Page 114 of The Blood Orchid

“Can we live here?” she said as I approached, her mouth full of fruit, juice dripping down her neck.

It would have been easy to say yes. Something about this place seemed to block out all of my fears. My life before I’d come here was only a series of facts as if read from someone else’s story, meaning little to me: I was an orphan. I could never see my aunt and uncle again. My cousins and I were dead. The royal alchemists had died because of me. All of these things were truths, unchanging and inconsequential as the pull of the tides. They carried no innate meaning.

“Let’s look around first,” I said to Yufei, because I couldn’t bring myself to saynowhen I didn’t want to leave either.

I sat down at the pebbled edge of a river that wound through the trees. Here, the water ran so smoothly that it was almost like a shimmering pane of glass, reflecting back all of the sky.

My reflection looked so much younger than I felt inside, though I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. Perhaps the island had strippedthe anger from my eyes, polished the scrapes and scratches away.

Wenshu sat beside me and took a pear from Yufei, leaning against me as he cataloged the clouds and the shapes of the mountain.

“I suppose alchemy isn’t all bad,” he said quietly, “if it can create a place like this.”

“And food like this,” Yufei added. “Do you think there’s animals here? What do you think a Penglai bird would taste like?”

“I doubt you can kill anything in a place like this,” I said. “I think that’s the point. Nothing and no one here can suffer.”

“Animals don’t suffer when I kill them,” Yufei said. “I make it quick.”

“There’s enough fruit here to last a lifetime, so maybe work your way through that first,” Wenshu said, shoving another pear in her face.

I turned back to the water, which flowed downhill toward the sea but didn’t ripple over rocks and plants like a normal river. Instead, it seemed to wave like a piece of silk in the wind, emanating a soft haze of light. I reached a hand down toward the clear water, and when my fingers broke the surface, the world flashed away.

I squinted through the searing sunlight, and when my vision cleared, Wenshu and Yufei were gone.

In their place, a group of people sat around the river, staring into its muddy surface.

I tried to step forward, to ask them what was going on, but it was as if I had become part of the whispering river, the shifting leaves, the twisted roots. I was everywhere—a bird looking down over them, blades of grass swaying beneath them, nothingand everything all at once. I had no body, no voice to call out.

Footsteps descended the incline, and the Sandstone Alchemist appeared around the bend.

His face looked much younger than the man I’d seen, the brightness of the island casting him in vibrant color, compared to the pale and sun-starved man I’d met underground. He met the gazes of the others, then looked up at the mountain from where he’d come and shook his head.

“If anyone finds out about this—”

“They won’t,” said a woman’s voice. And I recognized the lilt to her words before I even noticed her face. It was the Silver Alchemist, unchanged by time, kneeling before the river.

To her left, a young Taizong stood with his arms crossed, hovering close to the Silver Alchemist. I remembered how she’d appeared in his memories, how she’d given him the ring that he’d used to bring down his brothers and become emperor. My gaze dropped to his hands, but he wasn’t wearing a single ring yet.

Another man straddled a low tree branch beside them, hidden in the shadows. I was sure I’d seen him before, but couldn’t place where until he spoke.

“He can’t keep his mouth shut, you know he can’t,” the man said, rolling his eyes.

The Arcane Alchemist, I thought. His face was plain and unmemorable, so this must have been before he’d done the transformation that gave him his beauty. But he still had the same sharp, pompous voice.

Two women and two men sat nearby the first four alchemists in the clearing, their posture stiff, gazes darting around as if afraid to look anyone else in the eye. There was some great difference between the four alchemists I had met and the four I hadn’t, though I didn’t yet understand what it was. As thetrees shivered in the breeze and sunlight lanced through them, I recognized the two nameless ghosts I had met in the Silver Alchemist’s house.

“I don’t see how you can be so unbothered,” one of the strangers said, a pale young man who looked about as enthused as a soggy sheet, watching his reflection in the rushing current.

“And I don’t see how you’re so morose,” the Arcane Alchemist said. “You’re the one who wanted to know where alchemy came from.”

Where alchemy came from?I glanced up at the mountain peak, where the Sandstone Alchemist had descended from. My father’s scrolls had alluded to the source of alchemy hidden on Penglai Island, the reason alchemy had flourished in China and not the rest of the world.

It seemed they had found it.

The stranger shook his head, as if disagreeing with his own reflection. “I didn’t think—”

“What were you expecting?” Taizong said, and even now, when he was young, he had the voice of an emperor, the Son of Heaven. His low words shook the ground, the flare of anger in his eyes like a comet scorching into the earth. “Alchemy is the greatest power this world has ever seen. You thought that would come at no cost?”

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