Descendant of the Crane(21)

The work of sooths, Sanjing had claimed.

Fear streaked into her revulsion, one marbling around the other, a tumor that blocked her senses, allowing her to catch only a handful of what the man said next.

He’d been captured…Kendi’ans…drenched him in…blood of sooths…let…burn…strapped into saddle…given one mission…

“—you’ll pay.” The whistling had turned to gurgling, the man’s every breath and word greased with blood. “They wanted me to tell you that you’ll pay for your ancestors’ crimes.”

Then he choked to a stop.

Hesina lurched forward, hand outstretched, while Caiyan shouted for water. As someone rushed in with a goblet, the man slumped forward.

He didn’t move again.

Hesina’s hand remained outstretched, reaching. For what, she didn’t know. She lowered her arm as the shouts started up again, her fingers closing and her nails biting into her palms.

“It was the sooths!”

“It was the Kendi’ans!”

“Our queen is right! Our king was murdered!”

“A trial! A trial! A trial!”

People knelt at her feet, praising her name. Ministers came up, offering her their guidance through the trial. Hesina’s jaw locked against a scream. She was queen of a populace united, and she’d never felt so powerless.





II


TRIAL


The king blinked at the mess sprawled upon his daughter’s bed. A pouch of millet, a wooden sword, the white jade hairpin he’d given her years ago…

What are you doing, Little Bird?

I’m running away.

Without me?

She started to pack. You wouldn’t come even if I asked. He watched her struggle to fit the sword into the satchel. You’d say your place is at the palace. But I have nothing here.

You have Lilian and Caiyan.

Sanjing’s mean when I play with them. I’d rather have no friends at all.

The king took the sword out of her grasp. Here, let me. He strapped it across her back. How about this—let’s play stone, silk, and sickle. If I win, you stay.

She frowned as she considered. You have to too. You have to promise that you’ll stay forever if I win.

He agreed to her conditions. So they played. It was a game of reflexes, which he’d had many, many years to perfect. When he saw her small hand start to form stone, he made sickle, because he wanted her to win. He wanted—as ill-advised as is twas—to make a promise he couldn’t keep.





SEVEN





WHEN THE INNER PALACE IS IN TURMOIL, SO IS THE COURT.

ONE OF THE ELEVEN ON POLYGAMY


THEY SPEND MORE TIME IN THEIR BEDS THAN ON THEIR THRONES. WHAT MAN WITH TWENTY CONCUBINES WOULDN’T DO THE SAME?

TWO OF THE ELEVEN ON POLYGAMY

Hesina couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept.

At first, it was because she saw the burned rider wherever she looked. His face was the clump of tea leaves at the bottom of her cup. His voice was the whine and creak of her mother’s carriage when it rolled out of the Eastern Gate, returning the dowager queen to the Ouyang Mountains the dawn after her daughter’s coronation.

Then, it was because she couldn’t sleep. A queen simply didn’t have enough hours in the day. If she wasn’t writing letters to Kendi’a, demanding an explanation and requesting negotiations, she was reading about the sooths, trying to understand just how much of a threat they’d be in a purely hypothetical war.

It was thankless research. Books contradicted each other or stated things she already knew: sooths were evil, not all sooths had magic, and sooths couldn’t lie about their visions without truncating their life spans. One tome, which Hesina discounted because it had more pictures than words, claimed that sooths added a year to their natural life spans for every true vision shared. Some had lived centuries by virtue of honesty.

Maybe this was why so many books on the sooths had been burned, thought Hesina dryly. Imagine the outrage if schoolchildren found a shortcut to immortality! But if being well read was, in fact, the only way to godhood, then Hesina must have been halfway there. To top off all her paperwork, her page had delivered a report on the court officials with connections to Kendi’a and hundreds of their archived memorials as handwriting samples. The stacks were huge, towering in spires on her desk. As Hesina went through them, more and more people gathered on the terraces outside the palace. Everyone was waiting for the trial to open. There was a murderer roaming the kingdom, and they wanted the person found.

Hesina did too. But she’d also found murder in her own people’s eyes, and she couldn’t help but unfold, refold, and unfold the Investigation Bureau’s memorandum, creasing it like her brow. Justice was a muscle, Xia Zhong had said, but was it strong enough to withstand the people’s rage? Was the Bureau strong enough?

Some nights, she took her questions to the throne hall. She would stride down the enamel walk of python inlay, ascend the altar-like dais of black lacquer, and sit, a reredos fitted with twelve zitan and soapstone panels rising at her back, an empty assembly ground framed with faux gateways and cinnabar pillars spreading before her. Impossibly small beneath an impossibly high caisson ceiling commissioned by the relic emperors, Hesina would ask for advice and expect no reply. Vassals needed sleep, and none of their voices came close to her father’s.