by Joan He
“Give your testimony.”
“Wait!”
Heads turned.
“Y-you can’t call these witnesses,” stammered Rou as every eye swung toward him, including Hesina’s. “That’s the Investigation Bureau’s job.”
Heavens be kind to him.
“The Investigation Bureau has signed off on the case,” said the director.
“Then this is a trial,” said Rou. “If this is a trial, Queen Hesina deserves a representative like anyone else.”
“I’m afraid you’re forgetting the first tenement of the Tenets, Prince Yan Rou of Fei.” Heads now turned to Xia Zhong. “If this were any other charge,” continued the minister, “the queen would indeed be granted a fair trial and have a right to a representative. Sooths and their colluders are the one exception, as stated in Passage 1.1.2. of the Tenets. But there is nothing to fear. Should Viscount Caiyan’s evidence prove flimsy by the court’s ruling, then we’ll go through the usual rites of selecting representatives.”
The rest of the court murmured in agreement. What the minister had said was, indeed, true. Hesina had known it even before she’d decided to seek out the Silver Iris. All she could do was send Rou a silent thank-you before Caiyan’s voice overtook the court again.
“Speak,” he ordered the witness. “How did you come to witness the event two and a half months ago?”
“I run a carpentry shop with my husband in the eastern sector. That day, the talk of the marketplace was of a borderlands village vanishing like a puff of smoke. Our customers said the Kendi’an sooths were to blame, which was no surprise to me. Maggots are born without souls. We all saw what happened to that scout at the queen’s coronation.”
“Did the rioters do anything else?”
“Yes. They stormed the red-light district because…Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” The woman’s upper lip curled. “That place is a maggot breeding ground.”
“Did you follow along?” asked Caiyan.
“Yes.”
“Did you see what the group did?”
“They rounded up some whores. Killed one.”
“Was the one they killed a sooth?”
“That’s what we thought, yes.”
“Did you see the blue flame yourself?” asked Caiyan.
“I was standing in the back of the crowd—”
“‘Yes’ or ‘no’?”
“I did,” confirmed the woman. “I saw it. But then the queen came along and made a whole show out of burning the place down. Those flames were blue, too, from all the spilled wine. It made some of us doubt, but I know what I saw. Blue flame, brighter than any flame I’d ever seen, erupting from the whore’s body.”
“Do you remember the queen’s reaction to seeing the body?”
“Yes. She was visibly upset. Threw up too. I didn’t think much of it then, but…” Her voice trailed off.
“Continue,” said Caiyan.
“How do I put it?” The woman shuddered. “It almost looked as if she mourned.”
Murmurs rustled through the court.
This was all some terrible fluke. Hesina clung to this belief, though it contradicted everything she knew about Caiyan. He succeeded in whatever he undertook. Her fate was as good as sealed. She should have been prepared.
But she wasn’t.
Without pausing for breath, Caiyan summoned the next witness.
When she saw that cream ruqun edged with hydrangea blue, Hesina felt like she’d been punched in the gut. Tears sprang to her eyes, hot and embarrassing. She was eight again, crying over some injustice she’d suffered at her mother’s hands, except this time there was no one to wipe the shame from her cheeks.
“State your name and occupation,” said Caiyan.
“Ming’er. I entered the imperial service sixteen years ago and have served as the queen’s lady-in-waiting for fifteen.”
“Tell us what you found in the queen’s chambers.”
“I came across a loose floorboard while I was oiling the woodwork last week. It led to a hidden compartment stacked with drafts of letters written in the queen’s own hand. I didn’t intend to read them at first. I only handled them to clean off the oil that had dripped onto the paper. But I couldn’t help but notice a word.”
“What word?”
“The ‘Sight.’”
Hesina stared at Ming’er with glazed eyes. Why?
“To whom were they addressed?” asked Caiyan.
“Someone by the name of the Silver Iris.”
Why am I losing you too?
“Yes,” said the previous witness from the box. “That was her name.”
“Lies.” Hesina found her voice. She whirled on Caiyan. “You planted those letters.”
He ignored her. “Match the handwriting.”
Pages came forth bearing Hesina’s most recent decrees and spread them beside the letters on the ground.
Caiyan summoned the head of the imperial scribes. “By your expertise, are these letters forged?”
The man leaned over the spread of papers, gaze twitching between the letters and decrees.
“No, they’re not forged. See?” The scribe held up a decree in one hand and a letter in the other. “A skilled forger can replicate the form of someone’s character perfectly but still fail to transfer the imperfections. If you look closely here, you can see that the queen doesn’t quite wrap the tails of her ‘si,’ ‘su,’ and ‘shao’ characters correctly. Her hand wavers, and the ink feathers as a result. This is consistent in both the decree and the letter.”
Caiyan ordered that the letters and decrees be circulated. As pages ran them to the rest of the ranks, Hesina snatched a letter off the ground. Her gaze raced up and down the columns of characters.
Every stroke of ink was identical to hers, right down to the imperfections. Who—
“Last but not least,” Caiyan said, but his voice faded, replaced by the memory of the two of them sitting side by side, his hand around hers as he helped her with her characters.
You never form the ‘si’ correctly. The tail of the third stroke doesn’t quite wrap around the first.
That memory bled into another, of the throne room, where Hesina had marveled—and lamented—over Caiyan’s perfect rendition of her name.
The letter fell from her hand. Colors, shapes, lines kept morphing, as if she were looking through a waterfall. Someone bumped into her from behind, and it took Hesina a full second to register, process, and step aside.
The page scurried past, a gilded tray in his hands. Caiyan lifted an item and held it up. “Do we all recognize this?”
Pinched between Caiyan’s fingertips was a white-jade hairpin with a crane unfurling at its end, last seen disappearing into Xia Zhong’s pocket.
Let this be a dream. Hesina’s heel slipped over the dais edge. She regained her balance, but not her sense of self. Hazily, she took in the commoners down below, the nobles up above. Please, let this be a dream. In nightmares, she could run. She could jump off this thin suspension of a walk and bolt upright in a sweat. Here, she was trapped. Perspiration trickled down her back.
“I remember that,” said one of the ministers. “It was a gift from her father.”
“Yes, for her first namesday,” said another.
“And when was the last time the queen wore this pin?” asked Caiyan.
“That…” The ministers glanced at each other. “We can’t be certain.”
Caiyan looked pointedly at Ming’er.
“The queen hasn’t worn this pin in quite some time,” she murmured. “It’s been missing from her drawers for four months.”
Four months? It had to have been one month, at most—
“That’s because this was found in a particular courtesan’s chambers.” Caiyan turned, holding the pin out for all to see. “A courtesan by the name of the Silver Iris, the same sooth who burned in the riot.”
The court erupted with voices. A page pounded a staff for silence, but questions rang out, one louder
than the others:
“What did the queen need a sooth for?”
Without answering, Caiyan summoned another witness—a dungeon guard.
“Did the queen give you strange orders on any occasion?” he asked the woman.
“Let’s see…She did ask us to search for a convict with a rod.”
“When?”
“It must have been four months ago.”
“And was such a convict found?”
“Yes, in fact. Convict 315, who’d been charged with merchant robbing, was found in possession of a rod.”
Caiyan dismissed the guard and faced a ring in the upper ranks. “Minister Xia, you may come forward now.”
A sea of silk hanfu parted for Xia Zhong’s passage. Hesina stared as he stepped onto the walk.
“As many of you probably noticed,” began the minister, “the queen’s representative was quite adept. That’s because she hand-picked him from the highest rank of scholars and planted him in the imperial dungeons. She tricked me into selecting him by taking advantage of my egalitarianism.”
The pin hadn’t been enough to convince Hesina. Ming’er hadn’t been enough. But this was.
Caiyan had allied himself with Xia Zhong.
The realization struck Hesina like a hand to a zither. The fibers of her being twanged, and she snapped, shuddering as the marrow returned to her bones, the blood to her veins, her heart to her chest in all its raw fury.
“You forget,” she gritted out, “that we sink and swim together.”
Now sink with me, Xia Zhong. She tore off her sash, split apart the seam, and flung the letters he’d written to Kendi’a. Five, ten, twenty burst from their stitches and rained over the court below. The rest fluttered onto the walk.
Pages ran to distribute them to the upper ranks. Paper crackled like twigs snapped underfoot.
Hesina held up the letter she’d saved for herself. “Xia Zhong, how will you explain this correspondence?”
A page ran a letter to the minister. Teeth clenched, Hesina pinned her gaze on his bald head as he tilted it down to read.
Finally, it lifted. “Your Majesty,” said Xia Zhong. “Or should I say, your disgraced honor.”
The last of the letters were opened, and a hush fell over the court.
Hesina’s heartbeat slowed as she looked down at the letter in her hand. She wasn’t sure what she feared as she unfolded it—she’d sewn them together herself just a week ago—but this…
This couldn’t be.
There hadn’t been an addressee on the letters before. Now there was, and it was Hesina.
There hadn’t been an addresser on the letters before. Now there was, and it was the Silver Iris.
The letter wobbled in Hesina’s hand. She couldn’t read all the characters in between.
She didn’t need to.
Howls rose from the ranks, accusations merging like a pack of wolves. They lunged for her, a defenseless queen. They shredded her with tooth and claw.
“Maggot lover!”
“Traitor!”
“Death by a thousand cuts!”
“Take her away,” ordered Caiyan, and guards seized Hesina by the arms.
“I admit to speaking with a sooth!” she shouted as they dragged her down the walk. The court went into an uproar. A guard clamped a hand over her mouth; he yanked away when she bit down. “But I will never confess to treason! Speaking to another human shouldn’t be a—”
They gagged her. They lugged her through the double doors, which swung in like window shutters, narrowing her view of the court until only Caiyan’s figure remained in the sliver of space.
She willed him to look at her. It was the least he could do as he betrayed her. But he simply turned and ascended the dais. He was still ascending when the doors folded him out of view.
Hesina tumbled into the cell, concrete sanding her palms. The doors clanged shut behind her.
She picked herself up and stared blearily through the bars. A normal cell, she noted. Not a tianlao cell, where someone who’d committed her caliber of treason should have been locked. But she hadn’t bothered to rebuild after the explosion, and she guessed Caiyan hadn’t either. His first and only oversight.
She scooted against the cinder-block walls and hugged her legs tight to her chest, making herself smaller, as if that would diminish everything else.
Caiyan had sided with Xia Zhong.
Caiyan had convinced Ming’er to betray her.
Caiyan had forged letters in her hand. He’d swapped out the ones in her sash, or the sash entirely. It would have been easy for him. He was family. No one would have batted an eye if he visited her rooms one night while she was buried deep in the archives.
Or he could have gotten Ming’er to do it for him. Hesina shook, too stunned to weep. Caiyan had crafted an airtight case, considering that the Silver Iris had died. Had she been alive, he might have dragged her before the court and bled her himself. She’d be executed right alongside Hesina, a means to an end, a pawn on a board. They all were to him.
Even then, guilt fringed the hems of Hesina’s mind. When weariness finally overtook her, she dreamed that it was Caiyan who took her place at dawn, his flesh that the executioners carved, not hers. Afterward, she crawled to him, clutched him, and wept. Before he’d betrayed her, he’d been her brother. Before he’d turned everyone against her, she’d killed his only family. Her tears and remorse could be explained.
His blood and sacrifice could not.
Beyond the bars stood the Grand Secretariat, a decree scroll in hand. Hesina’s own official had come to read her sentence.
For threatening a high minister, Hesina was barred from entering the court for the next three months.
For manipulating the random selection of the representative, Hesina was forbidden from forwarding cases to the Investigation Bureau for a year.
Of course, none of that mattered, because for colluding with a sooth, Hesina was to be executed by a thousand cuts at the sixth gong strike tomorrow.
The Secretariat rolled up the scroll. “You have a visitor,” she said, retreating as the newcomer approached.
Hesina braced herself for Xia Zhong.
“My flower.”
But if she’d known it’d be Ming’er, she wouldn’t have braced herself at all. She had no defenses against her lady-in-waiting, and her heart went brittle as the woman crouched by the bars.
“Don’t call me that,” Hesina snapped. “And stop crying.”
Ming’er wiped at her apple cheeks. She parted her lips.
“Don’t waste your breath asking for forgiveness.”
“I know,” whispered Ming’er. “I just want you to know the truth.”
It was a little late for that, in Hesina’s opinion. “Hurry up and say what you need to say.”
“My fl—”
“Or leave, if you can’t control yourself.”
“It was Minister Xia.” Ming’er’s eyes brimmed. “M-Minister Xia found out about my daughter.”
Hesina’s gaze snapped to her. “You have a daughter?” Maidservants were forbidden from starting families of their own.
Ming’er nodded. “She was born early. The midwife didn’t think she’d live past her first namesday. Now, she’s seventeen—”
Hesina’s age.
“—still sickly, but so full of life. My sister takes care of her, and I send them my earnings to cover the cost of tinctures.”
A lump grew painfully in Hesina’s throat.
“I’m sorry.” Ming’er blotted at her lashes as tears eked out anyway. “I’m sorry.”
What did Ming’er expect her to say? I understand? I forgive you? You betrayed me, but for a good reason? Hesina felt a sudden surge of animosity toward Ming’er’s daughter. The girl had stolen the one mother Hesina had ever had.
“Get out of my sight.” But as Ming’er stumbled away, Hesina thought everything she couldn’t bear to say.
I understand.
I forgive you.
Some time passed. She wasn’t sure how much, but enough for the guards to deliver a meal of watery congee garnished with some stringy scallions. It seemed rather pointless; Hesina wasn’t going to starve before dawn tomorrow. She pushed the bowl away, the bottom scraping against stone, almost covering the guards’ mutters.
“Serves her right.” Their voices were distant but amplified by the dungeon tunnels. “Now this kingdom will get cleaned up once and for all.”
Cleaned up.
They didn’t need to say “of what.” Sooths. Maggots. The feared. The unknown.
Have you…ever felt something for them? Hesina remembered asking Caiyan. He had shaken his head. Don’t show your sympathy, he’d said. Don’t speak your feelings. Don’t act on them. Don’t jeopardize your rule. Trust me.
She had listened. She had trusted. She had believed him like a brother.
Not anymore.
Now she listened to Mei, who told her to protect them. She listened to Lilian, whose sacrifice had saved hundreds, perhaps thousands of sooths from losing the only cover they had. She listened to her father, whose heart she finally saw. His words passed on a love for the truth, but his actions passed on love for the people. For them, he’d given up everything, truth included. But bloodstained or hallowed, cursed or celebrated, named or nameless, he had never surrendered. He’d filled the throne hall with ghosts; he’d returned to face them all the same.
Hesina would too.
Because tomorrow at the sixth gong strike, she wasn’t going to die.
She dragged the shaguo of congee close and choked it down. Then she closed her eyes and began to think.
She couldn’t simply escape. If the Tenets held her people in the throes of hatred, then she would continue her parents’ work of trying to destroy it, with or without her throne.
As she pieced together a plan, the outer prison doors whined.
More visitors? Becoming a fallen queen was doing wonders for her popularity.
