Fox and Phoenix

by Beth Bernobich

  “Yāo-guài,” I whispered.

  The griffin emerged from the straw, his eyes bright and eager, chuckling softly. Without me saying anything, he wriggled underneath my shirt. I fiddled a while longer, then lurched back gracelessly to my old spot, between the wagon and the gate. Quan had inched closer too, but not much. Danzu was opposite us. And Jing-mei was lifting the last item from the last crate for the captain’s inspection.

  Time for ingenuity, I thought.

  I yelped as loud as I could. All three guards swung around to face me.

  Danzu bent down to his boot. In one swift motion, he’d extracted his knife and nailed one guard by the shoulder. Quan downed the second one with a rock to the temple. At the same time, I flung Yāo-guài into the air. The griffin swooped at the captain and snatched the talk-phone from her wrist, then disappeared in a cloud of glittering magic. Before the woman could react, Jing-mei grabbed her around the neck, squeezed tightly, and lowered her to the stones, unconscious. Quan and I took care of the other guards, and soon had them bound and gagged.

  “Hurry,” Jing-mei said. “We don’t have much time before the patrols return.”

  She searched the captain for keys to the gates. Quan and I released Lian and Yún from their crate. Among all of us, we unharnessed the horses and got them inside the palace storerooms. The wagon we left outside to confuse our pursuers. Then we took off at a run for the nearest stairwell to the upper floors.

  We met Gan in the hall of Royal Audience Chambers for Intimate Friends and Enemies. A dozen guards followed him, most of them young, but also one or two senior officers. “Your Highness,” Gan said, with a salute. “I brought a squad of loyal men for your protection.”

  Lian’s eyes shone bright with emotion. “I thank you all. I will remember this.”

  From far off came a thundering, as though a hundred feet galloped toward us. Lian pointed toward a side corridor and a wooden door that screamed servants’ passage. All but three of Gan’s friends took up positions at the foot of the stairs, their weapons ready. Gan and two others followed us up the narrow winding stairs. In the back of my mind, I heard Chen grunting in eagerness, and a faint whistling from Qi. Jun had turned visible, bristling with anger, her fox tail switching back and forth.

  We reached the next landing. A crash and shouts echoed from below. Lian never hesitated. She swung the door open and marched into the room beyond, with Quan a step behind and their companion spirits swarming after them. The rest of us spilled into a brightly lit chamber.

  It was just like the vision the ghost dragon king showed me—crowds of servants hurrying this way and that, a line of courtiers off to one side, gossiping, and in the middle, the bed where the king lay. Two royal physicians, surrounded by their attendants, gave orders and counter-orders. And there was a third physician, this one dressed in layers of silk robes. His collar was trimmed with silver lynx tails. His sleeves were embroidered with symbols of health and influence.

  Quan shoved through the crowd to the bed. He bent over the thin, old man who lay unmoving underneath the linen sheets and pressed his fingertips against the slack throat. The king’s face was as pale as new parchment, his wrists limp atop the sheet. He looked dead, I thought, then gulped to think my ill-thoughts might rise to heaven to influence the gods.

  Tense and unmoving, Quan listened. “He lives,” he said at last. “Just.”

  Lian, at his side, released a cry. “Can you save him?”

  “I will do everything possible.”

  Our entrance had frozen everyone. Now shouts went up, the attendants scattered to summon the guards. The third physician, the stranger to Lóng City, tried to drag Quan away from the king. “You idiot,” the man bleated. “You will disturb the pattern of my spells. Do you wish to murder the king?”

  Lian’s fingers closed over the man’s arm. “Excuse me. Your patient is my father. My beloved father. Make way for the physician I choose.”

  Quan laid his hands over Wencheng Li’s chest and closed his eyes. His lips moved rapidly in recitation of healing spells, a staccato dance of syllables that seemed never to repeat itself. And then I caught the pattern, one so very complicated and delicate, as though I watched the pattern of snowflakes in a blizzard. The air around us drew tight. More and more magic flux flooded the room.

  Pêng! Yāo-guài materialized at the foot of the bed. His gaze fixed upon the king, he crept closer, panting audibly. Quan paused in his recitation. His eyes widened—I wished I could read his thoughts—then he laid a hand over the griffin’s folded wings and recited a new series of words...

  ... and the king drew a long breath and opened his eyes. “Lian,” he whispered.

  “I am here.” Lian touched her father’s cheek, his forehead. “I was wrong—wrong to leave you, wrong to—I will never do it again.”

  “Not wrong. My brave daughter.”

  Quan had stepped back to make way for Lian. He was studying the king with narrowed eyes. A troubled, uneasy look—the look of a doctor who dislikes the signs in his patient. Everyone else had frozen again, so I sidled between to courtiers to reach his side. “What’s wrong?” I whispered.

  “I’m not certain. There’s a strange blankness over his heart.”

  ... a blank, a void, where the sickness eats at him.

  The ghost dragon’s words came back to me. “But you cured him.”

  “Not exactly. Not completely. That . . . thing still eats at him. And there are signs of other magic at work. Magic that heals and doesn’t—”

  He broke off. “Hēi! You, there. Stop!”

  He swung around and grappled the stranger physician to the floor. A dozen palace minions threw themselves on the pair. More servants and guards surged forward into battle. Animal spirits materialized from everywhere: pig, crane, fox, and phoenix. Other spirits—from the guards and courtiers—flickered in and out of view. Gan and I waded into the mess, both of us throwing punches. Someone grabbed me around the waist and hauled me away. It was Yún.

  “Don’t make trouble,” she said.

  She had a lump over one eye and a bloody nose. My lip split as I grinned at her. Then we turned back to rescue our friends. In a few moments, we’d separated Danzu and Jing-mei from two hulking guards. The stranger physician crawled out from underneath a pile of minions. He was covered in bruises, and someone had ripped the lynx tails from his collar. He looked like he might dart for the nearest exist, but then Nuó appeared and seized his arm in her teeth.

  Quan emerged from the chaos. He gripped a chain in one hand. The links were tiny, fashioned out of a whitish-grayish material that made my stomach turn queasy when I tried to look directly at it. Dangling from the bottom was a twisted mass of the same material. Its shape reminded me of a squashed spider, its legs sprawled in all directions. I noticed that Quan held the chain well away from himself and Lian.

  “The spider of death,” he said in a thick voice.

  Yún turned pale. “Are you . . . never mind. You would know.”

  Quan rounded on the stranger. “Where did you acquire this loathsome thing?”

  The man’s eyes popped wide into moon circles. “I didn’t. You can’t prove it. You—”

  “Shut up.” Quan squeezed his hand over the chain and spoke a word. A loud crack echoed through the chamber and my stomach lurched into my throat.

  The thing vanished in a puff of acrid smoke.

  Lian cried out. We all turned to see Wencheng Li attempting to rise. He fell back almost at once. When Lian dropped to her knees, he laid a hand on her head. Sweat poured from his face, but he was breathing, deep strong breaths, and there was an angry gleam in his eyes. “Begone,” he said to the minions that hovered over him. “I would talk to my daughter. To her alone.”

  “Take this man way,” Gan said to the guards. He glanced at Nuó. “If you don’t mind.”

  Even though Gan was a grunt and no officer, the guards rushed to obey. Soon the crowds had melted away. Jing-mei, Danzu, Yún, and I hesitated, uncertai
n where to go. All our companions—except for Nuó—had vanished into the spirit plane. Quan remained where he’d been standing, his hand still clutched around what had been a necklace. Slowly, he unfolded his fingers. Ashes floated to the floor.

  “You did it,” I said.

  “Yes.” But his expression flitted from confused to more confused. “Nothing can withstand the spider of death,” he murmured, more to himself than to me. “And yet the king has lived nearly two months. Almost dead, but not quite. I don’t understand . . .”

  Another ear-popping crack reverberated through the chamber. An enormous ghost dragon materialized, filling the room with its translucent body. Silver scales, like wisps of mist and snow, coiled around us all. My breath hiccupped as I realized their pattern was a magical one. Of course. And yet, I’d never paused long enough to notice before. The king of Lóng City’s ghost dragons caught my gaze. His inner eyelid quivered in a wink for me alone, then he swung his head toward the king. My friend.

  His voice made the air and stone tremble.

  Wencheng Li’s eyes fluttered open. “My friend. You saved my life.”

  Hardly. The dragon’s lips curled back in a soundless laugh. I sent minions. Those two. He pointed a claw at me and Yún. Your daughter brought the man who saved you. But until they could breach the many obstacles set by the Phoenix emperor, I asked a great favor of my other old friend.

  His jaws stretched open. A silvery mist flowed out—a cloud of magic flux that slowly resolved into a very familiar figure—a small slight figure, with bright black eyes and a fierce gaze.

  “Mā mī?” I croaked.

  And fainted.

  19

  “YOUR MOTHER IS THE MOST ASTONISHING PERSON I know,” Lian said.

  “All demons are astonishing,” I muttered.

  Lian merely smiled and poured out two cups of smoke-gray tea. “You must learn to see her as others do.”

  “As what? A half-demon?”

  “Ah, now you are being deliberately obtuse, my friend.”

  I scowled, but said nothing. It was all part of a grand ceremony, where we sipped our tea, delicately and formally, and kept our voices pitched low, in what the nobles called Everlasting Tranquility. We also wore our stiffest, most elaborate costumes. Lian, with her crown and jewels, could have challenged anyone in the Phoenix Court. Me, I wore a newly tailored shirt and trousers, and a short-sleeved robe decorated with silver threads and golden magic. That was because ours was more than a meeting between two almost-old friends. Today was for the royal princess and one of her trusted advisors.

  Oh, yeah, me.

  Two weeks had passed since we smuggled Lian into the palace and Quan rescued her father from a slow, miserable death. I’d thought our troubles were over, but I was wrong again. First, Lian had to summon the Guild Council and the king’s ministers to explain what had happened in the Phoenix Empire. Yún, Quan, and I served as witnesses. My mother, too, came forward and gave her account. She knew magic was involved, she explained, but she didn’t have the key to its power. She and the ghost dragon king had conferred, and agreed that she would remain behind, working spell after spell to sustain the king’s life, while her worthless son and her most valuable assistant traveled to the Phoenix Empire to fetch the princess.

  “There were plots underway,” she’d said, in her driest voice. “And so the ghost dragon king agreed to shelter me from view until the matter was resolved.”

  Only Mā mī, I thought, could call two months in the ghost dragon king’s belly shelter.

  After the ministers and Guild finished with her, or my mother with them, the court interrogated the false physician. They confirmed what I could have guessed in two seconds—that the man was a spy and agent for the Phoenix emperor, sent to disrupt Lóng City’s government, so that Lian would have no choice but to marry the emperor’s son. But I guess the muckety-mucks like to have all kinds of ceremony, so they dragged out the interrogation for three days, then opened another session with the ministers and the Guild to report their findings.

  Speaking of ceremony, this was another one.

  “You have saved my father’s life,” Lian said.

  “Quan did that.”

  She smiled, a more secretive smile. “True. And he will receive his reward. If he wishes it.”

  I’d guessed that much, too. “When’s the wedding?”

  Her gaze, as sharp as a knife, flicked up to mine. “When I ask and if he accepts.”

  “Oh, he will. He’s not that stupid.”

  For a moment, I thought I’d gone too far, because Lian’s face scrunched into a very odd expression, as though she couldn’t make up her mind whether to laugh, or snort, or order me executed by Death of a Thousand Cuts. She settled on merely exasperated. “Never mind about Quan. You are the reason for this meeting.”

  She touched her palm to a polished silver square set into the tabletop. A servant entered carrying a velvet cushion. On it was a small leather cylinder, with brass caps at both ends. The caps were engraved with dozens of tiny symbols. More symbols were burnt into the leather. Recognizing the official seals of the kings of Lóng City, I nearly whistled.

  “Your reward,” Lian said, presenting me with the cylinder. “With my word and this device, you are given freedom from all taxes and fees within the kingdom, for your life, the lives of your children, and so unto the distant future. You are named Friend of the Throne, and Brother of My Heart. Your debts are mine. Your sustenance shall be paid from my purse. My faith and loyalty are yours forever.”

  My hand shook as I accepted the cylinder. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Try, ‘You’re welcome, Princess.’”

  I regarded her suspiciously. “Isn’t that supposed to be ‘Thank you’?”

  “Not in your case.”

  I tried several different replies, but it took a while before my voice worked properly. “If I’m your friend, what about Yún? And the others?”

  “Yún and I have spoken already. If you wish to know how I rewarded her, you must ask her yourself. Gan will receive a purse of gold and a promotion. So will the guards he brought. As for Jing-mei and Danzu, they come to me tomorrow for an audience. There are certain matters to forgive. Nothing that we cannot achieve.”

  Kings and queens spoke a peculiar language, my mother always said. “Forgive” could mean any number of things, from nothing at all, to fines, to much, much worse. But this was Lian, and she would not forget that these two had helped her, even when it meant facing punishment later.

  I cleared my throat. “And my mother?”

  “She will have whatever she wishes. Though I doubt she will accept much. She is very . . . independent.”

  “Astonishing,” I agreed blandly.

  Lian’s mouth quirked into a smile. “An excellent word.”

  We drank more tea, nibbled some fancy pastries. (Pepper pastries. Someone must have told stories. Probably Chen to Lian’s fox spirit, Jun.) There were particular protocols for formal visits such as this one, so neither of us hurried. Besides, it was nice to sit in a pretty room, scented with cinnamon and cedar, drinking expensive tea.

  “What about your studies?” I said at last. “Are you sorry they ended so soon?”

  “Yes. No. I learned a great deal from the university, but I grew to dislike the palace.”

  We exchanged wry smiles at her understatement.

  “You could find another university,” I offered. “One without any power-mad emperors.”

  She shook her head. “My father is old. My duty is here. Also, Quan and I have talked about that. There are a hundred or more small schools all through the Seventy Kingdoms, but no true universities. We might establish our own in Lóng City. Some of those scholars in the mountain schools might join us, and Quan knows others in the empire who are excellent scholars, who need a post. Some of them are cousins . . .”

  Quan and his one million cousins. I wanted to envy him. I think I had at one time. He was smart, honorable, brave, and
competent. Now? I remembered his face, when he thought he’d lost Lian’s trust, and I was glad for him.

  Lian and I talked a while longer. Quan had started work on a new hospital for Lóng City’s poor. Lian’s father had recovered from the magical illness, but his ordeal had left him weakened. Lian would take his place in the trade negotiations when they reopened. She also spent hours with him and his ministers, discussing how to deal with the Phoenix emperor’s displeasure once the snows melted and the mountains were passable.

  Eventually, all conventions satisfied, I took my leave from Lian and the Golden Egg Crate. Lian had offered to order me a special carriage, but I’d had enough of fancy things. I walked to the nearest wind-and-magic lift and tossed a ten-yuan coin at the old woman. The lifts were running half speed in winter, with more wind than magic. Two easy stops later, the carriage doors opened and I strolled home through a drifting of snow to the West Moon Wind District and my mother’s tutoring shop.

  She sat at the front counter, ink brush in hand, checking her accounts with abacus and calculor. One of the shop cats snored on a sack in the corner. The griffin coiled around her inkstand, evidently dreaming, because it was twitching and making soft chirping noises. Yāo-guài belonged to both of us now, my mother had explained. Our magics had entwined in that accidental explosion and brought him to life. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, either.

  I paused at the door, and my mother glanced up. Her eyebrows quirked above those bright black eyes. “Staying or running?” she asked.

  We hadn’t talked since that night two weeks ago. Mā mī slept a lot. But even when she woke and puttered around the shop, I found other things to do. Mostly running up and down Lóng City’s staircases. It wasn’t that I hated her. I just wasn’t sure what I’d say. Something angry, probably.

  I blew out a breath. “Staying.”