An amused snort, filling the air between them with seawater. “You’re going to apologize again.”
Yên shook her head. She pulled Vu Côn close again, letting those lips engulf her, sealing all words away. She was lost, drowning beneath murky waters, lungs filled with brine and algae and oil, wanting only that coldness to fill her, to transfigure her.
And then, as the coldness wormed its way deeper and deeper into her chest, she realized what she was doing. Who she was kissing. Remembered Vu Côn walking away with Mother, casually taking her from the village. Remembered that she traded lives like coins. That she owned Yên.
“I can’t do this,” she said. “We can’t do this.”
And, before she could think or regret, she ran away from Vu Côn’s room, and back to hers, never looking back.
FIVE
A Slow Drowning
Yên’s village was a small, dusty affair in a small, unremarkable province. Vu Côn had barely marked it when she’d been summoned the first time. Now, as she walked up its streets, she saw nothing she hadn’t seen elsewhere: ramshackle buildings, small and malnourished people with the scars and sores of unhealed diseases, who were watching her warily. She didn’t blame them. In the days after the world’s breaking, strangers carried welcome news from outside but might also be plague carriers. She wore an isolation skin, though she had no need for it, as she was mostly immune to diseases.
Because of the isolation skin, her entrance into the village had been easy, subjected to mild decontamination protocols instead of an extended quarantine in the Plague Grove. She’d timed her arrival for market day. The guards were too busy processing traders, making sure their goods all bore the pine-and-crane certificate of decontamination from the magistrate’s tribunal. A single, healthy person carrying no merchandise was barely worth a sharp word.
The twins had barely blinked when she’d said she’d be gone for a while, but of course prayers, and the occasional summoning, took her away from the palace very often. How would they do in her absence? Thông would worry about breaking the world by accident, but the truth was that the twins mostly broke themselves: arms and legs trying to climb places of the palace Vu Côn would never have thought to explore. She still remembered the time they’d found a hidden set of rafters in the gardens’ towers, and Liên had fallen down, desperately trying to fly. Three broken ribs, and she was lucky it hadn’t been more.
They were almost adults now. A complex, bittersweet feeling. She wasn’t sure she’d done right by them—that, unchaperoned, they would fare well in the outside world.
Yên would teach them caution. She had to.
The house Vu Côn was looking for was on the edge of the village, near the oldest and most cracked section of the wall. It was on stilts, slightly higher than the floodable ground, though it was sinking into the omnipresent mud of the place. The air was sharp with despair, with unanswered prayers, with unfulfilled devotions, enough of it to make Vu Côn’s skin itch. She always forgot how much she hated going out into the world: it was bad enough in the audience room, but at least there she was in control. She could put a beginning and an ending and boundaries around it. Here, she was...not defenseless, not as much as she’d been under Vanisher rule, but still well out of her comfort zone.
As she climbed the steps, the walls shook. She paused for a moment while the house steadied itself. Her human form was heavier than average, and the house was even more ramshackle than the usual buildings. Poor people, Yên had said, or implied. The kind who wouldn’t be missed, the kind one could safely offer away.
She didn’t want to think about Yên, but she was going to have to, at some point.
“I’m sorry, how may I help you?” Yên’s mother stood on the threshold. With the house shaking, Vu Côn’s arrival couldn’t have been missed.
The isolation skin blurred her features, and in any case, Yên’s mother hadn’t seen her clearly. She’d already been drunk with fatigue by the time Vu Côn had arrived. “My name is Vu Côn, elder aunt. I have a message for you. May I come in?”
Yên’s mother frowned, but politeness narrowly won. “Of course. I’m Kim Ngoc, younger aunt.”
Inside, it was cramped and narrow. A single room gathered two sleeping pallets, a low table, and a kitchen corner.
Vu Côn handed Yên’s mother—Kim Ngoc—the message, and stood for a while, one hand on the threshold. She should slip away, while the attention was elsewhere. She wasn’t even sure why she was delivering the message in person, rather than just leaving it on the windowsill or, better yet, in the small shrine to the spirits in the corner of the room. That would have been appropriate. Safe. But she’d promised Yên she would carry the message, and that didn’t include shying away from delivering it.
She rubbed her lips again, feeling the roughness of the isolation skin under her fingers, remembering what it had felt like to kiss Yên. Like swallowing live coals, that brief moment when a lantern’s flame, plunged underwater, was extinguished; that raw, fleeting heat compressed on all sides, instantly turning to lukewarm and sending a thrill down her bones.
We can’t do this.
No, they couldn’t, and for so many reasons.
Vu Côn’s skin itched again, a distant babble of prayers from the nearby houses. Nothing from this one: the only prayer spoken over and over—Yên’s safety—was being answered.
Kim Ngoc held the paper away from her as though it might bite. Her hand shook as she laid it on the table. Her eyes were veiled with tears. Vu Côn felt her own heart being squeezed: reflex, nothing more, surely. A prayer, granted, even if she hadn’t been the one it was directed at. Yên meant little to her, and Yên’s mother even less. “Where did you get this?” she asked.
“It was given to me, elder aunt,” Vu Côn said. “In a dragon’s palace.” She wasn’t sure why she was so loath to lie. Respect due to old age? But she was much, much older than Kim Ngoc; older than everyone else in the village, though she wasn’t about to reveal this fact through mere forms of address. “When I came to beseech for my aunt’s healing.”
“She says she’s well,” Kim Ngoc said. Her gaze wasn’t on Vu Côn. “That she has students, and she’s found a book no one has ever seen.” A half-veiled smile. “She’d run away with my medicine books and hide in the Plague Grove. She hasn’t changed, has she.”
It wasn’t a question directed at Vu Côn. And if it had been, she’d have to lie again.
How well was Yên, really?
She’d been burning with fever, the night she’d run into Vu Côn: she hadn’t realized it, and Vu Côn had cushioned the worst of it before she’d left to examine an empty room, but she’d seen enough patients to know what she was dealing with. Pale skin and reddened eyes: not tears, either, though Yên might well think so.
She’d lied to Yên. Healthy people didn’t suddenly develop magic skills, or summon gates outside of their conscious control. The sick ones, though...
None of the Vanishers viruses were sicknesses, in the usual sense of the term. The Vanishers had manipulated biology as easily as breathing, taking and discarding shapes and abilities like favorite clothes. Their viruses were attempts at gene-modding targets, and diseases were what happened when they went bad, as they inevitably did. Because none of the targets, whether they be human or animals, had the Vanishers’ easy capacity to absorb and reshape viruses for their own ends. Spirits... Spirits such as Vu Côn usually walked through viruses unharmed: not because they were immune, but because the Vanishers had thought of them as servants and thus beneath their notice.
A few sicknesses caused the onset of magical powers, but most of them came with nasty side effects, if not worse. Vu Côn didn’t know the name of the sickness. It might be nothing. It might be easily curable. Or—
No. She wasn’t going to think on what she might have to do, if Yên’s disease couldn’t be cured—only passed on, to infect other people. Not going to think on what her duty would be then.
To Yên’s mother, Vu Côn m
erely smiled, showing white, polished teeth. “She’s well. Learning magic.”
“Really?” Kim Ngoc looked surprised. “She’s never had any talent for it. I guess everything blooms, in time.”
Vu Côn clamped her lips on the “no, it doesn’t” that she really wanted to say, and smiled again. Magic didn’t just happen out of nowhere. There would have been warning signs—and if Kim Ngoc, who was a healer, had missed them all—then it was bad. Because the only other explanation was a virus. “I’d assume so. I can’t stay long, I’m afraid. But I had to leave my aunt at the palace, so I’ll have to go back. I can take a message?”
“Oh, of course.” Kim Ngoc shook her head. “I’m sorry. I’m being frightfully rude. Thank you for coming.”
Vu Côn shrugged. “I had business here,” she said.
“At the market?” Kim Ngoc nodded. “I hope your aunt is...doing well?” A careful dance around the subject. She was worried. No, not quite that.
“As well as can be.” Vu Côn shrugged. She probably shouldn’t push her welcome. But Yên had been so desperately homesick, and she felt unaccountably guilty about the bargain she’d struck with the village. “Is there anything from here your daughter would like? Books, perhaps? Or food?”
Kim Ngoc gave her a long, hard look. “Food wouldn’t keep, on such a long journey, would it?”
Vu Côn smiled again. “Depends what. Sweets, perhaps.”
“She’s never been much for sweets. Noodle soup, or shrimp fritters,” Kim Ngoc said. “Wait here, I’ll give you a message.” She turned back to the lone table and hunted for paper and a brush to write down words. The paper, when she found it, was creased and grey, and the brush, thin and missing half its hairs, had seen better days. Kim Ngoc made a gesture asking for forgiveness that Vu Côn distractedly acknowledged. She’d never cared much for ceremony one way or another.
She waited, listening to the rhythm of the village, the distant rumble of the market, the itch of prayers thick in the air. Someone’s self-loathing and absolute belief that justice, when it came, would sweep them away. Someone else’s desperate entreaties for the harvest to be half-good, for the rice to be, if not white, free from grit and insects. A prayer for continued survival, for houses to still stand when the storms came, when the river burst its banks and rose...
“Here.” Kim Ngoc handed Vu Côn a folded piece of paper with tight handwriting. Vu Côn barely glanced at it before slipping it into a travel pouch: she wasn’t here to play prying busybody.
“Thank you.” Vu Côn inclined her head, and made to leave. And then stopped, because Kim Ngoc was staring at her with dawning horror on her face.
“You.”
Oh, no.
The smartest thing to do would have been to run for the open door. Vu Côn was smart, but she didn’t see the point of that anymore. Instead, she threw back the hood of her isolation skin, and looked steadily at Kim Ngoc, with eyes in which the depths of the sea would be laid bare.
Kim Ngoc took a deep breath, and then steadied herself. “You’re the one—”
“Who took your daughter?” Vu Côn smiled. There was no amusement in it. “You know all things have a price.”
Kim Ngoc didn’t move. She stared back at Vu Côn with an unreadable expression. “You didn’t have to come.”
“I did,” Vu Côn said, gently. “I promised her.”
“You—” Kim Ngoc shook herself. “She’s happy, in that letter,” she said, finally. “Here, all she thought of was escape.”
Yên hadn’t talked much about her life in the village, but it hadn’t sounded like much of one, more like a slow, steady act of drowning, a gradual choking of the light. Not that Vu Côn had the hypocrisy to think she offered better, not when she hadn’t given Yên a choice. But at least she wasn’t couching it as survival of the best, or necessary sacrifices, as the elders had. “Happy,” Vu Côn said, thinking of desire laid bare, and of an ill-advised kiss in the dead of the night. She kept her face expressionless.
Kim Ngoc looked up at her. There was no fear in her eyes, but it was a very different thing. Yên had stood up to Vu Côn because of outrage at unfairness. Kim Ngoc had no fear because she’d lived with so much, for so long, that she’d forgotten what it felt like to be free of it. “She wanted to be a scholar,” she said. “To pass the Metropolitan exam and be escorted to the capital. To be under the Empress’s protection.”
Vu Côn said nothing. She could feel it, though, gathering in the air: the unspoken prayer, the desire that Kim Ngoc couldn’t yet give voice to. She could have walked away. Her work, such as it was, no longer involved the granting of wishes. But instead, she found herself saying, “What do you want?”
Kim Ngoc was silent, for a while. Then she said, not looking at Vu Côn, because one didn’t look at superiors, or spirits one was beseeching, “A way out,” she said. “Filial piety has become chains, to her. She’ll never walk away as long as she’s alive.”
“And will you?” Vu Côn asked, taking in the room: the healer’s instruments all spread out, the piles of diagnosis and symptoms, the thick book of the Broken-World Teacher’s words, shimmering like liquid silver on the bookshelves.
Kim Ngoc didn’t move. “We both know the answer to that. Does a healer walk away from their patients?”
Vu Côn shook her head. “Then we both know what answer I can give you. I can’t fashion miracles.” She’d expected Yên’s mother to crumple, or to weep or to show some kind of emotion, but the other woman’s only answer was a brisk, businesslike nod. Only the tightness of her lips betrayed her.
“I see,” she said. “Thank you, Teacher. I shouldn’t have asked. It’s for us to work out.”
She looked so much like Yên, in that moment—standing, trembling, in Vu Côn’s room and apologizing for the disturbance—that Vu Côn lost her composure. Before she could think on what she was doing, she’d reached out and lightly touched the woman’s wrist. Her pulse was thick and complex, the flow of blood in the chest clogged around the heart, the breath shorter than it should have been. A blocked artery: an easy fix. Words flowed, from Vu Côn to her, a string of letters that shaped into an incantation, cutting through the blockage and incinerating it into nothingness. Sword. Sharpness. Needle. Heaven’s Will.
Kim Ngoc raised her hands to her chest, slowly, carefully. Her eyes were wide open, a slow, incredulous expression slowly spreading across her face. Vu Côn hated that part. She wasn’t divine, or at least not more than they were. She didn’t pretend to be superior or worth worshipping. She wasn’t her former masters.
She shook her head. “That’s a favor. Not a bargain. And it won’t last.”
“What was it?” Kim Ngoc asked.
“Clogged artery.” It shouldn’t have been common, not with the threadbare food that was now the norm, but some Vanisher viruses had odd effects. “Your body is building it up on its own.”
“The Stilling of the Crimson Mansions. It’s fatal within a few years.” Kim Ngoc didn’t sound like someone who’d just been handed a death sentence. Merely...curious. “But you can remove it.”
Vu Côn shrugged. “I know a few tricks.”
“Sword. Sharpness. Needle. Heaven’s Will.” Kim Ngoc rolled the words on her tongue, as if tasting them. “They wouldn’t work for me, would they? I don’t feel anything, when I say them. That usually means nothing would happen if I tried to put them in a healing circle.”
“I don’t think they would,” Vu Côn said. The Broken-World Teacher’s incantations didn’t depend on the language; or, more accurately, both human and spirit languages derived from the same archaic source, which fueled the spells’ powers. But some spells, for whatever reason, didn’t transfer from spirits to humans.
Kim Ngoc was looking at her with curiosity. Vu Côn braced herself for the roiling in the air, for the prayer she couldn’t answer, the one she heard ten thousand times a day: please make me well, please make me whole. But there was nothing.
“You don’t wish to be healed?�
�
“I already was.” Kim Ngoc smiled. “Greediness is unbecoming. I’ve seen enough miracles for a lifetime.” A slight itch on Vu Côn’s skin, nothing more: a passing curiosity. And that same deep-seated desire, like a background to everything. Wishing her daughter to be safe, to be well. To be happy.
Happiness. Again, the memory of that kiss. Of Yên’s smile, the way it had transfigured her entire face into something strange and fragile and wonderful. Of that feeling of drinking all of Yên in, of how good it had felt.
No. There was no time for happiness. And it wouldn’t be fair, or just, to Yên.
She needed to leave. Now, or she’d never breathe again. “Goodbye, elder aunt.” She all but ran to the open door: to the village, to its miasma of ill health, of poisoned soil and broken people. To safety, never once looking back, with Kim Ngoc’s message for her daughter weighing her sleeves down, as unforgiving and as cutting as sharpened metal.
* * *
Yên and Vu Côn had mostly avoided each other after...the incident. Yên gave the twins their lessons in the courtyard, pointing out with forceful firmness that the world had rules they couldn’t afford to ignore; and all the while, she kept half an eye on the door, expecting Vu Côn to be leaning against the doorpost, watching her children with fond amusement. But she was never there.
Perhaps it was indeed for the best. Except that whenever Yên closed her eyes, she’d feel again the cold, exhilarating touch of Vu Côn’s lips on hers. Except that she’d wake up at night and feel the silver letters on her hand itch, find them shining in the darkness, and see the faint outline of a waiting gate.
Magic.
Vu Côn had given her drugs, the same bitter and sharp glass she’d already drunk. Perfumed gourd, bitter melon, and something else Yên couldn’t identify. Although the fruit tasted like the lychee had: slightly off-kilter and wrong, too sharp, just enough to be recognizable but uncomfortable. She could have not taken it. After all, Vu Côn just wanted her to be a prisoner there. But the dragon had been sincere: helpful, comforting in the face of sheer malice. Desirable, and she just couldn’t afford to go there.
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