For so long she’d been fighting a mad, hopeless, desperate war. And now it looked so very, very winnable.
Ever so faintly in the back of her mind, though muted and strained by the spiritual back door that ran through Kitay’s mind, she heard the Phoenix laughing, too—the low, harsh cackle of a deity who had finally gotten everything it had wanted.
“Fuck you all,” she whispered at the coiling smoke that dissipated up into the reforming mist. She made a rude gesture with her hand. “That’s for Speer.”
She would have seen something if anyone in the Heavenly Temple were still alive. She would have seen movement. As she stared, the mountain mist played tricks on her eyes, kept making her believe she’d caught the faintest glimpse of a silhouette stumbling out of the pagoda. But whenever she looked closer, all she saw was smoke.
It took a few moments for her rational mind to start working again.
Basics first. First she had to get off this mountain. Then she had to get medical care. Her open wounds weren’t deep, and most of them had stopped bleeding, but a million other things—exposure, cracked ribs, bruised organs—might kill her if she didn’t move fast.
But moving was agony. Her knees buckled with every step. Her ribs shrieked in protest every time she breathed. She clenched her teeth and willed herself to trudge forward. She couldn’t manage more than a pathetic lurch with every step. The pain in her legs intensified—something, somewhere, was broken. It didn’t matter. Kitay was waiting for her below. She just had to get back to Kitay.
Silent wreckage littered the base of Mount Tianshan. Not just the debris of ruined dirigibles—Nezha’s bombers had also decimated Cholang’s troops. She saw fragments of ground cannons mixed in with airship shells. Craters formed horribly clean hemispheres in the dirt.
She stood a moment in the silence, breathing in the ash. Nothing moved. She was the only survivor in sight.
Then she heard it—a distorted hum, the sloping whine of a dying engine. She spun around. Looked up.
In the moonlight she saw only its black silhouette—small but growing, flying straight toward her. It wouldn’t make it. Whatever kept it alight was ruined—she saw smoke trailing out the back in thick, billowing clouds.
But it was still firing.
Fuck.
Rin dropped to the ground.
The bullets scattered pointlessly across scorched ground. The pilot wasn’t aiming, he just needed to destroy something, anything, before his life spiraled out of his hands. The dirigible loosed one last round of cannons, then careened into the side of the mountain and exploded in a ball of fire.
She stood up, unscathed.
“You missed me!” she screamed at the mountainside, at the spot where plumes furled up from the last dirigible’s wreckage. “You fucking missed!”
Of course no one answered. Her voice, thin and reedy, faded without echo into the frigid air.
But she screamed it again, and then again, and then again. It felt so good to say that she’d survived, that she’d fucking finally come out on top, that she didn’t even care that she was screaming to corpses.
Part III
Chapter 22
Arlong, Nine Years Prior
“Nezha.” Yin Vaisra beckoned with one finger. “Come here.”
Delighted, Nezha ran to his side. He’d been in the middle of a grueling Classics lesson, but his tutor had bowed and left the room as soon as his father appeared in the doorway.
“How go your studies?” Vaisra asked. “Are you working hard?”
Nezha swallowed his instinct to babble, instead mulling carefully over his response. Vaisra had never asked him questions like this before; he’d never displayed much interest in any of his children except Jinzha. Nezha didn’t want his father to think him a braggart or a fool.
“Tutor Chau says I’m progressing well,” he said cautiously. “I’ve mastered the fundamentals of Old Nikara grammar, and I can now recite one hundred and twenty-two poems from the Jin dynasty. Next week we’ll—”
“Good.” Vaisra sounded neither particularly interested nor pleased. He turned. “Walk with me.”
Somewhat crestfallen, Nezha followed his father out of the eastern wing into the main reception hall. He wasn’t quite sure where they were going. The palace of Arlong was a grand, chilly place consisting mostly of empty air and long, high-ceilinged hallways draped with tapestries depicting the history of the Dragon Province dating back to the fall of the Red Emperor’s dynasty.
Vaisra paused before a detailed portrait of Yin Vara, the former Dragon Warlord before the Second Poppy War. Nezha had always hated this tapestry. He’d never known his grandfather, but Vara’s stern, gaunt visage made him feel small and insignificant every time he passed beneath.
“Have you ever wanted to rule, Nezha?” Vaisra asked.
Nezha frowned, confused. “Why would I?”
Ruling had never been in his stars. Jinzha, the firstborn son, stood to inherit the title of Dragon Warlord and all the responsibilities that came with it. Nezha was only the second son. He was destined to become a soldier, his brother’s most loyal general.
“You’ve never considered it?”
Nezha felt vaguely as if he were failing a test, but he didn’t know what else to say. “It’s not my place.”
“No, I suppose not.” Vaisra was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “Would you like to hear a story?”
A story? Nezha hesitated, unsure of how to respond. Vaisra never told him stories. But although Nezha had no idea how to converse with his father, he couldn’t bear to let this opportunity pass.
“Yes,” he said carefully. “I would.”
Vaisra glanced down at him. “Do you know why we don’t let you go to those grottoes?”
Nezha perked up. “Because of the monsters?”
Would this be a monster story? He hoped it would be. He felt a flicker of excitement. His childhood nurses knew that his favorite tales were about the myriad beasts rumored to lurk in the grottoes—the dragons, the cannibal crabs, the fish-women who made you love them and then drowned you once you got too close.
“Monsters?” Vaisra chuckled. Nezha had never heard his father chuckle before. “Do you like the grotto stories?”
Nezha nodded. “Very much.”
Vaisra put a hand on his shoulder.
Nezha suppressed a flinch. He wasn’t afraid of his father’s touch—Vaisra had never been violent toward him. But Vaisra had never caressed him like this, either. Hugs, kisses, reassuring touches—those belonged to Nezha’s mother, Lady Saikhara, who nearly suffocated her children with affection.
Nezha had always thought of his father as a statue—remote, foreboding, and untouchable. Vaisra seemed to him less like a man than a god, the perfect ideal of everything he’d been raised to become. Every word Yin Vaisra articulated was direct and concise, every action efficient and deliberate. Never did he show his children affection beyond the odd somber nod of approval. Never did he tell fairy tales.
So what was going on?
For the first time Nezha noticed that his father’s eyes looked somewhat glassy, that his speech seemed much slower than usual. And his breath . . . a pungent, sour smell wafted into Nezha’s face every time Vaisra spoke. Nezha had smelled that odor twice before—once in the servants’ quarters, when he’d been wandering around past bedtime where he shouldn’t have been, and once in Jinzha’s room.