Descendant of the Crane(82)

“There’s something I must tell you, Little Bird.”

She braced herself for another lecture on the growing tensions between Kendi’a and Yan.

“I may not always be here for you.”

She missed the father whose smile was given freely.

“In my absence, there will be others who want the best for you.”

The years have passed. She no longer believed that her father could keep all his promises—even the impossible ones—but she wished she could go back to those summer nights of cicada song floating through his fan-shaped windows, of falling asleep on his lap with his hand crowning her head, of stories and explorations of passages yet to be discovered.

“But only you can decide the life you want to live.”

Maybe if she weren’t heir to the throne.

“Carve your own fate. Understand, Little Bird?”

She didn’t, but for her father, she lied. “I understand.”



A hand rested on her forehead, cool and dry against her hot skin.

“Queens are supposed to stay away from bombs.”

That sounded reasonable enough to Hesina.

“And assassins,” said the voice, much quieter.

Probably. Some assassins carried bombs and knives and poisons. But maybe there were other assassins who only carried rods.

Some, she wanted to say, but not all.



Wake up, Little Bird.



She shouldn’t have woken up.

She should have died. Mei had died. Gone without a trace, whispered the Doctress’s apprentices when they thought Hesina was unconscious. They puttered around her, dabbing her forehead with a damp washcloth. Not even a body to collect.

They squeaked when Hesina asked, “Where’s my brother?” They flinched when her voice rose. “Where is he?”

“In better shape than you,” answered the Imperial Doctress as she swept in. And then, before Hesina could cry ugly tears of relief, a medicinal candle was lit and the fumes sank her into a drug-induced sleep. Dreaming of One-Eye’s leering face, she convinced herself that he was her father’s poisoner. Never mind the logistics of how the sooth would have procured some legendary poison and known how to use it. He hated her. He hated the Eleven. It made perfect sense to her murky unconscious. In her dreams, she hunted him down and avenged Mei.

But when Hesina next woke, she stared at the turquoise-stained wood of the ceiling—adorned with golden turtles and yuanyang ducks and ginseng sachets looping down like vines—without emotion.

She should have died.

Why hadn’t she?

Was it because she was an abomination, just like her father? Had she died and somehow come back? Was Sanjing an abomination too?

Alive. The Imperial Doctress said he was alive. But the Imperial Doctress had also claimed her father was dead. Who could Hesina believe?

Only herself.

She needed to see her brother with her own two eyes.

She deforested her arms of acupuncture needles. They pinged onto the floor. She sat up—and almost fainted. Her back was a map of pain.

Gut twisting, Hesina drew her hand away from the valleys and ridges of burned flesh and slipped her legs over the bedside. The air felt cool on her shins, the huanghuali floor solid beneath her feet.

Stand, Hesina.

So she did.

She tried and failed, in her usual fashion.

She hit the floor with a thump that rattled her teeth and quaked through her skull. But nothing was as loud as her scream. The skin on her back was melting off. It had to be. Tears swam down her face by the time the Imperial Doctress flapped through the fretworked doors, a horde of apprentices trailing her.

“Fools! Who let the candle burn out?”

Three apprentices rushed to relight the medicinal candle. Four surrounded Hesina, dabbing at her face.

The explosion of activity was too much. “Don’t touch me,” ordered Hesina, and the apprentices scampered back.

“Dianxia—” gritted out the Imperial Doctress.

“Take me to my brother.” Hesina let some of the more seasoned apprentices help her to her feet.

“I’ll summon him.”

“No.” She couldn’t meet him in a room that reeked of her weaknesses. “I’ll go to him.”

“In due time,” said the Doctress. “You’ve been bedridden for eight days.”

Too long.

“When your strength returns, we—”

Hesina grabbed onto a shelf lined with delicate ceramic jars of the Doctress’s precious tinctures. She made her threat clear.

“Take me. Now.”

The Doctress didn’t need to be told twice.

The apprentices rushed for a stretcher, but Hesina stopped them. She would walk to her brother, even if it killed her. She had the strongest ones support her by the arms, and together, they made the slow, awkward hobble out of the infirmary. Sweat crowned her brow as they entered the facades. She pushed on.

Confusion clouded Hesina’s mind when they passed her brother’s rooms. Then they arrived at hers, and there he was, facing her desk, alive, standing, the bandage around his head the extent of his visible injuries.

Hesina could have collapsed right then and there.

But she didn’t. She left the apprentices at the door and entered on her own.

“They say you threw yourself on top of me,” Sanjing said when she was halfway to him.