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

by Amélie Wen Zhao

Once, he might have knelt at his master’s feet and begged for forgiveness. He might have told Dé’zǐ of the Demon Gods, of his plan to stop the Elantians from taking them for themselves. Yet now, Zen realized, no matter how hard Dé’zǐ had tried to save him, Zen could not run from his fate—the one that had been written in the stars of a young child who’d lost everything on the frozen Northern Steppes of the Last Kingdom. His soul had been forsaken since the day he’d chosen to accept the demon’s bargain; his story could have had only one ending, one that Dé’zǐ could not rewrite no matter how hard he tried.

Zen fell forward, his arms searing with pain. He felt Lan’s fingers on his face, cool against his feverish skin. He hadn’t realized just how weak his body was until this moment. One thought pierced through the haze in his mind, and he felt the corners of his lips curl. “You came for me.” “Don’t be a stupid egg,” she replied. “Of course I did. I’m not hunting down those Demon Gods by myself.” His smile stretched; he couldn’t help himself. Perhaps it was the pain that had made him slightly delirious. “With your current fighting abilities, you might be of some use as demon fodder.”

“I changed my mind. Perhaps I’ll leave you here after all.” “No.” In a single motion, he wrapped an arm around Lan’s waist. Her familiar scent of lilies enveloped him as she turned to him. “I need you.” Gently, she took his other arm and slung it over her shoulders, then drew them both to their feet.

He thought of her ocarina, of the Seal on her wrist. Of how she held the star maps, the secrets to the Demon Gods. How bright her qì flowed, how she had fought Erascius with nothing but a musical instrument. He closed the distance between them. His shoulders throbbed slightly as he reached to brush the hair back from her face, as though the answers might be written there, in her eyes. Who are you?

He had fallen asleep against the wall. A sliver of his chest, pale and corded, showed through his torn páo, rising and falling gently with each breath. His jaw cut a sharp line, his brows knitted under strands of his wet hair even as he slumbered.

His hand snapped over her wrist with startling speed; she cried out at the sudden pain. His eyes were open, and for a moment, she imagined she saw black filling the whites again. Then he blinked, and the sharpness to his expression softened. He let her go as though he’d been burned. “Forgiveness.” His voice was husky with exhaustion. “Habit.” “Well, you should have known I wasn’t going to attack you,” Lan said, raising the hot water kettle to pour more water into the bucket. “This isn’t a teapot.” Through the steam rising gently between them, she caught his smile. Warmth rushed through her, and not only from the water.

Lan leaned close, dabbing at the fresh wounds as carefully as she could. She had been around plenty of men, had flirted with them boldly for a tip of one or two extra wén, yet none of that had made her this nervous. Blood rushed to her face, she hardly dared breathe, and her heart was pulsing against her rib cage so hard that she was certain Zen could hear.

Zen had turned to face her, and his gaze was startling, arresting. Imperial, she thought, remembering the first impression she’d had of him. She had been accustomed to the sleazy, wine-blurred glances of the patrons of the Teahouse that were so easy to slip between. Yet when Zen looked at someone, he truly looked, as though nothing else existed in his world at that moment.

Lan found herself leaning forward. Heart in her mouth, she pressed the cloth to his cheek, wiping away blood from a cut. His eyes fluttered, but they did not leave her face.

“Lan,” Zen repeated, and she felt his fingers wrap around hers, firm but gentle. Heat bloomed where his skin grazed hers. “Lan, look at me.” She did, and the recognition in his eyes felt like coming home: a longing and grief for a part of her history and her identity that she had never known. The air between them had thickened, and for some reason her blood roared in her ears and her heart tumbled in her chest.

Lan’s lips curved, and she took on a teasing tone, meaning to break the sudden heaviness between them. “Since you have only one of the pair left, you had better choose carefully.” Zen’s eyes flickered. Gently, he took her hand and turned it so that her palm faced up. Then, carefully, he slipped his other palm over hers. The amulet felt cool as his rough fingers pressed it against her skin. “I want you to have it,” Zen said, “to remember that you are not alone. That you have lost so much, but I…I am glad to have found you.”

Her heart was unsteady; she might have been drunk on plumwine. She looked into Zen’s face, open with earnestness and a vulnerability she had never before seen in him, and in this moment, all the trials and tribulations she had gone through to get here might have been worth it. Lan lowered her gaze. The red cord of the necklace had somehow gotten caught over their fingers; it draped over both of their interlocked hands, seeming to bind them together. She thought of what Ying had told her of the red threads of fate, of how each Hin was born into this world with an invisible red cord tying them to their destiny.

“Is that all?” she asked. “You wish for me to feel less alone?” He hesitated, and she could see the conflict on his face, emotions warring with the guard he always put up. Then, without warning, all the layers of defensiveness and distance in his eyes thawed. In that moment, he spoke the words that utterly surrendered himself. “I wish for you to not go anywhere without me. In this wo...

Lan thought of how safe she felt with Zen, how gentle he was with her. How his presence could light up her world and speed up her heart, and how she had come to gravitate toward him like the moon to the sun. Of how his touch reached through the layers of imperfection and tragedy this life had conferred upon her and reminded her of hope. Of how she trusted him. All the terrible stories and unwanted memories peeled away from her, and she found within herself an instinct, guiding her like a lodestone.

She dared to open her eyes and found his face inches from hers, his pupils dilated. He smelled of mountain wind and rain and smoke, the scent invoking in her a sense of belonging.

It felt natural for her to tip her head and press her lips to his. Even the dim lighting could not hide the surprise in his expression. It gave way to something dark and heady that set her on fire as he drew her to him. Slowly, softly, with hesitation, fingers barely touching her waist as though afraid she might break. Afraid, she understood, that his kiss might conjure memories of what songgirls were made to endure at the hands of Elantians.

Lan reached up and ran a hand through the silky fall of his hair, rain-wet. The taste of him—sharp smoke and starless nights, quiet sorrow and tender hope—washed away the memories of cycles at the Teahouse. Tonight, she was but a girl, being touched by a boy for the first time in her life. Gently, he drew back. His mouth was soft as he pressed it to her forehead, her left cheek, then her right. His hand came up to cup the back of her head as he pulled her to him. And that was all he did: he simply he...

It was in that moment she knew—knew he understood her, more than anyone left alive in this world, and knew that she craved, more than anything, to be understood in a way that none had for the past twelve cycles. Not the kind aunties in the villages she’d wandered through, not the songgirls at the Teahouse, not Old Wei, not even Ying…she had given parts of herself and her p...

It wasn’t until she felt Zen’s thumb tracing her cheeks that she realized she was crying—out of the cycles of pent-up grief, the relief of knowing a part of who she was, and the joy of having found someone who understood. Looking into Zen’s eyes felt like coming home, like gazing into a reflection of her own face. Zen pulled her down onto the kàng. She tensed as he reached for her, but he only brushed a hand down the side of her jaw. His eyes were quiet black pools, and tonight was the first time she thought she saw through them: past the wall of ice or the raging flames. Tonight, there was tranquility in Zen’s gaze, the shimmer of something that might have been joy as he beheld her, drinking her in.

They remained like that, lying side by side, gazing at each other and marveling at the small miracle of two lives having crossed, two souls having found each other in this vast world. The paper windows were thrown open to the vast sprawl of mountains and gray skies and the pat pat pat of rain, but in this moment, their worlds might have just held each other.

“You must keep playing,” Zen said, “or I cannot transcribe the star maps.” “Let me rest a few minutes.” Lan yawned, and then her eyes took on a playful glint. “You want to try playing, and I’ll draw?” Zen sighed, but he couldn’t help the smile curving his mouth. “You mock me.” “Never. I daren’t.” “If I let you transcribe, our search would bring us to the other side of the world.” Lan poked her tongue out. “And if I let you play, the entire village’s ears would fall off.”

“Zen?” Lan came to crouch next to him, and he could not help but look at the way the lambent light draped soft over her outline, the shine to her eyes as she looked at the maps, then to him. His eyes trailed from her mouth to the crook of her neck where the red cord of his necklace hung, the silver amulet pressed into the curve of her chest.

He shut his eyes briefly, hating that he could not drive the thought of her from his mind. Since when had he become so painfully aware of her presence, every move or shift or tilt of her head, the way she looped her hair behind her ears or chewed on her lip when she was thinking?

She broke into a smile. “You look so grave when you think,” she said, and reached forward, poking her index and middle fingers to either corner of his mouth, pulling it wide. “Smile, Zen.” He reached up and cupped his hand over hers, unfurling her closed fingers so that her hand splayed against his face. Closing his eyes, he sighed and pressed his mouth to her palm just as the candle burned out.

All he wanted in this moment was to stay in this little village in the mountains with the girl he’d fallen for and sit by a window of rain, watching her hair grow white as snow with time. It was a desire that could be little more than a fantasy, not the reality they had been born into: the reality of Elantian rule closing its grasp tighter and tighter over the Hins’ necks.

The boy looked up at Lan in half fascination, half fear: the expression of a child who did not yet understand the horrors this world could afford. At eight cycles old, he would have grown up post-Conquest, his life confined to this small village, knowing nothing of the outside world. Where once traveling merchants might have roamed the Last Kingdom, peddling wares and trading stories across the land, and imperial messengers might have arrived on horseback to collect taxes and bring news of the outside world, those lines of communication had long gone cold in the era of the Elantian Conquest.

He caught her wrist and turned her to him. This time, he could only pray that the surface of his composure did not crack. His heart was breaking, and he could not let her know. Zen swallowed and took in her face, those bright eyes and that quick mouth, the red cord of the necklace he’d gifted her.

Lan wrapped her fingers around his and brought their intertwined hands to her heart. A brief touch, but the gesture nearly broke his resolve.

Zen thought back to that winter day thirteen cycles ago, to the words He With Eyes of Blood had whispered to him. Did you not call for me? Did you not cast an unspoken wish for power? For revenge? For the chance to do to them what they did to your family? He had. He had asked for all those things, and had achieved none. Instead, Zen had run in a perfect circle, coming right back to where he’d started. Except he was no longer a naive child yearning for the affection of his master, for acceptance in the world, for redemption of his soul. No, it was too late for that, and if he could achieve something with the path less taken, Zen would choose it.

He thought of Lan, of the red cord he’d bound for her, a promise and a wish that she’d miraculously granted him. That she could hold feelings for the likes of him had seemed too good to be true…but it hadn’t stopped him from dreaming of a future with her. A future free of persecution and war and suffering, where they could explore what this great wide world held for them. An ordinary life together, in which he could watch her skin wrinkle and her hair turn white. But if he did not make this bargain, she would no longer even survive for them to have a chance at that. His resolve firmed.

In another world, a different life, he might have had different choices. Better choices. But in the one Zen had been born into, this was the only path left for him. The best path.

Lan looked at where the landlady sat, on a little wooden stool by her broken wooden table, mending a scrap of cloth. The realization came like a portrait snapping into place. The Elantians might burn down their towns and cities, destroy their books, and cut off their language, but the one thing Lan had counted on the Hin to hold on to had been hope. Hope was that fickle little fellow that had tided her through the cold nights and hungry dawns when the exhaustion of another day stretched long and bleak before her. Hope, she realized, was what Māma had given her the day she had whipped out her lute and felled an army of Elantians. Hope was what Māma had entrusted to Lan, in that Seal on her left wrist: a promise that this story was not over. That she held the brush to write its ending. Yet this village, this landlady, had survived the Elantian assault physically, but their spirits had been broken.

Zen stood before her, black páo billowing in the slight breeze. The drumbeat of terrible yīn energies had vanished, the stillness gone without a trace as the lake waters rippled, the pines around them swayed, the clouds above them shifted. “Lan,” Zen said, and it was his voice, his face, her name in his mouth that she had heard over the course of the past several weeks. Relief crashed into her. “Why are you here?” She stared at him, at that cool, unreadable face he had had the first night they’d met. The one she had found her way past little by little, like sun melting snow. Now it felt like they were stepping backward, the distance between them growing.

Zen saw the answer in her eyes. He brought his hands to his face. A violent tremor passed through his body. And then he stilled. When he straightened, his hands slipping from his face to curl into fists at his sides, the wild, frenetic look had left his eyes. They were cold, black, and inscrutable, a night without stars. “I have chosen my path. If you are not with me, then you are against me,” he said, and she knew she had lost him.

Zen meant to stop them here, tonight. But he couldn’t turn away, couldn’t stop himself from gazing at the girl who had become his anchor to this world, the one that had stood between him and the darkness that now lingered at the edges of his mind. Lan stepped back from him as though she’d been burned. Her eyes wavered, searching his face. Whatever she found there cast a shadow of fear and hurt across her expression.

Zen steeled his heart. He had seen that before, too many times. Lan turned. With one burst of qì she was kneeling by Dilaya’s side, wrapping her arms around the unconscious girl’s waist; with the next, she was airborne, a smudge of pale páo against the cloud-covered sky as bright and as brief as a shooting star. Then she was gone, swallowed whole by the night. Once again, Zen was alone.

Skies’ End was beginning to wake up, disciples streaming into view from the stone steps lining the mountains. She watched as the children trembled, clutching their bundles. Watched the older disciples shore up weapons—spears, swords, and rounds and rounds of arrows. All made mostly of wood that would surely splinter against the thick metal armor of the Elantians. These disciples were barely older than children themselves. Their eyes, though, bore none of the light of youth—only the wearied, hardened looks of those who had lived lives of suffering.

And suddenly, she understood, so deeply, what Zen had said to her on the shores of that black-glass lake. It was a worthwhile trade: a single person for the power to save this land and this people. Because no matter what, if he hadn’t sought out the power of the Demon Gods, they would lose. Power was a double-edged sword…but to not have it—that was to have no weapon to fight with at all. Had she been in Zen’s position, would she have declined the Demon God’s offer?

“Your father and your family and your clan have passed beyond this world.” There was sorrow in Dé’zǐ’s eyes, but Zen knew his master’s tricks. “Live not for those whose souls rest in eternal slumber in the next world…but for those still struggling to find that peace in this one.”

Dé’zǐ rasped. His grasp tightened over Zen’s fingers. “I know it has not been an easy path for you to walk, Zen. One marred with the blood from your ancestors’ deeds. I have tried, instead, over the past eleven cycles, to win you over…with love. I have loved you as much as any father can love a son. I never dared hope that you would return it in full…but if you have held any form of affection for me, then perhaps there is hope yet.”

A great breeze swept the forest, drawing clouds over the moon and rattling the pines and ginkgos all around. The earth trembled, and then a flash of light cleaved the world into monochrome. Time seemed to stop, the clouds stifling the sky, the leaves frozen in a flurried dance, the first droplets of rain suspended in the air, shimmering like tiny, tinted glass jewels. And then they fell.

Lan slowed her steps and raised it to her lips. The melody she played flowed through her fingers, her soul. It was one she had held deep in her memory, and it came now like a dream: a bamboo forest, a warm fire, a boy whose coldness had melted like winter to spring beneath the light of her song.

She opened her eyes, and Zen knelt before her. He held one hand to his stomach, where a large gash ripped across his robes. Rain mingled with blood, dripping down his face. She lowered her ocarina. “Lan,” he panted, and she flinched at the sound of his voice. Once, her heart might have ached at the sight of him bleeding and injured before her. But that had been for Zen, the boy who had saved her on the walls of Haak’gong, who had patiently taught her practitioning, who had followed the tenets to the Way with rigid stubbornness. Who had kissed away her tears and promised she would never need to be alone again. Looking at the figure before her, dripping yīn energies, carrying shadows like black fire, she was unsure where human ended and Demon God began.

He trembled violently. Rain carved tracks down his cheeks. “I have not been truthful with you about many things,” Zen said, “but the one truth I can neither control nor deny is that you hold my heart, Lan. I have never used you for anything.” She was glad for the downpour that would obscure the wetness in her own eyes. Behind her, Dé’zǐ’s body cooled. Soon, it would return to the elements of the earth, the cycle of all things natural in this world.

Zen’s thoughts drifted, shadows to light, and he found himself blinking as rain continued to wet his cheeks. His fingers were pressed so tightly against Lan’s windpipe that her eyes had rolled into the back of her head. By now, the light of the Silver Dragon was no more than a speck in her left wrist, a dying ember.

Zen slumped forward. Blood dripped from his mouth and from the wound in his chest, running in rivulets through the soil at the base of Skies’ End. The shadows in his eyes cleared, and when he looked up at her, hair slicked to his face from rain, she knew with certainty she gazed at the boy she had fallen for back in a mist-cloaked village. His lips curved into a slow, faint smile. “Better…than teacups,” he whispered. Then Zen collapsed in the mud. His eyes fluttered shut.

Then pain whitened her mind. Lan was only aware of her legs buckling beneath her. She did not fall to the ground. A pair of arms caught her, firm with steel-plated armor. Held her. “You did well,” Yeshin Noro Ulara said. Lan looked up at the Master of Swords. “I didn’t think I’d live to hear you compliment me,” she croaked. And there it was, an image that would remain etched in her memories: the faint tug of a corner of Ulara’s lips. A half smile.

The words rang a bell. She thought of Zen in the Jade Forest on the first night they had met. So long as we live on, he’d said, we carry inside us all that they have destroyed. And that is our triumph; that is our rebellion. Words that were suddenly more significant, now that she knew his clan origin and the depths of his history.

Lan saw, once again, her mother standing before an insurmountable army with a lone woodlute. This time, she understood. So long as there was war, there was sacrifice. So long as there was power, there was bloodshed. So long as there was life, there was hope.

She was no longer falling. She was flying. Steady hands cradled her head, turning her away from the ending that awaited Erascius. Zen’s face was pale, expressionless, like a porcelain figure etched in black and white. His eyes were downcast, perhaps closed, lashes and eyebrows a curved sweep of ink. Those dark flames wreathed his body, burning him with a fire Lan could not feel.