Descendant of the Crane(34)

A tiny mountain was painted on one side of the alabaster bottle, a crane on the other. With a thumbnail, Hesina popped the jade bead stopper.

“Careful.” Akira took the bottle from her and sniffed first. He passed it back. “Just incense.”

Hesina raised the soybean-sized opening to her nose. A scent she could have recognized anywhere hit the back of her throat.

Slowly, she lowered the bottle. Her voice rasped when she spoke. “It’s Mother’s.”

Sticks upon sticks of this exact juniper incense had burned while she knelt in her mother’s chambers as a child. What did it mean for this snuff bottle to have shown up on her father’s desk? Hesina’s anxiety grew when Akira didn’t say anything for a long, long time.

“Did anyone have reason to kill your father?” he finally asked.

Before, she wouldn’t have been able to answer. Her heart had been too raw to entertain the notion. But now the wound had scabbed; she spoke around its rough edges. “Xia Zhong.”

She went to her desk and returned with a blank scroll and a brush wet with ink. “He wants Yan to go to war against Kendi’a. Father never would have allowed it.”

Her hand shook as she wrote the minister’s name, botching three strokes out of ten—not that he deserved any better.

Akira took the brush when she was done. “What about the people close to the king? Like your sister. Lilian, wasn’t it?”

Her gaze jerked to him.

He patted his neck. “We had an agreement.”

“I’m not so eager to behead everyone,” Hesina muttered. Still, she chewed uneasily on her cheek as Akira wrote Caiyan and Lilian after Xia Zhong, his brushstrokes quick and sharp.

“And the dowager queen?”

“Mother couldn’t have.” Hesina’s denial was vehement. It didn’t matter if the snuff bottle was the dowager queen’s, or if illness of the mind made her say terrible things. Her father had loved her mother. He would have wanted Hesina to defend her. “She’s at the mountains for months at a time. In fact, she’s there right now.”

Akira got to his feet. “Then she won’t mind if we search her rooms.”

“We—” Shouldn’t.

But he was already at the door, waiting.

Just a search, Hesina told herself as she reluctantly joined him.

They made sure to travel through the secret corridor and exit through Akira’s room. Even then, several servants gawked as the queen emerged, unattended, from her representative’s quarters. Heat rising to her cheeks, Hesina averted her eyes and focused on the route to her mother’s wing. The sooner they got this over with, the better.

Yet at the dowager queen’s opal-inlaid doors, she faltered. While Akira cut across the sitting room, Hesina gingerly stepped around the gourd-shaped stools and matching tables. The curtains were drawn. What little sunlight eked past was rusty red, making the chamber seem like the heart of a slumbering beast that might rouse if startled.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Hesina jumped as Akira tested the floor with his rod. When he approached the dowager queen’s sleeping chambers, he ducked under the brocade curtains.

After a conflicted moment, Hesina did too.

“We shouldn’t be here,” she whispered as he swept his rod under the vanity, then started opening drawers. The air seemed palpitate in tandem with her heart. She swore she smelled juniper incense, though none of the censers burned.

“Check the bed,” was Akira’s answer.

“Me?”

Akira didn’t reply, too absorbed in turning over some vials and pocketing others.

Hesina checked under the pillow log. Flipped over the embroidered quilt. She found nothing amiss.

Her relief was short-lived; Akira was already moving into the washroom. Hesina followed, overcome with vertigo when she saw the rosewood tub, raised on rooster feet, sitting in its corner.

“You won’t find anything,” she tried to tell Akira again. Her voice sounded as hollow as the tub did in response to Akira’s rod.

“You might.” He went on to examine the poultice cubbies built into the wall. “You’re her daughter. Try to think of where she might place something important…”

His voice faded as Hesina stared at the tub, a memory appearing as clear as yesterday. It’d been after kneeling for several hours in her mother’s sitting room. Petals had skimmed the surface of the water like little skiffs. Clouds of steam rose and parted, unveiling her mother, shoulders bare, eyes closed. Hesina had only peeked into the washroom to ask if she could leave. She wasn’t supposed to see the scar around her mother’s neck split open, blood weeping against her pruned skin.

She’d tried to back away.

Tripped.

Her mother’s eyes had snapped open.

Pain crackled up Hesina’s spine, jerking her into the present, where she’d backed out of the washroom and straight into her mother’s altar. Rubbing at what was sure to become a hideous bruise, she lifted her eyes to the pillar of stone, carved with the immortal gods the relic emperors had aspired to become.

Her mother’s illness of the mind had stumped the Imperial Doctress so thoroughly that she’d prescribed spiritual medicine. It hadn’t worked. But the altar had stayed, likely to the dismay of the maids. Altars were a hassle to maintain. They had to be cleaned a certain way. Positioned a certain way.