Forest of a Thousand Lanterns

by Julie C. Dao

  News had come from afar that mercenaries had captured the Empress’s second son on another continent. The Crown Prince insisted on going himself to lead the negotiations for his brother’s life, and it took all of the Emperor’s power to keep him at home. The youngest prince was deathly ill, and if the Crown Prince should go, Jun would risk losing all three of his heirs.

  “How joyful you must be,” Xifeng murmured, imagining Lady Sun listening from her watery grave. “If all of Lihua’s sons die, yours is next in the line of succession.” Unless, of course, a fourth legitimate heir were born—provided Empress Lihua delivered her child safely.

  Night had fallen in the frozen garden and Xifeng had missed supper, but she decided to have a servant bring a meal to her chamber. Maybe Kang would join her. He had grown more popular since attaining his higher position, but he would gladly leave the gambling and gossip of the other eunuchs to keep her company, if she wished.

  She spied two of Bohai’s assistants on the walkway to the Empress’s apartments. One of them was the well-trained young man Bohai had agreed to send into the Imperial City once a week at Xifeng’s request, to attend to Akira. It amused Xifeng that in doing so, the physician was unknowingly caring for his own daughter.

  Back in her chamber, Xifeng shook the snow from her cap and cloak. “You there,” she called to the guard, “bring some more candles to light my room.”

  But the figure that moved from the shadows was not a eunuch. It held a long kitchen knife in its hand, the blade gleaming in the dim light, and she hardly knew what had happened until the tip of it had stabbed her once, twice, three times.

  She was prone on the floor before she felt a burning sensation and the warm gush of blood. A blinding, tearing pain roared in her chest and shoulder, and then the world went black.

  When Xifeng returned to consciousness, she found herself in bed, her robe lowered over one heavily bandaged shoulder. A bloodstain flowered through the cotton wrappings, and an anxious lady-in-waiting hovered over her. Two eunuchs talking quietly in the corner approached when they saw her eyes flutter open.

  “How are you, my lady?” one of them asked. “Bohai gave you something for the pain before he left to attend to Her Majesty.”

  Xifeng sat up, testing her shoulder. Whatever Bohai had given her had worked, for she felt no sharp pain—only a dull ache that throbbed every time she moved her arm. “I’m all right.” She swung her feet to the floor, seeing blood-soaked cloths piled on the table. “Where is Kang? And did they find my attacker?”

  “Kang was coming to see you,” the eunuch explained. “He saw her attacking you and shouted for help, then ran after her. It’s been almost an hour and they still haven’t returned.”

  Every muscle in her body went rigid at the feminine pronoun. “Who was it? Who did such a poor job of trying to kill me?”

  The eunuchs exchanged glances. “Lady Meng. She was drunk and barefoot in the snow and I don’t believe it will take long to find her. She’s as . . . troubled as everyone says. We heard her screaming something as she ran,” he added, flushing. “I don’t recall what it was.”

  Xifeng rolled her eyes. “Tell me.”

  “S-she said you weren’t satisfied with just the Crown Prince, so you had to make yourself His Majesty’s new . . . whore. And she said you had poisoned him against her and influenced him to get rid of her.”

  “She gives me entirely too much credit. I need to find Kang. Alone.” Xifeng tugged on a thick robe and slippers, ignoring their protests as she stormed back out into the frigid night.

  Another inch of snow had fallen, showing clear tracks: one larger and heavier, and the other smaller and barefoot. They led to the underground passageway, where no guards stood, and Xifeng felt a stab of foreboding as she descended.

  She knew where they had gone . . . as improbable as it seemed, for she had never told a soul about the hot springs.

  The lanterns were all lit in the cavern, illuminating the scene: Kang with his back to Xifeng, standing over the body of Lady Meng. He gripped a knife in one hand, and when Xifeng came closer, she saw the woman had died from multiple stab wounds. Her chest had been torn open and bloomed like a flower, the jagged petals of her ribs reaching for an impossible sun.

  The springs bubbled and roared as she gasped out, “Kang?”

  A monster turned around.

  There was no sign of her friend in his face. He wore a feral, predatory expression, and his smile was an obscene blood-red slash. The lidless eyes had no whites; they were two black holes glistening in the darkness. He was the monk from the encampment, from her dreams, from the nightmarish bronze mirror at the trade market. She had once thought Guma might have sent him to follow her—how wrong she had been, for no human could possibly control this creature.

  Xifeng stood her ground, though her palms moistened and her heart thundered, making the wound in her shoulder sting. “You,” she uttered. “You’ve been with me all this time?”

  The monster stared back without blinking. “I am your slave, dark queen. Your steward and confidante,” he said in Kang’s voice, and indicated Lady Meng’s corpse. “And now I am your huntsman as well. Don’t you remember the last time you saw me?”

  A figure robed and hooded, eyes glittering as he tore viciously into Lady Sun’s ribs . . .

  “You’re the Serpent God’s servant,” she gasped, and his ghastly mouth spread wider.

  He held his arms out and his long sleeves billowed like banners of war. “This is my true form. My harmless, bumbling human appearance requires me to expend magical energy. I take the trouble to do so in the palace, but I want you to know . . . I want you to see me as I am.”

  She took a tentative step forward and the monk-creature placed the concubine’s knife on the ground. He backed away courteously so she could examine the body. In death, Lady Meng’s once pretty face resembled a drained, contorted melon. Kang had stabbed her through the chest a dozen times, and the deep blue silk she wore was black from the blood that had gushed out.

  It seemed like years ago that Xifeng had bemoaned her fate in the village while Lady Meng rode past in a palanquin.

  “I saw her with that knife and I knew she had come for you. I was too late to stop her.” He sank to his knees. “Forgive me, my queen, and accept her heart as my gift of apology.”

  Xifeng closed her eyes. The girl’s lifeless face felt too much like a different version of her own future. Back in her town, she had longed to be Lady Meng. If that silly wish had been granted, she too might have been a concubine; she too might have been overpowered by desperation, by the tie to a man who neither loved nor valued her. By her hopeless longing for another and her sheer, breathtaking worthlessness.

  But now Xifeng held the Emperor in the palm of her hand, and Lady Meng was dead. How generous is fate, she thought. And how cruel.

  She bent to close the girl’s eyes, and underneath her pity grew the drumbeat of a relentless hunger, humming in her veins. “Tell me everything,” she commanded Kang.

  “I was born to a poor village fisherman not far from your town,” he said softly. “When I was twelve, the black snake lured me to the cave as he had done with your mother. He transformed into a man and promised me wealth and power beyond my dreams. He invited me to join him and his priests.”

  Kang spoke of a cave that was merely the mouth and throat of an entire world that had sprung up beneath the ground. There were dank woodlands, a serpentine jungle pungent with the breath of toxic flowers, an ocean that burned hotter than fire, and dagger-sharp mountains stabbing into the dark. This labyrinthine world housed the Serpent God’s demonic monastery.

  “It is a sordid reflection of the heavens,” Kang whispered reverently. “The opposite of all that is goodness and light, balancing the whole universe. When I turned fifteen, he unleashed me from this dark world to establish myself in the Empress’s service and wait here for you.
I pretended to be weak. I allowed Lady Sun to have me beaten so everyone could see how harmless, how silly poor, fat Kang was.” His mouth cracked in a humorless grin.

  Xifeng looked into his bottomless eyes. “I saw you at the encampment and the market.”

  “When the time came, he gave me the task of protecting you and ensuring your entry into court. The Serpent God knows you have great enemies. Someone outside of the palace wanted so much to destroy you, they would have killed all in your party if given the chance.”

  Xifeng’s blood froze. “The assassins who attacked us in the forest and killed two of Shiro’s men. Then they were sent for me. But by whom? I thought Empress Lihua . . .”

  “It was not her, but a threat far greater than any found on this earth. That is all I know. The Serpent God sent me to summon the tengaru, to stave off the impending violence in their forest—and rescue you. I had to get you to the palace alive.”

  That was why the tengaru had treated their group with fear and distrust. “The demons sensed something odd, something wrong about you. And therefore, me.”

  Kang sneered. “Those mules boast about their magic when in truth, they would bow to the Serpent God in a second if he bothered to challenge them.” His nostrils flared. “There is an army in that world below the earth, my queen, a dark legion of men and beasts he created. In the sunlight, they appear as black snakes, spiraling in the depths. And they are at your command.”

  The words raised the hairs on her arms and neck. “An army . . . at my command?”

  The monk-creature’s mouth was an abyss of sharp teeth and scarlet tongue. “You are the consort chosen by His Dark Majesty. He saw you in the sands of time and the winds of fortune. Always, he sensed your presence,” he said. “The great queen who would help him overtake the continent that should have been his from the beginning. His mark is on every kingdom, mountain, and ocean. The arrogant lordling who called himself the Dragon King could never have dreamed the lowly Lord of Surjalana would be so worthy of that title. And the Lord of Surjalana, the Serpent God, in turn, dreamed of a queen worthy of ruling alongside him.”

  Xifeng felt this truth wrap around her like an embrace.

  Hunger throbbed in her veins, and her tongue emerged from her mouth, licking the salt of her lips like it was the sweetest lifeblood. Deep in the remote corners of her mind, the apple tree appeared. How far it seemed from her now, how removed. Perhaps it had never been meant for her after all; perhaps she didn’t want it to be. She had been chosen for something far, far greater.

  “He found the witch who would be your mother and orchestrated your birth. He gave her the incense of snakeskin and black spice, and he left her the book of poetry to remind her what she owed him.” As Kang spoke, images flashed before Xifeng’s eyes: a woman screaming on blood-splattered grass, begging for death as a baby clawed its way out. “When she transmitted his teachings to you, she passed his spirit on as well, without knowing. And you allowed him to manifest his powers and thoughts within you.”

  “But she denounced him. She burned what he had given her and turned her back on him.”

  The monk-creature laughed softly. “She imagined herself to be free, the silly woman. But her soul became his the first time she adopted his teachings. It wouldn’t matter if she threw the cards of fortune into the deepest ocean. Once he takes hold, he never lets go.”

  Xifeng exhaled. “It’s true, then. I told Guma he might be controlling her . . . controlling me and my destiny all along.”

  “But you made the choices to get there. You did what it took to get yourself to the palace, to defeat your enemies, to put yourself before Emperor Jun. Your own two feet walked that dark road, as the Serpent God hoped they would.” Kang took a step closer, his dead eyes glimmering. “He is your father, your lover, your true king, and the maker of your fate. He loves you as no one ever has or ever will. Every heart you take, every drop of lifeblood you drink, brings you closer to him. The darkness you felt inside was his protection. He will be with you always and forever.”

  “What would he have me do?”

  The monster lowered himself beside Xifeng, his icy fingers running down her cheek. “Take your place as supreme Empress over all of Feng Lu. Strengthen yourself with the hearts of lesser beings and allow him to speak and act through you. And in return, you will have the whole of his power at your disposal,” Kang murmured. “There is only one true god, and it is him. You will gain control of the continent and deploy your army, and together the two of you will finish the work he started. This is your destiny. This is what your clumsy mother tried to engineer, believing it to be her own wish.”

  Xifeng opened her eyes to see Guma’s face floating in the mirror-water.

  A savage smile tore across Kang’s face. “She has been most useful to His Dark Majesty. But now her time is over and you must think of her no more. She has served her purpose.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The vision in the mirror-water changed to show, of all people, Wei. He galloped on his black steed like a creature of the dark world, bent forward through the Great Forest on his way to Guma. In his hands, he clasped a moon-steel sword and a bloody chrysanthemum—the warrior the cards of fortune had shown her, whose destiny was tied to hers.

  “I used him to gain your trust,” Kang said. “I arranged for you to meet him so you could see me as your friend. And now he will fulfill his purpose. He still loves you, the honorable fool he is. He thinks he can save you, and that your salvation will come with Guma’s end. He thinks you’ll be free at last.” His lidless eyes stared into hers, and his next words were shards piercing her flesh. “He left the envoy to kill your mother.”

  “No,” Xifeng cried, hot panic rising in her like bile, and it became a scream. “No!”

  The monster’s hand came down on her shoulder like a vise. “There is nothing we can do for her, and nothing more we need her for,” he said soothingly. “Her time has ended.”

  Guma, who had fed and clothed her, given her all she could, and taught her all she knew. That was what a mother did for her children—she made them strong and prepared them for the hardship and brutality of life. Guma had endured pain and fear, but she had still raised Xifeng. I wanted the world for you. The soft, tender mother Xifeng had imagined in Mingzhu and Lihua had been a childish illusion. She’d had a real mother, and she had abandoned her.

  “Why?” she sobbed. “Why must I suffer like this? Why must I always be the one to lose and to struggle with the darkness?”

  The emptiness inside her roared. She had deserted Guma, and now she would never hear her say, at last, that she loved Xifeng. Wei had taken that from her, that hot-blooded warrior who had loved her so deeply. Once her lover, and now her mortal enemy.

  “Wei,” she breathed, and it was a curse. She raked her fingers in the dirt, imagining shredding his beautiful golden skin into ribbons of flesh. The warrior on the card had held a bloodstained flower . . . but whose blood was it?

  Kang knelt before her with the concubine’s knife in his hands. “Being chosen by the Serpent God and facing this darkness makes you special,” he said in a low voice. “It sets you apart. Why would you want to be like everyone else?”

  Behind him, in the waterfall, she saw her own beautiful face. Slowly, it mutated into something horrid: the fresh youth became a pockmarked, wrinkled visage ravaged by the cruelty of time. She trembled as the ruthless mirror-water stripped her of her beauty. Wei would not have loved her without it, she felt certain. Lihua would not have been drawn to her, and Jun would not have pursued her.

  Your beauty is all you are, and all you have, Guma had once told her. Your only weapon.

  “You have a choice.” Kang’s words sounded hauntingly familiar.

  Once before, Xifeng had chosen to accept the Serpent God’s assistance. She had let him help her destroy Lady Sun. This time, he was asking something of her—something th
at would ultimately help her as much as it did him.

  She could refuse him. She could return to her town in poverty and obscurity. She could grow old and ugly alone while the concubines’ bodies remained beautiful forever, locked in time in the springs. And everything she had been through—including Wei’s loss and Guma’s death—would have been for nothing.

  Or Xifeng could accept him and fulfill the destiny even Guma had not fully understood. She could remain forever young and beautiful, a powerful Empress and the Serpent God’s consort, living on the hearts of her enemies. She could surrender what was left of the light others had seen in her—the light Wei had taken with him when he left her. She could give up her old self to the darkness, completely, with both hands open.

  Do not resist me, echoed the voice she knew so well.

  Once again, she had a choice to make. So Xifeng chose.

  “I have no intention of resisting you,” she said.

  “Why would you want to be like everyone else?” Kang repeated.

  And she agreed with him. She agreed in the way her fingers closed on the blade, in the way she used it to dig into Lady Meng’s chest, and in the way she closed her lips around the blistering heat of the concubine’s heart. She was special, with every bite, every stream of blood spurting from her ravenous mouth. She was a monster, a bride of the darkness, and she rose to face her destiny as though it were the blood-red sunrise of a new day.

  Xifeng returned to the royal apartments to hear screaming from Empress Lihua’s bedchamber. Maidservants and ladies-in-waiting rushed in and out with pale faces, their eyes wide with fear. The Imperial physician stood in the corridor barking orders to his assistants, who raced past without a second glance.

  “Is it happening? Is the child coming?” she asked one of the ladies.

  “No,” was the grim reply. “Her Majesty has been poisoned.”