Descendant of the Crane(18)

“Make sure he eats.” Ideally, Akira would put on a few jin between now and the trial. “As for clothes…” Unfortunately, there was no time for tailor-made. “Buy him the best set of scholar robes you can find.” Hair! She’d almost forgotten hair. “And have him see a barber. I want him well-groomed.”

“Understood, dianxia. But there is one thing…Is he strong?”

“What?”

“Is he fast?” asked her page. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to catch him if he runs.”

“Oh.” Hesina leaned back in her seat. “Don’t worry.”

Her page frowned, worried. “A newly freed convict can be unpredictable. Perhaps a guard should accompany us.”

Hesina had considered it. She had the most to lose, after all, if Akira slipped away. But she wanted a representative she could trust, not a mule on a tether. If he broke his promise, she would consider it an arrow dodged. “No, it’s fine. You won’t be able to catch him if he runs, so don’t try.”

Lilian entered as the page left to his new assignments. “Poor thing. I’ve never seen someone look so confused. What did you do to him?”

Hesina fiddled with one of her new bronze scales. “Nothing scandalous.”

“Good. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss out.” Then Lilian lifted the ruqun hanging over her arm. “I come bearing gifts from the workshop. Do you like it?”

“It looks like a funeral gown.” Which, Hesina assumed, meant it was her coronation gown. The entire ensemble—from the billowy sleeves to the brocade bixi panel that would hang down the center of the skirts—was white. Bleached of color and of life, cut from coarse linen instead of silk. That was the point, of course. The coronation was more of a commemoration than a celebration, a time to remember that the peace of present had been built on the blood of the past.

Lilian cocked her head to the side. “It is lacking a bit of color. Shall I spruce it up?”

“Please don’t.” Hesina would cause enough of a stir by revealing the king’s true cause of death. She would wear the white, and it would suit her, because while the others mourned the heroes of the past, she would mourn the end of her life as a princess.

It’s for Father, she reminded herself after Lilian left and her maids streamed in. When they dusted her face with rice powder, she pretended she and her father were powdering their opera masks. When they helped her into the ruqun, she pretended she and her father were trying on costumes. But when they started pulling at her hair, forcing it into some gravity-defying coiffure, Hesina wished her father were really here to spirit her off into a secret passageway.

He would never rescue her again. Instead it was Ming’er, her lady-in-waiting, who swept in and shooed the maids away.

“How you’ve grown,” Ming’er cooed as she took her place by the vanity and set out a selection of pins. “Just yesterday, you were barely the length of my forearm, and you hated being bathed.”

Babies were odd creatures, Hesina concluded. “I hope I haven’t been too troublesome.”

“Oh, my flower. Time is the only troublesome one.”

For Ming’er, Hesina tried to smile. Then she glanced down at the array of hairpins before her. Garnet, opal, sapphire. Jewels befitting a queen. But one was missing.

“Ming’er, where’s…”

Her voice trailed off as Ming’er slowly set the final pin in the center. A crane in flight rose at the end of the white jade length, its wings spread and feathers individually carved, the longer ones tipped in obsidian.

Her father had gifted her this pin as he’d gifted his love: from the moment of her birth, when her hands had been too small to grasp its form. Her eyes moistened. She closed them, hiding the tears as Ming’er combed her hair—one stroke, two strokes, three strokes before the doors flung apart with a bang.

Hesina’s eyes flew open. Her maids fell to their knees and pressed themselves down in koutou, lending her a direct view of her mother.

The queen stood in a shaft of noonday light. Her face was pinched, her hair untamed. The cross-wrapped front of her thin underrobes gaped open, showing the cord of scar tissue at her throat.

Hesina’s own throat bobbed as she swallowed. She didn’t know what could have possibly left a scar so thick and so complete, a collar in its own right, but the sight of it exposed set her on edge.

Her mother drifted through the sitting room, under the painted beam, past two silk screens embroidered with cranes, and into Hesina’s inner chamber.

“Leave us,” she said when she reached her daughter’s vanity. Ming’er set down a pin. Hesina’s heart sank with it. The dowager queen had given a direct order; Ming’er couldn’t disobey. Still, Hesina hated to see the woman she cared for bow in submission. Ming’er drew the silk screens shut as she retreated, enclosing mother and daughter.

The dowager queen lifted a lock of Hesina’s hair and began curling it around a dowel, and Hesina tensed at the uncharacteristic gentleness. She should have said something daughterly, but there was no point in pretense with her mother, so she stayed silent and fixed her gaze on the slant of bronze mirror reflecting both their faces.

The resemblance never failed to startle Hesina. With irises more black than brown, skin more olive than peach, and ebony hair that never faded in the sun, each strand straight as bamboo, she and her mother were like the same person at two different points in life.