his words made my throat clench with nausea.

“Did you know that when I first met him, he asked if my dress was made of diapers?” I said, letting out a dry laugh. “It was technically the same fabric as diapers, so I guess he wasn’t wrong, even if he was an asshole.”

I looked to Wenshu for a response, but he was staring at me strangely, so I went on, inexplicably determined to fill the silence. “I made him eat one of his teeth,” I said. “The other alchemists hated me for it, but I don’t regret it. I won’t pretend to regret it just because he’s dead. He deserved it.”

“Zilan—”

“And who the hell feeds eggs to a duck? Who takes someone else’s duck for a walk? He would have let a little girl die in jail, but he cared about aduck.”

“Zilan.”

“He owes me a drink,” I said. The wind picked up, and my dress fluttered in scarlet silk around me, so I hugged myself to hold the fabric down. I didn’t feel the cold at all. “That’s probably why he died. So he could worm his way out of it.”

Wenshu’s shadow fell over me. I turned as he offered me a small green silk satchel. “I found this in his pocket,” he said quietly.

It took me a moment to recognize it—it was the satchel I’d bought for Zheng Sili in Baiyin to hold his alchemy stones. I tookit without thinking, tipping the contents into my hand.

A single grape fell into my palm. The kind he’d fed to Durian.

I stared at it for a long moment, the rushing river of my mind grinding to a halt.

Then I let out a laugh, closed my eyes, and clenched my fist around the grape. It burst, cold juice seeping between my fingers, twisting in sticky ribbons down my wrist. My hand shook, and I squeezed harder and harder until the flesh oozed out, then relaxed my hand and stared at the split skin and pale white flesh. Everything—and everyone—was so fragile.

“Zilan, we’re going to bring him back,” Wenshu said, wiping my tears with his sleeve. “We’re going to bring all of them back. We have the rings now.”

“Right,” I said quietly, holding tight to his unwavering belief in me, because Wenshu only believed in things that were probable.

He wiped my hand clean with a rag, then waved for me to follow him back into the palace.

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