Unravel the Dusk Read online

  THE BLOOD OF STARS DUOLOGY

  Spin the Dawn

  Unravel the Dusk

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Elizabeth Lim

  Cover art copyright © 2020 by Tran Nguyen

  Map copyright © 2019 by Virginia Allyn

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780525647027 (trade) — ISBN 9780525647034 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9780525647041

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  Contents

  Cover

  The Blood of Stars Duology

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Prologue

  Part One: The Laughter of the Sun

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Two: The Tears of the Moon

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Part Three: The Blood of Stars

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  To Mom, for giving me courage,

  to Dad, for feeding my imagination,

  and to Victoria, for always laughing with me along the way

  I had a mother once.

  She taught me to spin the finest yarn and thread, made from silkworms raised in our courtyard of mulberry trees. Patiently, she would soak thousands of cocoons, and together we’d wind the gossamer threads onto wooden spools. When she saw how nimbly my little fingers worked the wheel, spinning silk like strands of moonlight, she urged my father to take me on as his seamstress.

  “Learn well from Baba,” she told me when he agreed. “He is the best tailor in Gangsun, and if you study hard, one day you will be too.”

  “Yes, Mama,” I’d said obediently.

  Perhaps if she’d told me then that girls couldn’t become tailors, my story would have turned out differently. But alas.

  While Mama raised my brothers—brave Finlei, thoughtful Sendo, and wild Keton—Baba taught me to cut and stitch and embroider. He trained my eyes to see beyond simple lines and shapes, to manipulate shadows and balance beauty with structure. He made me handle every kind of cloth, from coarse cottons to fine silks, to gain mastery over fabrics and feel how they draped over the skin. He made me redo all my stitches if I skipped one, and from my mistakes I learned how a single seam could be the difference between a garment that fit and one that did not. How a careless rip could be mended but not undone.

  Without Baba’s training, I could never have become the emperor’s tailor. But it was Mama’s faith in me that gave me the heart to even try.

  In the evenings, after our shop closed, she’d rub balm onto my sore fingers. “Baba’s working you hard,” she would say.

  “I don’t mind, Mama. I like sewing.”

  She lifted my chin so our eyes were level. Whatever she saw made her sigh. “You really are your father’s daughter. All right, but remember: tailoring is a craft, but it’s also an art. Sit by the window, feel the light, and watch the clouds and the birds.” She paused, looking over my shoulder at the patterns I’d been cutting all day. “And don’t forget to have fun, Maia. You should make something for yourself, too.”

  “But I don’t want anything.”

  Mama tilted her head thoughtfully. As she changed the burnt-out joss sticks by our family altar, she picked up one of the three statues of Amana lining the shrine. They were plainly carved, faces and dresses washed out by the sun. “Why don’t you make three dresses for our mother goddess?”

  My eyes widened. “Mama, I couldn’t. They would have to be—”

  “—the most beautiful dresses in the world,” she finished for me. She tousled my hair and kissed my forehead. “I’ll help you. We’ll dream them together.”

  I hugged Mama, burying my face in her chest and holding her so tight a laugh tinkled out of her throat, like the soft strokes of a dulcimer.

  What I would give to hear that laugh again. To see Mama one more time—to touch her face and comb my fingers through her thick braid of black hair as it loosened into waves rippling against her back. I remember I could never weave silk as soft as her hair, no matter how I tried, and I remember I used to think the freckles on her cheeks and arms were stars. Keton and I would sit on her lap, me trying to count them, Keton trying to sweep them off.

  The stories she’d tell us! It was Mama who dreamed of leaving Gangsun and living by the sea. She recounted to us the tales she’d grown up with—of fearless sailors, water dragons, and golden fish that granted wishes—tales Sendo drank in with his soul.

  She believed in fairies and ghosts, in demons and gods. She taught me to sew amulets for passing travelers, to cut paper clothes to burn for our ancestors, to write charms to ward off evil spirits. Most of all, she believed in fate.

  “Keton says it isn’t my fate to become a tailor like Baba,” I sobbed to her one afternoon, weeping from the sting of my brother’s words. “He says girls can only become seamstresses, and if I work too hard I won’t have any friends, and no boy will ever want me—”


  “Don’t listen to your brother,” Mama said. “He doesn’t understand what a gift you have, Maia. Not yet.” She dried my tears with the edge of her sleeve. “What matters is, do you want to be a tailor?”

  “Yes,” I said in a small voice. “More than anything. But I don’t want to be alone.”

  “You won’t be,” she promised. “It isn’t your fate. Tailors are closer to fate than most. Do you know why?”

  I thought hard. “Baba says the threads he stitches into his work give it life.”

  “It’s more than that,” replied Mama. “Tailoring is a craft that even the gods respect. There’s something magical about it. Even the simplest thread has great power.”

  “Power?”

  “Have I told you about the thread of fate?”

  I shook my head.

  “Everyone has a thread tied to someone—a person who’s meant to be by your side and make you happy. Mine is tied to Baba.”

  I glanced at my wrists and ankles. “I don’t see anything.”

  “You can’t see it.” Mama chuckled gently. “Only the gods can. The thread may be long, stretching over mountains and rivers, and it may be years before you find its end. But you’ll know when you meet the right one.”

  “What if someone cuts it?” I worried.

  “Nothing can break it, for destiny is the strongest promise. You’ll be bound to each other no matter what happens.”

  “The way I’m bound to you and Baba, and Finlei? And Sendo?” I was mad at Keton, so I didn’t care if my youngest brother and I were tied together.

  “It’s similar, but different.” Mama touched my nose and rubbed it affectionately. “One day you’ll see.”

  That night I took a spool of red thread and cut a string to tie around my ankle. I didn’t want my brothers to see it and make fun of me, so I tucked the loose end under the cuff of my pant leg. But as I walked with my secret tickling my ankle, I wondered if I’d feel something when I met the person I was fated to be with. Would the string give a little tug? Would it stretch and bind to its other half?

  I wore that string around my ankle for months. Little by little it frayed, but my faith in fate did not.

  Until fate took Mama from me.

  It came for her slowly, over many months, like it came for the cypress tree outside our shophouse. Every day, leaves trickled from its spindly arms—only a few at first, but more and more as autumn loomed. Then, one day, I woke up to find all the branches bare. And our cypress tree was no more, at least until spring.

  Mama had no spring.

  Her autumn began with a stray cough here and there, always covered up with a smile. She forgot to add cabbage to the pork dumplings Finlei loved so much, and she forgot the names of the heroes in the stories she’d tell Sendo and me before we went to sleep. She even let Keton win at cards and gave him too much money to spend on his errands in the marketplace.

  I hadn’t given much thought to these slips. Mama would have told us if she wasn’t feeling well.

  Then one winter morning, just as I’d finished adorning our statues of Amana with our three dresses—of the sun, the moon, and the stars—Mama fainted in the kitchen.

  I shook her. I was still small, and her head was heavy when I lifted it to rest on my lap.

  “Baba!” I screamed. “Baba! She won’t wake up!”

  That morning, everything changed. Instead of praying to my ancestors to wish them well in their afterlife, I prayed that they spare Mama. I prayed to Amana, to the three statues I’d painted and clothed, to let her live. To let Mama see my brothers and me grow up, and not to let her leave Baba, who loved her so much, alone.

  Every time I closed my eyes and pictured the future, I saw my family whole. I saw Mama next to Baba, laughing, and teasing us all with the fragrant smells of her cooking. I saw my brothers surrounding me—Finlei reminding me to sit straight, Sendo slipping me an extra tangerine, and Keton pulling on my braids.

  How wrong I was.

  Mama died a week before my eighth birthday. I spent my birthday sewing white mourning clothes for my family, which we wore for the next one hundred days. That year, the winter felt especially cold.

  I cut the red thread off my ankle. Seeing how broken Baba was without Mama, I didn’t want to be tied to anyone and suffer the same pain.

  As the years passed, my faith in the gods faded, and I stopped believing in magic. I shuttered my dreams and poured myself into keeping our family together, into being strong for Baba, for my brothers, for myself.

  Every time a little happiness dared to seep into the cracks of my heart and tried to make it full again, fate intervened to remind me I couldn’t escape my destiny. Fate took my heart and crushed it little by little: when Finlei died, then Sendo, and when Keton returned with broken legs and ghosts in his eyes.

  The Maia of yesterday picked up those pieces and painstakingly sewed them back together. But I was no longer that Maia.

  Beginning today, things would be different. Beginning today, when fate caught me, I’d meet it head-on and make it my own.

  Beginning today, I would have no heart.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Thousands of red lanterns illuminated the Autumn Palace, suspended on strings so fine the lights looked like kites floating from roof to roof. I could have watched them all night, dancing on the wind and painting the twilight with a burnished glow—but my mind was elsewhere. For beneath the sea of bobbing lights, the Square of Splendid Harmony was staged for an imperial wedding.

  Seeing all this red, in celebration of Emperor Khanujin’s marriage to Lady Sarnai, should have gladdened me. I’d worked so hard and sacrificed so much for the peace their union would finally bring to A’landi.

  But I wasn’t the same Maia as before.

  The Autumn Palace’s vermillion gates rumbled, and I pushed through the throng of servants to catch a glimpse of the wedding procession. At its helm would be Lady Sarnai’s father, the shansen. I wanted to see the man who had bled my country from within, whose war had taken two of my brothers, and whose name alone made grown men shudder.

  The shansen, his gold-plated armor shining like dragon scales from under his rich emerald robes, rode on a majestic white stallion. Gray touched the tips of his beard and eyebrows. He did not look as fearsome as I had pictured—until I saw his eyes; they gleamed like black pearls, fierce as his daughter’s, but crueler.

  Behind him rode his favored warrior, Lord Xina, followed by the shansen’s three sons, all with their father’s dark, unsettling eyes, and a legion of soldiers wearing patches on their sleeves embroidered with the shansen’s emblem—a tiger.

  “The shansen will mount the steps to the Hall of Harmony,” announced Chief Minister Yun loudly, “where his daughter, Sarnai Opai’a Makang, will be presented as our emperor’s bride.

  “Tomorrow,” Chief Minister Yun continued, “the Procession of Gifts will be presented to the emperor’s court. On the third day, Lady Sarnai will formally ascend to her place as empress beside Emperor Khanujin, Son of Heaven. A final banquet will be held to celebrate their marriage in the eyes of the gods.”

  The wedding music swelled and merged with the clatter of the shansen and his men marching up the stairs. Firecrackers clapped, loud as thunder, and each stroke of the wedding drums boomed so deep the earth beneath my soles thrummed. Eight men strode across the hall bearing a golden carriage draped with embroidered silk and armored with glazed tiles painted with turquoise-and-gold dragons.

  When the shansen took his place before the hall, Emperor Khanujin stepped out of his palanquin. The music ceased, and we all bowed to the ground.

  “Ruler of a hundred lands,” we chanted, “Khagan of Kings, Son of Heaven, Favored of Amana, our Glorious Sovereign of A’landi. May you live ten thousand years.”

  “Welcome, Lord Makangis,” Emperor Khanujin greeted him. “It
is an honor to receive you at the Autumn Palace.”

  Fireworks exploded from behind the palace, shooting high beyond the stars.

  “Ah!” everyone gasped, marveling at the sight.

  Briefly, I marveled too. I’d never seen fireworks before. Sendo tried to describe them to me once, though he’d never seen them either.

  “They’re like lotuses blooming in the sky, made of fire and light,” he’d said.

  “How do they get up so high?”

  “Someone shoots them.” He’d shrugged when I frowned at him, skeptical. “Don’t make that face at me, Maia. I don’t know everything. Maybe it’s magic.”

  “You say that about everything you don’t know how to explain.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  I had laughed. “I don’t believe in magic.”

  But as the fireworks burst into the sky now, lurid splatters of yellow and red against the black night, I knew magic looked nothing like this. Magic was the blood of stars falling from the sky, the song of my enchanted scissors—eager to make a miracle out of thread and hope. Not colored dust flung into the sky.

  While those around me cheered, eight more young men carried another golden palanquin toward the emperor. Lanterns hung from its every side, illuminating an elaborately painted phoenix.

  A phoenix to match the emperor’s dragon. To breathe new life into the country, helping it rise from the ashes of war.

  The attendants lowered the palanquin, but Lady Sarnai didn’t step out. She was wailing so loudly that even from the back of the square, I could hear her. In some villages, it was the tradition for a bride to wail before her wedding, a sign of respect for her parents to show that she was distressed to leave them.