“Amah!” The name tore from Pinmei’s throat, and she fell to her knees next to the fallen form. Amah’s eyes were closed, her arms outstretched as if reaching. “Amah?” Pinmei said again, this time in a coarse, cracked whisper.

Amah did not move. She was as still as a clay figure. The only color to her ashen face was the dark trickle of blood from an ugly cut on her forehead. Pinmei threw herself against Amah’s chest. “Amah! Amah!” she repeated desperately, willing her to awaken, but Amah was deaf to her pleas. Pinmei began to weep. Had she left the mountain for this? Had she borne the cold, run from soldiers, gone through the frozen sea, and fought the emperor for this? She wept heartbroken tears, tears as inconsolable as Lady Meng’s and as despairing as Nuwa’s.

“Pinmei,” a voice said, and a hand touched her shoulder. She looked up and, through her tears, she saw Yishan.

He was bareheaded and his face was dirty, but he was unscathed, standing before her with an object in his hands. At first, Pinmei thought it was his hat, but as she blinked away more tears, she saw it was Amah’s special rabbit rice bowl.

Yishan knelt next to her and placed his hand on Amah’s chest. He drew it away swiftly and held his hand out to Pinmei.

“The Iron Rod,” he said, in a tone so urgent Pinmei’s tears stopped flowing. “Quickly!”

Pinmei handed Yishan the needle. He looked at her, and the corner of his mouth curved up in a smile. He reached out and gave her braid an affectionate tug.

Without a word, he pricked his finger and held it above the bowl. Only a single drop of clear, golden liquid fell from his finger, but when Pinmei looked into the bowl, it was full. He brought the bowl to Amah’s lips, letting the liquid drip into her mouth.

Little by little, Amah’s face began to color, the gray waxen tinge warming to rose gold. The evil gash on her temple disappeared as if wiped away, the stains of blood nothing more than dried paint. Her chest began to move with rhythmic breathing, and, slowly, very slowly, Amah opened her eyes.

She looked directly at Pinmei, and the love and longing Pinmei had carried for so long melted in her like a piece of ice in warm tea. Amah reached up and pulled Pinmei toward her. “My brave girl,” Amah said. Pinmei began to weep again, but this time the tears were ones of happiness.

CHAPTER

74

After hugging Pinmei, Amah sat up and, to Pinmei’s surprise, a sad expression came over her face.

“Yishan,” Amah said, sitting up and shaking her head, “Meiya would never forgive me.”

Pinmei turned to look at Yishan, and her mouth fell open. Yishan was not there. Instead, there was an old man, tall and silver and dressed in gray. He held a red bag in his hand, a bag Pinmei recognized as made from the same cloth as Yishan’s clothes. She stared as the moon bathed him in its luminous light and he seemed to glow.

“She wanted you to finally live as a boy and grow old as you are supposed to,” Amah lamented, “instead of always giving up your youth to keep her alive. You shouldn’t have done it for me.”

“Nonsense, Minli,” the old man said. He shook the needle in his hand, and it grew into an iron walking stick. “You know this is exactly what she would have wished me to do. Besides, what is another ninety-nine years? I’ll soon be young again and I’ll start over.”

Pinmei’s eyes bulged as she glanced back and forth between her grandmother and the old man. Yishan had turned into an old man because he saved Amah? He had done it before with Auntie Meiya?

“Yishan?” Pinmei started doubtfully.

“I never realized how short you are,” he said, and the half-amused, half-serious black eyes she knew so well looked down at her from his wrinkled face. As impossible as it seemed, this old man was Yishan.

“I guess,” she said unsteadily, “I guess this is what you were hiding from me?”

He gave a wide smile, and she was surprised again, for it was Yishan’s grin on the old man’s face. “I told you it wasn’t anything important,” he said.

He turned away and, with the Iron Rod, knocked over a small glowing light at the ground near their feet. Two monkeys popped up, whimpering and sobbing. The old man bent down, grabbed something, and then in a sharp voice said, “Go! And stay out of mischief!”

The monkeys ran off into the darkness, and the old man began to pick his way through the ruins of the courtyard, with Pinmei and Amah following. He stopped in front of the fallen column of the Black Tortoise Gate and, as if he were brushing away a dead leaf, pushed it aside.

“Amah,” Pinmei said, finally recovering from her shock, “why didn’t you tell me?”

“Well,” Amah said gravely, motioning toward the ground near Yishan, “that is one reason.”

Pinmei followed her gaze and caught sight of the gold silk robe. At Yishan’s feet was the body of the emperor.

The form was unmoving. The emperor’s face was frozen in a glare, and his arms were locked in an empty grip, as if even in his final moments he was grasping. Pinmei, again, felt a strange pang of pity.

“I know,” Amah said, touching Pinmei’s shoulder. “So much life but so little happiness. Perhaps the peace he never sought in life will find him in death.”

“Is… is he dead?” Pinmei asked.

“Dead enough,” Yishan said, and motioned her and Amah away. When they were far enough, the old man tossed the white-rabbit rice bowl at the emperor’s lifeless body. As the bowl spun in the air, it grew and grew. When it finally fell upon the ground, it covered the emperor completely and turned into a mountain!

They stood at the foot of it and, for a moment, all Pinmei could do was gaze upward.

The old man grunted. “Not much of a mountain, is it?” he said in a familiar mocking tone. “More a hill, really.”

Pinmei stared at him in bewilderment.

“But I thought…” she said. “The Paper said the emperor would be immortal.”

“And so he will be,” the old man said. “But not the way he thought.”

“How?” Pinmei asked.

“Why don’t you ask the Paper?” Yishan said, his eyes twinkling.

Pinmei took the Paper from her sleeve and unfolded it. A single line of words formed on the page. It was the same word, over and over again and to Pinmei’s surprise, she could read it. The word was Stories.