by Joan He
Her father’s tomb was one ring away. The gravediggers waiting by it helped Hesina and Akira pour boiling water over the frozen ground, melting it to sludge. Shovels soon rasped in and out of the earth. The sound scraped Hesina’s insides raw. It went on for what felt like hours before the diggers struck the coffin. They climbed out of the pit, and Hesina handed each a small pouch of banliang. She waited until they were gone before nodding at Akira.
The real work began when he jumped into the pit and bore a hole into the coffin’s side. He hammered in a metal spout, then inserted a ceramic pipe that fed into a vial he had depressurized by burning out the air. Before Hesina knew it, he was climbing back out, gas collected.
“Got it.”
Perfect, she should have said, then gotten them out of this place.
Instead, Hesina wandered over to the still-steaming pit. Here lay her father, or what remained of him. The least she could do now was look at his final resting place with fearless eyes. She leaned over, straining to see the coffin.
“The edge—” Akira started to say.
—was unstable. The sopping earth fell out from under her, and Hesina tumbled down in a flurry of cloak and skirts, her fall broken by something hard.
Seconds passed as she lay winded. Then she scrambled upright, rolling off the coffin. She thought she heard Akira’s voice, but the world above was muffled, the moon and stars distant. Down here, the gleam of her father’s lacquer coffin was her only source of light.
Queasily, Hesina crouched at the coffin’s side. The zitan was carved into a simple log shape. Kings in this era no longer had mausoleums built in their names, or ordered their concubines to follow them into the tomb and play the pipa until they suffocated.
“Are you hurt?” asked Akira, landing beside her.
She shook her head, her eyes pinned on the hole that Akira had made in the zitan. It was no wider than her little finger, but the darkness beyond appeared to contain a universe.
Vertigo washed over Hesina. She forced her attention down from the hole to something beneath it.
A rim of silver, half-buried in loam.
She brushed away the dirt—and jerked her hand away as if she’d been bitten. Her breath came fast. “Akira. Look.”
Moonlight embossed an etched vine and trumpet-blossom motif. Swirl for swirl, line for line, the design was the same as what graced her mother’s wedding lock, like one in a set. One in a pair.
The realization—that this was the other wedding lock, given by her mother to her father, protecting the secrets of a coffin instead of a chest—rocked Hesina onto her heels. She glanced to Akira and found him studying her, as if the lock was no surprise.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know,” Akira said quietly.
But Hesina knew.
It was because she had to make this choice on her own.
Her heartbeat was a gallop, thudding in her ears. Her fingers shook so badly that she spun past the 0 on the first try.
0.
Ba-dum.
0.
Ba-dum.
0.
Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.
The lock dropped into the mud.
Akira moved to the foot of the coffin. Hesina placed her hands on the head. She wasn’t ready to do this. She never would be.
But then she envisioned Lilian’s candlelit face again, and her jaw set. She couldn’t ignore the significance of the matching lock. She had opened her mother’s chest.
She could open her father’s coffin.
Together, on the silent count of three, they lifted, revealing her father’s legs, torso, neck, face.
His face.
Hesina’s thoughts took off like startled birds. Her extremities numbed, and Akira saved the coffin lid from crashing down. He heaved it to the side as she stammered, “This…this isn’t right.” She shook her head, mouth dry, gaze unfocused. “This can’t be.”
Then her gaze focused, but not on her father. He wasn’t there. In his place was a young man wearing his silk hanfu, everything about him perfectly preserved.
This is a dream.
Hesina pinched herself. The boy remained.
Grave robbers.
But he wearing her father’s clothes, her father’s mandalas, and worst of all…
Akira caught her shoulders as Hesina stumbled back.
…her father’s face.
The angles were softer. The hollows weren’t quite so prominent. But there was no mistaking it; the boy wore a younger version of her father’s face.
Hesina quivered in Akira’s hold. “Tell me we’re seeing the same thing.”
“We are.”
She whirled to face him. “You suspected something all along, didn’t you?”
His grip around her shoulders loosened.
“When?”
For a second Akira seemed on the verge of letting go. Hesina was glad when he didn’t; he held her wits in his hands.
“When I realized the poison was actually a mixture of fifty,” he finally said. “Some come from vents deep in the Baolin Sea. Others…I’ve never encountered, only read about their properties in theory books. The same goes for this particular mixture. It’s something of a legend. Intended to kill a legend.”
“To kill a legend? What legend?”
Akira took a measured breath. “To kill immortals.”
Immortals…immortals? As in the immortal sages? If so, Hesina knew all about immortals. Children’s tales. Tutors’ slogans. Giant cranes and moons and suns that consumed daughters. Her brain prattled off useless information, guttering to a stop when Akira spoke again.
“I’d assume…” He trailed off. His eyes flicked down to where Hesina had wound both hands into the front of his cloak. She didn’t let go. She didn’t care how it looked as she clung to him, her breath clouding with his in the narrow space between them.
“Tell me.” She meant it as an order. She spoke it as a plea.
Akira drew another breath, no longer so measured. The space between them suddenly seemed like a ravine. She stood on one end and he on the other, his voice so very far away.
“I’d assume the poison would still destroy things, even if it failed to kill. If it broke the illusion work wrought by sooths, it would explain his current appearance. He must have stopped aging the moment he became immortal. The face we’re seeing now must be his true face…”
If it failed to kill…became immortal…true face…
Failed to kill.
Failed to kill.
Hesina released Akira.
She knelt by the coffin’s side, the ground seeping damp past her skirts, and pressed her cheek over her father’s chest.
There was a heartbeat in her temples, a heartbeat in her throat. But the heartbeat that filled her ear was not her own.
Ba-dum.
Ba-dum.
Ba-dum.
NINETEEN
WHEN WE MAKE UP STORIES ABOUT THE THINGS WE CAN’T SEE OR GRASP, WE ARE SIMPLY LYING TO OURSELVES.
ONE OF THE ELEVEN ON SUPERSTITION
IT’S GOOD ENTERTAINMENT, BUT NEVER EDUCATION.
TWO OF THE ELEVEN ON SUPERSTITION
“Father?”
A dragonfly lands on his nose, but he doesn’t twitch. Seconds later, a magpie swoops by, and white droppings splatter dangerously close to his head.
She laughs and wades through the flowers. “Even the birds are telling you to wake up.”
It’s late summer. The irises are in full bloom. Their bladed foliage grabs onto the layered skirt of her ruqun. She tugs free and comes to loom over him, folding her arms. “Now you’re just pretending.”
Her father’s very good at pretending. They’ve spent hours rummaging through his costume chest, donning different kinds of garb. She’s watched him transform into an artisan, a merchant, a courier right before her eyes. He may be a king, but he can play the other roles too.
With a dramatic sigh, she uncrosses her arms and plucks an iris. “W
ake up and smell the flowers.”
She tickles him under the nose. She prods his cheek with the end of the long stem. He continues to sleep. The sun continues to shine. It beats down on her back. Reflects off the emerald koi pond nearby. Everything is a bright, prismatic haze.
“Father?”
Wake up.
Please, wake up.
They tried to wake him.
Akira tried, that was, poking and prodding at a series of vital energy points on the body. Hesina sat frozen. Someone had callously rearranged her insides and mixed everything up. Half of her would have betrayed the world to hear her father’s voice again; half couldn’t accept this boy, who looked no older than herself, as a father of any kind.
Which half was better, and which was worse? Hesina didn’t know. Past became present as they failed to wake her father, but unlike before, she experienced no grief. No denial. How could she deny something already denied by the laws of nature? If anything, she felt anger.
She shouldn’t have had to relive this nightmare.
Blood rushed to Hesina’s head as she staggered to her feet. Her father wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t alive either. He couldn’t comfort her. Couldn’t explain why his heart was beating months after it’d stopped. Nothing had changed; it was all up to her.
Mechanically, Hesina returned to the coffin side. Examine the body, Hesina, she ordered herself. So she did. She checked her father’s clothes, her motions rough and jerky. A thought slithered into her mind, and she pushed apart the silks covering his abdomen.
The incision was gone. The stitches were still there, but his skin was smooth and even in tone. As if the dissection had never happened.
Darkness fuzzed like mold over Hesina’s vision. A face that hadn’t aged. A body that hadn’t decomposed. A scar that had healed without a trace.
Was there a difference between immortal and abomination?
Stand, Hesina, she ordered herself. So she did. Her knees wobbled as she pushed to her feet. Akira followed seconds later.
Speak, Hesina.
“Is—” Her voice came out like a wisp of smoke; she tried again. “Is there an antidote?”
Akira shook his head. “The poison shouldn’t even exist outside of arcane theory.”
Yet here it was, in existence. “But there’s an antidote in theory?”
“In theoretical theory.”
Her head swam. Theoretical theory. It was the kind of ridiculousness that the imperial alchemists had entertained in their search for the elixir of immortality. Then it struck her like a knife to the chest—the elixir of immortality. To the relic emperors, immortality was neither a myth nor a means of tricking children into studiousness. They’d believed it was real, and it could be attained with the right combination of ingredients.
But none of the emperors’ alchemists had derived it. And the Eleven had dissolved the guild, deploring the epic waste of resources. That had been three centuries ago—though what did three centuries mean to an immortal? How long, exactly, had her father been alive? Did he have other children? Was she immortal too?
The questions existed in a swamp: venturing into one meant losing herself to the downward suction of all the others. The night around Hesina warped as she dragged her gaze to the body. Without an antidote, she didn’t know how, or when, her father would ever speak again. It could be years. It could be never.
Consider the logistics, Hesina, she reminded herself as her hands, arms, shoulders shook. Logistics.
She couldn’t bring the body back to the palace and risk discovery. She had to keep it in a place no one would think to look: here.
She took up her end of the coffin lid. Akira took up the other. They lifted. They lowered. With Akira’s help, Hesina clambered out of the pit, seized one of the discarded shovels, and began reburying the coffin.
Thud went the first shovelful of dirt onto the zitan lid. The loamy scent of it filled Hesina’s mouth, packing onto everything she’d tamped down: tears and bile. Grief and revulsion.
Thud.
Her father was immortal.
Thud.
The face she’d known all her life was a lie, aged forward by a sooth.
Thud.
How? Thud. How?
Thud. Thud. Thud.
It took them an hour to refill all the dirt. By the end, Hesina’s hands were an abraded mess. Yet she barely registered the pain as they returned to the palanquin and headed back toward the palace. Broken skin could heal. Maybe even hearts. Not trust.
Stay calm, Hesina. But the mental trick had lost its effect. As they reached the terraces, Hesina’s stomach surged like a fist, punching her lungs. She grabbed for the palanquin’s side.
“Go on without me,” she gasped to Akira. Then she ordered the bearers to set her down.
She staggered out, gulping air. They’d only climbed halfway up the terraces, but it was enough for her to see the city sprawl below: the courtyard compounds, the limestone alleyways, the black tiled roofs shimmering like scales in the predawn. The glow encapsulating the red-light district dimmed as other quarters blinked awake with lanterns. Merchants would be loading their wagons. Raft pushers would be heading for the moat, sedan carriers for the main boulevard. The rest of the kingdom would soon follow in waking, living, and believing their king had been murdered by some Kendi’an assassin, by some poison lethal to an ordinary, mortal human being.
Wrong! Hesina wanted to scream from the terraces. You’re all wrong! But she was the source of all their misbeliefs. Without her, there would be no trial. No search for a truth that ultimately implicated the sooths.
Without her, the ghosts of a previous generation wouldn’t have returned.
She buckled under the load of her guilt, but an arm caught her. It drew her close and supported her. Everything will be fine, Caiyan would have said, and Hesina almost expected to see his face when she raised her watery gaze.
Instead it was Akira, hair in his eyes, dirt on his cheekbones, insubordinate as usual.
She pushed at him. “I told you to go.”
“I did. I went and came back down.”
“I’m going to be sick.”
Akira released her, only to sit her down on the terrace. He slid a hand over the back of her neck, his touch featherlight as he coaxed her head to her knees.
Her nausea passed; her need to cry didn’t. But after several minutes, Hesina found the strength to stand. She climbed the terraces. Akira didn’t stop her. She waited for him to tell her it was going to be okay, but he didn’t do that either. He simply followed her to her father’s study, where she instructed him to wait. Then she headed for Caiyan’s chambers.
She made it halfway before her body spasmed. She clutched at the facades, breaking cold sweat.
Her father wasn’t dead.
Yet someone had tried to kill him all the same.
Who?
Someone close, close enough to have known about his immortality. Closer than Hesina herself.
Black lines zigzagged across her vision, carving up her mind like strokes of ink. Together, the strokes formed the characters of her mother’s name, a name that had never made it onto the suspect list. And the dowager queen? Akira had asked, brush hovering beneath Xia Zhong, Lilian, and Caiyan.
Hesina had rejected the idea, but no one else could have known about her father’s immortality. No one else had an army of attendants to act in her absence. The snuff bottle made sense. The matching silver locks made sense. Everything blended like segments on a painted top, fusing in motion.
Her mother.
It could only be her mother.
A hiccup escaped Hesina, the beginning of a sob, a scream. If she didn’t reveal this, Mei would stand trial tomorrow for a crime she didn’t commit, but if she did reveal this, then what about her mother? She clapped her hands over her mouth and ran the rest of the way to Caiyan’s chambers, until her lungs seared and there was no air left for sobs or screams.
“She’s going further than I expected.”<
br />
Hesina skidded to a stop at the sound of Lilian’s voice.
“Give her time.” Caiyan’s voice. Hesina approached his door, then flinched back when he went on to say, “Sooner or later, she will break from the truth.”
Her blood froze over.
“And if she doesn’t?” asked Lilian. “What if she decides it’s up to her to mend things?”
The ice melted, and her veins throbbed with heat.
They were talking about her.
“It won’t come down to that,” Caiyan said, but Hesina didn’t hear the rest. With a bang, she burst through the doors, whirling on her siblings.
“Perfect,” cried Lilian in delight, without a fluster of guilt. “More brains to solve this problem for my apprentice.”
Hesina narrowed her eyes. “Your apprentice.”
“Yes. Panling. You remember her, right?”
“No.”
“Fine if you don’t. You can still help. So here’s the thing: she’s besotted with this poet who thinks he’s oh-so-special when he’s about as evocative as a donkey in heat. But the real problem”—Lilian lowered her voice—“is that he’s already married and leading her on.”
Pieces of what Hesina had overheard slid nicely into this new framework—except for one.
She turned on Caiyan. “You know her?”
“He more than knows her,” Lilian answered for her twin. She pinched his cheek, and Caiyan, to Hesina’s dazed surprise, flushed. “Which is why I can’t let her be blindsided by that pretentious ass.”
“Oh,” said Hesina. She should have said more; this was the first time she’d ever heard of Caiyan having a love affair with something outside of academia. But all she said was “oh” again, too relieved and too ashamed to have suspected anything in the first place. “Just tell her the truth,” she finished.
“It’s not that easy,” said Caiyan. “It would hurt her.”
Lilian sighed. “You two are useless. I’ll deal with it on my own. So, why don’t you explain your new aesthetic?” She flourished a hand at Hesina’s ruqun. “There are easier ways of dyeing something brown, you know.”
Brown? Hesina looked down and saw the mud reaching up from the hem of her skirts. To explain it would require explaining everything, including her father’s not-dead state, his theoretical immortality, the poison meant to kill him, and the dowager queen who’d done it.
