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Someone of such exquisite loveliness—she has the power to topple kingdoms and overturn cities.
It is the cruelest fate for the gray-haired to bury the dark-haired.
She just nodded, her gaze still on the river. It was not the reaction a normal child would have to pain. Then again, perhaps there could be no normal children raised in an age of war.
I had learned to think of time in days, the stretch between two meals, from sunup to sundown. Sometimes it felt like that was all my life was, all it ever could be: the repetition of tasks necessary for survival until I grew older and my time expired.
“If you do succeed, Xishi,” he said quietly, “you will be the savior of our kingdom. You will forever alter the course of history.”
When it came down to it, the choice was this: a kingdom, or my happiness.
And how many people under Heaven were really fortunate enough to know happiness? Happiness was a side dish, like the sweet, sticky rice cakes Mother made during the festivals, or the glutinous balls stuffed with rich sesame paste. But revenge—that was the salt of life. Necessary. Essential.
But even if I could not rid myself of the pain, I could live with it. One could live with almost anything, so long as they had something to live for.
If my beauty was of the destructive kind, his was a beauty that pressed exquisitely close to sorrow; something as cold and untouchable as the stars scattered overhead.
In a world where everyone will demand something from you, it requires a certain degree of selfishness to be happy, you know.”
“We are most tempted by what we cannot have. Men will dream of the mountains they have yet to scale, the rivers they have yet to set sail upon, the plains they have yet to conquer.
The mind destroys; the heart devours. “I had it engraved to remind myself,” he said mildly.
“The heart is a fickle thing; it takes and takes. It is easily swayed, and tempted, and made weak. Too many have fallen victims to their own irrational desires. But the mind—the mind is dependable, accurate, deadly. It destroys the enemy, not the self, and ensures that we do what we need to, not what we want.”
They must have been from noble families; only the wealthy could show such joyous carelessness in an age of war and instability. They assumed their money protected them from everything. The ultimate injustice was that sometimes it did.
“The string of fate,” he said. “It ensures that you are bound for eternity, that your souls will find their way back to each other in every life. Perfect for a pair of young lovers.”
He looked to me in acknowledgment, and I felt a strange roaring in my blood, a kind of drifting away from my own body, until I was not blood and flesh but the things that mountain soil and river water and starlight are made of. Something ancient, eternal. I was that plan. I was part of the kingdom’s history.
So that was it. He would not offer any information he didn’t want me to know. Perhaps it was for the better this way. There were certain things that, once said, could not be taken back.
What a bittersweet fate we shared, balanced so precariously on the fine line between life and death, union and separation, joy and despair.
“But heroes always have tragic endings,” I said softly, a lump in my throat. “Yes, well. One cannot save the world and live in peace. That’s not how these things work.”
he whispered, “I’ve missed you, Xishi.” A sharp emotion sliced through me: joy so deep it resembled grief; grief so keen it resembled joy.
But King Goujian is not the answer to peace. None of them are. So long as we continue to put mortal men on thrones and hail them as gods, sacrifice our lives to their legacies, history will repeat itself.
Just as the ocean tides ebb and flow beneath the moon, empires will rise and collapse, wars will start and cease, and the rest of us will be left to struggle against the currents.
