by Joan He
The knowledge settled over Hesina like cold mist. A choice. Her father’s wish was to give her a choice.
Is that all? But then she thought back to the cavern behind the reredos, those words on the walls. Her father hadn’t wanted the mantle of a hero. He was giving her the choice he hadn’t been given himself.
And he’d done so at a cost she couldn’t accept.
“And what is your wish?” asked Hesina, to her own surprise.
Her mother blinked. “Forget your silly ideals, and leave with me. You have no one left. What is the point of clinging to a world that has abandoned you?”
“It may abandon me, but I can’t abandon it.”
She waited for her mother to call her a fool. Instead, the dowager queen stared at her, dead silent.
Then she threw her head back and laughed. That was more like the mother Hesina knew. “Stay, leave, what do I care? Tomorrow, I return to the mountains. Don’t bother seeing me off.”
Hesina rushed to rise with her mother. “I’ll have the servants ready your chambers—”
“Spare me.” Her mother swept to the doors.
“Wait.” Hesina drew a deep breath. She wanted an answer to one last question.
Did you ever love me? But that was too bloated with hope, too painful to ask, so instead she asked, “Why do you hate me?”
Deny it. Say you came back and asked me to leave because you want to protect me. Say—
“For the same reason I hate this palace.” The words were like metal, the blade of them wicked sharp. “For the same reason I hate that book,” continued her mother, even though Hesina had heard enough. “For the same reason I hate looking in the mirror with a face that belongs to a person I can never be again.”
Akira was gone, but the smoke stain on the ceiling of his room remained. The dark patch gazed upon Hesina like a bruised eye as she entered. She remembered that night with the fire and his face, a breath away. The memory tasted sweet. It made her throat ache.
She went to the bed. Reclined. She stared at the beams overhead and wondered what thoughts flitted across Akira’s mind as he did the same. He had suspected many things. What would he think now if she shared what her mother had said to her, asked of her? Would he advise her to leave or stay?
Hesina imagined his voice. Leaving doesn’t sound bad.
It didn’t sound bad at all. If she stayed, she could end up like her mother. Cold, sardonic, and embittered by reminders of the person she used to be.
Sighing, Hesina rolled onto her side and buried her face in the pillow. It didn’t smell like Akira. It occurred to her that he probably didn’t sleep on the bed at all.
She laid herself down on the floor and thought of sitting on the throne, standing on the terraces, thought about how it all felt and how it couldn’t compare to the ground. This was where she truly belonged.
For the first time in days, her sleep was sound.
She took her cup of tea on the infirmary patio the next morning, watching the rain pour off the upturned awning and melt the snow.
If she left with her mother for the mountains, this peace could be her reality. She wouldn’t have to worry about the kingdom. Caiyan could rule in Sanjing’s absence. But the image of his blood-flecked knuckles reared again, and a tremor shot through Hesina. Hot tea sloshed onto her hand. Her grip flinched open.
The teacup fell.
The sounds of rainfall quieted as she stared at the shattered pieces. Once, she’d done the same. Stared at her mother’s spilled concoction, the heat of humiliation in her cheeks, and begged for her blessing. She was no longer so stupid.
No longer so brave.
“I don’t see your things,” said her mother when Hesina met her by the northern gate. The dowager queen’s carriage was plain and her attendants few. No one would know that she’d come and gone, or that Hesina, like a coward, had considered going too.
“I’m staying.”
Rain pattered off their paper parasols.
Hesina waited for her mother to persuade her, but with a shrug and a turn, the dowager queen allowed her attendants to help her into the carriage. “Suit yourself.”
A familiar emptiness yawned in Hesina as she watched the carriage rattle off. She no longer had a father to take her to the persimmon grove, or a sister to drag her to the textile workshops, where they would dye bolts of white silk into pinks and turquoises and violets until Hesina forgot all about the dowager queen.
Except that she didn’t want to forget about her mother this time. Hesina had always been so singularly focused on what she might have done to make the dowager queen hate her. She’d never bothered to see it wasn’t about her. It’d never been about her. Not all stories were hers to tell.
Alone, she returned to the Eastern Palace and readied herself for court.
The rain didn’t let up the next day. Under a weeping sky, hundreds turned out for Lilian’s cremation. Their impatience smoked the air when the firewood didn’t; the first few attempts at lighting the pyre guttered under the lashing winds, and Hesina had to order the guards to douse the bed of branches with oil before flame finally caught. As black smoke billowed in choking clouds, she left the dry safety of her palanquin to stand under the downpour, letting the rain be the tears she couldn’t shed.
The rain turned to ice overnight, and the streets glittered as Hesina rode out to the pavilion once more at dawn. This time it was to see a vigilante leader hang. Crowds again flocked as the guards marched the young man to the gallows.
“The maggots are hatching!” he cried as they put his neck to the rope. “I may die today, but you will all die tom—”
The trapdoor gave; the rope jerked taut. Hesina looked away. When the thrashing and kicking stilled, she ordered that the body be left to hang one night and one day as a warning.
She turned to leave, but not before she heard a muffled sob. The sound wrung her heart. From whom had it come? A mother, mourning the loss of a child? A sister, mourning the death of her brother? There would be hatred in their eyes, if Hesina dared to look, and she dared, because she deserved it.
A hand grasped her elbow, stopping her.
Silently, Caiyan drew a cloak over her shoulders. He guided her down the pavilion before she could resist, standing behind her as if to shield her from all the hatred in the world. He helped her into the palanquin, and suddenly, Hesina found herself sitting knee to knee with a brother she hadn’t seen since that night in his room, hadn’t spoken to since that day in the throne hall.
She ought to say something now. She tried to work up the nerve for words.
Caiyan beat her to it. He reported on the progress of the examinations (they were past the preliminary rounds) and updated her on the movements of the city guards. Numbers and statistics passed his lips, his voice smooth and calm.
Hesina wanted to shake him. Stop pretending we’re fine. Tell me you hate me, blame me. Give me your hurt to work with, but don’t hide yourself like this.
But she was tired, and she was cold, and she was weary of battles she could not win. So she nodded along and listened and made all the right comments, and when they came to the palace, Caiyan bowed like a proper advisor and left Hesina standing before the throne hall doors.
Letters from Sanjing awaited on the ivory kang table inside. They’d been posted from Qiao, one of the three major merchant cities halfway to the front. Hesina carefully sliced them open. Her brother’s squared-off strokes were comforting, even though the words themselves—the Crown Prince has rallied a force of three thousand sooths, war is likely—were not.
She burned the letters once she finished reading and leaned her head onto her fingertips. Stability was only beginning to burgeon again; Kendi’a would kill it like a hard frost.
She spent the rest of the night drafting a missive to the kingdom of Ning. The Tenets forbade military alliances with any of the other three kingdoms, but she had chosen to stay. She had chosen to rule. Books and laws be damned—she had to do something.
She spent hours in the archives, seeking a way to destroy the book, skipping meals and forgoing sleep. A sooth had done the Reeling. Surely a sooth could reverse it. But considering her history with sooths—the two she knew were dead—Hesina wasn’t in a rush to befriend another.
Life went on as such for two weeks, until the evening Ming’er barred Hesina from the archives and insisted that she take a bath. Following a debate about hygiene, wars, and the pressing priority of both, Ming’er triumphed; a tub was filled with steaming vats of water carried in from the Imperial Laundry.
As Hesina soaked, her thoughts softened. Sleeping was also low on her list of priorities, but she couldn’t find a good reason not to close her eyes.
When she reopened them, seemingly seconds later, it was to the sight of her sister.
Hesina’s heart froze midbeat. “L-Lilian?”
Leaning her arms onto the rim of the tub, Lilian rested her chin atop her fists. “We could go anywhere, do anything.”
Hesina raised a dripping hand.
“We could ride serpents in the Baolin Isles, soak in the floating hot springs on the Aoshi archipelago.”
She reached for Lilian’s cheek.
“If I asked you to come, would you?”
Her hand went through air.
Hesina woke with a shudder, then shivered. The water had gone cold. She sat for a moment longer, staring at the empty space above the tub’s rim, then splashed out and grabbed the underrobes draped over the silk folding screen. Her sash crinkled as she tied it. She’d sewn Xia Zhong’s letters between the layers of fabric and hidden the original Tenets in plain sight on the shelves in her father’s study, the last place people would look.
She threw on a winter cloak and headed for the gardens, cutting a healthy branch from the peach grove before making for the persimmon. Under a moonlit sky veined with silver branches, Hesina set to work, clearing the snow, loosening the hard earth with a rock. She patted it all back in place around her inserted peach branch and studied her handiwork.
This was winter. Her first attempt was unlikely to succeed. But she would plant as many peach trees as it’d take for a lone one to stand among the persimmons. It wasn’t the same as a tombstone, but Lilian wouldn’t mind. In fact, thought Hesina with a watery smile, Lilian might have preferred it.
Then she rose and took in the surrounding gardens. She’d grown up here, seen ants swarm the peonies in the spring, tadpoles spawn in summer, gingko leaves ferment in autumn, camellias bloom in winter. She knew the paths and where they all led. That one went to the gazebo on the lotus pond. That, to the rock gardens.
And this, the one she ended up on, went to the place she’d sworn never to visit again.
Time had diluted her grief. Secrets had polluted it. Still, her pulse thrummed when she entered the iris beds. They were covered in snow, the flowers long dead. But they were preserved in her mind’s eye, just like her father, and Hesina knelt over the place she’d last found him, spreading her hands flat before her and pressing her forehead to their backs.
She stayed in the deepest koutou until her skin burned, itched, numbed. Until her form wilted and her shoulders hunched. She wished she could have said that she cursed this snowy spot, or wept solely for Lilian and Mei.
But that would have been her greatest lie of all.
Later that night, her page visited her sitting room. “I found your former representative’s cell number, dianxia.”
“I didn’t—” I didn’t ask for it.
But she had. She remembered now. In the twilight hours, after spending a whole night with dusty tomes that revealed no answers, drunk on hopelessness and helplessness, Hesina had buckled. She had asked.
Tell me, she wanted to blurt out. She would visit Akira. She would explain everything to him. But she wouldn’t be able to free him. Seeing him would reignite her agony, and whatever they had between them would decay, just as it had with her and her father.
It was time she learned to let go.
“I don’t want to know,” she gritted out, then crossed into the corridors even though she had nowhere to go, no place to be.
Except one.
Like last time, the doors to Caiyan’s rooms were unlocked.
“Caiyan?”
His bedchamber was empty, but a flame twitched in the oil lamp on his study desk, and a lynx-fur brush, still wet with ink, had been left propped against a porcelain rest.
Hesina could wait. She sat on his bed and brushed a hand over the pillow logs, the same ones she’d leaned upon after the Silver Iris’s death.
Promise me you won’t jeopardize your rule.
She had done worse than jeopardize her rule. She had jeopardized her life. Lilian was dead as a result. Mei too. The blood of shame rushed to Hesina’s cheeks, and the urge to bolt stiffened her legs. She wanted to escape this chamber and every reminder of the brother she’d failed so badly.
But she forced herself to stay. The night deepened. The lamp burned out. In the dark she sat, ears pricked for the sound of his return, a sound that never came.
“Dianxia. Dianxia.”
Hesina had no sense of place or time. The blinds were uniformly dark, and she could barely make out the face of her page.
She rose, palming her eyes. “What’s the hour?” Her voice sounded frog-like.
Her page’s was oddly strained. “Just past the fifth, dianxia.”
“Then why am I awake?”
“The court is in session.”
“Court?”
“Yes, dianxia. Here, in the Eastern Palace.”
“I know where my own court is,” Hesina snapped, then regretted it. Her page had never done anything to earn her wrath, unlike the rest of the people in this palace. “Who called the session? Director Lang?”
“No—”
“Is she awake?” interrupted a rough voice from outside.
Hesina held up a hand before her page could answer for her, then rose and went to the doors. Caiyan’s doors, she realized, taking in the carved herons with a drop of the stomach. He hadn’t returned all night.
Five guards stood in the corridor outside. “What’s the meaning of this?” Hesina demanded.
“Viscount Yan Caiyan requests your presence at court.”
Her irritation died. “Did he say what it was for?”
“He only said that your presence is required.”
Her hair was a mess, and she was still in her underrobes. But Caiyan wouldn’t have called a court session at this time unless it was an emergency.
“Fetch me a gown and a pin,” she ordered her page.
He scurried and came back with an onyx pin and a sepia ruqun bordered in gold.
Hesina cross-wrapped the ruqun over her underrobes, stabbed the pin through a hasty up-twist, and followed the guards out of the inner palace without a second word. But as they neared the Hall of Everlasting Harmony, uncertainty crept into her step. She stopped halfway down the hall, mother-of-pearl pillars towering tall, much like the guards on either side of her.
“The court is waiting, dianxia,” prompted a guard from behind.
You’re tired. You’re paranoid. You’re not thinking clearly.
But once the doors creaked open, the guards seized her. They dragged her up the dais. They shoved her to the floor. And when Hesina finally managed to push onto her elbows, what she saw next hit like another blow.
Black-and-gold hanfu.
Hands clasped, right over left.
His shadow, waxing over the stairs as he descended from the imperial balcony. His voice, soft as if he were speaking to her and her alone.
“I, Yan Caiyan, first viscount and son of King Wen, accuse Yan Hesina of high treason.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
A MEANINGFUL LIFE IS LIVED FOR OTHERS.
ONE OF THE ELEVEN ON THE NATURAL ORDER
LIVE FOR YOURSELF IF YOU TRUST YOURSELF.
TWO OF THE ELEVEN ON THE NATURAL ORDER
Just like that winter nine years ago, Hesina
was falling into freezing water. But this time, Caiyan wasn’t rapidly sinking, someone to rescue and protect. He was the one who had pushed her in.
She stumbled to her feet just as a minister spoke. “What is the offense?”
The woman was fighting a yawn. She wasn’t the only one. Hanfu were rumpled, broad-belts crooked, wusha caps tilted.
Caiyan’s next words woke them all up. “For colluding with a sooth.”
The court went still as new ice.
Then the full weight of the accusation landed, dragging Hesina under.
Keep calm, Hesina, she ordered, even as she fought for breath. She wasn’t guilty until proven so…the last of the evidence had died with the Silver Iris. Not even the madam of the Yellow Lotus music house could give testimony because Hesina’s hood had been up and Caiyan’s had been down and he couldn’t summon her as a witness without implicating himself and yes, it was fine. This was fine. It was going to be okay.
It’s going to be okay.
Yet she shrank back as Caiyan continued his descent down from the dais, drawing closer. “Though the sooth in question perished a few months back, I think you’ll find my evidence sufficient.”
Why? Simple. She hadn’t heeded his advice. She should have framed Xia Zhong and let him take the fall, not Lilian.
But…this was Caiyan. The brother who had withstood all of Sanjing’s jibes without lashing back, who had helped her through her imperial lessons.
Considerate, reliable Caiyan, who now ordered the first witness forward.
Hesina stared, breathless, pulseless, her heart fished out of her chest and left flopping somewhere on the limestone walk between them.
The witness came to the stand’s edge. It was a stern-faced woman in her forties whom Hesina didn’t recognize.
“State your name,” said Caiyan.
“Meng Hua.”
