Descendant of the Crane

by Joan He

  She was met with the sight of the entire Bureau cowering like rabbits, taking up refuge behind the long investigation tables.

  They feared her.

  The realization stunned Hesina for all of a heartbeat before she hardened. Good. They should fear her, because she didn’t know what she might do. Her gaze darted from the Bureau members to the tables to the contents of the tables. Her eyes widened.

  Slowly, she walked to one of the tables.

  It was stacked high with books on genealogy.

  This was truth.

  She walked to another table, papered with family trees of courtiers from inter-kingdom bloodlines.

  This was justice.

  She walked to a third table, where a single sheet of paper listed names, from palace servants to ministers, of people with Kendi’an relations.

  This was her father’s truth and justice.

  She rested her fingertips atop that final sheet. It hilled as she drew her fingers in, becoming a small mountain under her hand.

  She crushed the mountain.

  “Elevens!” A bellow came from the open doors at her back. “What—”

  The director stopped in his tracks as she turned.

  Heat pooled in Hesina’s fists. She advanced on the director, and he fell back.

  “Dianxia. Please. Allow me to explain—”

  He was a buzzing fly, speaking some language Hesina couldn’t understand. Her eyes narrowed. She wanted to silence him. She might have, if she’d stared at his face a second longer, those lips of his smacking with excuses. But instead, her gaze caught on a copy of the Tenets on the table behind him.

  Its edges were stained green.

  Green like the letters Sanjing had confiscated.

  She fell upon the book like a wolf on a carcass, seizing it and tearing it open.

  There. Right in the middle. A folio of torn-out pages, the stationery repurposed for something other than the Eleven’s philosophies—something such as letters.

  “Whose is this?” Hesina spun on the Bureau. No one replied. “Whose?”

  “Minister Xia’s,” a young Bureau member answered shakily, earning a glare from the director. “He lent it to us to ensure that our investigation complied with the Tenets.”

  Xia Zhong.

  There was a limit to how much something could break. Hesina’s trust had already been broken today. It could not break more. With calm and almost frightening clarity, she suddenly knew why Xia Zhong’s copy of the Tenets was here, and it had nothing to do with the Eleven’s philosophies.

  She grabbed the book and left, chest burning as she practically ran all the way back to her rooms. She flung into her study and lunged at her desk, papers going every which way, memorials avalanching.

  In the mess of hundreds of documents, she found one authored by Xia Zhong. She wasn’t a scholar of the letter arts. Her own calligraphy was lamentable. But she knew enough about it to match the weight and style of Xia Zhong’s handwriting to the letter writer’s. She then took the letters and fitted them into the Tenets. The torn-out ridges lined up perfectly. The green tint of the letters and of the book became one.

  Xia Zhong was the letter writer. Xia Zhong was feeding Kendi’a information, helping them raid Yan’s borderland villages. Hesina’s shock wore off like medicine; confusion and hurt panged behind her eyes. Why? Why?

  Even a monk has to want something.

  Hesina whirled on her pile of reports on officials with connections to Kendi’a. She hadn’t examined it closely before because everyone, it seemed, had some sort of tie to the land of sand and fire, be it an acre of land or a twice-removed cousin. Now she scanned the tiny characters for Xia Zhong’s name. He wasn’t in the first report, or the second. She flipped to the third and found a list ministers involved in the Kendi’an salt industry.

  Xia Zhong wasn’t listed.

  He was listed, however, in having a role in the Yan salt trade. Hesina inhaled sharply when she saw the numbers. In the last year, he’d purchased two domestic salt mines and invested in four. A significant number. A dangerous number, considering that before relations had soured, Yan imported most of its salt from Kendi’a.

  Xia Zhong and salt. Xia Zhong and investments. Xia Zhong, with his ratty robes and holey roof, and profits.

  He was doing this for…money?

  Hesina collapsed onto the floor, surrounded by scattered papers, something cold and damp in her hand. She uncurled a fist and blinked at the Investigation Bureau’s list of names, now compacted to the size of a small stone. She’d been gripping it so tightly that it’d become a part of her. It’d always been a part of her, this trial. She’d brought it into existence.

  She wouldn’t let anyone kidnap it.

  She wasn’t sure how much time passed before she picked herself up. All she knew was that the sun was going down, and the room was as dark as her mind when she slipped a single letter out of the stack, placed it into her sleeve, and made for the courtyards.

  NINE

  WEALTH SHOULD NOT DETERMINE FATE.

  ONE OF THE ELEVEN ON SOCIAL HIERARCHY

  EVERY KINGDOM HAS NOBLES, BUT NOT EVERY KINGDOM HAS ONES THAT REIGN AS KINGS.

  TWO OF THE ELEVEN ON SOCIAL HIERARCHY

  The gingko trees had shed all at once, leafing the ponds in gold. But the evening was abnormally warm for fall as Hesina traveled through the columned galleries, reminding her of the weather that night two weeks ago, when she’d gone into the red-light district. Except this time, she had nothing to hide. She was a queen on her way to a minister, and whether or not he wanted to, he would have to answer to her.

  She reached the Northern Palace, where the relic emperors had housed their favorite concubines. Even Xia Zhong’s courtyard complex, the shabbiest of all the ministers’, exhibited traces of odious elegance. Dragons reared at the upturned roof points, their claws forming hooks from which paper lanterns dripped like mandarins on a branch.

  Hesina hung up her lantern with the others and knocked on the latticework doors. They swung apart almost instantaneously, and she stumbled back as a maid hurried out.

  The sight rattled her. Had Xia Zhong been plying the maid just as he, or one of his cronies in the Bureau, had plied Consort Fei’s lady-in-waiting?

  Hesina still had trouble visualizing his involvement. But she’d seen the green-stained Tenets. Matched the handwriting. Found a motive. And now, when his voice came from the inner chamber—“Who’s there?”—she tasted something as foul as the tea leaves he always chewed.

  “Your queen.”

  The minister hurried out from behind the partition, one arm slid through a patched yi. “My chambers are unsightly,” he said, shrugging his other arm into the shirt jacket. “You shouldn’t be subjected to such filth.”

  No filth, Hesina decided as she crossed the threshold and shut the doors behind her, could be worse than Xia Zhong himself. “Your chambers will do just fine.”

  Xia Zhong bowed. She didn’t bother relieving him, and he remained hunched as he led her around the partition, inviting her to his inner chambers. Cheap sheep-fat candles smoked on bronze candelabra, releasing a gamy stink as they burned. The low kang table—piled with copies of the Tenets—looked cheap, too, nicked and scratched and denuded of most of its lacquer. Only the double-edged sword hanging on the wall appeared to be worth something. It was plain and unadorned, but the steel shone of quality.

  It wouldn’t surprise her, thought Hesina dryly, if Xia Zhong was secretly a swordsman too.

  She sat on a threadbare cushion before the low kang.

  “I’ll go make tea,” said the minister, backing away.

  “Stop right there.”

  Xia Zhong stilled in his tracks.

  “Come,” said Hesina, and the minister came. “Sit.”

  The minister knelt on the cushion opposite the kang, the Tenets atop it nearly eclipsing him. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

  Hesina answered by reaching into her sleeve and tossing a letter on
to the table.

  “What is this?” asked Xia Zhong. He sounded like a weary man who’d read too many documents and couldn’t possibly look at another.

  “I think you know very well.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Then let me explain it to you. You know that Yan’s salt mines will never outcompete the Kendi’an ones as long as trade exists between our kingdoms. And yet lately, you’ve invested in quite a number of mines in the Yan provinces of Yingchuan and Tangshui. It’s as if you foresaw inter-kingdom trade stopping because of a war…a war you’re trying to orchestrate by writing to the Kendi’an court.”

  The words came out polished, like bones picked clean by carrion birds. Hesina’s voice didn’t shake, didn’t tremble. Anger had cauterized her nerves. Numbly, she went on to say, “You’re feeding information to their raiding parties. That is treason.”

  Xia Zhong didn’t react. He merely tucked his hands into his wide sleeves. “Passage 2.3.2: ‘Suspicion poisons the heart. A ruler should see her advisors as friends and mentors rather than competitors.’”

  To think she’d ever tried to mimic him. “Open it, if you don’t believe me.”

  Xia Zhong drew the letter toward him. “I see you’ve taken a liking to your selected representative.”

  Hesina pinned the letter down.

  Their gazes locked over the table and the paper bridged between their hands. Cunning shined in the minister’s fishlike eyes; in the past, Hesina had mistaken it for fanaticism.

  “Let’s say we’re even,” said Xia Zhong. With grace, he withdrew his hand from the letter. “You forget these letters, and I’ll let you keep the convict.”

  “I earned my representative.”

  “Earned?” Xia Zhong laughed like a chirping frog. “My dear,” he said, leaning in, his shadow falling over the table. “I gave him to you so you would feel comfortable about forwarding your case to the Bureau.”

  “You—”

  “I spoke for you in front of the dowager queen because I knew you would investigate your father’s death if given the power.”

  He pulled back, drawing the breath in Hesina’s lungs with him.

  In speechless horror, she stared at the face of her true opponent.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” said Xia Zhong. The monk was gone. His diction had changed. Even his voice had slickened. “Without a war scare from Kendi’a, the people never would have accepted your investigation as anything more than the whim of a grief-stricken daughter. Consider our purposes aligned. If you are wise, wiser than your father, you will work with me.”

  “Work with you,” Hesina repeated, the words foreign.

  “Yes. Give me my war, and I’ll give you your trial.”

  The cushion beneath Hesina couldn’t have been more than a finger-width thick, but she suddenly felt as if she was sinking, suctioned into a swamp of desire for control—and shame for even considering the price of it toward him. “The Tenets forbid war,” she said weakly.

  “The Tenets?” Xia Zhong’s voice dripped with scorn, as if there wasn’t a pile of every edition stacked before his nose. The Ministry of Rites existed because of the books. Hesina didn’t agree with everything in the Tenets, especially when it came to the sooths, but she didn’t agree with Xia Zhong either when he said, “The Tenets are but paper.”

  It was the end of an era. Hesina would never be able to laugh at one of Lilian’s impersonations of the minister again.

  “What use do you have for that kind of money?” she demanded. It made no sense, and she was tired of things not making sense. Ministers earned decent salaries. Xia Zhong had the means to fix his roof or buy a new set of robes without resorting to such measures.

  “This is not an interrogation, dianxia,” the minister said amicably. “I’m offering you a partnership, a deal. A war for a trial. Take it or leave it.”

  No. She should have said no. But the word wouldn’t come. The silence stretched, and a bead of sweat carved a path between Hesina’s shoulder blades.

  Draw the line. But where was the line? She’d committed treason for this trial. She was blackmailing Xia Zhong for this trial. She kept drawing the line only to cross it. The idea of sacrifice didn’t scare her. She was willing to bend.

  But then she’d become the sort of person her father didn’t respect.

  The sweat on her back went cold. She rose and looked down on the minister’s bald head, waiting for him to meet her eye. “I won’t have the people believing a lie that will cost unnecessary lives. And neither will you. Remember this before you frame another person.”

  She made sure to leave the letter on the desk. The act spoke for itself. She had more. She could spare this one.

  Without a word, Xia Zhong fed it to the candle flame.

  “I could shove this up his ass,” growled Lilian, screwing the end of her poled net into the pebbled banks of the silk ponds. Surrounded by willows that wept into the silk-swathed waters, they were in the quietest section of the imperial gardens. “Or boil him in a vat of dye. The girls and I were thinking of roses and grays for the winter season. How do you think the monk would look in mauve?”

  Caiyan sighed, and Lilian snapped, “What? What do you have up your ass?”

  Without answering, Caiyan turned to Hesina. “Do you have the letters somewhere safe?”

  “Yes.” She’d placed them under the floorboards of her study, the only place her meticulous maids didn’t clean.

  “Good. Don’t use them.”

  “She should use them,” snarled Lilian as she flung her net out into the pond. Yan silkworms cast their cocoons on lily pads instead of mulberry trees, making the collection process as easy as skimming raw silk from the water. But today Lilian looked like she was trying to harpoon a tiger shark.

  “Xia Zhong is more than we ever took him for,” said Caiyan.

  “He is the lesser being of all lesser beings,” Lilian shot back. She jerked the net out, clumps of silk caught like white hair, droplets flying into Hesina’s face. “He’s the descendant of a slug.”

  Caiyan raised a fist to his mouth and started pacing on the banks. “You don’t know how he might retaliate if you push him too far.”

  “Which is why,” gritted out Lilian, detangling the silk and tossing it into her collection basket, “we should retaliate first.”

  “Milady, you must proceed with caution.”

  “To hell with caution! Na-Na—”

  “Stop!” The twins froze as Hesina clutched at her pounding head. “Just…stop.”

  Seconds passed, during which an unspoken conversation took place between Caiyan and Lilian. A decision was reached, and Caiyan bowed. “I’ll see you at dinner, milady.”

  As her twin left, Lilian crouched, plucked a stray silkworm from the ground, and helped it back into the water. “Sorry, Na-Na.”

  “It’s fine.” Hesina just wanted an answer to her problems, and neither Caiyan’s nor Lilian’s suggestions felt like one. She crouched by Lilian. “I doubt Xia Zhong will listen to me. He’ll just work closer with the Investigation Bureau. It’ll get harder to acquit the suspects from here on out.”

  “Don’t be so certain,” said Lilian. “Akira seems very capable.”

  What about me? What am I supposed to do?

  But Hesina was being silly. She wasn’t a princess anymore. Power wasn’t wielding the knife on her own but having someone else wield it on her behalf.

  With a groan, Lilian stood. “Any word from the Kendi’an court?”

  Power, apparently, was also ignoring letters from queens. “No,” Hesina muttered, rising with her sister.

  “You should bring a party of your strongest warriors to them and make them reply at sword point.”

  “I wonder why I haven’t thought of this before.”

  “Because you have that stone-head as your advisor, not me. If I were your courtier, we’d make all the kingdoms cower in fear.”

  “You hate court.”

  Lilian raised a
finger. “But I like muscular warriors and threatening people.”

  Hesina snorted. Lilian giggled. Snorts turned into giggles, and giggles into snorts. Hesina’s cheeks ached, as if the muscles required for mirth had atrophied. Right when she thought she might have pulled something, the pebbles behind them clattered and she was forced to school her features into a semblance of regality before facing the visitor.

  “Why, if it isn’t Prince Rou!” cried Lilian, batting her lashes and causing Rou to flush and stammer and bow to someone equal in rank. Hesina grimaced.

  “S-sister, may I have a moment with you?”

  “I’ll see you at dinner,” said Lilian, departing before Hesina could offer her a lifetime supply of candied hawthorn berries for her company.

  Your loss. But mostly, it felt like Hesina’s loss as she and Rou stood in awkward silence.

  At last, Hesina suggested a stroll to the koi ponds. Rou eagerly agreed. They sat on the shelves of rock, waterfalls cascading around them, and Rou reached into the cross-collar fold of his blue hanfu. Hesina stared as he withdrew a handful of lotus seed. First Xia Zhong. Now Rou. Was she the only one who didn’t carry food in her clothes?

  The koi fled as Rou scattered seed over the pond. Then, slowly, they returned. As they chased the seeds, Rou cleared his throat. “Thank you.”

  In two words, Rou expressed emotions Hesina couldn’t convey in a thousand.

  “Don’t thank me.” It was easier to speak to her half brother as if he were an emissary from another kingdom. Be gracious. “He was my father.” Be honest. “It’s my duty to keep innocents from being framed in his name.” Be firm.

  Rou scattered another handful of seed. “It’s my duty too.”

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t.”

  Her tone was sharper than she intended, and Rou’s gaze dropped to his knees. “I know what the palace thinks of me and my mother. But that doesn’t change the fact he was also my father. Which means you’re my sister, and I should have helped you.”