Descendant of the Crane(111)

“She is. But don’t worry. I have the guards hunting her down.”

“Good,” the minister whispers over him. “Dead or alive, it’s good that she’s gone.” He shudders, clearly shaken.

Caiyan agrees. It’s good that she’s gone.



His memory of that night glistens like a wound that’s never closed.

It had been right after the incident at the pond. Water had washed away most of the blood, and the freezing temperatures had crystalized what had soaked through his sleeve. He had told her that he was fine. He told her brother, who’d looked scared for once, that he was fine. Only he knew that he wasn’t fine, but he had no one to go to, Lilian least of all. He hated making her worry.

He’d hidden in his room, and when the shaking wouldn’t stop, he’d piled on the blankets. That’s how the king had found him: feverish, weak from blood loss, incoherent, but not incoherent enough to forget who he was. What he was.

He had tried lying to the king too.

He remembers everything so clearly. How the king sat at his bedside. How he looked at him with warm eyes, as if he were a true son. How his lips barely moved when he spoke those two words, so soft, so loud.

I know.

The king asked him what the weather would be like tomorrow. In a daze, he’d answered. The king asked him what the cooks would make for a feast a week from now. In less of a daze, he’d answered.

Question by question, truth by truth, the magic in his veins came to his aid, and the wound scabbed over.



That had been the beginning. Of late-night conversations over meaningless subjects, debates for the sake of entertaining new perspectives. No question seemed too big in the king’s study, and so Caiyan asked the one that’d been on his mind since the night he healed:

How did you know?

After all, he was nothing but careful.

The king poured him a cup of tea. Long ago, a sooth told me that I’d find a pair of twins, a boy and girl, on the roadside. He said that their veins would contain the blood I helped to spill, and that by protecting them, I might protect my own daughter from my legacy.

Long ago turned out to be three hundred years. The blood that the king had spilled turned out to be sooth. As for the king’s legacy, that was the legacy of One of the Eleven. By the time the king told Caiyan the truth about himself and the queen, the tea had gone cold.

He never saw the king as his father after that. But he didn’t hate him either, despite what the king had done to dismantle the power structures of the old era. Was that betrayal of his kind? He wasn’t sure. He’d always been overly rational, and to him, three centuries equaled many a lifetime and many a chance to start anew. The more the king told him about his hopes for a land where all were equal, the more he believed that the man once called One was trying to heal the kingdom’s wounds.

He still had questions though. You haven’t taught her to love the sooths.

I taught her to love the truth. You taught her to love learning. Your sister taught her to fight for what is right. Her mother taught her the pain of not being accepted for something she can’t control.

Those are things all children learn, he pointed out.

They are.

Not all children can end an era of hatred.

I want to give her a choice. Would you rather force one onto her?

He hadn’t known the answer then. But over time, as he read more about exactly what it took to end an era, his opinion began to form. As he watched her grow, he realized he wanted to preserve that smile she’d once shown him. His opinion solidified.

Last year, he’d finally reached the conclusion that it was better for her to never face a choice at all. He would end the era for her. He would save her from staining her hands.

Last year was also when the king had deemed it time. She’s ready.

Caiyan had disagreed.

Do you want to make your people wait any longer?

Of course not. But he could help his people and protect her at the same time.

The king couldn’t understand his reasoning. Love is giving someone the freedom to choose.

Love, to him, was protecting someone from unnecessary risk. But he didn’t say that. Instead he asked the king how he’d present the choice to his daughter.

By removing myself from the picture. My death will set her on the path of a private investigation. I’ll lay out all the clues. If she continues on her own volition and learns the truth about who I am, and still desires to rule, then that is her choice. But whatever you do, you mustn’t let her pursue a trial.

The king didn’t need to explain why. Ministers with political agendas would view a trial that significant as ripe fruit for the plucking. Then, the princess wouldn’t be faced with a choice, but a monstrous rupture of everything wrong with this kingdom.

It was what the king wanted to avoid—and what Caiyan needed to have happen. A series of monstrous ruptures would break her will. It’d force her to leave. If she left, she would be safe. It’d take a revolution to end the hatred against his people, and revolutions were dangerous things.

Promise me, Caiyan, the king had said. Promise me that you’ll be her guide.

So he’d promised. Then he’d gone to the queen, suspecting her opinion to be different from the king’s.

Why do you think I care? she’d asked after he revealed what her husband had planned.

He was always watching, always listening. Because she reminds you of yourself, so much so that you can’t bear to keep her close.