Kingdom of the Blazing Phoenix

by Julie C. Dao

  “I tried to enter, but I couldn’t,” he said brokenly, showing her the terrible burns on his skin. “A hot force threw me back out of the gates. Kang wasn’t lying, Wren. Jade’s gone.”

  Wren whirled to look inside. A pond surrounded the apple tree, and below the surface, she saw the dragon lying beside a smaller body with a cloud of black hair. Thick roots had wrapped around both corpses, as though the tree had tugged them into the pond. Wren slumped against the gate, shaking with grief and exhaustion. All they had endured. All they had lost.

  “I couldn’t stop her,” Fu groaned. Wren raised her head to see the ghost on the other side of the gate. “I remained here on earth to protect my sister and I failed. I’m sorry, Koichi.”

  “Fu,” Wren uttered, her heart in her throat. “You’re inside. The gates let you in.”

  “I ran in when I saw her bring the apple to her lips.”

  A wild, rising hope filled her breast. “The gates let you in,” she repeated, trying not to scream with frustration. “You’re the son of Empress Lihua, a descendant of the Dragon King. You’re no longer living, but your spirit is here! You can reunite the relics!”

  Koichi looked up, wild eyed. “It’s true,” he gasped. “Jade said you could take corporeal form when you had strong emotions. You saved her from quicksand and held off the Serpent God in the dark world for her.”

  “Exactly!” Wren cried.

  Understanding bloomed on Fu’s face. Without another word, he rushed over to his sister’s scattered belongings. Wren could have shouted for joy when his transparent fingers grabbed the crane feather cloak without passing through it. She and Koichi clutched each other, watching as Fu laid the cloak on the ground with the rose, fishbone, and sword of Tu Lam on top.

  His mouth sagging with grief, he plucked the apple from beside Jade’s body in the pond. The fruit had faded to a dull gray-red, with a perfect circle of white where Jade had bitten into it.

  Even this far away, Wren could smell its sweet scent, like a warm spring morning when flowers the color of sun and flame burst in the meadows. She looked at the apple in Fu’s hands with a sudden savage hunger and thought she might break down the gates with her bare hands if it meant she could have a bite too. Koichi’s hand tightened on her shoulder and she looked away, breathing heavily, the enchantment broken.

  “No one could have resisted it,” she whispered, and he shook his head grimly.

  But the ghost did not seem in the least affected by the apple. Fu carried it over to the relics, the treasures chosen by the gods ages ago to represent their kingdoms and honor their friendship. Integrity, resourcefulness, faith, humility, determination: all the lessons they had sought to teach leaders who followed in their footsteps—all the stories that conveyed their histories and the values they held dearest.

  “This is for Jade,” Fu whispered.

  And he dropped the apple on top of the cloak with the other relics.

  The world fell away as though behind a muted curtain.

  Ming—or Wei, as he had once been called—no longer heard swords clashing as enemy met enemy. He did not see Wren struggling with Kang on the ground, smell the trees of the Great Forest burning in the lantern fire, or feel the plumes of black incense on his skin.

  All of his senses, all of him, belonged to Xifeng, the girl with whom he had grown up, the girl he had passionately loved long ago in the village only they could remember.

  They walked, hands joined, safe in a world apart from the battlefield. And as she looked at him, her mask fell away, leaving behind someone who looked very young and very tired.

  “Wei.” Xifeng’s lips caressed the name.

  He held her hand tightly, afraid it might slip away. “I’ve never stopped loving you. No matter how many years passed, no matter how many places I roamed or women with whom I tried to fill your place. No one ever lived up to you.”

  Xifeng’s lips, red as the apple that had slipped from Jade’s lifeless fingers, curved sadly. “I have never stopped loving you. You’ve always been the only one.” She hid her face against his chest as she had done when they were young. Wei rested his head on top of hers, remembering.

  “You never loved Emperor Jun.”

  “That weak husband of mine could no more stir my heart than command the stars. He was nothing. He is nothing. Where have you been, love?”

  “In the deserts of Surjalana,” Wei said, holding her close to him. “Sleeping on the sands beneath the blazing sky.”

  She looked up with soft eyes. It had been two decades since he had seen her last, but there was not a single line or wrinkle to mar them. “That was where we talked of going,” she said, leading him into the tengaru clearing. It was as though she had drawn a protective shield around the two of them, and though Wei saw figures darting around, everything was blurred except for the woman on his arm. “Do you remember the first time we came here?”

  “You were eighteen and beautiful as the night, and I was hungry to join the Imperial Army. We saw the tengaru with Hideki . . . and Shiro.” Something about the name brought Wei back to the world outside for a fleeting moment. As they approached the pond, he saw a small man crumpled by the gates of the apple tree enclosure. A familiar-looking girl knelt beside him. But Xifeng turned his chin back to her, and their surroundings fell away once more.

  She pointed at the island, still shaded by weeping willows as it had been twenty years before. “The tengaru queen lay there, and beyond is the apple tree, which belongs to someone more deserving than me,” she said, but the trace of bitterness in her voice vanished when she gazed up at him. “What a life we have lived, Wei of mine, though we lived it apart.”

  “You’ve done more than the tengaru ever predicted for you,” he said, touching her face.

  Xifeng’s eyes clouded, and she lowered her head under his gaze. The movement was so familiar, it made Wei’s breath catch in his throat. How many times had she done that when they were young and in love? The worry on her features, the dip of her chin as though ashamed. Something in his expression had always prompted this.

  “You were not with me these twenty years,” she said. “But I feel as though you know everything in the way you look at me. You see every woman who turned to me with fear, every shadow in the firelight, every image in the mirror-water. Hearts beating in my hands and blood on my lips, just as my mother taught me all those long years ago.”

  Wei looked at her in silence.

  “No one has ever been able to see me as you did. As you do now.” She stood on her toes and pressed her warm, soft lips against his.

  “I can’t forget the day I left you,” Wei said. “I was heartbroken after you had promised yourself to Emperor Jun. But you were crying, and I realized then that you loved me, not him.”

  “But you left me anyway.” For the first time, Xifeng sounded angry. “You left me when I would have raised you high and taken care of you. I would have made something of you and you would never have had to be hungry or lonely. Yes, I can see that in you. You languished alone all these years in the desert, when we could have been together. Such a waste.”

  “You’re right, Xifeng.”

  She went still. “Say my name again,” she breathed in a pleading, cajoling tone no one had ever heard the Empress of Feng Lu use. “Please.”

  “Xifeng,” he said, and she kissed him again fiercely, as though she had been starving for decades. They broke apart, gasping, and then their lips met again slowly. “Xifeng,” he whispered against her mouth. “I chose to leave you, but you have never left me.”

  “What a choice that was.”

  “I’ve always had a choice. Same as you, and you have it still.” Wei held her away from him. “Give up this madness of blood and hearts and ghosts in mirrors. What can the Serpent God give you that I cannot?”

  At once, her impassive Empress mask slipped back as surely as if her own finger
s had held it there, hiding the girl he had once known. “Don’t speak of him.”

  “Renounce him.” Wei gripped her shoulders. It had been years, but that fantasy still consumed him: the thought that by shaking her, he might be able to dislodge her sorceress mother’s hold on her. “Give up your crown. It doesn’t make you happy, but I can. Even with all your silks and servants, you’ve suffered as much as I have these twenty years. You’ve been as alone in the palace as I have in the desert.”

  Her laugh seemed full of bloodshed and darkness, obsession and madness. “I am never alone, Wei, and never have been. You know that. I’m not as silly and empty-headed as you and my mother liked to think. As he likes to think, believing a few empty threats and illusions will coerce me to do his bidding.”

  Xifeng broke away from Wei and gazed at her flawless reflection in the water.

  “I took this path so I could be in control of my own fate, powerful and free. Don’t you think I know I lost myself along the way? Don’t you think I realized, at long last, that this life comes with the loss of freedom, not the winning of it? I have paid a high price.”

  This argument, too, was familiar. “But you had a choice,” Wei insisted.

  “Oh, I chose, my love,” she said, turning back to him. “I knew I had a choice all along, and I made it. I just didn’t choose you.”

  Even after all these years, her words cut Wei to the quick. He leaned on the railing of the bridge with his head in his hands, but Xifeng forced his face back toward hers.

  “I didn’t know no other man but you could ever sit by my side. I knew I needed Emperor Jun to take the throne, but I didn’t realize how easy he would be to bend to my will. He’s just a puppet, Wei. I could take his empire and keep you by my side.”

  “As another puppet?”

  Xifeng blinked at his bitter tone. “As my lover and minister and confidante. Dream of me no more. It is your turn to choose. My mother’s cards have forever shown the warrior and the Empress together, fates entwined. You’ve always had a part to play in my destiny.”

  “Your mother’s cards,” Wei repeated, the words stirring the dust in his mind.

  “You’re here now. Play your part in my destiny as you were meant to,” she pleaded. “Be with me, if you truly love me. Do you?”

  Wei looked deep into Xifeng’s eyes. “Yes,” he said fervently. “I love you. I always have loved you, and I always will.”

  And then he tore his sword from its sheath and plunged it into Empress Xifeng’s heart.

  “I love you,” he repeated, tears pouring down his cheeks as he stabbed her again and again. Blood gushed out and stained her green silk robes. “I love you. I love you.”

  He kept the cards’ promise.

  He played his part in her destiny.

  He ended her dark and brutal reign—took from her what she had taken from so many with neither grief nor conscience. He continued driving the sword through her heart even when she lay still in a pool of her own red-black blood, her sightless gaze on the lanterns of the forest. The little shield she had created around them disappeared, and the clearing came into focus as bloodshed and screaming and clanging weapons assaulted his ears.

  “Goodbye,” he told her, for the second time in twenty years.

  And then Wei left Xifeng—Empress of Feng Lu, love of his life—behind him forever.

  A great shaking and thundering sounded from deep within the earth. Fu stepped away from the gods’ relics, wide eyed as the silver gates around the apple tree began to tremble in a great wind that roared through the tengaru clearing.

  Koichi pulled Wren onto the safety of the island and they crouched behind a boulder, watching in horror as the wind ripped the gates right out of the soil and flung them away, opening the apple tree enclosure for the first time in countless ages. The sky deepened from blue velvet to ink black as the thousand lanterns flickered in the branches and on the forest floor. Still, the battle raged on, swords clashing and voices adding to the din of thunder.

  “Look!” Koichi cried. They saw Ming running out of the clearing, roaring as he charged at Imperial soldiers with renewed fury, gripping a sword and a long lethal dagger in each hand.

  Wren detected a splash of green silk where Ming had been standing and saw with a shock that Empress Xifeng lay sprawled on the grass. The woman had a horrific gaping wound in her chest, and her eyes pointed sightlessly at the roiling black sky. I must destroy her, or she must destroy me. Xifeng had believed that of Jade, Wren recalled, but the woman was now dead herself. What would become of Feng Lu with both of them gone?

  “Ming didn’t betray us after all,” Wren said in disbelief. “He loved her and he let her go.”

  Pain flitted across Koichi’s face as he looked back at the apple tree where Jade lay.

  The earth’s shaking grew increasingly fierce and violent. Rocks scattered and branches snapped from the trees, and at last the battle waned. The fighters looked around them, faces wary and vigilant. Then, all at once, the thousand lanterns shone as blindingly as the sun, illuminating the Great Forest until it was as bright as day.

  Wren covered her head with her hands as the sky cracked in two.

  The disturbed waters of the pond splashed over her and Koichi, chilling them, and something large descended from the clouds and landed upon the earth. Four of them, to be exact.

  She dug her fingers into Koichi’s arm. “It’s them, the Dragon Guard,” she choked out.

  “No.” Fu floated beside them, his eyes on the beings before them. “Not the Dragon Guard, but the gods. They’ve seen fit to answer this summons themselves.”

  Four magnificent dragons towered over the clearing, as high as trees and fierce as fire. All of them had five talons on each foot and a serpentine tail that ended in a stream of deep red. Their eyes were bright with otherworldly wisdom and power beneath the two twisting gold antlers upon their kingly heads. Only in the color of their scales did they differ.

  The largest, the Dragon King himself, had a body of gleaming pine green like the trees of the Great Forest, while the second was a deep water-blue. The third had scales of fog and smoke, gray as mountains beneath a winter sky, and the last was bright gold like grasslands in summer.

  Koichi leaned forward, bowing, and Wren did the same. She trembled at the sight of the gods standing shoulder to shoulder, furious and magnificent as they faced the battlefield.

  “When their alliance ended, they pledged to never directly involve themselves with the mortal world again. Why have they come now?” Koichi asked.

  “Because the heir of the Dragon King called them,” Fu said, his face full of grief. “I helped my sister complete her task, but she brought the relics to the clearing. She proved her worth as a ruler to the gods. And perhaps they wanted to end this, once and for all.”

  “This?” Wren repeated, but then the wind changed: it became hot and dusty, smelling of vast dunes and days of endless sun.

  Glittering grains of desert sand fluttered over the grass, which began to wither and die, turning an arid yellow-gray color where it had been lush moments earlier. The trees that had not yet burned bent their heads, their leaves transforming into the red and gold of autumn though it was only spring. The earth shook once more, and a crevice opened in the ground beneath Empress Xifeng, swallowing her dead body.

  A massive, slithering form crawled from the crack: an enormous snake, black as night and five times as long, with a pattern of deep scarlet spots all over its body like a million drops of blood. Its eyes, too, were deep scarlet and full of hatred as it regarded the four dragons in the clearing, and a toxic smell like damp soil and rotten swamp grass hung over it.

  “A Dragon Lord who has forfeited his dragon form,” Koichi said in a very low voice. “He wanted to be unique and separate himself from the others. And so he became the Serpent God.”

  “But he’s a coward,” Wren sai
d. “How dare he show himself to them after everything?”

  “The other gods answered our summons and they must have compelled him forth, too. Maybe some magic unites them still, so that when they come forward, all of them come.”

  “If the Serpent God wants Feng Lu,” Fu said grimly, “he’ll have to fight for it.”

  The five Dragon Lords regarded one another for a long moment, the first time they had been together since the destruction of their alliance. Wren could not see how the Serpent God could stand against the other four until she realized that the great wind of their arrival had put out the fires in the forest, killing the smoke of Xifeng’s incense.

  Now, with only the lantern light upon them, the Empress’s men regained their true forms as ruby-eyed serpents. The snakes poured into the clearing and piled on top of each other, whirling like a spiraling fog until they formed three massive red-spotted snakes identical to the Serpent God. They joined their master, blurring in and out of focus until it was no longer clear which of the four huge serpents was the true Serpent God. One by one, their mouths opened to reveal a thick forked tongue, a garish imitation of a smile.

  Beyond this new battleground, the Crimson Queen and her army stood motionless, looking on. In their posture, Wren saw why: this was not their battle to fight. Not any of theirs.

  This last and final battle belonged to the gods.

  The four mighty dragons advanced, putting one sharp-taloned foot in front of the other, approaching the four serpents with deadly intention.

  “How will they know which is the real Serpent God?” Wren gasped, but Koichi and Fu shook their heads, unable to look away from the scene.

  And then the battle began.

  The dragons and snakes lunged at each other, their bodies meeting in a colossal crash that shook the foundations of the earth in a deafening roar. Broken branches flew off the trees as the gods hurtled toward each other again and again, every movement rife with hatred and vengeance. Snake scales rained to the ground and dragon blood splattered the trunks of the Great Forest.