Page 75 of A Song to Drown Rivers
“This is important,” he insisted. “Just listen for a moment, okay? This is really—a revelation. I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve decided… none of it matters.”
“What?”
“The kingdom.” He tilted his head farther back, eyes closed. “The land, the lakes, the places of worship. All the gold and the godly statues and the jewels. I’m willing to give them all up,” he said, a grin splitting across his face like lightning, “as long as I can be with you always.”
I stared. I had not imagined this. It was one thing to know that he desired me, that he enjoyed my presence, admired my dancing, that I occupied a place in his heart few others ever would. But what he spoke of now—it sounded suspiciously like love. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I managed.
“I do,” he said sincerely.
“You’re drunk.”
“I’m always drunk.”
He was not wrong. “You are a king,” I reminded him, gazing around the room at all the somber faces, those who had left theirhomes and their lives behind just to serve him. “The kingdom is your birthright.”
“Is that a no?” He looked more agitated than when the Yue had been on his doorstep. He’d set his jug down, shifting forward to meet my eyes. “Don’t you wish to be with me too?”
The words stopped in my throat. I didn’t know what to say, how to tell him that none of this mattered anyway. Would it be kinder to feed him another lie now? Or give him the truth?
I was a coward; I shrank from the question, took the easy way out. “We can talk about this another day,” I told him gently, knowing there were no days left.
First we heard the hoofbeats. Distant, but growing more distinct by the second, getting higher and higher up the mountain path. Then the swishing of armor.
“Are those reinforcements?” a maid asked hopefully, running to the entrance. “Maybe they’re coming to rescue us.”
Fuchai had already run through the supply of wine available. He blinked at the noise, as if pulled here from a great distance. Then he rose, supporting himself against the wall with his good arm, and said with sudden, surprising sharpness: “Don’t open the door.”
Too late.
The maid fell back with a startled cry, and an emissary marched in, surrounded by soldiers. They were all well trained, a perfect line of men in fine-quality uniforms, their hair left long and pinned into sleek black knots atop their heads, the Yue flag flying out behind them. Next to the Wu—the cowering maids, the exhausted guards with their tunics hanging in tatters, the ministers slouched by the far walls—their preeminence was a visible fact, a taunt. The air seemed to solidify around them.
The shriek of a sword. In two strides, Fuchai had stepped in front of me, throwing his injured arm before my body, his sword pointed at the emissary. Someone cried out.
My blood had become ice. Years of preparing for this very moment, and now it was happening too quickly.
“Get back,” Fuchai warned.
The emissary was a tall, lean man with a face like a hawk and the build of an archer. He looked like the kind of person Fanli might pick out from a crowd, seeing potential others didn’t. He regarded Fuchai with cold disdain, and Fuchai’s sword as if it were a stick wielded by a boy. “Do you even know how to fight?” he scoffed.
I could see the color rise up the back of Fuchai’s neck. In the palace, everything and everyone was his; nobody ever dared scorn him. Still, when he spoke, he retained the dignity of a king. “Well enough to cut off your head.”
The emissary made another scoffing noise, but didn’t draw his sword. “No need. You’re outnumbered; surely even you can see that?”
Fuchai stared around the room in silence. For every Wu guard and maid left, at least two Yue soldiers stood, armed with polished blades and carved shields. The doors had been blocked, the windows locked tight. Outside lay the sheer drop of the cliff, and a treacherous mountain path that required the best steeds to navigate.
“But don’t worry,” the emissary said, pacing around the room with leisure. He stopped only to snap a fan open and hold it out over his face so only those coldly gleeful eyes were showing. I wondered if Fanli had specifically asked him to be as infuriating as possible, to better rub the salt in the wound. But no, that was not quite Fanli’s style—to be malicious without reason, to stomp over the dead body once it had already cooled. It was more like something Goujian would do. “I’m not here to pick a fight, only to deliver a message from King Goujian.”
“Goujian,” Fuchai repeated with vehemence. Under the black fury in his voice, I sensed the sting of betrayal too. Perhaps he had genuinely considered the two of them friends. From everything Fuchai had told me, it was not as if he’d had much experience with real friendship.
“He says he can be magnanimous and spare you. If you agree to leave right now, he is willing to arrange for you to travel to Yongdong; you will be allotted three hundred families there to wait upon you for the rest of your days. You will never have to worry about hunger or poverty until your old age; that will all be taken care of.”
My heart thudded almost painfully. I knew it was more a calculated jibe than a gesture of goodwill, and yet… some weak part of me wished Fuchai would agree to it. His palace lay in ruins; his kingdom, wrestled from his control. Perhaps he need not die too.
I couldn’t fully make out Fuchai’s features, but when he spoke, there was mockery laced in his tone. “How generous. Is that all?”
“That is all,” the emissary said, smiling. Then he caught my eye over Fuchai’s shoulder, and recognition flashed over his face. I felt my pulse throb. “Oh, I did also have a message for Xishi.”
Everything seemed to go completely still. Then, very slowly, Fuchai turned toward me, confusion written over his features. “What?”
