Mount Hua was very quiet.
People who had never been there imagined something else when they heard the name—an ancient sect on a mountain in the East, its princess raised among silk and incense and the sound of a thousand swords in the courtyards at dawn. Seraphina had stopped correcting them years ago. It was easier to let them imagine.
The truth was stone halls that echoed. Her father had stopped coming out of his training chambers the year her mother died, and after that he barely looked at her at all. Her uncle was kind. The elders were fond of her, in the careful way you are fond of a child whose father has stopped seeing her. It didn't help. There was a great plum tree in the courtyard where her mother used to sit on her visits from the Ice Palace, and after the funeral, nobody sat there anymore except Seraphina, and eventually not even her.
And there was Sun.
