Ruyi remembered when she first realized there was something wrong with her. She was four years old.

Every weekend, the Yang household welcomed a parade of serious-looking people with big instruments and bigger coats. They would tell her to open her mouth, or press cups on her back, or draw her blood.

She remembered Father’s expressions as the days went on. When Mother got angry, she got angry. Her face got red and her eyes got big and her teeth gnashed tight. But when Father got angry, he drew inward, grew calmer, like a kettle—still over its iron surface, but hiding so much boiling water beneath. Sometimes when he wasn’t careful, it leaked out.

At the end of one long day, Father dismissed the last man with a spat word.

Mother sat at Father’s side, one soft hand on his tight shoulder. Mother looked sad, which made Ruyi feel sad. She asked what she could do to help.

“You are broken,” snapped Father. “We are trying to fix you. But you cannot be fixed.” With that he wrenched open the sliding bamboo door and stomped from the room. Scowling, Mother drifted after him.

Little Ruyi sat there blinking.

“Broken?” she mumbled.

That was the word Mother had used after she dropped her porcelain doll Xixi. Mother had found her desperately trying to make the arm fit the stump. But even with glue it never hung on quite the same. Father threw Xixi out after that.

She held very still then. She was too scared to move. If she moved too much, maybe parts of her would start falling off.

Then she had an even scarier thought, a thought so scary she started to cry.

What if the people in the big coats couldn’t glue her back together?

Would she be thrown away too?

***

At the age of six, in the middle of one of their races, Jin manifested his qi.

Until then they had been nearly equal in all things. In their games of chess they were split fifty-fifty. In their wrestling and their chasing, she would win one day, and he the next.

Then, when she was just about to reach the house’s great arch of a front door, just about to win their little race, she felt something foreign, something electric, wrench at her feet.

She stumbled, and he surpassed her with a triumphant grin. “I win!”

She never won a race with him again.

When father heard the news he threw a banquet. Awakening, at just six? Nearly unheard of! What a prodigy, that Jin Yang! He invited all the neighbors from over the hills, and they came bowing and smiling. They goggled at Jin as Father dragged him around like a little doll. The more jade around the visitor’s neck, the longer Father seemed to dangle Jin. There wasn’t a muscle out of place in Jin’s smile, but she knew he was tiring of it.

Slouched at her little side table, chewing tasteless chocolates, she couldn’t help but feel jealousy in slow drips, pooling in her as the night went on. At the end she was nearly drowning in it.

She had seen the servants stare at Jin a few seconds longer than they ought to. She had seen Father’s friends go still around him. Yet she never really knew what it meant to be a hero until then.

Oh, how desperately she wished to be a hero. In that moment it was maybe the most wonderful thing in the world.

***

1 year later…

One day near the start of winter, mother had to leave. Something about duties to her clan—Mother was very important, and they needed her far in the North, north of even the Great Lakes. Mother kissed her forehead and bid her goodbye.

Only then did she realize how much Mother had been protecting her.

The next day, she found her bedroom empty. All her belongings had been chucked in one big sack.

“You are to report to the servant’s quarters immediately,” said Father, with a calm she couldn't trust. “I shall not spoil my children. In this life all things are earned, not given.”

“But… what about Jin?”

“Jin has manifested his magic,” said Father. “What have you done?”

She had no answer for him. Her mouth felt very dry. This was how Father was in all things; he was convinced he was right, and he would not stop until you admitted it. And all the while he was ever-so-reasonable, ever-so-calm. How could you argue with a man like him?

“I was born to a mother addicted to poppy in the tundras of the West. I had no father. My hands knew the shape of a plow before I was your age. And now I am General of all Song’s armies. You shall take your bedroom back when you have earned it, just as I earned my way here. Do you understand?”

She felt there was something wrong with what he was saying. But she didn’t know what to say. It was hard to think. She had never noticed how vast and cold the entrance hall was, with its looming shut doors and its great oaken staircase, spiraling down, down, down… the ground swayed beneath her.

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She wouldn’t cry—not now, not in front of him. That was admitting he’d won, and the last shred of respect he had for her would vanish.

“Okay,” she said softly, hating her voice for quivering.

She took hold of her sack, and dragged it the full five li until she reached the servants’ quarters. She arrived deep in the night.

There, she let herself cry.

***

That night, she practiced sitting upright and closing her eyes and breathing deep, just like she’d always seen Jin do, or Father do, or Mother do when they cultivated. And when she did she felt qi—the powers of the Heavens—swirling around her like a sea of stars. Only when she called to them, tried to draw them in, they wouldn’t come. They didn’t want her.

The next morning, a servant girl found her collapsed on the steps to the servants’ quarters, shivering and delirious. The girl had raised a cry instantly. Before Ruyi knew it she was swaddled in furs and fed a bone broth. It was days before she recovered. The girl who’d found tended to her, muttering unsavory things about Father as she did. Ruyi could take no joy in it.

Father was right. She was broken after all.

The thought brought on fresh tears.

Every night she meditated for hours until sleep washed over her, and she could hold on no longer. And every night the stars were silent.

***

Jin visited in the middle of the week. He sported a bruise on his wrist, like someone very strong had grabbed it, but he wouldn’t say where it was from even though they both knew.

“I had a talk with Father,” he said, by which they both knew he had a heated fight. “He won’t listen.” Jin’s eyes flashed hot. “This is just wrong, Rue! We can’t let him—”

“It’s fine,” said Ruyi, chin held high. “I don’t want to be there anyways. You can go.”

Jin didn’t seem to know what to do with that. For a few seconds he fumbled for words. “I brought you this.”

A box of pastries, clearly hastily stuffed away. Savory flaky pancakes and egg tarts that made her mouth water. She turned up her nose. “I don’t want them.”

“But…they’re your favorites,” said Jin, crestfallen. And they were.

“I said I don’t want them! Go away.”

What had she done to earn them?

***

The servants didn’t seem to know what to do with her. They let her eat with them. They gave her a cot pressed up against a corner of the hall. The rest of the day she wandered about aimlessly, like a ghost haunting their quarters. Weeks passed like this.

Sometimes she saw carriages saunter by on the way to Yang mansion. Those nights she would creep out into the fields as far as she dared, just close enough to see the lights twinkling through those grand windows on the mansion’s facade, just close enough to hear the laughter, maybe even the tinkling of glass. She wasn’t sure why she did it. She knew it would hurt, and it did. But somehow the silence, alone in the long hard parts of the night, felt worse.

Those nights, she sobbed the hardest.

***

“What are you doing?”

For weeks she’d been nearly mute. It was the first thing she said, and she’d said it to the girl who’d found her on the steps. This girl, at least, wouldn’t turn away from her. Ruyi hoped. Still, it had taken her hours to gather up the courage to ask.

It was late, and where the other servants had gone off to drink or play cards, this girl had brought a big heavy book with her and was mouthing words at it in the dim light of a candle.

She was older, in her teens, with long brown hair that fell like water in a fast-coursing river. Her eyes were very pretty, the color of leaves in autumn.

The girl treated her to a calculating glance. Then shrugged. “Learning to read.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she sighed. “Because I don’t want to be stuck here all my life, shining your father’s shoes?”

For a while Ruyi just stared at her, silent.

“What?”

“Can I learn with you?”

***

The girl’s name was Ling. She was from the lower city. She took this job to support her sickly brother. She didn’t like talking about herself. She was very no-nonsense, crass, and thought Ruyi’s father was a prick.

These were the few morsels Ruyi got out of her the next few months they knew each other. Ruyi picked up reading fast—faster even than Ling. So fast Ling started to get snappy at her for no reason when they explored the woods or fetched water from the western stream. Ruyi pretended to slow down, for Ling’s sake.

But she discovered she loved reading.

Unlike qi, she could take these words, make them hers. With reading she could know things others did not. Things no-one could take away from her, not even Father. Knowledge, she soon learned, was its own sort of power.

She read all the texts she could get her hands on. Haltingly at first, skipping over big words or strange word-clumps, but she quickly caught onto them; it was like her brain was made to do it. Soon it was impossible to hide from Ling.

“Stop pretending!” Ling would snap after squinting for minutes at a clump of letters while Ruyi, beside her, breezed through her own book. “You’re just flipping pages!”

“But I’m not,” said Ruyi, and she sat there blinking.

Ling stopped asking her to go exploring with her after that.

But Ling could leave, just as Father did, just as Mother did. Ruyi had expected it; she’d been on edge ever since they’d first spoken, afraid of saying the wrong thing, or doing the wrong or being the wrong thing, knowing a break was coming—when it came at last it was a relief.

There were only a few dozen tomes in the servant’s quarters. Ruyi read her way to bed, woke up reading, read all through her meals. By the time Father came to visit, she’d gotten through half the tomes on the shelves.

Seeing her buried in The Principles of Alchemy, Vol. 1, Father ripped it out of her hand. She hadn’t seen him coming. She flinched, then flinched again at the sight of him.

He flipped back a page. “Name six functions of Gire vinegar.”

She stared at him, but there seemed to be no trick; he watched her expectantly.

There were twelve listed on the page. Slowly, hesitantly, she named them all with exactly the words the book had used. When she read a page, it was hers—every word of it. Forever.

Then he said only one word: “Good.”

She had imagined his coming a thousand times. She’d replayed their meeting again over and over, and each time she promised herself she would greet him with an upturned lip, perhaps a sneer. She might not even acknowledge him. It would feel so good to be cruel to him.

Yet seeing him now—seeing that foreign expression on his face, was that a smile?—she felt something in her chest melting.

“Really?” she breathed.

“Look at you. Learning of your own volition—making of yourself something valuable! Something useful! You have done well, my daughter.”

She nearly broke at that. He spoke with such warmth—warmth she’d only ever heard him use with Jin. Warmth he would withhold and dole out so rarely, a special treat, just for her. She felt so lucky.

He handed the book back, which she received with trembling hands.

“Keep this up, and perhaps we shall move you back to the main house soon,” he mused. “Which tomes have you read so far?”

“The tomes on runes, and—the tomes on legends, and the map-book,” she whispered.

“Which do you like the best?”

“Alchemy.” This she said without hesitation. “With alchemy you can change anything to anything else. As long as you have the power and the will. I love it.”

It was his turn to stare at her. His face was like a cinderblock, all strong bones. Even when his gaze was kind it made you want to look away.

“How curious.” His lips tightened into a grin. “That is one of the few arts someone as broken as you can still do. I shall bring you more tomes of alchemy. Perhaps we shall make something of you yet.”