I left then, trying not to make a sound. Behind me, no more words were spoken, there was just the creak of the door as it slid shut. This was a moment for my parents alone. I would have my chance later, with the three of us together. For the first time in my life, a profound and unfamiliar sense of oneness filled me—that we would finally have time enough for us to be a family, to know one another as we would have done had we lived in the Mortal Realm without the sunbirds, capricious gods, and enchanted elixirs.

Chapter 20

It was early afternoon when I made my way back to my mother’s room. I was reluctant to intrude upon my parents’ reunion, but dared not remain in the Southern Sea any longer. With Liwei’s escape and my part in it known to all, the emperor would be furious. He would retaliate, I had no doubt, my stomach churning at the thought.

Moreover, Ping’er had been laid to rest according to the customs of her people. Just this morning, my mother and I had knelt before her ancestral altar to pay our final respects. A lump had clogged my throat to see the ebony tablet inscribed with Ping’er’s name in gold. While there was a solemn peace in knowing she was among her people again, the ragged cries of her family and friends wrenched my heart.

We no longer had a reason to linger here, beyond the fact we had nowhere to go. As I entered my mother’s room, I found my father sitting by the table, his hair unbound, falling loosely over his shoulders. There was an ease to my mother’s smile, a new lightness to her movements. How strange it was to see my parents together, strange and utterly wonderful. Yet a slight uncertainty edged their interactions as though they were discovering each other again, as indeed they were: the way my father glanced at my mother to assure himself she was still there, the slight widening of her eyes whenever she looked at him. And when their fingers brushed, that moment of hesitation before my mother clasped his hand in hers.

“Daughter, I’m grateful.” My father inclined his head to me. “For your trust, for restoring my life. I had thought it impossible.”

“She is your daughter, Houyi,” my mother said with pride. “She does not walk the path before her; she forges her own.”

“Our daughter,” he corrected her, rising to place his palm on my shoulder. “All those years I’ve lost.”

I blinked away the prickling in my eyes. “We have time now, Father.”