Descendant of the Crane

by Joan He

  Three letters appeared on Hesina’s desk the next day.

  One was from the Investigation Bureau; they had received her case on the king’s murder and would notify her if it proceeded to trial.

  Another was from the Imperial Cosmologist, who’d selected an auspicious day for her coronation, two nights away.

  The last was from Xia Zhong.

  Hesina unfolded this one slowly, apprehension drying her mouth to lotus paste.

  Passage 2.4.1: ‘A minister serves.’

  If a trial is declared, consider Convict 315 your coronation gift.

  FIVE

  WAR IS THIEVERY ON A GRAND SCALE.

  ONE OF THE ELEVEN ON WAR

  THE EMPERORS THINK IT’S A GAME. THEY SIT ON THEIR THRONES AND WATCH PEOPLE DIE ON THEIR BEHALVES.

  TWO OF THE ELEVEN ON WAR

  Downward slash.

  Do you know how to duel?

  Palm the hilt.

  Come to me when you’re ready.

  Transition into leftward swing, leading with the torso.

  Win.

  Forearm to eye level.

  And I will represent you in your trial.

  Cut right.

  “You’re doing it wrong.”

  Hesina lowered her sword.

  Sanjing came up from behind. He adjusted her grip. Then he led her arm in a series of strokes. “Your opponent isn’t a log to be hacked at, but a painting to be finished. The tip of the sword should always fall sure. Keep your wrist loose for a wider range of motion.” He stepped back. “Try again.”

  “Stop favoring your dominant side,” he barked after her third repetition. “It makes you predictable.”

  Hesina cut right and returned to her center. “You always win,” she grumbled. A breeze combed through the courtyard, teasing apart the willow fringe on the white limestone walls. “That makes you predictable too.”

  Sanjing crossed his arms. “I can’t help being brilliant.”

  Hesina snorted, then smiled. The tension between them had eased—for now. “Why are you here?”

  “Thought I’d stop by before heading west. Carrying out your orders to delay a war, if I remember correctly.”

  Her smile slid. “Now?”

  She noticed her brother’s attire. Leather pads covered his legs. A thatch cloak for wicking away the rain fell over his shoulders. He was dressed to ride.

  She waited for Sanjing to speak, but he simply paced to the courtyard’s center, where an ivory table, speckled with black and white stones, displayed an unfinished game of Go.

  After studying positions, Sanjing lifted a white stone. “A messenger hawk from the Yan-Kendi’an border post just arrived.” Placed it. “We’ve lost a village. It’s gone.”

  “To another raid?” Then Hesina realized how ridiculous that sounded. People lost cattle and oxen and grain stores to a raid. Sometimes money. Sometimes lives.

  Not villages.

  “Explain, Jing.” Fear and frustration bolted through her gut—frustration because she should have had the answers, and fear because it felt like she never would. No matter how much Hesina learned, her kingdom was too large. She would always be blind to its corners. “What do you mean by ‘gone’?”

  “What do you think I mean?” Sanjing’s eyes burned black. “Nothing is there. No livestock. No people. Everything is gone without a trace.”

  He raised a black stone, gripping it as though he aimed to hurl it. Hesina drew back, and the fire in her brother’s gaze abated.

  He placed the stone on the board beside a white one. “Some say it’s the work of sooths.”

  “Jing…”

  “What? Don’t believe me?”

  Hesina lowered her gaze to the game board in case Sanjing saw her skepticism. Yes, the sooths were hated for their Sight. In the relic era, it’d enabled them to rat out countless individuals who harbored the mere thought of rebelling.

  But what kept the hatred flowing, from mouth to mouth, generation to generation, was the rumor that the sooths could perform magic. The specifics of what and how were lost to time. The handful of sooths caught in the centuries since the purge certainly didn’t have magic. If they did, wouldn’t they have saved themselves from death by a thousand cuts?

  Now her brother expected her to believe that sooths were responsible for the disappearance of an entire village. That magic was real. Not only that, he expected her believe that sooths were aiding Kendi’a. If he said this kind of thing on the streets, then Yan would descend into chaos. The people might just believe in the assassination of the king without Hesina’s help.

  Something clicked into place, and comprehension unlocked like a door. “I see how it is.” She lifted her eyes from the game board and let them rest on her brother’s. “Your scare tactics won’t work on me. No matter what you say, I’m not sacrificing justice for Father.”

  “The sooths—”

  “—aren’t making the villages disappear. When was the last time you encountered a sooth?” Days ago, for Hesina, but that didn’t diminish her point. “When was the last time anyone encountered one with power stronger than the Sight? There are no magic-wielding sooths, Jing. Not after the purge. There are sandstorms, and there is your undying paranoia.”

  “You think I fear for myself? You—” Her brother bit back his words. His knuckles whitened around the pommel of his liuyedao. “You’re unbelievable.”

  “And you’re delusional.” One of them had to be.

  “Yes.” Her brother let out a humorless laugh. “It seems that I am. So what’s the secret to making you listen? Should I spout passages from the Tenets?”

  Tenets? Hesina blinked. Where had that come from?

  “Anyway, congratulations,” Sanjing said without much cheer. He turned to the moon gate to go, then stopped. “I’m sure you won’t miss me at your coronation, but on the off chance you do, Mei will attend in my place.”

  “She’s not going with you?”

  “She has better things to do, like watching over a certain inexperienced queen from the shadows.”

  “I don’t need her,” said Hesina, partly out of spite, and partly because she knew what Commander Mei meant to her brother, who had plenty of admirers but not many friends. It was the one thing they had in common. “I have guards. I have…”

  “Who?” her brother scoffed. “Your manservant?”

  “It’s been ten years, Jing.” Ten years since their father had adopted the twins, ten years of enduring Sanjing’s jealousy. He accused her of replacing him with Caiyan. She accused him of being petty. But the closer she grew to Caiyan, the further she grew from Sanjing, and Hesina had to wonder—was everyone’s heart like her mother’s? Was love a resource to be split, sometimes unequally?

  She sat on the table’s matching ivory stool and rested her sword over her lap. They’d moved from the war to Caiyan, from one argument to another. But at least she was used to this fight.

  “Caiyan’s been nothing but civil toward you.” Especially after what Sanjing had done to him that winter day on the lake. “You don’t have to like him, Jing. But you can accept him.”

  “I can’t accept a person I don’t trust.”

  “Give me one good reason why you don’t trust him.”

  “He’s a bad influence.” His jaw tensed as Hesina snorted. Bad influence and Caiyan. She’d never thought she would hear those words together. “It’s because of him that you…”

  “I what?”

  “Forget it.”

  “What were you going to say?”

  Sanjing looked away. “You went to the red-light district.”

  The sword slipped off Hesina’s lap. Without realizing it, she’d risen from the stool. “You’re spying on me.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  First the comment about the Tenets. Now this.

  For a second, she thought her brother would deny it.

  He didn’t. “Only because you refuse to tell me anything.”

  “Well, no wonder. Why w
ould I confide in a little boy who can’t mind his own business?”

  The words worked. Her brother whipped around and strode away, so fast that Hesina couldn’t even catch the expression on his face.

  Good. She collapsed back onto the stool and let out a damp exhale. All the emotions she’d been holding back trickled out: Vexation—how dare he spy on her? Relief—he didn’t know the worst of what she’d done. And finally, defeat—he’d never know that she kept him in the dark for his own good. Instead he’d head straight for the stables and ride out hard. He’d think she didn’t care, without giving her the chance to prove him wrong.

  Hesina rose. She lifted her sword and went through the sequence again, practicing until blisters bubbled on her palms, the skin wounds distracting from the pain inside.

  She could wait. Wait for a trial to be declared. Wait for her skill to sharpen. But all she wanted was to fight. With swords, not feelings, and with someone she could win against, someone other than her brother.

  In the prison exercise yard, sunlight highlighted the half-healed cuts and bruises on the convict’s face. He shifted his hold on the wooden sword’s hilt, the sleeves of his dungeon fatigues in tatters.

  Hesina adjusted her own grip, ignoring the sweat on the wood. She wasn’t nervous. Couldn’t be nervous. She would have this convict as her representative, or she would have no one at all.

  She drew her sword and judged the distance between them.

  Steady.

  Breathe in.

  Hold it.

  Now.

  She dashed.

  Crack. Wood struck wood. Gravel flew out from under their feet as they spun. She pressed into the gridlock of their swords to test his strength. His sleeves gathered at the elbows as he returned the effort.

  Measuring them to be equally matched, Hesina whirled backward, recovered her stance, then lunged again. They crossed once more. Sequence after sequence unfolded, and she fell into the rhythm, timing his blows and matching them. The darkening sky drowned out their shadows. The first few droplets pattered onto the gravel, right before sheets of rain split the clouds.

  With renewed vigor, Hesina pressed the convict onto the defensive. She knocked his sword upward, creating an opening. He slipped as he stumbled back. The opening widened.

  She danced behind him and slashed in from the right. He struggled to maintain his grip. Victory was all around her. Hesina pressed on, backing him into the wall. But as she thrust her blade forward, she saw all the things the rain had brought into sharp relief: his knobby wrists, his bony chest, his eyes, sunken and bruised with sleeplessness.

  Equality is not the natural way of the world, whispered her father’s voice. It must be nurtured.

  Her sword struck stone.

  The convict’s wooden blade streaked her way. Instinct kicked in; Hesina shoved her sword up just in time, but the impact slammed into her shoulder. She braced her palm to the flat of her blade and he leapt away, then came at her as an entirely different swordsman.

  His first slash drove her against the wall. His second had her trembling. His third wrenched the hilt from her hands and sent the sword flying across the exercise yard, where it snapped upon striking the cinder-block wall.

  He lifted his sword and touched its wooden point to her throat.

  Hesina wheezed. How? How had she not read his true ability? Why had he hidden it? Who was he, this self-proclaimed merchant robber who could fight with such power and grace? But the answers were inconsequential. She had lost. The rain rinsed out the world, drenching her.

  She had come this far for nothing.

  She moved out of the fighting stance, then held still, waiting for him to do the same.

  He didn’t, not at first. His wooden blade remained pointed at her throat, prolonging the burn of her humiliation. Then he lay down the sword and sighed. “Okay.”

  Hesina stared.

  “You won,” he went on. “Well, technically you lost—”

  “You’re fluent?”

  “Huh?”

  “You can speak Yan?” Elevens, he could speak at all?

  “Oh.” He scratched his head. “I learned it a year ago. There’s not much else to do in prison.”

  The tips of Hesina’s ears warmed. “Then what was all…this”—she waved her hand—“about?”

  “To make you go away.” He shrugged. “As I was saying, you lost, but you threw.”

  “What…Why…Wait…I didn’t throw.”

  “I’ve looked better, I’ll admit. Attacking my opening probably didn’t seem fair.”

  He closed in, and she stumbled back. The rain had filmed his clothes over his skin, highlighting the raised old scars on his arms and the fine, pointed angles of his face, fox-like in their definition. His eyes were young, yet dark with a lifetime’s worth of wins and losses.

  Hesina took another step back. “That doesn’t answer my question. Why give me a chance to duel at all?”

  He stopped several reed lengths away. “Why not send a champion in your place? Why not threaten me when you thought you had lost?”

  “That wasn’t what we agreed on.”

  “Yes. But I didn’t expect you to be so—”

  He opened his palm. Intersecting the fate lines was something silver and shaped like a dragonfly. The prison master key, freed from the cord of Hesina’s sash.

  “—honorable.” Key in hand, he strode across the exercise yard. “Ideals aren’t worth it. Yours cost you the duel.”

  He was a convict. She was to be his queen. She could have ordered him back or, better yet, had him whipped for his insolence. But instead Hesina sloshed after the convict, mud splattering her ruqun skirts as they made for the steps leading back to the underground dungeon. “Why, then, are you agreeing to represent me?”

  “Would you believe me if I said that I feel bad for your loss?”

  “No.”

  “I have a hunch that you’re going to pardon me. I’m in it for the freedom. Do you believe me now?”

  The hunch was correct, but: “No.”

  “Then how about this? I’m curious.” The dungeon’s darkness solidified like lard, melted intermittently by torches down the cinder-block tunnel. “A dead king,” said the convict. “A deceived populace. A truth seeker. Sounds like a story that could end very well or very poorly, and I want to spectate. Believe me now?”

  “You don’t have to be that honest,” muttered Hesina.

  “Sorry. That sounded better in my head.”

  “So is that the truth? You’re here to spectate?”

  “And help, I suppose.”

  “You suppose!” She stepped on his heel, and he stumbled.

  “To help!” He caught himself, then glanced at her over his shoulder. “To help.”

  In the dim light, his eyes were like pools of rainwater, reflecting more than they revealed. But they also were clouded with woe, an expression contradictory to the amusement curling at his lips. Someone with eyes like that could have smiled as they bled. Hesina was suddenly overcome with remorse. She wanted to apologize for tripping him, but he turned those eyes and that smile away, facing back around. “Though truth be told, I’m more used to harming than helping.”

  What he was used to didn’t matter. She could tear out his past as a criminal. She would embroider in a new identity, a motivation.

  “Let me tell you what you’re in this for,” she said as they came to his block of cells. “You’re a scholar. Your lifelong dream has been to serve the kingdom. But you’ve had a dreadfully disadvantaged upbringing compared to your peers—”

  “It wasn’t so bad.”

  “—and winning this case is your one chance of making it to the civil service examinations.”

  The convict rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “I see.”

  “Who are you?” Hesina demanded, quizzing like a tutor.

  “A scholar.”

  “What do you aspire to be?”

  “A civil servant.”

  She nodd
ed in approval, but the convict appeared troubled.

  “Er, what am I studying? As a scholar?”

  “You’re studying…” She thought back to all her imperial lessons and picked the topic she’d hated least. “Agriculture.”

  “Agriculture.”

  “Yes.” She would have her books delivered to him. She would train him herself on the specifics of sheep pedigrees and soybean rotations.

  “Can I suggest something else?” he asked as they stopped in front of his cell.

  He was rejecting her idea. She found that almost more offensive than when he’d stolen her key.

  On the thought of the key…

  “You said the king was poisoned,” said the convict as Hesina reached for his hand. She missed him by a second; their knuckles brushed as he raised the key to the cell padlock. Something in Hesina came briefly undone, just like the lock.

  He entered the cell and relocked it from the inside.

  “How about I study something related to poison,” he said, returning the key through the bars. “Like medicine.”

  She tried to avoid skin contact as she accepted her key. “Fine. Medicine. You’ll receive a pardon once a trial is declared.” She didn’t quite trust him enough to release him now.

  He nodded as if he completely understood.

  “Until then…” Hesina didn’t know what to say. Her father’s justice was in the convict’s hands. It made her vulnerable. Desperate. She forced herself back from the bars. “Who are you?”

  “A scholar—”

  “No. Your name.”

  “I have many.”

  “Which do you prefer?”

  The convict ran his teeth over his bottom lip, deciding. “Akira,” he finally said.

  “Akira.” Hesina memorized it, then turned away, disarmed but not defeated. “We’ll meet again in court.”

  SIX

  A RULER WHO ABANDONS HIS PEOPLE IS NO RULER AT ALL.

  ONE OF THE ELEVEN ON MONARCHS

  DRESS SIMPLY. EAT SIMPLER. WE WERE ALL COMMONERS ONCE.

  TWO OF THE ELEVEN ON MONARCHS

  Many gifts came overnight, well wishes for her coronation. Many more would arrive before the day’s end. But the thing Hesina wanted most was in her hand.