Prologue: The Weight of Snow

The year the Great Yuan Empire fell was also the year Yun Su learned that some debts cannot be paid in gold.

He was seventeen years old when he died the first time — or rather, when he should have died. The palace was burning. The Cang soldiers poured through the eastern gate like black water through a cracked dam, and the Yuan emperor's remaining loyal guard had been reduced to seven men and one fool.

The fool's name was Xiao Hou Chuan.

He was the third son of the Su Clan, a family of generals so decorated their ancestral hall could wallpaper the Imperial Hall twice over. Xiao Hou Chuan himself had none of his father's strategic genius, none of his eldest brother's sword-speed, and none of the court's political cunning. What he possessed instead was something more dangerous: an absolutely uncomplicated sense of right and wrong, and arms broad enough to shield a fleeing prince from three crossbow bolts.

Two of those bolts had meant for Yun Su.

"Go," Xiao Hou Chuan had said, blood already darkening his blue robe from shoulder to hip. He didn't look frightened. He looked the way a man looks when he has already made his decision and is merely waiting for the world to catch up. "Go, Your Highness. I'll hold them."

"You'll die," Yun Su said. It was a stupid thing to say. He was seventeen and had never learned the art of elegant last words.

Xiao Hou Chuan had smiled — that wide, uncomplicated smile that Yun Su had seen across banquet tables and training grounds a hundred times and never once thought to memorize. "Probably. Now go, before I waste the gesture."

Yun Su had gone.

He had not stopped running for six years.

— ✦ —

The Cang Empire absorbed what remained of the Great Yuan like a tide consuming a sandcastle. Yun Su survived by becoming no one: a traveling merchant's apprentice, a temple sweeper, a river ferryman. He grew from a soft-handed prince into something leaner and harder and far more dangerous — a man who had learned that survival is not a gift but a craft, and that the craftsman must be willing to make ugly things.

But in every city he passed through, in every inn where he slept with one eye open, one question followed him like a persistent ghost: Is Xiao Hou Chuan alive?

The answer, when he finally discovered it five years later through a network of Yuan loyalists operating in the shadows of the new empire, was both more complicated and more infuriating than a simple yes or no.

Xiao Hou Chuan was alive. He had survived his wounds by some miracle of constitution that the physicians who treated him could not explain. He had been captured, ransomed by his clan, and installed — with considerable grumbling on his part, according to sources — as the Su family's representative at the court of the Cang Empire's northern territory.

He was, by all accounts, enormously respected. Bafflingly honest. Irritatingly incorruptible. And utterly, completely unaware that the man he had shielded with his body in a burning palace was now planning to dismantle the empire that had killed their world, piece by careful piece.

Yun Su stood in the cold mountain wind above Beiping Province and looked down at the city where Xiao Hou Chuan slept, and felt something tighten in his chest that was not grief and not quite love and was perhaps the most inconvenient feeling a man engaged in patient, meticulous revenge has ever experienced.

I will repay you, he thought. The only question is how.

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