Mama had no spring.
Her autumn began with a stray cough here and there, always covered up with a smile. She forgot to add cabbage to the pork dumplings Finlei loved so much, and she forgot the names of the heroes in the stories she’d tell Sendo and me before we went to sleep. She even let Keton win at cards and gave him too much money to spend on his errands in the marketplace.
I hadn’t given much thought to these slips. Mama would have told us if she wasn’t feeling well.
Then one winter morning, just as I’d finished adorning our statues of Amana with our three dresses—of the sun, the moon, and the stars—Mama fainted in the kitchen.
I shook her. I was still small, and her head was heavy when I lifted it to rest on my lap.
“Baba!” I screamed. “Baba! She won’t wake up!”
That morning, everything changed. Instead of praying to my ancestors to wish them well in their afterlife, I prayed that they spare Mama. I prayed to Amana, to the three statues I’d painted and clothed, to let her live. To let Mama see my brothers and me grow up, and not to let her leave Baba, who loved her so much, alone.
Every time I closed my eyes and pictured the future, I saw my family whole. I saw Mama next to Baba, laughing, and teasing us all with the fragrant smells of her cooking. I saw my brothers surrounding me—Finlei reminding me to sit straight, Sendo slipping me an extra tangerine, and Keton pulling on my braids.
How wrong I was.
Mama died a week before my eighth birthday. I spent my birthday sewing white mourning clothes for my family, which we wore for the next one hundred days. That year, the winter felt especially cold.
I cut the red thread off my ankle. Seeing how broken Baba was without Mama, I didn’t want to be tied to anyone and suffer the same pain.
As the years passed, my faith in the gods faded, and I stopped believing in magic. I shuttered my dreams and poured myself into keeping our family together, into being strong for Baba, for my brothers, for myself.
Every time a little happiness dared to seep into the cracks of my heart and tried to make it full again, fate intervened to remind me I couldn’t escape my destiny. Fate took my heart and crushed it little by little: when Finlei died, then Sendo, and when Keton returned with broken legs and ghosts in his eyes.
The Maia of yesterday picked up those pieces and painstakingly sewed them back together. But I was no longer that Maia.
Beginning today, things would be different. Beginning today, when fate caught me, I’d meet it head-on and make it my own.
Beginning today, I would have no heart.
CHAPTER ONE
Thousands of red lanterns illuminated the Autumn Palace, suspended on strings so fine the lights looked like kites floating from roof to roof. I could have watched them all night, dancing on the wind and painting the twilight with a burnished glow—but my mind was elsewhere. For beneath the sea of bobbing lights, the Square of Splendid Harmony was staged for an imperial wedding.
Seeing all this red, in celebration of Emperor Khanujin’s marriage to Lady Sarnai, should have gladdened me. I’d worked so hard and sacrificed so much for the peace their union would finally bring to A’landi.
But I wasn’t the same Maia as before.
The Autumn Palace’s vermillion gates rumbled, and I pushed through the throng of servants to catch a glimpse of the wedding procession. At its helm would be Lady Sarnai’s father, the shansen. I wanted to see the man who had bled my country from within, whose war had taken two of my brothers, and whose name alone made grown men shudder.
The shansen, his gold-plated armor shining like dragon scales from under his rich emerald robes, rode on a majestic white stallion. Gray touched the tips of his beard and eyebrows. He did not look as fearsome as I had pictured—until I saw his eyes; they gleamed like black pearls, fierce as his daughter’s, but crueler.
Behind him rode his favored warrior, Lord Xina, followed by the shansen’s three sons, all with their father’s dark, unsettling eyes, and a legion of soldiers wearing patches on their sleeves embroidered with the shansen’s emblem—a tiger.
“The shansen will mount the steps to the Hall of Harmony,” announced Chief Minister Yun loudly, “where his daughter, Sarnai Opai’a Makang, will be presented as our emperor’s bride.
“Tomorrow,” Chief Minister Yun continued, “the Procession of Gifts will be presented to the emperor’s court. On the third day, Lady Sarnai will formally ascend to her place as empress beside Emperor Khanujin, Son of Heaven. A final banquet will be held to celebrate their marriage in the eyes of the gods.”
The wedding music swelled and merged with the clatter of the shansen and his men marching up the stairs. Firecrackers clapped, loud as thunder, and each stroke of the wedding drums boomed so deep the earth beneath my soles thrummed. Eight men strode across the hall bearing a golden carriage draped with embroidered silk and armored with glazed tiles painted with turquoise-and-gold dragons.
When the shansen took his place before the hall, Emperor Khanujin stepped out of his palanquin. The music ceased, and we all bowed to the ground.
“Ruler of a hundred lands,” we chanted, “Khagan of Kings, Son of Heaven, Favored of Amana, our Glorious Sovereign of A’landi. May you live ten thousand years.”
“Welcome, Lord Makangis,” Emperor Khanujin greeted him. “It is an honor to receive you at the Autumn Palace.”
Fireworks exploded from behind the palace, shooting high beyond the stars.
“Ah!” everyone gasped, marveling at the sight.
Briefly, I marveled too. I’d never seen fireworks before. Sendo tried to describe them to me once, though he’d never seen them either.
“They’re like lotuses blooming in the sky, made of fire and light,” he’d said.
“How do they get up so high?”
“Someone shoots them.” He’d shrugged when I frowned at him, skeptical. “Don’t make that face at me, Maia. I don’t know everything. Maybe it’s magic.”
“You say that about everything you don’t know how to explain.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
I had laughed. “I don’t believe in magic.”
But as the fireworks burst into the sky now, lurid splatters of yellow and red against the black night, I knew magic looked nothing like this. Magic was the blood of stars falling from the sky, the song of my enchanted scissors—eager to make a miracle out of thread and hope. Not colored dust flung into the sky.
While those around me cheered, eight more young men carried another golden palanquin toward the emperor. Lanterns hung from its every side, illuminating an elaborately painted phoenix.