Page 52 of The Nightblood Prince

“You sound like a capital rat,” A’du said, and it was not a compliment. “Times of prosperity are just lies told to us peasants to keep us from rebelling. I alone have seen three different flags fly over my borderland town. My father has seen seven.”

“Who is the best ruler?” I asked in jest, and A’du grimaced.

“Good emperor, bad emperor, all tyrants are the same. There is no good ruler, only those who are more benevolent than others.”

I thought of my prophecy. If it ever came true, would the gods finally bring peace to the continent? Or would I become just another bad ruler that my citizens saw as the least of all evils?

I sat at the edge of the table while everyone else traded stories. Everything from village gossip to the monstrous rumors uttered of Lan’s demons.

Luyao always spoke of Zhangxi. Every night, he stared up at the sky and whispered loving words, in hopes that the moon and the stars would relay his love to her and their unborn child.

Another boy—younger than I was, barely fifteen—spoke of his family every night. Of his elderly father, his blind mother, and his little sister, whose smile was vibrant and sweet as the peaches they gathered from summer forests. He hadn’t enlisted by choice. Forced here by the richest merchant of the village to replace his silver-spooned son in order to pay off his father’s debts.

Others had similar stories, having been paid by wealthier men to enlist in place of their sons in order to keep their siblings fed or buy their parents medicine.

With them, I cried.

With them, I laughed.

However, the conversations always ambled from reminiscent memories to fears of the inevitable. The same fables of war, which sounded more like ghost stories to scare misbehaving kids.

Lan Yexue’s soldiers walked into a downpour of arrows and came out alive.

They say his men move fast like lightning and are stronger than bulls.

Those are not men. They are demons, with glowing red eyes. My uncle saw them! They have fangs in place of teeth!

None of this is true!someone would proclaim every night.These are just haunted men repainting their worst memories with demons that don’t exist!

I wasn’t so sure. If Lan Yexue could move like lightning and fling grown men around as if they were rag dolls, who was to say his soldiers could not do the same?

The way Yexue meticulously pushed Rong’s army back with languorous slowness felt personal. Like a predator toying with his prey, or a strategist, waiting.

Was this really revenge for the degradation he’d suffered at Rong’s court? Or was Lan Yexue planning something more?

Memories fluttered: my dagger in his chest; his eyes that bled with pain as he watched me ride away with Siwang.

How I wished I had gone for his heart when I had the chance.

Day by day, night by night, these strange faces slowly became familiar.

Men whose laughter I began to recognize, whose families I felt as if I had already met. Men whose quiet sobs lulled everyone to sleep in the dark. The ones who laughed the hardest also cried the loudest.

Every night, after the fires whimpered into smoke and exhaustion forced my eyes to close, I watched these newfound friends die in my never-ending nightmares.

Lan Yexue’s haunting, bloodstained smile against falling snow.

You can run, but you can’t hide, my goddess.

31

On the thirty-fifth day of the year, exactly one month since I’d arrived at camp, our monotonous schedule shattered like dropped porcelain.

Instead of waking up at dawn to run laps around camp, Caikun gave us permission to sleep an extra hour—on the condition that we were washed and uniformed and gathered in the courtyard at the seventh hour. Any tardiness would be punished by laps, barefoot in the freezing snow.

Caikun always followed through on his promises, so nobody dared to disobey.

We weren’t the only ones who gathered the courtyard, however. The entire Third Army was here. Each battalion had its own separate schedule determined by our commanders, and we were almost never at the same place at the same time, except for dinners around the fire. There wasn’t enough room in the courtyards and the archery field for all of us to train at the same time, so we went in alternate slots.

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