“Never mind. Thank you for your guidance. I have a question about the sister of—”
“The hell he is!” Cynna cried.
Lily had mostly tuned out what was going on in the large room outside her cell. Cynna’s angry outburst jolted her attention that way, and she realized she’d heard but not heeded a new voice in the conversation between Cynna and Alice: Fist Second Fang Ye Lì.
He said something in Chinese. She caught a few phrases—“yellow-haired” and “tell her”—but not the significant ones.
“Be still,” Alice said firmly, “or the Fist Second will have you restrained. How will that help?”
Lily sent her mindsense back into the other room. Cynna’s mind was the easiest to spot, being that light, glowing green. Alice’s mind was distinctive, too. There were four unknown minds clustered together—guards?—and one she thought she recognized. That mind was close to Alice and Cynna. She reached for it.
The Fist Second spoke again, but he wasn’t addressing her, so she didn’t get a mindspeech assist in catching the meaning. She didn’t need it. The words were simple. “Bring Lily Yu out now.”
A moment later one of the guards stood in the doorway and used that hated word: “Come.”
Ah Hai must have understood that English word, if she didn’t know any others. She helped Lily rise to her feet. Lily felt stupidly weak, but her ankle wasn’t as bad as it had been . . . it was wrapped, she realized. Someone had wrapped it while she slept. Ah Hai, most likely—she’d wanted to do that before, and now she considered herself Lily’s . . .
Lily gave her helper a sudden, sharp glance. How had Ah Hai known that Lily had accepted The Pain in her stead? The spawn and Lily had been speaking English, not Chinese. “Do you understand English, Ah Hai?” she asked casually.
The tiny woman replied in Chinese. “Pardon, honored lái?” She sounded neither puzzled nor comprehending.
“Come!” the guard barked again.
Lily managed to walk out of the cell on her own. She didn’t start trembling until she’d left the little cell and Fist Second Fang told her that Zhu Kongqi required her presence.
TWELVE
IT was the Qī Jiā again. The Home of the Seven. Where Kongqi kept his lab.
Lily couldn’t hide her fear. It swamped her, creating a physical tide she could not control. As she walked down the hall beside Fang, her legs seemed strung on rubber bands instead of bones—twitchy and unreliable, apt to collapse. No doubt her skin had turned an interesting shade of pasty. Her arm throbbed. The guard who’d bound her hands in front of her had tied the rope too tightly. It hurt.
“. . . early for monsoon season, but rain seems likely soon,” the Fist Second was saying as they walked toward the door flanked by a pair of guards. “Is your home subject to monsoons, Lily Yu?”
She clenched her jaw. He’d been doing this all the way here. Talking to her, asking questions. It might be an effort to gain information when she was rattled, but the questions were so trivial . . . which could mean they were intended to lower her guard. Or his chattiness might be what it seemed: an effort to distract her from her fear. She took a slow breath, trying to calm her racing heart, and checked the mate bond. The feel of Rule steadied her. “Some parts of Earth have monsoons, but where I live is dry. San Diego is the name of my city.”
“What does San Diego mean?” The city’s name sounded odd surrounded by Chinese.
“It’s named for a saint.” The Chinese word she used for “saint” meant holy or sage.
“Does your city venerate the wise?”
“My city is filled with people,” she said dryly. “People venerate many things, most of them not wise.”
A small snort. “Many here venerate alcohol.”
“Many in my home realm do, also.”
The guards at the door saluted Fang with that chest thump. He gave his name and title as he had before. Again the door swung open without the assistance of a hand. Lily thought she might throw up. Did she really have to just walk inside? Screaming in terror sounded like a better idea.
She swallowed bile and stepped into Kongqi’s lab.
The dragon spawn sat in his comfy chair again, a teapot and two cups on the table at his elbow. “Lily Yu,” he said in Chinese. “Take tea with me.”
She wanted to say something clever. She couldn’t think of anything. She wanted to reach for Rule again. She didn’t dare. The mate bond had a spiritual component, but it was magic, too. She couldn’t risk Kongqi becoming aware of it. Alone and silent, she walked toward the horrible parody of hospitality waiting at the far end of the room.
“Fist Second,” Kongqi said as Lily sat in the chair where she’d been tormented before, “you may remove her bonds, then leave us.”
Fang banged his chest with his fist, then bent to untie Lily’s hands. Her fingers tingled as the rope fell away. She opened and closed her hands to restore circulation and tried to ignore her fear and the way her arm burned.
A moment later, the door closed behind Fang. She forced herself to look at the room’s other occupant.
Kongqi’s incongruously bright blue eyes studied her. “You are very frightened,” he observed in English.
“It is natural to fear pain.”
“You have made an illogical assumption.” He said that reprovingly, like a disappointed tutor, and poured pale tea into one of the cups. “Why would I subject you to the stings of the téngtòng mǎyǐ a second time? Either I already have the required data from my first test or the test failed. If it failed, subjecting you to it a second time would introduce a variable that would taint any data I obtained.”
Lily licked dry lips. He wasn’t going to use the pain ants on her. No, he said he wasn’t, but that might be part of his experiment. Maybe he thought he’d get all kinds of interesting data if she weren’t expecting the pain. She breathed carefully and managed to say, “Which is it?”
“The latter. Some of the ants that stung you have mutated.”
She got out another word. “Mutated?”
“Unfortunately.” He held out the cup.
She took it, hating the tremor in her hand.
He went on as he poured himself a cup of tea. “The téngtòng mǎyǐ come from a high-magic region. Mutations are common. Most are readily discerned with a visual examination, but some are not. That was the case this time. It took me several hours of examination to discover the variance.”
Lily raised her cup to her lips. The tea smelled so familiar. Like home. Like Grandmother. She inhaled for a moment without sipping and was able to express a complete sentence this time. “What form did this mutation take?”