Chapter Soundtrack:

"The Menjiang Girl," from Lei Qiang's Chinese Traditional Erhu Music 2.
"In the Chess Court," from the Hero soundtrack.
"Spirit Fight," from the Hero soundtrack.

Part of what I love about this project is that I get a chance to watch all of these Chinese wuxia movies all over again. Y'all are feeding my martial arts movie nerd.


Eleven: Kusarigama

Alphonse laid his head on the desk, and groaned. They'd been talking this in circles for hours, in preparation for the Gathering (and because Mei was more a torturer than a tutor), and it felt exactly like that moment when she'd first tried to explain the Dragon's Pulse to him in Amestris. She'd say something, he wouldn't get it, and she would just repeat it, louder and slower, as if that was going to help him. He peeked up at her through his bangs. "Again?'

"Honestly." She sniffed, and dropped down into the chair next to him, fluffing her hair. She'd undone her braids, for once—he knew that they were an alkahestry mastery thing, and that the more braids someone had, the higher they were in their mastery—but he liked it when Mei did leave her hair down. It frizzed around her face from being braided all the time, and it hung down past her hips. "It's not that difficult. Amestris has different peoples in it, doesn't it?"

"Mm." He ticked them off on his fingers. "There are the majority groups, which are the Strya people—they settled Amestris in the first place. The Ishvalans. The Nongena, too. There are the Xingese immigrants, the Cretans and Aerugans. The helfte."

Mei's nose wrinkled. "Helfte?"

"I…guess they're people of mixed heritage? That's the closest approximation. It's a word from Old Amestrian."

"It sounds like half."

"Well…" Al shifted. "Yes, that's what it means."

Mei scowled at him. "That's rude."

"I didn't say I liked the word, I'm just saying that's what they're called."

She hummed, and then yanked the map of Xing closer to both of them. It was split into fifty-one pieces, some of them huge, some of them miniscule, all but one marked with a family name. (The fifty-first was the capitol city.) The Changs were in a smallish territory at the foot of the Yingxiong Mountains, hundreds of miles north of Xinjing. "Thirty-four of the Fifty Families are Chun. It was a member of the Chun people that originally founded Xing—that was the God-Emperor." She leaned forward, and traced a path from a country to the northeast to Xing. "We think that the Chun came from roughly here—" she jabbed a finger at a patch of empty mountain territory—"but we haven't found much evidence either way. Xing was already well-founded when the kingdom of Xerxes…disappeared, and that was over a thousand years ago."

Al nodded. This was all stuff he knew, but if he was being perfectly honest, he did like having Mei explain it. There was something lyrical about the way she spoke that made him want to smile. Mei pointed at another country, the Ma, and then traced her finger down the seam between Xing and desert. "The other sixteen families, though, come from different ethnic roots, and there are dozens of smaller tribes or peoples who have simply been sworn to one of the Grand Families rather than claiming a title of their own. Some—" She ran her finger from the desert to different countries along the edge, and even further in: Wang, He, Zheng, Qiao. "—came in from the desert and settled, taking a family name and living under the dominion of Xing until they became part of the fabric of the nation. Others were conquered and assimilated. But they brought different traditions with them, different heritages and different rules. There have been even more families that have died out, some recently, some not."

Al frowned. Then he pointed at another name, a shaded blue-and-white patch of land further east than Ma territory, but still a part of the northwestern steppes. It was part of Songland, he thought, but he wasn't certain; he didn't recognize the character printed within the province borders. "What about this one?"

Mei's lips pressed tight together. "That's Nohin territory. The Nohin…I suppose you could compare them to the Ishvalans in some ways. They were a leashed kingdom that was put under the dominion of Xing hundreds of years ago, but they've always been very proud; there were any number of rebellions against the Emperor, but somehow they always failed. Only half of them wound up civilized, and those that founded cities and towns called themselves the People of the Setting Sun. The rest of them were nomadic, like the Ma and their sister tribe, the Saatii." She bit her thumbnail. "About thirteen years ago, there was a civil war in Nohin territory. The settled peoples, backed by the Tea Leaf Emperor, led a series of extermination raids against the tribes. Those who weren't killed outright were indentured or executed later." She looked at him with wide, liquid eyes. "It was…very bloody. Not many escaped, and those that did…they don't call themselves Nohin anymore. After that the territory was given to the Song family. Their land grant was much smaller before the Nohin War."

Al felt sick. He sat back, and closed his eyes for a moment. Something, some wound that had opened when Amestris had sacked Ishval, a wound that had festered when Hohenheim had told him about Xerxes, throbbed. Life was sacred. Why were so many people so willing to destroy it?

"Alphonse-sama?" Mei asked worriedly, and he couldn't help it. He opened his eyes, and stood, touching the top of her head lightly with his fingers.

"I've told you a thousand times not to call me that anymore."

Mei blinked at him. Al smiled. Then he reached forward, and tapped the northernmost province of Xing, Bei-guo. "Tell me about them."


Lan Fan knew she was dreaming because she was staring at the body of Fuhrer King Bradley. Her stump of an arm, fresh, raw, throbbed like a heartbeat under the metal. She watched him, tasting the blood and death on the air, and realized that she was alone in the cavern with the Fuhrer's dead body. Scar was gone, and there was no hole in the ceiling like there should be.

One of the Fuhrer's swords—she knew instinctively it was the one that had torn her arm to shreds—was sticking up out of a crack in the stone, broken in two, blood streaking down the blade. The prince's blood. She could smell him in it, him and the homunculus, and her heart clenched, skipping into double-time.

She couldn't feel anyone. The Dragon's Pulse rippled under her feet, squirming, crying. She couldn't bear to be so close to it, but she had nowhere else to go. She put her hand to her aching stump, and turned away from Fuhrer King Bradley and his sword, reaching out blindly. She couldn't feel her grandfather. Because he's dead all over again, something hissed inside her, and the scar in her heart tore open again. She blinked furiously. She could feel the prince, but his qi-sense was curious, muffled; like it was buried under a hundred others.

Lan Fan was swept away in the sudden torrent of souls before she realized that there was another person in the room. Thousands of them, more, their agony torqueing and twisting the Dragon's Pulse, corrupting it, staining it. She nearly clapped her hands over her ears. All her instincts screamed at her to run. Homunculus. When she looked down at the Fuhrer, though, he was still dead, bloody tears leaking out of his ouroborus eye, wrinkled, armless, damnably peaceful.

There was a rush of motion from behind her. Lan Fan seized the Fuhrer's sword from the stone and rolled. When she came to her feet again, she thrust the jagged blade forward, and she felt the give of flesh beneath the blade in the instant before the sword shattered with a clang that set her teeth to trembling. Red eyes opened, and swallowed her whole. Her heart burst.

Master Ling. But it wasn't Master Ling. She could feel him, and yet not, buried amidst all those other souls, the only peaceful spot in this mass of horror that was smearing his body. Inside the deepest part of herself, Lan Fan screamed. "No," she said. "No, you left."

Greed didn't say anything. He just grinned at her, using her master's mouth and her master's teeth and her master's body, and it wasn't the smile she knew so well. It wasn't any of his smiles. She knew all of them, and this wasn't any of them. This was wide and insufferable and wrong, and she wanted to punch it off his face if it wouldn't have broken Ling's. She swallowed hard.

"You left," she said again. "You sacrificed yourself for us. You died. You're dead!"

Greed offered his hand to her, the grapheme sliding forward over his forearm, wrist, fingers, until his hand was clawed like an animal's. He reached forward with his other hand, Master Ling's hand, and set his fingers against the pulse in her throat, sliding his hand up into her hair, cupping the back of her head. Lan Fan wanted to jerk away, but she couldn't move. The dream had frozen her in place.

"Well," he said, "that's just stupid."

His thumb brushed against her trachea, and pushed. Lan Fan choked. I hate him, she thought, I hate him, and she seized his wrist with both hands. But it was Master Ling's wrist, and she couldn't defend herself against Master Ling.

This was wrong. Greed had never attacked her. He'd always made a point of it. I don't fight with women, he'd said, and she'd never known if it was because he didn't think women were powerful enough to face him or because the women he met were too important to him to fight with, but either way, he had never laid a hand on her. She choked, and spots flared in front of her eyes. Greed lifted her off her feet, holding her with one hand. He looked bored.

"By the way," he said. "Huli says hello."

Then, with his free hand, he slit her open nose to navel. Lan Fan opened her mouth in a silent scream.

Traitor.

"Swallow-girl? You're twitching."

Lan Fan jerked, and woke up panting. Across from her, Lien Hua—who was twirling in front of the mirror again, studying her reflection—glanced over her shoulder.

"Are you all right? You look like someone just stabbed you in the gut."

Lan Fan licked her lips. Her arm ached. "It's—nothing." She rubbed the stump through her clothes. "Just…I was dreaming about when I lost my arm."

Half a lie. It still shut Lien Hua up. She made a face that might have been disgust or pity or both, and turned back to her reflection, spinning one last time. "Are you sure this one's all right?" she asked, and picked at the Feng green ruqun that she'd had commissioned. The seamstress must have had a hundred apprentices and a great many more hours in a day than Lan Fan did in order to get Lien Hua's gown and Lan Fan's done in time for the Opening of the Gathering, but the fact remained that she'd done it. Maybe alkahestry had been involved. Actually, now Lan Fan thought about it, alkahestry had definitely been involved. There was no way the embroidered pheasants on Lien Hua's skirts would look like they were moving otherwise. "I still think the green's not quite right."

"It's fine." Lan Fan smoothed a wrinkle out of her own ruqun. A ruby-red skirt with a black waist-skirt, her cuffs and seams all embroidered with silver horses. A piece of jade carved with her borrowed family name hung from beneath the waistskirt. The zhaoshan that went with it was still draped on Lien Hua's bed. All of it was made of more expensive material than she had ever worn in her life, but because she was the "cousin" of the Commander of the Imperial Guard, no expense had been spared. Niu Lu had pulled out more lidschatten from her box of makeup, and dabbed deep red paint onto Lan Fan's lips. Her hair was loose and streaked with red and all it was doing was getting in her way. She brushed it impatiently out of her face. "It's Feng green, isn't it?"

"Not the Feng bit, the underrobe." Lien Hua picked at it, frowning. "It's just a shade too pale."

Lan Fan shrugged. "It's a robe."

"It's a robe for the Gathering and she managed to get it wrong," Lien Hua said; somehow she had managed to sound like a put-out queen and a spoiled child simultaneously. "I'll have her hide for this. Ning!"

The alkahestrist-servant poked her head into Lien Hua's room, and Lan Fan seized her zhaoshan and scuttled out of the room before she was dragged into another color-changing experiment. Lien Hua had had Ning try to adjust the color of her long skirt three times in the past hour, and each time she just grew more dissatisfied with it. Honestly, Lan Fan thought it was an extraordinarily shallow use of alkahestry, but she wasn't about to say that. Lien Hua might actually throw her out of the Feng rooms, and that would serve no purpose at all.

Lan Fan cracked the knuckles of her flesh hand, and dropped her shoes by the front door before dropping down onto the bamboo matting in front of the snuff table. Xinzhe and Dong Mao were still in their respective rooms—she wasn't sure if they were changing or just hiding from Lien Hua's tantrum—and Wen, the second maid with the knives, was standing in the corner of the room, keeping her eyes on the floor, waiting for instructions. Lan Fan shifted, so her back wasn't to the woman holding a bunch of knives, and then propped her chin in one hand.

There were six points of entry to the Feng rooms. If Dong Mao and Xinzhe's bedrooms were anything like Lien Hua's, anyway. Three windows, one front door, one back door, and the servant's entrance she had caught Ning using last week. The Opening of the Gathering will last at least six hours, and there will be more people there than there were at the Sevens Race. If she timed it right, she'd be able to get sneaky.

Her heart should be pounding, she thought. Instead, it almost seemed to be beating too slowly. No adrenaline, no fear. Just…relief, in so many ways. She'd been talking herself in circles for weeks and now she finally could do something. She had a prisoner locked up in the guardhouse and within three hours she'd have a set of empty rooms for her perusal. She refused to think about the fact that as of yesterday, she had officially lasted longer than any other spy they had sent against the Fengs so far. It had been a sick sort of anniversary. She'd gone to the tiny shrine at the end of the corridor near her apartments and lit a stick of incense for them.

She wanted to talk to the Nohin prisoner again. Sakari was locked up in one of the side rooms of the Imperial Guardsmens' wing; a benefit to having the Commander of the Imperial Guard as your supposed cousin-in-law. They'd had to call in a healer, she knew that much, but the Commander had been careful to organize her life so she hadn't had time to go see Sakari in the forty-eight hours that had passed since she'd caught him. Her eyes burned with the frustration of it. She finally had had something to break the endless monotony of her mental circling, and she wasn't allowed to go near him. It wasn't even as though he was a part of the Feng network—at least, she didn't think he was, considering the Firebrands had tried to kill the triplets only a few weeks ago—but the Commander had ruled it too dangerous for her to interrogate him, and so she'd obeyed. Grudgingly. But she'd obeyed.

Lan Fan splayed her metal fingers on the Fengs' coffee table, and let out a breath. Tonight. Tonight, when Wen and Ning were following the Fengs in their little servant entourage, like all the other personal servants did at the Gathering; tonight, when the Fengs were plying their trade; tonight, she would finally have some sort of clue. And she could clamber out of this traffic jam she'd lodged herself in. Finally.

She felt the prickle of apprehension on the back of her neck the instant before she sensed Xinzhe and Dong Mao behind her. Lan Fan whipped around just in time to catch the bean bag that Xinzhe had just tossed at her head. Xinzhe swore. Dong Mao looked pleased with himself—she had to blink a few times when she realized it was the first time she'd seen his face twist into anything other than a scowl—and held out his hand to his brother.

"Five ling," he said. "Pay up."

"Hardnose," said Xinzhe, but he disappeared back into his room to get the money anyway. Lan Fan threw the bean bag back at Dong Mao, who caught it easily in his left hand. When she lifted her eyebrows in a question, he ignored her. Lan Fan snorted, and pulled the copy of Tomiko's Letters that Mingli Chen had loaned her (as part of his attempt to educate her in "court things," just like Suyin had requested) closer. She'd read most of the books he'd given her before, but Tomiko's Letters was new and fascinating and different. A Nohin woman who was proud to call herself Nohin, a woman who was proud of being female, a demand for equal rights and equal pay. In many ways, Xing was better than countries like Drachma or Aerugo, who didn't allow women into their governments or their military, but at the same time the Tracts of Wu Xia had still made their mark. The courts in particular were creaking under the weight of the traditions that Master Ling had dedicated his life to unraveling. The thing was, when a tradition was embraced as much as Wu Xia and the Fifty Families, it was damn hard to unravel in only a few years of work.

Lan Fan kept her senses open, thumbing through the book to find her place again. Lien Hua had had a fit—one of her good fits, not one of her flee-the-room fits—when she'd realized Lan Fan was reading Tomiko's Letters, and had immediately gone to her bookshelf and wrenched out four more books (a transcription of Tomiko's speeches in Feng-guo, Chen-guo, Jiang-guo, and Pan-guo; a book of feminist philosophy; The House of the Earth, a philosophical fiction book that made her head hurt just to look at it; and a book on architecture from the time of the Lightning Strike Emperor, which Lan Fan thought had been an accident) and pushed them into her hands. Considering Lan Fan had had little time to do actual spy-things (her belly still rolled at that idea) she'd been making her way through all of them, alternating one chapter at a time. The combination was…interesting, to say the least. She still had to say she liked Tomiko's Letters best, simply because unlike The House of the Earth, Tomiko Fukuda said exactly what she thought, in letters or in speechmaking. It was easier, she thought, than teasing out all the different meanings of every word in The House of the Earth.

She'd found her place again. She could sense, hear, and see Xinzhe knocking on his brother's door again, offering the five ling he'd lost for not being able to hit her. In ancient times there were various evil teachings and customs in our country, things that would make the people of any free, civilized nation terribly ashamed. Lien Hua was chirping, her words incomprehensible, from her bedroom. Ning was still inside. Of these, the most reprehensible was the practice of "respecting men and despising women." She turned the page. That is why I speak of equality and equal rights. Yet in our country, our Xing, just as in the past, men continue to be respected as masters, husbands, and intellectuals, and women are held in contempt as maids or serving women. When she shifted, pulling her ankles out from under her, sitting sideways, she heard a creak of floorboards, and paused. There can be no equality in a society which perseveres in this mistaken ideal.

Lan Fan glanced to Dong Mao's open door, and then at Wen, who was staring blankly out of the partly open door into the Sprout Gardens. She let her hand slip to the floor, and when there was a particularly loud chirp of joy from Lien Hua, she rapped the floor, keeping her eyes on Tomiko's Letters. She thought that this was the place where Dong Mao had always sat, whenever she'd been to these rooms before. She'd never stepped here. She woud have heard the creak before now if she had.

There was a thrum of hollow wood when she rapped it with her metal knuckles, and Lan Fan hid a secret smile behind the pages of her book. At least when she broke in later, she had someplace to start looking.

Ah. There it was. The thrum of excitement. Long overdue. Her body was burning with energy. She was ready, damn it, after so long, because here at last there was something she could do other than sitting around and pretending she had a clue what she was doing.

The notebook and pencil she'd shoved into her sash earlier sizzled against her belly. She wanted to juggle one of her knives. Lan Fan stowed her metal hand in her lap again, and turned the page in Tomiko's Letters.

An hour. And then she'd finally have something to show for all of this waiting.


The Gathering happened once every two years. Ling wondered why they couldn't have it even less often, considering the amount of primping and fawning that went on in the weeks before. (The sheer volume of dirty looks people gave him when they thought he wasn't looking after the Gathering, though—those were too satisfying to pass up.) Every night was an exercise in extravagance, and every day was a stretch of his dwindling reserves of patience.

Mei Chang's modern party had gone well. There had been four more mimicking her in the past four weeks. None of them, of course, thrown by people that the Fengs would care about, so he didn't think Lan Fan knew she'd been at the first party in a stream of the same, but at the same time she'd been at the center of an explosion of a new fad. Modernity. He let a satisfied smile creep onto his lips as he fixed the crooked bangles on his headdress and let one of the servants—he thought it was one of the multitudes of Liu boys that were crawling around his rooms lately—drape the Yao sash over his shoulder, olive-green and embroidered with oak leaves. It was shaping up to be an explosion of foreign and Xingese ideas: politics and fashion and literature, art and philosophy and music, and it was starting right under the noses of the people who would most like to see it fail. That out of everything might have been what he enjoyed most about plans like this: that because it was the youth initiating it, the younger sons and daughters of the people who had been settled in The Way of Things for decades, nobody noticed.

He raised his arms, and let the attendants buckle on the ceremonial sword. As soon as they left the room, he would replace this one with one had been worked to look exactly like it: one that had an edge, and wouldn't shatter like glass at the first real blow. He glanced at Peng, the fake Shadow, and decided to slide a dagger up his sleeve as well.

What happened in the Imperial City would leak down to the populus eventually. It might take a while, but he had settled in for the long game, and if he had to wait years for it, he would. There wasn't any way he could really speed up the process without drawing attention to his own role in Mei Chang's decision to throw a party laced with "modern" sensibilities. Eventually, through letters and cultural osmosis, it would spread through the capitol city, and then to the outlying countries. People would write back to their provinces, and it would catch on, and then he could finally start implementing some of these changes he'd been scripting for over two years now.

The attendants left. Ling switched out the swords, shoving the ornamental one under his bed (no one would find it for a while—probably) and then tucked his hands up into his sleeves, pasting on a court smile. He'd been very careful to make sure that there was the slightest hint of modernity, of progress, in the robes that had been made for the Opening Ceremonies. There was a hint of Drachma in the cut and color of the overrobes, Aerugan embroidery styles in the sash. Thamasq was hiding in the collar, too. In fact, the only country he hadn't tried to reference yet was Amestris, and that was because people were already worried enough that he was too loyal to certain bodies of government in Amestris to be a worthy emperor for Xing. Which was patently ridiculous, but it was a good weapon for the opposition, and one that he would not place into their hands.

There was a knock. Then Gen Chang slipped into the room and into a deep bow, mumbling something under his breath. He would have plastered himself to the floor had Ling not banned that behavior in his private rooms ages ago. (He would have placed a general ban throughout the whole palace, but Shen Liu had turned an impressive shade of purple that had made him concerned for the man's health.) "What is it, Guardsman?"

"Imperial Highness." Gen Chang kept his eyes on the floor. "The esteemed Empress Dowager is requests the honor of entering your presence."

Ling swore very loudly and very graphically in Amestrian, and Gen Chang choked. Had Lan Fan been teaching him Amestrian? Ling couldn't remember. He went to school himself into a smile again, and then realized his court face had never actually fallen away. No wonder Gen Chang was still sputtering. "Do I have to let her in?"

Gen Chang choked again, and Ling wondered if he'd ever been so open with this particular guardsman. This one had been the man Lan Fan left in front of his doors when she went off to sleep or tend to her own needs, he remembered. Mei Chang's fourth cousin twice removed went up a notch in his estimation. "Forgive this one for his crass and unworthy observations, eminence, but the Empress Dowager, may she live long, seems to have already—and accidentally—broken a vase on her way into the imperial apartments."

She was in a mood, then. Ling bit back a sigh. "Which vase?"

"This one believes that it was the double-handled monkey vase in the hall outside, eminence."

"I liked that vase."

"This one's deepest apologies for not preventing the accident, eminence."

"It's not your fault." Ling rubbed the bridge of his nose rather fiercely. When he glanced back at the mirror, it had turned pink. "Bring her in, then, Chang. And make sure that once she's out of the way that all the vases in the hallway are removed, so she can't accidentally break any more of them on her way out."

Gen Chang bowed, lips twitching, and then backed out of the room without looking up once. Ling had just enough time to regret his decision before the Empress Dowager, Huian Yao, the lotus blossom of the Zhao family, the seventh wife of the Retired Emperor, and his highly estimable and completely untrustworthy mother swept into the room.

Huian Zhao had been adopted into the Yao family as a political prisoner at the age of three. If she hadn't caught the Retired Emperor's eye at the age of sixteen, she probably would have married the younger son of the old Yao patriarch, and lived out her days in the relative obscurity of petty familial politics. Through accident or design (Ling was fairly sure it was the latter) she had wandered into the Emperor's heart and never quite left it again. She had, by all accounts, been one of his favorites until she'd had Ling, and then the Emperor had lost interest in her entirely in favor of a Huang girl less than half his age.

He remembered very little of his mother until he'd turned about twelve. He'd been brought into her presence every Saturday (or so they told him), where his tutors had reported his progress and accomplishments, or the lack of them, depending on whether or not he'd been obedient that week. (The older he'd grown, the less obedient he'd become.) Fuu had been Huian Yao's primary bodyguard for years, until it became clear that people were more interested in killing Huian's son than Huian herself. After all, by the time he was eight, she had fallen both out of favor and out of sight as the Emperor had flitted from woman to woman, and then from illness to illness, until the final long slow crawl to death that he'd embarked on while Ling had gone to Amestris.

He could remember only one image of her from those days. She would look at him from over her fan, her dark eyes searching him from top to toe, and then her eyebrows creasing slightly, as though she'd found something wanting. She had never had time for a child, and she'd made sure he'd known it, even when he'd been traipsing around after her during court events for the last two years before he'd left for Amestris. It had only been when he'd returned from what people had called a suicide mission with a philosopher's stone around his neck, a dead Huo, and a Chang girl under his arm (and Lan Fan, but then again, Lan Fan had never really been visible to his mother) that Huian had decided that her son was finally worth all of her time.

Huian wasn't more than thirty-six now (she'd only been eighteen or so when Ling had been born) and she barely looked her age; whatever wears and cares time had given her had been carefully smoothed away. She dropped down to the floor in an exquisite toppling motion, meant to show off her white neck, her gorgeous silks. She was in Yao green with a touch of Qiao black, in reverence of the Retired Emperor, spirits bless and keep him. Her eyes had been layered with charcoal. Ling folded his arms carefully across his chest.

"Hello, mother," he said.

"Health, strength, and reverence to you, my son," she said. Her voice was lovely and lyrical. When she looked up at him, he could see his nose, his eyebrows reflected in her face. He wondered what parts of herself she saw in him. She lowered her gaze again. "I offer my congratulations on the opening of the Gathering. The people seem pleased with the arrangements so far."

"Really? They weren't supposed to be." He kept the smile stuck to his face like plaster, wondering when she would start to twitch. "What brings you here this evening, mother? I heard something break outside."

"One of the servants bumped into a vase." She smiled, but her eyes were glittering. She had already had one disappointment today, he wagered; if he denied her whatever she wanted, she would exact her revenge in careful, painful ways. "It was unfortunate."

"Ah." He tapped his thumb against the inside of his opposite wrist, careful to keep his fingers hidden. Huian didn't know him as well as Lan Fan did, and so she couldn't read his hands, but at the same time, Huian Yao had been brought up at court; if she ever caught a tell like that one, she would ply it to her advantage. "Did you only come to offer your congratulations?"

"For what other reason would I come, my son?" Huian Yao said, and rocked back onto her feet. She was only a few inches shorter than he was, but something about her made her seem taller. "I wanted to wish you luck; the Gathering promises to be an excellent one."

"Everyone is accounted for, then?"

"Even the Ma," she said, and her nose wrinkled, ever so slightly. She glanced at Peng, and then lowered her voice. "Do you know, it's the first time in decades that one of the Ma has come to the Gathering? I had heard that there was a pair of nomad women on the imperial grounds, but I had thought it was a joke until the Commander informed me otherwise. I had no idea that he had married so far below him."

"Lady Suyin is an admirable examble of her people and an excellent wife for Shan."

"He would have been better suited to one of the Sheng girls," Huian corrected him gently. "There was talk of a betrothal between them for many years, you know."

Ling smiled widely, and offered his arm to his mother. "Which one was he going to marry? The elder bitch or the younger addict?"

"So crass," she sniffed, and slipped her hand into the crook of his elbow. "I don't understand your determination to keep that man on your payroll, even if he is an excellent guardsman."

"Why? Because he's only half-Yao?"

"Because he regularly insults and disobeys you, imperial eminence, of course." She smiled. "For what other reason would I push for his resignation? I only feel that he is not properly loyal to you; he will endanger you eventually. What else can a mother do but protect her son?"

"What else indeed," said Ling. They left the main suite just as one final servant vanished through a secret door with the mate to the monkey vase. "Shan is happy with his wife, mother. Don't be a bully."

She laughed. "What an awful thing to say. You shouldn't tease people so, Ling. It makes them think you don't like them."

"If I don't like someone, they would be the last to know," he replied, and offered her a little bow of the head, a flourish of the wrist. He slid his hand back up into his sleeve. They slid into the hallway, and Gen Chang fell seamlessly into step with them. Peng followed them two steps behind Gen Chang, and the sight of Lan Fan's mask on another person's face twisted away at him like it always did.

"The steppes woman is pregnant, I hear?" said Huian delicately, and Ling inclined his head.

"She requested one of her cousins be brought to court in order to accompany her through her first birth. The girl has been staying in the palace."

"In the Bamboo Gardens," said Huian, and glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. Ling kept his face blank.

"Was she? I didn't know that."

"I didn't think you did." Huian sniffed. "I may move her, if you don't mind. Bolin Qiao has been asking for a different room, quite reasonably—two rooms is altogether much too small for him—and it seems uncouth for a steppes barbarian woman to have such an excellent apartment when the cousin of the Retired Emperor goes wanting."

Ling smiled. "Do as you like in this instance, mother."

Huian smiled back, but with an edge. "Wonderful. I will have her things moved immediately."

Sorry, Lan Fan. "Is that all you wanted?"

"You insult me." She squeezed his elbow with her nails. "One would think you expected me to only visit you when I wanted something."

He shrugged. They passed a cluster of Lu girls, and all of them slid down into deep curtsy-bows that looked extraordinarily painful, considering they had had their feet bound. He made another note in his head to add footbinding to the list of things he was going to outlaw. Huian's own feet were bound; it meant that walking with her was an excruciatingly slow process that had her hip bumping against his every step. She was going to bruise him sooner or later.

"The Minister of the Left tells me that you have been going riding in the mornings."

Shen Liu, Ling thought. Since when had Huian Yao been talking to Shen Liu? He'd thought they'd stopped speaking to each other five years before the Emperor even died. "I was thinking that I've been cooped up in the palace for too long. Watching the sun come up is soothing."

"Shall I send anyone to accompany you?"

"That would rather defeat the purpose, don't you think?" He was fairly sure no one had realized, yet, that he was out riding with Lan Fan, but the shoe would drop soon. He wondered when the whispers about the emperor and the nomad would start—and when the Feng would start sniffing around Lan Fan's heels for imperial scraps. That's the whole point of it, after all, he told himself, and refused to consider the reason it rang false.

Huian wrinkled her nose again. "Are you certain? I can think of a number of cheery companions for you, if you would like them."

"I'm content on my own," said Ling, and he let a tinge of warning creep into his voice. "Though I thank you for your consideration."

She hummed, and said nothing. He wondered if he would have to distract her with a project in order to keep her from sending Shen Liu's candidates for empress along with him in the mornings. Though as soon as people saw him riding with Lan Fan, that would be happening anyway. There was a rustle in the back of his head, an echo of Greed. Man up, pissant.

They came to a side-corridor, and at his side, Huian Yao paused. "My apologies for abandoning you so soon, imperial majesty, but I forgot—I must go and assist Bolin Qiao's wife with preparing her daughter for her first Gathering." She leaned forward, and kissed his cheek. She smelled of powder and beeswax. "I will see you at the ceremony, my son."

"Good luck," he said, and she bowed one last time before swaying down the hall towards the Northern Ward. He waited until she'd disappeared around the corner before letting his sleeves fall back. Ling looked down at his hands—they had clenched themselves into fists—and let out a breath, slowly forcing himself to relax. He glanced at Gen Chang. The guardsman had kept his eyes carefully on the wall above Ling's head, pointedly not looking at either the Emperor or the Empress Dowager.

"Well," said Ling. "Crisis averted. No more broken vases." Today.

"Well done, imperial highness," said Gen Chang. Ling stared at his palm for a moment, and then hid his hands in his sleeves again.

"Maybe." He flexed his fingers behind the safety of the silk, ignoring how his forefingers ached. Ling let out a breath, and glanced behind him at his shadow, out of habit. The eyes that looked back at him, though, were foreign and strange. Ling shook himself briskly. "Shadow, with me. We're going to the Gathering."

Peng inclined his head. Gen Chang dropped away.

They walked.


"Shubiao hasn't reported in."

Huli spun the stolen knife between his fingers. The blade was scary-sharp—he'd realized that when he'd slipped the first time and nearly slit his forefinger down to the bone. Even with alkahestry, the cut had left a mark, the same as the gouge deep in the back of his hand. Across the tavern table, Sheng made a mark on her slate with a sliver of chalk, and didn't meet his gaze.

They had commandeered the tavern in Weiqu the day after the botched assassination, just in case someone came looking in Xuanwu. This new place had an owner that was more scared of Huli and Sheng than he was of the Sun God, and only wore the medallion out of a misplaced sense of self-preservation. At least his terror meant the man wouldn't rat them out at the first possible opportunity, like the last innkeeper would have. Huli tossed the knife into the air and caught it by the flat of the blade, ignoring the way that the innkeeper's boy watched him with wide eyes. "When was he supposed to?"

"Twelve hours ago."

He flipped the knife again. "And why didn't you tell us earlier?"

Dushe, Shubiao's partner, flinched a little. For a man who'd been named for a viper, he was a babbling coward. "Sometimes he does this. But it's been too long. I think he's been captured."

"If he'd been captured, he'll have taken the cyanide pill." Still. Huli swore under his breath. He'd been depending on at least a little information on Ying (or whatever her real name was) before their spies had been caught. Then again, he couldn't exactly expect a bunch of half-converts to do the job the way someone from New Haven would. He closed his eyes for a moment. "But if he hasn't, we'll have to leave him there. If he was dumb enough to get himself captured, he's of no use to us."

Dushe flinched. "But—"

"We have a purpose here, Dushe." His eyes dropped to Dushe's collar, to the medallion hidden beneath his jacket. Then he focused on Dushe's face again. It was plastered with sweat and scars. "If you have a problem with how I manage things, then you can challenge my authority, or you can get out of this tavern. It's your choice."

Dushe was smarter than his partner. He knew that both of those options meant he'd be dead in an alleyway in less than a day. He swallowed hard, and inclined his head, and Huli felt a small coal of satisfaction come to life in his belly.

"Yes, marshal," said Dushe.

Sheng erased her chalkboard in one swipe of her wrist, and began to draw. He could just barely see, out of the corner of his eye, the growing skeleton of angel wings. When she cleared her throat, all of them fell silent. "The fact remains," she said, turning her chalkboard so she could get at the fletching, "that there is an obstacle between us and one of our primary goals, and that all obstacles must be eliminated. Huli, Dushe, Mao—" the newest recruit, a girl of no more than sixteen, perked her head up—"the three of you will work together. Eliminate this woman. I don't care how you do it. Get rid of her. She cannot stop us from taking out the triplets. Not again. We cannot afford failure."

Huli drove Ying's knife deep into the table. Next to him, Dushe flinched again. Mao, though—Mao offered Sheng a curving, creepy smile, and the teeth she'd had alkahestrically sharpened to match a cat's canines glinted in the sputtering candlelight.

"Yes, mistress."

Sheng glanced at Huli for a moment. She went back to her picture. Huli leaned back in his chair, and wondered if he was pissed off or turned on or both. "Lang," she said, and the man by the door perked his head up and loped over to them. "Mao has her own assignment. You will assist her in any way she requires."

Lang glanced at Mao. Mao hissed at him.

"Huli." Huli looked up through his bangs to find Sheng watching him carefully. "If your squad finds Shubiao, you will kill him. He has been caught. If he has not already been killed, he will have provided intelligence, willingly or not. We cannot afford mistakes like that."

Dushe's lips parted, but he didn't speak. Huli pressed a hand to his heart.

"Yes, mistress."

Sheng tossed her chalkboard onto the table. Wings on a blazing sun. No shading, no shadows. It looked like a child's drawing, but the gut-deep recognition of it sizzled in his gut. She clasped her hands together, and they all copied her, Dushe a moment later than the others. Huli made a careful note of htat in the back of his mind. Even if Dushe had converted unwillingly, if he kept making stupid mistakes like that, he was going to end up as dead as his damn Nohin partner.

"May the Sun God provide," Sheng said, simply. Huli licked his lips and joined in the chorus.

"May the Sun God provide for us all."


A/N:

YES. Finally. Things are happening. FINALLY. You guys have NO IDEA how much agony I've gone through to get us all to this point. Like I said a few chapters ago: there's a reason for why everything is happening the way it is (with bursts of motion and then long slow periods where there's a lot of introspective angst and non-momentum [thanks Lan Fan]) but it was so freaking hard to write. I'll probably be going through it at a later date to see if there's any way I can trim it down (though unfortunately at this point it looks unlikely because I needed every single word of the past six chapters or so to get everyone where they needed to be, emotionally, mentally, and physically) but at this point, everything is where it needs to be.

Thank you for suffering through my longwindedness, and we've kicked off the second part of Swallows on the Beam, which I've tentatively titled Stuff Explodes. The first part (from the first chapter until Cyanide) was called Observation Deck.

So yeah. Hope y'all enjoy it from now on because it's going to get kind of bloody and awesome.

Speaking of: I tend to post a lot of my "unofficial" soundtracks on Tumblr, so if any of you are interested in my weird musical tastes, pop on over.

Andelevision: AAAAAAH I KNOW YOU SAID THIS A FEW CHAPTERS AGO BUT YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH TAMORA PIERCE MEANS TO ME AS A PERSON WHO FORMED MY WRITING STYLE IN SO MANY WAYS TO BE COMPARED TO HER IS A FREAKING DREAM OKAY ALSKDFJDSLAFJDSLFJDLSAFDSA

eanaros: I tend to write slow-paced stories, since if things go to fast, they actually bother me. Not a defense, just an explanation, I suppose? And thank you for the compliments, love.

pinkconchshell: The Feng puzzle will start being put together (or unraveled, I suppose) from the next chapter on.

MandereLee: Ah, thank you, darling. I'm sorry Lan Fan has been kind of repetitive. I've been wanting to kick her in the pants, but...I mean, she's bored. I guess. She won't acknowledge it, but she's really freaking bored and thinking herself in circles. XD

TheClumsyThief: *snuggles you forever* THANK YOU DARLING

And thank all of you for all your compliments on my Ling. I was so terrified he'd be wildly out of character (especially in his outburst towards Al) so hearing all of your lovely compliments (or reading, I suppose) was incredibly reassuring.