By the time they got back to the Gate of Flowers Inn with the sack full of recovered copper yun and returned the money to the cashbox, half the night was gone. Despite the hour, Jun couldn’t fall asleep. He felt jittery with residual adrenaline. When he lay down and shut his eyes, his thoughts churned in ceaseless, turbulent circles, like leaves spun in a whirlpool.
He’d done it. He’d summoned Dragon’s Breath and channeled all his force into one shattering blow. The memory of Ren’s astonishment and pride warmed the back of his neck. If only more people had been there to witness the feat. Sai had always been excited and impressed whenever he showed off a new skill.
Well, yeah. His twin’s voice popped unbidden into his head, with an imagined mixture of brotherly pride and grinning superiority. But once you did anything, I could do it better.
A curl of unwelcome anxiety rose, dampening Jun’s elation. Chang’s training had changed him after all, but would it be enough?
He climbed out his window and onto the flat roof of the inn, where he could sit and look upon the walls of Xicheng. They were so close that he could see the figures of the guards moving around high up on the watchtowers above the city’s tall, closed gates. The night was not dark or quiet; torches blazed in the inn’s courtyard, and Jun could hear music, singing, and laughter coming from the pavilions where moneyed travelers drank wine flavored with pomegranate and lychee, listened to pipa music and spoken poetry, and paid for the attention of the inn’s courtesans.
“Can’t sleep either?”
Jun looked over the edge of the roof. Ren stood on the balcony beneath him, her head tilted up. She’d thrown a robe over her nightclothes and her hair was unbound. Before Jun could overcome his surprise, she climbed up onto the balcony’s railing in her bare feet and jumped up to grab the edge of the roof. He hurried to help her, but Ren pulled herself up onto the roof with an acrobat’s ease, dusted her hands as she stepped lightly across the tiles, and sat next to him. She let out a long sigh. “I can’t believe we actually pulled that off.”
Relief made him laugh. “Me neither. It feels like we bluffed our way through the whole thing.” He nudged her with his shoulder. “Thanks to you. You were fearless.”
Ren smiled shyly, the remaining tension sagging out of her. “I’m an actor. I bluff for a living. It’s about projecting confidence. Showing strength when all eyes are on you.”
Jun nodded. As a poor, scrappy exiled boy in Cheon who regularly got into street fights, he’d learned the same lesson early on and internalized it. The first one to show doubt loses. Most fights were won or lost in the mental struggle before the physical one. Jun would rather be tested for being arrogant than targeted for being weak.
Ren nudged him back, her smile growing. “You do it better than me. The look on those gangsters’ faces when you broke their table with a single short punch. That was incredible.”
Warmth rushed through Jun’s chest. He glanced at her, then away again, reluctantly trying to keep his eyes from going places they shouldn’t. Traveling together for the past month, he couldn’t help seeing Ren in nightclothes and with her hair down sometimes. When they were hosted by wealthy patrons or lodged in well-appointed inns, they had their own rooms or quarters with screens separating each sleeping area. On other occasions, camped outside or in modest shelters, there was no such privacy, but Chang had always been present, sleeping between them.
Being together alone on a rooftop at night was uncharted territory.
Perhaps sensing a change in the air between them, Ren drew her robe close, tucking her bare feet under the hem. She pulled her hair up and coiled it, securing it in place with two silver pins. If the intent was to appear more proper, Jun would have to say the messy bun with strands of black hair tumbling loose around her face had the opposite effect.
She said lightly, teasing, “I guess all that time you were trying to break that miserable wooden board, you just weren’t motivated enough. Turns out we only needed to face down a bunch of gangsters who wanted to rob and kill us, and then it was no big deal.”
Jun snickered, but then he admitted, “I didn’t even think about what I was doing at the time. What Zhang was saying got to me.”
“About how you need a breathmark to win the tournament?” Ren scoffed. “That’s what he believes because he lost to Yama.”
“It’s not just him,” Jun said sourly. “A lot of people believe the same thing.”
It had always been that way, throughout the history of Longhan, centuries before the Snake Wall existed. Only those with Dragon’s blood were allowed to rule, because it was said only they could comprehend the complete wisdom of the Scrolls. The belief persisted: In the West, only a breathmarked descendant of the emperor could be heir to the throne; in the East, only children born with dragonskin could be trained as Aspects of Virtue and allowed to study the martial arts at all. Those with breathmarks were admired and sometimes feared, because they were the descendants that Dragon chose to recognize over others.
Jun had learned that inviolable distinction early in life and could never forget it.
Ren turned toward him. A crinkle formed on her brow between her luminous eyes. “Li Jun, you ran away from home and stowed away with the intent to compete, unsponsored, in the biggest tournament that exists. If that doesn’t take an offensively large amount of self-confidence, I don’t know what does. Why should it bother you what other people think?”
Jun rubbed his forehead. Being out here with Ren, just the two of them … Something seemed to shift inside him, like an unstable rock shelf sliding into the ocean. “I had a brother. Have a brother,” he confessed. “A twin, back in the East where we were born. When we were six years old, a man and a woman came to our house and took my brother away to be trained as an Aspect of Virtue, because even though we were identical, he was breathmarked and I wasn’t.”
The words felt heavy, as if they resisted being spoken; he had told so few people in his life about this hurtful part of his past. Saying it to Ren now felt as if he were opening up his chest for her to peer inside. He couldn’t say why he was doing it. “My mother was allowed to stay with him, but my father and I were exiled to the West for secretly training in the martial arts. I was the spare twin, the one without Dragon’s blood, without any special destiny.”
Ren had gone still and quiet, listening.
“I guess … that’s why competing in the Guardian’s Tournament means so much to me,” he went on slowly, staring at his hands. “Of course, I want the honor of winning, but … more than that, I want to prove all of them wrong. The Aspects, my father, everyone. Maybe even Dragon himself. Because he made me and my brother identical except for one tiny thing, and that thing made all the difference.”
Ren was silent for so long that Jun began to wonder with mounting worry if she would react at all. What did she think of him blurting out his guts to her like that?
“Have you seen your mother or your brother since you left them?” she finally asked.
Jun shook his head, too uncomfortable to keep speaking. Ren sat back thoughtfully for a moment. “I want to show you something,” she said, with a seriousness that made him look up at her in concern. Ren untied her robe and began to lift her nightshirt.
“Wait, wait, don’t we need to talk about this?” Jun’s voice came out comically high. Heat rushed into his face and other parts of his body in a way that made him grateful it was dark.
“Don’t get the wrong idea,” Ren said with calm amusement. She lifted her nightshirt only far enough to bare her flat stomach. At first, Jun had no idea what she was trying to show him, other than her smooth, pale, creamy skin, faintly lit by moonlight. He gulped.
“Look closer,” Ren told him.
Still unsure of what he was doing and why, Jun leaned in closer, his face alarmingly and enticingly close to her body. Then he saw it: a tiny cluster of three pearly white scales, so small and flat that someone else seeing them but not staring in close examination might mistake them as minor discoloration of the skin above Ren’s navel.
Jun reared back. “You’re breathmarked?”
First Sai, then Chang, and now Ren? Great Dragon. People with breathmarks were rare and getting rarer. Why did he seem to keep finding himself among them? All this time he’d been traveling with Ren, she’d never told him. He’d been honest and vulnerable with her, thinking she would understand his feelings, but she, too, was one of Dragon’s chosen.
“What’s your ability?” Accusation scraped across his voice.
Ren dropped her nightshirt back down and pulled her robe closed. “I don’t have one.”
“Of course you do. You have Dragon’s blood.”
“Yes,” she remarked sourly, pulling her elbows close to her body and meeting his glare with her own. “That’s why I was forced to leave my family in the East, just like you were.”
Jun opened his mouth, then closed it again. “What?”
Ren’s pale throat bobbed in a hard swallow. “My parents were opposed to the Council of Virtue’s policies of isolationism and its nationalization of martial training. They refused to allow me to be taken to the Sun Pagoda and made an Aspect. So they sent me away instead. They paid bribes to have me smuggled across the Snake Wall to their friends in the West.”
“You’re … also from the East?” He realized he was just repeating what she’d already said, but he was having a hard time reorienting. He could believe Ren was breathmarked, but he’d never suspected she was an immigrant like him. She’d never had an accent, never seemed to be ill at ease in her environment; she must’ve come over at an even younger age than him. Most people simply assumed she was the flutist’s daughter by blood. “Why didn’t your parents come with you to the West? Why would they send you alone? You must’ve been just a child.”
“They couldn’t leave. They had four older children to think of and important work to do and their livelihoods were in the East. Getting one little girl across the border was a lot easier than a family of seven.” She picked at the hem of her nightshirt, shoulders sagging. “Besides, times were tough. They probably didn’t mind having one less mouth to feed.”
Jun tried to think of something to say and failed.
“The irony is that they sent me away for nothing.” Bitterness sharpened her words. “I have the mark, but I don’t have any ability. There’s nothing special about me. I’ve heard that many breathmarked children just know what their gift is, but that was never the case for me.”
“But you are gifted,” Jun said. “The things you can do onstage—”
“I didn’t take naturally to dancing or acting or any stage skills. I had tutors who drilled me relentlessly all day, every day. I would’ve given up long ago, but I knew I had to succeed as a performer in Sifu Chang’s company because I couldn’t return home, and I had no one else to take me in. I kept praying for my breathmark ability to finally show itself to me, but it never has.”
Jun shook his head incredulously. “Is it possible? To be missing a breathmark gift?”
“I don’t know.” Ren blew out a loud breath of frustration. “Maybe if I had been taken to the Sun Pagoda, the Aspects of Virtue would’ve tested me. Maybe they could’ve identified my gift, if I even have one. But Sifu was the only other breathmarked person I knew.” She touched her stomach, as if it pained her. “I used to be so angry, to have a mark that had gotten me sent away, but that did nothing and meant nothing. I tried to pull off the scales. When I was thirteen years old, I even managed to cut one of them off. It hurt like the eighteenth circle of hell, like trying to remove your own fingernails. It doesn’t work, by the way. They just grow back.”
Jun fought a shudder.
“You said your brother has a destiny, because he was born breathmarked and you weren’t.” Ren took Jun by the shoulders and turned him toward her, gazing into his face with an intensity that made him go completely still. He felt as if he couldn’t move—that Ren had locked him into place as surely as if she’d immobilized all his pressure points.
“If there’s one thing I’m certain of by now, it’s that a breathmark alone isn’t a guarantee of anything.” Her words were low and insistent. “It took me years to realize this, and even longer to accept it: The abilities that matter the most don’t come from Dragon’s blood. They’re gained day by day, through sweat and tears. Marked or not, every one of us has Breath enough to will our own destiny into being.”
She sat back, letting go of him, though her eyes did not relinquish their hold. “Do you think Sifu would’ve spent time training you if he didn’t think you could win? I’ll admit that at first, I thought he was being foolish to bring you along. But now I see what he knew from the start. It’s what Old Man Zhang and his crew found out tonight. The Guardian’s Tournament is a stage, too, a very big one. Only a few actors can play the hero when all eyes are on them.”
Jun felt as if Ren’s words filled his head, sank through his body, settled into his bones. He remembered thinking that worldliness and responsibility had made Ren wiser and more adult, but now he knew that hardship and doubt had shaped her even more than they had shaped him.
He had nothing else to say. They sat together side by side, gazing at the sky. This close to the outer sprawl of Xicheng, the view was not as crisp and clear as he’d seen it on nights out in the countryside. Smoke from cooking fires and the blazing light of thousands of torches and oil lamps rose up and blurred the bright-red pinprick of Dragon’s star.
Jun moved closer to Ren, studying the lines of her face. He wanted to kiss her. It wasn’t the first time the thought had occurred to him, but the desire now was sudden and almost irresistible.
Ren turned to him with a soft smile and touched his cheek with her fingers, tilting her chin slightly as if she could hear his rapidly beating heart, her wide pupils aglow with reflected light. Her nearness transfixed him, drawing him in like a boat tugged by the tide. Jun’s face dipped toward hers.
Wait. He paused, as if catching himself on the ledge of a precipice. Not yet.
Tomorrow, they would enter the capital, where he had a tournament to fight. Chang had trained him and brought him this far; it would be disrespectful to get involved with his daughter right before he was supposed to fight in the arena. He couldn’t be distracted, not right now, not before the biggest contest of his life.
But after he won, after he was the Guardian … he could offer her anything she ever wanted.
Ren paused, sensing his hesitation, her fingers still hovering against his skin. Then she drew back, opening up space between them, the embarrassed flush on her face visible even in the dark. Jun’s ears were burning hot, but the roof felt suddenly cold.
Ren scooted to the edge of the roof and dropped back down to the balcony with graceful ease. “I’m going to try to get a few hours of sleep. You should, too. We’ll need to leave early if we hope to beat the rush into the city tomorrow.”