by Natasha Ngan
THIRTY
EVEN THE SOLDIERS ARE UNABLE TO hide their shock when I finally stagger from the King’s chambers.
I have no idea how long I’ve been in there. Only minutes could have passed. Or an entire lifetime. How long does it take to break a person? To take their will and fire and spirit and love and crush them beneath your fists?
As the doors swing shut behind me, my legs give way. Wren’s wolf strides forward to catch me. He lifts me gently, the other guards watching in silence as he lopes past, cradling me to his chest. The torn robe I’ve wrapped around me is bloodied. Dully, I notice the servants as we go by, the way they avert their eyes. Even the Paper caste ones.
Shame flows through me, a constant, unforgiving ebb.
I look up at Kenzo. My voice is a croak. “They’ll suspect you.”
“No,” he says, staring ahead. “They won’t. This is not the first time a Paper Girl has had to be taken from the King’s rooms in such a condition.”
Underneath the pain and horror: a shot of rage.
“I hate him,” I whisper with the last bit of strength I have.
Kenzo doesn’t answer, but he holds me a little closer, and before I pass out I understand this to mean that he agrees.
When consciousness returns, the comforting scent of Wren’s wolf is gone. There’s the whisper of voices around me. The soft pressure of a warm hand on mine. I must be back in my room at Paper House. I try to move, but currents of pain snap and fizz through my body, forcing me to fall still. The pain wasn’t so strong earlier. My mind must have blocked it out as the King took from me what I have denied him for so long.
That’s what it felt like. A taking. A robbery.
I inch my eyes open, and even this hurts.
“She’s awake!”
Aoki’s face is the first I see. Her hand is the one wrapped round mine, and she leans over me, eyes so wide that my entire vision is an ocean of deep green. Then she draws away and is replaced by Wren.
The expression on her face. I can barely look at her.
“Oh, gods, Lei,” she whispers, dipping her forehead to mine. “I’m so, so sorry.”
I lick my cracked lips. “The wolf. He—”
She shoots me a warning look. “You mean Major Ryu? Yes, he brought you back. He escorted you all the way here.”
My eyes drift shut.
“How kind of him,” Aoki murmurs.
There’s the sound of the door opening.
“The doctor’s on his way, Mistresses. He won’t be long.”
My heart gives a little leap at the sound of Lill’s voice. Even though my plan failed, she’d been the one who made it possible in the first place.
And then I remember. My plan. The herbs.
The poisonous herbs.
I jerk upright. Pain erupts, a starburst all over me. Aoki and Wren try to draw me back down, shushing, but I struggle against them, eyes wild.
“Where are my clothes?” I cry.
“Lei,” Aoki pleads, “you need to rest—”
But I’m almost screaming now. “Where are my clothes?”
Lill snatches up a torn bundle of fabric, lantern light illuminating the layered pattern of my robes—wildflowers and vines, twisted in a kaleidoscope of deep magenta and lapis. “This is all you had with you,” she says sorrowfully, holding them out for me.
I riffle through the flimsy material. A sob racks through me and I slump back as if winded.
“Lei?” Wren asks, fingers light on my wrist. “What’s wrong?”
I close my eyes. “The sash,” I whisper. “It’s gone.”
I have to wait until much later, until the doctor and shaman have checked on me and magicked away my wounds, and Aoki and Lill have gone to bed, to tell Wren about my plan to poison the King.
She lets go of my hand when I’ve finished, and the gesture loosens something in me. “So the herbs are still there?” she asks sharply. “In his chambers?”
“Yes.”
“If he finds them—if anyone finds them…”
My teeth are gritted. “I know.”
“What were you thinking? You shouldn’t have taken such a risk.”
I edge slightly away. “I was thinking,” I say thickly, “that I couldn’t bear having to sleep with him.”
Wren’s face drops. “Lei—”
“And I was thinking you’d understand.”
“I do. Oh, love, of course I do. I’m so sorry.” Warm fingertips trace my cheek, winding round to cup my head as she leans down and brings her lips to my hairline, holding me close. “You know how much this hurts me, too. But if you had managed to poison him, don’t you think the royal doctors would have been able to figure out how it happened? It could ruin everything we’ve been working toward. They could increase the King’s security. Stop us from seeing him. Even cancel the Moon Ball. Not to mention what the King would do to punish you.”
Tears sting my eyes. “I—I didn’t think about any of that. I just… I couldn’t bear the idea of having to go through with it. Even once.”
Sighing, Wren laces her arms around me, hugging me tighter. “Oh, Lei. Of course not. I’m so sorry. If there was anything, anything I could have done, any way to save you tonight…” Pulling back, she scans my face. “Do you want to talk about it?”
It.
Such a tiny word for everything contained within.
I squeeze my eyelids, trying to expel the images from them. But I know that no matter how hard I try, what happened tonight is going to stay with me forever. The shamans might have healed my bruises, but the King’s brutality is still all over me. It lives in my skin.
It breathes in my bones.
More than anyone, I know how some wounds can stay hidden and yet still be felt so keenly, day after day, year after year.
“Not yet,” I tell Wren eventually.
She takes my hands. “Well, when and if you need to, I’ll be here.”
I nod. Then, eager to change the subject, I ask, “What are we going to do about the herbs? Maybe I can get them back. I’ll go back to the King’s chambers, make up some excuse—”
“No.” Wren stops me. “It’ll only make them suspicious. And I’m not letting you go anywhere near that monster.” She looks away, forehead puckered, then nods. “I’ll get word to Kenzo. He should be able to get to them before the King.”
“You think so?”
Her lips curve into a half smile. “It’s Kenzo. He’ll find a way.”
I try to return her smile, but the tuck of my lips is wrong and all I can do is grimace. Then her words just a couple of minutes ago echo back to me.
“The Moon Ball,” I say. “Isn’t that the party the King is hosting to celebrate the New Year?”
Wren nods. “What about it?”
“You said you’re worried they might cancel it.” Her expression stiffens, and suddenly I understand. All this while we’ve been sitting on my sleeping mat, close enough to whisper, but now I shift back, my voice hollow. “That’s when it’s to happen, isn’t it? You’ve been given the order.”
She looks down, long lashes hiding her eyes. “Kenzo told me when he brought you back earlier. Everything’s in place.”
“The New Year is less than four weeks away,” I choke out. I let out a dull, humorless laugh. “Did you know it’s my birthday then, too? Some present you’re giving me, Wren. You’d better not die, too, or it’ll all be too much.”
I mean it as a joke, even if it is a twisted one. But her jaw sets and her eyes flick away, and in that moment I know.
“Oh, gods.” I scramble to my feet, something wild racking through me. Wren reaches out, but I back into the wall, shaking my head, my ears rushing with the whoosh of blood, the deep pulsation of my heartbeat. “Tell me there’s an escape plan, Wren. Tell me they’re going to get you out.”
She falters. “They’ll do their best.”
Neither of us moves as the morning gong rings. Footsteps and voices began to spill into the corridor. The normal
cy of it seems absurd, obscene even. How can the world still tick simply by when this beautiful girl is admitting her fate to me, when I can still feel the pain of the King’s fury imprinted upon my body?
How can we just go back to that life, knowing what we know now?
Feeling the way we do now?
“You think you’re going to get caught,” I say, not taking my eyes from Wren’s.
“Lei—”
“Tell me the truth! You think there’s no hope of you getting out. That they’ll capture you once you’ve killed him.”
Something in her face slackens. After a beat, she whispers, “Yes.”
The word cleaves me, splits me straight in two.
“That’s why you didn’t want to tell me. You knew what was going to… you didn’t… didn’t want to hurt me.…”
She gives a tiny nod.
My breath rattles through me, almost painful, but I force myself to draw another. Then another. And with each new inhale the fire returns to me—the red flames that burned through my bloodstream when I walked into the King’s chambers last night, the boldness of my love for Wren that sings in our veins every time we’re pressed skin to skin, our hearts racing each other.
I recall Mama’s saying: Light in, darkness out.
Perhaps it works another way, too.
Fire in, fear out.
“Let me help,” I say steadily. I take a step forward. “You’re going to kill the King, and I’m going to help you do it.”
Wren tenses. “I told you the other night. No.”
“Yes.” I close the distance between us, my fingers sliding between hers. “When the world denies you choices,” I say, echoing her words to me that night in the rain-filled garden all those weeks ago, “you make your own.” I keep my eyes fixed on hers. “This is my choice. The King hasn’t just harmed me and you. Think of all the Paper castes he has his soldiers capture as slaves and kill as easily, as if we weren’t even human. All the families and lives they tear apart. Just like they did with ours.” I grip her tighter. “I don’t know how much longer I can bear it. So I’m going to help you, and then we’re getting out of here—alive.”
Her lips press. “Lei—”
“He gave the orders, Wren.” My voice catches. “He told me. It was him who ordered the soldiers to raid my village.” The wet kiss of a tear tracks my cheek. “How many others has he ordered? How many more families have been broken the way mine was? I can’t take it anymore. I can’t just keep sitting here doing nothing.”
More tears flow. Releasing my hands, Wren cups my face to thumb my tears away, her dark eyes soft. Then she draws me to her. We kiss slow and deep, a kiss I feel from the very tips of my toes to the core of my being. A kiss I feel in my soul. And for a few moments we get a glimpse of what the future could be like for us—to be with each other, free, with no fear that our love might get us killed.
When I was young, my parents used to kneel by my sleeping mat at bedtime and tell me stories from the Ikharan Mae Scripts, the myths about how our world was born. According to the Scripts, the sky began as a sea of light. There were no distinctions between stars or moon or clouds. Everything was white.
Then Zhokka, Harbinger of Night, came.
He was jealous of the sky’s brightness. Zhokka was originally an earth god, and he hated how he could see the sky gods dancing high up above, bathed in light. He wanted that light for himself, but also to take it away from them. So he gathered an army of creatures from the darkest parts of the earth and brought them to the sky.
The battle is supposed to have lasted over a hundred years. The sky gods fought valiantly, but Zhokka and his dark army finally defeated them, and as a victory prize Zhokka swallowed all the light of the sky. Now there was only darkness.
But Zhokka had been careless. With no light left, he didn’t see Ahla, the Moon Goddess, creeping up on him. She’d fled when she saw he would win the battle, and had been waiting for the right moment to return. Taking her powerful crescent-form, she lanced herself through the darkness at Zhokka and split a huge, grinning gash through his face, blinding him in the process.
Some of the light he’d swallowed managed to escape through this tear, and these returned to their beloved sky as the stars. And for the rest of eternity, Zhokka is doomed to roam the galaxies, searching blindly for Ahla to take his revenge.
The story comes back to me now as Wren and I hold each other. I always wondered what that night-filled abyss looked like before Ahla cut Zhokka open. I could never quite picture it. But tonight I finally understand how it would have felt.
The King is Zhokka, swallowing everything. And Wren is Ahla—the moon, the light, the only one who knows how to bring the stars back to my sky.
“I’m going to help,” I tell her when we finally draw apart. “I’m going to help you kill him.”
And this time she agrees.
THIRTY-ONE
THERE IS AN OLD PROVERB IN our kingdom: “He who seeks revenge should dig two graves.” I’ve already prepared to dig the Demon King’s. The other is for the girl I used to be. The girl who was sleepwalking through her time here until she fell in love, until she had her eyes opened to the world beyond her walls. The girl who accused Aoki of falling for the King, for being seduced by palace life, when she, too, was embracing it.
Well, no more embracing.
No more sleepwalking.
I don’t want an easy life. I want a meaningful one.
Now that I know what they’re planning, Wren involves me in her secret meetings with Kenzo. It takes some convincing on Wren’s part, especially because Kenzo narrowly missed getting caught when he went to the King’s chambers to retrieve the poisonous herbs I’d left there. But the wolf eventually concedes, deciding that my role as a Paper Girl can be useful as a distraction while Wren gets the King alone. While it’s not much, I’m pleased to be able to do anything to help. The smoother everything goes at the ball, the better Wren’s chance to come away safely will be.
Every few nights, we wrap up in furs and overcoats and head into the forest, listening to news Kenzo has brought from the court—changes to the guest list for the Moon Ball, more signs that the Sickness is worsening, outbursts of rebellion in more of the provinces. Anything that could affect the plan. And though our everyday routine as Paper Girls continues as normal, I float through it with a kind of absent focus, tired from our midnight excursions but also too fixed on the approaching New Year to concentrate on much else. It’s taken the form of a color in my mind—the brightest, sharpest white, like light catching the edge of a blade.
In a few weeks’ time, I’ll be at the Moon Ball, distracting the King’s guards as best as I can while Wren steals him away to bury a knife in his heart.
One morning Lill says, “Not long now, Mistress.”
She’s in the middle of fixing my hair into its usual bun. I start, causing her fingers to tangle.
“What—what do you mean?”
“Your Birth-blessing pendant,” she clarifies with a frown. “Isn’t it your birthday on the New Year?”
I follow her gaze to the shrine in the corner of my room. Because we’re not allowed to wear jewelry during our lessons, ever since coming to the palace I’ve kept my Birth-blessing pendant there, hanging from an unlit stack of joss sticks. It seems like another thing from the life of the girl I used to be. Something else to bury with her.
“Is there something you’re hoping for?” Lill asks.
“Anything involving cake,” I reply, and she laughs.
But the truth is I know exactly what sort of fate I hope to find within my pendant, and it’s one that life within the palace walls could never offer me.
Freedom.
When there’s less than two weeks to go, Wren and I sneak out to the clearing in the woods. I’m expecting for us to meet Kenzo as usual, but he isn’t here.
“He’s not coming tonight,” she tells me. “This is something for just you and me to work on.”
It’s a still
winter’s night. The forest is wrapped in silence, the trees towering around us, shifting drops of moonlight filtering in through the canopy overhead. The air is cool with the promise of snow. The screech of some night bird cuts suddenly through the quiet, and I start, grabbing my fur shawl tighter around me.
“That,” Wren says with a smile, “is what we’re going to try to deal with.”
“What do you mean?”
“You need to be prepared in case there’s any trouble on the night. Kenzo’s going to get a weapon to you—something small, easy to conceal. But in case you lose it, or for whatever reason he can’t get it to you, you’re going to have to know how to defend yourself without it. Have you ever had any martial arts training?”
I arch a brow. “What do you think?”
“Well, we only have a couple of weeks. We’re just going to have to dive in.”
Wren shifts into position, knees bent, arms raised, palms open. I’m just about to copy her because it seems that’s what I’m supposed to do, when she lunges forward and strikes her right hand at my head.
I clamp my eyes shut, expecting a flare of pain. When it doesn’t come, I inch my eyes open to find her hand hovering by my head. She draws back.
“How—how did you do that?” I gulp.
The corner of her lips tuck up, but her face is serious. “I’m one of the Xia, remember? I won’t hurt you, Lei. I promise. But you have to act like this is a real battle.”
“Sure,” I mutter. “Let me just recollect the last time I was at war.”
“It’s a bit like what Master Tekoa teaches us,” Wren continues, ignoring my quip. “You want to access your most natural instincts and allow them to control you without you having to think about it too much.”
“If someone is coming at my head with their fist, my natural instinct is to run as fast as I can in the opposite direction.”
After a moment, she asks, quiet, “Is it?”
The stillness of the forest seems to draw in. Wren moves closer, boots crunching on the frosted grass. Our breaths form clouds in the air.
“Think about all the times you’ve fought against what’s been happening to you. I told you that night when the King had you locked up. You’re brave, Lei. Braver than you think. You fought him then, and you’ve fought him since, and I know you are strong enough for whatever is coming next.”