Page 82 of A Song to Drown Rivers
He’s dressed in the same robes as the day we first met. The sun rises behind him, gilding his sharp outline.
“Fanli,” I call, stepping forward. “I have to talk to you.”
He looks up at me, wild hope and disbelief and grief painted all over his features, and I see his breath catch in his throat. “Xishi?”
I don’t even have time to reply when something flashes across his eyes, and he grabs my wrist, tugs me forward. I crash against his chest. Then his lips are on mine, firm and desperate, his fingers tangled in my hair. It feels—real. Wonderfully, impossibly real. The softness of his mouth, the heat radiating from his skin as he deepens the kiss, his hand tightening around the small of my waist, drawing me closer until there’s no space left between us at all.
“I should have done this a long time ago,” he breathes against my mouth.
“Fanli,” I manage, but he kisses me again, even harder than before, like it’s all he’s ever wanted, like he might go insane otherwise. I can feel his pulse dance under his skin, his erratic breathing, the small shudders running through his body.
I almost cave in.Let him kiss me until he wakes, I think dimly.Let him do whatever he wants.But then I remember why I wanted to speak to him in the first place, and with all my remaining self-control, I push him away.
It’s a gentle push, but he flinches, then stares at me with such open hurt I have to fight the urge to undo everything, to seize him by the collar of his robes and pull him back to me.
“Am I forbidden, even in my own dreams?” he murmurs. “This is all I have left now.”
“Focus, Fanli,” I tell him, forcing my voice to harden even as my chest twists with a deep, inexpressible ache. “This is important.”
“Nothing is more important than you.” He sounds like he has never been so certain of anything in his life.
Such sweet words. I would have given up half my soul just to hear them back when I was alive. “I know what you plan to do,” I push on. “I know you’re going to find Goujian.”
He goes very still. “How did you—”
“I’m right, aren’t I?”
He makes no point of denying it. “I’ll kill him,” he says, with a quick, ready violence that is completely unlike him. “I’ll make sure he suffers. I’ll sever every one of his limbs and feed his heart to the wolves. Everything he has, I will take from him.”
“You can’t, Fanli,” I whisper. “He is the king.”
His face is hard as stone, immovable. I imagine him standing alone on some high, jagged cliff, staring down at the tumultuous waters of the ocean, too far away for anybody to reach. “He is the reason you’re dead.”
“The kingdom will be thrown into unrest,” I tell him. I can feel him starting to wake, the dreamscape blurring around us. The petals closest to us have withered and faded to gray. I cannot stay long. More urgently, I continue, “Bothkingdoms. Everything we’ve done will be for nothing. Everyone we’ve lost, every sacrifice—all the civilians whose lives we’ve preserved. They deserve to know peace.”
At this, his eyes focus on me. “You’re too good,” he says, sounding pained. “They don’t deserve you. None of them. Not me either.”
“That’s not true. I have my own plans for revenge; I just don’t want you to get hurt.”
“But—”
“If you wish to do something,” I tell him, “then work against Goujian in private. Use your intelligence to help the common people, to change the kingdom in ways the king will not. Distribute wealth to the poor, aid them like you aided Wuyuan, create new opportunities for those struggling. That is what matters.”
It comes to me now in sharp, stunning clarity, fierce enough to sweep me off my feet. I see the map of the Wu and the Yue and all the fragmented kingdoms, the markers that separate one territory from another, the roads I had memorized until I could draw them out with my eyes closed. I blink, and this time, the perimeters blur like dents in sand, smoothed out by waves. In their place appears the vermilion palace with its gilded roofs and hollow halls, looming high above all the coasts and villages and streets.
The will of kings—that was what Zhengdan’s mother had alluded to. The divine order of the heavens, the natural right to rule; those things we were taught as children, trained to accept without question. But King Goujian is not the answer to peace. None of them are. So long as we continue to put mortal men on thrones and hail them as gods, sacrifice our lives to their legacies, history will repeat itself. Just as the ocean tides ebb and flow beneath the moon, empires will rise and collapse, wars will start and cease, and the rest of us will be left to struggle against the currents.
If only I had known earlier.
If only I could go back in time.
Fanli lifts a hand, rests it briefly against my cheek. The sky buckles above us. A wind sweeps through the trees, ripping the petals from their boughs. His image wavers before me, like ink in water, and I can sense my own presence slipping away, as if there is a great wind tugging at me too.
“Promise me,” I urge him, my voice already dissolving, too faint. I can only pray he will remember when he wakes.
He wakes with a shudder, a gasp, like someone breaking free from water. He recalls the dream only in fragments, but he knows I was there. Now, in the violet daylight, it is like he has lost me all over again. He buries his face in his hands, crying without sound.
Then he stands, pulls his hair into a high knot, sharpens his sword. It is a new blade to replace the one he had gifted me, with hundreds of thin, parallel marks etched down the side. I would cry too, if I had a physical form, eyes from which to weep. They are the number of days I’ve been gone. Counting down to the very date of my return, and my death.
