Xisi looked at Bingmei and then Zhuyi, her expression guarded. After a moment, she held up her hand, and Zhuyi stepped back, no longer in a martial stance.
“I admit,” Xisi said, “that you’ve surprised me. Not many can, Bingmei. So let us agree. Echion must be stopped. Only I can do this. Even if you had the poison that would turn him mortal, he would never take it from you. It must be ingested. He does not eat or drink because he does not need to. And he fears that I’ll find a way to poison him again. I’ve gotten ever so good at fooling my husband. No one else could manage it. I will do it again this time, making him mortal. Then, it’s up to you to destroy him . . . if you can.”
“What of his dragons?”
“Our dragons?” Xisi said, correcting her. “Unless the Woliu is closed, they will remain, but they are not immortal. You will need a husband to close the Woliu, Bingmei, someone equal in power with you. Again, it only matters if you survive my husband.”
“At least he will be mortal,” Bingmei said. “Tell me how the bond of Xieyi works.”
“Remove the sigil on Mieshi first,” Xisi said. “I promise they will not attack you.”
Bingmei sniffed, but she smelled no deception.
“How I wish I had your gift,” Xisi purred. “You see? I cannot deceive you. Release her. They are obedient to my commands.”
Bingmei saw that Zhuyi still stood apart, watching them with emotionless eyes. Stooping down, Bingmei untraced the glyph, removing the dianxue hold. She offered her hand to Mieshi, who took it and stood. It felt so strange to see Mieshi and Zhuyi together again, without the close bond they’d always shared. It made her grieve for her bond sisters. For all the poor souls who’d been rent apart by the dragons.
She turned back to Xisi.
The queen traced her finger across the meiwood cradle. The baby was squirming in his blankets, looking unsettled and smelling of agitation. “We must make the pact willingly. The glyph is one of the Immortal Words. That binds both sides to fulfill the oath. Once we make it, we cannot double-cross it.”
“How did you learn it?” Bingmei asked her cautiously.
“Echion learned it,” Xisi said. “In another time. Another place.”
“Back when he served the emperor?”
A smell of surprise came from Xisi. “You learned our history in your journeys?”
“Some of it, yes,” Bingmei confessed. She didn’t reveal that she’d learned much of it from Echion and Xisi themselves.
“So you know that my husband stole his throne from the phoenix. After the empress united the kingdoms under her rule, she wanted to usher in an era of peace. Echion was crafty and led her to believe he shared her vision. Soon she gave him more authority, hoping he could help her ensure her legacy of peace and cooperation. She told him of the existence of scrolls containing the Immortal Words. She began to teach them to him but safeguarded the most powerful ones. Most of those can only be used when bonded with a dragon or phoenix. He discovered where they were hidden through treachery.
“There were legends, at the time, of various ways to achieve it. One legend was of a great whale that could swallow a man whole and, after three days, spit him out as an immortal man. It was not true. The one consistent rumor was of a tree. He found its location mentioned in the hidden scrolls. While performing his duties as the empress’s ambassador, he sought it out, but there was no fruit on the tree. Only deadly butterflies. He reasoned that the tree was not barren. It only appeared to be. Like a stand of aspen in winter. What if this tree took longer than the normal growing season to bloom? The only way to pluck its fruit would be to travel forward in time and then return.”
Bingmei nodded slowly. It was the same principle by which Shixian had been conceived. “How did he learn that Immortal Word?” she asked Xisi.
“He found it engraved on an altar in a shrine dedicated to the dragon. That was where he communed and bonded with the Dragon of Night. There was also a warning about the balance, the forces of male and female acting as one. If he ate the fruit alone, he would die. But if he ate it with his wife, they could rule the world together.” She smirked. “Of all the handmaids, I was chosen to be his bride because I was the best at deceit and ambitious enough to desire immortality. The empress married us herself. After our wedding, he flew me to the dragon shrine so that I could bond with the white one. Bound to our dragons and each other, we traveled to the silver-skinned tree to use the word that now held power for us. We traveled together to the future to claim the prize that would empower us to usurp the throne from the empress. My husband never revealed the word to me and made the dragon shrine inaccessible to me. I know all the Immortal Words save that one, Bingmei, the one that conquers time. And neither of us can break the pact. Even after death I am bound to him.”
“If we make the pact, then you must destroy Echion? When?”
“I must begin to act on it immediately,” Xisi said, no deception in her smell. “The magic will create a compulsion that cannot be resisted. Once you make it, you cannot take my Chushuile away from me. If you try, it will compel you to return him to me. You cannot resist it. Believe me . . . I have tried to break my own bond.”
Bingmei closed her eyes again, despair washing over her. Even hearing Xisi’s name for her son made her want to retch. Must
