Kingdom of the Blazing Phoenix

by Julie C. Dao

  But he has never touched Wren, she thought. He had taken Jade’s hand when Kang had ridden past, and when she had held his in town, he hadn’t let go. She remembered her urge to lean her head against his shoulder, and felt her cheeks grow warm.

  “Are you all right over there, Jade? You’re quiet,” Wren commented.

  “Just tired,” she said, forcing a yawn and rolling onto her back where they couldn’t see her face. She thought Koichi might be able to read her expression like one of his books if he saw it now. “We should sleep.”

  But long after they had put out the fire, she lay awake, remembering the press of Koichi’s warm fingers against hers.

  * * *

  • • •

  There were bones in the sand, bleached white by the sun.

  First a skull, then a rib cage, then a pair of legs, picked clean like morbid porcelain.

  They saw more and more skeletons as the day went on, and though Koichi tried to make light of it, Jade couldn’t help thinking it might be their fate if they didn’t find water soon.

  Her wish was answered by sunrise, though not in the way she might have expected.

  A great rectangular shape of blue-gray appeared on the horizon, fluttering in the hot wind, with a large brown lump in the sand nearby. Jade led her friends out of its direct path; her first thought went to Xifeng and what tricks the Empress might devise to trap her. But as they drew closer, they saw that the blue-gray object was a clumsily constructed tent.

  “That’s a dead horse,” Koichi whispered, pointing at the brown lump. Several large black birds pecked at its carcass, but they squawked and flew off when Jade’s party approached.

  “Be careful,” Jade warned Wren, who slipped off the pony and advanced on the tent with a dagger in each hand. “Someone may be yet inside.”

  “There might be supplies we can use,” Wren answered, and because she turned to speak to them, she did not see the gaunt, hollow-eyed man who had crawled to the tent’s opening. When she faced front again, she gave a great shout and pointed her blades at him.

  The man looked at her blearily. “I’m going to die anyway. Do you think I care how?”

  “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “Does it matter?” He gave a dry, hacking cough that shook his whole body. His face was like a skull, the skin drawn back tightly across the bones like transparent fabric.

  His sunken cheeks and frailty reminded Jade of her father. She dismounted and knelt beside him with her pouch of water, but he refused it.

  “Turn back if you can,” he croaked. “Don’t go on any farther.”

  Jade and Wren saw it at the same time: a vicious, horrific knife wound in the man’s side, soaking his shirt and pants with dried brown blood. His cracked lips spread in a hideous smile.

  “My dearest friend took all of our water, then did this to me and that to my wife.”

  Wren grimaced as she moved the flap of the crude tent, releasing an overripe smell like rotten meat. A woman’s corpse lay under a swarming cloud of flies.

  “Desperation makes monsters of even the best people.” He gazed up at Jade imploringly. “The stone horses aren’t worth it. There is no treasure more worthwhile than your own life.”

  “Stone horses?” Jade repeated, thinking of the embroidered steeds on Amah’s map, but he did not elaborate. “Is there anything we can do for you, sir?”

  “Dig a hole for my wife and me. Please.” His bloodshot eyes moved to the interior of the tent. “There are shovels. Blankets and food. Take it all.”

  Wren pulled her tunic over her nose and mouth and went inside, returning with her arms full: two blankets, a length of rope, a pair of shovels, and a packet of dried meat.

  The man turned away, breaking into another violent fit of grating coughs, and lay still.

  Jade placed her hand on his chest, which had stopped rising and falling. “He’s dead,” she whispered, shutting his eyes gently and uttering a quiet prayer.

  Wren bowed her head, then chose one of the shovels and began digging close to the dead horse. Wordlessly, Jade joined her, and Koichi dismounted to put away the supplies.

  “There’s someone else over there on the ground,” he said uneasily, pointing about a hundred feet in the direction they were traveling. “Let me see who it is.”

  “Be careful,” Jade urged him as he walked away. She wiped her forehead and continued digging, helping Wren shift the sand beneath the horse to make a large hole into which it would fall. The light, fine sand was not difficult to lift, but shoveling in the midday sun was hot work.

  It seemed a long time before Koichi trudged back, struggling under the weight of several heavy objects. “Far be it from me to take joy in another’s misfortune,” he said, “but that dead man had four pouches of water. I guess we found out where this couple’s dearest friend went.”

  “Thank the gods,” Wren moaned, reaching for one of them.

  “He died from a vicious snakebite,” Koichi said grimly, handing another pouch to Jade. “It appears he paid dearly for his crime.”

  “Good. One less body we need to bury,” Wren spat. “He deserves to have his brains pecked out by the birds for what he did to these poor people.”

  “There’s plenty of room,” Jade chided her. “And more birds might attract Kang.”

  They dug far enough to ensure that the bodies wouldn’t be disturbed, and eventually the dead horse sank into the hole, pulled down by its own weight. Koichi helped them gently place the couple inside, and then they rolled a blanket beneath the traitor and dragged him over. The man’s leg had swollen to twice its natural size and grown an ugly purple-black from the snakebite. When they had finished their task, they set off again.

  Though the water had renewed their spirits, they traveled in silence for the rest of the day, each lost in their own thoughts. Jade pondered what the traitor had hoped to gain by leaving his friends for dead, and what the dying man had said about desperation. Was the Serpent God’s rose the treasure of which he had spoken?

  “I could never do anything like that to either of you,” Koichi said, when Jade brought up the subject that evening. They had stopped in the shadow of a dune to rest. “Even if those stone horses guarded a royal treasury. It’s not worth it.”

  Jade shook her head. “People are desperate. I think it’s hard to say what we will or won’t do until we’re in their shoes. All of us have been fortunate to have had food and shelter.”

  “When you’re poor and starving, and ruled over by an empress who literally thinks of human hearts as food,” Wren said, “maybe just the idea of treasure will seem worth it.”

  Jade hugged herself, eyes on the darkening dunes. Every step they took, every hardship they witnessed, stoked the fires of her anger, but over the weeks, it had changed from a sharp, burning outrage into a steady, purposeful wrath. Her destiny was no longer something she plodded toward reluctantly, but was now a means to an end . . . a weapon to vanquish an evil she had never imagined in her darkest dreams. And she would do whatever it took to get there.

  She thought again of the poisoned comb hidden in her sack. Her fingers itched for it more often than she cared to admit. A bit of blood, she thought, might be worth seeing what Xifeng was planning. But each time the strange longing seized her, she heard Empress Lihua’s warning: She might want you to use it again. In the vision, Xifeng had seemed to sense Jade’s presence—if she knew of the connection the comb forged between them, she might use that knowledge somehow to trick Jade.

  Koichi’s shout of excitement broke into Jade’s grim contemplation. “Look! There!”

  Jade followed his finger to where the desert met the sky in a clash of pink and midnight-blue as the sun set. A few hundred feet ahead, at the bottom of a great slope of sand, stood a cluster of heavy-headed trees full of drooping fruit. Jade rubbed her gritty eyes, but the vision did not vanish in
the last light of the sun. Something glimmered between the twisting trunks . . .

  “Water!” Wren shrieked. “Is this a trick? Do you see it, too?”

  “As clearly as I see you,” Koichi said heartily. “I think we’ve found salvation.”

  As Wren began to wave her arms and sing and Koichi laughed at her, a ringing came to Jade’s ears at the edge of hearing. She looked down at the glittering sand, which began to vibrate, and glanced to the east, where a rising cloud of sand and dust had gathered.

  “What is it?” Koichi asked.

  And then the sound grew louder: the whinnying of horses, the storm of hooves, the whipping of shadowy cloaks on metal armor. It was the coming of a writhing black storm, and Jade’s scream died in her throat, knowing what the thousand lanterns in the Great Forest would reveal: the soldiers’ true form, an evil rushing tide of onyx serpents.

  She could almost see their glowing red eyes hunting the sands for her, and hear Empress Xifeng’s whisper rippling across the black star-burned skies:

  Find her, huntsman, and bring her heart to me . . .

  “Run,” Wren whispered, and then the whisper became a shout. “Run!”

  They plunged down the dune, the horses rearing their heads. The oasis now felt much too far away as they raced across the sand. Jade clung to the pony’s neck, her heart in her throat.

  He found us. The thought coiled like a serpent in her stomach. He found me.

  Kang seemed to have brought the lion’s share of the soldiers with him. There was nowhere to hide on this vast, rolling landscape. The oasis would be a dead end, but where else could they go? If they tried to run, it would only be a matter of time before the men caught up.

  We have lost. Oh, Mother, Amah, we have lost.

  “We can’t hide the horses,” Koichi said, looking sick when they reached their destination at last. “We’ll have to dismount and leave them. It’s the only way.”

  Wren leapt off and hugged her pony. “There must be a better way,” she argued. “We won’t go far in this desert without them. We’ll die for sure . . .”

  But there was no time to discuss. They seized what few possessions they could—Jade making sure she had the map and the crane feather cloak—and ran into the trees. It became clear at once that they could not climb the slippery trunks. These were not the trees of the Great Forest, but unfamiliar giants with heavy heads and no low branches.

  Koichi whirled, noting the boulders that dotted the ring of trees, while Wren examined the shallow body of water in the center. Though the breeze had died, the crane feathers in Jade’s arms lifted of their own will and tickled her nose. She peered down at the cloak. There was more to it than met the eye—of this, she felt certain. Her own words came back to her: That god prided himself on his shape-shifting ability and was also said to be bashful. It makes sense that a method of disguise may have appealed to him.

  Nothing had happened when they had put on the cloak before. But they had not needed to hide then, and they desperately had to now.

  There was no time left to think.

  “Hurry, get under this!” Jade squeezed herself and her belongings into a recess between a tree and two boulders. Wren and Koichi crawled in beside her, all knees and elbows and frightened faces as Jade tossed the crane feather cloak over their bodies. It was light despite its thickness and more than big enough to hide the three of them. To their surprise, they could still see out as clearly as though they had nothing over them at all.

  “This isn’t going to do anything,” Wren whispered, her eyes full of panic.

  But Jade hushed her as the black flood of serpent-men on horseback poured over the sands and into the oasis. Wren stifled a sob as her faithful gray pony and Koichi’s stallion fled, taking off across the desert. Jade put an arm around the other girl as the soldiers dismounted.

  “You three, go after the horses,” Kang commanded, and the mere sound of his voice made Jade’s stomach clench with terror. “If the girl is not here and is riding away, on your heads be it. The rest of you, search every tree and crevice. Leave no stone unturned.”

  Three soldiers took off at once. The Empress’s huntsman stepped into the ring of trees, standing not twenty feet from Jade and her companions, and swirled a fallen tree branch in the water. The black armor and etched breastplate made him appear massive, cruelly powerful.

  Twenty masked men followed him into the oasis. One walked stiffly toward the hidden trio, who cowered beneath the cloak, and studied them for so long that Jade’s blood seemed to freeze. This is it, she thought, digging her nails into her palm. We’re dead.

  It had been a vain and foolish hope that the cloak would disguise them. She had been thinking like a child, pulling a blanket over her head to hide from monsters in the dark . . .

  “What is it?” Kang asked, striding over.

  Wren and Koichi tensed as the huntsman’s cold gaze ran over them. Jade silently sent up every prayer she could, heart beating so loudly she wondered if Kang could hear it.

  “A bird,” he said flatly. “What is a crane doing in the desert?”

  Jade gaped at Wren and Koichi.

  “Look at the size of it. I’ve never seen one quite so large.” Kang crouched down, folding his arms on his bent knee. “The eyes, too, are strange. Almost human, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, sir,” the soldier answered tonelessly.

  Kang tipped his head. “And what bird of its kind travels in complete solitude?”

  As he crept forward, Jade resisted the urge to pull her leg in closer to her body. Any movement might give them away. Beads of sweat trickled down her back as the huntsman ran his sharp teeth over his bottom lip, studying them without blinking.

  And then, as though his words had prompted it, a great rustling sounded in the trees. The soldiers tensed as twelve great white cranes descended, tilting their elegant heads. They calmly went about their business: digging in the sand for insects, drinking water, and settling down to sleep by the trunks. One of them took a small, heavy date from the trees and pecked at it.

  The sky-maidens, Jade thought, seeing her own relief and exhilaration on her friends’ faces. They’ve come to help us.

  “Well, well, well. Nothing but a lost family of cranes.” Kang rose, his face twisted with fury. “We’re losing ground every second. Some peculiar magic is on the girl’s side, and if we lose her, the Empress will behead me herself. To your horses!”

  Within seconds, Kang and his soldiers took off, and only when the cloud of dust from their horses’ hooves had disappeared did Jade feel safe enough to throw off the feather cloak.

  Koichi wiped his forehead, laughing weakly. “I might have known a god wouldn’t have chosen an ordinary relic. You saved us, Jade. The cloak disguised us only when we needed it to.”

  Jade leaned against a tree, her legs too shaky to stand. “Don’t speak too soon,” she said, clutching her still-racing heart. “We’ve lost our horses and most of our belongings. We may as well stay here tonight and figure out what to do in the morning.”

  One of the large white cranes approached and blinked benevolently at Wren, then at Jade. It did not speak, but merely folded its wings and settled itself against a tree.

  “Thank you, sky-maidens, for your help tonight,” Jade whispered.

  The crane blinked again and fell into a gentle slumber, and all around them the other birds dozed in trees and between boulders, as though protecting them. Eventually, Jade and her companions followed suit, driven to exhaustion by their ordeal.

  The first day was hard, and the second day was harder.

  They put one foot in front of the other, each step sinking into the sand so that the simple act of moving forward felt interminable. When the sun beat down in the afternoons, they found weak shadows in which to sit. The mere heat tired them just as much as the walking. They had filled their water pouches in the oasi
s, but by the third day, their supply was almost gone, as was the pile of dates Wren and Koichi had picked off the trees.

  Wren had to force Jade to drink. “Don’t be heroic,” she said sharply, when Jade told her and Koichi to take what was left. “We need you to survive.”

  They slept by day and walked at night, but even with the cooler evening temperatures, Jade knew that Koichi was struggling. He never spoke a single word of complaint, but his short legs tired more easily than theirs, and he could not go fast.

  On the fourth day, they were down to the last of the rations, and on the fifth day, Jade was sure they would die. The wind had intensified, whipping crystals of sand into their eyes, and more often than not, the dunes seemed to dance and sway before her. She had refused the water too many times, insisting she wasn’t thirsty though she could have gladly drunk the entire oasis. Wren and Koichi had to support her as they sat down in the shadow of a dune.

  “You two rest,” Wren said. “I’ll scout the area and see if I can’t find something.”

  “She’s strong and brave,” Koichi murmured weakly as she strode away. Though Jade knew he hadn’t meant it as criticism toward her, she still felt a twinge. Wren and Koichi were suffering in the desert because of her, and she couldn’t do anything about it.

  She could only lean her dizzy head against her knees, wishing this horrible heat would go away. Every time she opened her eyes, fuzzy black dots danced in her vision, so she shut them and breathed slowly, the air chafing her cracked lips and parched throat. The sun had been a friend to her growing up, but here in this land of vast, blinding gold, it was an enemy. It burned the air and lit the world with shimmering fire, making her mind play awful tricks on her.

  For surely, that was not Wren hurrying toward them with a tall, strongly built man whose evil weapons gleamed at his side. He was bald with sun-bronzed skin, and though Jade could not see his features, her mind filled them in: fathomless eyes and a sharp-toothed mouth, long fingers braced on the dagger that would cut her heart out.