When the Stars Forget (Follow the Stars · Book Two)

The qilin waited until she had stopped screaming.

Qilin do not hurry anyone. It stood at the edge of the lotus pool with its great stone head bowed, and it waited, the way it had waited all her life for a small girl to stop splashing in a pool she was not allowed in.

At last Mei-Ling’s voice gave out. She knelt in the cold water with Hoki’s arms round her and Miyx peering anxiously over Hoki’s shoulder, and breathed.

“Princess,” said the qilin again, more gently. “You are home.”

“I know,” she whispered. “That’s the problem.”

Behind her, the Thousand-Petal Lotus had opened all the way. It had never done that before, not even on the night she left. It stood above the water like a white lamp, its light falling across the courtyard and the pool and the six bedraggled strangers who had just dropped out of the sky into it.

Fror was sitting in the shallows with a lily pad on his head. Gror kept trying to stand and slipping. Feredis lay on the stone edge of the pool, staring up at the stars with his smoking hat clutched to his chest like a dead pet. Bai Gui had climbed out first, shaken himself over everybody, and now sat beside the qilin with an expression of enormous satisfaction, as if he had arranged the whole thing personally.

“Is it,” said Feredis to the sky, “always this wet, travelling with you?”

“Usually,” said Hoki.

“Good. Just checking.”

Mei-Ling turned up her right wrist.

The tree-shaped mark was still there where the rune had sunk into her skin on the first night in the north. But it was dark now. Not glowing. Not even warm. It looked like what it had always pretended to be: an old, pale scar.

She pressed her thumb against it and called to it, as she had in the burning courtyard, when the whole sky had opened for her.

Nothing answered.

“It’s gone quiet,” she said.

“What has?” said Hoki.

“The door.” Mei-Ling turned her wrist over and back again. “It took everything it had to bring us home. There’s nothing left.”

Hoki’s eyes went from the scar to Mei-Ling’s face, and her jaw set in a stubborn line Mei-Ling was learning to recognise.

“Then we find another door,” she said.

The palace woke the way a hive wakes when someone kicks it.

First came a single shout from the walls. Then a gong. Then lanterns, dozens of them, bobbing through the dark gardens toward the forbidden courtyard, and the clatter of guards in lacquered armour thrown on over their night robes.

They burst through the moon gate with spears levelled. They saw the Lotus, open and blazing, and stopped so suddenly the ones at the back walked into the ones at the front.

Then they saw who was kneeling in the pool beneath it.

One by one, the spears came down. One by one, the guards went down too, onto their knees on the wet stones. Nobody spoke. Somebody at the back started to cry.

Feredis sat up slowly. “Are they going to kill us?”

“No,” said Mei-Ling.

“Are they going to feed us?”

“Probably.”

“Then I take back everything I said about this place.” Feredis lay down again.

The crowd of kneeling guards parted. A man came through them at a run.

He was tall and straight-backed, with a long, stern face, his hair down from sleep and his dark robe tied crooked. He had a wife, two concubines and six children, and he was the most serious person Mei-Ling had ever known. He had not laughed at a joke in public in living memory. He stopped at the edge of the pool, and his face crumpled like a paper lantern in the rain.

“Mei-Ling,” said Crown Prince Haoran.

“Hello, Haoran.” Her voice wobbled. “I... I fell in the pond again.”

Her brother made a sound that was half a laugh and half something much worse. He stepped into the water in his good robe, pulled her up, and held her so hard that her ribs creaked.

“You stupid girl,” he said into her hair. “You stupid, stupid girl.”

“I know.”

“We thought you were dead. Father thought... Three moons, Mei. Three moons, and not one word, and the vault open and the Lotus shut and that thing of Fenglian’s halfway to the Shadow Mountains with the news...”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

He scrubbed his face with the back of his wrist, as he had as a boy when he thought nobody was watching. “Three moons,” he said again. “The longest of my life.”

“Told you every road has a toll,” said a dry little voice from somewhere near her ankle.

On a stone at the edge of the pool, with his feet dangling in the water and a peach in his hand, sat a tiny old man with a long white beard and a face like a walnut.

“Grandfather Shi,” she whispered.

“Peach from the third row,” said the earth god, and took a bite. “Thought you might want one. You’ve been somewhere cold.”

The Emperor came last.

He came running, which no one in the palace had ever seen, barefoot down the long covered walkway from the Hall of Lotus Harmony, with the hem of his night robe gathered up in one fist and his grey hair loose about his shoulders, and the servants and guards and half-dressed ministers scattered like startled cranes.

He stopped at the top of the courtyard steps.

Mei-Ling was still standing in the pool in her ruined scout’s leathers.

Emperor Chen Mingyu did not look like a mountain wearing silk tonight. He looked like a father who had not slept properly in three moons.

“Mei,” he said. It was barely a sound.

She never remembered climbing out of the pool, or the steps. Only the smell of his robe, sandalwood and ink and the dry, papery smell of old scrolls, and how his arms shook when they closed round her, and how hers did.

“I thought I would never see you again,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

“I signed you away.” His voice broke. “I sat on that throne and let them read it out, and I signed you away like a sack of rice to keep the peace. I should have torn the treaty up and burned the hall down round it.”

“You did what you thought would save everyone.”

“I would have torn the realms apart,” the Emperor said, “if I had known what it would cost.”

Nobody in the courtyard moved. Even the cranes on the roof were quiet.

Then, from the pool behind them, came a long, wet, heartfelt sniff.

“Oh, gods,” sobbed Feredis thickly, blowing his nose on his sleeve. “That’s beautiful. That’s going to be a statue one day. I can see it already.”

Hoki reached over and smacked him on the back of the head.

“Ow.”

“Shut up, you soggy turnip. Nobody asked you.”

“I’m moved. I’m allowed to be moved.”

“Be moved quieter.”

The Emperor lifted his head and peered past his daughter at the dripping, steaming, extremely foreign collection of beings in his sacred lotus pool. His eyebrows rose.

“Daughter,” he said. “Who are these people?”

Mei-Ling wiped her eyes and turned round. Two dwarves, one with a lily pad on his head. A wizard in a hat that was still faintly smoking. A street thief with a knife in each boot and a faeblink wound round her neck like a scarf.

“They’re mine,” she said. “They followed me across two worlds. They’re rough round the edges, and they snore, and that one will try to steal your spoons. But they’re mine.”

The Emperor studied them.

Fror took the lily pad off his head and bowed with it. Gror bowed too, and fell back in. Feredis waved. Hoki gave him the small nod one soldier gives another.

“Then they are welcome,” said the Emperor of the Lotus Throne. “As honoured guests.”

His eyes went past them to the edge of the pool, where a large white tiger was sitting beside the qilin with peach juice all over his whiskers.

“And you,” said the Emperor, “have been in the third row again.”

Bai Gui licked his whiskers and did not look sorry at all.

“Separate rooms,” said Hoki at once. “Thick doors. And someone keep the wizard away from the silverware.”

“I wasn’t going to—” Feredis began.

“You were looking at it.”

“I was admiring it.”

The Emperor’s mouth twitched. For the first time in three moons, his eyes looked less tired.

But when he turned back to his daughter, Mei-Ling saw something else behind them, like a storm sitting on the far side of a mountain. She had felt it too, the moment the Lotus opened.

The whole valley had seen that light. Every spirit in every tree, every carp in every pool, every gossiping stone lion on every bridge.

And whatever the valley saw, the Shadow Mountains would know by morning.

* * *

The palace attendants took one look at the guests and declared a state of emergency.

There were baths. There were a great many baths, in cedar tubs with rose petals floating on top, and flower-maidens in plum-blossom silk with sleeves tied back, armed with brushes and soap and terrible determination.

Hoki backed into a corner with a knife in each hand.

“You are not undressing me,” she announced.

“Honoured guest,” said the head maid, with enormous patience, “your clothes have been through a war, a portal and a pond. It is customary—”

“I will bathe. Myself. With the door shut. And if anyone tries to take my trousers, they’ll be bathing in their own blood.”

The head maid considered this. Then she bowed, handed Hoki a brush, and left her with a tub, a screen and three towels. Hoki emerged an hour later scrubbed pink, wrapped in apricot silk and looking deeply betrayed by how much she had enjoyed it.

Feredis was less trouble. He had never had a bath he did not have to heat himself, and when a young flower-maid ran her fingers through his wet red hair and whispered that it shone like fox-fire, he went the same colour all the way down to his collarbones and could not speak for some time.

The dwarves were the hardest.

It took six maids. It took three tubs, because the water went brown in the first and grey in the second. It took a great deal of soap, a pair of shears, and a long and passionate argument about whether the beard counted as part of the head or the body.

“You missed a bit,” said Gror helpfully, pointing at his shoulder, which was covered in thick ginger fur.

The maid blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Honoured guest, it is all a bit.”

“We aim to please,” said Fror proudly, from the next tub, as two maids scrubbed his back with what appeared to be a broom.

Bai Gui refused to be bathed by anyone. He went and lay in the lotus pool instead, beside the qilin, and the qilin allowed it, which nobody had ever seen it do.

* * *

Her own room had not changed at all.

That was the strangest thing. The pearl-inlaid table. The heron screens. The tall bronze mirror. The old guzheng by the window. Even the cushions she had flopped on, the night she said she would throw herself into the Void before she married a demon, were exactly where she had left them. Someone had plumped them every day and put them back.

She sat down at the mirror.

The same jade-green eyes looked back, the same stubborn chin. But her eyes had stars in them now. Not as a figure of speech. Small, faint points of green-white light, deep down in the jade, like stars at the bottom of a well. They had been there since the night beneath the World Tree, when her mother had kissed her forehead and turned the key.

And something else the mirror could not show her. Silver hair. Ice-blue eyes. A scar from temple to jaw. A voice saying quietly, in the dark of a ruined courtyard: I’ll find you. However long it takes.

There was a soft knock at the door.

“Come in,” she said, and did not turn round.

Her father came in. He had dressed in plain grey silk and tied his hair back, and looked more like himself, though his eyes were still red. He stood behind her and met her eyes in the mirror, as he used to when she was small and Nurse Lan had just finished her hair for a festival.

“I had the maids dust in here every day,” he said. “In case you came back.”

“It’s good to be home.”

He was quiet. Then: “You are not staying.”

It was not a question. She had never been able to lie to him, so she did not try.

“No,” she said.

He let out a long breath and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Tell me,” he said.

So she told him.

Not everything. There were things that were hers and the north’s and nobody else’s. But she told him about the forest, and the fall through the green fire, and the outpost of the Wolf Legion. About the healing house, and Hrefna with her bag of bones, and Jingfei conquering the kitchen in a single afternoon. About the trolls, and the meadow of blue flowers, and the golden city in the trees. About the battle, at the end. About the man at the gate.

She found she could not say his name. But her father heard it anyway, in the gap she left.

“And Jingfei?” he asked gently. “She ran after you that night. With a meat cleaver, Haoran tells me. I had hoped she would be at your side.”

“She stayed,” said Mei-Ling.

“Stayed?”

“She found something there.” Mei-Ling smiled, and it hurt. “People who listen to her. A whole Legion of enormous elves who are terrified of her and call her Boss. And one of them who loves her. She asked me to tell you she’s happy, Father. Really happy. I’ve never seen her like that.”

The Emperor closed his eyes. When he opened them again, they were wet.

“She was more than your maid,” he said. “She was family.”

“She still is.”

“Then I pray the ground she walks on is kinder to her than ours ever was.”

“It is,” said Mei-Ling. “I promise.”

They sat in silence. Outside, the wind-bells on the eaves rang the hour, and somewhere far off a crane called.

“There’s something else,” Mei-Ling said at last. “I saw her.”

“Jingfei?”

“No.” She turned round on the stool to face him properly. “Mother.”

Her father went still.

“Not in a dream,” she said, before he could ask. “At the roots of the World Tree, where three old women spin, by a well as white as bone. She was there, Father. She was waiting for me.” Her throat closed, and she swallowed hard. “She told me who she was. What she was. She told me about the night I was born, and what she did to save me. And she unsealed the thing she’d locked inside me, so I could use it.”

The Emperor’s hands closed slowly on the silk of his knees until his knuckles went white.

“She was a star,” he said at last. “Wasn’t she. I always thought... There were nights she would stand on that balcony and look north, and I would think, she is not looking at the sky. She is looking at home.”

“She asked me to give you a message.”

His head came up.

“She said...” Mei-Ling’s voice broke, and she had to start again. “She said, Tell your father I still laugh at his poetry."

The Emperor of the Lotus Throne stared at his daughter.

Then he laughed, a great helpless bark of a laugh, and another, and put his face in his hands and his shoulders shook, and Mei-Ling could not tell any more whether he was laughing or crying, and she suspected he could not either.

“It was terrible poetry,” he said into his hands. “Oh, gods, it was so terrible. I used to leave it on her pillow. Odes to her eyebrows. Twelve verses about her left ear. She kept every one of them.” He lifted his face, wet and laughing. “She said I had the soul of a poet and the talent of a goose.”

Mei-Ling laughed too, and cried, and he held out his arms and she went into them, and for a while there was nothing in the room but the two of them and a woman who had been gone for as long as Mei-Ling had been alive and had just, impossibly, come back.

Later, when the lamps had burned down, he asked her what she meant to do.

“There were three runes,” she said. “You told the priest so, the night I left. Haoran heard you. One beneath the Lotus.” She turned her wrist over to show him the dark scar. “That one’s spent. It’s part of me now, and it used the last of itself bringing us home. One in the deepest trench of the Eastern Sea, where even the Dragon King fears to swim. And one in the heart of the ice, in a world we have forgotten.”

Her father said nothing.

“I need the other two,” she said. “My friends have to be able to go home if they want to. I won’t keep them in a world that isn’t theirs.” She hesitated. “And I need to go back.”

“For him.”

“For him.”

The Emperor rose and went to the window. He stood with his back to her, toward the Lotus, still glowing in its courtyard like a fallen moon.

“Mei,” he said. “That night. When I said those words to the priest. Do you know who else was listening?”

She frowned. “Haoran. The ministers...”

“Fenglian’s creature had just been in the vault, and escaped. I did not know where it was, or how many more of them there were, in the walls, in the shadows, in the stone lions on the bridges.” He turned round. “I said far too much that night. I knew it the moment the words were out of my mouth.”

Mei-Ling stared at him.

“So the moment the hall was empty,” said her father, “I sent men out. Before his creatures could get there first. Two companies. One to the Eastern Sea, to the trench. And one east, past the last road, into the old mountains at the rim of the world, where the oldest scrolls say there is ice that has never once melted since the world was young.”

“And?”

“The ones I sent east never came back.” He was quiet for a moment. “Not one. A woodcutter found what was left of them a few weeks later, at the foot of the high passes. Fenglian’s men had been waiting for them. Whisper Fangs, by the cuts.”

“And the sea?”

“A few came home. Four, out of thirty. Half drowned, and grey in the face, and they would not speak of what they had seen down there.” He looked away, out of the window, at the Lotus glowing in its courtyard. “Fenglian’s creatures have been dragging that trench every day since you left, Mei. Drowned men. Eel-hounds. Ships of black iron. They have found nothing. There is no rune in the Eastern Sea.”

She let out a long breath. “Then the other one. In the ice.”

“I don’t know where it lies,” he said. “Only that it is east, beyond the last road. And that Fenglian’s killers are already watching the way to it.”

“Is that the truth?”

“Daughter, I am the Emperor. I lie before breakfast.” A faint, tired smile touched his mouth. “You did not get the daisies from my side of the family.”

Out of a lifetime of habit, she glanced at the floor by his feet.

There was no daisy, of course. There never was, with him. He could look her straight in the eye and say anything at all, and the floor would stay perfectly bare, and she would never, ever know.

“Get some sleep, little lotus,” the Emperor said. He kissed the top of her head and went out, closing the door softly behind him.

She did not sleep.

She went out onto the balcony instead, as she used to as a girl. The night was warm and smelled of jasmine. Below her, the valley lay quiet under its moon, the little lanterns of the farmhouses winking out one by one.

And there, low over the northern hills, burning faint and green and steady, was the northern star.

Every night since she was small she had stood here and waved at that star, because her father told her that her mother lived there. She had kept doing it even after she knew it was only a story. Then it had turned out not to be a story at all.

She lifted her hand.

She did not wave this time. She held it up, palm out, toward the north, the way you hold your hand up to a window when someone you love is on the other side of it.

I’m here, she thought. I’m here, and I’m coming back. Wait for me.

On the inside of her wrist, so faint she thought at first she had imagined it, the dark tree-shaped scar gave a single, tiny pulse of warmth.

Like a heartbeat. Like someone, far away, answering.