The sock struck the top of the storehouse like a falling comet, and with a white flash, the whole roof burst into flames. I’d seen far worse fires start from far less in Guangzhou. The dim courtyard was suddenly alight with blazing orange, the fire roaring and churning smoke into the night.
The prince shielded his face, but I didn’t look away until I saw the guards rushing through the smoke toward the burning storehouse.
“Come on!” I said, grabbing the prince’s sleeve and yanking him across the courtyard before more guards could come running and spot us.
I coughed, stones slipping through my sweaty fingers as I wasted precious seconds fumbling with the lock. But with a few firestones, it unlatched and we rushed into the dungeons, slamming the door shut behind us.
The sounds of fire faded, the air suddenly cool and moist. We stood in a shadowed hall of slick stone walls covered in ominous black fungus, lit only by sputtering candles on the far ends that cast sickly circles of gray light across the doorways.
“No guards?” I said, rubbing the sting of smoke from my eyes.
“Only on the outside,” the prince said. “They say the mold in here makes them sick.”
“Wonderful,” I said, already feeling like the air was coating my throat in slime. The prince hurried to the left, nearly skidding on the wet stone floor. He grabbed a candle from the wall and rushed down a spiral staircase, slipping on the last step as we emerged into a long, dark hall of cells with bamboo bars.
I hesitated in the doorway, even as the prince ran forward. I knew this scent.
This was the stench of corpses with teeth rotted from bloody vomit, skin spoiled with sores. As shops in Guangzhou shuttered with black X’s painted across their doors, I had to charge half price for dead children because there were just so many of them. It was an illness that answered to no one, that stopped at nothing. Sick bodies started to rot even before they died, and they smelled like this.
“Yiyang!” the prince called out. “Gao’an!”
Formless whispers floated up from the cells, murmurs of pain or thirst, but nothing that told us where the princesses were.
The prince slipped his candle between the bars to peer inside. Most of the prisoners cowered, hair draped over their faces, shielding them from the light. What unspeakable horrors had these people done to end up here? Was I walking among Chang’an’s most dangerous murderers with nothing but bamboo between us?
The prince’s expression hardened as he moved down the hall, calling for his sisters. He was hurrying farther away with our only candle, so I plucked another from the wall and quickly lit it with some firestones.
A hand shot out from the closest cell, grabbing my sleeve, tearing the fabric. I gasped and pulled backward, breaking the weak grip easily, but my candle tumbled to the ground and extinguished itself in a puddle.
Through a cool sliver of moonlight pooling through the barred window, I caught a glimpse of a light brown eye with flecks of green.
Auntie So had always said my eyes were like honey, not warm and dark like my cousins’. It’s because of your father, she’d said. I’d never seen anyone else with such light eyes, but of course, I’d never met anyone else with a Scotian father. Only foreigners had green eyes.
“You’re an alchemist,” the voice said. A man’s voice, so distant that it was hardly there at all. He didn’t sound like a foreigner.
I snatched my candle, edging away from him.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I am too. Or, I was.”
He’s lying, I thought. The prince had already said how much the Empress liked “collecting” alchemists, that she wouldn’t hurt us because she needed us for her precious life gold.
“Touch me again and I’ll break your hand,” I said, fishing for more firestones.
The man shook his head, curled hair falling over his face. “I don’t mean any harm,” he said. “But I saw you walking with the prince.”
“You saw nothing,” I said through gritted teeth. I hadn’t planned on killing anyone tonight, but if this man kept talking, I might have to.
He sighed, hunching over, sharp shoulder blades jutting from his back. “It’s not as if anyone would listen to me, even if I told them,” he said. “Once you get on the royal family’s bad side, no one believes anything you say. You need to stay away from them.”
“I don’t take advice from people rotting in dungeons,” I said, lighting my candle. I only caught a quick glance of the man’s gaunt face before he drew back at the sudden brightness.
“You want to be one of their lapdogs, don’t you?” he said, his greasy hair shielding him so I could see only the gaunt silhouette of his profile. “They don’t want your alchemy. They want your soul.”
Cold rushed through me in a violent wave, my hand clenched against the wet stones. I rose to my feet, my skirts soaked through, and hurried after the prince. I didn’t need warnings from a starving, disgraced alchemist probably hallucinating from all the mold and spores growing in the dungeon. Clearly, I could handle myself better than him. I was the one outside the cage.
“Zilan!” the prince called from the other end of the hallway.
When I caught up to him, he was kneeling on the ground before a cell, clutching two pairs of pale hands reaching through the bars.
Two round faces peered through the darkness, their bright skin smudged with dirt, streaked through with tears. I recognized them from the procession, but up close, I could see the way their faces glimmered with gold flecks, hinting that they were older than they appeared. They had papery pale complexions, sweet and smooth like newly bloomed azaleas, moon eyes, and full cheeks.
“Did they hurt you?” the prince said.
The girls shook their heads. “We’re okay, but it’s cold and wet in here,” the older one said. The other one had angled herself toward me.
“Is this your girlfriend?” she said.
The prince let out a stiff laugh. “Umm—”
“No,” I said, frowning. “Don’t say umm like you need to think about it!”
“I just didn’t know what to call you!” the prince said. “You’re my...” He turned to his sisters. “She’s my... Well, we met—”
“I’m Fan Zilan,” I said, before he could waste more time. “I’m getting you out of here.”
I had so many questions about why the princesses were even here in the first place, but I knew we didn’t have much time before the guards put out the fire.
“You’re paying to replace all the stones I’ve used tonight,” I said to the prince, digging out three more metalstones and warping them into a key. I didn’t want to break the locks—hopefully, when guards realized the princesses had escaped, they would assume someone had taken their keys rather than used alchemy to blast free.
The doors swung open and the girls hurried out, crushing themselves against the prince. He wiped their faces with his sleeve and took one girl under each arm, ushering them to the door at the end of the hallway. By the time we emerged, the courtyard was completely shrouded in smoke.
The fire was mostly extinguished, but still smoldered warningly, embers flaring on what remained of the thatched roof. Guards and servants had spilled outside of the nearby houses to see what happened, so it wasn’t difficult to slip past them unnoticed and make our way back down to the vegetable cellar.
“Where are we going?” the younger girl said to the prince as he locked the gate behind us.
“The nuns at the eastern convent can hide you,” the prince said. “We can walk you halfway there, but then Zilan and I need to return before my absence becomes suspicious. It’s a straight line from the midpoint, anyway.”
“How long will we stay there?” the older girl said, clutching the prince’s sleeve so hard that I worried she’d tear Wenshu’s coat.
The prince didn’t answer at first, our footsteps clattering across wet stones. “I’ll send for you when it’s safe,” he said quietly. It wasn’t a real answer, and I was sure the girls knew it, because they didn’t ask again.
We hurried through the dark labyrinth for so long that I started to feel like I was sleepwalking, my numb legs shuffling forward on their own. When we reached a juncture of five tunnels, the prince pointed to the one farthest to the left.
“Continue straight until you see sunlight,” he said, bending down to hug the girls. After peeling herself from the prince, the younger one crushed my legs in an embrace, making me stumble backward.
“Thank you for helping us,” she whispered.
“I... Don’t mention it,” I mumbled, too aware of the prince’s eyes on me.
Then the girls rushed off, and it was only me and the prince standing alone in the heavy darkness. As their footsteps retreated, the prince made no move to turn back, staring off into the tunnel that had swallowed them whole.
“The last time my mother sent a family member to the dungeons, they came out in pieces,” he said, the words quiet. “Their body was chopped up and crammed into barrels of wine, which my mother served at a party. That’s what I was expecting.”
A weak wind shuffled leaves at our feet. I took a small step closer to the prince.
“You think your mother sent your sisters to the dungeon?” I asked.
“She’s the only one who could,” he said. He turned around, his expression tight, gaze focused sternly on the tunnel behind me. “My father is too ill.”
“But why would she—”
“Zilan xiǎojiě,” he said, his voice low, “if I tell you this, you cannot repeat it to anyone.”
Something about the graveness of his voice unnerved me. The gold flecks in his eyes had never looked quite so sharp. But it was far too late to go home and pretend I had no part in this. “We have enough secrets to bury the both of us,” I said. “What difference is one more?”
The prince nodded, letting out a tense breath. “There are things that I’m not supposed to remember,” he said. “I was very young when it happened, and everyone thinks I’ve forgotten. But I could never forget how it sounded. And the silence that came after.” He pressed his eyes closed, shaking his head. “They say that Yiyang and Gao’an are the traitor’s daughters. But I was there when my sister died, and their mother did not kill her. My mother did.”
The traitorous words echoed through the tunnel and fell quiet again before I could even begin to understand, much less believe them.
“The Empress?” I said slowly. “Why would she kill her own daughter?”
“Because she wasn’t the Empress yet,” the prince said. “It was easy to blame it on my father’s other concubine. He had her jailed and married my mother, who became the Empress.”
I closed my eyes, already wishing he hadn’t told me. People had probably died to keep this a secret. I already had enough people wanting me dead—I didn’t need to add another reason.
“I am the Crown Prince because of what she did,” he said. “I thought that was what she wanted—a son to secure her position as Empress. I thought that meant I was safe.” He shook his head. “But the servants say that she’s begged my father to change the line of succession, to write me out of it so that if he dies, the empire belongs to her alone.”
“And has he?”
“No, he’s always refused. But...”
A breeze rushed through the tunnel and the prince looked up sharply, as if expecting someone to appear. I couldn’t help looking over my shoulder, but saw nothing other than endless dark.
The prince sighed, gripping the ends of his sleeves. “Two months ago, something changed. I don’t know why, but my mother seemed...uneasy. Death notices started coming in from my cousins, all over China. Everyone in the House of Li was turning up dead. Every day, my meals were poisoned. I lost twenty taste testers before I fled to Guangzhou to find you. Even now, I’m scared to eat. I hardly sleep. I’ve been attacked...” He trailed off, and in the dim light, I could make out the glossy scar tissue of the scratches near his throat. “I told Mother, but she wasn’t concerned at all. I think... I think now that she’s survived a century on life gold, she’s realized that she doesn’t need me to stay in power. She can be the Empress forever if there’s no one left but her when my father dies.”
I swallowed, though my throat felt full of rocks. When I’d lived in Guangzhou, the royal family had always seemed so untouchable. I had thought the rich had no problems, no worries, no fears.
“Have you told the Emperor?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I’m not even allowed to see him anymore. The healers say he’s too ill, and since I’m the only legitimate heir, they can’t risk me catching it. Do you understand what I’m saying, Zilan?”
His eyes blazed, begging me to say the treasonous words he had so long avoided. In the tunnels, where wet stones carried our voices into a secret darkness, the thought seemed almost too dangerous to speak. But I had to be certain. “You came to me because the Empress wants you dead,” I whispered.
He nodded, his lips pressed into a tight line. “Yiyang and Gao’an are very far down in the line of succession. If she’s trying to kill them now, that means that there’s almost no one left but me.”
Something splashed in the puddles behind us.
The prince moved in front of me, pressing me into the wet stone walls. I held my breath, but before I could speak, a rabbit hopped in front of us, darting down another tunnel. The prince let out a shaky breath.
“Please don’t tell anyone what’s happened here tonight,” he said, huddling closer to me. “I suppose your siblings already know part of it, but no one else can. It puts all of you in danger.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not interested in angering the Empress,” I said. He stood so close, the gold flecks in his eyes the only light in the darkness. The secret that had begun our relationship had somehow kept growing. Ever since the day I met him in Guangzhou, I’d felt my life starting to unspool, flying fast and far away from me. So much more was at stake now, and a wiser person would have fled.
But I thought about the prince walking through the labyrinth of the central palace in the dark, surrounded by guards who wouldn’t listen to him and a mother who wished him dead. Did he even know how to fight?
“Are you really safe in the palace?” I said.
He shrugged. “I wander a lot at night, so I’m not easy to find. I have guards and taste testers and many locks on my doors. But I think that once I’m the last one on her list, the Empress will come for me, and I won’t be able to stop her.” He looked back at the tunnel where his sisters had disappeared into the shadows, then back at me, a gentle lie of a smile creasing his tired face.
“It’s late,” he said. “I should take you home so I can return before sunrise. I can’t have anyone knowing I rescued my sisters. They’ll likely suspect it anyway, but I don’t want to give them any evidence.”
With that, he turned and walked past me. I followed after him, beginning to feel the lack of sleep catching up to me. I hugged myself as a cold wind wafted through the tunnels, fingers catching at the torn sleeve where the prisoner had grabbed me.
“There was an alchemist in the dungeon,” I said.
The prince didn’t even slow down. “I’m not surprised.”
“I thought you said the Empress didn’t want to waste alchemists?”
“There are noblemen, and servants, and—as you saw—princesses down there too,” the prince said. “If the Empress doesn’t like you, it doesn’t matter who you are. She’ll make sure you never see sunlight again.”