Song of Silver, Flame Like Night (Song of the Last Kingdom, #1)

by Amélie Wen Zhao

But in rare moments like this, when the sun hung ripe and swollen as a mandarin over the glittering sea, there was still a shattered-glass beauty to be found in the remnants of a conquered land.

“There are old gods and new gods, kind gods and fickle gods—and most powerful of them all are the Four Demon Gods.”

Lan drummed her fingers on the wooden counter, polished with the comings and goings of so many others before her. Here was the trick to surviving in a colonized land: you couldn’t show that you cared. Every Hin you came across would have his share of sob stories: family slaughtered in the Conquest, home pillaged and plundered, or worse. To care was to allow a chink in the armor of survival.

Old Wei was one of those ardent believers in the myths of folk heroes—practitioners—who had once walked on water and flown over mountains, wielding magic and slaying demons. And perhaps they once had—long, long ago. “Then where are they now? Why haven’t they come to save us from…this?”

“Because it lets me hope that there’s something else for me out there. Something other than this life.” The dust motes before her swirled, stained red and

“Four Gods preserve you,” she heard Old Wei mumble to her. It was an old Hin saying based on the belief that the Four Demon Gods would watch over their motherland and their people. But Lan knew, with cutting clarity, that there were no gods in this world. Only monsters in the form of men.

To be so free, and to be so powerful—what might that taste like? Perhaps one day she would know; perhaps one day she would be able to do more than gift an old, ailing man a slim silver spoon and run when danger knocked on the door.

Yīn and yáng: two halves of all qì, two sides of a coin constantly shifting, one into the other in a continuous cycle of balance. Warmth to cold, light to dark…and life to death. It was when the balance was thrown off that there was a problem.

Zen leaned forward. In the darkness, the old man’s eyes were still open, his face frozen in fear. The moonlight blanched his skin white, the Hin color of mourning. Zen slipped his gloves back on and, with two fingers, pulled the shopkeeper’s eyes shut. “Peace be upon your soul,” he murmured, “and may you find the Path home.” Then he stood, drew his black peacoat tightly around him, and stepped out of the ravaged shop. Within moments, the shadows had swallowed him, and he was no more than a silhouette in the night.

Lan cast one last glance at her reflection. As always, she was in her white silk qípáo, plain and flat compared to the other girls’ luxurious dresses, and just as she liked it. Better to stay hidden as a plain dove than stand out as a peacock in these times. She was the lead—and only—singer for the Teahouse shows, eternally playing the part of the Teller of Tales. The Madam had taken one look at her scrawny appearance ten cycles ago and declared that she wouldn’t be wasting any fine cloth on “a curbside fox.”

He was the most startlingly beautiful man Lan had ever set eyes on. A tangle of midnight hair, cropped short in the Elantian style, spilled over a slim, chiseled face like ink on porcelain. Eyes the gray of smoke, framed by straight black brows, tilted with the slightest edge of insolence—a portrait completed by an insouciant curve of a mouth, corners currently sloping downward in boredom. He was dressed like an Elantian merchant, perhaps even a plainclothes court official: smooth white shirt and black trench coat and pants, not a spot of color on him. A Hin courtdog, Lan thought; a Hin who had turned traitor to work for the Elantian government. Her stomach did a small flip. He was looking straight at her.

As the first note of the song struck, though, the rest of the world—the smells of tea, the bright pops of peonies on the tables, the shimmering gold-and-bamboo screens on the walls, the waiting patrons squirming in their seats—faded. Lan began to sing. The melody was warm on her lips, flowing smoothly from her as though in a dream. An image found her, bright and sharp, as the room around her fell away.

Lan opened her eyes only when the last quavering note of the ballad had melted like snow. The soft red light of the lanterns held the Teahouse in a muted silence, the patrons as still as statues even as the songgirls crouched into the final positions of their dance.

“Forgiveness.” A black-gloved hand darted to her waist to steady her, the other catching the edge of her tray before it tipped and the contents went crashing to the floor. “I didn’t mean to startle you.” A voice, lovely and deep as velvet midnight, speaking to her in near-perfect Elantian. Lan blinked as she was set back on her feet, the tray returned to her hands. Her rescuer stepped back quickly, lightly, like a retreating shadow, and it was then that she caught sight of his face.

His hand snagged on her right wrist, light, loose, tracing what might have been a question mark. Nothing like the grip of the Elantian soldier from earlier.

The rest of the world peeled away as she caught sight of the Demon Gods at the corners of the scroll, the top of the curved character she’d studied just a few bells ago. She blinked, then looked to him. He had her full attention now. His face was careful, impassive, but his eyes—they seemed to pierce her mind, slowly unraveling each of her thoughts. Beneath it all, though, there was a hint of surprise mingled with confusion, as though he had found something unexpected in her.

Her mother crashed onto the floor right above her. Lan tasted her blood on her lips. Warm, copper-scented, and so undeniably human. The heroes in her stories had never bled.

Whether it was magic or simply the strength of a woman with unfinished will, her mother had taken a long, long time to die that day. By the time Lan had crawled out of the vent, the Winter Magician and the soldiers were gone, leaving only a trail of screams and scarlet in their wake. There, lingering in the air had been the unmistakable scent of burnt metal.

“Unless you intend to surprise me with pastries, you can put down that butterknife.” She froze. She recognized that voice—rich and dark, with all the makings of a smoky night sky. The Hin official from earlier in the night stepped inside with two neat clacks of his patent leather boots, and slid the doors shut again. She immediately noticed that one of his black gloves was off. She’d expected the skin on his hands to be smooth as polished wood, a sure sign of aristocratic upbringing—only it was marked by dozens of pale, crisscrossing lines that puckered on the flesh.

It was the norm now for Hin to converse with each other in Elantian in public; those who dared, and still cared, could try to speak Hin in the privacy of nooks and crannies and behind closed doors. The Elantians had enforced this as law “to promote greater unity in the Great Elantian Empire,” but Lan knew better. They were trying to eliminate the Hin tongue completely, to prevent uprisings and secret political movements—because, well, how did you destroy a people? You began by cutting off their roots.

Lan looked back up. The boy’s face was utterly unmarred, not even a splash of tea on those smooth cheekbones. Impossible, she thought, taking in the wreckage all around their feet. She hadn’t even seen him move. The courtdog’s expression was not amused. His mouth was pressed into a thin line as he held her arm. “You’ll have to try a lot harder than that if you want to run.” “Got it,” Lan said, and with her other hand, smashed her teacup into his face.

The Hin turned to Lan, and she caught a glimpse of his face: beautiful, terrible, furious as a storm-tossed night. A trickle of blood wound down the side of his face. He was saying something to her, his lips moving quickly, urgently, but the words slurred in Lan’s brain.

He turned to look at her then, and his eyes held command of her world in that moment. “If you wish to live,” he said quietly, “you will come with me.” If you wish to live. So obvious the choice seemed until, all of a sudden, it wasn’t. Lan thought of the crumpled body of her best friend, torn open from the inside out. Heard the screams coming from somewhere down the hallway, the songgirls dragged into this carnage, flowers swept into a winter storm— Did she wish to live? How many lives was hers worth?

“Hold on.” The boy drew her close to him. His arm fell to her waist, his hand clasping her wrist, careful to avoid the wounds from the porcelain shards of the teacup. Lan stiffened against the memory of Teahouse patrons reaching for her with their wandering fingers. The boy’s touch was light, courteous, his fingers warm against her skin.

She twisted her head to look back. The last that she saw was the winter gaze of the Elantian Royal Magician piercing her with a promise. He would find her. And he would do to her what he’d done to everyone she’d loved. The world tilted beneath her, and then they were falling.

Ordinarily Zen would never have risked revealing his identity for a songgirl indentured at some high-class bordello in an Elantian stronghold. But common songgirls did not kill Elantian soldiers in the blink of an eye. Zen had felt it from downstairs: the shockwave of qì that had ripped through the Teahouse, detectable only by trained practitioners. It had been a qì full of shadows and darkness, of yīn energies without balance.

Magic. Elantian metalwork magic. Whereas Hin practitioners borrowed the energies of qì from all elements of the natural world, Elantian magicians harnessed the power of metals to create their magic. Each type of metal, as far as Zen knew, yielded different strengths and weaknesses, and each magician was born with a connection to one, which they wore around their forearm.

With some difficulty, he focused his vision. The girl was dragging him forward along King Alessander’s Road. The auric lights were blurring; sweat slicked down his cheeks as the world thudded with the pounding of his steps. All that kept him anchored was the feel of the girl’s arms around his waist, the scent of lilies drifting in the fog smothering his mind.

“Are you all right, mister?” Her voice was like song: sweet as silverbells, clear as a halcyon sky. He looked up to see her peering at him, moonlight draping her pale outfit like a pure spill of milk. Her chin-length hair was slick with sweat, but she was lovely. He’d noticed back at the Teahouse—he hadn’t been able to help himself. Lips bowed over a sharp chin, dark lashes sweeping over smile-curved eyes that were currently studying him just as he studied her. Zen averted his gaze. “Yes,” he said, his voice rough. “Thank you.”

The edge to his voice softened. “First time you’ve seen a massacre?” “No.” Her answer surprised him, and that single bladed word held a thousand more. Her gaze might have been the unread pages of a book, a story burning within. One Zen suspected he would be achingly familiar with. His jaw hardened. “Then you know there is nothing we can do but survive.”

With tremendous effort, he stood and held out a hand. “You will need to hold on tightly to me.” There it was again, that shadow of fear that flitted across her face at the prospect of touch. Zen understood—and he related more than she might ever know. The Elantians had left their marks on both of them, in ways both visible and invisible.

“You see it,” she whispered, and the fear on her face gave way to wonder. Zen was mentally preparing himself for more needling questions when she let out a breath. In a sudden, unexpected move, she closed the gap between them and slipped her arms around his waist. Her head bumped against his shoulder. There was nothing romantic to the gesture; it was a moment that sent a strange ache through Zen’s chest, a motion drenched in desperation. A little girl clinging to the last piece of refuge in a dying world.

The world opened to him in a thrilling rush of light and darkness, yīn and yáng: the alleyways zigzagging between crumbling roofs of dilapidated houses, strings of fluttering laundry trailing outside windows like pale souls, a flickering candle here and there whispering yellow through paper windows. He could sense it all, elements of the world constituting the flow of qì: the sodden earth weeping beneath streets coated in waste and grime, the stale air hanging over hunched residences. The small pools of water choked with sewage, the coal fires lending little warmth in the autumn chill. You could do something, a voice whispered in the recesses of his mind. You could end the suffering of your people. All this power, all yours to command. If you would only break free.

“You,” he said quietly. “I thought I recognized the magic from twelve cycles ago: the very one I told myself I would never forget.” He knelt, his blue-gloved fingers wrapping around her jaw so tightly she let out a gasp as he jerked her face toward his. His eyes narrowed in triumph.

She’d sworn to herself that the next time they met, she wouldn’t be the frightened, trembling child lying helpless in the hot water vents. That she’d have grown powerful. That she would fight back. Yet as Lan met his gaze, she found her voice drying up in her throat. Fear overtook her—so violent that she shuddered in its grasp.

Cool wind, grass-scented. Wetness on her cheeks. Lan awoke to the soft pitter-patter of rain. Above her, the sky was slatted with bamboo leaves, the moon no more than a silver whisper behind storm clouds. She did not recognize her surroundings. She appeared to be in the midst of a bamboo forest. No Elantians, no city gates, no fear or pain. Here, there was only the soft susurrus of water winding down mossy stalks, dripping into the slumbering earth.

Lan turned her head, ignoring the sharp streaks of pain that shot through her teeth. Next to her, half a cheek in the mud, black hair spilling like streaks of ink over his face, was the boy. He was utterly still but for the shallow rise and fall of his back. Blood trickled gently from his temple and from his nose; his skin was ashen. His coat pooled around him like a puddle of dark water. They were alive.

Lan swallowed and held her arm out to him. She tried not to flinch as his fingers brushed her skin. The boy’s eyes flicked up to hers. Without a word, he drew his hands back and let them rest in his lap. He leaned over her arm, staring at it for a very long time.

Something heavy draped over her shoulders. The boy crouched before her; he’d wrapped his cloak around her. With one sleeve, he began to dab at her face, pausing every now and then to gauge her reaction. She let him, let the rain wash over her and numb her as he wiped away the blood from her cheeks and her split lip. He was gentle, careful, and efficient, each swipe of fabric cleansing away the memory of Elantian hands.

When he finished, the boy drew back and folded his fingers together. “I know how it feels,” he said quietly. “I know how it feels to have everything taken from you. And I know how difficult it is…to continue to live.” She looked up at him then, arms wrapped tightly around herself. There was nothing of the foreign, ancient blackness to his eyes as he gazed back, face marshaled and restrained. There was no kindness either, only a hard, bladed empathy.

“But you must remember that, should you choose to live, you do not live only for yourself.” He made a gesture as though to touch his heart. “You live for those you have lost. You carry their legacies inside you. You see, the Elantians destroyed everything that made the roots of our kingdom: our culture, our education, our families and principles. The...

“But what they do not know is that, so long as we live on, we carry inside us all that they have destroyed. And that is our triumph; that is our rebellion.” Rain clung to his lashes as neither o...

Lan lifted her head again. She drew the cloak tighter over her shoulders and glanced at the boy, suddenly aware that he was sitting in nothing but a thin white shirt in the rain. The broadcloth was soaked and semi-transparent, outlining the lean, corded muscles of his torso like a charcoal sketch. One side was torn; blood had spread across it like an ugly inkblot.

The boy tilted his head. The rain was running in rivulets down his black hair, but he looked at her with a spark of weary earnestness. “I know the practitioners of old are spoken of as no more than legends and lore these days. But we exist. We always have. And you…” He made as if to reach for her left arm, then thought better of it and pointed, instead, at her scar. “If you are not one of us, then you have been in contact with one of us. It is a great undertaking for a practitioner to imbue a Seal unto someone.”

The boy sighed at her silence. “Let me show you,” he said. “Give me your arm. I promise, it will hurt less than what he did to you earlier.” In spite of everything, she liked the way he spoke: bluntly, honestly, presenting the truth to her no matter how difficult it was to hear. She’d had enough of lies, of things left unsaid.

Slowly, she held out her arm. She forced herself to hold still as his hands came to wrap around her skin, but he was gentle, the barest tips of his fingers grazing her wrist to steady her. With his other hand, he pressed his index and middle fingers to her flesh. Lan drew a sharp breath. The air seemed to shimmer—not visibly, but in a way that resonated in her soul, like the missing chords to a harmony. She felt something flow from his fingertips into the flesh of her arm, seeping through blood and bone.

Relief rushed through her, so strong she thought she might weep. For twelve cycles, she’d thought of her last memory with her mother as a hallucination born out of the trauma of that day. It hadn’t been. Everything she’d thought of as impossibility was true. That her mother was—had something to do with—the practitioners of old. That she had died to protect a secret, to lock it inside Lan…and to suppress Lan’s connection to qì so the Elantian magicians would not find her.

Lan opened her mouth, but her torrent of questions faded on the tip of her tongue when she caught sight of the practitioner. He’d leaned gingerly against a stalk of bamboo, and she suddenly saw how weary he was. Blood had clotted on the side of his head, and the stain on his shirt was still spreading. He closed his eyes. He was breathing hard.

He had saved her life. And he was the closest link she had to finding out more about all this—the Seal her mother had left her, the reason the Winter Magician was after her. Lan ripped the fabric of her torn sleeve, separating it into long, thin strips, and knelt by the boy; he flicked a glance up at her in dull surprise. I wish to live, she thought, and then in conjunction: I need you.

Something eased in her chest. She hoisted him straighter against the thick stalk of bamboo, and they were quiet as she dressed his wound, then dabbed the cut on his temple. She let her fingers rest on his skin for moments longer here and there to warm her numb hands, and in the silence and soft fall of rain against bamboo leaves, a new connection might have been forged between them. Trust.