“What do I—” she started to ask Bill.
“You.” Lu Xin’s voice was surprisingly strong. “Help me hide his body.”
The dead man’s hair was white around his temples; he looked about sixty years old, lean and muscular underneath many elaborate robes and embroidered cloaks.
“I—um, I don’t really think—”
“As soon as they learn the king is dead, you and I will be dead, too.”
“What?” Luce asked. “Me?”
“You, me, most of the people inside these walls. Where else will they find the thousand sacrificial bodies that must be buried with the despot?” The girl wiped her cheeks dry with slender, jade-ringed fingers. “Will you help me or not?”
At the girl’s request, Luce moved to help pick up the king’s feet. Lu Xin readied herself to lift him under his arms. “The king,” Luce said, spouting out the old Shang words as if she’d spoken them forever. “Was he—”
“It is not as it appears.” Lu Xin grunted under the weight of the body. The king was heavier than he looked. “I did not kill him. At least not”—she paused—“physically. He was dead when I walked into the room.” She sniffed. “He stabbed himself in the heart. I used to say he did not have one, but he has proven me wrong.”
Luce looked at the man’s face. One of his eyes was open. His mouth was twisted. He looked as if he’d left this world in agony. “Was he your father?”
By then they’d reached the huge jade wardrobe. Lu Xin wedged its door open with her hip, took a step backward, and dropped her half of the body inside.
“He was to be my husband,” she said coldly. “And a horrible one at that. The ancestors approved of our marriage, but I did not. Rich, powerful older men are nothing to be grateful for, if one enjoys romance.” She studied Luce, who lowered the king’s feet slowly to the floor of the wardrobe. “What part of the plains do you come from that word of the king’s betrothal had not reached you?” Lu Xin had noticed Luce’s Mayan clothing. She picked at the hem of the short brown skirt. “Did they hire you to perform at our wedding? Are you some sort of dancer? A clown?”
“Not exactly.” Luce felt her cheeks flush as she tugged the skirt lower on her hips. “Look, we can’t just leave his body here. Someone’s going to find out. I mean, he’s the king, right? And there’s blood everywhere.”
Lu Xin reached into the dragon wardrobe and pulled out a crimson silk robe. She dropped to her knees and tore a large strip of fabric from it. It was a beautiful soft silk garment, with small black blossoms embroidered around the neckline. But Lu Xin didn’t think twice about using it to mop up the blood on the floor. She snatched a second, blue robe and tossed it to Luce to help with the mopping.
“Okay,” Luce said, “well, there’s still that knife.” She pointed at the gleaming bronze dagger coated up to the hilt with the king’s blood.
In a flash, Lu Xin slipped the knife inside a fold of her robe. She looked up at Luce, as if to say
“What’s that over there?” Luce pointed to what looked like the top of a small turtle’s shell. She’d seen it fall out of the king’s hand when they moved his body.
Lu Xin was on her knees. She tossed down the sopping bloodstained rag and cupped the shell between her hands. “The oracle bone,” she said softly. “More important than any king.”
“What is it?”
“This holds answers from the Deity Above.”
Luce stepped closer, kneeling to see the object that had had such an effect on the girl. The oracle bone was nothing more than a tortoiseshell, but it was small and polished and pristine. When Luce leaned closer, she saw that someone had painted something in soft black strokes on the smooth underside of the shell:
Fresh tears welled in Lu Xin’s eyes, a crack in the cool resolve she’d shown to Luce. “He asked the ancestors,” she whispered, closing her eyes. “They must have told him of my deceit. I—I could not help myself.”
Daniel. She must be talking about Daniel. A secret love she’d hidden from the king. But she hadn’t been able to hide it well enough.
Luce’s heart went out to Lu Xin. She understood with every fiber of her soul precisely what the girl was feeling. They shared a love that no king could take away, that nobody could extinguish. A love more powerful than nature.
She swept Lu Xin into a deep embrace.
And felt the floor drop away beneath them.
She hadn’t meant to do this! But her stomach was already pitching, and her vision shifted uncontrollably, and she saw herself from outside, looking alien and wild and holding on for dear life to her past. Then the room stopped spinning and Luce was alone, clutching the oracle bone in her hand. It was done. She’d become Lu Xin.
“I disappear for three minutes and you go three-D?” Bill said, reappearing in a huff. “Can’t a gargoyle enjoy a nice cup of jasmine tea without coming back to find that his charge has dug her own grave? Have you even thought about what’s going to happen when the guards knock on that door?”
A knock sounded sharply on the great bamboo door in the main chamber.
Luce jumped.
Bill folded his arms over his chest. “Speak of the devil,” he said. Then, in a high, affected shriek, he cried out, “Oh, Bill! Help me, Bill, what do I do now? I didn’t think to ask you any questions
But Luce didn’t have to ask Bill any questions. Knowledge was rising to the front of Lu Xin’s mind: She knew that this day would be marked not just by the suicide of one crappy king, but by something even bigger, even darker, even bloodier: a huge clash between armies. That knock on the door? It was the king’s council waiting to escort him to war. He was to lead the troops in battle.
But the king was dead and stuffed in a wardrobe.
And Luce was in Lu Xin’s body, holed up in his private chambers. If they found her here alone …
“King Shang.” Heavy knocks echoed throughout the room. “We await your orders.”
Luce stood very still, freezing in Lu Xin’s silk robe. There was no King Shang. His suicide had left the dynasty without a king, the temples without a high priest, and the army without a general, right before a battle to maintain the dynasty.
“Talk about an ill-timed regicide,” Bill said.
“What do I do?” Luce spun back to the dragon wardrobe, wincing when she peered in at the king. His neck was bent at an unnatural angle, and the blood on his chest was drying a rusty brown. Lu Xin had hated the king when he’d been alive. Luce knew now that the tears she’d cried weren’t tears of sadness, but of fear for what would become of her love, De.
Until three weeks before, Lu Xin had lived on her family’s millet farm on the banks of the Huan River. Passing through her river valley on his shining chariot one afternoon, the king had glimpsed Lu Xin tending the crops. He had decided that he fancied her. The next day, two militiamen had arrived at her door. She’d had to leave her family and her home. She’d had to leave De, the handsome young fisherman from the next village.
Before the king’s summons, De had shown Lu Xin how to fish using his pair of pet cormorants, by tying a bit of rope loosely around their necks so that they could catch several fish in their mouths but not swallow them. Watching De gently coax the fish from the depths of the funny birds’ beaks, Lu Xin had fallen in love with him. The very next morning, she’d had to say goodbye to him. Forever.
Or so she’d thought.
It had been nineteen sunsets since Lu Xin had seen De, seven sunsets since she’d received a scroll from home with bad news: De and some other boys from the neighboring farms had run away to join the rebel army, and no sooner had he left than the king’s men had ransacked the village, looking for the deserters.
With the king dead, the Shang men would show no mercy to Lu Xin, and she would never find De, never reunite with Daniel.
Unless the king’s council didn’t find out that their king was dead.
The wardrobe was jammed with colorful, exotic garments, but one object caught her eye: a large curved helmet. It was heavy, made mostly of thick leather straps stitched together with tight seams. At the front was a smooth bronze plate with an ornate fire-breathing dragon carved into the metal. The dragon was the zodiac animal
