“And what might that be?” I asked, a little suspiciously.
“Two archers,” he quipped.
“You’ll have one less soon,” I told him darkly.
He laughed. “And speed. Your speed, to be precise. I’ve never seen anyone shoot as accurately and swiftly as you. That will be crucial.” He spoke the last part somberly.
“I might have trained differently if I’d realized what we were up against.”
“How could you have pushed yourself harder than you did?” he countered, before his tone gentled. “Don’t you feel ready?”
My mouth twisted into a grimace. More than my fear of the serpent, I did not like this feeling—that I was a chess piece played to his whim. Told what he believed I should know, positioned where he thought I should go. Such was the hierarchy of command as Shuxiao had warned me, but I was no powerless recruit.
“Next time, I prefer to decide my readiness on my own.”
His lips curved as he rose to his feet. “Good night, Archer Xingyin. It’s late and everyone else is already asleep.”
I expected him to go to his tent, but he walked toward the mountain instead, disappearing into its shadow. Where was he going at this hour? My curiosity battled with my reluctance to intrude, my desire to respect his privacy winning out. We all needed time to ourselves. The flames flickered weakly before dwindling into a smoldering heap. Without its hiss and crackle, the silence was only punctured by the steady breathing of the other soldiers. I had no idea how long I sat there, lost in my thoughts. When Captain Wenzhi finally reemerged, he stared at me, sitting alone in the dark.
“Why are you still up?” he asked, striding toward me.
“I’m not tired.” My eyes flicked to his hands, streaked with dirt. “Why are you still up?” I repeated his question back to him.
“I needed to inspect our path for tomorrow. To make sure there weren’t any surprises.” He sighed. “Get some sleep. Tomorrow we have a steep climb and a hard fight.”
I left him then, to find my place on the ground. The nights were the hardest. When I lay alone in the dark, the memories I drove away in the light of day came crashing down. Of warm dark eyes and a teasing smile, which wore away at the hard shell around my heart until I wrapped my arms around myself, struggling to breathe through the tightness in my chest. Perhaps it was worse tonight because I was in the Mortal Realm—where my mother and father had met, fallen in love, and been happy. Until the sunbirds. Until me.
Once, I had screwed up the courage to ask my mother how they’d met. If I had not read the book, I would never have been so bold. But it was so with all knowledge, having just a little left you with a greater thirst. And I had found that she did not mind speaking of her mortal past. It was the memories that came after which she shied from. Sometimes I felt there were two parts of her—the mortal and the immortal—of which the former belonged to my father and the latter to me.
She had glowed at my question, a flush rising to her cheeks. “We grew up together in a village by the sea,” she had told me. “He was the clever one, the fastest runner and quickest with a bow. It was no surprise when the soldiers came for him just after he turned seventeen, recruiting him to join them. He did not complain, only hugging his mother as she wept over him. I tried not to cry, too, though we loved each other. Before he left, he promised he would come back for me. For five years, I waited. Sometimes I thought he had forgotten me along his path to greatness. But he did not.”
A cloud had fallen over her face then, as she pressed her trembling lips together. There was no need for her to say aloud what we both knew: that they had parted, more irrevocably than if my father had a change of heart and never returned—with the entire sky between them now.
With a sigh, I stretched out on the cold ground. Everyone else was asleep just as Captain Wenzhi had said. I still ached, though no longer for my loss alone. My parents had been torn apart as a peach twisted into two halves. Their love was intact and yet they could not be together. Was that worse than the inevitable finality of death? I did not know.
I thought bitterly that unlike me, at least my mother had married her love. He had been true to her. And she to him, until the fateful day she had taken the elixir. Was this where all paths to love led? Heartbreak, whether through separation, betrayal, or death? Was the fleeting joy worth the sorrow that came after? I supposed it depended on the strength of the love, the memories made—which seemed enough to sustain my mother through the decades of her lonely vigil. Yet in my lowest moments a darkness had crept over me, whispering hateful things—that I was a fool, a weakling, so easily discarded. It would have eased my gnawing ache had I surrendered to the hate, letting resentment smother my grief, blaming Liwei for the hurt he caused me. It would only have been a brief respite though as what I mourned more than any injured pride was the love we had lost, the future which was no longer ours.