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She flexed her fingers. Touched her face, felt her fingers on her cheeks. The bliss of those sensations, of the sheer freedom of movement, made her want to cry.
“Great Tortoise,” said a voice she hadn’t heard in a lifetime. “Someone clearly never learned to meditate.”
Rin’s eyes took a moment to adjust to the torchlight. Two silhouettes stood over her. To the left, Daji. And on the right was Jiang, covered from head to toe with gray dust, smiling widely in greeting as if they’d seen each other only yesterday.
“You’ve got dirt in your hair.” He reached down to unbind her legs. “My gods, it’s everywhere. We’re going to have to dunk you into a creek.”
Rin recoiled from his touch. “Get away from me.”
“You all right, kid?” His tone was so light. So casual.
She stared at him, amazed. He’d been gone for a year. It had felt like decades. How could he act as if everything were normal?
“Hello?” Jiang waved a hand in front of her face. “Are you just going to sit there?”
She found her voice. “You abandoned me.”
His smile dropped. “Ah, child.”
“You left me.” His wounded expression only made her angrier. It felt like a mockery. Jiang didn’t get to skirt this conversation like he skirted everything, dodging responsibility by feigning madness so well that they all believed it. He’d never been as crazy as everyone thought. She wouldn’t start falling for it now. “I needed you—Altan needed you—and all you did was, was—”
Jiang spoke so quietly she almost couldn’t hear him. “I couldn’t save Altan.”
Her voice broke. “But you could have saved me.”
He looked stricken. For once he had no quippy retort, no excuse or deflection.
She thought he might apologize.
But then he cocked his head to the side, mouth quirking back into a grin. “Why, and spoil all your fun?”
Once upon a time Jiang’s humor had been irritating at worst, a welcome salve in an otherwise dreadful environment at best. Once upon a time he’d been the only person who regularly made her laugh.
Now she saw red.
She didn’t think. She lashed out at him, fingers curling into a fist midway to his face. His hand flashed out of his sleeve. He caught her wrist, forced her arm away with more strength than she’d expected.
She always forgot how strong Jiang was. All that power, concealed inside a reedy, whimsical frame.
He held her fist suspended between them. “Will it make you feel better to hit me?”
“Yes.”
“Will it really?”
She glared at him for a moment, breathing heavily. Then she let her hand go limp.
“You ran away,” she said. It wasn’t a fair accusation. She knew that. But there was a part of her that had never stopped being his student. The part that was terrified and needed, still needed, his protection.
“You left.” She couldn’t keep her voice from breaking. “You left me alone.”
“Oh, Rin.” His voice turned gentle. “Do you think this place was anything like a refuge?”
Rin didn’t want to forgive. She wanted to stay angry. She’d been nursing this resentment for too long. She couldn’t just let this go; she felt like she’d been cheated of something she was owed.
But the horror of immurement was too immediate. She had just escaped her stone prison. And nothing, nothing, could make her enter it again. She’d fling herself off the ledge first.
“Then why did you do it?” she asked.
“To protect you,” he said. “To protect everyone around me. I’m sorry I couldn’t think of a better way how.”
She had no response to that. His words terrified her. If Jiang had seen this hell as the best of alternatives, then what had he been afraid of?
“I’m sorry, child.” Jiang stretched out his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “I am so sorry.”
She turned away and shook her head, hugging her arms to her chest. She couldn’t forgive so easily. She needed time to let her anger burn down its wick. She couldn’t meet his eyes; she was glad the firelight was too dim for him to see her tears.
“So what’s changed?” she asked, wiping at her cheeks. “Your Seal has eroded. You’re not afraid of what will come through?”
“Oh, I am terrified,” Jiang said. “I have no idea what my freedom might cause. But suspending myself in time is no answer. This story must end, one way or another.”
“This story will end.” Daji had been watching their exchange in silence, her mouth twisted in an unreadable expression. Now, her cool voice sliced the air like a knife. “The way it was always meant to.”
Jiang put his hand on Rin’s shoulder. “Come, child. Let’s see how the world has broken while I was gone.”
Again, he offered her his hand. This time, she took it. Together they approached the open door, a circle of blinding light.
The sheer whiteness of the sun on snow was agony. But Rin relished the pain shooting through her eyes just as much as she delighted in the cold bite of wind on her face, stone and half-melted snow under her toes. She opened her mouth and took a deep breath of icy mountain air. In that moment, it was the loveliest thing she’d ever tasted.
“Be ready to march,” said Daji. “I can’t fly that airship. We’ll have to go by foot until we can find some horses.”
Rin glanced back at her and then blinked, startled.
The old hag from Tikany was gone. Entire decades had melted from Daji’s face. The lines around her eyes had disappeared, the skin around her gouged eye was smooth and unscarred, and the eyeball somehow, miraculously, healed.
Jiang, too, was more vividly alive than she’d ever seen him. He didn’t just look younger. That wasn’t new—Jiang had always had an ageless quality about him, like he’d been ripped from a place out of time. But now he seemed solid. Powerful. He had a different look in his eyes—less whimsical, less placidly amused, and more focused than she’d ever seen him.
This man had fought in the Poppy Wars. This man had nearly ruled the empire.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
Rin shook her head, blinking. “Nothing. I just—um, where are Nezha’s troops?”
Daji shrugged. “Dealt with them as soon as they got you in the mountain.”
Rin was indignant. “And you couldn’t have freed me a bit earlier?”
Daji cast her an icy smile. “I thought you should know how it felt.”
They made shelter that night under a small alcove near the base of the mountain. Humming, Jiang set about constructing a fire. Daji disappeared into the trees and, twenty minutes later, returned with a string of dead rats, which she then proceeded to skin with a dagger.
Rin slumped back against a tree trunk, trying to keep her eyes open. The absurdity of this scene would have amazed her if she had the energy. She was sitting at a campfire with two of the most powerful figures in Nikara history, figures that to most people existed only in shadow puppet plays, watching as they prepared dinner. Anyone else would have been slack-jawed in awe.
But Rin was too exhausted to even think. The climb downhill hadn’t been arduous, but the Chuluu Korikh had drained her; she felt like she’d barely survived tumbling down a waterfall. She had nearly drifted into sleep when Jiang poked her in the stomach with a stick.
