Descendant of the Crane(97)

The truth of who’d poisoned the king.

YOU MIGHT EVEN KNOW.

But she hadn’t. Not when she’d seen his body in the iris beds, impeccably costumed, hands folded across his stomach, the perfect image of death without a struggle. Not when the cooks and kitchen maids reported that no one had delivered food and drink to the study that day. She hadn’t considered the significance of the Tenets being left open to a biography of One of the Eleven when her father was One of the Eleven. She’d repressed any subconscious realizations, just as she’d repressed her motives. She’d never been looking for the truth. She’d been looking for someone to blame.

All the pieces fell into place. The snuff bottle on her father’s desk had led Hesina to her mother’s rooms. There, she’d found the chest. The contents of her mother’s chest had led her to the Tenets. Now, she saw that it verified her father’s identity as One of the Eleven.

Meanwhile, her father had flipped the book open to One of the Eleven before rising from this desk. He’d strung on a medallion carved with the character for longevity because he’d wanted her to know. He’d taken his paring knife with him not to cut up persimmons, but to carve his final message onto these walls. And he’d put on a courier’s hanfu to deliver it, this truth that Hesina had paid a price in blood to find.

The pitch of her laughter shot high.

“So now you know.”

That voice.

The laughter died on Hesina’s lips.

“Well?” The train of her mother’s scarlet ruqun whispered over the floor as she swept to the square zitan table in the center of the lower study.

Hesina stared blearily at the dowager queen. A ghost. She couldn’t actually be here.

But a ghost’s words didn’t cut the way her mother’s did. “Does it hurt? I imagine it would, going through all this trouble, just to find that he ended himself.”





TWENTY-SEVEN





WE BELIEVE THE THINGS WE WANT TO BELIEVE.

ONE OF THE ELEVEN ON HUMAN NATURE


I’D LIKE TO THINK THAT MY CHOICES ARE MY OWN, BUT HOW MANY TRULY ARE?

TWO OF THE ELEVEN ON HUMAN NATURE

They sat across from each other, the letter Hesina had written and inked with Sanjing’s seal on the zitan tabletop between them.

It hadn’t even been opened.

Hesina didn’t speak. If she moved a single muscle in her face, she feared she might cry, and she was pitiful enough in her mother’s eyes.

“Why did you keep this from me?” Hesina finally whispered, hovering her gaze over her mother’s shoulder instead of her face. It was easier to coexist this way.

The dowager queen gave a cold chuckle, and Hesina’s hands tightened in her lap.

“If you’d told me from the start…” Hesina’s voice broke. None of this would have happened. No one would have died for my trial.

Her mother chuckled again. “Four months ago, I offered to rule.”

“That’s not my question.”

“I said you would bring this kingdom down to its knees—”

“You should have told me the truth!”

Silence quivered in the wake of Hesina’s scream. Her vision blurred, and she pulled back the tears with a rough inhale. “You should have told me the truth.”

The dowager queen raised a brow. “Was that not the truth?”

Hesina expected nothing less from her mother.

“This was his final wish.”

But she hadn’t expected that. “What? For me to think he was murdered?”

“No one forced you to think that. No one forced you to declare a trial. No one forced you to continue searching for the truth on your own.

“I—”

“How many times did you think about giving up? Why didn’t you?”

Hesina had no answer.

Her mother sighed. “Stubborn as always.”

Hesina was too shaken to even bristle.

“Leave with me,” said the dowager queen without warning, and Hesina’s gaze jerked to her mother. Again, she was startled by how much they resembled each other, down to their oval faces, the midparts in their hair. But the mother she knew didn’t say things like, “Pack what you need. A second carriage is waiting by the northern entrance.”

“Is that it? After seventeen years, that’s all you have to say? To ask me to give up my throne, my kingdom, with no explanation?”

“You think they’re yours? That you can control the people? That you can tell them what to think and believe?”

“I can help them.”

“Oh? Like you did today?”

She gutted Hesina like a fish.

“Show me the book.”

Hesina feigned dumb. “What book?”

Her mother buffed her nails against her ruqun cuff. “The one you stole from my room.”

Get it yourself. But predictably, Hesina went to her chambers. She got down on her hands and knees, on the verge of lifting the floorboards when she stiffened.

The hair she always stuck between the boards was gone.

She yanked the boards apart. The original Tenets and Xia Zhong’s letters were still here. The sprint of her heart slowed. She was being paranoid. The floorboards looked shinier than usual, and the citrus tang of bergamot perfumed the air. The maids must have just oiled them. The hair could have been swept away. Even if someone had stumbled upon this nook, they would have found a worthless copy of The Medicinal Properties of Exotic Fungi.