by Joan He
If water was the cure, Hesina would bring an ocean to him. But there were no oceans, or rivers, or streams. There weren’t even any full waterskins; it took combining three to fill one. By the time she ran to Akira with it, he had already started a fire at the pit and was reducing sticks to charcoal. Calmly, as if his hands weren’t shaking, he tipped the charcoal into the waterskin. Hesina watched, chest locked, as he drank. She waited, breath held, as he frowned at his bloodstained hanfu skirt. She blinked, pulse slowing, as Akira proceeded to use the rest of his lifesaving concoction to rinse the cloth out.
Hesina lost it. “Why did you do it?” she snapped as Akira wrung his hanfu. She snatched the cloth from his hands when he didn’t reply. “You could have died!”
Her throat stung, and she wasn’t even the one who’d eaten sand. Akira blinked. She’d startled him for a change, and he looked…young, with his eyes wide, the spread of his pupils black as ink.
Then his face closed. “Unlikely.”
She shook her head. “Who are you?”
He rose and tugged his hanfu free. “Someone queens shouldn’t get close to.”
He made for the horses, and only the pain in Hesina’s side stopped her from throwing her hands into the air. Princes. Brothers. Ex-convicts. Everyone was utterly maddening. She glared at Akira’s back when they started to ride, a detail that didn’t escape Sanjing’s attention.
“I see you’ve expanded your entourage,” said her brother as he pulled up beside her. “At least this one has a spine.”
The not-so-subtle jab at Caiyan might have gotten to Hesina if this day hadn’t already. “His name is Akira,” she said coolly, then paused. Sanjing was returning to the imperial city so that they could make a joint announcement on the cessation of Yan-Kendi’an aggressions. She wouldn’t be able to hide the trial from him there. “And he’s my representative.”
She summarized the last two months, her hands clenched around the reins. She braced herself when she finished, but Sanjing was uncharacteristically silent.
“So the people think the Kendi’ans killed our father,” he finally said.
“And sooths,” Hesina added quietly. “Because of the vanishing villages. And, well…because of your scout.”
“My scout.”
“Yes. He came to my coronation and said the soothsayers were working with the Kendi’ans.” And he hadn’t been lying. They were—against their will as slaves.
“Where is he now?” asked Sanjing.
Hesina didn’t answer.
Sanjing wheeled his stallion in front of hers. For the first time since their reunion, she saw the chips and cracks in his bone laminar. “Where is he, Sina?”
She looked away, cheeks burning. “He’s dead, Jing. I’m so sorry. We couldn’t save him.”
“All my scouts are alive and accounted for.” Her gaze snapped to her brother, but Sanjing didn’t give her a moment to think. “Six’s bones. A captured scout is a security liability. You think one would be able to ride up to you at your coronation, just like that?”
“I—”
“No, you didn’t, because you never think,” Sanjing continued, relentless. “The guards should have stopped him. It’s a red flag if they didn’t. You should have closed the investigation immediately.”
“And leave the question of who murdered Father unanswered?” What could she have possibly said to the people? I take it back! Forget everything I said about the king dying before his time!
“Who urged you to go on with it?” demanded Sanjing. “Your manservant?”
Evading the inevitable was not a strategy, and Caiyan had seen that. But Sanjing wouldn’t understand, so Hesina didn’t explain.
Her brother cursed at her silence. “You don’t listen to me, but you listen to him. I warned you from the start, but you—”
“So I made a mistake,” she snapped. “Haven’t you? Or have you forgotten about that day on the pond?”
Then, before she could see his expression, she steered her mount around and trotted ahead.
They stayed apart for the rest of the ride. Hesina filled her mind with the logistics of resituating the returning militia members and passing new salt taxes to reflect the normalization of trade. But it was like applying a thin bandage to a wound; her thoughts bled through the administrative work and returned to her brother. She didn’t know what pained her more—that they brought out the worst in each other, or that they hadn’t always.
When they stopped for the night and set up camp in a bamboo thicket at the juncture of two streams, she put aside her pride and went to Sanjing’s tent. She was two steps short of entering when her brother spoke to someone inside. “I can explain.”
“Yes,” came a voice that sounded like Mei’s. “I’m sure you can. But that doesn’t change what you did. You loosed that arrow.”
“What did you want me to do? Let my people capture her? Have her brought back to the palace, where she would have died by a thousand cuts?”
“She hadn’t flamed yet.”
“She didn’t need to. She was dead the moment she moved the sand. You haven’t been on the front, Mei. You haven’t seen what my men and women have seen. They can spot sooth work from a li away now.”
Silence.
Mei broke it. “I think I understand why you ordered me to stay behind. You said it was for your sister. I believed you. But it was also to keep me from seeing this side of you.”
“What? No,” Sanjing said earnestly—too earnestly, like that time he denied filling Caiyan’s pillow log with dead tadpoles. “Mei—”
The flaps parted without warning, and Mei flitted by like a wraith.
Blinking, Hesina cleared her head. She wasn’t here to eavesdrop. She pushed through the flaps and almost ran into Sanjing, who looked to be in midpursuit but froze at the sight of her, deliberately turning away as she approached.
Her wound, surprisingly shallow thanks to Lilian’s gown, still throbbed under the bandage when she reached for his shoulder. “Jing…”
The harder her brother tried to hide his emotions, the more they bristled. She could practically feel the spines of his confusion and guilt. She withdrew her hand. “This is about the sooth, isn’t it?”
“So what if it is?”
“I…”
What did she want to say?
The truth. Tell him the truth.
But what was the truth?
Recently, it was the thing she found hardest to admit. “I would have done the same.” She would have killed the girl to save him too.
“I know,” said Sanjing, and Hesina relaxed. Then he faced her, black eyes burning. “You’re like all the others.”
“The…others?”
“What are you here for?”
Hesina couldn’t remember. She did remember that she’d come grounded with intent, with justification and reason and solution, all blown away as they coasted toward the same old ruts. “I—I just wanted to say thank you. For coming. For helping.” Her throat went tender. “I’m glad we could work together.”
“Of course. Issue the summons anytime you need a hand in killing some helpless slaves, and I’ll drop everything and come running like I did today.”
His words dashed over her like cold water. When he brushed past, she couldn’t grab him or order him to stay. Her lips parted with the tent flaps, and the air leaked out of her after he left.
This was what they did, Hesina reminded herself, too weary for anger. They broke themselves. They took the shards and drove them up the chinks of each other’s armor.
She stayed in the tent for a little longer, unready to face the world. When she finally did emerge, the moon was high and round, just as it had been yesterday. But everything else had changed. No legends circulated around the bonfire tonight. Sanjing’s soldiers had joined Hesina’s guards, whispering about sooths who aged young children to death, sooths who, with a single blink, turned breathing livestock into steaming meat.
“But what about the women?” venture
d Hesina’s scout, her face lit by the flames. “What happens to them during their yuejin?”
“They burn,” said a clean-shaven soldier, yelping as his female comrade elbow-locked his neck and knuckled his head.
“Jun, you idiot,” sighed the girl, before looking to the scout. “Don’t listen to him. The monthly cloths you and I use? Sooths stuff theirs inside so the blood can’t evaporate. But that’s where our similarities end. Want to know what mothers do to their newborns?”
“What?”
The girl released the clean-shaven soldier. Leaned toward the fire. “They blind them,” she whispered. “With the same bloody knife used to cut the umbilical. Makes the Sight stronger—”
Stomach clenched, Hesina escaped to the banks, where the autumn breeze drowned out the bonfire stories but also combed goose bumps over her arms. As she rubbed them away, tempering her nausea, the shadows beside her rippled with a familiar presence.
She let out a heavy breath. “Don’t be angry at him.”
“Why? You are.”
No, Hesina should have said, of course not. A queen had better people to be angry at—hotheaded Crown Princes and two-faced Ministers of Rites, for example.
“Anger is a form of confidence,” Mei said when Hesina didn’t reply. “A hope that the ones we admire will change for the better.”
But why be angry at all? No one else was upset at Sanjing. They celebrated the death of a sooth.
“Something wrong?” asked Mei.
“Nothing.” But a strand of woodsmoke and laughter strayed their way, and Hesina shivered.
Mei watched her carefully. “Do you believe what they say?”
“I’m not sure.” Could she believe in anything else when she knew nothing? “Do you?” asked Hesina.
“I believe sooths are human. There are the good, the bad, and all the ones in between.”
It was obvious, in retrospect. “You’re a sympathizer.”
“I’m not the only one.”
Mei didn’t say Hesina’s name. She didn’t need to. Her words connected with their target even before her gaze hit Hesina’s arm, the one she’d cut in front of the mob.
Irrational relief filled Hesina. She wasn’t alone. Someone finally knew the princess who’d committed treason and been foolish enough to let it change her.
She couldn’t reveal that, of course. She’d made a promise to Caiyan, and now she kept it by stepping back. “Don’t be so sure,” she told Mei.
She retreated to her tent. Within its dark privacy, she pushed up her ruqun sleeve. The cut she’d given herself had been shallow and clean. It should have healed without a scar. But no queen had time to apply tiger balm twice a day, and a bumpy seam of new skin gleamed under the lantern light.
Hesina traced it, recalling that night. The blood. The shouts. The fire. The ash.
She slid the sleeve back down.
The Crown Prince had tried to kill her for what she’d learned today. Would he have done the same had her father also possessed forbidden knowledge? Could it be that the Kendi’ans really were behind the king’s death? No outsiders had been in the palace that late summer day, but the murderer didn’t have to be an outsider. Xia Zhong couldn’t be the only one in secret correspondence with the Kendi’ans.
Speculating out in the hinterlands of Yan was no use. Hesina had to get back to the imperial city.
They’d ridden out at a hard pace; they rode back harder, pushing the limits of what their mounts and bodies could take. Soon, the last stretch of land disappeared. The rolling hills flattened. When the imperial city walls teethed on the horizon, Hesina’s doubts broke the surface too. No one knew how the Eleven had breached the massive structures of pounded earth and stone. Scholars had hypothesized everything from gliding over to tunneling under, but was the Crown
Prince right about the Eleven using the magic of sooths? Hesina wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure of a lot of things anymore. Knowledge is truth, her father had said, yet all knowledge had done was unveil a world of lies.
News of their return preceded it, and throngs of people paved the limestone boulevard wending to the Eastern Gate to welcome them back. They chanted the name of a queen who’d kept her promise to avoid war and secure salt. But it was also the name of a girl who’d broken her promise to protect all, regardless of blood.
Again, Hesina tasted ash. The flavor fermented as they rode into the eastern tunnel, becoming more sour than bitter, more dread than regret. Dread of what, Hesina didn’t know. That happened to be the nature of dread.
No one ever knew what they dreaded until it came to pass.
The moment they emerged from the tunnel, city guards poured into the gateway and surrounded Hesina and her entourage.
“Seize the suspect!” shouted the director of the Investigation Bureau, who stood behind the regiment. “Protect your queen at all costs!”
Hesina’s stallion startled. For a dangerous moment, she slipped in her saddle. Then she jerked the reins tight, wrangling back control. “What is the meaning of this?”
The director bowed. “A grievous oversight on the Bureau’s part. We couldn’t find the next suspect when we went to apprehend her. We scoured the city, thinking she’d gone into hiding. Little did we know…”
Two guards passed by Hesina and her mount, dragging someone between them. They kicked the person to her knees and yanked her head back by the hair.
By the braid.
The russet of Mei’s irises became the red of Hesina’s shock, then rage, as the director gazed down at the swordswoman and sniffed. “…the vixen was with you all along.”
SIXTEEN
THE PERSON PURCHASING RIGHTS SETS A PRICE OTHERS CANNOT MATCH.
ONE OF THE ELEVEN ON CORRUPTION
WEED IT BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE.
TWO OF THE ELEVEN ON CORRUPTION
It was the director who arrested Mei, his men who dragged her away.
But it wasn’t the Investigation Bureau that Hesina stormed.
Ten sets of heads turned as she burst into Xia Zhong’s residence. She stared at the young courtiers, kneeling on thin reed mats, brushes poised over note-taking paper. They stared at her, their faces slack with awe and shock—and terror, too, when she started laughing.
Marvelous. To think that Xia Zhong was grooming the young officials of her court, lecturing them on the values of—Hesina glanced at one courtier’s notes—honesty and humility.
“Class dismissed,” said Xia Zhong, clutching shut the scroll in his hands.
Books went into bags. Brushes slid into oxhide wraps. The courtiers rose, bowing at Hesina and murmuring dianxia as they passed. The doors had barely shut behind the last one when she spun on Xia Zhong, who had lowered himself to his hands and knees and was rolling up each mat.
“Release her.” Hesina loomed over him as he continued his busywork. “We both know she isn’t the murderer.”
“Of course she isn’t.” Xia Zhong stacked one rolled mat atop two others. Hesina wanted nothing more than to kick them apart. “She wouldn’t have stayed around if she were, unless it was to kill you, which means she would have attempted on the road.”
“You—”
“You made your move. An elaborate one, at that, traveling a thousand and eight hundred li just to stop a war. Now I make mine.” With a groan, the minister rose, knees popping, and shuffled to the mats on the other side of the room. “I thought you knew the rules of the game, my dear.”
His not-quite-black robes bunched as he squatted again, reminding Hesina of a roosting pigeon. A pigeon, she realized with a burst of fresh fury, who pecked at her as if she were millet on the ground.
“It doesn’t matter who you frame. You won’t get your war.”
“What’s to stop me from trying? Do you propose that I sit idly by and accept ‘fate’?” Xia Zhong chuckled, shaking his head. “You sound like a sooth.”
Ice speared up Hesina’s spine, but the minister had already moved on to gather all the mats. She followed h
im warily to the partition of gridded shelves dividing his inner chambers from outer.
“Why?” she demanded as he stuffed the mats into the grid holes. “What are you doing all of this for?”
“You know why, my dear. The letters are still in your possession, if you need to refresh your memory.”
Hesina could accept sooths drawing water out of thin air, but she couldn’t, no matter how she tried, stomach the idea of Xia Zhong going to such lengths to increase his personal wealth. It had to be something more, something to explain the fire in his eyes.
His hand went to the beads around his neck, an accessory Hesina had found monk-like before. Now that she was close enough to count the liver spots on his drooping face, and his head wasn’t bowed in obeisance, she saw that the beads were actually onyx, polished to a wood-like matte.
“Have you ever heard of the Xia family, my queen?”
“Which?” There were only a hundred or so surnames in the Yan language, and sharing one didn’t necessarily mean sharing blood.
Somehow, her question seemed to be enough of an answer for Xia Zhong. He dropped the beads. “The Eleven destroyed more than just the sooths. They tore apart the fabric of society.”
He paced to the other side of the partition, the grid coming between them. “The Xia family used to be one of the greatest patrons of the arts and culture. They sponsored academies across the kingdom, including a minority that instructed the sooths.
“They brought us down by affiliation, those ingrates. Now, the only names the people worship are those of eleven thieves.” His gaze pinned her through a hole in the grid. “I will regain what we lost, ingot by ingot, right under the nose of this dynasty.”
Unasked for empathy stole away Hesina’s words. A lost legacy wasn’t so different from an untold truth. She identified with the weary anger in the minister’s watery eyes, the mirthless mirth.
She would never admit that, of course, and when Xia Zhong went on to say, “Yet, you and I, we’re the same,” she found her voice again.
“We’re not.”
