“Very well,” the head guard said. “What do you suggest, Master Fu-Fu?”
There was no smile on Fu-Fu’s face as his gaze fell on the twins. “I suggest imprisoning them for a day and feeding them nothing but vinegar and hot chili peppers.”
“They’re trespassers and thieves. Mere imprisonment is insufficient.”
Fu-Fu glanced at Mei again, then back at the guards. “How about flogging one of them? I suggest the boy.”
“Just go ahead and kill them!” a brutish guard in the back called. The others muttered in agreement.
“Or—or make them play Dice of Destiny!” Fu-Fu hurried to say.
Several guards nodded, murmuring, “Good idea, let luck decide.” The head guard mulled over it for a bit longer. Finally, he agreed.
Minutes later, the twins found themselves being dragged along the corridor while Fu-Fu hurried quietly alongside them. “No, please take us to Princess Zali,” Mei begged of the guard gripping her upper arm. “We were only running an errand for Her Highness. Ask her!”
Predictably, the guards ignored her. Next to Mei, Yun, who had concluded such appeals would be worthless, whispered, “The princess can only stick her neck out for us so far. Logically, she’ll deny her role in this. We have to face facts: we’re going to die!”
Maybe this is also a dream, Mei wanted to say. But instead, she turned to Fu-Fu and asked, “What’s Dice of Destiny?”
“You’ll see,” he replied.
The guards escorted the twins around a corner and to a heavy-looking door at the end of another hall. A stony-faced man stood in front of it. “Trespassers and thieves,” the head guard announced. He thrust Mei and Yun forward. “Young Master Fu-Fu here has suggested Dice of Destiny as punishment.”
With a silent nod, the man guarding the door stepped aside. Mei and Yun followed the guards past him.
“Where are we?” Mei whispered to Yun, wishing she had Princess Zali’s map of the Imperial City in front of her.
“Based on my recollections of the palace layout, I believe we’re in the guards’ quarters,” Yun murmured back.
They had entered a large room. The twins blinked to adjust their eyes to the sudden light and din that surrounded them. The room was actually a large hall with rows of tables, each one piled with cards or game boards. Groups of five or six men were gathered at each table, laughing and chatting animatedly, or else scowling and serious.
The guards took the twins to a dimmer section toward the back, where a small table sat in a pool of moonlight streaming through a nearby window. The table was bare, save for a pair of dice and an empty bowl.
Several members of the crowd, who had curiously watched them pass, now clamored around the table, murmuring with anticipation.
“It’s—it’s a game?” asked Yun, his eyes wide.
“Kind of,” said the guard to his left. “It’s a rather benevolent punishment, all things considered.” His companions barked in laughter.
The head guard silenced the audience, then announced, “Judgment is ripe upon these prisoners. Today’s crime: breaking and entering!”
“And thievery,” someone else called.
“A crime worthy of the dice!”
The audience cheered and called out bets on what was about to unfold. The head guard faced upward and recited,
“Dice of destiny seal your fate,
Cast fair and foul upon this date.
All pairs fickle and bear suspense,
Luck alone is your defense.
But mind the pair that steals your breath:
The lowest roll will bring forth death.”
“Did he say death?” whispered Mei. In the crowd, Fu-Fu suddenly looked pale.
The guard told Mei and Yun the rules. “The prisoner starts with a score of zero and must roll the dice three times. If the sum of the amounts on the dice is an even number, that number is added to the prisoner’s score. If the sum is an odd number, that number is subtracted. If both dice show the same number, then the score resets to zero. At the end of the three rolls, the prisoner needs an overall number above zero if he or she wants to live.”
Yun had never heard of a more atrocious game. “This is ridiculous!” he sputtered.
“One more thing. The prisoner needs to avoid rolling two ones—also known as ‘snake eyes.’ If you do, then the game is automatically over, and you lose. Well? Are you ready to play?”
Mei and Yun trembled. In the crowd, Fu-Fu called out, “Hold on, I thought if they lose, they get imprisoned in the dungeon for a month.”
“No, Master Fu-Fu,” said the head guard tonelessly; you annoying git seemed implied, though never spoken. “Losing in Dice of Destiny always means death.”
“W-Well, there are two of them,” argued Fu-Fu. “Why don’t you just take one of them as the prisoner who plays and release the other one?”
The crowd murmured. The head guard seemed to consider this. As he did so, the twins glanced at each other.
“This was my fault, Yun,” blurted Mei, her chin quivering. She held her head high, as she refused to cry in front of the guards, especially the rotten Fu-Fu. “I’ll play. You can go. You’ll find a way to save Grandpa and the village, I know you will.”
Next to her, Yun fervently shook his head. “No, if you’re playing, then I’m playing. We’re a team.” He turned to address the head guard. “In fact, Mei and I should count as one prisoner.”
He had calculated the odds in his head. It was more favorable for both of them if they only needed to beat the odds once.
The head guard hesitated, then said, “Fine.”
Mei nudged her brother. “Do you know what you’re doing?” she whispered.
Yun nodded, though he was still trembling.
“It’s fine,” he reassured her. “Even if all doesn’t...” He tried again. “Even if things don’t go as planned, we tried. That’s what’s important, right?”
Mei nodded slowly. This they agreed upon, absolutely. At least afterward, people would say, Ah, yes, the odd but commendable Wu twins died while trying to save their village.
“Let the game...begin!” announced the head guard.
The room fell silent. Yun slowly picked up the pair of dice, shook them, then dropped them in the bowl.
“Four, five,” read the guard. “Score: negative nine.”
The crowd oohed. “Better write up an epitaph,” someone called.
Yun’s mind raced. There was a 50 percent chance they’d roll another odd number—the same as flipping a coin—and then no amount would bring them back to the positive side. There was a 33 percent chance they’d roll an even number, an even smaller chance they’d roll a zero, and a sliver of a chance that they’d roll snake eyes. His head ached from the calculations.
“Let me do it,” said Mei in a hoarse voice, her skin prickling. “I have a good feeling.”
Yun stared at his sister. Ridiculous, he was about to say, but then he paused. For the first time, he understood a little of what Mei meant when she talked about luck and gut instinct. Even when he had all the calculations laid out in front of him like a map, life still presented opportunities for leaps of faith. He had no good feelings about this whatsoever. But if Mei did...
“Hurry up!” one of the spectators yelled.
Yun handed the dice over to his sister and squeezed her hand. “Good luck,” he said, ignoring the somersaults in his stomach.
Mei shakily took the pair of dice, then rolled them into the bowl.
“Four, four,” read the guard. “Score: zero.”
Groans and boos filled the room. The twins breathed a sigh of relief. Now all they needed to roll was a four, a six, an eight, or a ten. The chance of winning was still not in their favor, but at least they had a shot.
“Last roll!” announced the guard.
The entire room waited. All eyes were on Mei and Yun.
“Want to roll the last one together?” asked Yun with a faint smile.
Mei grinned back nerv
ously and nodded.
They each gripped a die, closed their eyes, then let the dice fall to the bowl. The moonlight shimmered.
There was a deafening silence.
“Three, one,” the guard read. “Score: four. The prisoners...are free!”
Half the crowd left in disappointment, but the other half cheered enthusiastically. They clapped the twins’ backs, shouting, “Good job!” and “Luck knows no bounds, eh?”
Mei smiled back, accepting the congratulations. She searched the crowd to find Fu-Fu’s reaction, but the boy had disappeared.
Yun, meanwhile, was still looking at the table in stunned silence. He stared for a long time at the pair of dice in the bowl, then out the window at the crescent moon. When Mei rejoined him, she followed Yun’s gaze. The twins turned to each other with the same question in their eyes.
Even years later, the two siblings never did determine if they had been extraordinary lucky that night, or if they’d gotten a little extra help. As the guards escorted them across the grounds to the palace exits, the twins thought of a story Grandpa told them when they were younger.
Once upon a time, there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. All his neighbors muttered it was bad luck. The farmer replied, “Good luck, bad luck, who can tell?”
The next day, the horse returned and brought seven wild horses with it. All the neighbors came around to congratulate on the farmer’s good fortune. The farmer replied, “Good luck, bad luck, who can tell?”
A few days later, one of the farmer’s sons tried to ride one of the horses, and he was thrown off and broke his leg. The neighbors agreed amongst themselves that the farmer’s life was cursed with misfortune. The farmer replied, “Good luck, bad luck, who can tell?”
Then the next morning, the conscription officers came from the imperial courts to draft young men into the army. They rejected the farmer’s son due to his broken leg. Later, all the men in the village who’d been drafted had died in battle. And the neighbors whispered about the farmer’s exceeding good luck in life, unparalleled by any. To which the farmer replied, “Good luck, bad luck, who can tell?”
For centuries, hundreds of thousands of humans have tried to understand and control luck, through myriad and odd ways: a bowl of goldfish, a four-leaf clover necklace, or (yes, horrifyingly) a rabbit’s foot. Years afterward, Mei and Yun often wondered whether it was bad luck their father had been a scholar, and as a result took their mother to the City of Ashes in the pursuit of knowledge. They wondered whether it was good luck they encountered Princess Zali in the Imperial City, and, yes, even Fu-Fu, who did not turn them in right away.
From my thousands of years’ of observation, fortune and misfortune are misnomers. There are only a series of consequences as life rolls on.
But as for a simple pair of dice rolling to display the exact numbers one needs to win a game of life and death in the den of the Imperial Palace? Yun was right to wonder. Sometimes a little moonlight does the trick.
CHAPTER TWENTY
二十
The Dream World
The guards brought the prisoners to the entrance of the Imperial City. Its large gray doors were as tall and thick as trees. The guards thrust the twins through them and out into the road beyond. As Mei and Yun struggled to their feet, the tall doors slammed shut behind them. They’d been thrown out of the palace.
For several long moments, neither twin spoke as they faced the formidable red walls surrounding the complex. They stood silently in the cold night, the wind whispering in their ears. Behind them, the streets of the Outer City were quiet, the houses silhouetted against the dark. Soft, colorful mists drifted out the windows of the houses, the silky strands a golden yellow and blue.
“Nobody else can see those,” Mei said, finally breaking the silence.
Yun glanced at her, wondering what she was referring to. Mei pointed to the windows.
“Outside our family, I mean. We’ve seen them our whole lives. The dreams. We can see them just like Grandpa can. Just like Mama could, too.”
“I know,” said Yun, his teeth chattering from nervousness and the cold. “We never thought it was weird. I suppose things often don’t seem as strange when you’re younger. We simply thought it was a natural part of the world. And turns out, it is.”
Yun’s observation was a profound one. Though the twins didn’t know it at the time, young children often have more pure inquisitiveness than adults, more courage, and more acceptance, too. You can tell kids frightening tales of ferocious beasts who eat peoples’ heads, and they’d curiously ask for more. Meanwhile, an adult would immediately claim it’s nonsense and insist they have no time for make-believe. Indeed, the bravest adults are often the ones who retain their childlike wonder of the world and are not afraid to consider the unknown or its possibilities.
“The Jade Rabbit’s instincts were right, then,” said Yun slowly. “We have this ability, to—to see dreams, and the Jade Rabbit said we share the same...essence as Lotus’s lost city. If that’s true, we must have gotten it from Mama, who got hers from Grandpa. Who presumably got his ability from his parents. But none of this explains what happened inside the library. I don’t even remember falling asleep.”
“Me neither. We were really tired, but everything seemed normal.” Mei’s eyes grew wide, and her mouth dropped. “Until...until the floating orbs started shaking.” She stared at Yun. “That must have been a sign we’d fallen asleep—that we were dreaming, just like when the walls of Lotus’s dream chamber came alive!”
“Yes,” sighed Yun, remembering the brilliant flash of light. “Somehow I knew those chests opening so easily was too good to be true.”
“So we fell asleep,” Mei repeated, recalling the scenario in her mind’s eye. “We only dreamed we opened the evidence chest and found the letters and herbs.”
Yet it had seemed impossibly real. If it had indeed been a dream, it felt like a deliberate one, somehow; not like the whimsical, fragmented dreams they normally had when sleeping.
“The Jade Rabbit did say the dream world is the mirror to the physical world,” pointed out Yun.
“Do you think what we saw in the dream, then, is actually inside those chests?” continued Mei excitedly.
“Only one way to find out,” said Yun. “We have to get back into the library. The question is, how?”
They studied the map of the city that Princess Zali had drawn. Although she’d marked the little-known passageways within the royal city, there was only one entryway to the complex itself, and that was heavily guarded. The stately walls were also better maintained than the ones surrounding the City of Ashes—there were no convenient holes for the twins to crawl through. It was impossible to get back over the wall without the Jade Rabbit’s cloud.
They looked at the sky again, waiting for an answer to appear (hopefully in the form of the Jade Rabbit). Unfortunately, life has a rude habit of not always quite granting us the things we want at the moment, whether it’s an enormous piece of candy that never shrinks, or a convenient cloud that magically transports its users over walls and across the country.
“I’ve got an idea,” Yun said suddenly.
“What is it?”
“Not a lot of people know about this. The chefs have a secret passageway that leads to the outside. I’ve never actually used it, but I know the exit is somewhere in the marketplace.”
“Yun, that’s brilliant!”
They hurried along the Outer City, which had started to wake up for the day. Somewhere, a rooster crowed. Early risers grabbed a change of laundry from clotheslines. A mother rocked her baby to sleep on a porch step while two old men set up a game of chess beside her. It wasn’t that much different from the twins’ village. They even passed an elderly woman who looked like the female version of Elder Liu.
The marketplace was full of vendors setting up their stalls for the day. The smells of ripe fruits, pork buns, and other foods made the twins’ mouths water.
“Breakfast would b
e nice,” Mei said, her stomach growling. Unfortunately, they did not have a single coin in their pockets.
“Once we get back in, we’ll have all the breakfast we need,” Yun reassured her, thinking of the always-stocked imperial kitchen.
They shuffled through the street, looking for signs of hidden doors or passageways. A few adults frowned at them as they passed. “Looks like a pair of peasants,” one of them muttered. Another snorted, “Lazy beggars!”
The twins shrank back in embarrassment. With their dirt-streaked skin and lack of belongings, they really did seem like beggars. Mei was sorely tempted to tell these people that not less than twenty-four hours ago, she’d earned the respect of a real princess, but Yun nudged her and said wisely, “Let it go.”
By midday, they’d still had zero success in finding the purported passageway. The sky had become overcast with rolling gray clouds. By early afternoon, the people in the marketplace and the surrounding buildings were in a foul mood. Neighbors argued loudly. Food vendors fought each other, pushing over stands and stomping on each other’s fruits and vegetables. The clouds continued to roll overhead, a sheet of white-gray.
Mei and Yun stayed out of everyone’s way. They sat in the shadows of a dark alley, keeping an eye on the marketplace for palace chefs and taking turns trying to fall asleep to conserve their energy. But trying to sleep during the day was hard, and doubly so with the rising commotion.
“We’ll probably have better luck watching this place at night, when it’s deserted,” admitted Yun. “We might have to wait a while.”
“What’s one more day?” agreed Mei wearily.
Someone threw a potted plant out a third-story window. It landed with a clattering crash next to the twins, making them jump. That was when they noticed that the clouds overhead had a vaguely familiar look. They rolled like liquid, and the place suddenly felt extra cold.
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