While Daitai rejoiced over her blessed fortune, Lanfen sat silently on her mat, breathing deeply into the soft, soft hair of her newborn son. The chosen one, the thunderbird. A tear dripped off Lanfen’s long eyelashes and onto her baby’s cheek, sparkling in the golden lantern light.
MONTHS LATER, A SMALL form trekked up the mountainside of the highest peak of the Shangyangs, an even smaller bundle slung across her chest. Darkness had long since fallen, making Lanfen glad Daitai had insisted she take a lantern along. Eyes shined in the undergrowth when her meager light passed by—not only the greens and yellows of natural beasts, but flashes of demonic magenta, teal, and ever-shifting rainbows. Fearsome guai, demon beasts, roamed these mountain forests, hungry for hunters and lost travelers.
Lanfen carried nothing more than the child in the sling, the lantern in her hand, and a small pouch tucked into her robes for after her errand was done. When her slender, shaking hand was not comforting her infant son, it frequently returned to the pouch in her robes, as if to reassure itself that the contents had not spilled out. She was more frightened of losing it than her life.
She felt no fear for her son’s safety. Raijin was the chosen one, after all, and the chosen one could not be eaten by guai before he fulfilled his destiny.
Lanfen had no martial skill or training with weapons, had never even cultivated her Ro beyond what she needed to manifest a pick for her moon zither. In the teahouse, she sang and played and danced and giggled delicately when the patrons said something they felt was clever. Entertaining was her skill, not fighting, and so all she could do as she journeyed through the eye-filled forest was sing. Raijin at least seemed to enjoy the music, and through the night, no wild beasts or guai attacked, so perhaps they enjoyed it as well.
The sun was rising when Lanfen finally stepped out of the tree line and into the light. She had only a few minutes’ walk under the caress of its warm rays before she ascended into the smoky cloud layer surrounding the peak. Chilly mist wet her face and beaded on Raijin’s eyelashes and hair like diamonds, but the baby only laughed.
Lanfen’s hands shook endlessly now, and in spite of the chill, she was sweating. With no need for the lantern any longer, she dropped it beside the path and kept one hand on her son and the other on the pouch. Its contents were for later, not now, not before the errand was complete, but touching it, reminding herself it was there, made her feel safe.
Near midmorning Raijin began to complain for his meal. He’d been a good boy, gone the night through without eating, and Lanfen’s legs were unaccustomed to such strenuous use, so she stopped gratefully and sat on a flat rock in the shelter of an outcropping to rest and breastfeed him. Usually these days, Raijin ate rice pudding or soft bits of boiled vegetables, but Lanfen had left too suddenly the day before to think about bringing solid food. Now that she was feeding him, however, she was glad she hadn’t brought anything, glad for the closeness. She bent down and kissed his forehead. This would be his last meal with her.
Her shaking intensified at the thought, the nagging ache in her bones turning into an unbearable need. She couldn’t wait until the trip back down the mountain. She reached for the pouch.
The deep call of a great rainbird rumbled overhead.
Startled, Lanfen looked up, searching for signs of the creature. A trio of trailing plume feathers as wide as a grown man and twice as long cut through the pale gray mist. Each one shimmered with greens, indigos, purples, and blacks.
Just before the tailfeathers disappeared, a soft indigo barbule drifted down through the swirling fog to land on Raijin’s cheek.
Lanfen’s fingers trembled so badly that she had to try three times before she successfully plucked the fuzzy barbule from his skin. It was no more than a wisp, so downy she could hardly feel it. She popped it in her mouth.
The barbule tasted of plum blossoms and dissolved on her tongue like a sugar sweet.
Immediately, strength returned to her exhausted limbs, and her blearing vision sharpened. The shaking vanished, her hands becoming as stable and strong as when they were wrapped around the neck of her moon lute or pouring a drink for a wealthy patron. The nagging, aching need battling to take control of her mind dissipated. The pouch remained unopened.
As soon as Raijin finished his meal, Lanfen pushed away from the boulder and returned to her climb. Her delicate feet seemed to fly over the rocky path as if her silken shoes, which had been nearly destroyed by the journey so far, no longer touched the earth. It was as if she had become a storm cloud drifting through the sky. Before she knew it, a dark shape began to emerge from the mist.
Lanfen had been told all her life that the structure at the top of the Shangyangs’ highest peak was a monastery filled with monks watching over Kokuji and the mountain pass to the east. These holy men were said to be the reason the village had never been overrun by guai.
As she drew closer to the structure, her jade eyes followed the line of the building’s ancient wood porch around each corner. The wooden shakes of the roof had been painted a deep forest green, and its eaves were upturned at the corners in a foreign or forgotten architecture. She counted three sets of sliding doors along this wall, all closed against the pervasive chill. Each panel
