Descendant of the Crane(57)

“Leave.” Hesina closed her eyes, not wanting to see Ming’er’s expression, and reopened them when all the maids had swept out.

Her chambers were deathly quiet as she rose from the vanity and went to her desk. She removed the bundle from her satchel and peeled back the crude silk, corner by corner, until the book lay revealed at the center.

Again, Hesina traced the three characters on the cover with a forefinger. Again, she swept a hand over the crinkled first page, as if she could dust away the barrier between the words and her mind. She needed answers more than ever, but the book didn’t care.

“I’m lost,” she admitted to the silence. No matter where she turned, she couldn’t find a way out.

Lost and trapped, like the time she’d made a wrong turn and found herself in a secret passageway longer and wider than any of the others she had known. It was her father who found her hours later, who brought her back to his rooms, brewed a pot of chrysanthemum tea, and lit every single candle. He rocked away her fears. He taught her how to never lose her way again.

How do you learn one passageway? You don’t start by looking at the differences. You look for the similarities, the patterns that link the new to the old. Now, how do you learn all the passageways of the world?

Memorize them?

Even Caiyan can’t do that. No, you breathe, and follow the way.

What way?

The way of the breath. The way of things we know, but do not notice. Instinct, you could call it. The most basic of truths. So breathe. And again. And again, until you forget you are deliberately breathing. Search until you forget you are deliberately searching.

From the start, she’d been fighting against the book. Now she surrendered. Just as the pitch-black of a passageway would help her pick up on a change in the cut of stones, or a whistle of air signaling an exit nearby, the utter darkness of unknowing opened her mind to the words—not their meanings, but their shapes, the rhythm of their march up her skull, the clicking of their secret language. She ingested one unreadable character at a time, then faster, until they filled her like cicadas in a jar, scrambling over one another, fighting to be heard.

Breathe, her father reminded. She’d lost him, lost her most treasured possession from him, but his voice lived on in her ear. Breathe.

And again.

And again.

One insect clicked louder than the others. It was a thing of many legs, but its core was comprised of three downward strokes sitting atop two jagged, overlapping lines.

Look for the similarities.

It could have been three downward strokes atop the character for mountain.

It could have been the Yan word for truth.

Every muscle in Hesina’s body stilled. How had she not seen? And how could she have forgotten? When the Eleven burned the relic books and opened schools to commoners and women, they hadn’t invented a new language. They’d merely pruned the complex version, removing extraneous strokes, sometimes by the dozen, condensing core radicals. But roots of the new language extended back to the old.

To learn, her mind had needed to unlearn. Different associations now chimed, brought together by that missing breeze.

Slowly, Hesina flipped the book back to the first page. Swept her hand over the creases, and lifted it away to the column of words beneath.

Some were too far removed from the simplified characters for her to read. But others she could guess:


WHAT IS TRUTH? SEEK IT. WRITE IT. GOOD KINGS PAY TO HEAR IT. BUT IN TRYING TIMES, TRUTH IS THE FIRST THING WE .

—ONE OF THE ELEVEN ON TRUTH

She shut the cover. Traced over the three characters running vertically on the right-hand side. Two she could read. As for the one she couldn’t…the longer she stared at it, the more it looked like what it represented. Short, vertical strokes nestled within a box of closed strokes.

Quotes on a page.

Adages in a tome.

Tenets.


TENETS OF ELEVEN

Hesina kept her finger on the cover, convinced that in the next moment, the next breath, the characters would turn to insects again, and this whole revelation would be some hallucination born out of frustration. But it stayed solid under her fingertip, this book that’d shaped their laws, their customs, their minds and hearts and souls. The original Tenets. A relic, lost—until now.





SEVENTEEN





INSTINCT IS THE MOST BASIC OF TRUTHS.

ONE OF THE ELEVEN ON TRUTH


IT’S ALSO DAMN STUPID AT TIMES.

TWO OF THE ELEVEN ON TRUTH

Book in hand, Hesina plunged into the secret corridor connecting her study to Akira’s. The shadows accepted her as if she were one of their own. But she wasn’t, not like Mei. The swordswoman had worn darkness as a cloak, though it hadn’t been enough to protect her in the end.

Hesina hadn’t been enough.

But now she had answers. She had hope. She tore past the lacquered panels, steps never surer. She picked up speed until not even the shadows could cling to her, pushing through the panel at the corridor’s end without pausing for breath.

“Akira?” She cleared the linen tapestry with an arm as she entered. “Akira, are you—”

She stopped in her tracks.

The burner in the center of the floor was still going. It belched out smoke that clouded against the beamed ceiling while Akira sat in the corner, unmoving.

The book in Hesina’s hand hit the ground.