Descendant of the Crane(94)

Lilian smiled that horribly red smile. Then, with a gasp of effort, she flung out a sleeve.

A package tumbled down the steps. The guards rushing toward them barely had enough time to stumble away before it exploded. Chunks of stone rocketed into the air, and the commoners screamed even as the smoke cleared. The resulting damage was incomparable to what happened in the tianlao cells.

But the people didn’t know that.

The people would link the two as congruent events.

The smoke of Hesina’s confusion cleared, too, and comprehension flayed her.

Lilian was scapegoating herself before an audience of hundreds. Word of her confession would flood the provinces, the streets. Who killed the king? None other than the queen’s adopted sister. They had all the evidence they needed. The knife to Hesina’s throat. The scripted confession. The bomb, a prop.

“Why?”

Lilian closed her eyes. “Now you can protect them…all of them…”

“Shhh.” Tears spilled over Hesina’s cheeks, hot like the blood soaking her skirts. Tell me you’re not doing any of this for free. Tell me you want your payment of candied hawthorn berries. “S-shhh.”

“You’re ruining another…gown…” Lilian’s lips quivered with a smile. “Though…it was bland anyway…”

Voices swelled from down below. Blood…not burning…not a sooth…

Hesina’s jaw trembled as she bit back a howl of rage. The people could have her heart. They could have her life. They could have everything she had to offer, but Lilian wasn’t theirs to take. She wouldn’t allow it.

“You’re going to be okay. The Doctress will make you okay. Stop talking,” she said as Lilian opened her mouth.

“Promise me…” The boots of the imperial guards pounded around them, nearly drowning out Lilian’s whisper. She raised a hand, struggling to reach Hesina’s cheek. “Promise…you’ll finish this…in style.”

Her hand wavered. Hesina clasped it before it could fall and squeezed, just like she had when they’d waded into the ponds together, or flown down the corridors with hot mantous clutched in their skirts, the cooks in fierce pursuit. She held on so tightly that she never felt the exact moment when Lilian stopped squeezing back.



Hesina didn’t change. Didn’t have someone see to her neck. She finally looked the part she deserved: bloodstained.

She swept into the throne hall like a squall, her ministers scrambling to assemble in her wake. From the dais, she ordered members of the Investigation Bureau to search Lilian’s chambers and return with an immediate report. As they waited, a few of the younger vassals snuck glances in her direction. If they were hoping to see a reaction, they’d sorely be disappointed. Hesina was amber and stone, a fossilized cicada shell with dust for innards, a cavity for a heart, and a single thought for a mind:

Finish this in style.

The thought anchored her when members of the Investigation Bureau came back carrying gilded trays.

“Dianxia,” addressed the director. “Per your orders, we searched the kingslayer’s rooms and found the following items.”

He proceeded to identify them: a vial containing crane’s crest, an arsenic-based poison, and a forbidden tome criticizing the Eleven and the new era.

Hesina gripped the arms of her throne as the items emerged. Lilian had staged her exit well. Too well, for the girl who wore ribbons in her hair and dye on her apron, shunning politics and its players.

But she had played them all.

“Excellent,” said Hesina, her voice hollow, hurt dripping into her heart like water in an empty cave. She should have grown accustomed to people keeping secrets from her by now. “Today marks the conclusion of this case. Vigilante groups who fail to disband will face death by hanging. The same goes for anyone carrying out an unauthorized cutting. Grand Secretariat Sunlei, see that these penal laws are posted throughout the city within three days.”

“Understood, dianxia.”

Hesina moved on, issuing reparations to businesses and vendors, matching the silver outflow with a tax raise on millet, and backing a public effort at reclamation and restoration of destroyed property. Word by word, decree by decree, she stitched her kingdom back together.

“And what of the disposal of the kingslayer’s body?” asked Xia Zhong from the ranks.

Hesina met his eye unflinchingly. “That matter falls under your jurisdiction, Minister Xia. By the Book of Rites, how should the body be disposed?”

“They are to be burned in public, their ashes scattered into Tricent Gorge to be forever tormented by the rapids.”

No tomb. No ceremony. Nothing to bury or to mourn.

Hesina forced her fists apart and flattened her hands upon the throne. “Then see that the rites are observed.”

It wasn’t Xia Zhong who made her falter, but Caiyan, whom Hesina summoned from the ranks next. She thought she could barrel through what needed to be done, but as he stepped before the dais and bowed, time slowed as it had on the terraces. A hundred heartbeats raced by before Hesina tore her gaze away from his hands—clean now, but bloodied in her memory—and managed to speak.

“Kingslayer or not, she should have faced trial like everyone else. That is the law of the Tenets. You”—killed her. Killed her killed her killed her—“didn’t afford her the chance.”