The Blood Orchid (The Scarlet Alchemist #2)

Chapter Twenty-Six

Li Hong, Emperor of Tang

Once, death was my greatest fear.

When you live in a court of eternal life, where everyone’s skin glitters with gold, their bodies slowly calcifying into statues,

you are raised to believe that death is the worst thing that can happen. For people like us, death means sacrificing power.

It means crossing into an After that is inevitably less gilded and glorious than this life.

But death was much simpler than I thought.

After I died, I passed lonely nights on the banks of a river with no temperature, an endless ribbon of time with days I no

longer counted, a moonless sky, and soundless woods. I was a whisper of wind between silver grass, the pale reflection of

moonlight cast across a pond.

I only remembered my name when she came to visit me.

I saw her and then there was light, and the shadows had sharp edges, and the river was once again cold on my feet, and I was something and someone separate from the blur of endings. I never told her that when she left me, I could feel myself growing roots into the cold earth, colors fading into the forest. I never wanted her to know, to hurt for me more than she already did.

But even death has an endpoint.

One day, the walls of the forest fell away, and I was back in the palace where I had died, my sister’s hand in mine. My home

was crumbled and ruined, but it was real , I was real, feeling as if I’d spent the last month dreaming.

Upon my arrival, the royal alchemists were already giving orders that I was all too glad to take. They wrote laws for me to

sign that they promised would fix the country, and I trusted them because Zilan had, because following their orders felt like

following hers.

Zheng Sili appeared among their ranks on the second day, clutching a full written proposal as to why he deserved to work in

the court even though he could no longer do alchemy. He’d only gotten through the first sentence before I told him to save

his breath, that he could stay here as long as he liked. He was Zilan’s friend, so he was mine.

I think all of them knew that I was a dreamer, not an emperor. They seemed all too prepared to have me as their puppet, and

for the time being, I couldn’t bring myself to care. The only order I gave was to send ships out to the Bohai Sea, the last

place that had mentioned Penglai Island in any written record.

Even without alchemy, the royal alchemists destroyed the private armies within a week. They offered the peasant soldiers more

money to work for the palace, distributed food to the poorer districts, and declared the hiring of private armies illegal,

punishable by death regardless of one’s class. It only took one public execution before the aristocrats realized, with horror,

that they would be punished like peasants for disobeying.

Soon after, I officially became the emperor. I dressed in yellow robes that once were only for my father and watched the crowd of my sparse city bow to me with a reverence I didn’t deserve. That same night, the Paper Alchemist reported that the ships in Bohai had returned empty-handed.

“Send them out again,” I’d said, leaving no room for comment.

Day by day, the world began to shift.

From my window, I watched as the shattered rooftops of Chang’an were retiled, as the rain washed away the bloodstains, as

the market stalls were repaired and the pear trees lining the canals flowered once again. The palace walls were rebuilt with

clay, the bloody ponds drained and replaced with fresh water, and soon it was hard to see that anything had changed at all.

But I sensed the newness of this world in small ways that no one else would believe.

At first, I noticed that rain would only fall at night, the clouds scattered by morning, the sky more blue and open than I’d

ever seen it in my lifetime. The moonlight seemed sun-bright every evening, casting the palace in silver light. The plum blossom

trees in the courtyard flowered even though it was the middle of summer.

I asked the magistrates how the other cities under their control were faring, and they told me that the homes had been rebuilt,

the dead buried, extra rice safely delivered. Disease and disquiet had tapered off, and for now the world was calm.

Of course, that was exactly what they would tell a new emperor, even if it was a lie.

So I sent Zheng Sili out to do a circuit of the northern cities in my place. He returned a week later and confirmed that what

the magistrates said was true.

There were no signs so drastic that I could fully attribute it to the loss of alchemy. But life gold had taken nearly a century to destroy China, so surely it would take just as long to recover. This was only a quiet beginning.

“Thank you,” I whispered as I knelt in the alchemy courtyard, knowing she wouldn’t hear it. My palace of a thousand rooms

was so empty that I could hear the wind twisting through the lattice windows, humming over the still ponds, dying as the sound

hit the clay walls. At night, I listened for footsteps in the grass, but they never came.

I told the Fans that they could stay in the palace, but they insisted on finding their own housing. I imagined that to many,

the palace walls would forever look like they were stained with blood, but as the emperor, I couldn’t run away.

Perhaps I would go down in history as the worst emperor that had ever lived. In the dawn of my reign, alchemy had vanished.

But I trusted Zilan, always. She once told me that alchemists wanted to rebuild the world and start again. Perhaps this was

how she wanted to do it, the way others before her had been too afraid to attempt.

The ancestral shrine of the Wu family had a great many visitors in the months after the reconstruction. I couldn’t blame them,

as few knew what my mother was like in person. They could only see the streets paved in gold, which, under my reign, were

quickly tarnished by footsteps. I stopped by there on occasion to pay my respects.

My mother once said that we laughed at the dead for their failures, but I didn’t feel like laughing when I saw her carved

out of stone, people crying at her feet. Her stone visage looked so much kinder than she ever had. I looked at it and imagined

a world in which she hadn’t felt the need to trample others on her path to power, in which she could have lived as she was.

Maybe, without alchemy, that world would come into being.

On the day before my wedding, I lingered too long at her temple. After a few weeks passed, my sisters convinced me that Zilan had been right—it was dangerous for the last heir to the House of Li to be unmarried. My sisters were not interested in ruling, and their claims to the throne were tenuous enough as it was.

It seemed more reasonable now that the bodies had been buried, the streets cleaned, the city of Chang’an so much quieter than

before, but somehow I didn’t mind the quiet. It gave me the same feeling as standing in the retiled palace courtyards, where

all the dead plants had been uprooted and new seeds planted that hadn’t yet broken the surface. For now, it was nothing but

wet soil and hope.

With all the rites established and a perilously long investigation process to ensure I wasn’t accidentally marrying my own

relative, I bowed to my veiled bride before a crown of aristocrats who cared nothing for either of us, trying not to squirm

under their gazes as we ate dinner before them, then finally retreated back to my room.

“I’m not consummating anything, just so you know,” she said once the door shut. “I ate so much food I think I’m going to explode.”

She reached for her veil, but I gently took her wrist.

“Let me at least do this properly,” I said, picking up the wooden dowel that one of my advisers had given me that morning.

I slid it beneath the veil and lifted it back, over her head.

“Finally,” Zilan said, smiling as she peeled back the rest of the veil and cast it to the floor.

Ten days after the disappearance of alchemy, a merchant ship had found Zilan on an island in the Bohai Sea.

I would have traveled out there to meet her immediately if the royal alchemists hadn’t argued for hours that it would destabilize the country once more, and that they would bludgeon me unconscious to stop me if necessary. Her siblings had no such qualms and raced across the country to meet her halfway.

It was another week before she returned, and I knew at once that something was wrong.

Her eyes were vacant, her words quiet and far away. She looked at me only fleetingly, always talking just past my shoulder,

as if staring beyond.

One night I found her sitting in the shallow water of a courtyard pond, watching Durian swim under the moonlight. She didn’t

react as I approached, but I knew she heard me because she became very still. Moonlight spilled across the silk of her dress,

painting her in stony white.

“I don’t believe any of this is real,” she whispered.

I waited to see if she would continue, but she only dropped her gaze to her lap.

“How can it not be real?” I said.

“Because all of this,” she said, gesturing to the palace behind her, “this life that I get to have, it’s worth so much more

than just losing my alchemy.”

I watched her for a moment longer, then slipped my shoes off and knelt in the pond beside her. She moved as if to stop me,

but I was already sitting in the cold pool, blue silk floating around me.

“You don’t think it’s a fair exchange,” I said. “You’re worried something worse is coming.”

She nodded, hugging her knees. Durian swam toward me—his human food dispenser—and pecked at my hands.

“Maybe you did die,” I said, petting Durian, who turned and swam away when he seemed to realize I didn’t have any food. Zilan stared at me, waiting for me to continue.

“The Scarlet Alchemist died,” I went on. “You lost your alchemy, your dream.”

“Everyone lost their alchemy,” she said.

“Yes, and everyone gets to live in a better world because of it,” I said. “Maybe, instead of one person paying the ultimate

price so that everyone can be happy, everyone carries just a little bit of the pain. Maybe it’s enough that you were willing

to pay. Maybe that’s the good that wipes out all the evil.”

Finally, a smile rose to Zilan’s lips, soft and bright as a blooming orchid. She turned away so I couldn’t see it.

“That’s nice,” she said, “but that’s not how alchemy works.”

I shrugged. “Alchemy doesn’t work at all anymore.”

She smacked my shoulder gently, then scooted closer and leaned against me. It was the first time she’d touched me since I’d

hugged her upon our reunion.

“You’re right about one thing,” she said. “The Scarlet Alchemist is dead. I never want to hear that name again.”

“Because my mother gave it to you?”

She nodded, pressing herself closer.

“Well, empresses typically receive new titles,” I said. “We could come up with something for you.”

She seemed to consider this for a moment, then shook her head. “I don’t want a new title,” she said.

“But I thought—”

“I want to be Fan Zilan,” she said. “I have always wanted to be Fan Zilan.”

“As you wish,” I said, pulling her close. “ Empress Fan Zilan, if that’s all right.”

Now, in our room, as she removes her veil and wipes the makeup from her face with her sleeve, my Empress at last, I can’t help but think that her smile in this moment is something that will last forever. Even though life gold is gone, this moment is etched into my soul.

“I don’t really know how to be the Empress,” she says, wrapping her arms around me, her head against my chest, listening to

my heartbeat.

“That makes two of us,” I say. “Mother wasn’t the best example.”

“I’m probably going to be very irritable and tedious until I find some new hobbies,” she says. Then, softer, as the wind snuffs

out one of the candles, casting us in quiet, secret darkness: “I don’t really know who I am without alchemy.”

I hold her tighter. “I don’t know either,” I say. “But let’s find out together.”

She looks up and pulls me into a kiss.

Tomorrow, I am sure that I will have to think about the many people who would like to see both of us dead, who will challenge

our claim to the throne, who will try to avenge the loss of alchemy. But that is a problem for the morning.

I will never tell this to Zilan, but I think that maybe the alchemists had it all wrong from the start.

Maybe the key to eternal life was never gold, or youth, or an island free of pain and suffering, but just the dream of tomorrow

that can never be extinguished, a hope that endures even when its leaves are wilted, purple petals unfurling without fail

in the morning sun.