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On the day the eighth bride arrives, the storm swallows the sun. Wen Kexing watches its grey mouth twist around the golden light and swallow it down, mouthful by mouthful, sip by sip, until its brilliance is a thing of the past and everything is in shadow. The water children gather around, folding themselves into the darkest spaces between rocks along the side of the river, peering over the crest of the waves once the raft has passed, and watch the bride under the red veil drift closer and closer to the mouth of the sea.
It’s a man this time, adorned in fine silk, eyes shaped like peach blossoms glancing from the shifting shadows on the surface of the river to the clouds overhead. He does not smell like fear, not like the rest of the brides who had trembled and cried and startled out of their skin the moment the current shifted too quickly. When a brave water child meets his eyes, his human ones melting into their distinctly alien ones, he doesn’t flinch away, and merely watches until the raft has passed them by, studying their webbed ears and sharp fangs and inky scleras, and then turns his head as if he has seen nothing at all.
From the highest point of the gorge, this much is visible: under the fine veil, the color of blood losing its warmth, the eighth bride’s hair is a stark white, like sun-bleached bones pulled into fine strands.
“You should drown him,” Luo-yi says. Wen Kexing hadn’t heard her coming over the hum of the storm, but he’s unsurprised. Her place by his side has always been absolute. The storm-grey of her sleeves brush against his own red ones as she comes to stand by him, and they watch the raft continue to pass down the river, quiet like they’re waiting for the eighth bride to turn, look up, and meet their eyes. He doesn’t. “Pretty faces like that, A-Xing, they bring nothing but trouble.”
“That’s too easy,” Wen Kexing hums. Luo-yi doesn’t deny that. It was her, after all, who had taught him how to pry open the mouth of an oyster, pluck its pearl from its tongue, and roll it between the palms of his hands. She understands the thrill of finding treasures as much as he does, perhaps even more. “I’ll have him brought to the island. He might fare better than the previous seven.”
Luo-yi nods and all it takes is a singular flick of her dainty wrist: somewhere among the rocks, just as the raft passes by, a shadow slips into the stream. A drop of ink coalescing in clear water, darker than the reflection of the storm on its surface. The tail rises to the surface first, long and heavy and thrice the length of the poor thing on the raft, and then the head surfaces. Blue-grey skin, scaly cheekbones, sharp teeth, and dark hair. Even from the top of the cliff, Liu Qianqiao’s face is as familiar to Wen Kexing as his own is. He watches her swim to the side of the raft, reach out, webbed fingers in the air, the tips of her claws brushing the raft
“You’re not him,” the bride says.
He doesn’t look at her, not really, but his eyes flicker to the side, and the line of his shoulders is tense. His voice is clear like pebbles falling through the surface of still water.
“No, I’m not,” Liu Qianqiao rasps and curls her talons around his ankle, pulling him under.
The raft disappears first, then the hem of the wedding robes, then the line of the bride’s slim waist, then the slope of his shoulders. The indifferent expression in his eyes only wavers once the water comes up to his neck, his eyes widening as he inhales as much as he can before he goes under. Under the storm-darkened water of the stream, his pearl-dust hair glows momentarily and then dulls into nothing.
The wind blows, carrying with it the sound of a thrumming, human heart alongside the tumultuous waves of the river, and once the ripples across the surface of the stream have settled, Wen Kexing walks into the mist and disappears to greet his guest. Cold, stormy air whips past his figure as he falls, and the gorge finds him as he lands, gentle despite the height he stepped off from. It is home. It is the only thing he knows, and despite the storm, it is as good as it gets.
Several zhang away from where he’d been pulled into the water, the eighth bride breaks the surface of the waves. He is a red dot in the dark waters, like a drop of cooling blood on stone, and he gasps for air once, twice, three times before being pulled under again. Over the howling wind, Liu Qianqiao’s malicious laughter rings clear. Standing on the river bank as he watches their shadows underwater, Wen Kexing watches the eighth bride struggling to get away from the unhurried strikes from Liu Qianqiao’s talons. Wen Kexing breathes in the panic and the dread bleeding its way into the eighth bride’s heartbeat, and he feels so, so good about it.
“Enough,” he calls.
The storm does not still nor does it hold its breath, but even underwater, a dog will recognize their master. Liu Qianqiao rises from the water. Beneath her, the eighth bride struggles as he dangles from one of her talons that have snagged his wedding clothes. She drags him across the river in an instant, her tail transforming into her legs once the water is shallow enough, and she hauls the eighth bride to his feet. Once at the river bank, she seizes his arm, her cold fingers closing over an open wound she’d inflicted on him underwater, and pushes him to his knees in front of Wen Kexing.
Like a criminal before a judge.
He’s a pretty thing, this one. His veil must be underwater by now, lodged between rocks or in the mouth of an unassuming sea creature, but his face — sharp angles tempered with slight undertones of grey and blue — is easy on the eyes. The bride’s teeth chatter in the cold, ringing like cicadas trilling in the wind. There’s a cut on his jaw, presumably from Liu Qianqiao’s. His hair, silver moonlight under the storm-saturated sky, sticks to his face and twists into matted curls along the slender line of his spine.
Above everything, there’s fight in him, stitched into the fine crease between his brows when he frowns, etched into the way his fingers curl until the tip of his nails dig into river-cool skin, and there’s nothing in him that says that he’s terrified out of his mind. He doesn’t grovel, doesn’t plead with his eyes for Wen Kexing to put him out of his misery and pry the life out of him, and there’s something about the line of his mouth and the calculated edge to his eyes that tells Wen Kexing that perhaps he never will.
Royalty, then, he thinks, absentmindedly.
“He’s bleeding,” Liu Qianqiao says, a strange contrast from the she’s dead or they aren’t breathing anymore she’d tell him of the other brides in the past, “but he isn’t dead, my lord.”
“Humans are persistent when they think they are going to die,” Wen Kexing replies airily, reaching out to hold the eighth bride’s chin in his hands and raise his head up to study him in the grey light of the storm. “Shamelessly so, don’t you think?”
“They’re relentless,” Liu Qianqiao sneers.
“Pathetic,” Wen Kexing agrees, and releases the bride’s chin. He’s as sorry a sight as he is pretty, drenched and angry and simmering with unsaid words, too proud to so much as open his mouth and snap back, but there is no trace of fear in his plum blossom eyes. Wen Kexing sneers. “Show our honored guest to the island, would you, Qianqiao?”
The honored guest in question doesn’t speak and continues bleeding onto the sea-salted rocks. He does, however, incline his head in a bow. There’s no gratitude in it, only indifference, and Wen Kexing sneers one last time before turning to walk away.
The island is shaped like a crescent moon. Before Wen Kexing’s first unfortunate ascension to the mortal world, Luo-yi had spent centuries carving it with her sharpest set of knives. Their handles, he’s been told, were carved from the femurs of all the humans Luo-yi had loved enough to carry with her when she turned her humanity away to embrace the part of her that had always been a monster. He’d asked her why she hadn’t just found an island that was already shaped like a crescent; she had told him that it built character to have something tangible to touch and feel once all the blood had been shed and all the sweat had sunk into the rocks.
This is home, A-Xing, she had liked to say to him back then, when he had been just a boy clinging to her webbed fingers and refusing to let go. When he’d opened his eyes in the trench, cold and lonely without knowing what it was to be cold and lonely, he’d never imagined he’d have one of those.
Once he enters the island, the eighth bride disappears for days.
Liu Qianqiao tells him that the eighth bride slept for a long time once the palace staff gave him fresh clothes to wear and dried his hair. He hadn’t verbally expressed his unsettlement at the staff’s webbed hands and sharp fangs, but he’d flinched away from them whenever they touched his scalp. He’d uttered a few words — thank you, spoken so quietly that they may as well as have dissolved into the air, said to the staff running a comb through his fine hair who’d remarked that it looked like pearls in moonlight. He sounded, according to Liu Qianqiao, regal, like someone who’d been programmed to know the weight of words and what they could do since the day he was old enough to speak.
Wen Kexing leaves his throne to seek him out on the third day and finds him fast asleep on the marble floor of his chambers. His whole body is lax, and his head is tilted to the side, exposing the column of his throat, unmarred like smooth, white jade. It would have been easy to kill him then, to sink a single talon into his neck and leave him to die on the floor, gasping for air that would never touch his lungs again. Still, he hadn’t, and the eighth bride had lived to see another day.
None of the other brides had survived the gorge. They’d all given up, submitted to the waves, and lost. They had all been scared. This one had survived the gorge, saved himself from drowning, and is clearly determined to continue surviving until the very end. Wen Kexing hates persistence with a burning passion — it is pathetic to attempt to change the inevitable — but it does make him curious about the way the eighth bride continues to live on despite the odds. And in all his years of ruling the sea, Wen Kexing has never turned down a good puzzle.
On his seventh day on the island, the eighth bride finally speaks his name. He kneels at the throne, humble yet still indifferent, and does not meet Wen Kexing’s eyes. He knows where he stands on this island, whatever he might have been in his life before he became who he is now, and he acts accordingly. Still, he does not look afraid in the least bit.
“I am the Prince of Nan’ning,” he says, his lips curled halfway into a smile aimed at nothing, “Jing Beiyuan. It is my honor to be in the presence of the Lord of the Seven Seas.”
“A prince, you say.” The words taste like blood in his mouth, coppery and hollow. Wen Kexing watches the salt-saturated sunshine align itself into the prince’s moonlight-colored hair — a thin, delicate thread against the mouth of a needle — and nearly sneers. “Helian Yi must value you less than he values the rest of his court, to have sent you away so dishonorably to become my prisoner.”
“The Dragon Emperor only seeks what is best for his people,” the prince says, as any liar in his position would. There’s nothing on his face that indicates that he’s lying, but there are also no signs that he’s being honest. “It is honorable work to be presented to you in exchange for the safety and protection of the Great Qing.”
“You love your nation that much?” Wen Kexing asks, and if the prince has an issue with the careless informality in his tone, he doesn’t show it. It is as if he’s stitched a mask of false politeness and thinly-veiled indifference on his face and has no intention of revealing what is underneath. As if he’s taken all the ugliest parts of himself and stuffed them under his skin, never to be shown, never to be seen by anyone other than himself. A true mark of royalty, selfless and selfish in equal measures.
The prince laughs. It is hollow, like the vacant spaces within the bones that rest under the flesh of birds. He says, “Who doesn’t love their home, my lord? Whether it serves us well or not, and whether we serve it well or not, it will always be our final calling.”
Liar, Wen Kexing thinks and still does not kill him.
“Very well,” he says instead, and smiles at the prince with his teeth. The prince barely flinches at the sight, and does not look away from it. He meets the sharp edges of Wen Kexing’s smile with a softer, more polite one of his own, and there is not a flicker of fear in those dark eyes of his. “You’re free to roam the palace as you wish, your highness .” The mockery does not get a rise out of the prince. Nothing seems to. “It’s your earned right, after all, for having survived this long on the island. None of the other offerings made it this far.”
Outside, the waves break against the shoreline, and the sound of it melts into the soft whisper of the wind.
“The rumors were right,” the prince says, his voice like windchimes and his eyes like obsidian, calculated and analytical down to the yellow marrow in his bones but still not afraid though Wen Kexing could replace the curves of the curtain drapes with his intestines if he wanted to. “The Lord of the Seven Seas is truly benevolent. This servant is eternally grateful for everything, my lord.”
Years ago, Wen Kexing had found Gu Xiang when he was swimming his way down to the trench he first emerged to the world from. Her mother floated beneath the water, dead or dying. Her egg was sinking. Water dragon hatchlings can’t swim at birth. The eggshell was cracking under the rising pressure, stained blue from the ocean. If Wen Kexing had swum past it and let it go, the hatchling would have opened its eyes, emerged from its shell, and promptly combusted into a mass of blood and bones.
This, the two of them had in common — a lonely emergence into a lonely world. He’d picked her up, careful of the eggshell, and carried it to the shore. The hatchling had opened its eyes to sunshine, gold meeting gold, an odd lavender hue to its skin that reminded him of lotuses, and it hadn’t left his side since.
It had been him who’d taught her how to walk on her human legs and how to fly with her dragon wings. He had read her poems when she was barely old enough to speak in jumbled words, played the er-hu for her when she insisted on it, pulled her first wobbly milk tooth out of her mouth to allow her fangs to grow properly, and trained her into a formidable warrior in her human form. When he’d killed his predecessor and pulled her flesh off her bones and eaten her heart to complete the ritual, Gu Xiang had been there, tucked away into the crook of Luo-yi’s arm, face turned away from the blood and gore, and still, much later, she had hesitantly asked if he would do her hair the next morning. She had forgiven him for wrongs he had never had it in him to apologize for, and she had never seen him as less because he had to do bad things to survive and then to maintain his reign. In return, he had given her a home.
She is, and always has been, the heart of the island, his most loyal and most favored subject.
It doesn’t come as a surprise, not to him anyway, that when he tells her of the prince, the lack of fear in his eyes, and the strange air of calmness he seemed to carry himself with despite living among the monsters that had terrorized his nation for decades, all she says is, “What an asshole. I’ll keep an eye on him, zhu-ren,” and then proceeds to disappear without letting him add another word into it.
And so, wherever the prince goes, Gu Xiang begins to go with him.
The prince spends his time on the island in his chambers, lounging in his bed or by the open window (guarded aerially by one of Hei Wuchang’s finest monsters). He does as he is told, speaks when he’s spoken to, and isn’t so much as seen anywhere that would give any of the island’s inhabitants a reason to kill him. Generally, he seems to take advantage of the illusion of freedom he’s been given by taking long walks along the beach or napping in a perfect square of sunshine within the woods. He does a lot of calligraphy as well, and Luo-yi claims they’re fine pieces of work. Still, he speaks only a few words, never lingers where he shouldn’t be seen, and gives no reason for anyone to suspect anything from him.
Which, in itself, is a cause of alarm. Everyone on this island wants something, whether it’s safety from the rising tides, or protection from the monsters sent to defend the sea from those who wish ill upon it, and the prince, who had been sold off as a human sacrifice, who had looked at death in the eye and still fought to live, is certainly no exception to this.
Monsters exist within everyone in some measures. In human hearts, it always manifests as selfishness — ugly and mangled, but still ever-present.
The ways of the seas might be simpler than the ways of the land, but in the end, politics, power, and authority always come back to one thing: pride.
And Wen Kexing knows, less from personal experience and more from hearsay, that if pride would present itself in a disgusting, temporary mortal shell, then surely, it would belong to that of Helian Yi’s.
It takes a few days for Liu Qianqiao to get in touch with her source from the Great Qing — something about the weather being bad, though trips to Du Pusa’s always seemed to take a while — and when she does come back from her travels, holding onto the fin of her most treasured sea dragon and still looking more human than not, she bows by the throne, presents him with the osmanthus wine she knows he likes best, and says without preamble, “The prince is the most valuable member of Helian Yi’s court. His family has served the royal family for four generations.”
“How fascinating,” Wen Kexing drawls, although it really is anything but. He’s more than aware of what this means, and he imagines Liu Qianqiao is as well. Luo-yi pours him a cup of the wine, careful as ever, and hides a smile. “The prince is clearly favored by Helian Yi, and is clearly trusted by him. So what’s he doing here on our island, playing prisoner to us when he could be servicing his homeland better as Helian Yi’s loyal dog?”
“Just that, I presume.” Hei Wuchang says, finally speaking up from his position in the wings. His mouth never seems to run when he’s around Wen Kexing, but sometimes, he makes decent points. “The damage you’ve done to their ships is extensive, my lord. They’ve lost years’ worth of supplies since you’ve sunk so many of them. Would it be farfetched to presume that Helian Yi has sent his dog sniffing around our island to spy on us? Perhaps they are seeking a long term solution rather than giving you their most beautiful women and men and hoping that it distracts you from getting rid of them.”
“It’s shallow of Helian Yi to assume we’d fall for it.” Luo-yi remarks. She lives to fan the flames. “So, what’s the prince going to do? Turn up his charm and try to seduce our lord? Assassinate him right under our noses?”
“He wishes,” Wen Kexing says.
“He can’t,” Liu Qianqiao says at the same time. She does not flinch but pauses anyway. Wen Kexing gestures for her to go on. “Du Pusa tells me that he’s not quite… gifted when it comes to martial arts. All that the general public knows about him is that he’s royalty, well-read, fond of good wine and pretty faces, and eerily persuasive. He does not strike as the type to be sent to assassinate someone, much less the lord of the seven seas.”
“So he’s been sent to spy,” Bai Wuchang hums, thoughtfully, “gather intel on where we are, and then take down the lord?”
“He intends to leave the island,” Luo-yi says.
“He can’t.” Wen Kexing says. “Gu Xiang’s on his tail constantly, and she says he doesn’t seem like he’s in a hurry to go anywhere. He’s taking his time. Lulling us into a false sense of security, perhaps.”
A ripple goes through the throne room, like stone falling through still water.
Finally, one of the water ghouls asks, “What now, my lord?”
The first day on that gorge. The storm-heavy wind, the sunless sky. The grey clouds, heavy and foreboding. The rickety raft with the pearl-haired bride standing on it, the obsidian eyes that saw nothing and everything at the same time. You should drown him. Pretty faces like that, they bring nothing but trouble. The howling wind, the glint of the water spirits’ teeth from a distance. No. That would be too easy.
“What else would we do with someone playing a game with us?” Wen Kexing smiles, all sharp teeth and bloodlust, and the others look away. Sometimes, he thinks they’ve never moved on from the day he moved up in the line of succession. The image of him devouring his predecessor’s heart is driven into their minds. He thinks that they still look at him and see the blood in his teeth and the cold, calculated murder in his eyes, and some days, he feels as if he’s never moved on from that either. “We play along, obviously, and we win.’
Because, he does not tell them, losing is simply not an option, not against a pathetic, persistent human like the prince, anyway.
The ritual of sacrifice, contrary to popular belief, hadn’t begun in the Great Qing. It had begun in a small fishing town that had lost everything during a storm that had also taken down several of the Great Qing’s warships, resulting in the superstitious belief that the Lord of the Seven Seas would continue killing until he was appeased by the presentation of a sacrifice. All those sacrifices had drowned within the gorge, never to be seen again. The ships continued sinking, and no solution was in sight.
Wen Kexing never thought the Great Qing to be archaic enough to subscribe to such superstitions; the Dragon Emperor himself is famously unconcerned with auspicious dates and astrological phenomena, having ascended the throne on an inauspicious date, mere minutes after his father’s death, long before the dead man’s flesh had become cold — so for them to send their prince as a hostage, they must be desperate for him to succeed.
Any time the prince is asked about it, the answer is the same: it’s a duty he’s been entrusted with for the sake of his nation and everyone within it. If he has any ulterior motives, he does not make it known.
How sickeningly noble.
The island holds its breath and waits for him to fumble. He remains under the sharp scrutiny of the palace staff, the birds overhead, and the guards sent to tail him. All his movements are monitored from the moment he opens his eyes every morning until he closes them to sleep. Every hitch of breath is noted, and every step he takes is traced. He knows it, too, if the way his eyes flicker to the shadows is anything to go by. Still, he knows his place. He never questions it.
He is most amiable towards Gu Xiang. Despite her abrasive nature, he insists that she sit with him as he paints the sunset on the beach, and he asks her for her thoughts on his favorite poems. (She has none, because unfortunately, the one thing Wen Kexing has never been able to instill in her is an appreciation for finer arts.). He laughs the most around her too, quiet and polite, with a dainty hand over his lips, a picture of sophistication and good manners. As time passes, Gu Xiang becomes strangely sweet to him, too. It’s as though the prince is a candle, and Gu Xiang is a thin layer of ice.
“You’re charmed,” Wen Kexing tells her.
“I’m not charmed,” Gu Xiang insists, and then, to contradict herself completely, she holds up a bag of moon peaches from the box one of Bai Wuchang’s attendants had brought into the palace. “Do you think he’d like peaches, zhu-ren? Or should I stick to the grapes?”
So, yes, she’s plenty charmed. Wen Kexing isn’t, though, and with him, it seems as if the prince does not even try.
He has dinner with the prince twice a week, less out of courtesy and more because Luo-yi suggested it might be beneficial in the long run. She does not insist on it, but she implies that it would be a great chance to scope out his true motives, since he is here for Wen Kexing. It’s a chore to entertain him for the night. The prince isn’t awful company, by any means. He makes small talk — royals are great at that, since a lot of it is just empty words and listening to the sound of your own voice — and always insists on making tea or pouring wine. He’s interested enough to seem like he cares, but only about the unimportant things — what are some of the best places to paint on this island? Is it possible to walk from one end of the crescent to the other? What is the name of the bird that guards my chambers when I sleep?
He never once asks about the sunken ships or the sightings of sea monsters where the Five Great Sects sail. There’s never any curiosity in his eyes, just as there had been no fear in them the day he’d been brought here from the brink of death.
“Do you miss home, sometimes?” Wen Kexing asks him on one of these occasions. The open window allows sea-salted air into the room. It brushes the free strands of pearl-dusted hair towards the prince’s face. He doesn’t care about the answer, per se, but injured people flinch when they’re poked and prodded too close to the wounds that have yet to heal properly. “You’ve been here a while. Surely, there must be something you wish to go back to.”
The prince smiles, and it is stained the color of the sea when it’s at its loneliest, when there are no ships and no birds surrounding it.
“I don’t have a family, if that’s what you mean, my lord. I am an only child and my parents died years ago. Perhaps that’s why the Dragon Emperor chose me to be presented to you.”
Hook.
“We’re not married, and we never will be,” Wen Kexing says absentmindedly, and the prince stops pouring the wine for a moment, the line of his slender fingers pressed against the wine jug just for a brief moment before resuming its task. “And if I see a ship allied with the Five Great Sects, I’ll sink them. You still won’t ask to leave? Even when you’re only here on a farce, and I won’t hold up my end of the bargain?”
At the very least, the prince is easy on the eyes. Those who did his portraits in the Great Qing must have been stunned by the symmetry in his face and the shape of his eyes. He’s not the ugliest person Wen Kexing has ever been offered, and he’s young. He’s slender and lean and has beautiful hands, ones perfect for lifting pages of old books without causing serious damage to the crumbling pages, and if Wen Kexing were a lesser man, he’d have deemed the prince acceptable for a concubine at least.
Line.
“I still won’t ask to leave,” the prince says, his voice like windchimes, and when he meets Wen Kexing’s eyes, they are heavy with intent, “so long as my people are protected from the attacks and no harm befalls them.”
And sinker.
“So long as your people are protected,” Wen Kexing echoes and tilts his head towards the prince. The prince’s face is carefully blank, his mask set in place, and how he feels about Wen Kexing having connected the dots is unclear. “Your interest is in protecting the Great Qing. The ships allied with the Five Great Sects — they aren’t your priority, are they?”
The prince’s lips press into a thin line. “All human life is sacred—”
“The question, Jing Beiyuan,” Wen Kexing interrupts, and the prince falls silent. “Answer it.”
The prince’s eyes flicker to Wen Kexing’s.
“No,” he finally says, and smiles a little, as if he’s daring Wen Kexing to speak of it. “They aren’t my priority. They never were. My interest has always been in protecting the prospects of the Great Qing and ensuring its continued survival.”
“Huh,” Wen Kexing says, and the prince places the jug of wine on the table with a flourish. “I didn’t think you had it in you to be ignoble.”
“I’m not as good as I’m presumed to be on this island,” the prince comments. “I fear you give me too much credit. The Dragon Emperor does not value me for my kindness, nor does he value me because I act with honor. He values me because I am selfish. Ruthless in a way he could never afford to be, I suppose.”
“How fascinating,” Wen Kexing says. He means it this time. If the prince is telling the truth, then there’s no agreement to begin with. “The Great Qing’s alliance with the Five Great Sects—”
“Improper, unnecessary, and perhaps the greatest political blunder the Dragon Emperor has ever made,” the prince interrupts. He doesn’t seem worried that he’s spoken too much. “The alliance won’t exist soon, anyway. I’m aware that your aim has always been to destroy ships affiliated with the Five Great Sects, my lord. The Great Qing won’t be a collateral for anyone. Our nation will put itself first and cut them loose eventually.”
“And you do not care what becomes of them after they’ve been cut loose?” Wen Kexing asks. The wine tastes sweeter tonight. Not like victory, but something close to it.
“Whatever they did to invoke your wrath,” the prince says, and his peach blossom eyes become warm with the night air, “I’m sure they’re most deserving of the consequences you’ve decided for them, my lord. I’m just a mere, insignificant prince in the Dragon Emperor’s court, anyway. What could I do for them even if I was interested in saving their lives?”
“Right,” Wen Kexing says. Sometimes, he wonders who Jing Beiyuan thinks he’s fooling when he speaks of himself like that, because he clearly knows he is anything but insignificant. “I suppose that’s correct.”
Outside, the waves break against the shoreline, and the sound of it melts into the soft whisper of the wind. It is as if it’s still the first day in which the prince had told Wen Kexing his name, as if no time had passed at all.
The waning moon shifts into the full moon and then begins to wane again, and time passes as if the world beyond the island has completely crumbled and disappeared. Nothing changes, and a routine develops. The prince paints for days on end and stays out of Wen Kexing’s way if he can help it. In turn, the island flourishes and blooms, and all is well.
Then, one day, the waves bring with it a corpse of a dead protection spirit, it’s entire body covered in wounds and marks of suffering, and the peace and harmony that had been accumulated over months disappears into nothing.
There is a grim, distinctively cold bite to the atmosphere in the throne room that night. All those who live in the palace are present, seated at various positions befitting of their station. The prince, seated farthest from the throne, had offered his condolences on the death of the protective spirit, though the general consensus in the room was that he had something to do with it. He had attended the final rites, sitting alongside Gu Xiang in silence until it was over, and he’d squeezed her shoulder when she looked at him as the bones were burning.
Wen Kexing wasn’t personally fond of the spirits that guarded his seas, but they’d been there for centuries. Much, much longer than he has been. Their work has always been honorable and difficult, and they’ve never led the island nor its inhabitants astray. They’d accepted him as their ruler and continued to protect him and his subjects for years despite the changing political climates. To have one of them killed so brutally and suddenly doesn’t scare him, but it is alarming. Whoever got past this spirit is more than capable of getting past the others.
“Whoever killed this spirit did it with a sword,” Liu Qianqiao says, breaking the silence that had settled into the room. She’s next to Luo-yi, having returned after looking into what had happened over the afternoon. “The water ghouls from the north, they spoke of it. There’s a man, not from Great Qing, but a martial artist of some sort. His sword bends but doesn’t break.”
“Bends but doesn’t break?” Hei Wuchang asks. “It’s flexible?”
“So they say,” Liu Qianqiao says. “I searched where I could before coming back. There was no trace of him, but almost all the sea creatures agreed that the northern ghouls were correct.”
“He’s approaching the island?” Bai Wuchang asks.
“Seems so,” Liu Qianqiao says. She tilts her head towards the prince, who hasn’t spoken a word since the conversation began. “I would imagine that whoever is doing all this is doing so for him. The island has been undisturbed for years, but our spirits begin to turn up dead the moment we allow him within our midst. Seems a little too convenient, don’t you think so, my lord?”
“It’s not true. He has nothing to do with this,” the prince says, through gritted teeth, and when Wen Kexing looks at him, his fingers are clenched into fists in his lap, and the line of his shoulders is tense. He stands, and rather than meeting the scathing looks he’s receiving from the others, he turns to Wen Kexing. For the first time, there’s a hint of something aside from indifference in his eyes. Something closer to fear, something closer to worry. “My lord, you must send him away. He’s not — You have to make sure he leaves.”
“You dare beg for mercy on behalf of someone who has killed the protective spirits of the island?” Luo-yi sneers. The prince flinches, clearly a stranger to this tone of voice. He must have gotten too comfortable with them and assumed that Luo-yi’s civil tone was permanent. “Those spirits have been alive for centuries, boy. They are blessings from the spirit of the ocean itself. And you dare ask our lord to spare their killer? Send him away, you say, rather than restoring balance by killing him in exchange?”
“My lady, he—"
“He has nothing to do with this , you said,” Gu Xiang interrupts, and the prince turns to her sharply, like he’d known this was coming but had still expected better. “Why do you wish to protect him, then? He seems plenty powerful, having destroyed a protection spirit who’s existed for centuries in a matter of days. Why do you ask zhu-ren to spare his life, then, when he's fully capable of fighting for it?”
“He’s my friend,” the prince says evenly, and he carefully doesn’t react when Hei Wuchang has the audacity to laugh mockingly at him. “I never—he doesn’t know I’m here, but he must be looking for me. You have to send him back, my lord.”
“I’ve denied you very few things while you’re here,” Wen Kexing tells him.
“And I’d give up on all those things if it would mean that you won’t deny me this, my lord,” the prince says. This might be the first sincere thing he’s said since he stepped foot on the island, the first time in a while he’s been completely truthful to himself and to others. “I chose to be here. He’s only doing this out of duty.”
“Then he is an idiot, and he deserves to confront the consequences of his own actions,” Wen Kexing sneers, and the prince’s face twists like he’s hurt . “Jing Beiyuan, do not ask me to spare someone coveting death by my hand. Let him come to the island. For every spirit he kills, for every rock he splinters, I will make him pay.”
The prince squares his shoulders. “My lord—”
“You’re so intent on protecting him, it’s pathetic,” Wen Kexing sneers, and the prince flinches. “He better not disappoint, and he better crawl his way in front of me if he has to. I’m curious to see what insignificant idiot makes you grovel in front of me, your highness .”
The silence that settles in after the words have been spoken is oppressive.
Finally, after a long pause, the prince inhales sharply, turns on his heel and stalks away without another word. His hair, as always, is dusted with orange and red and purple in the dwindling rays of the setting sun, and he doesn’t turn back as he leaves.
The next morning, there’s another dead protection spirit on the beach.
On the next, there’s another.
On the sixth day, the protective barrier around the island shifts, and Wen Kexing feels it the moment an intruder breaches the protection wards. The waves pick up speed almost immediately, attempting to flush the intruder out, but he persists despite the storm brewing overhead.
“Oh, Zishu,” the prince murmurs, standing by the window of his chambers as he watches the waves devour each other as the wind picks up. He says the name like he’s sorry and thankful at once, like it’s a prayer and then a curse. “What have you done?”
“I’ll kill him if he makes it here,” Wen Kexing says, but as always, he receives nothing in response. “You know that, don’t you?”
“Whether I know it or not makes no difference,” the prince says, and then he turns away.
The next day, the body of the ninth and final protective spirit washed up on the island. Without them, all that’s left for the intruder to battle will be the large sea dragons and the ghouls. If he kills those or intimidates them into leaving him alone, he should spot the island within days and can begin swimming towards it. Then, he’ll encounter the larger dragons, buried within the reef, each with enough teeth to cut holes into flesh until they resemble a sponge. If he makes it through there, his final hurdle will be Wen Kexing, and no matter how skilled he is or how determined he is to take the prince away, he will have to pay for the destruction and the losses he’s caused. Wen Kexing will make sure that he does.
Whatever hopes he has of taking the prince and running away, whatever illusions he has of freeing his friend and moving on with their lives, whatever bargain he’s going to attempt to offer in exchange of the prince’s freedom — Wen Kexing can’t wait to crush them like insignificant pebbles under the soles of his shoes and paint the sand red with his blood.
On the day of the intruder’s arrival, the prince wears all white, from the sash around his waist to the ribbon in his hair, and he watches the violent clashes miles away from the ocean through the clear glass of his window in silence. He turns away the food and drink that the palace staff bring to him, brushes past Gu Xiang when she seeks him out, and doesn’t speak a single word to anyone. It is as if he is mourning a man who has not died yet, as if he has doomed his friend to death by his own hands and is repenting for it.
It is, perhaps, the most pathetic, the most human, display of weakness Wen Kexing has ever seen from the prince, who had, up until this moment, remained cunning and steadfast in completing his task. It makes something in Wen Kexing roil — how much a wound left unattended could sting for a human, how weak someone as smart as the prince could become when it comes to someone he cares for.
At sunrise, the waves pick up speed.
Bai Wuchang’s dragons have laid dormant under the sea for centuries. They are massive, larger than the average whale and loud to match it’s size, curled up into coils where they ebb and flow with the waves. Every move they make shakes the ocean. They form a series of waves similar to a tsunami but not quite, and the sound it makes when they roar rattles the island off its roots. From a distance, they seem as if they’re thrashing around by themselves, but up close, their enemy flickers in and out of focus around them — a man, completely ordinary from the cotton robes to the top knot in his dark hair, a mosquito compared to the beasts he’s battling. His face isn’t visible as he uses the flailing dragons’ bodies as leverage to twist mid air and aim his next strike, methodically moving closer and closer to the heart of one with his sword.
“He is quite skilled,” Luo-yi notes. She’s by his side as he stands at the top of the palace, watching the waves crash against the barrier, listening to the sounds of the wailing dragons. “Or lucky. I can’t decide which option is worse.”
“He’s made it this far,” Wen Kexing says, disinterested. One of the dragons falls with an anguished cry, and the other roars. There is only one of them left, and then the hurdles between him and the island are minor. “I’d hate for him to disappoint me and die when he’s so close to being my next opponent.”
“Will you let the prince go with him?’ Luo-yi asks.
She knows about the curse better than anyone else — a ritual sacrifice can’t be taken back unless the lord allows it to happen — and also knows, better than anyone else, where Wen Kexing stands on that. The prince is as good as a prized possession now. To let a human take it from him would be as if he’s being made a fool out of.
“It is not a matter of whether I let the prince go with him or not,” Wen Kexing hums. “It’s a matter of whether the prince understands what he’s doing if he chooses to leave dishonorably. The Great Qing has never interested me, but if they go back on the terms of the ritual of sacrifice, compensation is in order.”
“Of course,” Luo-yi agrees. “His highness should consider himself lucky that you haven’t killed his friend in front of him yet.”
The final dragon falls, landing in the water with a mighty splash. The swordsman — the prince’s friend, painfully ordinary — stands atop it’s head as a hunter would with his catch, and surveys the area. It is the first time Wen Kexing has ever seen his face. Even from a distance, he has sharp eyes, a sharper jaw, and he’s stupidly human in the way his hands shake when he lifts his palm up to his cheek to wipe the blood away. His human eyes don’t detect Wen Kexing, not from this distance anyway, and even like this, in the moments between the last battle and the next one, locked in the liminal space where the pain from the wounds barely feel like anything from all the adrenaline, Wen Kexing thinks that this man is, perhaps, the most beautiful man in the world.
The man inhales, wipes the blood off his mouth, and jumps. He disappears into the surface of the sea, and doesn’t emerge for a long time.
By noon, all the smaller water ghouls are dead, and their bodies have beached.
By sunset, the intruder makes his way to the shoreline, shrouded in the light of the setting sun. He meets the gazes on him, barely a sign of fear in his eyes though his bones must be aching from all the killing he’s done. There’s something about him that unsettles the islanders too — Liu Qianqiao shudders when she meets his eyes, and Hei Wuchang flinches away from his gaze like it burns.
He meets Wen Kexing’s eyes when he’s waist deep in the water. Although he doesn’t hesitate, the sight of his face, flickering with recognition and then determination, makes the animal latched shut within Wen Kexing stir. The intruder’s hair, dark like the night, falls into his face with an air of gentleness a killer like him hardly deserves. He looks away, and his eyes lock onto the prince next.
“Zishu,” the prince murmurs, a strange, soft look to his eyes.
The intruder doesn’t smile, but the tension in his shoulders seems to drain out of him when he sees that the prince is unharmed.
There’s a wreckage of mangled bodies in the water closer to the sea. Floating corpses, bloodied bones. The spine of a monstrous sea snake, the jaw of a decaying protective spirit. Surrounded by his own handiwork, the blood and the scent of death, haloed by the setting sun, tinged in yellow-orange, the intruder is an angel of death.
“So,” Wen Kexing says, once the hem of the intruder’s robes have touched the sand and he’s standing on solid ground, “it’s you who deems himself important enough to destroy the spirits that have protected my island for centuries.”
“And it’s you, I suppose,” the man says, guarded and sharp, like the edge of a blade right out of the mouth of a fire, “who’s been sinking ships after centuries of peace between our kind and yours. The Lord of the Seven Seas.” His lips curl into a smile, just shy of mocking, and it makes something in Wen Kexing burn. He flicks his sword towards the prince. “Hand him over, my lord, and do so quietly. It’s been an arduous journey. I can only hope you understand.”
“You’re aware that he belongs to me now,” Wen Kexing says. The man’s lips twitch into a grimace at that. “Everything on this island does. He does not go unless I say he does.”
“I’m not leaving without the prince,” the man sneers. His stance is perfect even when he shakes with exhaustion, and he lifts a hand to wipe the blood on his jaw. His eyes are dangerous, and the thrill of being at the center of his attention feels better than any high Wen Kexing has ever had. “I’ve come this far, and I refuse to be intimidated by you.”
“Humans are so strange,” Wen Kexing remarks. The sword glints in the light of the setting sun, warm silver stained with copper where the blood had accumulated on it. He smiles at the man, all teeth and bloodlust, and the man meets it head on. “You, a human, dare challenge me? The Lord of the Seven Seas?”
“Better yet, my lord ,” the man twists his sword and it comes back to him as if it’s an extension of his limbs, the movement fluid like hot wax against the body of a candle, “I would win.”
He raises his sword, and the sound of its blade cutting through the air echoes like shattering glass.