“I was going to tell you.” Red bloomed in the empress’s cheeks, but I had dealt with far better pretenders. Perhaps her loathing of me was too great—that she was unable to mask it, unable to discern between wanting me dead and aiding her own cause.

“Why don’t you help us?” I asked her without rancor. “You despise me, think me beneath you. But Wugang took my home, and now he’s taken yours. He threatens all we love, the entire realm itself. Nothing should matter except stopping him.”

“I don’t need your help to do that,” she snarled.

Liwei stepped between us. “We need all the help we can get.”

The Long Dragon’s gaze was intent upon me, its words for me alone. The nine slain sunbirds were arrogant, selfish, and capricious. However, they did not deserve their fate. While your father saved the mortals from certain calamity, you should not forget that the sunbirds, too, were unfortunate participants in this farce—they on one end, your father on the other. One tricked with false coin, the other forced to pay an impossible price.

Before, I had felt little grief for the sunbirds, blaming them for tormenting the world. To be reminded that they had been young and foolish, and they had family who grieved for them still … it hurt, for I had tasted the bitterness of loss. And yet, that was incomparable to a mother’s sorrow.

Lady Xihe’s grief is vast, her rage unquenched, the dragon continued. It simmers each morning as the sun illuminates the skies, roiling as she bears her lone child in the chariot, reminded anew of those she lost. It pulses in the vicious lash of her whip as she strikes her mount. She was not cruel before, though her heart is now hardened by misery. The most dangerous hate is that which festers unsated.

Why are you telling me this? I asked in the silence of my mind, not wanting to draw the attention of the others.

Only you can ease Lady Xihe’s pain. Only you can make amends. The grove is the home of the sun, and yet, all these decades—the darkness is all they have known.

How can I do this? I wondered, almost beseechingly. What would satisfy Lady Xihe except my father’s death or mine?

Death need not be repaid in kind, but the chain of vengeance must be snapped, and the hatred spawned extinguished—else they will flame into an untethered blaze. Catastrophic, in times as these, when our world hovers on the brink of destruction.

The dragon stretched its neck out to the skies. Who could have imagined that the fate of the realm now rests upon a single feather? Ease the Sun Goddess’s torment. Don’t let the woodcutter turn her to his side, or devastation will surely follow.

My father’s voice rang out. “What is the matter, Xingyin?”