by Joan He
A guard struck his sword down. The rod split in two with a crack that halved Hesina.
“I don’t require remuneration,” prompted Xia Zhong. “I raise my concern for the sake of palace security.”
He said this all with a glint in his fishlike eyes. Pardon him, if you dare.
In another life, Hesina would do more than dare. She’d pardon Akira and finish strangling Xia Zhong. But with every eye pinned on the imperial city, she couldn’t risk compromising her position, not by issuing suspicious pardons or by ruffling the feathers of her oldest minister.
Defeated, she sank back into the throne.
Finish this in style.
“Arrest him,” Hesina said, closing her eyes so that she wouldn’t have to see the order carried out.
She should have covered her ears instead.
“The dungeons aren’t a bad place to stay.” The low lilt of Akira’s voice punctured her, and the willpower keeping her in the throne gushed out. “No rules, no expectations, no poison in the goblet—”
The doors shut with a resounding groan.
Hesina stayed behind after everyone left, until the urge to bolt to dungeons and explain herself to Akira withered, along with every other sensation.
Numb, she descended the dais. She wandered through the facades, letting her feet lead the way, and almost laughed when she saw where they’d guided her.
To be fair, she would have come to Caiyan in the past. If she were a house, he was the beam holding her up. But now she couldn’t even look at the carved herons rising out of his chamber doors without seeing his hands all over again, right clasped over left, knuckles seeded with blood.
She squeezed her eyes shut, spots of light puckering beneath the lids. She reopened them. Stared at the doors. Lifted a hand to knock. Dropped it. Let his name rise in her throat. Swallowed it. Hesina wanted answers, but what did she have to give in return? I’m sorry I couldn’t protect her? Sorry I couldn’t even secure a proper burial? Caiyan might have driven in the knife, but Hesina had capitalized on Lilian’s sacrifice.
Neither of them had the face to confront each other.
She turned to go. Four steps forward. Four steps back.
She barged through the doors.
Caiyan’s rooms were cold. Dim. The braziers had not been lit, and Hesina could barely make out the outline of his form at the foot of the bed, but she saw him. A brother who needed her.
He didn’t acknowledge her when she sat beside him. She pressed her palms to his damp face, and he pulled back. She wrapped her arms around him before he could withdraw again.
They stayed that way for a long, long time.
Eventually, she coaxed him into bed and rummaged under the frame until she found his secret stash of literature.
Lilian had lied. Wang Hutian didn’t write erotic novellas, but sappy, melodramatic poems. Hesina read them out loud, finishing one collection and moving on to another, until the words stole away her voice and dreams stole away Caiyan’s troubled breaths.
“‘Then morning came cloaked in dew./I drank to the sight of your fading ghost,/and you raised your glass to your lips/for one final toast…’”
The sheaf quivered in her hands. Hesina set it down. Instead of distracting her from her emotions, the poems had filled her with borrowed ones. The longing of Wang Hutian’s fair fox spirits became her longing for respite. The righteous rage of his qilin hunters became her righteous rage against her kingdom. And the guilt of his mistress-taking scholars became her guilt over everything she had done since her father’s death.
Her bottom lip trembled. She bit down until she tasted copper.
Your fault. Your fault. Your fault.
Hesina lurched out of Caiyan’s room. She shut the doors behind her. She stuffed her fist into her mouth and screamed. Her fault. Lilian’s death was her fault. Had she not opened a trial, there would have been no question of who killed the king.
The king wasn’t even dead.
It was his fault for keeping so many secrets, his fault for teaching her to believe in justice and law.
His fault.
Hesina clutched herself, and something cut into her stomach. Her father’s medallion. The one she’d oh so carefully strung onto her sash in search of the truth he claimed to love. She tore it off and hurled it at the ground. The jade broke with a crack, and she breathed hard from the satisfaction of it.
Then her breathing stopped.
Golden gas curled up from the medallion’s shattered remains.
The same golden gas that’d risen from her father’s body.
Akira’s voice suddenly sounded in Hesina’s head. She’d been trying so hard to ignore it in the throne room that she hadn’t deciphered what he was trying to say.
No poison in the goblet.
Still holding her breath, Hesina crouched. She lifted the shards. They were curved. The medallion had been hollow. Hollow to carry the poison. Not the goblet. Not her mother’s snuff bottle.
The poison came from the medallion that’d been on her father’s body all along.
She dropped the shards, shaking her head in dry-eyed confusion. What did this mean?
Go back to the place where all this started. Before the red-light district, where the Silver Iris had said I See golden gas rising from a pile of shards. Before the imperial gardens, where Hesina had discovered her father’s body among the irises.
Go back to the place where he left pieces of himself behind.
Hesina made for her father’s study. She strode to his desk. Quaking, she sat in his tortoiseshell chair, just as he probably had.
What did he do next?
The chair scraped as she rose. Pain bloomed in her chest; she was reliving his final moments. But she pushed on, kneeling by his costume chest. She riffled through the costumes, just as he probably had, ran her fingers across the textures. Silk and hemp.
He hadn’t pulled the courier’s costume out at random. He’d searched for it with deliberate intent.
Why?
What had he done next? Opened the Tenets to a page of One of the Eleven. Entered the secret passageway that would lead him to the gardens.
Fueled by pure instinct, Hesina staggered to the wall of books and pulled out The Cosmic Cycles, Pangtie’s Reflections, and The Rise and Fall of the Relic Reign. The shelves split down the middle, and the varnished corridor that appeared gleamed like a secret river. She stepped in and pulled the lever protruding from the side panel. The river plunged into darkness.
A shred of old panic curled up in Hesina. She’d gotten lost in a passageway as lightless as this one. But her father had told her to breathe deeply and use the walls as a guide. So she did. She inhaled the piney varnish, felt her heart calm, then placed her hands to the side panels—
And froze.
There were knife marks gouged into the wood, each stroke forming characters.
LITTLE BIRD…
Somewhere in the palace, maids were dusting. Cooks were plucking geese. A hundred thousand others breathed, walked, talked in the imperial city, a million beyond the walls. But they didn’t exist in this moment. Hesina’s entire world throbbed in the words at her fingertips.
LITTLE BIRD,
BY THE TIME YOU’RE READING THIS, YOU’LL KNOW. YOU’LL KNOW THAT YOUR FATHER WAS A LIAR, A SINNER, A MURDERER. YOU MIGHT EVEN KNOW, AS HARD AS IT IS TO ACCEPT, THAT I—
Hesina jerked away.
YOU MIGHT EVEN KNOW, AS HARD AS IT IS TO ACCEPT, THAT I—
She backed up and thumped into the opposite wall. She was gulping air and drowning in it. Laughing was the only way she could breathe.
AS HARD AS IT IS TO ACCEPT.
Still laughing, she pawed at the panels until she found the lever. She pulled. The wall of books fissured apart. She escaped the darkness for the study’s ashy light, but the truth followed her out.
The truth of who’d poisoned the king.
YOU MIGHT EVEN KNOW.
But she hadn’t. Not when she’d seen his body
in the iris beds, impeccably costumed, hands folded across his stomach, the perfect image of death without a struggle. Not when the cooks and kitchen maids reported that no one had delivered food and drink to the study that day. She hadn’t considered the significance of the Tenets being left open to a biography of One of the Eleven when her father was One of the Eleven. She’d repressed any subconscious realizations, just as she’d repressed her motives. She’d never been looking for the truth. She’d been looking for someone to blame.
All the pieces fell into place. The snuff bottle on her father’s desk had led Hesina to her mother’s rooms. There, she’d found the chest. The contents of her mother’s chest had led her to the Tenets. Now, she saw that it verified her father’s identity as One of the Eleven.
Meanwhile, her father had flipped the book open to One of the Eleven before rising from this desk. He’d strung on a medallion carved with the character for longevity because he’d wanted her to know. He’d taken his paring knife with him not to cut up persimmons, but to carve his final message onto these walls. And he’d put on a courier’s hanfu to deliver it, this truth that Hesina had paid a price in blood to find.
The pitch of her laughter shot high.
“So now you know.”
That voice.
The laughter died on Hesina’s lips.
“Well?” The train of her mother’s scarlet ruqun whispered over the floor as she swept to the square zitan table in the center of the lower study.
Hesina stared blearily at the dowager queen. A ghost. She couldn’t actually be here.
But a ghost’s words didn’t cut the way her mother’s did. “Does it hurt? I imagine it would, going through all this trouble, just to find that he ended himself.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
WE BELIEVE THE THINGS WE WANT TO BELIEVE.
ONE OF THE ELEVEN ON HUMAN NATURE
I’D LIKE TO THINK THAT MY CHOICES ARE MY OWN, BUT HOW MANY TRULY ARE?
TWO OF THE ELEVEN ON HUMAN NATURE
They sat across from each other, the letter Hesina had written and inked with Sanjing’s seal on the zitan tabletop between them.
It hadn’t even been opened.
Hesina didn’t speak. If she moved a single muscle in her face, she feared she might cry, and she was pitiful enough in her mother’s eyes.
“Why did you keep this from me?” Hesina finally whispered, hovering her gaze over her mother’s shoulder instead of her face. It was easier to coexist this way.
The dowager queen gave a cold chuckle, and Hesina’s hands tightened in her lap.
“If you’d told me from the start…” Hesina’s voice broke. None of this would have happened. No one would have died for my trial.
Her mother chuckled again. “Four months ago, I offered to rule.”
“That’s not my question.”
“I said you would bring this kingdom down to its knees—”
“You should have told me the truth!”
Silence quivered in the wake of Hesina’s scream. Her vision blurred, and she pulled back the tears with a rough inhale. “You should have told me the truth.”
The dowager queen raised a brow. “Was that not the truth?”
Hesina expected nothing less from her mother.
“This was his final wish.”
But she hadn’t expected that. “What? For me to think he was murdered?”
“No one forced you to think that. No one forced you to declare a trial. No one forced you to continue searching for the truth on your own.
“I—”
“How many times did you think about giving up? Why didn’t you?”
Hesina had no answer.
Her mother sighed. “Stubborn as always.”
Hesina was too shaken to even bristle.
“Leave with me,” said the dowager queen without warning, and Hesina’s gaze jerked to her mother. Again, she was startled by how much they resembled each other, down to their oval faces, the midparts in their hair. But the mother she knew didn’t say things like, “Pack what you need. A second carriage is waiting by the northern entrance.”
“Is that it? After seventeen years, that’s all you have to say? To ask me to give up my throne, my kingdom, with no explanation?”
“You think they’re yours? That you can control the people? That you can tell them what to think and believe?”
“I can help them.”
“Oh? Like you did today?”
She gutted Hesina like a fish.
“Show me the book.”
Hesina feigned dumb. “What book?”
Her mother buffed her nails against her ruqun cuff. “The one you stole from my room.”
Get it yourself. But predictably, Hesina went to her chambers. She got down on her hands and knees, on the verge of lifting the floorboards when she stiffened.
The hair she always stuck between the boards was gone.
She yanked the boards apart. The original Tenets and Xia Zhong’s letters were still here. The sprint of her heart slowed. She was being paranoid. The floorboards looked shinier than usual, and the citrus tang of bergamot perfumed the air. The maids must have just oiled them. The hair could have been swept away. Even if someone had stumbled upon this nook, they would have found a worthless copy of The Medicinal Properties of Exotic Fungi.
Regardless, Hesina made a note to change the hiding spot.
When she returned to her father’s study, her mother flicked a finger at the desk. “Place it.”
Again, Hesina obeyed, setting it beside a miniature jiutan of sorghum wine that had appeared in her absence. She knew better than to question it.
She sat as her mother flipped the book open, and stared as the dowager queen tore out a fistful of pages.
Hesina was too stunned to make a sound. A relic, destroyed just like that.
But then the pages floated out of her mother’s hands and fused back into the book.
Hesina had seen sooths draw water from air. She’d seen whole pots crack into shards. But this defied everything she knew. If all magic stemmed from reeling the future into the present, how could this be? Paper couldn’t heal itself.
Yet it had. Gingerly, she pulled in the book and ran a finger down the pages. Smooth. Seamless. The tear gone without a trace, much like the cut on her father’s abdomen.
Her head spun. “What was that?”
“The same magic that makes us immortal.”
“You—”
“I am Two.”
The gong struck six. In the gathering dark, Hesina stared at her mother. Two was characterized as brave and spirited. The dowager queen was neither of those things. But now Hesina saw the way she looked at the book, her gaze heavy. These words were her words. The stories they told were her stories. A part of her remained preserved in those pages, no matter how she’d changed.
“How?” she still asked. If her mother was in fact Two, how was she immortal? By enlightenment or elixir?
Her mother took a long draw from the jiutan. “When we finally breached the imperial walls,” she said, voice like ground glass, “there were only five of us left. We couldn’t have defeated the emperor. It was Kaishen—your so-called Nine—who suggested we seek out the most powerful sooth in the kingdom. She saw a future in which your father and I lived on in the commoners’ hearts, our names and feats kept alive in tales and sagas. She Reeled the immortality of legend into our flesh.”
Her gaze slid to the Tenets. “Unbeknownst to us, she did the same to this book. Its teachings will forever prevail. The commoners worship every word we wish we could take back.”
So this was why the commoners were so opposed to war. Why they hated sooths and couldn’t be persuaded otherwise. This…book was the source of Hesina’s plight. She didn’t care if it’d heal itself; she wanted to shred it.
Her mother took another swig. “Wen suspected the book’s indestructibility was tied to our own.” It took Hesina a second to place her father’s name. “We tried to kill ourselves. Burning. Drown
ing. Beheading—we’ve done it all.” She tapped the scar at her throat, and Hesina blanched. “Some attempts healed worse than others. When all failed, we faked our deaths to give other rulers a chance to right our wrongs.”
She raised the jiutan.
Hesina seized it before it met her lips. “Why are you telling me now? Why did the two of you return after your first reign? And if Father faked his death again, why leave any clues for me to find at all?”
“Let go.”
She did, and her mother tipped back the jiutan. “Tell me,” murmured the dowager queen, setting it down hard. “Was the truth worth it?”
Another deflection. Hesina’s jaw tightened. “No.”
“Good. Pack your things, and—”
“But searching for it has opened my eyes to the kingdom’s wounds. I want to help it heal.”
“It’s rotten, not wounded. Can you be the knife to cut away the parts that fester?”
It doesn’t have to be that way. But words and reason could sway people only so much, and there wouldn’t always be a Lilian to take the fall. “I can.”
“You’ll ruin yourself,” snapped her mother.
“Someone has to.”
“Foolish girl.” The dowager queen lifted the jiutan again, frowned, and set it back down. “So be it. You want to know why we returned for a second reign? It was for you.”
“You came back just for…” Me? Hesina couldn’t repeat the words without the risk of laughing out loud.
“We’d adopted children, but never had our own. You were the first. Wen saw you as the kingdom’s hope.” Her mother chuckled without warmth. “A dreamer to the bone.”
“Hope. I’m to be the kingdom’s hope.”
“Ludicrous, am I correct?”
Yes, very. “If what you say is really true, then why haven’t I been told this before?”
“Your father decided that the best way to tell you was to show you. He faked his death prematurely knowing very well that you’d pursue a trial, that your actions would throw everything wrong with this kingdom into sharp relief. Now you know exactly what you’re up against. To stay or to leave is your choice, and your choice alone. This was his wish.”
