There are two guards outside the Treasury, as always. The squat, steel-doored building is separated from the Temple of Atonement by a row of bushes. Jun crouches behind the bushes, a silent shadow, while I stand next to one of the guards, vanished, and count in my head. When I reach twenty, Jun tosses a handful of gravel at the roof of the Treasury. It skitters along the tiles; both guards startle and look up. Jun aims the little handheld crossbow I got from Dek and shoots one guard with a dart while I stab a dart into the neck of the fellow next to me. They sway and fall together. Neither has time to raise the alarm. I reappear, grinning like crazy.
“That is easy part,” says Jun, but he’s smiling too, his dimples showing. How he can go from looking so fierce to looking so sweet in less than half a second astounds me. I could watch the change all day. “How we can open this door?”
“That’s the easy part,” I tell him, producing Dek’s magnetic pick with a flourish. I am showing off, I admit, and while either one of us could have managed this job alone, doing it together is more fun. I was touched by how relieved he was to see me when I turned up at Count Fournier’s. When I described the job to him, assuring him that it was not common thieving but necessary to save Theo’s life, his eyes lit up. He is a boy after my own heart, all right.
Dek’s pick gets the door open in a jiff, and once we are inside, I take out the lantern and light it. Jun gives a low whistle, carrying the lantern along the shelves. I have never seen such a sight myself. Paintings, ancient scrolls, crowns, weaponry, pottery, jade sculpture, gem-studded goblets, a diamond the size of my fist, and chest after chest filled with bricks of gold—the Shou-shu Monastery is wealthy beyond anything I’ve ever imagined.
“Why they have all this?” says Jun. “They are monks! What they need gold for?”
“Everybody likes gold,” I say. “I don’t see it, though. How often does the guard change?”
“Three hours,” says Jun.
“All right. We should be able to check every inch of this place in three hours.”
And we do. We empty every chest, feel every stone and beam for hidden panels. Jun climbs along the rafters of the ceiling with the lantern, then comes swinging down, landing in front of me. The lantern flickers, making his face go dark and then light as he holds it up and looks around the room again.
“Your treasure is not here,” he says. “I think they guard ordinary treasure in ordinary way—locks and guards. But if they have magical treasure, they would guard in a magical way. We cannot find it like this.”
“I reckon you’re right,” I agree. I’d hoped at least something might come easily.
“Guard will change before too long,” he says.
So we leave, locking the door behind us and giggling at the idea of the guards waking up and how confused they will be, with nothing missing from the Treasury. Still, going back to Mrs. Och empty-handed when she has made it clear that we are out of time leaves me with a pit in my stomach.
We walk slowly through the Xishui Triangle. I’m trying to think of something to say that will make him smile at me again when he grabs my hand and pulls me up a quiet road toward an ancient-looking tree, gnarled and twisted, its branches a darker black against the night sky. Only when we are right under its branches do I see the twists of paper, as numerous as the leaves.
“Look,” says Jun, squatting by the thick trunk. I kneel on the ground to see what he is showing me. It is a little wooden box nestled between the tree roots, and inside it there is a pot of ink, a brush, and hundreds of blank strips of paper.
“Do you ever write wish?” he asks me.
“No,” I say. “I don’t understand why people do it. If you’re not a witch, writing something down isn’t going to do anything.”
“The magic does not come from witch,” says Jun. “You don’t know that? The magic come from writing. From words. Some people—witches—they can bring that magic out. But there is power in any writing. If I write, I cannot make magic happen, but still the writing has some magic in it. Maybe it can change some small thing. Give me some luck, or some chance.”
From what I’ve seen of witches and magic and luck, I’m not sure I believe this. But Jun is already unscrewing the cap of the inkpot, dipping the brush. He writes something in swift characters on a slip of paper, then gives me a mischievous look and goes scampering up the tree, looking for a good spot.
“I like to put my wish near top,” he says from above. I cannot even make out the shape of him among the dark leaves.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Feels more lucky.”
I pick up the brush, dip it, and pause. I have the overwhelming urge to write Forgive me on the paper and tie it to the tree. I think it, brush poised: Forgive me. Forgive me. But who am I asking for forgiveness? Frederick would say that in the eyes of the Nameless I am already forgiven, that we are all forgiven for our mortal errors, and that every moment of our lives is a clean slate, starting over. And what does it matter if I am forgiven by those I’ve wronged? If I forgive myself? What does it change? Not what I did, nor what I mean to do.
And so I write, Keep Theo safe, and I climb up the tree after Jun, twisting my wish onto a twig with no other wishes.
“Come here!” he calls, and I climb higher, to where he sits astride a branch, his head poking above the leaves at the top of the tree. The branches are thick and sturdy even this high up. He reaches for me and pulls me onto the branch next to him, so we are facing each other. My back is against the trunk, and he is balanced out on the branch, seeming entirely at ease way up here. It is a clear night, and the moon is just a sliver, the sky strung with stars. I look straight up, thinking of the map of the planets Frederick showed me once, how tiny the world looked in the endless sea of space, and I try to hope that what I’ve written has some power.
“I am sorry we cannot find your magic treasure,” says Jun. “But I am glad you ask me for help.” He smooths my hair back from my face with soft fingers, and that touch ripples right through me, setting my skin alight. He is looking at me very seriously.
“What you wish for?” he asks.
“Doesn’t it spoil the wish if I tell you? Make it not come true?”
He looks puzzled. “Writing wish is not like that,” he says.
Looking at him in the moonlight, the dark leaves around his face, I almost want to tell him everything, open my heart like a box and take my secrets out one by one to lay before him. I can’t, of course—I can’t tell him my secrets. But I can tell him my wish, and so I do: “I wished for Theo to be safe.”
He smiles. “You are good person.”
That brings me all at once to the edge of weeping. “Not really.”
“You are,” he says, nodding. “I make selfish wish.”
“All right, what was yours?”
He smiles that wicked smile again, the dimples coming out, and I hold on harder to the branch beneath me. “Every night since I meet you, I do not sleep enough. Do you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because instead of sleeping, I am lying in my bed and wondering, What it is like to kiss Julia? I am trying to imagine it, and not sleeping, just imagining. So I wish for a kiss from Julia. Maybe if I know, I can sleep again.”
“Waste of a wish,” I tell him, laughing, and the sky seems to tilt dangerously overhead. “You could have had that anytime.”
I lean in to kiss him. He kisses me back with the softest mouth. I think of Wyn, but fleetingly. Jun’s kisses don’t allow my mind to wander far from the feeling of his mouth on mine. I pull him closer, fit my legs over his thighs, leaning back against the trunk.
“You are strange girl,” he murmurs, which isn’t exactly the most romantic thing anybody’s ever said to me, but I don’t care. I’ll pretend he meant dazzling and it got lost in translation.
“Hush. Get your wish’s worth.”
He smiles that irresistible smile, leaning in so his lips catch mine again, his hand sliding round to the back of my neck, pulling me deeper into his kiss. The image of that antlered, fox-faced beast pointing at me across the steaming river in Kahge flashes through my mind. Lidari. But none of it can be true, not with Jun kissing me this way, not with everything I’m feeling right now. My longing expands, filling up with something else, something like defiance. I put my hands under his tunic and yank it roughly over his head, this hunger opening wider and wider. I surrender to it, let it root me in my body, my self. There is a tattoo over his heart, a Yongwen symbol. I run my fingers over it.
“What is that?” I ask.
“It means luck,” he whispers, and I almost want to cry. Instead, I move his hands away to untie my own tunic. He lifts it over my head, and we let the tunics drop and tangle on the branches below, his eyes fixed on mine. I feel lighter and lighter—more and more real. His skin is brilliant in the moonlight, and he pulls me up against the length of his smooth torso, whispering to me in Yongwen.
“I don’t know what you’re saying!” I laugh.
It feels desperate and effortless at the same time, and I’m drinking in the sound of his laughter, the warmth of his skin. For a little while I am only Julia, and I think of nothing else.