Steel Crow Saga

by Paul Krueger

  An icy hand closed around Xiulan’s heart. Lee was afraid of her.

  Good, a voice snarled. After you opened up to her the totality of your significant resources, this was how she repaid you. She should be terrified.

  That ice around her heart solidified and permeated deeper. She’d been a fool to open herself up so much. Of course Lee had run out on her. That was what people like Lee did. That was what everyone did.

  A hundred fleeting fantasies raced through her, each of a different way she could exact vengeance. She could have Lee jailed again. She could have the pactmark carved out of the woman’s skin, erasing Bootstrap from existence for good. She could use her formidable resources—the same ones she’d so generously offered Lee, stupid White Rat that she was—to track down the rest of Lee’s family, and make their lives miserable, too. Her fury was a bottomless pit, and every fantasy was new fodder to feed it.

  “What is it you were hoping to accomplish here?” she said at long last. “What is it you think you deserve for this little performance of yours?”

  Lee met her gaze. Her eyes were dry, serious, haunted. “Nothing at all.”

  Xiulan didn’t know what she’d expected Lee to say in that moment. But for some reason, she hadn’t expected that.

  TWO HOURS AGO

  The prison wagon was made of heavy oak, drawn by an ox-shade the size of an elephant. Kurihara and the other Steel Cicadas were herded into its back door, encouraged to step lively by the snarling tiger-shades of their captors. Xiulan should have found the sight immensely satisfying: Was it not just like the climax of every Bai Junjie story, where the great detective successfully maneuvered his quarry into a cell?

  But it was difficult for her to savor her victory when her sister refused to treat the afternoon’s proceedings as a loss.

  “I imagine your display of brinksmanship was meant to reprimand me for what I did to your friend in Jungshao,” Xiulan tried as a guard locked the wagon doors tight.

  “No reprimand necessary,” said Ruomei. “Magistrate How was never nearly so important to my plans as he liked to imagine himself. Everything he could do for me, countless others could do as well.”

  Xiulan rolled her eyes. This went back to their childhood in the Palace of Glass. Anytime Ruomei had a setback, she would always claim it had been part of her grander plan to lose in the first place. It made her, among other things, the world’s most frustrating person to play go against.

  “So,” Xiulan said, gesturing to the departing prisoners. “To which work camp do you intend to send our newly captured dissidents, once your new preferred magistrate finds them guilty?” Such duplicity was only to be expected of her dear older sister, but in this case she wasn’t displeased to see Kurihara go. Instrumental as he’d been to getting them to Hagane so swiftly, that didn’t change the fact that he was a criminal and a terrorist who had no place in the new order. And there was the small matter of threatening to melt her face off, which Xiulan wasn’t likely to forget in a hurry, either.

  Ruomei shook her head. “None of the above. I really am sending them back to their families.”

  “What families?” Xiulan spat. “Lord Daisuke of the Kurihara clan festers in a cell like a cluster of mold, ready to hang for the thousands of war crimes on his shoulders.”

  “Your desire to be poetic’s made you mix metaphors,” Ruomei observed. “No mold I know has shoulders…or a neck.”

  “There’s no family to give him back to, Ruomei,” Xiulan said. “To say nothing of the other Steel Cicadas.”

  “Of course there is,” her sister said with a shrug. “They are their families now.”

  Xiulan balked. “What?” she said. A blanket pardon? Unthinkable. “But the Shang they’ve killed—the damage they’ve done—the myriad ways in which they’ve jeopardized the peace!”

  Ruomei shrugged. “All reprehensible. But the Steel Cicadas are from prominent, powerful families in the Tomodanese ruling class.” She cocked her head Xiulan’s way. Xiulan realized she was being challenged.

  “So the ax of justice hangs over all,” Xiulan said with a sneer, “but the rich are free to skirt its edge whenever they please?”

  Whatever test Ruomei intended to set for her, Xiulan could tell she’d failed. Her sister rolled her eyes. “You let too many books do your thinking for you. Use your own brain for once, meimei. You got the best one out of all of us.” The gentleness in her tone was gone, replaced with a hardness far more familiar to Xiulan’s ears. “The Tomodanese have their own complex system of honor and face. The Steel Cicadas will face that judgment, and the consequences that come attached.”

  “So their parents will be mad at them on their way to the gallows,” Xiulan scoffed, as the coachman shouted a command and his ox-shade pulled the wooden cart away from the train station. “How fearsome a fate. And I believe I made myself clear on the subject of the diminutive meimei,” she added.

  Ruomei let out an exasperated sigh. “Once again, you’re not thinking. Say we do things your way and throw them down into the bottom of a zinc mine and have them work their fingers to the bone. We call the families of every soldier they hurt or killed, and tell them all about this mine we’ve put the Steel Cicadas into. What does that get us?”

  “Justice,” Xiulan said simply. “Albeit an ineffective one, considering we would be putting metalpacters in close contact with raw ore…”

  “No,” Ruomei said. “It empowers the remaining Tomodanese nobility, while giving them a convenient reason to be more anti-Shang than ever. They would be far more likely to back the plays of an anti-Shang Steel Lord, to say nothing of Sanbuna and Dahali interests they could advance at our expense. But by giving the new heads of houses back their lives when we had them dead to rights, we gain influence over them. And once we establish that credit with the Tomodanese and reinforce it with time…we have a lever to undermine the Steel Lord whenever we like.”

  Xiulan narrowed her eye. “And the dead soldiers these spoiled children have left in their wake? Are they merely acceptable sacrifices to offer up to the altar of your ambitions, then?”

  “It’s not my ambition.” Ruomei sighed again. “It’s Shang’s. Our country’s far larger than me, and it will outlast me. I only intend to be its steward for a time before I have to pass it on. And if ensuring its good condition means sacrificing a few hundred lives to avert a conflict that could one day take the lives of hundreds of thousands, I’ll do that and consider it a bargain well struck.”

  Xiulan felt something harden in her gut at the sound of her sister’s words. She felt a cold chain of logic running through them, and the moment she sensed herself understanding it, she recoiled. In her mind, it wasn’t Ruomei’s job to make sense, not even a little bit.

  Ruomei produced a slim gold cigarette case and pulled two cigarettes from it. She offered one to Xiulan, who took it. She pulled out her pipe, clenched it in her teeth, and unrolled the cigarette, funneling the now-loose tobacco into the bowl. Ruomei wrinkled her nose. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” she said. “It’s disrespectful to the factory worker who rolled the cigarette, and it only makes the leaf taste worse.”

  Xiulan’s defiant streak burned within her. She dropped the now-empty paper to the asphalt, then tipped a match into the bowl and took a puff. Sure enough, the leaf tasted foul, but at least she was smoking her pipe again, instead of just gnawing on its button.

  Ruomei held out her cigarette for a light. Xiulan knew perfectly well she probably had a light of her own on her somewhere, or else that she could’ve ordered one from any of her retinue. But begrudgingly, she struck a second match and offered it up to her sister, and Ruomei cherried her cigarette on it. “Tell me,” she said with her first sigh of smoke. “Why do you want to be Crane Empress?”

  Tch, Xiulan thought. Such a typically small-minded view of her. Leave it to Ruomei to underestimate her. “Because I want wha
t’s best for the country, not just myself. While you were off playing games at court, I joined the Li-Quan to help reestablish law and order in our reborn country.”

  Ruomei chuckled. “My dear sister,” she said with perfectly inflected condescension, “how do you think a princess got a job working in law enforcement?”

  That brought Xiulan up short. “I…” She’d never even stopped to consider that it could have been anything other than her outstanding mental acumen. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying,” Ruomei said with a roll of her eyes, “that someone—even a princess—without any background in police work only gets recruited into an elite law enforcement agency if there’s somebody behind the scenes. Somebody pulling strings. Valuable political connections,” she added, “cultivated while playing games at court.”

  Xiulan reeled as if she’d been slapped. Her badge had always been a literal mark of pride for her. A bitter tide rose in her. She had to believe Ruomei was lying. She couldn’t believe that the one thing that had been her very own had been given to her—and out of what? Pity? She felt ill in every cell of her battered body.

  Next to her, Ruomei was oblivious to her inner turmoil. She sighed wistfully. “Why have we always been at each other’s throats, Xiulan?”

  Xiulan gaped in disbelief as Ruomei calmly took a drag.

  “Why?” she said eventually.

  “That was the question, yes,” said Ruomei.

  Xiulan chuckled in that way people only did when nothing was funny. “You want to know why the last person I wish to see sit the Snow-Feather Throne is the woman who spent my entire childhood terrorizing me? Who tried to quash any brightness I had within me, so she could shine above the others? Who arranged things so I couldn’t even enjoy a meal in my own home?”

  Ruomei only frowned at that last one. “I was young,” she said. “Perhaps overzealous.”

  “Perhaps?”

  “For Heaven’s sake, they were mushrooms.”

  “You starved your own sister! Just to maintain some semblance of dominance!” Xiulan couldn’t believe she had to spell out something so patently obvious. “If you’re willing to do that, what kind of a queen could you possibly be?”

  “The one Shang needs right now,” Ruomei said, raising her voice for the first time. “Our father is a doddering old fool who finds more comfort in the stories grandmother told him of our past glory than he does in the potential of a bright new age. If he were a man with any vision or ambition left, we could have thrown off Tomodanese rule decades ago, and without Sanbu or Dahal to help us. Decades.”

  Xiulan found herself without words for once. She wasn’t certain she’d ever heard Ruomei speak so candidly in her entire life.

  “Do you know why I’m designated Second Princess, and our oaf of an eldest brother is First Prince?” said Ruomei. “Because even though the old man knows I’m his best choice for successor, he still wants to make me fight for my position.”

  “Are you seriously trying to tell me you shouldn’t have to?” Xiulan snorted with a healthy dose of contempt.

  Ruomei was unfazed. “I’m saying I already won out long ago. I have thirty-two siblings, and the only one who’s ever come close to being my equal is standing right here. And if that woman can’t handle a few mushrooms in her soup,” she added with sudden scorn, “then she’s not really an equal candidate to begin with.”

  Xiulan almost looked around to see which of their siblings had joined them, before she realized how stupid that would make her look. She was so surprised by the compliment, backhanded as it was, that she couldn’t even internalize it. “So,” she said with a long pull from her pipe, “you worked to suppress me because you saw a threat in me?”

  Ruomei raised an eyebrow. “I’ve worked to suppress everybody who stands in my way. You’re just the only one too stubborn to take a hint and fall in line.”

  “So why did you relent so easily just now?” Xiulan said. At last, she could get to the heart of things. “If you see in me the threat of a competent alternative to which Father could look, why provide me with the opportunity to solidify my position?” But no sooner had she posed the question than she understood the answer: “You don’t believe I can. You’re giving me an opportunity to humiliate myself in the most public manner possible, so that Father will have no choice but to unequivocally extend you his favor.”

  “And if it took you that long to figure it out, it would appear I have little about which to be concerned.” Ruomei dropped the cigarette on the sidewalk and didn’t even bother grinding it out. It just lay there on the pavement, smoldering. “You’ve defined your whole life in opposition to me. I’m fine letting you stand unopposed now, because I know it’ll show the whole world what’s left when you take me away: nothing at all.” And then she sauntered toward her waiting car.

  Xiulan clenched her teeth and fists alike as she watched her eldest sister strut away. Today’s victory should have been the sweetest broth she’d ever tasted. But she should have remembered: Any broth Ruomei served her would always come with mushrooms.

  * * *

  —

  It would have been so comforting, to let the stony grip of anger squeeze everything else out of her heart. To act on her every vengeful fantasy in the pursuit of balancing the scales. Anger was not a complex emotion, and there was an overpowering appeal to letting it simplify matters, the way a glacier flattened and smoothed the earth beneath it.

  And yet.

  And yet.

  Xiulan’s exhale was long and painful. “What was that?” she said quietly.

  “You heard me,” Lee said, bristling a little now.

  Xiulan shook her head. “I want to hear you again.”

  Lee gathered herself before answering: “I said, ‘Nothing at all.’ ”

  But this time, when Lee spoke, it wasn’t Lee’s voice Xiulan heard. It was Ruomei’s.

  It’ll show the whole world what’s left when you take me away.

  The words came out of her before she quite realized she was saying them. “I forgive you,” she said simply.

  “You what?” said Lee.

  Xiulan echoed her incredulity, but the longer the words hung in the air, the truer they sounded in her own ears. “I forgive you,” she said again. “When the time came for you to be tested, you failed me as a partner, Lee Yeon-Ji, in every capacity in which I’ve enlisted you as one.” She took a long, deep breath to steady her pounding heart. “And for that, I forgive you.”

  Lee blinked. Xiulan had the distinct impression that she’d probably never heard those words addressed to her before. Xiulan supposed it made sense; they generally only came in response to an apology, and from all appearances Lee was just as unfamiliar with those.

  “But…I ran out on you,” Lee said. “Right when you needed me most, I saved my own skin. I did the same shit I always do.”

  “And then,” Xiulan said gently, “you came back for me. Which,” she added with a gentle caress of Lee’s midriff, “you’ve only done for one other.” A tear glistened in her eye.

  Lee’s mouth hung open in disbelief. “What’re you doing crying, you idiot?” she said. “You’ve got it backward.”

  “Perhaps,” Xiulan said. “But I have you back, and I don’t care about anything else.”

  For a moment, she saw a glimmer in Lee’s own eyes before her partner closed them and leaned in for a kiss that made all Xiulan’s hair stand on end. The frost in her chest thawed and ran. Without the anger to keep it at bay, she felt every single angle and contour of the hurt lodged there. But there was comfort to be found: in the soft lips on hers, the deft fingers slipping her shirt hem out from her trousers…

  She sat up straighter and pulled herself back. “Forgiveness is a, ah, multi-stage process,” she said carefully.

  Lee turned the kind of bashful red Xiulan never would have expecte
d from the thief. “Er, right, sorry,” she muttered. “Old habits.” She smoothed the front of her dress, then reached for the letter on the floor. “Guess you’ll be wanting to read this?”

  Xiulan eyed the letter. The seal on it was unmistakably that of the Mountain Throne. For better or worse, Iron Prince Jimuro had ascended. Ruomei had failed. Strictly speaking, so had she. But her voracious consumption of the Bai Junjie canon had given her a keen eye for story structure, and one thing she knew was that failure did not necessarily mean the end.

  She had so many questions she wanted to ask Lee, about how she’d come to be an envoy for the Steel Lord. Xiulan was certain it would be almost as interesting a story as the misadventure she herself had shared with Sergeant Tala.

  But that misadventure had changed things. She was far more than just an agent of the Li-Quan now.

  Somberly, she nodded for Lee to hand her the letter. “Let’s see what His Brilliance has to say.”

  He didn’t hear the Copper Sages approach. One moment, he was alone in the family shrine; the next, he knew that to no longer be true.

  “Your Brilliance,” came a voice from behind him. An old man’s.

  Jimuro didn’t rise, didn’t even open his eyes. “Is it time?”

  “We’re sorry the moment must come now, of all moments.” A different voice this time; younger, and a woman’s.

  He nodded, then rose and opened his eyes. His vision filled with a grand steel altar, big enough to take up the entire wall by itself. It had been sculpted centuries ago as a replica of the Palace of Steel, every detail lovingly rendered by the finest metalpacters of their age. The lanterns hanging from either side of the room cast distorted reflections in its gleaming surface, so that Jimuro looked as if he were surrounded by ghosts.