Descendant of the Crane(28)
She was met with the sight of the entire Bureau cowering like rabbits, taking up refuge behind the long investigation tables.
They feared her.
The realization stunned Hesina for all of a heartbeat before she hardened. Good. They should fear her, because she didn’t know what she might do. Her gaze darted from the Bureau members to the tables to the contents of the tables. Her eyes widened.
Slowly, she walked to one of the tables.
It was stacked high with books on genealogy.
This was truth.
She walked to another table, papered with family trees of courtiers from inter-kingdom bloodlines.
This was justice.
She walked to a third table, where a single sheet of paper listed names, from palace servants to ministers, of people with Kendi’an relations.
This was her father’s truth and justice.
She rested her fingertips atop that final sheet. It hilled as she drew her fingers in, becoming a small mountain under her hand.
She crushed the mountain.
“Elevens!” A bellow came from the open doors at her back. “What—”
The director stopped in his tracks as she turned.
Heat pooled in Hesina’s fists. She advanced on the director, and he fell back.
“Dianxia. Please. Allow me to explain—”
He was a buzzing fly, speaking some language Hesina couldn’t understand. Her eyes narrowed. She wanted to silence him. She might have, if she’d stared at his face a second longer, those lips of his smacking with excuses. But instead, her gaze caught on a copy of the Tenets on the table behind him.
Its edges were stained green.
Green like the letters Sanjing had confiscated.
She fell upon the book like a wolf on a carcass, seizing it and tearing it open.
There. Right in the middle. A folio of torn-out pages, the stationery repurposed for something other than the Eleven’s philosophies—something such as letters.
“Whose is this?” Hesina spun on the Bureau. No one replied. “Whose?”
“Minister Xia’s,” a young Bureau member answered shakily, earning a glare from the director. “He lent it to us to ensure that our investigation complied with the Tenets.”
Xia Zhong.
There was a limit to how much something could break. Hesina’s trust had already been broken today. It could not break more. With calm and almost frightening clarity, she suddenly knew why Xia Zhong’s copy of the Tenets was here, and it had nothing to do with the Eleven’s philosophies.
She grabbed the book and left, chest burning as she practically ran all the way back to her rooms. She flung into her study and lunged at her desk, papers going every which way, memorials avalanching.
In the mess of hundreds of documents, she found one authored by Xia Zhong. She wasn’t a scholar of the letter arts. Her own calligraphy was lamentable. But she knew enough about it to match the weight and style of Xia Zhong’s handwriting to the letter writer’s. She then took the letters and fitted them into the Tenets. The torn-out ridges lined up perfectly. The green tint of the letters and of the book became one.
Xia Zhong was the letter writer. Xia Zhong was feeding Kendi’a information, helping them raid Yan’s borderland villages. Hesina’s shock wore off like medicine; confusion and hurt panged behind her eyes. Why? Why?
Even a monk has to want something.
Hesina whirled on her pile of reports on officials with connections to Kendi’a. She hadn’t examined it closely before because everyone, it seemed, had some sort of tie to the land of sand and fire, be it an acre of land or a twice-removed cousin. Now she scanned the tiny characters for Xia Zhong’s name. He wasn’t in the first report, or the second. She flipped to the third and found a list ministers involved in the Kendi’an salt industry.
Xia Zhong wasn’t listed.
He was listed, however, in having a role in the Yan salt trade. Hesina inhaled sharply when she saw the numbers. In the last year, he’d purchased two domestic salt mines and invested in four. A significant number. A dangerous number, considering that before relations had soured, Yan imported most of its salt from Kendi’a.
Xia Zhong and salt. Xia Zhong and investments. Xia Zhong, with his ratty robes and holey roof, and profits.
He was doing this for…money?
Hesina collapsed onto the floor, surrounded by scattered papers, something cold and damp in her hand. She uncurled a fist and blinked at the Investigation Bureau’s list of names, now compacted to the size of a small stone. She’d been gripping it so tightly that it’d become a part of her. It’d always been a part of her, this trial. She’d brought it into existence.
She wouldn’t let anyone kidnap it.
She wasn’t sure how much time passed before she picked herself up. All she knew was that the sun was going down, and the room was as dark as her mind when she slipped a single letter out of the stack, placed it into her sleeve, and made for the courtyards.
NINE
WEALTH SHOULD NOT DETERMINE FATE.
ONE OF THE ELEVEN ON SOCIAL HIERARCHY
EVERY KINGDOM HAS NOBLES, BUT NOT EVERY KINGDOM HAS ONES THAT REIGN AS KINGS.
TWO OF THE ELEVEN ON SOCIAL HIERARCHY
The gingko trees had shed all at once, leafing the ponds in gold. But the evening was abnormally warm for fall as Hesina traveled through the columned galleries, reminding her of the weather that night two weeks ago, when she’d gone into the red-light district. Except this time, she had nothing to hide. She was a queen on her way to a minister, and whether or not he wanted to, he would have to answer to her.