Descendant of the Crane(71)

Her final request was protect them.

Hesina spun on Sanjing. “Does she have family?”

“Yes,” he answered, still looking dazed.

“Take me to them.”

His eyes cleared, and he nodded.

Hesina glanced out his windows, to the sun hung like a silver disk in the sky. The taste of ashes returned to her tongue. They had to act quickly. If the people had gutted the Silver Iris because they’d heard about a vanishing village, they would do much, much worse now that hundreds of eyes had confirmed a sooth’s existence in the imperial court.

“Now,” she ordered Sanjing, a plan coming together.

He’d already advanced to the door. “Step aside,” he barked at the others, fingers wrapping around his hilt.

No one moved.

“We’re coming with you,” said Caiyan.

Sanjing started to unsheathe. Hesina stopped him. “It’s not safe,” she said to the others.

“You can come with us,” Sanjing said to Akira. “As for the rest of you, give me a good reason why I should trust you. Then prove to me you won’t slow us down.”

“We care about your sister as much as you do,” said Caiyan. A vein twitched in Sanjing’s neck, and Hesina clutched his arm tighter despite her stinging palms. “And you may need more than two people. Abandon us, if we slow you down.”

“Fine,” Hesina said. It was decided. Sanjing might not have trusted them, but she could—with the one exception.

She turned on Rou. “Why are you here?”

“B-because—”

“Are you a sympathizer?” Sanjing pressed.

Rou swallowed and nodded. “My mother always says we fear what we don’t know. She says it’s why people stay away from her and spread rumors about her face. I…I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand what it’s like for the sooths, but I can understand a little.”

Hesina exchanged a glance with Sanjing. Rou was right. They feared the things they didn’t know. They made them less than human.

And Caiyan was right too. Time was of the essence. They would need all the help they could get.

“Change your robes,” Sanjing finally said to Rou. “I can spot that color from a li away.”



They emerged from the secret passageway and into the abandoned tavern, then stepped straight into the midday hustle. Wheelbarrows and sedans clogged the limestone alleyways ribbed with vendors and their stands. A number of young men and women milled through the streets with rucksacks and bedrolls strapped to their shoulders. The first wave of civil service examinees. They were both a blessing and a curse, stopping every few steps to admire some cultural relic, but also helping Hesina’s group blend in.

That didn’t deter the vendors from foisting their wares onto them.

“Bream!” cried a man, shoving a fistful of the iridescent fish into Rou’s terrified face. “Fresh bream!”

“Hongmu coffins! Genuine redwood! Buy one for your aging parents today!”

Hesina took their harassment as a good sign. No one would be hawking coffins or fish if news of today’s court had reached them. They had to find Mei’s parents before the mob did.

Sanjing led the way to an apothecary on the far edge of the western market sector, squashed between an antique shop and a wine seller. A man stood behind the medicine counter, weighing piles of dried herbs and fanning the knob-handled shaguo on the burner beside him.

“Good afternoon,” he said as they entered. “Are you looking for a preprepared decoction, or…”

His voice trailed off as Hesina lowered her hood. His eyes widened to the whites, and before she could stop him, he thumped to his knees and flattened into koutou. “Dianxia!”

“What’s going on?” A woman emerged from the back cellar with a clay jar under her arm. Strands of gray hair escaped the wrap of her linen kerchief. Her russet eyes shot to her husband, prostrate on the ground.

“You fool! Have you forgotten about your arthritis?”

“T-ting…” Trembling, the man inclined his head in Hesina’s direction, keeping his gaze respectfully lowered.

The woman looked directly at her. “What do you want?”

Hesina hadn’t thought of what she’d say. How did she break it to them that their daughter was to die at sunrise by a thousand cuts?

Directly, perhaps, as Caiyan did. “Your daughter bled in front of the court.”

The father fainted.

The mother stood, still as a figurine. Then, with a crack, the jar under her arm split into a dozen hovering shards as if it’d been smashed. She seized one of the pieces and dropped by her husband, lifting him by the hair, exposing his throat, slashing toward it with that winking ceramic lip—

The shard struck the wood of Akira’s rod.

He wrenched it away and swept the rest of the shards out of reach. “Let’s not be so hasty,” he said as Hesina struggled to make sense of what she’d seen.

Sooth work…Her husband…She’d just tried to kill him—

“Take me to my child,” said Mei’s mother. “I’ll come willingly. Take me, but let me spare him.”

Spare him.

Understanding stabbed Hesina, a knife wrenched sideways by guilt. A person was a soothsayer by blood, and blood was passed from parent to child. By coming here, by declaring Mei a sooth, she was essentially sentencing the entire family to death by a thousand cuts. She’d forgotten because she could afford to forget, having never lived a life of terror and fear herself.