Darkening clouds gathered on the western horizon as Shyong Liu Yoichi and Shyong San Koida rode through the twilit gates of the Sun Palace. Nobles, officials, and concubines—both the most beautiful taken from his father’s harem and the ones recently added to Yoichi’s—colored the courtyard like freshly blossomed flowers in their best silks and jewels.

Yoichi smirked. An air of almost frantic approval hung over the sycophants, as if each one must show that they alone were most excited for his triumphant return.

Few aging faces graced the throng, only the wise few who had supported Yoichi’s claim to the throne from his arrival at court five years before. Of the previous Emperor’s appointments to nobility—the graying warrior artists with whom Hao had enjoyed swapping stories of their Heroic Records over cups of hard wine—the rare exception who had survived the massacre had been sent back to their holdings, while their heirs took their place in the Rising Phoenix’s court.

At Yoich’s side, Koida surveyed the brightly adorned gathering with open contempt.

It was the most emotion he had seen from her since the flesh artisan’s village, when he had taken that two-headed demon adder away from her. Scorn was well suited to Hakiko’s proud face, but he doubted his little sister was merely holding to her assumed role as this invented desert warrior artist. At a glance, he could pick out the gathered flatterers who had slighted or condescended to the second princess over the years. He may have to offer her a few heads once she had her first taste of power. The thirst for revenge was the first one a new Water Lily always needed quenched.

It mattered not. Now that he was Emperor, there was no courtier that he couldn’t easily replace. They were mere scenery on a shadow puppeteer’s backdrop anyway, providing bits of color, extra Ro, and added security for his coming ascension.

The scent of lotus blossoms filled his senses.

They may be nothing, the Whisperer warned, but the Dragon must not be so easily dismissed. She loves power as much as she loves revenge, my white-haired hero, and she will not see your silly nobles as the only ones who wronged her.

Yoichi had expected as much, but he didn’t fear retribution from his little sister. The Path of the Water Lily was most often traversed by those for whom ambition was a never-ending climb. Grandmasters had long ago been forced to develop a technique for protecting themselves against attack by their own students. Once Koida had stepped onto that path, she would find Yoichi an impossible target, much as he had found his own mother, and Youn Wha her grandmaster before her.

At the palace steps, Yoichi reined in his horse. Though he felt for all intents dead from the waist down, his new legs responded to his intentions as if they had always been a part of him, pressing his knees against the mount’s shoulders to expertly turn it.

Yoichi manifested a scepter of glowing ruby Ro. The gathered nobles fell silent, each one adopting an expression of eagerness to hear whatever their Rising Phoenix Emperor might have to say.

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“The Water Lily second princess is dead,” he began.

They erupted in the expected applause and cheering. It was not the wild celebration he had come to expect from his father’s return ceremonies, and it held none of the ecstatic abandon of the commoners’ praise. This was more refined. Delicate. The nobles who would have contributed raucousness with the rough deportment of earned rather than born rank were gone. Had they been there, he doubted they would have cheered for the Emperor’s bastard anyway.

As the noise crested and began to fall, Yoichi continued.

“Her corpse will be given to the commoners and their dogs, and let her spirit suffer all this and more. Tomorrow, her Ji Yu consort will be executed before the populace and treated to the same care. The spirits of my exalted father, the first princess, and all nobles whom the Water Lily traitor murdered will finally find rest.”

He waited through the second wave of approval, satisfaction narrowing his plum-colored eyes.

“However, it is not only the death of the traitor and her conspirator that we celebrate.” Yoichi held out his hand, and the false Hakiko rested her palm on his. “Tomorrow begins my wedding feast, as the Empire not only rids itself of a dark stain of evil and corruption, but gains a mighty First Empress. The warrior artist Hakiko, hero of the desert oasis, who alone fought beside me to destroy the treacherous second princess and the army of corpses she had conjured.”

The cheering and applause reached its height with this announcement.

With a nod to the fictional Hakiko, Yoichi hopped easily from his mount, landing catlike on limbs that felt nothing of the impact. He had a sudden urge to Drink from the Pool of Life until every living thing in the courtyard fell dead at his feet, but having consumed an entire village not that long ago, he knew it would make no difference. Better to save the sycophants in case they were needed.

At his side, Koida dismounted and offered the Rising Phoenix Emperor her arm as befitting of her disguise’s lower rank. They ascended the steps together, the dead limbs propelling him with the same grace and ease he’d had before his fall—if not more.

The royal guard fell in around them. As they stepped through the great entry doors, Koida cast a last look of disdain over her shoulder.

“Do your new subjects meet with your approval, Hakiko?” he asked in the intimate speech tone of a lover. “Both the common and noble folk seem quite taken by their beautiful new warrior artist Empress.”

“Fools are taken with anyone who claims to possess a heroic record.” In spite of her scorn, she remembered to couch her reply in the lover’s speech tone for the sake of their guard. “The Rising Phoenix Emperor promised to show Hakiko his study. When will we see it?”

Yoichi chuckled. Through every step of their journey, Koida had never lost her eagerness for the promised advancement.

“You don’t wish time to rest and recover from the journey before touring the palace?”

Her false features darkened. “Rest is for the weak.”

It was a reply befitting of a Master of the Living Blade. The palace guard looked on it as proof of their new First Empress’s merit. Only Yoichi heard his little sister’s bitterness for what she was, her hunger to flower into something new and deadly. And, as he had the two-headed demon adder whose venom she had been using to block out exhaustion, emotion, and pain confined in a dense leather purse in his robes, only he knew how hard she was fighting toward that goal of strength and power.

And perhaps revenge. Better that she learn sooner rather than later that he was not so easily fooled—or killed.

Smiling, Yoichi veered away from the royal residences. “To the Eastern tower, then.”