by Rachel Aaron
“You’re right,” Julius admitted, turning back to the Qilin. “I can’t change the past, but I don’t have to, because that’s not where we live. We’re alive right now, and if there’s one thing being Bob’s tool has taught me, it’s that now can always be changed for the better.”
The Empress Mother looked baffled by that, but Julius had already put her out of his mind. He also banished the sick feeling of worry for Chelsie and Fredrick, whom he hadn’t seen since they’d been swept away in the flood that was still raging behind him. He let go of everything, focusing only on the dragon in front of him as he got down on his stomach in the cold mud so he could look at the Qilin face to blank face.
“Your Majesty?”
Nothing.
“Emperor?”
Nothing again.
“Xian?”
It was probably wishful thinking, but Julius would have sworn he saw the emperor’s golden eyes flicker at his name. It wasn’t enough to go on, but Julius took it anyway.
“Do you remember what I told you in the throne room?” he said softly. “Chelsie told you the truth today, and while you are the very last Qilin, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. You’ve been held prisoner by a power you can’t control for your entire life, holding everything in and making yourself miserable for centuries in the name of duty. But if misery is the price of the Qilin’s good fortune, then it’s not good fortune at all. It’s a curse. I wouldn’t wish your luck on my worst enemy, and I don’t think you would, either.”
He smiled. “Look at it that way, and this whole thing becomes a blessing in disguise. You haven’t lost an irreplaceable gift. You’ve spared your son from having to suffer as you have, and that’s more good fortune than your luck has ever brought you.”
He paused there, holding his breath, but the emperor’s face was still as blank as ever, and Julius sighed.
“Chelsie told me you always wanted children,” he said, trying a different approach. “Well, now you have twenty. Twenty-one, counting the baby. You’ve got Chelsie, too. She never wanted to cut you off. The only reason she lied was because she was afraid of this.”
He waved his hand at the destruction around them.
“But it doesn’t have to be this way. You can’t control your luck, but you can control how you react to things, and this isn’t the catastrophe your mother claims. Yes, the Qilin line is broken, but you’re still emperor. You’ve still got your dragons and your lands, but now you have a family, too. Your family, who needs you. You already lost Chelsie once because of this. How much more are you going to let being Qilin take from you?”
As he said that last part, Julius felt the ground shift under his hand. When he looked down, he saw that the Qilin’s fingers had dug deep into the soft dirt. He didn’t know if that was because of him or not, but it was the first movement he’d made since he’d gone down. Julius was scrambling to think how best to build on that when Fredrick burst out of the water with a gasp.
The giant wave had passed while he’d been talking to the Empress Mother, but the flood was still raging. Julius was high and dry thanks to the lee of the fallen Skyway and the little hill the emperor had chosen to collapse on, but the rest of the lot, the street, and the buildings on the other side were consumed beneath several feet of violently churning brown water.
It flowed so fast, the water dragged Fredrick right back off his feet. He fought his way up again a second later, grabbing a chunk of the collapsed Skyway to keep his head above water as he looked around frantically. It wasn’t until he dove back into the flood, though, that Julius realized Chelsie hadn’t come up yet.
An icy stab of dread went through him, and he turned back to the emperor. “Please, Xian,” he begged. “Don’t let them use you like this! You’re not a weapon. You’re a dragon. An emperor! Who cares what your mother wants? You can still have everything you want: Chelsie, your son, your children, your empire. You can have it all, but you have to come back right now and save it before—”
A splash interrupted him. When Julius looked over his shoulder, though, it was just Fredrick coming up for air. He looked panicked now, tossing his sword up onto the broken hunk of Skyway before diving back down. When he’d vanished under the swirling water, Julius turned back to the Qilin, grabbing the emperor’s head and forcing him to look.
“Your son is going to die,” he said, voice shaking. “He’s going to drown down there searching for Chelsie. She might be gone already. That’s a much bigger tragedy than losing the Qilin. You said you just wanted to be happy. Well your happiness is down there under that water, and if you want to save her, save them, you need to snap out of this and go help your son!”
He was shouting by the end, clutching Xian’s blank face between his shaking hands. And nothing happened. The emperor didn’t blink, didn’t flinch, didn’t do anything. Then, just as Julius let go and jumped to his feet to go help Fredrick himself, a tiny voice whispered, “My son?”
Julius whirled back around. The emperor was still exactly as he’d left him, his eyes blank as a doll’s, but there was a strain in his muscles that hadn’t been there before. A tightness that quickly became violent shaking as he forced himself to move.
“My son,” he breathed, prying his curled hands out of the ground. “I have a son.”
“Yes,” Julius said, dropping back down to his knees so he could help the emperor. “You have ten sons and eleven daughters, one of whom is apparently the next seer. You can’t let her go through that alone! She needs you. They all do, but Fredrick needs you now, so come back. You said you’d be our emperor, but what emperor leaves his subjects when they need him most? If you really cared about your duty, you’d come back and do it. Come help us. Right now.”
He stopped there, holding his breath, but the dragon didn’t move. Behind them, the water splashed as Fredrick came up for air and went back down, but Xian didn’t even flinch. Then, just when Julius was on the edge of giving up, the emperor blew out a long line of smoke.
What happened after that came in painfully slow bursts. Julius didn’t know what was actually going on, but from the outside it looked like the Qilin was trying to force his body through a wall of cold, heavy clay. He came back in bits and pieces, his muscles straining and giving up then straining again until, all at once, the magic released him, letting go as fast as it had taken hold to drop him in the mud beside Julius.
“Xian!” Julius offered him his hand at once. The Qilin grabbed it, lifting his face—which, of course, was completely free of mud—to look around in confusion.
“What happened?”
There was no nice way to put it, but Julius tried anyway. “You did,” he said. “But that’s over now. It’s time to make things right, starting with Chelsie.”
The emperor’s already pale face went even paler, and he shot to his feet. “Where is she?”
Julius pointed at the flooding water, and the Qilin started pulling off his golden robe to dive in. Before he’d gotten his arm out of the sleeve, though, Fredrick broke the surface again, and this time, Chelsie was with him.
“Julius!” he yelled, his normally calm voice frantic. “Help me!”
Julius was there before he could finish, charging into the water to help his brother haul Chelsie’s dead weight into the shelter of the broken skyway. When the emperor moved in to help as well, though, Fredrick turned on him with a snarl. “Don’t touch my mother!”
“It’s okay, Fredrick,” Julius said, putting up his hands. “He’s himself again.”
The Qilin nodded rapidly, but Fredrick wasn’t paying attention. He was leaning down to do CPR on Chelsie, breathing into her mouth five quick times before sitting up to press his locked hands into her chest for the compressions. He repeated the cycle twice, alternating between forcing air into her lungs and pushing it back out through her chest. Then, just as he was about to start the third round of breaths, Chelsie’s body convulsed.
She rolled over with a gasp, coughing out lungfuls of mud
dy water as Fredrick slapped her on the back. She was still struggling to breathe when a voice called the emperor’s name.
“Xian?”
Everyone looked up to see the Empress Mother standing in the farthest recess of the fallen skyway, her silk slippers pressed together on the last remaining dry patch of land.
“Come,” she said calmly. “Let’s go.”
The Qilin looked at her like she was insane. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“You can’t possibly want to stay with her,” the empress said, sneering at Chelsie, who managed to glare back even while choking. “Whose fault do you think this is?”
“Mine,” Xian said firmly, rising to his feet. “And yours.”
He looked around at the destruction as if he was seeing it for the first time, which, to be fair, he probably was. “I did this,” he whispered, voice shaking. “But you helped push me to it.” His jaw clenched as he turned back to his mother. “You used me.”
“I did,” she said, lifting her chin. “You are the Qilin. You exist to be used for the good of our Golden Empire. A weapon against the enemies who would—”
“Enemies?” he cried, flinging out his arm toward Fredrick. “Is my son the enemy? Is she?” He shifted to point at the little dragon the Empress Mother was still clutching in her arms. “How long have you known I had children?”
The empress’s jaw tightened beneath the sag of her wrinkled skin, and the Qilin began to growl. “How long, Mother?”
She sighed. “I suspected the truth shortly after hearing Bethesda had clutched two years in a row, but I knew nothing for certain until today. That is the truth, Xian, but it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d known from the beginning. I still wouldn’t have told you, because I knew you’d do this.”
She waved her hand at the flooded lot dotted with collapsed roads. “To allow such a disaster would have been a disgrace to my name and yours. But it had to be done eventually, so I chose to let it happen here. This way, it is Algonquin who suffers, not our subjects. I should think you’d be glad of my foresight.”
“I am glad,” Xian said quietly. “Glad it wasn’t worse. Glad I didn’t—” He cut off with a wince, and then he turned away, putting his back to her. “Go home.”
The empress’s red eyes went wide. “I will not be dismissed like a—”
“So long as I am emperor, you will be whatever I say,” he growled. “Go home, Empress. And leave the child.”
Her arms tightened on the little girl. Before she could say anything else, though, Chelsie blew a puff of fire into her hands to warm them.
The moment the magic flashed, the girl’s head popped up like a cork. She started to scramble, biting the empress with her baby fangs when the old dragoness wouldn’t let go. The empress dropped the whelp with a pained cry, and the little girl skittered across the ground before launching herself straight at Chelsie, latching on to her torso with all four limbs like a baby monkey.
From the look on her face, Chelsie was as surprised by this as everyone else. Julius, though, could only grin.
“I bet it’s your fire,” he said, smiling down at the little dragon, who seemed to be trying to burrow her way into Chelsie’s ribcage. “You did feed it to her every day for six hundred years. It makes sense she’d recognize it now.”
“I think you’re right,” Chelsie whispered, putting a hesitant arm around the little dragon. The shyness only lasted a second before she crumpled, wrapping herself around the little dragon with a sob. “I’ve got you,” she whispered, pressing kiss after kiss against the child’s fine black hair. “It’s okay. You’re safe now.”
In classic whelp fashion, the little dragon immediately tried to bite her. She actually landed one, sinking her teeth into her mother’s arm. It looked painful, but Chelsie didn’t seem to mind at all. She just laughed, prying the little dragon’s jaw off her arm with an indulgent smile while Julius stared in shock.
He didn’t think he’d ever seen his sister smile like that. He’d definitely never heard her laugh, but she must have been too exhausted to hold back, because she was doing both in earnest now, the relief making her look centuries younger as she beamed down at the daughter she’d never thought would hatch.
“A proper dragoness,” she said, bopping the whelp on the nose and then snatching her finger back before the little dragon could bite it off. “At least I can see Bob hasn’t been starving you.”
The baby dragon chuffed, and Chelsie laughed again, but the happy look fell off her face when she looked up to see Xian watching the interaction with an expression that could have been wonder or terror.
“I have a daughter,” he whispered.
“Actually, you have several,” Chelsie said, lowering her eyes. “I thought this one was a dud, but apparently, Bob found a way to hatch her.” She heaved a long sigh. “I suppose I owe him for that.”
Considering what Bob had put them through, Julius didn’t think she owed him anything. He was about to say as much when Xian dropped to his knees in front of Chelsie.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she said, shifting uncomfortably. “It’s my fault. I was the one who ran.”
“Because you were afraid of me,” he said angrily. “I should never have made you fear. You were everything to me, and I let you go. I believed the lies, even when I should have known better. I left you alone with Bethesda, left you to suffer.” He clenched his hands. “I’m sorry, Chelsie. I’ve done you so much wrong, and I can’t—I’m just—” He cut off with a frustrated scowl that quickly turned into a regretful one. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t make this all your fault,” she snapped, meeting his eyes at last. “I was the one who panicked and lied. I should have trusted you more. I should have told you.”
“You did what was needed to protect yourself and them,” Xian insisted. “Someone had to protect them from…”
He didn’t finish, but his haunted eyes said the rest, and Chelsie sighed.
“Maybe I did,” she admitted. “But that doesn’t mean it was right. So much of this could have been avoided if I hadn’t tried to do everything myself. Even if my intentions were in the right place, I had no right. After all”—she smiled at him—“they’re your children, too.”
Julius had said the exact same thing, but he never could have gotten the look of pure joy that spread over the Qilin’s face when she said it. “They are, aren’t they?” he said, his golden eyes going from Fredrick to the little dragon and finally back to her. “We have children.”
“If you can call six-hundred-year-old dragons children,” Chelsie said, her dark brows furrowing. “I’m not even sure where most of them are right—”
She didn’t get to finish, because that was the moment when the Qilin swept down, throwing his arms around Chelsie and the little dragon on her lap. By some serendipitous stroke, he managed to snag Fredrick as well, dragging the tall dragon down with him as he pulled them all into a tight embrace.
“It’s not lost,” he said in a voice that was neither controlled nor serene but vibrant with relief and happiness. “I have you. We have a family.”
No one could say anything after that. Xian was squeezing them too tight for words, but other than the little dragoness, who was wiggling fiercely, no one seemed to want to escape. They were all just…happy, which Julius took as his cue to turn around before he got all maudlin about missing another warm family moment, which he was absolutely not going to do. They deserved their happiness, and he wished them nothing else. He just needed to look away for a while.
Thankfully, there was plenty to look at. The flood was receding now, the muddy river trickling peaceably back to its banks. He poked around the rubble for a bit in the vague hope of finding some trace of where Bob had vanished to, but the water had washed the seer’s scent clean away.
He was contemplating going to check on the Empress Mother’s car next. She’d made herself scarce once the baby had jumped ship, but Julius still wanted to make sure she’d rea
lly left and wasn’t waiting in the shadows to get revenge or anything stupid like that. He was about to walk over and check when someone tapped him on the shoulder.
It felt like Fredrick, but when Julius turned around, he found himself face to face with the Golden Emperor. It didn’t seem possible, but the Qilin looked even more astonishingly perfect now with his muddy robes and wild hair than he had when he’d landed in the desert. It was the smile that did it, Julius decided. He’d never seen anyone look as perfectly happy as Xian did right now, which made it even odder when the elegant dragon dropped to his knees.
“Julius Heartstriker,” he said solemnly, bending down to press his forehead to the dirt at Julius’s feet. “You have saved me and my family from my mother’s treachery. On behalf of the Golden Empire and all the dragons who benefit from my fortune, thank you.” His voice began to tremble, and he bowed lower still. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
Julius cringed in horror. He hated when anyone bowed to him, but this went beyond anything he could have imagined. The only thing that saved it for him was the thank you. That, he would treasure for the rest of his life, but the rest of this experience made him want to sink into the ground.
He was trying to figure out how to make the Qilin stop when the emperor raised his head on his own. And as his eyes met Julius’s, the full power of the thankful Qilin’s magic landed on him like a golden mountain, knocking everything else away.
Chapter 14
If Marci had had a life left to lose, the last thirty minutes would have taken twenty years off it.
Not five minutes after she’d agreed to wait for Bob’s signal, the DFZ had started shaking like gelatin. The collapses came next. It started by the river, but within minutes, every Skyway in the city was either cracked or falling. It was the worst disaster since the original flooding of Detroit, and stuck here in the Heart of the World, she couldn’t do a thing about it.
