Descendant of the Crane(96)

Caiyan’s rooms were cold. Dim. The braziers had not been lit, and Hesina could barely make out the outline of his form at the foot of the bed, but she saw him. A brother who needed her.

He didn’t acknowledge her when she sat beside him. She pressed her palms to his damp face, and he pulled back. She wrapped her arms around him before he could withdraw again.

They stayed that way for a long, long time.

Eventually, she coaxed him into bed and rummaged under the frame until she found his secret stash of literature.

Lilian had lied. Wang Hutian didn’t write erotic novellas, but sappy, melodramatic poems. Hesina read them out loud, finishing one collection and moving on to another, until the words stole away her voice and dreams stole away Caiyan’s troubled breaths.

“‘Then morning came cloaked in dew./I drank to the sight of your fading ghost,/and you raised your glass to your lips/for one final toast…’”

The sheaf quivered in her hands. Hesina set it down. Instead of distracting her from her emotions, the poems had filled her with borrowed ones. The longing of Wang Hutian’s fair fox spirits became her longing for respite. The righteous rage of his qilin hunters became her righteous rage against her kingdom. And the guilt of his mistress-taking scholars became her guilt over everything she had done since her father’s death.

Her bottom lip trembled. She bit down until she tasted copper.

Your fault. Your fault. Your fault.

Hesina lurched out of Caiyan’s room. She shut the doors behind her. She stuffed her fist into her mouth and screamed. Her fault. Lilian’s death was her fault. Had she not opened a trial, there would have been no question of who killed the king.

The king wasn’t even dead.

It was his fault for keeping so many secrets, his fault for teaching her to believe in justice and law.

His fault.

Hesina clutched herself, and something cut into her stomach. Her father’s medallion. The one she’d oh so carefully strung onto her sash in search of the truth he claimed to love. She tore it off and hurled it at the ground. The jade broke with a crack, and she breathed hard from the satisfaction of it.

Then her breathing stopped.

Golden gas curled up from the medallion’s shattered remains.

The same golden gas that’d risen from her father’s body.

Akira’s voice suddenly sounded in Hesina’s head. She’d been trying so hard to ignore it in the throne room that she hadn’t deciphered what he was trying to say.

No poison in the goblet.

Still holding her breath, Hesina crouched. She lifted the shards. They were curved. The medallion had been hollow. Hollow to carry the poison. Not the goblet. Not her mother’s snuff bottle.

The poison came from the medallion that’d been on her father’s body all along.

She dropped the shards, shaking her head in dry-eyed confusion. What did this mean?

Go back to the place where all this started. Before the red-light district, where the Silver Iris had said I See golden gas rising from a pile of shards. Before the imperial gardens, where Hesina had discovered her father’s body among the irises.

Go back to the place where he left pieces of himself behind.

Hesina made for her father’s study. She strode to his desk. Quaking, she sat in his tortoiseshell chair, just as he probably had.

What did he do next?

The chair scraped as she rose. Pain bloomed in her chest; she was reliving his final moments. But she pushed on, kneeling by his costume chest. She riffled through the costumes, just as he probably had, ran her fingers across the textures. Silk and hemp.

He hadn’t pulled the courier’s costume out at random. He’d searched for it with deliberate intent.

Why?

What had he done next? Opened the Tenets to a page of One of the Eleven. Entered the secret passageway that would lead him to the gardens.

Fueled by pure instinct, Hesina staggered to the wall of books and pulled out The Cosmic Cycles, Pangtie’s Reflections, and The Rise and Fall of the Relic Reign. The shelves split down the middle, and the varnished corridor that appeared gleamed like a secret river. She stepped in and pulled the lever protruding from the side panel. The river plunged into darkness.

A shred of old panic curled up in Hesina. She’d gotten lost in a passageway as lightless as this one. But her father had told her to breathe deeply and use the walls as a guide. So she did. She inhaled the piney varnish, felt her heart calm, then placed her hands to the side panels—

And froze.

There were knife marks gouged into the wood, each stroke forming characters.

LITTLE BIRD…

Somewhere in the palace, maids were dusting. Cooks were plucking geese. A hundred thousand others breathed, walked, talked in the imperial city, a million beyond the walls. But they didn’t exist in this moment. Hesina’s entire world throbbed in the words at her fingertips.


LITTLE BIRD,

BY THE TIME YOU’RE READING THIS, YOU’LL KNOW. YOU’LL KNOW THAT YOUR FATHER WAS A LIAR, A SINNER, A MURDERER. YOU MIGHT EVEN KNOW, AS HARD AS IT IS TO ACCEPT, THAT I—


Hesina jerked away.

YOU MIGHT EVEN KNOW, AS HARD AS IT IS TO ACCEPT, THAT I—

She backed up and thumped into the opposite wall. She was gulping air and drowning in it. Laughing was the only way she could breathe.

AS HARD AS IT IS TO ACCEPT.

Still laughing, she pawed at the panels until she found the lever. She pulled. The wall of books fissured apart. She escaped the darkness for the study’s ashy light, but the truth followed her out.