Descendant of the Crane(43)

Then he stepped back and erased the worry from his face.

The gesture moved Hesina more than any logical argument could. “I will.”

With one last breath drawn under the cool shade of the stone tunnel, she stepped out into the daylight. She swung into her saddle and surveyed her entourage.

Four guards, one scout, and Akira, the recipient of some dubious glances as he trotted his steed to her side. The others hadn’t seen him fight. They didn’t know he was helping her find the truth outside of the trial. Hesina wanted to keep him close as he investigated the gas in the vial, so that she could track his progress and perhaps share hers—and the existence of the book—once she made headway worth speaking of.

But right now, he felt a little too close. The rising sun that gilded the hills and valleys between them and Kendi’a gilded him, too, lightening his hair to wheat and plating silver over his gray eyes. It stole Hesina’s breath to see the ex-convict thoroughly transformed—before he opened his mouth, at least.

“You sure you want to give a robber a horse?”

Her head cleared. “Representative,” she corrected. “Remember that.”

Then she snapped the reins.

She had the Eleven to thank for her passable riding skills. They’d decided that no ruler, man or woman, was above learning the grit of their own lands. The journey would be rough, but she could weather it. Negotiations could fail, but she had to try.

“Jia!” she cried, leaning into the wind. The world whipped past. This time, she was the one making it fly. “Jia!”



They set a hard pace, stopping only to change horses every fifty li. Aches and pains plagued Hesina, hindering her ability to appreciate the crystal-clear basins, emerald rice paddies, and bamboo forests around them. But gems of life were sewn into every corner. When they cut through mountain passes, golden-tailed monkeys chattered on the crags overhead. When they forded streams, red-crowned cranes, rumored to be the animal counterparts of immortal sages, crossed alongside them.

With every gasp and glimpse of beauty, Hesina found it harder and harder to accept this fertile, dew-crowned land as hers. Rather, it became easier to accept it hadn’t always been hers. In ancient times, cranes had been the size of horses. Now their heads only came to her stallion’s chest. The relic emperors, believing the blood of the birds to be an ingredient in the elixir of immortality, had hunted them to near-extinction.

The land also bore scars of the past. Tombstones appeared on the roadside as they approached Tricent Gorge at the end of the week. The water levels had receded under the Eleven’s reign, but the gorge, exaggerated in myths to be a thousand li deep—hence the name Tricent—had flooded biannually in the past, drowning tens of thousands at a time. On the morning of the crossing, even the toughest of Hesina’s guards forewent breakfast. Their faces were as white as the rapids below by the time they cleared the swaying bamboo bridge.

When night saturated the sky, starting from the distant Ning peaks, the scout would ride ahead while the rest of them pitched camp. The guards would draw their shifts, and Hesina would go to Akira. He’d packed a small burner, jars filled with multicolored powders, a set of silver spoons, and the vial of golden gas. Except that it wasn’t a gas anymore. And it wasn’t gold. He had condensed the poison into an orange-toned liquid that Hesina watched him dilute with water, boil off, and dilute again. Whenever she inquired after his process, his responses ranged from “I’m not sure” to “thinking” to “burning things.”

Sometimes there was no response. Akira would merely finish whatever he was doing, take up his rod, and begin to carve.

“Monsters roam at night,” he’d say, and Hesina would stare, unsure how to take his words. But she’d grown accustomed to uncertainty around Akira, to the point she didn’t mind it. She was content to watch him work until he eventually dozed off. Then she would remove her mother’s book from her satchel.

It was infuriating, the book. It would trick her into thinking she was reading it. The characters would crawl through her pupils and chant their secret language, and the itch of knowing would fill her subconscious as if it’d been etched upon her bones. But the second her mind cleared, the knowing vanished. The characters devolved into many-legged insects again. Night after night, Hesina found herself at the edge of this precipice. And night after night, she resigned herself to three pathetic observations.

The first: Each column of text was short. The entire book seemed to be comprised of quotes rather than paragraphs.

The second: A set of three characters always appeared at the end of each quote, as if the authors all shared the same surname.

The third: The book had doubled as a travelogue. Sketches of foreign plants, landscapes, and weaponry were crammed in the margins, and drawings of Kendi’an sandstone citadels, Ning ice pagodas, and Ci porcelain-tiled mansions were stitched between the pages.

There was a fourth observation, if it counted: The book refused to be deciphered.

More than once, Hesina caught herself looking to Akira for answers. Yet she never woke him. He didn’t mutter or stir in his sleep, but the space between his brows would knot. A knot would form in Hesina’s own chest, and she’d keep an eye on him until his brow smoothed and his head settled. He was no more than a boy, really, a boy with powder-stained fingertips and hair that was always falling out of its tie, begging to be brushed back by a careful hand.