“I haven’t
“Your anger is your own.” Uri shrugged. “You can let it go, or let it run your life. That’s your choice, kid.”
“I’m supposed to be helping Alice sneak into the Forbidden City. I shouldn’t even be here.” Gavin rose, stood with one foot over the edge of the porch with darkness below him. “Your bird put me in a fugue, or I wouldn’t have come.”
“So why don’t you leave?”
“I should.” But he hung there.
“Maybe you need to learn something here,” Uri said. “And once you learn it, you’ll be able to help Alice the way you want to.” He held up the medallion again. It was compelling, almost hypnotic.
Gavin sat back down again. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“You don’t need to know. Let the universe tell you.” He paused, then reached into a shadow and came up with, of all things, a fiddle case. He opened it. “Do you still play?”
The unexpected question made Gavin feel self-conscious. “Of course I play. I earned money on street corners, bought bread with it because
“Play for me.”
“No.”
“If you didn’t want to play, why did you say you still know how? This is a great fiddle. I bought it in San Francisco. Or maybe I stole it. My memory of that time isn’t very good.” He ran the bow over the strings in liquid notes that shot old memories down Gavin’s back. “My old fiddle was better, though.”
“The old one isn’t your fiddle anymore. It’s mine. You left it behind, just as you left everything else behind.”
“Yeah.” His eyes took on a faraway look. “Still, it sure would be nice to hear you play again. It’s been so long. Yep, sure would be nice.”
Gavin hesitated, then relented. He took the fiddle from his father and, still seated, began to play with the moon hanging over his shoulder and turning his wings to mercury.
His hands shook as he played. He couldn’t make a mistake, not in front of his father on his father’s instrument. It had never occurred to him that he might one day play for Dad, the man who had admonished him not to make mistakes. He slowed the song, but that only made things more difficult.
His left hand twitched on the final note. The fiddle squawked, and there was no way to recover. Gavin corrected and replayed the note, but the damage was done. He stopped playing and felt the heat rise to his face. He wanted to fall backward off the edge of the porch and let himself crash to the rocks below. But he sat with his head bowed instead, waiting for the inevitable harsh words.
Uri sighed. Of course. The terrible playing deserved that exact reaction.
“I remember that song so well,” he said. “Your mother loved it.”
Gavin’s head came up. “I messed it up at the end. It was awful.”
“Perfection doesn’t exist, kid. One mistake doesn’t ruin the whole song any more than a single ripple ruins an entire stream.” Uri touched Gavin’s arm. “You play it better than I ever did. No wonder that Alice girl fell in love with you.”
Something broke inside Gavin at those words, something he couldn’t define. Chains he hadn’t known he was carrying fell away, and he wanted to weep for the lightness.
“Maybe I should try again,” he said hoarsely. “Where’s that medallion?”
But as he was reaching for it, a familiar silver nightingale encrusted with jewels zipped under the overhang. It landed on Gavin’s shoulder. He clapped a hand over it, and it was as if Alice were standing next to him. He missed her with a deep intensity that made this place feel all the more foreign. Uri cocked his head and touched the brass bird on his own shoulder.
“Is that one of mine?” he said.
“Probably. It belonged to the emperor’s nephew.” He pressed the bird’s right eye.
The nightingale fell silent.
“She has a pretty voice,” Uri said. “Reminds me of your-”
“Don’t finish that sentence,” Gavin warned. “Not even in your head. I need to go.”
“You coming back?”
Gavin, who had already gotten to his feet with the Impossible Cube, paused and said, “Do you want me to come back?”
“The Dao teaches us that once you become one with the universe, there are no needs, no wants, no desires. Everyone has to follow his own path, and it doesn’t always travel where we-”
“Fuck the Dao, Dad. Do you want me to come back or not?”
Uri fell silent. He took the fiddle into his lap. Gavin watched him, trying to stay dispassionate. The two Dragon Men stood on the mountainside, surrounded by flowing water; one with wings and one without; one with a fiddle, one with the Impossible Cube; one older, one younger. The universe hung balanced between them. Gavin held his breath, and even the water seemed to slow.
At last Uri said, “You need to find your own self, Son, wherever that is.”
“Fine, Dad,” Gavin said tiredly. “You have your life, and I have-”
“But,” Uri interrupted, “I think the universe would smile if your path and mine traveled side by side again.”
Gavin gave a short bark of a laugh at that. “And maybe that’s the best I can hope for. All right, Dad. Maybe I’ll come back. But think about this-maybe
They embraced, a gesture made clumsy by Gavin’s wing harness, and for a small moment Gavin let himself be a small boy again. Then he turned and leaped off the edge of the porch. His wings left a blue trail as he followed the silver nightingale back to Alice, the Impossible Cube clutched in his hands.
Chapter Sixteen
“Li and his men will be beheaded in the courtyard,” Phipps muttered to Alice. “Su Shun has other plans for us. They won’t be pleasant.”
“No doubt,” Alice replied tightly. Su Shun’s men had taken her wire sword away, of course, along with the new pistols and the weapons Li’s soldiers carried. They couldn’t take away the metallic hands and arms, at least. Or rather, Alice amended privately, they hadn’t done so yet.
Su Shun’s men herded them out of the false storage building and into the streets of the Forbidden City proper. It truly was a city, with walkways and buildings and parks, and Alice wondered whether she was the first Westerner ever to see it. She also wondered if she would survive to tell about it. The buildings all had the odd peaked roofs that swooped up at the eaves. Lanterns on poles burned everywhere to provide light. The air smelled of gunpowder and hot metal. The thudding and thumping Alice had felt underground were more prominent up here.
Imperial soldiers surrounded them on all sides, weapons drawn and ready. Su Shun himself, dressed in a suit of yellow lacquered armor, walked at the head of the procession with a single soldier between him and Alice. He
