by Joan He
To the Queen of Yan,
We have received your request for negotiations, and we accept. On the first day of the eleventh month, we will wait for you by the banks of the Black Lake. We hope you find this to be a suitable intermediary location. You may bring six companions of your choice, but no more.
Transcribed by Jikan the Scribe
Dictated by Tasn the Eunuch
Willed by the Dragon Who Wields the Fire, Crown Prince Siahryn, Fifth to His Name
THIRTEEN
THE FOUR KINGDOMS MUST BE KEPT IN PEACE.
ONE OF THE ELEVEN ON WAR
AT LEAST FEED YOUR PEOPLE BEFORE CONSCRIPTING THEM.
TWO OF THE ELEVEN ON WAR
Hesina was going to the Black Lake, and nothing Caiyan did or said could dissuade her.
That didn’t stop him from trying.
“If you go,” he said on the morning of her departure, two days after receiving the Kendi’an letter, “they might break the truce.” The two of them had climbed to the imperial mail room atop the eastern gong tower, stooped between the gabled ceiling and the bird droppings on the slate floor. “They make their demands—land, water, whatever it may be—and attack when you refuse. They may even kill you.”
It was troublesome, thought Hesina grimly, that everyone believed her so easily killed.
“In doing so, they force Yan’s hand,” continued Caiyan. “War will erupt over your death.”
“There will always be risks.” They’d come to a point in the debate where every argument and counterargument felt like the steps of a well-rehearsed dance. Maybe that’s why Hesina improvised with a little wave of the hand. “There might even be sooths.”
Caiyan’s expression hardened like clay, and she wished she could take back her words. She didn’t want to believe that the sooths had allied with the Kendi’ans, but she and the rest of the delegation were prepared—as prepared as one could be with anti-sooth paper talismans tucked into sleeves and shoes.
“I understand this isn’t ideal.” Doves cooed as Hesina passed the cages for Sanjing’s birds. “But I have to do something. And yes, I know,” she said before Caiyan could interrupt. “I know I promised I wouldn’t jeopardize my rule.”
She unlatched a cage. “But let’s consider the alternative: I don’t go. Kendi’a continues threatening our borders while the trial frames more suspects. The people grow more paranoid by the day. War erupts, I enact the first conscription in centuries, and my rule is jeopardized anyway.”
Caiyan pinched the bridge of his nose. “You’re comparing plums to persimmons.”
They weren’t all that different, in Hesina’s opinion.
“Any danger can be faced from the throne,” Caiyan insisted. “But out there? Without support?”
“I have protection.” The falcon Hesina chose gave her a reproachful look as she tied a matchstick-sized tube to its leg. “And I have a backup plan.”
Caiyan eyed the falcon. “That backup plan being General Yan Sanjing.”
“Who happens to be at the borderlands.” She carried the bird to the slatted window, which she opened to the overcast day. Fog blanketed the farmland beyond the city walls. “You’re the one who always advised me to use my immediate resources.”
“The Black Lake is not an immediate location.”
Hesina sighed. There was no winning against Caiyan, who sensed his advantage and pressed it.
“Send someone on your behalf, milady. Send me, if you don’t trust anyone in the court.”
She let the falcon go and waited until it was a speck against the clouds before she faced him. “You’re right. I don’t trust anyone but you in court.”
“That’s why—”
“That’s why you must stay.” She grasped his hands, willing him to understand. The journey to and from the Black Lake could take upward of a month…far too long to leave Xia Zhong to his own devices. “Only you can keep the officials in line while I’m gone. I need you.”
And I need to protect you. Hesina remembered that winter day. That terrible crack. The black pond waters. Blood on ice. Caiyan had almost died once. If the Kendi’ans really broke the truce, she wasn’t sure she could save him again. She couldn’t lose the one brother as close to her as kin.
“I need you,” she repeated, quieter this time.
Not enough to take me, he could have retorted if he knew where to dig the knife.
But Caiyan wasn’t Sanjing. He simply sighed and bowed. “Then use me as you please, milady.”
A crowd of commoners had gathered at the base of the gong tower; they knelt when the queen and her first advisor emerged. Some reached to touch the hem of her ruqun, and Hesina couldn’t help but flinch away. These hands had killed the Silver Iris. She wanted nothing to do with them.
“A word or address?” suggested Caiyan as they proceeded through the crowd.
Words? Her brain was millet mush. Caiyan’s reservations weren’t unfounded. Negotiations might fail. Sanjing might not pull through. A thousand things could go wrong on her first journey past the city walls, to the borderlands no less.
But what queen left her people without so much as a parting?
Without anger or grief to inflate her, Hesina felt small before the crowd. “The Eleven hoped to build a kinder era,” she said, then caught herself invoking the Tenets. The taste of ashes returned to her mouth. “They gave us a peace that has lasted three centuries, a peace I go forth to protect.”
The people lapped it up. Hope opened faces. Chants parted lips.
“Dianxia! Dianxia!”
“Wan sui, wan sui, wan wan sui!”
Unease rolled over Hesina, followed by the sensation of being watched. Over the heads of the commoners, she spotted a group of court officials. Xia Zhong stood among them. Their eyes met, and his lips curled.
What do you think you can do? he seemed to ask. The pieces have been set; you can’t stop this war.
They’d see about that.
At the Eastern Gate, Lilian waited with a bundle of cloth that she stuffed into Hesina’s arms. “If you’re going to negotiate, you should do it in style.”
Hesina shook out the black silk ruqun. A coiled dragon—the Kendi’an insignia—wrapped from front to back, very fierce, very beautiful, and very…headless.
Looked like she’d attend her funeral in style too. “It’s…”
“No need to thank me,” said Lilian as Hesina touched the red embroidery spewing from the severed neck. “I’ve woven threads of silver into it as a sad excuse for armor. Still, better than nothing if they’re dumb enough to cross you.”
Now that Lilian mentioned it, Hesina noticed that each scale had been rendered with iridescent thread. The entire dragon must have taken days to stitch. Her gaze cut to Lilian’s. “You didn’t have to.”
For once, her sister’s eyes were solemn. “It’s the least I can do.”
No matter how tightly Hesina laced back her emotions, Lilian undid her. There were so many things she wanted to say, but all she managed was, “I’m sorry I’ll be missing the harvest festival.”
The sentiment came out stiff; expressions of love didn’t come any easier to Hesina than speeches to the people.
“I’m not,” chirped Lilian. “I get to eat your share of moon cakes.”
“You would have done so anyway.”
“Hey!” Lilian scowled, then poked her in the arm. “You better return in one piece. I’ll never forgive you if you leave me with the stone-head. He’s been reading so many books recently that you think he’s trying for immortal sagehood.”
Caiyan cleared his throat. “Didn’t know you still believed in children’s tales.”
“Oh yeah?” Lilian raised a brow. “When did you outgrow them for erotica—”
“Ready, milady?”
Hesina nodded, hugging Lilian before entering the tunnel that bore through the city wall. Caiyan accompanied her. His footfalls stopped short of the other side. Hesina fortified herself against another barrage of reasons
as to why she should stay, but he only said, “Be careful.”
Then he stepped back and erased the worry from his face.
The gesture moved Hesina more than any logical argument could. “I will.”
With one last breath drawn under the cool shade of the stone tunnel, she stepped out into the daylight. She swung into her saddle and surveyed her entourage.
Four guards, one scout, and Akira, the recipient of some dubious glances as he trotted his steed to her side. The others hadn’t seen him fight. They didn’t know he was helping her find the truth outside of the trial. Hesina wanted to keep him close as he investigated the gas in the vial, so that she could track his progress and perhaps share hers—and the existence of the book—once she made headway worth speaking of.
But right now, he felt a little too close. The rising sun that gilded the hills and valleys between them and Kendi’a gilded him, too, lightening his hair to wheat and plating silver over his gray eyes. It stole Hesina’s breath to see the ex-convict thoroughly transformed—before he opened his mouth, at least.
“You sure you want to give a robber a horse?”
Her head cleared. “Representative,” she corrected. “Remember that.”
Then she snapped the reins.
She had the Eleven to thank for her passable riding skills. They’d decided that no ruler, man or woman, was above learning the grit of their own lands. The journey would be rough, but she could weather it. Negotiations could fail, but she had to try.
“Jia!” she cried, leaning into the wind. The world whipped past. This time, she was the one making it fly. “Jia!”
They set a hard pace, stopping only to change horses every fifty li. Aches and pains plagued Hesina, hindering her ability to appreciate the crystal-clear basins, emerald rice paddies, and bamboo forests around them. But gems of life were sewn into every corner. When they cut through mountain passes, golden-tailed monkeys chattered on the crags overhead. When they forded streams, red-crowned cranes, rumored to be the animal counterparts of immortal sages, crossed alongside them.
With every gasp and glimpse of beauty, Hesina found it harder and harder to accept this fertile, dew-crowned land as hers. Rather, it became easier to accept it hadn’t always been hers. In ancient times, cranes had been the size of horses. Now their heads only came to her stallion’s chest. The relic emperors, believing the blood of the birds to be an ingredient in the elixir of immortality, had hunted them to near-extinction.
The land also bore scars of the past. Tombstones appeared on the roadside as they approached Tricent Gorge at the end of the week. The water levels had receded under the Eleven’s reign, but the gorge, exaggerated in myths to be a thousand li deep—hence the name Tricent—had flooded biannually in the past, drowning tens of thousands at a time. On the morning of the crossing, even the toughest of Hesina’s guards forewent breakfast. Their faces were as white as the rapids below by the time they cleared the swaying bamboo bridge.
When night saturated the sky, starting from the distant Ning peaks, the scout would ride ahead while the rest of them pitched camp. The guards would draw their shifts, and Hesina would go to Akira. He’d packed a small burner, jars filled with multicolored powders, a set of silver spoons, and the vial of golden gas. Except that it wasn’t a gas anymore. And it wasn’t gold. He had condensed the poison into an orange-toned liquid that Hesina watched him dilute with water, boil off, and dilute again. Whenever she inquired after his process, his responses ranged from “I’m not sure” to “thinking” to “burning things.”
Sometimes there was no response. Akira would merely finish whatever he was doing, take up his rod, and begin to carve.
“Monsters roam at night,” he’d say, and Hesina would stare, unsure how to take his words. But she’d grown accustomed to uncertainty around Akira, to the point she didn’t mind it. She was content to watch him work until he eventually dozed off. Then she would remove her mother’s book from her satchel.
It was infuriating, the book. It would trick her into thinking she was reading it. The characters would crawl through her pupils and chant their secret language, and the itch of knowing would fill her subconscious as if it’d been etched upon her bones. But the second her mind cleared, the knowing vanished. The characters devolved into many-legged insects again. Night after night, Hesina found herself at the edge of this precipice. And night after night, she resigned herself to three pathetic observations.
The first: Each column of text was short. The entire book seemed to be comprised of quotes rather than paragraphs.
The second: A set of three characters always appeared at the end of each quote, as if the authors all shared the same surname.
The third: The book had doubled as a travelogue. Sketches of foreign plants, landscapes, and weaponry were crammed in the margins, and drawings of Kendi’an sandstone citadels, Ning ice pagodas, and Ci porcelain-tiled mansions were stitched between the pages.
There was a fourth observation, if it counted: The book refused to be deciphered.
More than once, Hesina caught herself looking to Akira for answers. Yet she never woke him. He didn’t mutter or stir in his sleep, but the space between his brows would knot. A knot would form in Hesina’s own chest, and she’d keep an eye on him until his brow smoothed and his head settled. He was no more than a boy, really, a boy with powder-stained fingertips and hair that was always falling out of its tie, begging to be brushed back by a careful hand.
It wouldn’t be hers. That much Hesina knew. She had enough on her mind, and she had no intentions of losing it to some idyllic fantasy.
They arrived at the Black Lake on the day of the harvest festival. As Hesina and the rest tethered their spent mounts in a cypress grove between the nearest village and the banks, the scout rode out to survey the region. She returned with a report on the terrain, and Hesina took particular note of the best retreat routes in homage to Caiyan.
The scout seemed more concerned about a cypress tree. Hesina followed her to the tree in question and looked to where the woman pointed.
“It followed me.”
Yellow eyes peered out from the dark net of needles. Her brother’s falcon. The message tube was still attached to the bird’s leg, but the letter was gone, replaced by a scrap from one of Sanjing’s banners.
Hesina wanted to shake the scrap at the heavens and demand an answer in plain Yan. “Any sign of my brother or his men?”
“Not in the radius of a li.”
So Sanjing hadn’t moved yet to answer her call. He knows what he’s doing, said a little voice inside Hesina. But it was drowned out by a louder voice that said Caiyan’s right. You’re wrong to rely on him. For all she knew, her brother could have torn her letter apart and shown the shreds to his lieutenants. See this? he’d drawl. My sister only writes when she needs me.
The worst of it was that he was technically right.
Her mood darkened as dusk fell. The guards built a bonfire, and laughter and cypress smoke soon filled the air, along with stories of the Thousand-Faced Ning Spy and the Ci Whisperer of Secrets, legendary antiheroes Hesina had read about between her Tenets studies. She wanted to join in but couldn’t bring herself to. Her presence would stifle things.
Alone, she wandered back to the tarps containing their supplies. She picked up the unreadable book, tried to read it, threw it, picked it up again, tried to read it again, and threw it again. As she picked it up a third time, she noticed Akira’s rod on the ground.
That was strange. Akira never neglected his rod. Frowning, Hesina glanced back to the fire. He wasn’t with the guards. He wasn’t in any of the other tarps either. That left the lake. With the full moon as her guide, she started for the banks.
“Must we go through this again?” came a voice from behind.
Hesina spun—into Mei.
Splendid. She’d found herself some unwanted company instead of Akira. “Why are you here?”
Mei leaned against the gnarled trunk of a cypress tree. “I go
where errant queens go.” Her hood was down but her mask was up, and she wore her braid wrapped twice around her neck. “Has your arm healed?”
The question caught Hesina off guard, and she forgot to sound cross when she said, “It has.” She pushed up her sleeve and showed the scab to Mei. Then she remembered how unabashedly she’d bled over the swordswoman and figured some gratitude was in order. “Thank you for helping me that night.”
Mei’s russet gaze lingered on the scab.
Hesina dropped the sleeve, her embarrassment curdling to unease. “I didn’t happen to say anything…strange, did I?”
“No. Just the usual rhetorical questions.” Mei pushed herself off from the tree. “You should get some rest. For tomorrow.”
Tomorrow. The thought of it compressed the breath in Hesina’s chest. “Will you be coming with us?”
“Am I needed?”
Hesina toed the gravel by the tree roots. “No.”
“I’d recommend sleeping instead of wandering,” said Mei. “And on the subject of recommendations, be wary of those you trust.”
Hesina knew whom Mei was referring to; distrusting Caiyan appeared to be a prerequisite for Sanjing’s friendship. “Not you too.”
Mei pulled up her hood. “I’m suspicious of all the secretive ones. It’s a trade necessity.”
“You’re quite secretive.”
“Once again, a trade necessity.” Mei turned to go, then stopped, glancing over her shoulder. “Your brother cares, you know. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
Then she retreated into the shadows.
Your brother cares.
Like Elevens he did. Thinking about Sanjing cast another cloud over Hesina’s mood, which continued to blacken when she tried—and failed—to find Akira. That’s what she got for pardoning a convict. He’d run off. Left her alone with his stupid rod. The guards, on the other hand, couldn’t leave her alone. They didn’t actually want to bring her along to celebrate the harvest festival at the nearby village, but they, like she, had no choice. Hesina followed them, sulking the whole way. Then, just as a cramp panged through her abdomen, explaining her mood but not helping it, villagers swarmed her and she had to smile through the pain. Couldn’t they see that it was a lie?
