Page 125 of The Blood Orchid

“Thank you,” I whispered as I knelt in the alchemy courtyard, knowing she wouldn’t hear it. My palace of a thousand rooms was so empty that I could hear the wind twisting through the lattice windows, humming over the still ponds, dying as the sound hit the clay walls. At night, I listened for footsteps in the grass, but they never came.

I told the Fans that they could stay in the palace, but they insisted on finding their own housing. I imagined that to many, the palace walls would forever look like they were stained with blood, but as the emperor, I couldn’t run away.

Perhaps I would go down in history as the worst emperor that had ever lived. In the dawn of my reign, alchemy had vanished.

But I trusted Zilan, always. She once told me that alchemists wanted to rebuild the world and start again. Perhaps this was how she wanted to do it, the way others before her had been too afraid to attempt.

The ancestral shrine of the Wu family had a great many visitors in the months after the reconstruction. I couldn’t blame them, as few knew what my mother was like in person. They could only see the streets paved in gold, which, under my reign, were quickly tarnished by footsteps. I stopped by there on occasion to pay my respects.

My mother once said that we laughed at the dead for their failures, but I didn’t feel like laughing when I saw her carved out of stone, people crying at her feet. Her stone visage looked so much kinder than she ever had. I looked at it and imagined a world in which she hadn’t felt the need to trample others on her path to power, in which she could have lived as she was. Maybe, without alchemy, that world would come into being.

On the day before my wedding, I lingered too long at her temple. After a few weeks passed, my sisters convinced me that Zilan had been right—it was dangerous for the last heir to the House of Li to be unmarried. My sisters were not interested in ruling, and their claims to the throne were tenuous enough as it was.

It seemed more reasonable now that the bodies had been buried, the streets cleaned, the city of Chang’an so much quieter than before, but somehow I didn’t mind the quiet. It gave me the same feeling as standing in the retiled palace courtyards, where all the dead plants had been uprooted and new seeds planted that hadn’t yet broken the surface. For now, it was nothing but wet soil and hope.

With all the rites established and a perilously long investigation process to ensure I wasn’t accidentally marrying my own relative, I bowed to my veiled bride before a crown of aristocrats who cared nothing for either of us, trying not to squirm under their gazes as we ate dinner before them, then finally retreated back to my room.

“I’m not consummating anything, just so you know,” she said once the door shut. “I ate so much food I think I’m going to explode.”

She reached for her veil, but I gently took her wrist.

“Let me at least do this properly,” I said, picking up the wooden dowel that one of my advisers had given me that morning. I slid it beneath the veil and lifted it back, over her head.

“Finally,” Zilan said, smiling as she peeled back the rest of the veil and cast it to the floor.

Ten days after the disappearance of alchemy, a merchant ship had found Zilan on an island in the Bohai Sea.

I would have traveled out there to meet her immediately if the royal alchemists hadn’t argued for hours that it would destabilize the country once more, and that they would bludgeon me unconscious to stop me if necessary. Her siblings had no such qualms and raced across the country to meet her halfway.

It was another week before she returned, and I knew at once that something was wrong.

Her eyes were vacant, her words quiet and far away. She looked at me only fleetingly, always talking just past my shoulder, as if staring beyond.

One night I found her sitting in the shallow water of a courtyard pond, watching Durian swim under the moonlight. She didn’t react as I approached, but I knew she heard me because she became very still. Moonlight spilled across the silk of her dress, painting her in stony white.

“I don’t believe any of this is real,” she whispered.

I waited to see if she would continue, but she only dropped her gaze to her lap.

“How can it not be real?” I said.

“Because all of this,” she said, gesturing to the palace behind her, “this life that I get to have, it’s worth so much more than just losing my alchemy.”

I watched her for a moment longer, then slipped my shoes off and knelt in the pond beside her. She moved as if to stop me, but I was already sitting in the cold pool, blue silk floating around me.

“You don’t think it’s a fair exchange,” I said. “You’re worried something worse is coming.”

She nodded, hugging her knees. Durian swam toward me—his human food dispenser—and pecked at my hands.

“Maybe you did die,” I said, petting Durian, who turned andswam away when he seemed to realize I didn’t have any food. Zilan stared at me, waiting for me to continue.

“The Scarlet Alchemist died,” I went on. “You lost your alchemy, your dream.”

“Everyone lost their alchemy,” she said.

“Yes, and everyone gets to live in a better world because of it,” I said. “Maybe, instead of one person paying the ultimate price so that everyone can be happy, everyone carries just a little bit of the pain. Maybe it’s enough that you were willing to pay. Maybe that’s the good that wipes out all the evil.”

Finally, a smile rose to Zilan’s lips, soft and bright as a blooming orchid. She turned away so I couldn’t see it.

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