Descendant of the Crane(91)

“You didn’t lie.”

A beat of silence. “The last time I checked, I was still alive.”

“But the Specter died.” Hesina pictured Akira as the boy he had been, a boy swallowed by a cause. She didn’t know what it meant to be an orphan or an assassin, but she knew how easy it was to adopt another’s values. “He died when you left the name behind. It’s why you won’t touch a real weapon, why you question things and think for yourself.” She dangled a hand over the bed and onto his head. “Why you’re Akira now.”

“Am I? You can bury a body,” Akira continued, “but the bones don’t go away.”

That’s not true. But who was she to say what was?

“Will you show me the tattoo on your back?” Hesina asked instead. She didn’t know where her inhibition had gone, and she didn’t much care. She’d already confessed to watching him sleep.

“It’s only fair,” she added sternly when Akira said nothing.

“It’s not pretty.”

Then her back must have been ghastly, because she thought the tattoo—which was of some sort of flower, yanked up by the root and clenched in a fist—almost looked noble. It spanned from Akira’s shoulder to the curves of his ribs. He stiffened as she covered the tattooed hand with her own.

Hesina thought of all the ways stories could be conveyed. Inked on flesh. Sewn on silk facades. She thought of her father, beheading the relic emperor. Purging the sooths. An era drawn from blood. A throne erected upon bones.

If she could extend acceptance to Akira, but not her own father, did that make her a terrible daughter?

“Not sleeping?” asked Akira some time later.

“Thinking.”

“Sleep,” said Akira. “Thinking can wait.”

Nothing can wait. A queen cannot stand still as everything and everyone rushes past her. But that had already happened, and Hesina, though arguably worse off than before, had survived. So she listened to Akira and closed her eyes.



Come morning, the skin on her back felt supple, and the blisters were no longer unpleasantly tight when Hesina raised her arms.

It worked, she wanted to tell Akira, but he was gone. The only physical evidence of his visit was the jar on the floor. Hesina’s hand drifted to her lips, then quickly dropped. It was morning. Time to be queen again, and to stop a citywide massacre.

She dressed herself and twisted up her hair without Ming’er’s help, steeling her heart as she dabbed vermillion onto her lips, polishing her words as she swiped her cheekbones with the pearlescent powder of crushed dragonfly wings. Identifying the sooths and placating the masses was only the first challenge. The next—wiping out the masses’ hatred—would be even harder. To think she could do it was perhaps downright naive.

Hesina snapped the powder box shut. The opposite of naive was jaded. Her reign had just begun, and her one talent was her bullheadedness. She owed it to the Silver Iris, to Mei, to all the sooths in this kingdom to make full use of it.

Mask perfected, she exited the palace by way of the Hall of Celestial Morality. In the mist-swathed courtyard, two lines of guards stood at the ready by the palanquin. It was a jewel box of a thing fashioned out of lacquered zitan, with rounds of jade implanted beneath the pole brackets, the imperial crest of the water lily and the serpent rising in low relief from the green stone.

Hesina was pleased to find the litter uncovered; she wanted the people to see her for themselves. But she began having second thoughts after they went down the terraces and took the main boulevard to the eastern market sector. Stakes had been driven into the roadside, and skewered objects—pigeons, she realized with a lurch of nausea—topped them like human heads.

“Kendi’an,” whispered the guard on the palanquin’s right. “It’s the people’s response to their leaflets about the sooths.”

The messenger pigeons were hard with frost, their necks twisted at odd angles. Plaques hung from the grasp of their claws:


LET NONE ESCAPE

LEAVE NONE ALIVE


It was the beginning of a very long tour.

The imperial guards announced their arrival at the market sector. Hesina hardly recognized it. Vendor stalls had been burned or picked clean like chicken carcasses. Broken curios littered the icy ground. The few remaining sellers had set up makeshift tarps.

“The queen’s ashes!” hawked one such merchant. Customers were pulling out banliang for the little silk pouches he offered. “Her only remains! Retrieved from the depths of the dungeons!”

If only. Then Hesina wouldn’t have to suffer through this. “Why haven’t these ventures been stopped?” she asked the guard sharply.

“We shut them down, but they pop up again overnight because…” He trailed off.

Because there was a demand. Even with all the notices papering the limestone walls, how many still thought she was char on the ground?

“Bring me to him,” she ordered.

As her palanquin drew close, the bystanders fell to their knees. “Dianxia!”

“D-Dianxia!” stuttered the merchant.

She considered his prostrate frame. A man in his midthirties and in decent health, robust enough to withstand a lesson. “You dishonor your name by profiting off lies.”

“I-I’ll pack up my wares—”