Descendant of the Crane(92)

“No, leave them. Watch him,” she ordered a guard. “If anyone touches his wares, treat them as robbers.” Then she addressed the bystanders. “The rest of you are relieved.”

They wished ten thousand years unto her life and rose. The merchant started to follow.

“Halt.” Hesina sounded so much like her mother that she shivered at her own voice. “Did I say you could rise?”

“N-no, dianxia.”

“Remain as you are, and meditate on your crimes for the next four hours.”

“Thank the queen for her mercy,” ordered the guard.

The merchant’s jaw snapped shut. “T-thank you for…”

She waved her guards onward.

The residential wards were next. Again, Hesina wasn’t prepared. A shoeless child wandered through the crowds, bleeding from a long cut on his arm. Magistrates and their residents clustered the limestone corridors and their moon gate cutouts. Some sought her blessings, but many more simply continued their fights.

“Oh, so you think I’m a sooth?” screamed a woman. “You’re the one who proposed joining our families through marriage!”

“Marriage?” The man had a kitchen cleaver in his hands, and only his children were holding him back. “Forget about marriage. I’ll have your life!”

Hesina intervened where she could. But some battles were already lost. At the moat, vigilante groups circulated pages torn out of the Tenets and spewed their convictions. A number were about Hesina. If she wasn’t secretly backing the perpetrators, she was conspiring with the Kendi’an Crown Prince and plotting ten other things. Whoever this queen was, she surpassed Hesina.

“Don’t engage,” she warned her guards. The tour had to go on. Still, she gritted her teeth as they left the moat. The muscles of her face ached from maintaining a mask of indifference, and she almost cracked when they came to the Eastern Gate.

Three bodies swung like tassels in the archway’s crown. One was badly burned. The others had been cut so many times that they were equally unrecognizable.

One sooth.

Two colluders.

People like her.

You deserve the same fate, their mangled faces said.

Anger, sorrow, and fear brewed up Hesina’s throat. “Take them down.”

A crowd gathered to watch as the guards cut the ropes.

“Should have let them hang longer,” spat out an old man. Others echoed his sentiments, but followed the palanquin when it continued to the terraces.

A crowd had already gathered on the Peony Pavilion. Many wore white hanfu cuffed and collared in black—the uniform of young scholars and civil service examinee hopefuls.

“Dianxia!” they cried. “Dianxia! Dianxia!”

Hesina ordered the litter to halt and stepped out.

“Dianxia!” People craned their necks to see her. “Dianxia!”

The guards pressed them back, but Hesina held up a hand. She approached a girl near the front of the crowd. “What is your name?”

The girl blinked, then bowed over her clasped hands. “Family name Bai, given name Yuqi.”

“Do you have a favorite text, Bai Yuqi?” asked Hesina, nodding at the sack of books slung over the girl’s shoulder.

“T-the Tenets, dianxia.”

Of course. What had Hesina expected her to say? Assassins through the Ages? “And why is that?”

“The past is a timeless teacher, dianxia.”

“Raise your head.”

Hesina touched two fingers to the girl’s temple once she did. “The mind is a timeless teacher.” She tapped the girl’s collarbone. “And the heart. The past must be filtered through both to mean anything in the present.”

“Bai Yuqi will commit that to memory, dianxia.”

Hesina tucked her hands into her sleeves as she turned. “I’ll walk the rest of the way,” she murmured to her guards as they came forth to help her back into the palanquin.

Her legs were still weak. By the time they made it to the terraces, Hesina had cold-sweated through her underrobes. Still, she rejected any assistance. There was a time to lean on others, and a time to stand alone.

She raised her gaze.

The steps, swept clean in preparation, were already dusted with fresh snow. Imperial guards outfitted in ceremonial jade laminar flanked the ascent, the crimson-dyed tassels of their halberds stirring in the wind. The palace loomed over them all, growing larger and larger as Hesina huffed and puffed her way up. She braced a hand on her thigh once she reached the landing, caught her breath, and straightened.

Caiyan was here as promised. So was Lilian, her chin smudged with soot. She gave Hesina the smallest of nods. No matter what happened today, Mei’s parents and the others were out of this city. They were safe.

Relief bolstered Hesina and gave her the courage to remove the hand scroll from her sleeve.

She faced the pavilion. The sky teemed above their heads, a billowing sea of gray. Her people stood miniscule beneath it. They shouldn’t have had to claw for air, yet when Hesina opened her mouth, she suddenly felt like she was suffocating.

Then wind blasted through the crowd, cleaving Hesina’s core with icy clarity.

There’s a tale. The tale of Yidou.

A tale of a life for a life, flesh to sustain flesh.

But feeding the people’s fear wasn’t giving them sustenance. It was poisoning them.