Page 41 of Song of the Crimson Flower

“I’m not just saying that because the spell might kill me without you.”

In her laugh, Bao heard relief, and it filled his lungs like air. He felt a flurry of movement beside him and realized that the little girl’s twin brothers had snuck up to his bag and started pawing through it for sweets. The bamboo flute fell out, and Bao snatched it up, quick as a flash, just as the boys reached for it eagerly. “This isn’t a toy,” he said gently. “It’s a flute, and it’s something that’s very important to me.”

“Will you play something?” one of the twins asked.

“What do you want to hear?”

The child thought for a moment. “Something beautiful.”

“Somethingfast,” his twin said, with a wide, toothless grin.

“Well, I don’t know any fast songs, but I do know something I think is pretty.” Bao lifted the flute to his lips, intending to play a cheerful tune he had learned long ago. But what emerged from the instrument instead were the soft, reedy notes of the melody he had written for Lan.

Little yellow flower,

You crossed the grass and the wind kissed every blade

Your feet had blessed.

I see springtime in the garden of your eyes.

He sensed her awareness beside him and her eyes on him, soft with memory. Bao gave in to the music, enjoying the perfect calm of doing something he loved and pleasing others at the same time. Across the way, Tao peered out of the sick woman’s cottage with a smile, and the children who had watched Bao make tonics earlier crept back out of their cottages to listen. The melody was short, but Bao repeated it a few times as his audience grew.

Music had always been one of the ways in which he battled his terrors. His moments of panic seemed to dull whenever he picked up the flute, running his hands down the familiar worn bamboo, and found the perfect combination of breath and finger placement to make something beautiful—something he would hold on to whenever he was afraid, as he was now and had been since leaving the river witch. It gave him hope that he would find the answers he sought.

When Bao finished playing, the children clapped dutifully, their faces wreathed in smiles. “Another! Another!” they cried, but he shook his head at them, promising another song later, and they all scattered back to where they had been. The sun was setting, casting a rosy light over the village as the sky deepened into star-dappled blue-black. Bao looked at his flute in the light—his only companion for so many lonely years, and now his lifeline.

“I never thanked you for writing me that melody,” Lan said.

“You’re welcome.”

She rested her head on her knees. “It makes me think of home. I’ll be glad to see Ba and Mama again. Just think: in a few days, your spell will be broken and we’ll be on our way back.”

“Home.” Bao rolled the word around in his mouth. “I’m not sure I have the right to use that word.”

Lan lifted her head from her knees. “You’re not... you’re notthinking of staying in the Gray City? Not with everything that might happen?”

“I just don’t know if the river market was ever home for me. And there’s so much good I could do elsewhere,” he said, aware that he hadn’t answered her question. The truth was that he didn’t know what to do. Family was what made a home, but family wasn’t always blood—which was all he shared with Mistress Vy and the witch at the moment. “They need physicians everywhere. I felt lucky when Master Huynh took me in, but I quickly learned that healing walks hand in hand with death. There is so much sorrow in the world, and if I could ease that, if I could make my life mean something, that would be enough.”

“I envy you,” Lan said quietly. “For knowing what you want to do, and for having the freedom to do it. I wish... I wish I could go with you.”

Bao’s breath hitched in his throat. He felt like he was standing at the edge of a precipice, one he had looked over before and vowed never to see again.But this time, I’m not alone, he thought as she turned and looked straight into his eyes. It was not a dream or a wish anymore—he saw the truth of her feelings in her gaze. “I wish you could go with me, too,” he whispered.

“How did you spend it?” she asked suddenly. “The money the Huynhs paid you to keep up the pretense of Tam wanting to marry me?”

“I bought medicine for the river market people. I guess it was my way of thanking the people who had been kind to me. Like Huy and these villagers.”

“See? An orphan of very much account.” She smiled at him, and Bao allowed himself a moment of pure, quiet joy. She had seen him—seenhim—at last.

They heard Wren’s voice outside the village, calling them to supper at the encampment, and Bao rose and dusted himself off. Lan stayedwhere she was, her hand outstretched for his. He pulled her up, her warm fingers fitting as perfectly in his as the bamboo flute ever had. He’d had precious little human contact in his life—he couldn’t remember many of his guardians hugging him when he was a child, and certainly not dignified Master Huynh. The feel of Lan’s hand in his was a foreign sensation, one that filled him with inexpressible joy.

Bao didn’t want to let go before they started walking, though propriety demanded it.

Lan looked down at their joined hands, then up at his face. She didn’t let go.

17

That night, Bao kept his vigil beside the sick woman’s bed while everyone slept. He had persuaded Cam and Tao to get their rest, and Lan had gone to the cottage next door to stay with the little girl and her twin brothers—far enough that Bao could feel their separation acutely, but not so far that it would prevent him from doing his task. He wiped the ailing woman’s forehead with cool water every now and then and monitored her breathing. Thanks to the tonic, she slept deeply, and after a few hours Bao felt himself slipping into slumber as well.

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