by S. L. Huang
Rosa tamped down some indignation, that Hou Yi would think she had committed to this journey, trekked all this way, confessed so much of herself, only not to see it through. Had they not faced all manner of danger together, the past two years? But she excused it as the fallout from the night, or perhaps some over-consideration for Rosa’s Western views on sorcery, and let it pass.
Her story was almost complete anyway. At least as much as she was willing to tell.
* * *
“Look, Red! I brought you a present.” Goldie gave her hand a flourish, and something hard and heavy fell out of it to thunk upon the tabletop. “You wouldn’t believe what I had to do for it. And I gave up the Crown Beryl for it, too, but I said, ‘It’s for my Red, it must be done.’” She placed a hand dramatically across her breast and turned her face so the broken skin on her cheekbone caught the best light.
What? What had she done? Confusion warred with concern. Rosa reached out and picked up the object.
It lay heavy and oblong in her hand. A rifle cartridge.
“You … gave up the Beryl?” she said. Goldie had talked of nothing else for a month before she stole the Crown Beryl, and bragged of nothing else for a year after.
“Of course I did, stupid. Because I know how much you want to slay the dragon.” She beamed at Rosa.
Slay the dragon.
Slay the dragon …
All she wanted was for Mei to run away with her. To hell with the grundwirgen. To hell with the kingdom—Bistherne could keep eating the king’s soldiers for as long as she wanted; Rosa didn’t give a damn. Someone else could stop Bistherne’s rampage, someone who didn’t have so much blood staining her hands already, some hero with a clear conscience who was serving the people, not still playing out revenge for a murder nearly twenty years past. Some righteous person, who hadn’t sat and traded jokes with her victim and wondered if there was really any difference between them.
Goldie’s face drew down into an annoyed frown. “It’s enchanted, you dimwit. Stop standing there with your mouth open. I think you mean to say, ‘Thank you, Goldie, you’re my best friend for all eternity and nobody else but you would give up a gorgeous, perfectly cut Crown Beryl just so I can slay my stupid dragon, and I will be beholden to you forever.’ It better be worth it.”
“I…”
“Or don’t say it. Whatever. I know how amazing I am.” Goldie tossed her head. “Just get it done before the harvest so we get invited to all the good banquets. I have a plan for them. And you owe me big now.”
Rosa closed her hand around the magic cartridge. It stayed cold as a shard of ice against her palm.
This is who you are, it seemed to say. No escape.
* * *
“She hadn’t really given up her gemstone, had she,” Hou Yi said, offering a hand to Rosa as they climbed down the steep trail to the shore.
“No,” Rosa said. “I found Puss flaunting it, after I came back with Bistherne’s blood on my cloak, with the whole kingdom feting me for a murder. In one night I went from being a specter people whispered about in fear to a hero of the land, and it was the worst feeling in the world.”
“What did Mei say?” Hou Yi asked.
Of course Hou Yi would know to ask that. “Not much, at the time. But she pulled away from me. She’d thought I was turning away from that path. I had been turning away from that path.” Rosa paused. “Perhaps it was smarter of her, to be skeptical I could truly change.”
“But you did.”
Yes, she had, but not before she had undone everything, committed the final inescapable act that had decided her fate. The only one she had failed to confess to Mei. She had no plans to voice it to Hou Yi now, even though that last crime had been the one to fall slowly through the years, threatening to crush her and anyone she dared love.
She could not rail against a destiny she had inflicted upon herself.
Aloud she said, “After the dragon, Mei and I made a bargain. I promised that was the end for me, that I was done. And she agreed to come away with me.”
“And was it the end?” Hou Yi asked.
No. But close enough. “For many years,” Rosa said. “We built a life together. We had … so many adventures together. Later Mei had Xiao Hong, and we raised her together. Then—well. The King’s Justice has a long memory. My sins caught up. I think … all those years, I told myself I had started again, that I had become better, but … there is no erasing such things, is there?”
“No,” agreed Hou Yi, low and gruff.
“And having a child now—it changed everything. Mei had looked past so much, been willing to forgive far more than she should have, but when Xiao Hong found out … I could no longer playact that I was truly the person they loved.” Her mouth tasted acrid. Or maybe it was only the remnants of the smoke from a few days before. “Even if the law had not been bearing down on us, I had no place there anymore. Not after they both knew everything.”
“So you left.”
“I left.”
The phrase was too simple. Glossing over the weeks of horror, fear, a devastated Xiao Hong spitting Rosa’s past at her through tears.
She’d thought Xiao Hong would be the one wholly good thing she did with her life. The one person she protected to the end—from everything, but especially from herself.
Pure hubris.
“There was a potion I had,” Hou Yi said.
Rosa glanced over at her. They’d just dropped down onto rocky sand, and Hou Yi had set her eyes on the shoreline, to start crunching toward the white-capped waves and the diving sunbirds beyond them. Rosa scrambled to follow. Behind them, the hare hopped delicately down the rocks as if it were a mountain goat.
“An enchanted potion,” Hou Yi continued. “One I had been gifted to—it doesn’t matter. But powerful, and dangerous. Feng Meng overheard my wife and me speaking about it, and came to the house while I was hunting and Chang E had gone to market. He didn’t even have to break in; he was such a welcome guest—but once there, he tried to steal the elixir.”
Chang E. Hou Yi’s wife. Hou Yi had only rarely spoken the name aloud, but Rosa remembered.
“Chang E surprised him in the act,” Hou Yi continued. “There was … a violent struggle. She tried to keep it from him. But in the end, the only way she could do so was to drink it all down herself.”
Grief saturated Hou Yi’s words as the rushing of the surf filled their ears and the salt breeze their senses. Rosa tried to stretch her mind to imagine such a betrayal from her own child, but her mind blanked against the monstrousness of it.
“What did it do to her?” she asked softly.
“It gave her the powers of a god,” Hou Yi answered. “We still loved each other, but she … drifted. I continued to get older, with the concerns of a mortal, and she drifted away from me, into a whole new world that had opened for her. One where I could not follow.”
“The moon?” Rosa said.
“When she left she said she would reach it. Who knows? I could barely understand her anymore when she spoke. We had grown so far apart, so quickly, and I could not pull her back. I tried. I tried so hard. But she had become a goddess.”
“And that was when…”
“I went mad with grief and menaced the very people I’d worked to protect, until my own grasping apprentice was able to rally the townsfolk into a mob against me. Yes, you have the right of it. They thought I died that day … Perhaps I did. I doubt many even recall my name now.”
Rosa suspected that, like herself, Hou Yi had kept some things back, but the picture was clear enough. Lost her wife, lost her son, and in worse ways than I. At least Rosa’s losses had stemmed from her own betrayals, with the consequences falling solely on her. She was not sure how she could have continued on without the knowledge that Mei and Xiao Hong were still comfortable and safe somewhere.
“I’m sorry you have to revisit it,” she tried, inadequately. But her attempts trailed off.
Directly in front of them was the hare.
Somehow, even under their watchful eyes, it had appeared between them and the still-distant surf without Rosa having seen it move. Now it crouched among dried, beached tufts of seaweed, facing them.
Rosa and Hou Yi simultaneously slowed, edging toward it. This time the hare did not move with them, but stayed in place.
Hou Yi slid to the side. The hare hopped effortlessly to keep abreast of her, blocking their way.
“What now?” Rosa said.
Hou Yi hesitated and gestured uncertainly with her bow. Rosa didn’t want to take that route—the hare was clearly intelligent; it might be stalking them and filling their heads with visions, but threatening its life still seemed far out of proportion.
You’ve killed for less before, the little voice in the back of her head reminded.
She had. But that was why she would not, now.
“If we try to go past…” Rosa said. The sentence seemed too ridiculous to finish. Would the hare attack them? Even knowing it wielded some type of magic, Rosa felt the absurdity of it: such a small beast, prey and not predator, trying to hurt two large, armed human beings. But if it did move to some sort of violence … their weapons were ranged ones. A human intelligence in a hare’s body—if it turned to aggression, what might it do?
As if she had read Rosa’s mind, Hou Yi slung up her bow and pulled her hunting knife.
Rosa hadn’t been carrying a knife when they’d gone after the sunbirds. She cradled her rifle cautiously. It seemed like sacrilege to consider using such a well-crafted rifle as a melee weapon, but if it meant her life, she could use it like a club.
Together, they advanced. Watchfully. Slowly.
The landscape changed.
It wasn’t a sudden snap, more a jarring slide into another reality, the surrounding rocks and sand and shore swelling and bubbling until they melted into a new geography. The sky bled from a dusty blue to white, with the clouds high and even enough to make the overcast pleasant.
Only the hare remained. It hopped to the side, into the grass to their right, but Rosa had stopped watching it entirely, because behind where it had sat walked a woman and a girl.
Longing socked into Rosa so hard her body gave out, her lungs clenching and her fingers trembling on the rifle. Her knees hit the suddenly present grass without her being aware of falling.
Mei and Xiao Hong. She had not seen their faces in so long.
What devil would send her such pain?
What angel would bestow upon her the wish she dared not even voice?
It took her long moments to register anything other than shock, desperation, desire. But as they approached, she saw that they were both older. More silver than black wove through Mei’s long plait now, the lines in her face carved deeper, and Xiao Hong … she had been a child before, only barely at the height and form of a woman. Now she had … grown up.
I missed it, Rosa thought, and it felt like a part of her curled away and died.
But that meant … if this was not a lie, it was also not a memory. This was the present. This was Mei and Xiao Hong, today, wherever they were … with large rucksacks? Walking staffs? Each carrying a rifle?
They must be on an extended hunting trip. Off to build some new blind, follow some new track … late nights bonding together, hugged close in the cold, the thrill of the journey even if they came back empty-handed.
I’m missing it all.
A hand on Rosa’s shoulder. She looked up to find Hou Yi’s face, creased with worry.
“Your family?” Hou Yi said, her voice gentler than Rosa had ever heard it.
Rosa couldn’t manage speech, but she nodded.
Mei and Xiao Hong had come to a stop only a few paces before them. Apparently unaware of Rosa and Hou Yi, they shrugged their packs to the ground and sank down upon them. Xiao Hong drew out a waterskin, and Mei, with concentrated movements, unwrapped some gleaming shapes Rosa didn’t recognize. Polished stones and carvings, cylinders that must be scroll cases …
“You should teach me to read,” Xiao Hong said, watching her mother’s hands unroll one of the scrolls. Its surface cracked slightly in her fingers, the parchment flaking at the edges.
“It’s a great deal to learn,” Mei said evenly.
Rosa was momentarily confused—Xiao Hong had known her letters almost since she could walk—until she saw the sure ink strokes of Hou Yi’s language.
Hou Yi’s language—and Mei’s, from when she was a child.
“But I’d better learn, hadn’t I?” Xiao Hong said. “We aren’t going to be able to go back home after we find her.”
Mei’s pale face came up, startled. “I had not … thought that far.”
Xiao Hong smiled slightly, and Rosa was again struck by how much she had grown.
But where are you? she thought. Why can’t you return? Had Rosa’s flight not accomplished its goal? Had her crimes overtaken not only her own life, but gutted the very two people she’d meant to save?
Mei had weighted down the edges of the scroll with the stones and carvings. She studied the writing and slowly slid an ebony rabbit and a jade monkey closer together.
Then back again. Then closer.
“What is it?” Xiao Hong asked.
“It’s … not clear.” Mei once more manipulated the carvings, and a frown formed between her eyes. Rosa wanted more than anything to reach out and touch her, to feel the warmth and strength of her. But this was all an illusion, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?
“Did we get off track?” Xiao Hong raised her eyes to the white-cloaked sky. “It’s hard to keep on course without the sun.”
But not for Mei, Rosa knew. From the very first time Rosa had taught her to hunt, Mei had displayed the direction sense of a migrating bird, following her nose unerringly even when Rosa needed a moment to adjust her bearings.
“No, we went the way we were pointed,” Mei said now. “It’s the readings that have changed. They are … confused.”
Magic. The realization startled Rosa. Mei was doing something with magic. Those items … they were ensorcelled, in some way.
“I see the same path we were following,” Mei continued. “Only … I must be misreading. It seems to say she is—”
Her posture straightened suddenly, like a pointer on a scent, and she snapped her head around to look directly at Rosa.
Rosa’s throat closed and her heart tore into a thousand shreds just as the landscape collapsed into a jagged puzzle before snapping back into place as sea and surf, the tang of salt once again stinging their nostrils and the clouds dissolving away.
“No—” Rosa cried without meaning to, reaching out so fast she would have fallen if Hou Yi’s hands had not gripped her shoulders painfully.
Where Mei and Xiao Hong had sat, only rocky sand and tumbled seaweed remained. And a hare, twitching its nose at them insolently.
“Why? Why would you show me this?” Rosa lunged, swiping out at the animal. But just as it had avoided Hou Yi’s arrow without a thought, the hare took one hop straight backward, out of range of her flailing arm.
Hou Yi helped Rosa regain her feet. The hare turned and finally hopped away from them, down along the beach without a care, as if it were only out for a stroll by the waves.
Rosa took a ragged breath. “They were seeking…”
“Seeking you. It seems so.” Hou Yi’s voice was distant.
Hou Yi should not have been able to understand Mei and Xiao Hong’s conversation. But just as Rosa had understood Feng Meng in the dream, the hare’s magic had wrought the translation.
“Was it real?” Rosa pleaded, even though she didn’t expect any answer.
“If it was, they are not far,” Hou Yi said. “A week’s journey north, perhaps. I know those mountains.”
Had there been mountains? Silhouetted against the horizon, perhaps, Rosa vaguely recalled. Her eyes had seen only Mei and Xiao Hong.
“But why would they be here?”
“It’s obvious. Isn’t it?” Rosa was no longer falling, but Hou Yi had
not released her grip. Now her fingers clenched even tighter, and for the first time Rosa took notice of how stiff she sounded. It took effort to pull out of her grasp and step away.
“They’re looking for you,” Hou Yi said. She was gazing after the direction the hare had gone, and her face was hard. “You said they broke with you. You said they forced you to leave.”
“I—” She hadn’t said that, had she? Not in exactly those words. But the truth was close enough to it anyway. “It had all gone wrong,” she said. Desperate defensiveness washed through her, and she wasn’t even sure why. “I had to leave or they would have—the King’s Men had tracked me. They would have blamed Mei if I had not run; I … I could have surrendered myself, but Xiao Hong told me, she told me to go…”
“Out of love,” Hou Yi said. “I see now. To save you. How can you be so blind?”
“I’m not—what?”
“You don’t see. They did not chase you away from them; they chased you from those who would do you harm. And now they seek you and you run from them.”
“I didn’t know they were here!” Rosa’s thoughts spun. “How they discovered, I don’t even know—”
“If my wife and son sought me, nothing in the world could stand in my path. Nothing.”
Rosa was shocked into silence. Hou Yi’s eyes glittered with anger, more fury than Rosa had ever seen in her.
“Go,” Hou Yi said bitterly, flinging a hand toward the north. “You only imagine this prison of yours. You can have everything you want.”
“I don’t want…”
Rosa couldn’t tell how everything had gotten so turned around. She was unmoored, swimming in confusion and faced with an argument that did not even make enough sense for her to counter. “I would have destroyed them,” she protested. “I still—I shouldn’t be near them. Not with who I am—”
“And you’ve made that decision?” Hou Yi almost sneered. “They feel your lack enough to trek halfway around the world to forgive you; they give their souls for the magic to find you—and you scorn them? How dare you?”