Descendant of the Crane

by Joan He

  “The world denies us the things we desire. We go to great lengths to secure them. You blackmail me with letters; I arrange a little tragedy at your coronation. You ride to Kendi’a; I—”

  “The scout at my coronation was your doing?”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t realize sooner, my dear.”

  People had alarming amounts of faith in her ability to notice every tiny detail while running a kingdom.

  “You are many things,” Hesina spat, empathy evaporating. “But I didn’t think ‘murderer’ would be one.”

  “He was a leper who knew his time in this world was nearing its end. I gave him enough gold so that his family would be provided for after his death. It was a transaction, much like ours.”

  A transaction. The words jarred purpose back into Hesina. She hadn’t come for Xia Zhong’s tragic backstory. She’d come for Mei.

  “Release the suspect, and I’ll give you whatever riches you desire.”

  Xia Zhong went to his kang and sat. “I can’t release her,” he said as he spread out rolls of parchment. “It would interrupt the interrogation.”

  Interrogation?

  “I can grant you visiting privileges, seeing that the Investigation Bureau has suspended them.”

  Interrogation. Torture. Imprisonment. None of this had happened to Consort Fei. Hesina’s mouth opened, then closed. What could she do? Accuse him of being unfair? The game they played wasn’t fair.

  Visiting privileges, Xia Zhong had offered.

  It was better than nothing, and nothing was all Hesina had.

  “Write the document,” she ordered.

  The minister already was. “What would you like to trade?” he said as he stamped it with his seal and held it up to dry.

  Too late, Hesina realized she had nothing on her. Nothing but her travel-worn ruqun and her imperial seal, the dusty slippers on her feet and the hair on her head.

  And the pins in her hair. Most were small, whittled from whalebones imported from the Aoshi archipelago, hardly worth a silver tael combined. Knowing what she knew now about Xia Zhong, they wouldn’t satisfy him.

  Only one pin would.

  She hadn’t removed the crane pin since her coronation. Slipping it out now felt like relinquishing another piece of her father. Recognition lit in Xia Zhong’s eyes, and Hesina’s throat squeezed as his fingers pinched the jade length. She forced hers to let go.

  The minister pocketed the pin and lifted the document. “Not your father’s daughter after all,” he said as she, in exchange, pocketed the visiting privileges.

  Hesina froze.

  Anger was a form of confidence, Mei had said, but her anger toward Xia Zhong was fire and acid. It corroded rationale, reducing her to pulse and impulse. She was a reaching arm. A seizing hand.

  She wrenched the minister’s beads into a noose around his neck. “You’re wrong.”

  He had the audacity to laugh. But then she gathered beads into her clutch, and the laughter stopped. His face reddened. Purpled. Spittle frothed at his mouth, and Hesina knew she was close. To cutting off his air. To appointing a new Minister of Rites.

  All it’d take was one more bead.

  It shouldn’t have been a decision. She’d come to bargain, not murder. But there was a moment of teetering, of peering into an abyss that called to her, before she pulled herself back and yanked.

  Xia Zhong fell to his knees, gasping as beads bounced around him.

  Hesina’s hands rose to her own throat. Flesh and blood. That was all they were, even Xia Zhong. Had she really considered ending him?

  No, she was just trying to scare him.

  She was sending a message.

  She was asserting her power.

  Her hands twitched as she told herself these lies.

  “There is only one thing we have in common, Minister Xia.” Clenching her hands, Hesina turned for the threshold. “We’re not who we think we are.”

  With a sweep of brocade, she crossed into winter’s chill.

  If she regretted choking Xia Zhong, she didn’t the moment she saw Mei. The swordswoman lay unmoving in the corner of the cell, her fingers swollen to the size of baby daikon radishes. Scarlet and plum banded around the knuckles, hallmarks of the bone-cruncher. It was the only legal interrogation instrument of the new era, able to inflict excruciating pain without breaking skin.

  Caiyan went straight to Mei’s side, setting his lantern onto the hay-scattered prison cell floor and unstacking his medicine box. Lilian joined him, removing instruments from the trays.

  “Get away from her,” Sanjing growled, advancing.

  Akira checked the general with his rod at the same time Lilian said, “Touch one hair of his, and I’ll castrate you myself.”

  Sanjing’s fury jolted Hesina out of her own, and she seized her brother by the arms. “Control yourself, Jing.”

  “Control myself?” Sanjing barked a laugh. “You bring him and expect me to control myself?”

  “You asked for Caiyan.”

  “I asked for anyone but the Imperial Doctress. I guess I should have known that you’d run for your manservant.”

  “He knows what he’s doing.”

  “In your eyes, he knows everything under the sky. What’s the worst injury he’s seen?” snarled Sanjing. “A paper cut? How many broken bones has he set?”

  “More than you.” Lilian handed off a roll of gauze to Caiyan and rose, bringing herself chest to chest with Sanjing. “And if you don’t shut up, he’ll have to set yours too.”

  A muscle ticked in Sanjing’s jaw. Hesina tried to pull Lilian back, but Akira took Hesina’s arm first, shaking his head.

  Then Caiyan finally spoke. “She’s going to be all right,” he said, his hands deft at work, applying poultices, binding linen, aligning splints. Sanjing was right in thinking that most courtiers wouldn’t know the medicinal arts, but most courtiers also hadn’t grown up in the slums, where brawls led to broken bones, and broken bones led to infection and death. Caiyan tied off the last splint, and with a twang of nostalgia, Hesina recalled the time he had done the same for an injured sparrow in the imperial orchards. They’d been twelve and ten, respectively, but the gap between them was one bigger than age.

  Yet unlike Sanjing, Caiyan had done his best to bridge their differences. “The bones will heal in four to six weeks,” he said as he packed away his supplies. “She’s out from the pain right now but will come around in an hour or two.”

  “If she doesn’t—” started Sanjing.

  “Then you know where to find me.” Caiyan rose, tucking the chest under his arm. “Lilian, step away from the general.”

  “But—”

  “Please.”

  With one last glare, Lilian obliged.

  Sanjing didn’t move. Not immediately. His black eyes fixed on Caiyan, and for an absurd second, Hesina thought he might express a word of thanks.

  Instead he said, “My sister might not blame you, but I do.”

  “Jing.”

  “While she was away, you were here,” continued her brother, unremitting. “You were supposed to stand sentry over this palace in her place. You failed her.”

  “Jing, that is enough.”

  Sanjing held Caiyan’s gaze a heartbeat longer. Then he went to Mei’s side, sinking to a crouch beside her. With a knuckle, he cleared her forehead of sweat-dampened hair.

  As much as Hesina wanted to stay angry, she couldn’t. Her composure came untethered, and her voice splintered when she said, “Leave us for a moment.”

  Quietly, Caiyan bowed and filed out. Akira followed, draping his cloak over her shoulders.

  Lilian left last, giving Hesina a squeeze of the hand.

  The doors shut, and Hesina swayed. But she didn’t deserve to buckle. She had to bear her own weight, be there for Sanjing when he rose and faced her.

  “Prove her innocent.”

  He spoke as if she were a soldier under his command, not a sister, not a queen.

  At least sh
e was still someone to him. “We will. But understand this: Xia Zhong wouldn’t frame her without reason. Akira will need to know everything you can provide on Mei’s background.”

  “You trust him completely?”

  Hesina hesitated. Did she? She didn’t know his past. Didn’t know what crimes he’d committed. She wouldn’t be awfully surprised if she didn’t even know his real name. But he’d fought for her, taken poison for her. He’d seen her at her cowardly worst and believed in her all the same.

  “I do,” she said. “Will you meet with him?”

  Sanjing nodded, but the wariness didn’t melt from his face. “Don’t let them hurt her,” he said as they left the cell, and Hesina understood very well that his distrust wasn’t just meant for the dungeon guards they passed. She’d failed to foresee Xia Zhong’s counterattack. She’d lost this match.

  She wouldn’t lose the next.

  Hesina woke, neck stiff, cheek on an edict, and immediately jerked upright. Then she sagged even though the throne wasn’t made for sagging and rubbed a hand over her face.

  She’d come to the throne hall after visiting Mei, determined to defeat the paperwork that had accumulated in her absence. The stacks on the ivory kang were particularly imposing with the civil service examinations nearly upon them. Erected by the Eleven to replace nepotism, and hosted in the imperial city, the exams were the reason why Caiyan, with no noble blood to his name, was a court official at all. He’d already volunteered to oversee them—from the appointment of registration officers in provinces as far as Anmu to the regulation of roads as the returning militia overlapped with traveling hopefuls.

  But each action required ten edicts, which—considering how she’d dozed off—induced sleep more efficiently than medicinal candles. Now a migraine pounded behind her eyes as she stared at the edict she’d used for a pillow. The words were smudged, but the fact that there were words at all, when she didn’t remember writing them, had Hesina frowning and leaning in.

  The edict was filled out. The necessary revisions and signature—her signature, in her hand—were in place. So was the edict beneath it. So were all the others. The mountain of paperwork was still a mountain, but they required only the stamp of her insignia.

  Had she signed them in her sleep? If so, that was a useful talent to have as a queen.

  But on closer inspection, Hesina realized the handwriting wasn’t hers; it was better. It had her weight, her style, but lacked all the little imperfections that drove her calligraphy tutors mad. This was especially apparent in the three characters of her name.

  You never form your “si” correctly, sounded Caiyan’s voice in her head. The tail of the third stroke doesn’t quite wrap around the first.

  As children, he would guide her hand through the strokes. Now she pulled out a fresh piece of paper, lifted her brush, and wrote her name. She stared at it, side by side with one of Caiyan’s renditions, and crumpled up hers.

  He was better at this than she’d ever be.

  Thoroughly defeated, Hesina left the throne hall for her chambers, where she let Ming’er help her out of her wrinkled ruqun and run a bath she arguably didn’t have time for. To hell with ruling. Why even try? But when Ming’er removed the pins from her hair, Hesina remembered everything she’d already sacrificed, and when she looked into the mirror, she saw her mother’s face.

  You can bring this kingdom to its knees, for all I care.

  Gooseflesh tickled her skin. “Leave me.”

  “But the bath—”

  “Leave.” Hesina closed her eyes, not wanting to see Ming’er’s expression, and reopened them when all the maids had swept out.

  Her chambers were deathly quiet as she rose from the vanity and went to her desk. She removed the bundle from her satchel and peeled back the crude silk, corner by corner, until the book lay revealed at the center.

  Again, Hesina traced the three characters on the cover with a forefinger. Again, she swept a hand over the crinkled first page, as if she could dust away the barrier between the words and her mind. She needed answers more than ever, but the book didn’t care.

  “I’m lost,” she admitted to the silence. No matter where she turned, she couldn’t find a way out.

  Lost and trapped, like the time she’d made a wrong turn and found herself in a secret passageway longer and wider than any of the others she had known. It was her father who found her hours later, who brought her back to his rooms, brewed a pot of chrysanthemum tea, and lit every single candle. He rocked away her fears. He taught her how to never lose her way again.

  How do you learn one passageway? You don’t start by looking at the differences. You look for the similarities, the patterns that link the new to the old. Now, how do you learn all the passageways of the world?

  Memorize them?

  Even Caiyan can’t do that. No, you breathe, and follow the way.

  What way?

  The way of the breath. The way of things we know, but do not notice. Instinct, you could call it. The most basic of truths. So breathe. And again. And again, until you forget you are deliberately breathing. Search until you forget you are deliberately searching.

  From the start, she’d been fighting against the book. Now she surrendered. Just as the pitch-black of a passageway would help her pick up on a change in the cut of stones, or a whistle of air signaling an exit nearby, the utter darkness of unknowing opened her mind to the words—not their meanings, but their shapes, the rhythm of their march up her skull, the clicking of their secret language. She ingested one unreadable character at a time, then faster, until they filled her like cicadas in a jar, scrambling over one another, fighting to be heard.

  Breathe, her father reminded. She’d lost him, lost her most treasured possession from him, but his voice lived on in her ear. Breathe.

  And again.

  And again.

  One insect clicked louder than the others. It was a thing of many legs, but its core was comprised of three downward strokes sitting atop two jagged, overlapping lines.

  Look for the similarities.

  It could have been three downward strokes atop the character for mountain.

  It could have been the Yan word for truth.

  Every muscle in Hesina’s body stilled. How had she not seen? And how could she have forgotten? When the Eleven burned the relic books and opened schools to commoners and women, they hadn’t invented a new language. They’d merely pruned the complex version, removing extraneous strokes, sometimes by the dozen, condensing core radicals. But roots of the new language extended back to the old.

  To learn, her mind had needed to unlearn. Different associations now chimed, brought together by that missing breeze.

  Slowly, Hesina flipped the book back to the first page. Swept her hand over the creases, and lifted it away to the column of words beneath.

  Some were too far removed from the simplified characters for her to read. But others she could guess:

  WHAT IS TRUTH? SEEK IT. WRITE IT. GOOD KINGS PAY TO HEAR IT. BUT IN TRYING TIMES, TRUTH IS THE FIRST THING WE .

  —ONE OF THE ELEVEN ON TRUTH

  She shut the cover. Traced over the three characters running vertically on the right-hand side. Two she could read. As for the one she couldn’t…the longer she stared at it, the more it looked like what it represented. Short, vertical strokes nestled within a box of closed strokes.

  Quotes on a page.

  Adages in a tome.

  Tenets.

  TENETS OF ELEVEN

  Hesina kept her finger on the cover, convinced that in the next moment, the next breath, the characters would turn to insects again, and this whole revelation would be some hallucination born out of frustration. But it stayed solid under her fingertip, this book that’d shaped their laws, their customs, their minds and hearts and souls. The original Tenets. A relic, lost—until now.

  SEVENTEEN

  INSTINCT IS THE MOST BASIC OF TRUTHS.

  ONE OF THE ELEVEN ON TRUTH

  IT’S AL
SO DAMN STUPID AT TIMES.

  TWO OF THE ELEVEN ON TRUTH

  Book in hand, Hesina plunged into the secret corridor connecting her study to Akira’s. The shadows accepted her as if she were one of their own. But she wasn’t, not like Mei. The swordswoman had worn darkness as a cloak, though it hadn’t been enough to protect her in the end.

  Hesina hadn’t been enough.

  But now she had answers. She had hope. She tore past the lacquered panels, steps never surer. She picked up speed until not even the shadows could cling to her, pushing through the panel at the corridor’s end without pausing for breath.

  “Akira?” She cleared the linen tapestry with an arm as she entered. “Akira, are you—”

  She stopped in her tracks.

  The burner in the center of the floor was still going. It belched out smoke that clouded against the beamed ceiling while Akira sat in the corner, unmoving.

  The book in Hesina’s hand hit the ground.

  She rushed to his side. Was he sleeping? In this smoke? Elevens, was he dying? Was it the poison? Had his charcoal-water concoction been just that—charcoal and water?

  “Akira.” She clutched him by the shoulders, giving him a hard shake. “Wake up. Akira.”

  His eyes flashed open.

  The breath thudded out of Hesina as she slammed into the wall. The rod bisected her throat. Light and dark blotched her vision. Ringing filled her ears. Smoke clogged the rest of her senses, dulling the pain, the shock.

  Akira pressed the rod closer. The fire backlit his face in washes of red and umber. His hair was down, out of its tie, brown bangs screened over gray eyes devoid of recognition.

  This wasn’t Akira. This was somebody else. A stranger. A killer. A scream rose in Hesina’s chest, but her throat clamped down. No. She couldn’t. She couldn’t bring the guards running unless she wanted to lose her representative.

  “Akira…it’s…me…”

  Somehow, someway, she got a hand between the rod and her throat. As she strained, something twitched in Akira’s expression. The death-like stillness to his face cracked, and the pieces scattered like mah-jongg tiles.

  The rod clattered as it fell.