The Emperor’s Guard stationed themselves in the corridor at the bottom of the Eastern tower as Koida followed Yoichi up the winding stair. The scene was strangely familiar—Batsai had always had her guard do the same when he escorted her to the healers—but she recognized none of these faces. Either intentionally or by virtue of no previously employed soldiers surviving the massacre, Yoichi had populated his royal guard with men Koida did not recognize.
The sconces lining the staircase sat empty, leaving them to make the familiar climb in unfamiliar darkness. The scent of salts and chemicals stung her nose before they had made it even halfway, bringing back memories of making this climb for salves, tinctures, and powders. It seemed another lifetime when her monthly pain or a bruise from training seemed the worst of her concerns. Koida ran her hand over the cold stone walls, a part of her needing to feel solid proof that she was truly home again.
Home again, yet still unable to relax. She added another layer to her stone soul.
Her calves and thighs shook with every step, exhaustion twined so deeply into every muscle that she no longer felt the separate aches of too long on horseback or too little rest. She was one huge ache that refused to be ignored.
Yoichi, however, seemed to have no difficulty traversing the stairs ahead of her. His every movement was as fast and agile as it had always been. An outsider would never guess that just days ago the Rising Phoenix Emperor had been incapable of taking a single step on his own.
The sound of screaming and the smell of burning flesh tried to overpower her, images of villagers choking on Yoichi’s tendrils of poisoned Ro and falling dead at her feet, but she clung tighter to her unbreakable truth and forced them away. The living lavaglass in her arm, always so eager to form the wickedly spurred moon broadsword, retreated reluctantly, leaving her with two flesh and blood hands.
“When will you return my glass moon serpent?” she asked in a low voice, dropping the false tone of the lover.
“When I’m certain your show of hatred in the Boking Iri square was truth and not another attempt at deceit,” Yoichi returned. “Make a move to blow up the tower as you did with the flesh artisan’s workshop, and you’ll die before I do.”
Koida scowled, allowing a measure of her true hatred to show. That violent explosion of Ro and death had surprised her as much as it had him. The tiny bit of remaining amethyst energy in her heartcenter was still recovering.
“You slaughtered half their people while she laughed,” Koida snarled.
“Their Ro was needed to wake my new appendages,” Yoichi said. “If any one of them had absorbed enough to be worth consuming, I wouldn’t have had to take so much.” Superiority fairly dripped from his voice. “The Rising Phoenix will put it to better use than they ever would have.”
Yet another reason she had sent Pernicious away as soon as she’d come within sight of the Great Library. Had she not, the world would have one less half-demon terrorizing it, and her half-brother would have that much more powerful Ro to command.
“I do not dispute that,” Koida growled. “My grievance is that you caught me unprepared. If you had told me of the necessity for killing them, I would not have been startled into such a violent reaction.”
Yoichi snorted. “Little sister will forgive me if I choose to await proof of her loyalty.”
“And elder brother believed the best way to prove little sister’s loyalties was to lie about having the Ji Yu chieftain’s Ro?”
She heard Yoichi stop and his hand trace over the wood of the overhead trap door that led into the alchemist’s laboratory.
“I never lied to you, Koida. You assumed I had his Ro, and I allowed you to go on believing it.”
Koida was so tired that she couldn’t even recall whether this was a lie or another of Yoichi’s twisted versions of the truth. She wished again for the glass moon serpent. Thinking was so much easier when she was numb.
“Am I also under a mistaken assumption that you can restore my deficiency?” she asked, unable to stop herself from prodding at Yoichi’s smug superiority. “Raijin at least told me truly before I began training that I may never advance on his path.”
If he was stung by her doubt, Yoichi didn’t show it.
“You will see advances and gain strength upon the Path of the Water Lily that no other Path can offer,” he replied smoothly.
With a thrust of his arm, he shoved the trap door open and allowed it to fall with a bang on the floor above. The last lights from the dying day showed him stalking into the laboratory ahead of her.
Koida followed. When she joined him on the upper floor, Yoichi had lit the trough of salt that wound around the edge of the tower room. The cold white flames illuminated a destruction Koida had never seen in the laboratory. She would never have called the alchemists’ tower orderly, but always before there had been some organization to the chaos, an air of lively discovery and experiment contained within these walls.
Now bloodstained rubble, splintered shelving, myriad bottles, phials, shattered glass, and cracked stoneware littered the floor. A westerly wind whipped through a hole in the stone wall large enough to allow an oxcart to pass, pulling her hair from Hakiko’s warrior’s knot.
“It appears my mother put up quite the fight against your precious Ji Yu chieftain,” Yoichi said with an air of both appreciation and satisfaction. “The old spider had more venom left in her than I anticipated.”
Herbs and powders gritted beneath his tooled leather boots as he crossed the floor. Koida swallowed hard and turned her eyes away from a dried swatch of blood. Dry was always less disturbing, but the thought of what a pool so wide must have looked like glistening in the daylight turned her stomach.
I am sick of blood and death. I have seen enough of both to last me lifetimes.
She frowned. From where had that thought come to her? The voice was unfamiliar, and she could recall no scroll or play in which a character declaimed the words nor dream in which they might have been uttered.
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“Be certain not to touch anything that looks as if it was once inside someone,” Yoichi drawled, eyeing the same patch of brown that had turned her stomach. “You are not yet strong enough to survive it. Likely why it’s been left in this state. Difficult to set a room to rights when your servants keep dying or their minds keep deteriorating before they can finish cleaning it.”
To think she had once found her half-brother’s irony the height of cleverness angered her as much as his callous comment.
Pushing her disgust aside, she seized on the chance to return to the subject of the Path of the Water Lily. Keep him thinking there was nothing she cared more about than advancement. Until she had rescued Raijin, it was the same as true.
“At what stage will I be strong enough to survive it?”
“Your first advancement will build immunities to several toxins. However, for something as powerful as a Grandmaster’s blood, you would need to have reached the Bloom of Malignant Beauty stage, as I have.” With a muted grunt, he hefted a chunk of wall much too large for his slender form to move and levered it aside. The piece dropped back to the floor with a thump that shook the worn boards beneath their feet. “Now, if I can only find my effects in this mess.”
“Can the restoration ritual be completed without them?” She didn’t have to fake the concern in her question. Her plans had been shattered when she saw Raijin in chains rather than the ice coffin she had expected.
“If my collection survived, then the ritual can go on immediately.” Yoichi lazily kicked aside an overturned bench. It splintered against the wall. “And if not, the ritual will only be delayed. A minor setback is not the end of the Path for a Water Lily.”
For several long minutes, Yoichi searched the rubble and self-doubt clawed at Koida’s stomach. Cold Sun had said that her greatest obstacle was the belief that she was powerless because of her deficiency. She had to remember that she had come this far on a lavaglass broadsword, a burled steel dagger, and a stone soul. If she had to save her betrothed with nothing else, she would do it. That world-scorching blast in the flesh artisan’s shop came back to her. It had taken nearly everything she had, but if the last bit of her crippled Ro was required of her to rescue Raijin, then she would give it. He had saved her when she was worth nothing—worth less than nothing. She wouldn’t fail him.
“Ah,” Yoichi said, straightening. “Your ritual will take place tonight after all, little sister.”
As he spoke, his hands deftly pried up a dented hidden door from a smaller section of rubble. It creaked open to reveal a series of stone phials, elaborately lacquered urns, and tiny metal chests.
Yoichi selected a box the size of a child’s fist and opened it. Inside rested a sphere of woven grass. Though it must have been in this hiding place for at least the month of Koida’s absence from the castle if not longer, the cut blades of grass were inexplicably green. Not only still alive, but thriving.
He took the grass sphere from the box and pried it apart like a mollusk’s shell. One swaying emerald blade stuck out like a tongue, and in its crook a sat a single drop of dew sparkling from within like a pearl-studded moon.
For a thin moment, Koida was struck dumb by its beauty.
In a small voice, she asked, “What is it?”
“The Water of Knowing. This, little sister, is the first component required in our Path’s restoration ritual.”
Here again she found the opposite of what she expected, and it showed in her expression.
“Perhaps you thought I would force you to eat the charred heart of an infant?” Yoichi rolled his eyes. “That old bear Batsai told you one too many fright tales invented to scare naughty little princesses in behaving. What good is the heart of a child? Frankly, I doubt such an organ’s palatability, much less its restorative capabilities.”
“But water? It is beautiful, but what does it do?”
Yoichi switched to the tone of a Master lecturing a student. “What is the name of your new Path?”
Years of the importance of respect in the student-master relationship brought the answer to her lips in spite of the perceived inanity of the question. Without thinking, she replied in the dutiful tone of a student.
“The Path of the Water Lily.”
“And what gives the water lily life and drowns its enemies? What does its bloom rise above each day? In the depths of what does it hide its petals each night?”
“Water.”
Yoichi raised the grass sphere with its single drop of dew.
“This is not the same vulgar, dirty water anyone can dip from the Horned Serpent River or the koi fountains in the palace gardens. The Water of Knowing comes from ancient passages that stretch between the Mortal World and the Land of the Immortals. Water Lilies have a knowledge no other practitioners do, the knowledge of how to become more than human and Ro, a creature that transcends both.” His plum-colored eyes locked on hers. “And your grandmaster, little sister, unlike mine, has even greater knowledge than this—the knowledge of immortality.”
He waited, but this time Koida could not guess what he wished to hear.
With an annoyed sigh, Yoichi gestured to himself. “Behold, your Water Lily Grandmaster.”
“Did you come into the title from your mother?” she asked.
He let out a sharp, bitter laugh. “Unlike our departed Shingti, I would not have been gifted with a title and kingdom I had not taken for myself. All I have, little sister, I fought and clawed for. Every bit of power, respect, and strength that I wanted, I had to earn in blood and Ro.”
The blood and Ro of my family.
Hatred swelled so thick and suffocating at the thought that it nearly choked Koida. The living lavaglass surged toward the surface.
She swallowed hard. Reminded herself of pinning Yoichi to the Library shelves with her moon broadsword, of the burled steel dagger Lysander had planted in his head, of the broken necks and slit throats, of every should-be death he had survived. Attacking now, when she did not know the secret to his endless resurrections, would be wasted effort.
Retreating into her stone soul required every ounce of effort she had, but she kept the moon broadsword from ripping the sleeve of her desert garments to shreds. She clasped her hands behind her back, the fingers clenching into fists.
Fortunately, Yoichi was too busy extolling himself to notice.
“When the Grandmaster of our Path, my mother Youn Wha, was killed, the next most advanced practitioner gained her status. I was the youngest Water Lily Master in two centuries, and I am the youngest Grandmaster since the ancients who founded our Path.”
Both of which are conveniently more impressive than Shingti’s rise through the Path of the Living Blade, Koida thought.
Aloud, she said, “And you have the knowledge of immortality.”
“Little sister does not believe elder brother?”
“I have been lied to before,” she said. Yoichi opened his mouth, but she interrupted, pressing her fist to her heartcenter and bowing over it in sarcastic contrition. “Apologies, esteemed Grandmaster. Rather, I have been allowed to believe an incorrect assumption by one who could easily have corrected me.”
A smirk tugged at the corner of Yoichi’s lips.
“Then allow me to convince you.” He beckoned her closer.
Cautiously, Koida closed the distance.
The scent of lotus blossoms was overwhelming so close to the box. That smell stirred something deep in her mind, but she could not keep hold of the feeling.
With one slender hand, Yoichi tilted Koida’s head back, exposing her throat—and his gut. The living lavaglass pulsed, begging for her to spill his superior entrails all over the laboratory floor.
When the time was right, she promised the bloodthirsty lavaglass, when the cut would do the most damage, but not before.
Yoichi lifted the blade of grass from its sphere and held the tip just above her left pupil.
Her lashes fluttered shut instinctively.
“Keep your eyes open,” he ordered. “What’s in this box is all the chance you have at restoration.”
With her left hand, Koida took hold of her eyelids with her fingers and held them open, staring beyond the tip of the grass blade at the stone ceiling.
Steadily, Yoichi tilted the grass. The Water of Knowing rolled forward, sparkling like liquid moonbeams. For a thin moment, it clung to the end of the blade, then dripped into her eye.
Koida felt a heartbeat of cool wet, so sweet and refreshing that she could almost taste it.
Then the blade of grass, the ceiling of the alchemists’ laboratory, and her traitorous half-brother disappeared.