Descendant of the Crane(90)

“Yes. Okay.”

His gaze hardened. “I’ve killed people.”

“I know.” Well, now she really did.

“Nobles. Serfs. Elders. I killed them just because I could.”

“I don’t believe that.”

The corner of his mouth jerked up in cold amusement. “It’s the truth.”

“Then what about the monsters that roam at night?”

“I am the monster.”

“What about the ghosts that haunt you to this day?” Hesina pressed. “Without remorse, you think you’d still have nightmares about your past?”

Akira didn’t speak for a long time. “You should be scared.”

Are you? his eyes asked.

Hesina was scared of her people. She was scared of herself. But Akira? She looked at him and all his little imperfections, like the nick interrupting the arch of his right brow, the scar breaking the dip of his upper lip, the blue tinge of a vein lurking under his left eye, almost covered by the fall of his bangs.

She gave her answer—by curling a hand into the front his hanfu and rising up on her knees. She cut short his intake of air and spoke it to him without words.

A thousand moments fused into one. Maybe it was a second—maybe it was a hundred—before Akira reacted.

He jerked back. They were both gasping. The shine of moonlight was on his lip. The taste of him was on hers.

Hesina caught her breath. “You’re the one who’s scared,” she realized out loud. You’re scared of being accepted as you are.

Akira passed a hand over his eyes as if he didn’t want to see her, or for her to see him. “I’m really not the person you think you know.”

“Neither am I.” Who was she? What was she? If she told Akira the truth about her father, would he think of her as the descendant of a murderer or the descendant of a savior? Or would he think of her as just…her?

“I can’t change how people see me,” Hesina said. “Just as you can’t change your past. But I can choose to accept.”

Akira got off the bed.

She lurched to follow. “I accept you.”

He walked to the doors.

She stumbled in front of him. “As you are, as I am, I accept you.”

He tried to cut around her. Hesina backed up against the fretwork, one hand still clutching her collar shut, the other spread out beside her to block his escape.

“So please—”

Her breath hitched as he braced a forearm above her head, gray eyes locking on hers.

—Stay.



He did.

He carried her back to the bed and sat on the floor beside it. They stayed in each other’s silent company. There was so much that Hesina wanted to ask, but she didn’t press for more, and eventually Akira began speaking on his own.

He told the story of a boy, orphaned by the Kendi’a slave trade, raised by a poison master, a boy just shy of eleven who’d joined a guild of twenty-three other assassins. By day, he killed for the usual clientele—paranoid princes, greedy barons, estranged lovers. By night, he killed for a sect called the Red Amaryllis. Anyone connected to the Kendi’an slave trade was fair game. The masters and their families. The landlords and their overseers. The accountants and shippers and secretariats. Evil must be weeded by the root, the sect leader often reminded the gray-eyed child, a child who listened closely and took the words of others as his truth.

The people renamed the child the Specter because he killed without a sound. Even his own guild brothers and sisters regarded him as a threat. None of the twenty-three noticed when the boy didn’t show up at the mess hall one night, or saw the blood on a brother’s hands. They laughed and joked as a family while the boy lay in the gutter of some sandstone alleyway, split from throat to navel like a hog, silent as always because he didn’t think anyone would come.

He was wrong.

From the start, the boy and the girl lied to each other. She wasn’t the manor’s healer that she pretended to be, but the daughter of a baron who’d died some months prior. He wasn’t the alchemist’s apprentice that he pretended to be, but the assassin who’d poisoned that baron at the sect’s bidding. Theirs was a friendship born out of ignorance. He recovered under her care and stayed at her request. They passed the days on the manor grounds, climbing pear trees and looking for treasure in the sandstone wells. He didn’t contact the sect. He didn’t return to his guild.

The servants liked him because he lacked the usual airs of apprentice boys. One evening, he overheard them speaking of an appreciation banquet the manor’s young heiress was throwing for twenty-three scholars. The boy thought twenty-three was a strange number.

A familiar number.

He arrived too late and not late enough. He saw his guildmates slumped over the banquet table, punished for the murder of a baron that was his alone to bear, killed by a tasteless, scentless poison he’d created out of simple curiosity in the manor’s workrooms. When a masked figure approached the last breathing guildmate, the boy acted without thinking. He saved the brother who had once tried to kill him. He killed the masked one, the girl who’d saved him, and with her penultimate breaths she had asked: Was he dead? Was the Specter dead?

The boy lied.

“As for the rest,” said Akira, “well, it’s not that interesting. You already know it. Merchant robbing. Touring the realm, prison by prison—”