The Grass Cricket

When she is five years old, Fan Chang Ning watches her sister carry a half-dead stranger in out of the snow and decides, in the way small children decide enormous things, that guarding him will be her job. It is the first thing she ever chooses for herself. It will not be the last.

This is the story of the girl at the edges of the war. Stolen from a market crowd and sold north into a cold house. Traded back out of the dark. Thrown through the black air above a battlefield, and caught. Somewhere along that road she presses on a lonely boy the only thing she owns that is worth giving, a cricket folded from a blade of grass, and he presses a piece of imperial jade into her hand in return, and neither of them yet understands that the boy will grow into the emperor, or that a scrap of folded grass can come to outweigh a throne.

Years later, a decree travels north with her name written inside it. Empress. The court calls it the great fortune the readers of faces saw in her when she was a baby. But Chang Ning has spent her whole life learning to tell a gift from a cage, and she knows the difference better than almost anyone alive, because she has been kept once already, and she will ride the length of the country to refuse being kept again.
Told first in her voice and then in his, The Grass Cricket is a story about stolen children and the people who go back into the dark for them. About a young emperor trying with everything in him not to become his father. And about the oldest question love has ever asked. Whether to close the hand, or to open it.

A companion to A Name Like Smoke. It stands on its own.