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Xifeng felt better when they entered the sun-dappled shade on the edge of the forest. Her heart slowed as the breeze cooled her feverish face. Wei set her down gently against a tree and knelt before her, concern softening his savage features.
“What happened?” he asked.
She put a hand to her cheek, surprised to find it wet. “I saw something horrible. A vision of death.” She bit her trembling lip and felt his eyes go to her mouth immediately. He was so aware of her every movement, even the whisper of her lashes against her cheek. “It happened last night, too, when Guma read the cards for me.”
“The cards.” Wei shook off the words like gnats. “I thought I smelled her demon-scent on you. She’s made you ill again with her sorcery nonsense.”
“It’s not nonsense,” Xifeng protested, though she could hear her own uncertainty. Nightmares of pain and death had tormented her for years, visions woven by the creature inside her. But Guma’s incense had alwayshad the curious effect of bringing these terrors into day, blurring her dreams with reality.
“If you want to believe something, believe you should be free of her. Why stay?”
Xifeng felt the truth in his words, but at the same time, she remembered Guma stroking her cheek so tenderly. “She raised me, and I have a duty toward her,” she said softly. “She’s the only mother I have.”
“Mothers may be strict with their children, but they’re not cruel to them,” Wei argued. “She’ll never love you, no matter what you do.” He put his arms around her, and she leaned her head against his comforting bulk. “Let me take you away from here. Please.”
“Where would we go?”
“Does it matter, as long as we’re together?”
She raised her face and pressed her mouth against his hard, unsmiling one. He tasted the same way he smelled, of sweat and smoke and metal. He kissed promises into her lips, gentle at first, then fiercer, wilder. She let his unspoken words roll across her tongue and fit her body against his in tacit agreement. He belonged to her, no matter what anyone else said—no matter what anyone else wanted. The cards knew it. The universe knew it.
“I love you,” he said.
One breath. Three simple words.
He had always been there for her—her escape, her sanctuary. He knew her better than her mother ever had and her aunt ever would, and he offered his heart to her freely. Butherheart only gave a coy silence when she asked it about him. And whenever her own promises of love lingered on her tongue, the voice would come from within:Remember you are meant for another.
She had never told him what Guma believed the cards predicted:that Xifeng would one day be the Empress. And if this destiny came to light—if, one day, she sat on the throne—only one man could sit beside her, and it would not be Wei. No matter how she tried to deny it, she felt surer, each time the warrior card appeared, that the sacrifice the spirits demanded from her was Wei.
But if the prophecy turned out to be wrong, then she would have given up the only light in her dark life... for nothing. Which would be the greater sacrifice: the crown, or the person she cherished most in all the world?
She held him tightly and ran her lips over his cheekbone. The taste helped her forget the disturbing thought that plagued her in the dark and quiet: that she might never be free to love as others did.
“I’d cross the sky and bring you the moon, if you wanted me to. I would be a free being if not for you.” Wei buried his face in her hair and breathed through the strands, a fish ensnared in a dark net. “I’ve loved you since the day I first saw you. You were eight and I was nine, and it was the coldest morning we’d ever had. You had a brown scarf on your head to keep out the chill.”
Xifeng listened, astonished. “That was ten years ago.”
“You were withher,and she was pinching and scolding you. You were shivering, but still you took off your scarf and gave it to her, to make amends. You wrapped it around her and tucked the ends in so she’d stay warm. I saw you and I wished it were me you cared for.” Wei’s kiss seemed to burn her, to smoke out the truth about her awful visions and thethinginside her.
“Itisyou I care for,” she said, pulling away with a shaky laugh. “But I’m not as good as you think. When I saw Ning with you earlier, I imagined doing something terrible to her.”
His eyes crinkled at her. “You were jealous.”
“Be serious,” she snapped. “I imagined killing her, Wei. I wanted her dead. I saw it happening clearly in my mind.” Wei always blamed the incense for her visions, claiming Guma drugged her, and she clung to that pitiful strand of hope. The alternative was too awful to contemplate. “What kind of person am I if I could see myself doing such horrible things?”
“It was only in your mind.” He caressed her cheek, now dry. “The bad thoughts you think and the evil dreams you dream... those come from Guma. But the tears you shed are your own.”
Xifeng clung to his words like a rope in the sea, overwhelmed by the love for him that she couldn’t express. “You see only the best in me. You make me believe I could be good.”
“Youaregood. I don’t need sorcery to know I can give you a better life.” Wei rested his chin on top of her head. “We could go to the Imperial City, like you’ve always talked about. We’d have food, rooms protected from the winter chill, and fat, contented children.”
“That sounds heavenly,” Xifeng whispered, with a soft laugh at how simple his needs were: a hearth, a home, a wife, a child. His innocence tore at her heart. He was so sure they would always be together. But she masked the truth with a smile, to save him from pain, and wondered if it would only hurt him more someday. “I like the sound of a life away from here, with you.”
“Have I talked about running away for so long that I’ve finally convinced you?” Wei asked, delighted. “I’ve only mentioned it every year since we were thirteen.”
“I haven’t forgotten.”
With each passing year, he had grown more persuasive, and stronger and angrier, too. Xifeng had watched him practice with the swords he made, picturing Guma’s throat laid bare beneath the graceful deadlinessof his blade. It had been a comforting thought on those nights when she lay curled on her side because sleeping on her whipped back was too painful.
