She looked like any other peasant girl. Tattered tunic, trousers ratty but sewn neatly, with care. Rather plain-looking, Ruyi thought.

“Ah,” said Jin. “Mei—I… didn’t think you’d be here.”

“Ren,” she said again, looking shattered. “Who’s this?”

“Oh!” Only then did he realize how things looked. He got off Ruyi, thank Heavens, since she was starting to turn blue. “This is my sister. R—Nala.”

I’m who now?

“Oh… I thought you’d—”

At the same time, Jin said, “I would never—”

They blinked at each other. Then Mei flung herself around him and kissed him right in the lips. And not in a courteous way—she kissed him like she was dying of thirst and he was a flask of water.

Jin didn’t throw her off him, either. He seemed kind of into it, if a little helpless. Ruyi caught his eyes, him looking profoundly embarrassed, her with her mouth wide open.

You dog, Ruyi mouthed. You absolute dog!

He blushed harder.

He looked ready to faint by the time Mei climbed off him. All three of them were red-faced then.

“So…” said this ‘Mei’. “You’re the alchemy genius Ren keeps telling me about.”

“He tells you about me?”

“All the time! He goes on and on about how you made this elixir and found that recipe…he’s really proud of you.”

She wasn’t sure why she was surprised. Of course he did. If she had a sister like herself she’d brag about it too.

“Aww! That’s nice. But I do find it strange he’s told me so little about you,” said Ruyi.

“He hasn’t?” ‘Mei’ blinked. “Oh—well I’m Mei-ling, but you can call me Mei. It’s so nice to meet you!”

She put on a friendly smile and held out a hand, which Ruyi eyed with suspicion.

“Who are you?” Ruyi demanded. “What do you do, Mei-ling? If that’s even your real name?”

“Please, Rue—”

“Shut up. I’m questioning.”

“Um.” To her credit, Mei-ling didn’t back away. “I do a lot of things. I help my dad run his bake shop in the day. I do healing work on tournament nights. That’s where I met your brother, actually.”

“Tournament nights? What tournament?”

“You know. In the—”

“I think that’s quite enough,” said Jin testily, trying to put herself between them, but she snuck her head around him. “What tournament?”

“In the underground,” said Mei-ling, baffled.

“What underground?!”

Mei-ling asked a question of Jin with her eyes, and Jin sighed. “Sometimes I fight in this underground arena. To blow off steam.”

“You get in illicit duels?!” Ruyi thought she’d really known Jin—thought she was one of the few folk who could see past his perfect boy facade. Now she realized she only saw what he was willing to feed her. It must be the same with this Mei-ling. They both thought they knew him. Both saw a surface of him, but not the same one.

“We don’t need to talk about this now,” said Jin, clinging to his own arm for support.

“I’m sorry. I sense I’m interrupting something,” said Mei-ling, looking uncertainly between them. “I should go. Will you come over later?” This she directed at Jin.

“Yeah,” he mumbled. At least he had the decency to look guilty about it.

“Then I’ll be waiting. It was really nice meting you, Nala!”

“Uh-huh,” said Ruyi. She only gotten halfway through her interrogation. She’d been about to go, ‘what are your intentions with my brother?’ and ‘what nefarious organization do you work for?’ But her quarry escaped down the side of the roof.

“Unbelievable,” she sighed, turning to a still-blushing Jin. “Here I thought you were a pure innocent boy. But all this time you were out here seducing poor peasant girls!”

“I mean….I wouldn’t put it that way—”

***

On the way back, they came across a huddle of folk she thought were demon cultists at first. They looked the part—dressed in their black robes with the pointy red caps. She expected Jin to tell her, “no, they’re actually kindhearted monks, you bigot,” or something. But it turned out they were in fact demon cultists.

Out on the street, in open view, chanting. “Now is the time, my friends! No longer shall we labor under the thumb of the nobles! No longer shall we plant the trees, while they taste the fruit! They mock us in their high castles!”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

This Ruyi knew to be untrue. She rarely thought about poor people at all. It was incredible what a warped view these simpletons had. They liked to imagine nobles as these evil creatures when they’d never met one their whole lives.

“Can you believe this?” She hissed at Jin. “Why isn’t anyone stopping them?”

Not only was nobody stopping them, they’d drawn quite a crowd.

“To fund his Midsummer Banquet the Emperor levies taxes on us. While we shiver, he wines! In what realm is that fair?”

To be fair it was quite a nice banquet, but Ruyi suspected now was probably not the best time to bring that up.

“Why does he get to sit on his great gold throne while we are made to suffer? The Mandate of Heaven? I spit on the Mandate of Heaven!”

“This is treason,” she whispered. So why couldn’t she stop staring at it?

“All they have over us is their wealth. Their elixirs. Their training. Their power. Wealth perpetuates itself… unless we can find a way to match them.” Here the speaker paused. “They say the demons are our greatest enemy. The demons, across the mountains! But a demon has never hurt me. A demon has never stolen from me. A demon has never starved my wife and daughter. Only the demon in the royal palace has done that!”

At this point Ruyi had balled her hands into fists and was ready to give them a stern talking-to, but before she could get started Jin clamped a hand over her mouth and dragged her squealing away.

***

“You’ve got to learn when to hold your tongue,” said Jin with this long-suffering look.

“And why should I?”

“You can’t just barge in there and talk down an angry mob!”

“Yes, I can. And I would’ve, if you hadn’t rudely stepped in.”

“I think,” said Jin slowly. “You’re a little too used to getting away with things. Things that normal people don’t get away with.”

“Are you kidding? Everybody hates me!”

“That’s not what I—” Jin rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You know when you talk to boys, and they get this glazed look in their eyes, and they just start nodding and smiling at you? Or when you talk to girls and they laugh at every little thing you say? That’s not normal, Rue.”

“Now you’re being stupid,” said Ruyi, sullen. “That’s just how people talk.”

“You can’t expect a mob to hear you out—”

“You don’t know what I’m capable of.”

Jin muttered something under his breath, something about ‘hopeless,’ which she pretended not to hear.

“Can you believe that, though?” She jerked her head down the alley they’d come. “Out in public. Right on the street corner!”

“I mean… kind of?”

“What.”

“I don’t agree with the idea of summoning demons to gain quick power,” said Jin slowly. “I think that’ll lead to an early grave. Even if I don’t like their solution, I can understand why they feel it’s needed.”

“Do you hear yourself?” Ruyi tried shaking him by the shoulders, but she only ended up shaking herself. “They tried to kill you, and you’re sticking up for them?”

“I’m just saying—look. Do we really need all those fields? I do wish they’d go about it more peacefully, but—”

“You’re ridiculous.”

***

After a month of daily complaining and a dozen or so crying fits, Ruyi managed to kick her drinking habit.

“I will never forgive you,” was the first thing she said to Gao upon her return. Upon which she took a vow of silence. Logistically this made research quite difficult since Gao was her advising Master, but she went through with it anyways. You did not cross Ruyi Yang without dire consequences.

“Seriously?” Gao had said. A week later Ruyi was still holding to it.

Then Gao threatened to quit and she backed off instantly. Instead she settled for hissing at the old woman every once in a while.

Around this time, a letter came in the mail. A letter from the royal palace. It was written in neat, elegant script, and the page smelled like her. Ruyi had to set it down on a table since her hands were shaking so hard she couldn’t read it.

“Dear Ruyi Yang,

I greatly enjoyed our time together at the Midsummer Banquet. I read in Alchemy Quarterly you are looking into organic transmutations. As it so happens, my family owns a rich collection of original texts on the subject. Would you like to come visit our library? I would love to show you around.

Sincerely,

Tingting Song”

She had squealed so loud mother heard it in her soundproofed second-floor study. ‘Greatly enjoyed,’ she said—not just enjoyed, but greatly enjoyed. And she said she’d ‘love’ to show Ruyi around! But she didn’t close her letter with ‘lovingly,’ or ‘yours in life and death,’ which bothered Ruyi. Sincerely was something you wrote to a friend. Or was it? Maybe she was just being coy. Or maybe she was trying not to encourage Ruyi too much. It was very confusing. She spent hours dissecting each sentence like it might contain some secret code.

When the day finally came, she was ready. She’d agonized over what to wear, and she never agonized over what to wear. She hated everything in her wardrobe. She ended up in a skirt she was pretty sure made her stomach look bloated but which mother said was ‘perfect,’ whatever that was supposed to mean. She could hardly sit still the whole carriage ride there.

The same footman as last time greeted her. “This way,” he said, leaving her in this cozy little side room. The walls were wood, lined by wooden bookshelves on one side, a guqin on the other, slightly dusty. Sunlight filtered through polished glass windows, painting a pale yellow square on the floorboards.

“Hello.”

She hadn’t even seen the princess enter.

For about a breath she just stood there, speechless.

For months she’d done a lot of fantasizing about Princess Song. But none of it could possibly compare to the girl standing before her now. Something about her glow, her presence… also she had clothes on, a marked difference from most of Ruyi’s fantasies. She wore a modest dress and these thin-rimmed glasses and her hair fell in wild locks and the sun brushed gold across her collarbones, and she was so pretty it was almost physically painful. She grown even prettier since they’d last met. Ruyi wasn’t sure how it was possible.

Then the princess smiled, and all thoughts fled Ruyi’s mind. In their place was a kind of high-pitched whine.

“Ah. Um. Hi,” breathed Ruyi, struggling mightily to remember how words worked. Then she blinked and snapped upright, cleared her throat. What was she doing? She’d come in with a battle plan. Be cool. Be smart. “Um. First, I would like to formally apologize for the fiasco that occurred when I was last here. That behavior is not reflective of me or my character.”

“It isn’t?”

“I was under the influence of alcohol, and I embarrassed myself. I should not have done that,” she said stiffly. “If you would like to peruse the library, I shall be glad to do so now.”

“Oh…” Why did the princess look so disappointed? Had she said something wrong? What had she said?

“I mean—” she said hastily. “I don’t regret it or anything, I’m just saying—um—”

The princess giggled behind a gloved hand. “You’re funny. Come with me?”

Then the princess grabbed her hand, which was just too much for Ruyi to handle. It was so soft and so dainty, and—and—

“Are you alright?” asked the princess.

Ruyi snapped out of it. Her face was steaming red. “Yeah—yeah, just, um, sleep. Slept bad, head… bad. Mhm. Were we, um, library?”

Oh, Heavens. This was bad. This was much worse than she’d thought.