A phoenix to match the emperor’s dragon. To breathe new life into the country, helping it rise from the ashes of war.
The attendants lowered the palanquin, but Lady Sarnai didn’t step out. She was wailing so loudly that even from the back of the square, I could hear her. In some villages, it was the tradition for a bride to wail before her wedding, a sign of respect for her parents to show that she was distressed to leave them.
But how unlike the shansen’s daughter.
A soldier parted the carriage’s curtains, and Lady Sarnai tottered forward to join the emperor and her father. An embroidered veil of ruby silk covered her face, and the train of her gown dragged behind her, crimson in the fragile moonlight. It did not even shimmer, as any of the dresses I’d made for her would have: woven with the laughter of the sun, embroidered with the tears of the moon, and painted with the blood of stars. Strange, that Khanujin would not have insisted she wear one of Amana’s dresses to show off to the shansen.
I frowned as she continued to wail, a shrill sound that pierced the tense silence.
She bowed before her father, then before the emperor, falling to her knees.
Slowly, ceremoniously, Emperor Khanujin began to lift her veil. The drumming began again, growing louder, faster, until it was so deafening my ears buzzed and the world began to spin.
Then—as the drums reached their thunderous climax—someone let out a scream.
My eyes snapped open. The shansen had shoved Khanujin aside and seized his daughter by the neck. Now he held her, shrieking and kicking, above the Hall of Harmony’s eighty-eight steps—and he ripped off her veil.
The bride was not Lady Sarnai.
CHAPTER TWO
The false princess’s legs thrashed wildly beneath her skirts, the long satin train of her wedding robes rippling beneath her.
“Where is my daughter?” the shansen roared.
Already, everyone around me was placing bets on the poor girl’s fate. Would the shansen slit her throat—or would the emperor beat him to it? No, they’d let her live until she talked. Then they’d kill her.
“I—I—I—I d-don’t know,” she blubbered, her wailing intensifying before she repeated, “I don’t know.”
She let out a scream as the shansen dropped her onto the stone steps.
“Find my daughter!” he barked at the emperor. “Find Sarnai, or there will be no wedding—only war.”
The warning hushed everyone in the square.
Where was Lady Sarnai? Didn’t she care that thousands would die if this marriage did not proceed?
“The war would never end,” Keton had told me. My youngest brother so rarely spoke of his time fighting for Khanujin, I could not forget his words: “Not unless the emperor and the shansen came to a truce. At dawn of the New Year, they met to make peace. The shansen agreed to withdraw his men from the South and reaffirm his loyalty to the emperor. In return, Emperor Khanujin would take the shansen’s daughter to be his empress and tie their bloodlines together.
“But the shansen’s daughter refused. She had fought alongside her father’s army. I’d seen her myself—fierce as any warrior. She must have killed at least fifty men that day.” Keton had paused. “It was said she threatened to kill herself rather than marry the emperor.”
When Keton had shared this story, I doubted its truth. What girl wouldn’t want to marry a man as magnificent as Emperor Khanujin?
But now that I had met Lady Sarnai—and the emperor—I knew better.
Gods, I hoped she hadn’t done anything rash.
I stood on my toes to get a better look at what was happening, but a shooting pain stabbed the back of my eyes and they began to burn. Urgently, I rubbed them. Tears came, trying to wash out the heat. But my pupils only burned more fiercely, and I saw a blood-red sheen reflect onto the track of tears smeared on my palm.
No, no, no—not now. I covered my face, hiding the mark of Bandur’s curse, the terrible price I had paid to make Lady Sarnai’s dresses and secure peace for A’landi.
My heart began to pound in my chest, my stomach fluttering wildly. A rush of heat boiled through my body, and I crumpled to the ground.
Then, suddenly the burning in my eyes vanished.
My vision cleared. I no longer saw the people around me clamoring in commotion. I heard them chattering and fidgeting, but they were far, far away. My eyes and ears were somewhere else, outside of my body.
I was there, on the steps of the Hall of Harmony. The air reeked of sulfur and saltpeter from the fireworks; the sky was scarred with stripes of white smoke.
I saw the girl, her rose-painted lips and tear-streaked cheeks, and I recognized her—she was one of Lady Sarnai’s maids. Imperial guards pulled her up the steps as the emperor approached.
He struggled to contain his ire—his fingers twitching at his sides, inches from his dagger, whose golden hilt was artfully hidden under layers of silk robes and a thick sash with dangling jade amulets.
He knelt beside her, taking her hands into his and untying the cords that bound her wrists. Once, he’d crouched beside me the same way, when I’d been a prisoner. How marvelous I’d thought him then, unaware that I was under a powerful spell the emperor’s Lord Enchanter had cast over him.
Without Edan’s magic, sweat glistened down the nape of Khanujin’s neck, and his back strained under the heavy weight of his imperial robes.
I wondered if the shansen noticed.
The emperor tilted the maid’s chin up to him, his fingers pressed so hard against her jaw they would leave bruises. Cold fury raked his black eyes.
“Speak,” he commanded.
“Her Highness…didn’t say. She…she asked us to drink some tea with her to celebrate her betrothal to you, and we couldn’t refuse.” The maid buried her face into the hem of Khanujin’s robes.
“So, she poisoned you.”
Fear punctuated her sharp, gulping breaths. “When I woke, I was dressed in her clothes, and she said that if I did not pretend to be her, she would kill me.”
Khanujin let go of her. He raised an arm, likely to order that she be taken away and executed somewhere quietly, when—
“Lord Xina is gone!” one of the shansen’s men cried.
Like whiplash, my sight broke. Whatever had stolen me from my body hurled me back again, until I was among the emperor’s servants as before, ears ringing with the uproar over Lord Xina’s disappearance.
“Find them!” Khanujin shouted. “Ten thousand jens to whoever finds the shansen’s daughter and brings her to me. And death by nine degrees to anyone caught aiding her escape.”