by Mimi Yu
Min lifted the pendant with one hand. It caught the shaft of sunlight streaming through the half-opened doors and flung scintillating motes of pinks and greens and yellows across the room, the color streaking down the papered walls. She pressed the crystal up against one eye, closing the other so that the whole of her world was contained within that iridescent prism. It was a nice idea: everything clean and tiny, a tinted and lilting pastel version of itself.
A shadow fell over the doorway, eclipsing the light and throwing her tiny glowing world into darkness. Min scowled. “Snowdrop, I can see you. I said I wanted to be left alone …” she began, lowering the crystal.
White silk robes flashed in the slivered doorway.
Min sat up. The heavy pendant dropped hard against her sternum, as though echoing her racing heart.
No one but she and her nunas and perhaps Amma Ruxin would be in her apartments at this hour. And neither nunas nor ammas wore white. Who would? White—the color of mourning. Of ashes. Of death.
Cautiously, Min stood. “Hello?” she called.
There was no answer. Then she heard a pair of pocket doors down the hall whisper open.
Min walked over and peered out of her room, fingers perched gingerly on the wooden frame of her own doors. She heard Butterfly giggling from within the closed room directly across the way, familiar and oddly distant.
Then she saw it: the doors at the far end of the hallway were opened, just wide enough for a girl Min’s size to slip through. Shafts of sunlight wove their way through the woody vines and glossy green leaves of the jasmine growing over the open, trellised ceiling above, but Min shivered. It was strange, how an open door could frighten her so.
Something brushed her cheek and she nearly screamed. It was only a falling jasmine flower, though, from the vines overhead. Min glared at where it had come to a rest on the floor just beside her foot, snow-and-pink petals fringed in the sour brown of its waning. She made sure to step on it as she walked out the open door into the courtyard.
And found herself standing between the two guards stationed there. Of course—how could she have forgotten them. She opened her mouth to explain she was going for a stroll, then snapped it shut, her face flushing in panic at the flimsy lie. They were sure to fetch Amma Ruxin no matter what she said, but perhaps they could at least tell her who had come through—
“Would’ve loved to join the hunt,” said one of the guards.
“Excuse me?” she squeaked.
The other man grunted in agreement next to her. “Would you want to be in the princess’s party, though, or the general’s?”
The first man gave a sly grin. “I’d want to be in the winning party, naturally.”
“Which is …?”
“Which is the winning party.”
“Clever,” his friend said, and snorted.
“Discreet,” said the first man.
Min cleared her throat, shocked that they hadn’t seemed to notice her presence yet. “D-did someone come through here just now?” she asked in a voice that quavered far more than she would’ve liked.
But instead of straightening and stammering apologies, the guards just chuckled between themselves. The first one stretched, then twisted at the waist and bit out through a yawn, “Whatever the results of today are, things are going to get wild around here.” He turned and raised his eyebrows at the other guard then, looking directly at Min.
Or … through her.
This time, she couldn’t stop the cry of alarm that rose in her throat.
It hardly mattered, though—neither of them heard it. Instead, the second guard asked, “Listen, have you got some extra tobacco? I’m dying for a smoke.”
The first one nodded, glancing around surreptitiously to make certain they were alone before pulling a rolled cigarette from within his belt pouch. Then, casual as anything, he handed it to the second guard.
His arm went straight through Min’s chest.
She looked down in shock, a strangled noise emerging from her. When the man withdrew his hand, Min half expected something to happen … What, exactly, she wasn’t certain. Would there be a gushing wound where his arm had been? Would her body disappear in a puff of gray smoke?
Instead: nothing. The second guard lit his cigarette with a match produced from inside his jacket and eked out a low moan of satisfaction.
Min looked down at herself, heart pounding, half a hundred stupid children’s ghost stories flickering through her mind. She didn’t look any different than normal. She reached down and pinched herself cautiously, and felt the customary jolt of pain.
Only … she waved her hand in front of the second guard’s eyes, just to be certain. No response.
Behind her, a girl laughed, rough and throaty.
Min whirled around just in time to see a flash of white robes disappear behind the groundskeeping cottage that stood at the edge of her courtyard.
This time she didn’t hesitate, running after the glimpse of this unknown girl.
She was well ahead by the time Min managed to round the cottage, but for the first time Min could see her: a slight figure, running across the footbridge so lightly she seemed to float. Her long ink-black hair that was bound in a tight plait down her spine and her simple, gray-white robes were of an unfamiliar cut that struck Min as both foreign and old-fashioned. In her wake the girl left the scent of vetiver and wood smoke, and something that struck Min as the smell of stone—but no, that was ridiculous, wasn’t it?
“Wait!” Her voice tore from her, but the girl did not so much as turn; she just crossed the footbridge and then abruptly turned off the path.
Min caught the barest glimpse of a pale, narrow face, like the sliver of a new moon. The girl’s eyes were large and dark and unbearably sad, contradicting the low laugh she left hanging in the air as she disappeared into a building. It was only then that Min stopped and realized where she was.
The old shamaness temple loomed high over her.
Min felt an odd certainty then, that she could still turn around, could still wend her way back to her apartments, slip past the guards and down the hall, past where Butterfly and Dove and Snowdrop and Tea Rose were gossiping, could slip back into the soft silks of her bedding and close her eyes and pretend this was all a strange dream. But that would be a lie—she knew this in her heart.
She moved toward the vacant temple.
And felt a sudden flare of heat upon her chest, so fierce that it nearly took her breath away. She looked down at the crystal pendant from Yunis, Set’s gift, and saw it clearly for what it was: a sign.
The unknown girl had left the temple door ajar. Min looked at that black gap and swallowed hard, feeling a trill of fear in her chest. No, not quite fear—anticipation. Excitement. Was this what Lu felt when she broke the rules? Was that why she smiled so brightly when she did it?
Min stepped into the dark.
It was cool inside, which might have been a relief from the summer heat were it not so musty. She blinked, willing her eyes to adjust, seeing nothing.
As if in response flame flared to life in the next room and Min followed it, no wiser than a moth drawn to a candle. When she turned the corner, she found the unknown girl sitting there, just as she somehow knew she would. The girl knelt on a silk pillow, tending a brazier and humming contentedly, as though she had been waiting there all morning just for Min to arrive.
“What do you want from me?” Min asked, her voice somehow both timid and much too loud in the silence.
The girl looked up, and for the first time Min could see her properly. The wan face she had glimpsed earlier wasn’t exactly pretty up close but striking. A face like a fox, or some other feral thing.
The girl smiled.
“I have a gift for you,” she told Min. And yet her lips did not move in accordance with the words. Rather her voice seemed to at once seep from the walls of the dark room and emanate from within Min’s own head.
Who are you? Min wanted to ask. But something in the room�
�perhaps the musky odor of whatever herb the girl was burning in her brazier—was making Min sluggish, as if she were walking through water. Her head felt woolly and soft.
“You look tired,” the girl said, again without speaking. “Please, sit.” She gestured to where another silk cushion had appeared on the opposite side of the brazier.
Min stumbled forward and all but collapsed to her knees.
“Let me help you.” The girl was at her side, though Min could swear she had never seen her move. She held out one small hand and Min took it, grateful. When she clutched it, she felt a jolt move through her arm, straight to her heart. It felt at once like a burn, and yet cold, so cold.
“Who …,” Min began, but her eyes were fluttering closed.
“When I was a boy, I sometimes wondered how I would die.”
Min blinked. It was her father’s voice. And there—there was her father, lying in his silken bower of pillows, far below her. Min gave a cry—she was in her father’s bedchamber, and she was floating. Hovering in the air just below the intricately painted ceiling, like a spider suspended in an invisible web.
The girl was beside her, still clutching her hand. When Min met her eyes—somehow so familiar, that deep, earthy brown flecked with spangles of gold and copper—the girl raised a finger to her lips to gesture for silence. Then she grinned, as though they were just two naughty children waiting for a joke they’d played to unfold before them. Min clamped her mouth shut, though she sensed somehow her father would not be able to hear her, even if she were to scream.
“What did you say?”
Min looked down and saw her mother there as well. The empress had been stooped down beside a brazier, tending idly to its low-burning embers. As she spoke now, though, she rose, her voice stern and strong in contrast to the emperor’s dry rasp.
It was strange, seeing her parents alone like this. A hidden passageway connected the emperor’s apartments with those of his wife so they could visit one another with a sense of marital privacy, but nevertheless it was common knowledge that her mother rarely visited her father.
The emperor moved, and Min watched uncomprehendingly as he drew a long, thin silver flute away from his mouth. No—not a flute. She spotted the jade bowl affixed to its end, then the eerie, telltale blue smoke that unfurled dreamily from his nostrils, between his parted lips. He set the pipe on his nightstand beside a matching lacquered tray bearing an odd little lamp and some tools Min did not recognize.
Poppy tar? But it’s banned! She could not understand. Perhaps his physicians recommended it, for his pain, she told herself. But wasn’t that what poppy tears were for? And the physicians were always so cautious, so miserly in doling those out …
“When I was a boy, I sometimes wondered how I would die,” her father rasped again, interrupting Min’s thoughts. The way he said it, Min wasn’t certain if he was responding to her mother or just speaking for his own benefit. He blinked furiously, as though his eyes were dry, and his gaze was vacant. For a moment, he cast it upward and looked straight at Min—or rather, straight through her.
“It was a childish thought, only half-formed—pale smoke curling around the edges of my mind,” her father continued. “I could only understand death as being somehow apart from me. A thing that would happen only to some old man I might become, but never to me. You understand.”
“I do not,” her mother replied flatly. She was fiddling with one sweeping, embroidered sleeve of her robe.
“Only,” the emperor continued as though she hadn’t spoken, “only, it’s not like that. I didn’t see it until now. There is no mystery. There’s no distance at all. All the days of my life were with me then, even then, as a boy …”
Her mother drew something from her sleeve then—a silken purse. She loosed its strings and withdrew a small white porcelain vial no bigger than one of her elegant fingers. Min watched as she pulled the stopper, walked to the emperor’s bedside, and emptied its contents into a cup of tea.
“If only I’d been able to see, to truly see myself as I was, I would’ve seen my death there as well. Death has walked beside me all my days,” her father murmured.
“Drink this,” her mother said harshly, holding forth the cup of medicine and tea. “It will bring you relief.”
Her father looked at the tea, then into her mother’s eyes.
“I gave you what you wanted,” he said. “You have Minyi.”
Min jerked at the sound of her own name. What did he mean, exactly?
“I do.” Her mother’s words were fierce and taut.
“You remember what Tsai told you, about the girls’ fates being interwoven.” His voice was a whisper.
Her mother’s face twisted into a horror. The look lasted only for a breath, though—then her mother’s placid, beautiful face dropped back down like a mask.
Tsai? Min had never heard the name before. The unknown girl’s hand clenched tight around her own, like a claw.
“I will never forget what that creature said,” her mother said harshly, still holding out the tea.
“I’m dying,” the emperor said, looking at the cup. “I won’t be longer than another month. Maybe two.”
“I know.”
“Then, why?”
“You’re in pain. And you’re a coward. The going will be softer this way.”
“I cannot,” he murmured. “Lu. I must remain for Lu …”
At the mention of her sister, their mother went white. A horrible sound like a growl rose in her, and she flung herself upon her husband, one hand scrabbling at his throat and face. The tea sloshed over the cup she grasped in the other. Min held back a gasp. Her hand tightened in the unknown girl’s.
“We have to stop them!” she cried. But then she saw the hungry, rapt stare on the other girl’s face and understood she would receive no help from that quarter.
Below them, her mother had gained control over her father. Min watched helplessly as she closed one hand hard over his nose and pried his mouth open, dumping the contents of the cup into his mouth. She held his jaw closed as if he were a fussing baby.
Her father flailed weakly against the soft, coddling cushions of his bed, then went rigid. Min saw the muscles of his throat—sagging and thin beneath the regal collars of his robes—working as he finally swallowed the tea.
Her mother released him with a satisfied sigh. A strand of hair had fallen loose from its fiercely clean upsweep. She composed herself, but Min couldn’t stop staring at that bit of hair.
For a long moment, the emperor was so still he seemed to have stopped breathing. But then: “Would you stay?”
The dying man’s voice was low, husky, and yet there was something of a child’s plea in it. A whine, almost.
The empress stood, straightening her robes. “I’ve killed you,” she told him coolly. “You know that much, don’t you?”
“I know,” he said. “Only … I don’t wish to be alone.”
“You are afraid.”
“Yes.”
Her mother leaned in close, her gray eyes regarding her dying husband with some strange mixture of tenderness and brutality. “Then be afraid,” she whispered.
She righted herself, drew the tiny glass vial up inside the sleeve of her gown, and slipped out the hidden door without a backward glance.
The emperor’s face went ashen. His breathing slowed, then quickened into a rusty rattle.
“Father!” Min cried, shaking herself from her shock, trying to comprehend the lie that was her family laid bare before her.
“Please,” she said, turning to the girl beside her. “What’s wrong with you? Why are you showing me this?” She tried to wrench her hand free, but the girl’s grip was like iron, watching the man below them struggle and gasp and writhe. Her face no longer had the strange feral hunger it had shown before, but it was no less intense, no less rapt.
Min followed her gaze and saw her father staring wide at nothing—but, no. He was staring at them. He was staring back at the girl.
His body had gone slack, but for a moment his face contorted, a terrible collision of grief and longing.
“Tsai …”
The name was less spoken than pushed out of him, a long-held breath finally released. It was his last; he went still.
“Who are you?” Min demanded, whirling back at the other girl. Unable to extract her hand from hers, Min shook their arms in furious tandem. “What are you?!”
At that, the unknown girl started, as though only now, for the first time, hearing Min’s voice. She turned slowly toward her and smiled.
“I am the death born inside you,” she said. She embraced Min. Where their skin touched, it was like fire. Min screamed and threw her arms out, trying to push the other girl away, but it was as though she were melting, searing flesh to flesh, sinking down into her bones—
“Princess!”
There were hands upon her now—new hands, different hands. Stable and firm and warm. Alive.
“Princess!”
Min opened her eyes. Butterfly leaned over her, prying Min’s wrists and arms away from her face. Behind her, Snowdrop was wringing her hands. “Princess, please. You must wake,” Butterfly said.
“I’m …” Min saw that she was in her own bedchambers, lying atop her coverlets, fully dressed. A dream. It had all been a strange dream. A horrendous and ugly dream, but a dream nevertheless. Her mother, her father—none of it was real.
Oh, thank the gods.
“Princess?” Butterfly said, apprehensive. “Are you all right?”
Min blinked, felt the cold tension ebb from her muscles. The way the nunas were staring, Min could tell her face must have an odd look. She quickly rearranged it. “I’m awake. I’m fine.”
Butterfly nodded and released her hands. The fear on Snowdrop’s face did not fall away. If anything, it now intensified. Min felt suddenly more awake than she had been.
