Page 92 of The Blood Orchid

I clenched my fists, clinging to whatever scraps of my own mind remained. There was the Empress waving me closer, and her hair was more vibrant than all the night sky, tangled with constellations of flowers. And there was her pearl necklace, the one that had once snapped and spilled pearls across the throne room on the day she died. I clung to that thought, the image of her grinning before a wall of fire, then dying between my teeth, blood and salt and dreams that would never come true.

I tried to get a good look at the ring on Gaozong’s hand, but the edges of the memory blurred, dissolving when I tried to discern any details.

Then I was standing atop the gate, looking down across a kingdom of gold, and Hong—no, Gaozong—was looking at me like the world was mine. I looked down at my yellow silk dress, the color only the empress and emperor could wear. The hands were not mine, too thin and small. Such delicate hands that would one day kill so many.

“Anything you want, it’s yours,” Gaozong said.

“Anything?” I said. And the words were maybe mine, maybehers. Alchemy had once made me the same promise. “You may come to regret those words,” we said.

I held out my hand, and he didn’t even hesitate, laying his palm on top of mine, clasping our fingers together.

And there it was at last: a red diamond wrapped in the embrace of a golden phoenix, tight around his ring finger. The ring stolen from his dying father, who used it to seize the palace for himself.

The ring that I had definitely seen before.

The world dissolved, an eclipse of night crashing over Chang’an, Gaozong dissolving into ashes at my feet. Nothing existed except for the blazing, clear image of the ring.

I remembered that jewel tangled in my hair as Hong held my face. He had worn that ring in the river plane, which meant he had died wearing it.

I had a vague memory of Wenshu returning all of Hong’s jewelry to me when he’d woken up in his body, but I couldn’t remember what I’d done with it. I definitely hadn’t packed it for our journey, which meant it was surely back in Chang’an, in the palace under siege.

We would never find it.

It was such a small jewel, and if it hadn’t been crushed under the feet of soldiers, surely it had been stolen in the raids and sold for its value in gold. I’d held it in my hands, and then I’d lost it.

I clawed my way out of the riverbank, falling onto crooked roots that jabbed into my ribs, barely registering the pain. I stared at my palm where Gaozong had laid his hand in mine, wishing I could wrench the ring from his finger. But this world was not the real world, and its treasures were only an illusion of light.

Except...

I sat up straight, remembering the restaurant in Baiyin where the Empress had ambushed me and my brother. I’d attacked her in the river world, and when I’d woken up, I’d found her broken pearls still clutched in my palm.

Maybe objects in the river plane began as tricks of light, but in the hands of an alchemist, they didn’t have to stay that way.

I took off running before I could even see, tripping over broken branches, repeating Hong’s name in my mind in a panicked loop. The soft, fertile ground of the river of Gaozong’s life quickly withered and tightened with coldness, until at last I was standing by the same forest where I’d met Hong so many times.

The rope arced into the sky once more, exactly the same as the last time I’d visited. I grabbed the lowest branch of the tree and scrambled up and up, bark scraping my palms raw. How high had he climbed?

The clouds thickened into an impenetrable gray cloud as I climbed higher, each branch its own island in the sky. I nearly fell down when I reached out for a branch and missed, but a cold hand closed around my wrist and yanked me up to the next branch.

“Hong—” I said, but my words died on my lips.

Perched on the highest branch, the Empress held the frayed end of the rope in one hand.

“Hello, Scarlet.”

Chapter Eighteen

I jolted back and nearly toppled all the way down, but the Empress grabbed the front of my dress and yanked me onto her branch, like I weighed no more than a dream.

I shoved away from her and backed up against the trunk, clutching the bark to steady myself.

“Where’s Hong?” I said. “What have you done to him?”

The Empress examined the rope in her hand, running a thin finger across the threads on the frayed end. The fog blurred her features, her golden eyes the only thing that didn’t wave and shiver in this colorless plane.

“You can’t keep secrets from me, Scarlet,” she said at last. “I would think, after all we’ve been through together, you could at least tell me the truth. You owe me that much.”

I closed my eyes, trying to think of Hong, hoping the river plane would deliver me to him, but the sky seemed to erase his name as soon as my thoughts carved it overhead, like he didn’t exist at all. I dug my fingers into the bark and tried harder, but the landscape stayed stubbornly still. There was nowhere to go. He wasn’t here.

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