by JC Kang
Xiulan looked down at the ground.
Kaiya sighed. With the White Moon Renyue’s passage toward new, her sisters-in-law’s normally cheerful demeanors turned first to nervous anticipation and then invariable melancholy. Xiulan had been married for three years, Yanli for one, and neither had conceived.
That left her, a girl with skinny hips and no husband, to conceive a son and ensure the continuation of Wang family rule.
Yanli’s eyes narrowed as they followed Kaiya’s hand straying to the lotus jewel inside her sash. “You’re still pining over Prince Hardeep, aren’t you?”
Kaiya’s cheeks burned. Telling Yanli about the prince had been a mistake. “No,” she lied. She was older and wiser now. Of course the foreign prince had tried to manipulate a naïve girl. Maybe even used his Paladin powers. Oh, but his smooth voice, those blue eyes… She mentally chastised her younger self for venturing into the present.
Shaking her head with a knowing smile, Yanli took Kaiya’s hand. “Kaiya, even if Ankira weren’t occupied and its royal family scattered in exile, their prince would never be a match for you. Don’t let an idealized memory set the standard for a suitor.”
Kaiya nodded. It was true. He was a foreigner, after all. She would forget about him. This time, the thousandth time, it would work.
Xiulan took her other hand. “Yanli is right. Your brother and I were arranged to marry, and yet we fell deeply in love. It’s not impossible.”
Yanli gave her hand a gentle tug. “Come. Lord Chen is waiting.”
“Like this?” Kaiya freed a hand and waved at her plain robe and unmade-up face. Her appearance was more suited for, well, someone practicing a dance.
Yanli’s eyes sparkled mischievously. Her dear sister-in-law was still there, buried under the disappointment of another failed cycle. “It will send Lord Chen a message, won’t it?”
Kaiya rolled her eyes. “I did say he was as dumb as a rock, right?”
They shared a giggle before straightening their postures into epitomes of imperial dignity. It had been so hard in the years preceding that fateful encounter with Hardeep, so easy just a year later.
With Xiulan in the lead and trailed by imperial guards and handmaidens, they glided through the alleys toward the Phoenix Garden. A year after Xiulan had shown Kaiya the pillow book, she still hadn’t made use of it.
At the edge of the garden, they paused. In the pagoda where they’d dined the night before the fall of Wailian Castle, the handsome Young Lord Chen was talking to another man whose posture looked familiar. He made a gesture, and Young Lord Chen bowed…and left? Without so much as acknowledging he’d seen her.
Kaiya exchanged glances with Xiulan, whose brows furrowed. With Young Lord Chen’s departure, there wasn’t much point—
The other man turned around and met her gaze. Cousin Kai-Long! It had been almost a year since they’d last met. He’d returned to his home province of Nanling, and apparently had instituted land and trade reforms.
Kaiya nodded toward Xiulan and Yanli. “I am going to greet Lord Peng. Perhaps we can have tea later?”
“An hour, in the Danhua Garden.” Xiulan smiled, and then she and Yanli, along with the bulk of the imperial guards and handmaidens, shuffled out of the garden in a flash of color.
Watching them leave, Kaiya glided over the arching footbridge to the pagoda. Chen Xin, Zhao Yue, and Han Meiling kept a respectful distance.
“Dian-xia.” Kai-Long bowed his head, addressing her formally. Even though he was an elder cousin, her position as a princess from the direct ruling line ranked her above him.
Kaiya smiled at him. “Cousin, you do not need to stand on formality.”
“As you command, Kaiya.” He grinned back.
They’d repeated the same exchange, almost verbatim, for years now. She covered a laugh. “What brings you to the capital?”
“I am here brief to the Tianzi on my progress in governing Nanling Province. It has been wildly successful.” Kai-Long’s smile faded. “Unfortunately, I am also reporting on the latest incursions from Madura. Since our trade agreement expired, they have sent even more of their Golden Scorpions across the Great Wall to steal firepowder.”
A note of sadness laced his voice. He still suspected the Golden Scorpions of assassinating his father, even if Lord Tong had taken credit for it. She placed a sympathetic hand on his arm.
He nodded at the gesture, smiling wryly. “Madura’s greedy ambitions will turn our way before long. I am going to beseech the Tianzi to finance the Ankiran resistance, which has fallen into disarray since Prince Hardeep was gravely injured.”
The prince! Blood rushed from her head and she stretched a hand out onto the balustrade to keep from falling. Hadn’t she just banished the prince from her heart? Yet mention of his name alone nearly caused her to faint. “Will the prince survive?”
He nodded. “Yes, he escaped to Vyara City. He is under the care of the Ayuri Paladins.”
Kaiya covered her mouth to bury her shocked exhalation. She quickly lifted her chin and composed her expression into one of distant concern.
Her cousin drew in close, reaching into the fold of his robe. He pressed something into her hand and whispered in the secret royal language, a tongue which none of her retinue would understand. “A message for you, from the prince. He recently initiated contact with me to ask for my province’s aid.”
She kept herself from looking at her trembling hand and fought the urge to unwrap the tightly folded parchment. Not in front of prying eyes. Did he remember her after all this time? If so, did he feel the way she hoped he did?
As he left the garden for his audience with the Tianzi, Peng Kai-Long kept his face composed to hide his delight. From watching Princess Kaiya’s reactions to the simple mention of a name, he confirmed what he’d suspected from her rejection of so many eligible young lords: Prince Hardeep still held sway over her heart, even if they hadn’t spoken or corresponded a year.
Before stepping into the castle, he stole one last glance over his shoulder to see the princess. So poised moments before, now reduced to a pathetic ball of female emotion. This was why women weren’t fit to rule. Governed by their feelings, they lacked objectivity.
And were easily manipulated.
Walking through the castle halls, Kai-Long congratulated himself for his quick thinking. After his spies had told him of her second meeting with Young Lord Chen, he’d moved swiftly. He gave her the forged letter in hopes it would shatter any budding romance between her and the handsome young man. Her trembling hands told him it had worked.
With a scholar of Ayuri poetry and a master of written magic in his pay, Kai-Long could pass on as many letters as it would take to keep the princess yearning for a foreign prince—one who must’ve forgotten her after all this time.
Perhaps he might even offer to smuggle a message for her. It would help him control the princess further. Through her, perhaps even influence the Tianzi himself. More importantly, it would keep her unmarried.
Servant girls knelt and slid open doors. New ripples in his plan occurred to him. Sun-Moon Palace had many eyes and ears. If word leaked that the princess was corresponding with the exiled Prince of Ankira, the Madurans would have a motive to intervene. When the Madurans acted, they rarely did so with restraint. At least, that was what the Hua Court believed, thanks to the rumors he spread.
The nation’s beloved princess, murdered by agents of the rogue Kingdom of Madura.
He liked the idea of it, even if making it happen would require careful planning. It would extinguish one source of potential heirs to the Dragon Throne, and stir up enough outrage for Hua to take punitive action. He would just have to wait and see how well he could control her, and then decide whether she was worth more to him dead or alive.
BOOK 2: oRCHESTRA OF TREACHERIES
PROLOGUE:
Rude Awakenings
Waking up without wings perplexed Avarax even more than the purple light that flashed at the entrance to his
cave. The glimmer danced among the precious metals and gemstones, which towered above his uncharacteristically small size. A rumble shook the cavern walls, punctuating the rude awakening.
It had been a pleasant nap. Now someone would die for disturbing him.
He looked among his horde, searching for his most valued treasure.
The girl was gone.
Her scent lingered, yet in impossibly minute traces.
He thought back. Her voice had resonated with the universe, harmonizing with the vibrations of his own life force. Its vibrant tempo, like the torrent of river rapids, lulled to the dripping of a melting icicle. Heavier and heavier…
She must’ve sung him to sleep! But how?
He wrapped his consciousness around The dragonstone in his core, the almost-infinite source of energy all dragons had. Its pulsations meandered lazily, like a winter stream before the spring melt.
It didn’t seem possible for a small human to affect him so much, no matter how special her voice.
And why?
Surely she’d adored him, as much as he did her.
It was time to learn the answers to this question, even if required more conventional means of drawing them out. Uttering a word of magic, his bipedal form morphed. His size swelled as arms bent into forelegs, and wings sprouted. Hands and fingers became talons, while his tail thickened and elongated.
Ah, it felt great to be a dragon again! He stretched his limbs and spine to work out tight muscles. Sufficiently limbered up, he snaked towards the cave opening. Night hung over the land, cloaking the world in darkness.
Another flash lit up the sky. He tracked it to its source, hundreds of miles to the southwest. A column of purple fire streaked down from the heavens, annihilating stretches of a sprawling port city of domes and minarets.
A city that had not been there when he went to sleep.
How long had he slumbered? Shrugging his shoulders a few times, Avarax loosened his wings. His claws tore into rock as he coiled his hind legs and then vaulted skyward. Higher and higher he flew, reacquainting himself with a land drastically different from the one he remembered.
Cities and towns. Hundreds of them within his far-reaching sight, oases in wide expanses of farmland. Not ghastly orc outposts, which glared out from the mountains, nor even the graceful spires of elf citadels melding with their surrounding forests. But rather, the centers of human populations he had seen as a younger dragon, back when their civilization was upgrading from collections of mud huts.
Their rebellion against their orc masters must have succeeded. Like all bottom feeders, humans had a way of proliferating when left unfettered.
The dragonstone in his chest sank. There was no way they could’ve expanded so fast within the girl’s lifetime. Given how little of her song echoed in the pulse of the world, hundreds of years must have passed. The one whose voice connected with him more than any other must be long dead and withered to dust.
Still far in the distance, another blast of energy pulsed down on the city, obliterating the levees restraining the Western Ocean. An inexorable tide crawled across the low-lying lands and swallowed up towns and villages.
Hell rained down from the heavens. Destruction and suffering. Avarax laughed, belching blue sparks from his snout.
In that moment, he caught a faint whiff of her, in the direction of her homeland. Maybe, just maybe, if he could recover a strand of her hair, or a bone, he could recreate her.
He accelerated northwest, in the direction of her scent.
Flight! The cool night air streaked over his wings. The last time he had flown, he’d held her in his claws.
Over the mountains he soared. In the distance, a town had risen up where her village had been.
There, to the left, was Celastya’s lair. From the scent, the only other dragon in the world still lived. Even if the slave girl’s ward on his dragon stone allowed him to draw on a trickle of energy, he was more than a match for Celastya. He would rip her open and swallow her Flaming Pearl. The thought had crossed his mind over the millennia. Instead he had regularly mated with her and ate her clutch of eggs to gradually increase his potential power. He did not have the luxury of time now.
Ignoring the sporadic flickers of purple in the skies behind him, Avarax scanned the landscape below. The plains first rose into rolling hills before vaulting higher into mountain crags. Nestled in a valley, Teardrop Lake glimmered a pale blue, even in the dark of night. The light from the three moons gamboled in its ripples, the reflections dancing across Celastya’s hidden cave entrance.
He hovered by the opening. Stronger or not, it would be foolish for him to fight in her lair. He would have to coax her out. His voice echoed across the valley, shaking the mountains. “Celastya, out with you! It is time to mate again.”
She was inside. Avarax could hear her shrink back, smell her fear. He would roast her alive and pick through her charred remains for her Pearl. He took in a deep breath and belched into the cave.
Only a few sparks fizzled out— enough to incinerate a human, but only a tickling to a dragon. His frustrated wail sent the mountains shivering. He clawed at the cave mouth, ripping rock away.
A burst of reds and oranges erupted high in the heavens, just above the Iridescent Moon. A roar tumbled across the lands, the shockwave pushing him back from the cave.
Celastya darted out. She glanced at him with her luminous blue eyes. Her wingless, slithering form undulated past as she levitated close to the ground. Light from the White Moon sparkled off of her silvery scales before dark clouds billowing out from Mount Ayudra blotted out their sheen.
Avarax gave chase, the gusts from his wings splintering trees below. He barreled into Celastya, sending her careening into the loathsome Tivari pyramid still standing by the shores of the lake.
Its stones cracked as she rebounded off the walls. He drove his claws toward her, but she darted away, and he ripped into the pyramid’s stonework instead. His talons lodged into something deep in the rock, sending a searing shock through body. Curse the Tivari for ever building the vile structures!
Avarax tore his claws free and resumed his pursuit. Celastya flew over the mountains and towards the shore, and then skimmed the ocean as she streaked towards Jade Island.
The fool thought she could channel the island’s latent energy. Of course, he could, too. Perhaps it would energize his dragonstone, reinvigorating it a little more.
Mountains along the closed end of the horseshoe-shaped island shielded a port town at the head of the bay. A smooth metal arch, engraved with runes of elven magic, spanned the mouth of the harbor. Celastya coiled herself around the arch. Her eyes glowed a brilliant blue.
As he approached, she unwrapped herself, freeing herself just in time to avoid a swipe from his foreclaw. With a graceful spin, Celastya twisted around him and tangled up his wings. The air dropped out from beneath them. Wind roared past as the ground rushed up to meet their tumbling bodies.
They crashed into the shore with a jolt that shook the island. Her strangling grasp around him eased. She seized his forelegs in her own claws, but Avarax was still much stronger. He raked a talon across her neck. Bright blue blood spurted out. They struggled for dozens of minutes, toppling statues and buildings as they thrashed around.
“Avarax!” A bold voice called his name, and he turned to see a puny elf. He radiated power far out of proportion to his size.
Though smaller than one of Avarax’s fangs, the golden-haired elf dared to lock gazes with him. He began to chant. The vibrations of his voice, similar yet different to that of the slave girl from before, rolled over him.
The power of the dragonstone lurched inside of him. A dull ache blossomed into searing pain as his bones broke and reformed. Hulking muscle shrank and impenetrable scales softened. His forelegs and claws withered into arms and hands, his hindquarters transmuting into legs.
Several excruciating minutes of transformation later, Avarax rose on wobbling humanoid legs, a scant head above th
e elf whom he had dwarfed just minutes ago. He looked down at his naked, frail body.
A human! The most pathetic of sentient beings.
Avarax scoffed. The silly trick might buy them time, but he would pay them back tenfold. He uttered the words to restore his dragon form.
Nothing happened.
What? His morale melted away. Instead of a roar that would compel a mortal to obey, his voice merely shouted. “What have you done?”
“Made you wish you had stayed asleep for another seven hundred years.” The elf whipped out a narrow longsword.
Avarax felt its power, knew that it held a magic enchantment. His new tiny heart rattled against the narrow confines of his scrawny chest. Was it in fear? He had not experienced that emotion in several millennia.
He closed his eyes as the tip pushed into his chest. The blade made a divot into the thin flesh covering him, not even cutting the skin.
It barely tickled.
A magical elvish blade should have stabbed through a human with ease. Avarax held the elf’s shocked gaze. In that second of silence, Avarax sensed the dragonstone inside of him. It pulsed as feebly as before, yet it still held all the potential energy of a dragon. He spoke a word of power, sending the elf hurtling back into the sand.
He spun to see Celastya bearing down on him. He slammed his fist into her swiping claw. She recoiled and winced.
Avarax laughed. Even in this pitiful form, he was still a dragon. He punched again, hitting nothing but air.
Celastya, the elf, and the horseshoe island were all gone, replaced by wind-driven snow on a mountain top. Ice sizzled and melted beneath his feet.
He evaluated his dragonstone. The elf’s ward dammed it up. The trickle of vitality would not sustain his dragon form, at least not for more than a few minutes.
