Huang Fa felt good, full of light and hope. He nodded to the shell and begged the wizard, “Have you checked the oracle bones?”
Master Wong gazed at him for a long moment, his face stoic. He finally nodded a bit, and said evenly. “You cannot escape your fate. I’m sorry. We cannot always escape the consequences of our errors, no matter how bitterly we regret our deeds.”
At that moment, Huang Fa wakened to a strange sensation. His face felt numb, and he noted that the skin itched on his forehead. He reached up and touched the side of his head—and felt a distinct nub protruding sharply up, stretching the skin taut.
“What?” he asked, fear lurching in his stomach. He noted something odd about his hand, and saw that a fine soft fur had begun to grow out of it, as white as the hide that he’d slept beneath.
Huang Fa screamed in wordless terror, and leapt out from under the hide.
“The animal spirit has entered you,” the wizard said apologetically. “Battarsaikhan’s spell is more powerful than I could have dreamed. It is not just your nature that will change.”
Huang Fa leapt away from his bed, shoving the great white hide away. He peered at the luxurious fur.
“In the land of the Kazakhs,” Master Wong explained, “the animal that wore that skin is called a ‘giant deer,’ and its meat is treasured as the sweetest of all venison. Its hide is as pure as the driven snow in the mountains where it lives, and its wide antlers are valued by all, but it is so rare that some believe it to be only a myth. Here near the Altai Mountains, a few still survive, but even in our tales it is hardly more than a myth—the Xie Chai. Though it has two horns, some insist that it is a type of unicorn.”
Huang Fa tried to climb out of bed and obeyed a strange compulsion to stand on all fours. He felt a sudden excruciating pain in his ankles as bones twisted. He knew the name of the Xie Chai, of course. It was said that the unicorn could smell good and evil and was attracted by the scent of righteous men while it punished the evil. The Buddhists said that it often carried the book of law in its antlers.
“Haaaawlp!” Huang Fa cried, but the words twisted in his mouth, and only an animal’s mewling cry escaped his lips.
“This is your fate, the fate that Battarsaikhan, the peaceful sorcerer, has placed upon you,” the wizard said sadly: “You shall roam the land upon four hooves, and be doomed to paw beneath the snow for lichens and grass at the feet of the Altai Mountains. You shall never know the love of a woman, for you are among the last of your kind.
“You shall be hunted for all the days of your life, by both barbarians and by true men, and by wolves and snow leopards in the mountains, and by cheetahs on the plains. There is no escape for you, oh man with a gentle soul, nowhere that you may hide. I fear that you will not last the winter, for most of all you shall be hunted by the feral children, from whose mouths you have taken their livelihood, and it is the will of the sorcerer that you shall be found.
“At the very last, you shall feed the feral children with your own flesh.”
An image of Yan flashed before Huang Fa. He saw her at the foot of a screen, painting an image of a phoenix upon black silk. She looked up toward the sunlight streaming in through a window.
Huang Fa lunged toward the flap of the tent and lurched through it into the dusty air. His animal instincts made him yearn for freedom, to run under the open sky, and he clattered the last few steps upon hooves that slipped upon the silk beneath him; his growing antlers caught in the flaps of the tent and threatened to break his neck before he tore free. The sky outside was filled with dust and had a surreal glow to it, as red as if lit by the Sun God’s fires.
Yan, he thought.
Huang Fa snorted and whirled, his feet kicking up dust, and peered into the tall grass near camp. There he saw tiny figures—the sprawling bodies of half-starved children, hiding in the grass, teeth filed sharper than daggers.
He turned and bounded away, his tail raised high like a flag of warning, his feet exploding with power as he ascended into the air, dipped to the earth, and then soared upward again.
#
In late winter, Yan woke one night. The lunar New Year had just begun, and it was the night of the lantern festival. A great red lantern hung from the rafters on her porch, giving a little light that streamed through her window.
She’d dreamt of Huang Fa again, and the excitement of the holidays was dulled by a sense of loss. He had never come home. She feared that he was trapped in the snowy mountains, or that he had died while crossing the desert.
Yet tonight her heart told him that he still lived, and she imagined that he had come to her bed.
She inhaled deeply, trying to catch the scent of him. She tried to remember the light in his eyes, his broad handsome smile, but the memory had faded.
Yan untangled herself from the sheets of her bed, from the arms of her little sister whom she feared might waken and beg for breakfast. She went to the door. The red lantern hung above her head, burning gaily in the night.
She gazed out across the wooden bridge in front of her house, toward the bamboo grove whose leaves rustled in
