We arrived in Chang’an in three weeks and three days. For what felt like an eternity, we’d ridden through farmlands, fields of rice and soybeans, mosquitoes and locusts buzzing in our ears. Our bags quickly grew lighter as we had to eat all our fruit before the summer heat spoiled it, our stomachs sloshing with citrus as we rode over jagged, unpaved ground.
Any time we stopped in a city, Yufei and I kept our hats on and our heads low, walked behind Wenshu, and pretended not to speak Chinese. If anyone asked, he told them we were tribute girls from southern Asia who Wenshu was delivering to the Emperor. Few would dare try to steal the Emperor’s slaves, after all.
For long stretches of time, there was no water. We grew dizzy from the heat, our skin parched and pink. I fainted only once and managed to dismount Kumquat first, whereas Wenshu toppled off Turmoil twice. We all but fell into the Cháng River when we finally reached it, and from there onward, the roads were always paved and lit with lanterns, a tavern never too far away, for this was the path that postal couriers took to Chang’an. We’d had to sell Kumquat and Turmoil about a day’s walk from the capital because only nobles could ride horses through the city streets.
I knew when we’d arrived because the golden walls of the city glistened from far in the distance, brighter than any star. Though Guangzhou had walls too, they were barely my height, made of rammed dirt, and were mostly meant to mark the city limits and stop the sheep from wandering out into the fields to eat all the crops. But the walls in Chang’an were made of golden desert sand packed into bricks, three times my height, as if to keep something out. A moat was carved into the earth surrounding the walls, like the whole city was a lonely island floating in black waters.
We filed into the line to pass through the gate, where imperial guards interrogated weary travelers before letting them into the city. People at the front of the line gave the guards handfuls of gold coins, though I couldn’t make out how much. As we drew closer to the gate, the guards started yelling at a couple in white robes, shoving the woman to the ground.
“We don’t need more beggars in Chang’an,” the guard said. “If you can’t pay, get out!”
The couple hurried away, the line shuffling ahead. Wenshu’s fingers twitched as he counted the remaining coins in his satchel. We had a few more sewn into our clothes, but this wasn’t the best place to undress, and we needed that money if we didn’t want to sleep on the streets for the next few months. We’d already far overspent what we’d estimated just to get here in one piece. We couldn’t arrive in Chang’an with nothing at all.
The family in front of us passed through the gates, and soon the guards loomed over us, palms outstretched.
“How much?” Wenshu said, his voice even as he unhitched his satchel, like the price was inconsequential.
“Fifty for men, thirty for women, twenty for children,” the man said, jerking his open palm toward Wenshu with impatience.
Wenshu pressed his lips together and pretended to count, but I knew from his face that we didn’t have enough. How could we have come all this way just to be sent away at the city gates?
I slipped a hand up my sleeve and yanked the thread binding two pieces of gold to my clothes. I’d never attempted alchemy on money before—it was said that the capital gold was made from unstable materials, and the punishment for counterfeiting coins was death.
But as Wenshu grew pale, eyes darting around while cataloging his options, I decided there was a first time for everything.
I clenched the coin in my hands, crushing it against my new trio of copper rings. I used the copper catalyst to thin the gold, splitting the coin in half and reshaping the pieces into smaller coins that I hoped looked passable.
I didn’t even have a chance to check before the coins multiplied again, bursting from my fist and spilling down my sleeve, rolling in the red dirt. Everyone turned to stare at me, then the coins at my feet. Wenshu’s gaze fell to my right hand, where my copper rings had mysteriously disappeared, his face sinking into a tight grimace. I could almost hear his searing thoughts: Did you really do illegal alchemy standing right in front of the city guards?
He sighed, then grabbed my arm and threw me to the ground.
“You stole from me again?” he said. “I knew I was missing some.”
“Forgive me,” I said, bowing deeper into the dirt. Hopefully, the guards would think I was just a disobedient wife and not trying to counterfeit coins.
But the guards didn’t seem inclined to investigate further. From my spot on the ground, I heard Wenshu drop my coins in their hands and tie up his satchel. I watched his feet moving, Yufei shifting from foot to foot, horses and pigs passing by.
“Come on,” he said at last, yanking me up by the back of my dress. I stumbled after him until we passed the guards, then I took his wrist in one hand and Yufei’s in the other.
“Run,” I said in Guangzhou dialect.
“What?” Wenshu said. “Why?”
“Hey!” the guard called out. I looked over my shoulder and caught a glimpse of the guard holding a handful of ash spilling through his fingers. That answered one question at least: fake gold only lasted a few minutes.
“Run!” I said again, and this time they listened, darting around horses and carriages and carts, shoving our way through married couples and families, stumbling across spilled fruit and splashing through murky puddles.
People shrieked behind us as the guard thundered his way through the crowd. I jammed a hand into my bag of stones, fishing around for something useful while trying not to crash into anyone. Yufei grabbed my arm just in time to yank me away from a child chasing after a ball. Ahead of us, a man was pulling a cart of cabbages out into the street. I grabbed three chunks of amethyst in one hand and slammed my other palm into the cart.
It burst into wood splinters, cabbage leaves flying up into the air and raining over the crowd, cabbage heads rolling into the street. The guard tripped over a spinning cabbage and landed face-first into a puddle. I hardly had time to laugh before Yufei pulled both me and Wenshu into a side street, tucking us behind an abandoned cart. Only moments later, heavy footsteps rushed past us.
We panted for breath, cuffing sweat from our foreheads.
“Sorry about pushing you down,” Wenshu said. “It seemed preferable to beheading.”
I waived a hand in acknowledgment, wishing I had some water.
“I think we’ve made a good first impression,” Yufei said, sagging against the wall and feeling through her bag for oranges that she knew weren’t there.
“I’ll check if the coast is clear,” I said, rising to my feet even though my legs felt like paper, then hobbling to the mouth of the alley.
I flinched at the sound of a gong, sure that it meant the guards had somehow found us. But no one paid any attention to me. Everyone rushed to clear the streets, pressing themselves against buildings, ducking behind merchant carts, scooping up their children onto their shoulders. Wenshu and Yufei rose and stood behind me, trying to get a closer look.
Purple-robed officials on white horses trotted down the street, not even sparing a glance at the people below them. Their faces had a sharp brightness to them, like the ocean sparkling under midday sun. I’d heard that the more gold you ate, the more luminous you became, but I had never seen anyone with such a glow around them, as if the sun wasn’t shining on them but from within them. How much gold did they have to eat to look like that?
Behind the officials, four servants carried a gold-embossed palanquin at their waists. Everyone bowed as it passed, but when the wind blew the silk curtains back and I caught a glimpse of the person within, I couldn’t bring myself to move.
The warm, golden pools of her irises blazed as they captured the sunlight, matching the huādiàn on her forehead made of delicate gold foil and insect wings. Gold ornaments and flowers decorated her elaborate hairstyle, shimmering constellations in the glossy night black of her hair. She looked more like the perfect clay míngqì women in our shop than anything real, as if she had been shaped with exquisite care, hand-painted, polished with a ceramic glaze, baked at a perfect temperature until the colors grew deep and rich. She turned slightly and, for a single moment, met my gaze.
I suddenly felt bloodless, my feet rooted to the ground, breath trapped in my chest. Something about her stare felt almost physically sharp, like a hand clamped around my throat.
Someone tugged my sleeve—a merchant scowling at me from where he knelt on the ground.
“Are you a fool?” he whispered. “Bow or the guards will come for you.”
I dropped to the street as the palanquin rode past. “Who is that?” I asked.
The man’s frown deepened. “Do you live under a rock?” he said. “That’s the Empress.”
My gaze snapped back to the retreating palanquin. Empress Wu—who the people called the Eternal Empress—was celebrating her hundredth year as regent, one hundred years since the Emperor grew too ill to rule on his own and handed her the reigns to his kingdom, and still she looked barely older than me and Yufei.
In Guangzhou, the scholars said that under the Empress’s command, alchemists had discovered ways to measure time, ways to heal the sick, and of course, ways to stop aging. The Empress had thousands of questions about how the world worked, and using an obscene amount of the Emperor’s money, she’d set out to answer them all.
Following behind the Empress, with noticeably fewer guards, two young girls on horseback laughed and tried to race each other, forcing the disgruntled guards to grab the horses’ reins. They didn’t look older than ten, but if they ate gold like the rest of the royal family, their appearance said little about their true age. I’d heard of some aristocrats who liked to keep their daughters small and cute for decades.
The crowd began to murmur, some shouting curses as the girls rode past. Someone threw a persimmon at them, startling the horses, who took off faster down the road. The merchant beside me spat in their direction as they passed.
Wenshu nudged me to the side so he could get a better look. “What have they done?” he asked the merchant. “They’re only children.”
“They’re the traitor’s daughters,” he replied. “The Empress only lets them live out of kindness.”
“What traitor?” I said.
The man turned to me, expression pinched as if physically pained by my ignorance. “Consort Xiao. She killed the Empress’s daughter in her cradle,” he said slowly, “yet the Empress is merciful and lets the traitor’s daughters live as princesses.”
I mumbled my thanks and watched the princesses hurry after the Empress in a flurry of rotting fruit and insults. The last horse in the procession thundered past us, far too close. I jumped back and a sudden pain lanced through my head like a fire stoker.
I fell to my knees and kept falling, the ground nothing but silk under my palms. I tumbled forward into an empty sky and crashed onto my stomach, slamming the air out of my lungs. My fingers twitched across soft dirt, powdery red under my nails, ghosts of footprints beneath my fingertips. Voices spun above me in watery clouds, but even though they seemed miles away, I knew that some of the shapeless sounds were screams; I could feel the terror and agony in the pitch even without understanding the words.
I sat up and faced a wide, empty street of red dirt. In the distance, a gate with five great arches yawned open into nothingness. Their hungry darkness sapped the light from the street, swirling deeper, beckoning.
“Zilan?”
I blinked, the ground coming into focus beneath my hands. I was on my knees, Wenshu gripping my shoulder. When I raised my gaze to the path that the horses had followed, I saw the same five arches at the end of the street.
“I’ve been here,” I said, grabbing Wenshu’s sleeve. “I’ve been here before.”
Wenshu looked past me, probably at Yufei. “That’s not possible,” he said. “You need food and water.”
“No, listen to me,” I said, but he and Yufei—mostly Yufei—were already hauling me to my feet, dragging me away from the crowd. I heard Wenshu asking about shade, then they were pulling me down the street in the opposite direction from the gate. I tried to turn back, but my head still felt like it had been split open, so it was easy for Yufei to force me around a corner, where I couldn’t see the gates anymore.
I stumbled alongside the drainage ditches, glimpsing my watery reflection in the murky pools of rainwater. I smelled the sharp scent of citrus, then Yufei pushed me down by the shoulders, forcing me to the ground under the shade of an orange tree. She plucked the straw hat from my head and fanned me with it. I hadn’t seen where Wenshu went, but he reappeared moments later with three pieces of húbǐng—a flat bread covered in sesame seeds.
“Eat,” he said, sitting in front of us. “Both of you.”
I took a bite and then couldn’t stop eating until the bread was gone and my stomach felt tight. I’d finished before both Wenshu and Yufei, who looked at me like I was a caged animal. Yufei tore off a piece of her bread and offered it to me, but I pushed her arm back.
“No, I’m full,” I said. “And my head hurts, but I’m not losing my mind. I’ve definitely been here before.”
Wenshu sighed. “Zilan, you lived down the street from us for as long as I can remember, which is longer than you can remember, because I’m older. Your parents never took you this far north, and our parents certainly didn’t. Why would any of us come here?”
I pressed my lips together. It certainly would have been a long and difficult journey, especially for a child.
“Maybe you can see the future,” Yufei said, between bites. “Wouldn’t be the weirdest thing you’ve done.”
I supposed not. But I hoped that wasn’t the future, because whatever I’d seen was not just the streets of Chang’an, but pain and darkness.
Wenshu wouldn’t let me stand until I’d eaten an entire orange and my stomach felt ready to explode from food. Once he was satisfied, we headed back down the main street with the intention of finding a place to stay, though that plan was quickly derailed by Yufei trying to sample food from every single cart we passed.
There were more people here than I’d seen in my entire life in Guangzhou. I’d never really felt small before, but the scale of everything in Chang’an was immense—the rammed-dirt walls twice my height, the bamboo buildings with clean thatched roofs bound together with gold twine, the red-and-black pagodas in the distance stabbing into the pale sky. At every intersection, we passed a police post with stone-faced guards and bridges sloped over drainage ditches carved deep into the ground like the city’s wet veins. I’d expected a big city to stink, but Chang’an smelled mostly of elms and junipers and other fruit trees that lined the streets, probably to keep people from toppling into the ditches.
We wandered toward the eastern wards, where Yufei charmed a guard into buying her tánghúlu. He didn’t even flinch when she ate the hawthorn berries whole—seeds and all—and handed him the skewer to throw away as she told him how far we’d come to take our second-round exams.
“I should escort you to the dinner, then,” the guard said, inching closer to Yufei. “It’s almost time.”
“Dinner?” Yufei said, grip tightening around his arm. “What dinner?”
“For the arriving scholars,” the guard said. “The royal family is welcoming all the candidates tonight at sundown. You didn’t know?”
I shared an uneasy glance with Wenshu. We’d received almost no instructions from the Guangzhou magistrate other than the date and location of our next exam. It might have been a miscommunication, since we’d left for Chang’an quite soon after the first exam and mail from the North to the South was slow. But I also knew that the local school hadn’t been thrilled that one of their dropouts and his unschooled sisters had passed while some of their paying students hadn’t.
“What will they serve us?” Yufei said, pressing closer to the guard. “It’s real food, not gold, right?”
He tipped his head back and laughed, slipping an arm around Yufei’s waist. “No, the royal family won’t share gold that easily. But if they like you enough, they’ll keep you around to serve them forever.”
Forever, I thought. So much for retirement.
The guard led us to another eastern ward, this one lit with white paper lanterns painted with gold cranes, casting the paved courtyard in warm light as the sun sank behind it. We crossed a bridge over a silvery pond where golden carp shimmered beneath the water—was everything the rich owned made of gold, all the way down to their fish?
The guard left us at the gates and tried to kiss Yufei on the cheek, but she laughed coyly and ducked away. The smile dropped off her face as soon as the guard turned to leave.
“I’m surprised you tolerated that,” Wenshu said.
Yufei lifted a small red satchel from her pocket. “I took his money.”
Wenshu’s eyes widened. He spun around, making sure the guard was gone. “He’ll come back for you!” he whispered in Guangzhou dialect, eyeing the other guards in the courtyard.
“He’ll assume he dropped it,” Yufei said, stuffing it into her pocket.
Wenshu turned to me, as if I was the one pickpocketing. “We can’t do that here! Who knows what their jails are like!”
I nodded. “Yeah, Jiějiě, that’s probably not the best idea.”
“Thank you,” Wenshu said.
“You should let me do the stealing next time,” I said. “I can put holes in their pockets so it’s easier to believe they dropped it.”
Wenshu sighed but didn’t bother arguing as we walked closer to the building. Muffled voices and laughter echoed across the yard, the smell of salt and garlic and pork carrying across the lake on the gentle breeze. If being a royal alchemist meant attending feasts, maybe I could get used to it.
Another guard waited at the door, a scroll in one hand and a sword tucked into his belt. He frowned as we approached, unmoved by Yufei’s soft smile.
“This meal is for scholars,” the guard said before Wenshu could even open his mouth.
“We are scholars,” Wenshu said. “We’ve come from Guangzhou.”
The man’s gaze shifted across the three of us. “Guangzhou?”
“It’s in Lingnan,” Wenshu said, his words tight. “The south,” he continued, when the guard’s expression didn’t change.
“The south?” the man said. “I heard that southerners stuff baby mice with honey and let them scurry across the table for guests to catch and eat raw.”
I grimaced. I’d heard rumors of older people doing that, but I’d never met anyone who’d actually tried it. There were easier ways to get food.
“No,” Wenshu said, expression flat. “Check your list.”
The guard’s grip on his scroll tightened. “There’s a dress code,” he said. “You can’t sit among royalty looking like that.”
My gaze fell to my dirtied skirts. It was difficult to wash blood entirely from white cloth, so our clothes had taken on a brownish tinge, made worse from sleeping outside on our journey. Was this man really going to deny us a meal over our clothes after we’d spent weeks traveling?
I sighed, jamming my hand into my bag of stones.
“I don’t want your bribes,” the guard said. But I had already found three pieces of slate. I grabbed Yufei’s sleeve in one hand, the stones in the other. The slate drank up the blood and filth from her clothes, leaving her in a wrinkled but bright white gown. The excess poured down my wrist, pooling on the ground.
“Is that clean enough for you?” I said, my palms burning as I shook the blood and dirt off my hands.
The guard drew his sword, leveling it with my nose. The three of us froze, eyes fixed on the blade. I’d never had such a sharp weapon pointed at me before and was sure a wrong breath would slice my nose clean off.
“Only royal alchemists can practice outside the training compound,” the guard said.
“What?” I said softly, afraid to move my lips too much. “In the south, we’re allowed to do lower-level alchemy in public.”
“And in the North, we have rules. Our alchemists actually have skills beyond skinning hogs and squishing beetles. If you leave now, I won’t have you thrown in jail.”
“Don’t worry, we’re going,” Wenshu said, bowing and grabbing both me and Yufei before either of us could argue.
We moved wordlessly down the streets, Yufei casting sad glances back at the building as the smell of food faded. It was her expression more than my own pride that made me look over my shoulder at the guard growing smaller behind us, wishing I could rip his veins open. I would remember his face, and when I was a royal alchemist, I could make him crawl around and catch honey stuffed mice to eat raw.
Wenshu finally ground to a stop when we were a safe distance from the guard, his face red and jaw clenched. Had the encounter really upset him that much? Had risking jail more than twice in one day been the last straw?
“Gēgē,” I said quietly, “I—”
“Zilan,” he said, his voice low. “How long have you known how to do that?”
I blinked. “Do what?”
He grabbed Yufei’s clean sleeve and yanked it up in the air.
“Oh. That’s pretty easy,” I said, not sure why that, of all things, was the focus of his wrath. “A few years, maybe?”
He dropped her arm, fists clenched. “In that case,” he said, “then why the hell have I been doing all of our laundry this whole time?”
“That’s what you’re mad about?” Yufei said.
“I’m not using up my slate on laundry!” I said. “You would have made me clean all your clothes every time someone breathed on them! A little dirt isn’t a big deal!”
“What else can you clean?” Wenshu said, throwing his hands up into the air. “Can you wash vegetables? Scrub the floor?”
I looked at the ground.
“You can!” he said. “I can’t believe you! You think I enjoy cleaning up after you two?”
“Yes,” Yufei and I said at the same time.
“Can we talk about dinner now?” Yufei said.
“Yes,” I said, taking her arm and hurrying us away from Wenshu’s wrath.
Wenshu let out a withering sound of anger but stomped obediently behind us. “You could at least clean my clothes now.”
Though we’d hoped to stay somewhere close to the training grounds, we quickly realized that everything in the eastern wards was far too expensive. What their inns demanded for one night could have bought us food for a month back in Guangzhou. By the time we made it to the western side of the city, it was just after sundown and all the wards had closed their gates for the night, leaving us stranded in an abandoned labyrinth of dirt walls and worn paths.
We sat by a drainage ditch under a pear tree. It wouldn’t be the first time we slept outside in recent weeks, but something about it felt distinctly and conspicuously poor in a city as magnificent as Chang’an. We were invited here as scholars, the best in Lingnan, and yet we were sleeping on top of rotten fruit.
Maybe it was something about the vastness of the streets when empty, but I couldn’t relax enough to grow tired, despite how far we’d traveled. I rolled onto my side, wincing when a stone jammed into my hip. When I reached down to move it, I knew at once from the touch that it wasn’t a stone.
I scooted to the side, making Yufei grumble, and picked up a single pearl covered in muddy red. Even through the dirt, I knew the scent of blood. I brushed aside some smashed pears and found several more scattered pearls jammed into the ground.
I glanced at Wenshu and Yufei’s sleeping forms, then stuffed the pearls into my pocket to clean later. Maybe I could trade them for gold to buy us breakfast. I leaned back against the tree until my eyelids grew heavy, and when I finally sank into a dream, it was solid and unchanging as a painting, nothing but five tall archways leading into darkness.