Page 20 of A Forgery of Fate

I flipped to the end of my sketchbook, past a sketch I’d made last week of a man with long ears and a scholar’s hat. He was leaning forward, captured midstride, his eyes intent on whatever or whoever was before him.

Tangyor, it turned out. Gaari’s associate.

I’d been worried about that one. Thank Amana he ended up being harmless.

The last drawing in my book was the only one that hadn’t yet come true. A vision that had baffled me for days but now gave me a grain of hope.

It was of a ring on someone’s hand. Even on paper, the center stone was effulgent, glittering brightly while bordered by nine dark pearls. It looked expensive. Potentially twenty-thousand-jens’-worth expensive.

I tipped my sketch to the light and studied it. There was a smudge on the jewel, but I didn’t think much of it. What was more important was finding out when the ring would come into my possession. In the background, I’d drawn larches, but those were planted all over Gangsun. And the hand? It wasn’t mine or one of my sisters’.

“Do I steal it from someone?” I wondered aloud. “Or is it payment for a painting?”

It was silly to ask. The vision couldn’t talk back, and the throbbing weight of prescience in my hand answered no questions. I’d tried before. Tried asking for cheats to help Mama win at tiles, tried asking how I might make enough money to get my family out of Gangsun.

Tried asking where Baba was.

Swallowing hard, I set the sketch aside. I’d find out soon enough about this ring. I knew little about my visions except that they always came true.

Right now a new one was on its way. The nerves in my fingers were electric, buzzing stronger than ever before. The feeling had tortured me for days, but I’d held it back so I could finish the Lei Wing piece. Clearly that’d been a mistake. That dragon I’d painted in the river had almost cost me everything.

Or perhaps it was the key.

That dragon had a spark, Saigas,Gaari had said.A spark of something special. Where did it come from?

I dipped the tip of my brush in ink, then hovered it over the scroll.

All it took was letting go.

When I forged paintings, I focused so intently I counted my every stroke. To summon a vision, it was the opposite. My eyes half closed, pupils rolling back. I’d enter a dance, the music a song only I could hear. In swift, bold strokes, my brush birthed mist, clouds, and sea. The waves came howling, the clouds low and thick. Everything about them was unnatural, but my fingers were far from done. They leapt to the center of the scroll.

There, a curious shape emerged.

He arrived in a series of lines and strokes, his form falling from my fingers with such ease it was as if I’d painted him a thousand times. His scales unfolded from the tip of my thinnest brush, each endowed with the detail of a crane’s feathers, with every crypt and furrow in place. His horns mirrored the curve of the tiled eaves outside my window, and his claws pierced out of the sea’s tumultuous waves, each nail arched like a sickle moon.

I opened my box of paints and fluttered my fingers over the colors. I rarely painted with color. It was expensive, hardto mix and set properly. Besides, I’d learned over years how to be expressive enough with black, white, and the immeasurable worlds of gray in between.

But this dragon demanded more, so I reached for my pot of azurite and bestowed a hint of pale blue upon his silvery scales. His horns I imbued with the color of old gold, and the nails on his claws I shaped after shards of onyx. I hesitated at his eyes.

Only one was visible in the painting. Traditionally, an artist would keep it pupil-less—lest the dragon acquire a spirit and come to life—but the tingle in my hands wouldn’t permit me to leave the eye blank.

Squeezing out the excess water from my brush, I wavered among my paints. Should the eye be black, like twilight during an eclipse? Or should it dazzle with brilliance, like an osmanthus flower in bloom? Both answers seemed right, though I couldn’t explain why.

Without another thought, I dabbed into my yellowest paint and dotted the eye. It was a knife of sunlight piercing out from a storm. It glowed.

That was when my trance ended. It was like being pulled out of a dream, and I dropped my brush, trembling. My temples throbbed as the world turned clear once again and the tingle left my fingers. Then, sucking in a lungful of air, I tilted a candle to the parchment and viewed what I had done.

“Hello, dragon,” I whispered.

I stared. I’d never painted anything like this before.

In the past, my visions had manifested as simple drawings, clearly the works of an amateur. But tonight, I’d painted what some masters would never achieve in a lifetime.

I blew at the ink, and I could have sworn his whiskersflickered. This dragon was a thousand tiny brushstrokes, the scales so delicate and fine they shimmered, even though I’d only used coarse liquid ink.

He looked different from any other dragon I’d seen. His full form was obscured by turbulent waves, and his gaze was to the moon, so I could only see his profile, but that was enough. I’d never seen anguish on a dragon’s brow before.

I moved him closer to the window to let the ink dry. The beginnings of dawn seeped over the horizon, and outside my door I could hear Mama snoring and Nomi mumbling in her sleep.

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