Bixian had left the Luo residence without the Phoenix-Feather Sword, and there it remained out of obligation. Xingbei had no delusions of taking it up in his sister’s stead, and he told his mother as much when she gave him an extra helping of meat and rice cake at dinner.
“I am not my sister. I know not to cling to things long dead.” In a fit of boldness, he picked a few choice cuts of meat back to his mother.
Yildun poked at the meat but did not give it back to her son. “We left the steppes for you. So you may grow up with children like yourself. Because being alone isn’t the same as being free.”
“And I did, Ma, and I was loved. But if you and Ba have taught me anything, it’s that I’m citizen to no country but one.” Xingbei smiled without mirth and took a bite of a rice cake. “I belong only to the sky.”
“And even that was taken from you.”
“No it wasn’t. It’s still out there, above us. Not even the Great Sage can truly take away the sky.”
“But it’s no longer yours.”
Xingbei looked up at his mother and saw a woman approaching old age. For the past five years he was so preoccupied with surviving, he did not pay any attention to how his mother was aging. The same deft hands that prepared their meals now paused more often, laying the knife aside to rub life into sore arthritic joints. Yildun was always vigilant, but now it came with a weariness, an old musk ox watching its surroundings out of habit but with no more energy to flee if a predator came. But still it watched, out of stubbornness, to make sure the hunter earned its kill.
The fight was gone from Yildun’s eyes. Xingbei looked within and realized he never had any at all.
“The sword doesn’t belong with us,” he said. “We no longer belong to the Qiao.”
His mother startled him as she slammed her palms onto the table. “Never say that again. You are still Qiao, just as you are still an eagle. Even if it was taken from you, you still claim it and pass it onto your children. That is how we keep the Qiao alive. Not through vengeance, but through stories and generations.” Yildun’s eyes grew misty as she looked past her son into the life she had before she rescued an eagle with a broken wing. “War between the Ashina and the Tang may have scattered my clan, but it truly died when the elders refused to speak its name.”
“I’m sorry, Niang,” Xingbei muttered, rubbing his cheek. He watched as his mother stood up and rummaged through the grain pouches where they hid their valuables. She returned and handed him a jade turtle.
“Chen Di left me this,” Yildun said. “That is Prince Li Wenrong’s seal. Seek him out in the capital and give him the sword. The sword will be safer with a Tang prince than with us.”
Xingbei held it gingerly, for this piece of jade was more valuable than the house itself. Milky white and finely etched, it was already warming in his hand. “You kept it.”
Yildun shrugged. “What else would I have done?”
-
Li Wenrong spent much of his days in the Middle Court with the ministers and magistrates, discussing matters of tithes and taxation. He was seen as an enigma by his fellow statesmen. As the Emperor’s brother he was in a position of equal power and peril. Statesmen spoke gently around him, as he could be the next Emperor, or he could be executed for treason. He tread this path lightly, maintaining the right connections to stay at the table, but never betraying any ambition that may be seen as a threat. He spoke to the other statesman as an equal, which led to the second puzzling thing about the prince: his time as a magistrate in the remote village had made him a country bumpkin.
Even through veiled courtly language, it was clear he held peasants in high esteem. He spoke of sowing fields and harvesting crops as if he had been there, ankle deep in the mud and with the sun beating on his back. There were whispers, not too loud to reach his brother or the shrewd First Consort, that the prince’s palms were rough like a farmer’s, his grip too strong to have only held ink brushes all his life.
While her father conducted business within the palace, Li Liuruo watched over the household. At sixteen, it wouldn’t be long until she left her father’s house. She already had a list of suitors, vetted by the embroidered quilt that guided her family’s political maneuvering. It was now a matter of taste, and Liuruo was waiting for someone kind who would look past her weak legs. She often fantasized about her future husband finding her collapsed, her canes too far to reach, and he would pick her up and carry her in his arms.
She may need to make a choice by the end of the year. And while the Marquis Zhao, her current favorite, would never carry her through the streets of Chang’an, she was sure he would treat her kindly. She mulled this over as she combed a mixture of oil and charcoal through her hair. Her strongest memory of her mother, hazy as they all were, was of strong hands combing this mixture through her hair. It had become tiring paying off handmaids to keep the color of her hair quiet, so Liuruo elected to do it herself every morning. Her father saw the big picture and advocated for the peasants; she had to be there to make sure every stroke was in place and no one saw them as their enemy. Stark white hair would only distract her ministrations.
There was a commotion near the entrance, but she trusted faithful Chen Di to sort it out. It was only when she heard the cry of someone getting beaten that she peaked out of her window out of curiosity.
Two of her guards were striking a young man with the butt of their spears. Through their obscenities, which she did not think they expected her to hear, she heard the word “thief” repeated. Then there was Chen Di, shielding the youth with his body despite the difference in size between him and the guards. The men disappeared from view, and a few moments later two handmaids came to retrieve her.
“Someone is requesting an audience with the Prince,” one of them informed her.
“My father is away in court.”
“He had this on him,” the other handed her a piece of jade. “The guards think he stole it, but Chen Di is insisting you see him.”
Li Liuruo rubbed her thumb over the jade turtle. She had held many in their likeness, and knew it to be genuine. “Very well.”
The two handmaids helped her to the main hall, where the young man she glimpsed from before was kneeling with two guards on either side of him. Chen Di greeted her as she settled into her chair atop the dais.
“This is Luo Xingbei.” Chen Di introduced the young man. “One of your father’s subjects from when he was magistrate at Clear Water Mountain.”
The young man lowered his head briefly before looking back up. “I’ve come to seek your family’s help, Ruoruo.”
Gasps sounded through the hall at his familiarity with the princess. Liuruo herself was not so much offended as confused. “I will forgive your words as you do not know better,” she said slowly. “But I do not know who you are.”
The man’s face fell. “You really don’t remember me.”
Liuruo shook her head, studying him intently though all she saw was a wiry young man in threadbare clothes. Perhaps the shape of his eyes was a bit unique; they reminded her of the dignitaries from the oasis kingdoms in the northwest. She glanced down and saw something hanging at his side; though wrapped in the same cloth as his clothes, there was a hint of copper and cobalt beyond the likes of him could afford.
He must have saw her gaze fixate on the object and he hastened to untie the object from his hip and unwrap it. The guards readied their spears as the peasant boy revealed a fine sword with a copper hilt and azure scabbard, but they were quickly talked down by Chen Di. Luo Xingbei raised the sword up with his hands as he lowered his head to the ground.
“I offer this precious sword to you, Princess Li Luiruo. My sister took it up and tried to avenge us. She has failed. As a daughter of the Qiao, please guard it in memory of our leaders.”
“Forgive me,” she said. “I do not understand what you are saying.” She gestured to the guards, who lowered their spears. One of them approached Luo Xingbei slowly and took it from his hands.
“It is a fine sword,” the guard said, and attempted to pull it from its sheath. The blade did not budge. “But broken.”
“The sword will allow itself to be wielded by someone worthy. Guard it please, princess. My family has suffered enough tragedy by it.” “I don’t understand you. My people have beaten you and you return to me one of my father’s crests and bestow a treasure onto me. What do you want in return?”
The young man looked up at Liuruo with confusion that matched her own. “Nothing,” he said. “Only so the legacy of the Qiao do not die with me.”
“You keep speaking of the Qiao. Who are they?”
The young man’s lips moved, but by his remaining magic the words were only heard by Li Luiruo and Chen Di. “We are.”
Luiruo ordered for the young man be fed and given provisions for his journey back home. She sat on the dais as guards escorted him out the main gate. She made a note to fire the two who had beaten the boy.
The back of the young man’s head was so ordinary, but as Liuruo watched the wind gently loosen the stray hairs from a topknot tied with a fraying ribbon, a memory stirred. She was younger than she had ever remembered, and she was moving faster than she ever did. She was chasing a boy in the summer, golden sunlight shining through emerald leaves. A wind stirred as it did now, lifting strands of her white hair like gossamer threads. How strange, this memory; she moved so effortlessly and without pain. If there was more to the memory than the colors of the day, the wind on her skin, and the joy in her heart, she would have liked to look down and see the legs that carried her so freely.
“Chen Di,” Liuruo whispered as she watched the boy walk through the main gate and disappear into the crowd. “There’s no way I have met that boy before, is there?”
Chen Di was grateful for the coughing fit that masked his emotions. “Why do you ask, Young Madam?” he said once the fit was over.
“There are tears in my eye,” Liuruo said, bringing up a corner of her sleeve to dab at her eye. “And the wind is too gentle to have pulled out tears.”
-
Diwang, God of Death, lived in a world of yellow. While souls were brought to him by guardians dressed in black and white, the two psychopomps rarely stayed for long. What remained were the stacks of joss paper burned at funeral pyres, and the endless riches buried and subsequently lost. Beyond mementos from the living, there were the books; endless tomes detailing the life of every soul under the purview of their theology. While the books were initially bound in black and white, the paper faded, and the ink soured until they too were merely shades of yellow in a yellow world.
His current visitor faded into the background of this world. Her robes, silver in direct light and grey in shadow, resembled the smoke of burning incense, or the mixing of his psychopomps. A divine aura radiated from her, but he did not recognize it.
“What business do you have here?” he called out from his throne, which doubled as a writing desk as he fought a losing battle organizing the books of the dead.
“The Grey Executor pays her respects to the King of the Dead,” the figure bowed and then continued to walk forward. “I have something I would like you to look after.”
“I don’t recognize your title. You must be a new god.”
“Yes. Quite new.” Up close the Grey Executor looked to be a handsome woman, with only a horrible scar over her left eye disturbing her pristine figure. She held out a black cube and placed it on his desk. “Do you know what this is?”
Diwang grabbed a nearby block of ink and poked it. “I believe sages use this as a means of disciplining their acolytes. Though the seal on this one is stronger than necessary.”
“I strengthened it to contain the demon inside. She has approximately three hundred years’ worth of cultivated magic. And she despises me.”
“Why not hand it over to someone in Heaven? They could dispose of her easily.”
The Grey Executor looked away. “I do not wish for her to be disposed.”
Diwang stroked his beard and looked closer at the new goddess. “You weren’t human before your divinity, were you?”
She shook her head. “I was the Qilin Sage’s crane.”
“I can always tell. Gods who once were demons always have a weakness for their own kind.” Diwang tapped at the cube again and jolted back as it emitted an angry roar. “I’ll keep watch over your little prisoner. I was a demon too, after all.”
Bixian bowed and took her leave, and the God of Death returned to his never-ending work. He glanced at the cube five months later, after he was halfway through sorting his current stack.
“Well, if you’re going to stay here you might as hell work.”
This concludes Tangyou and Ao Luming's story for now. There are a few chapters left to Book 1 of this series. Thank you to everyone who has read so far!