by Joan He
On the twentieth day of the first month, a citywide cutting, enacted sector by sector, ward by ward, will be conducted by authorized members of the imperial guard. Those who flame will be held in the city guard barracks and await further processing.
Her hand lost its steadiness.
The strokes bled.
Her head page came in just as she was stamping the yellow silk with her seal. “Minister Xia is throwing a feast in the Northern Palace.”
Could she even be surprised? She lifted her seal, revealing a perfect impression, the red ink crisp and not the least bit smeared, each squiggle of her name bold and unforgiving. She set aside the decree to dry.
“Relieve your people from watching him.” Xia Zhong had gotten what he wanted. There was no need to spy on him out of spite. These words made sense, unlike her next: “Reassign them to watching Yan Caiyan.”
“Understood, dianxia.”
It’s because I’m worried about him, Hesina told herself. She cared for his well-being, just as she cared for the well-being of a certain dowager queen. “My mother. Has she written?”
“There’s been no word from the dowager queen.”
“I see.” Hesina rubbed her temples. She didn’t have the energy for disappointment, let alone anger. The full-moon deadline had come and gone, but what would she even ask her mother? Did you know Father was One of the Eleven? That you married a man as old as the new era itself? She couldn’t justify sending a cohort to the mountains for an answer so obvious. And though her father’s poisoner remained unfound, she couldn’t justify searching for the assassin either. The truth couldn’t quell the chaos. The truth couldn’t bestow the power she desperately needed.
“Dianxia?”
Hesina had pressed her head to the bed frame. She never wanted to lift it.
“Is there something wrong?” asked her page in concern.
Yes. Everything is wrong. “No. That will be all.”
And then, because her head was simply too heavy, Hesina rested it on the pillow log.
She stumbled down a steep mountain pass, her bare feet bleeding into the snow, her ears numbed by the wind, which howled so loudly it almost drowned out the snarl.
She spun. The beast emerged from the rocks, shoulder blades jutting as it stalked in, ribs heaving as it inhaled.
She fumbled for her knife with half-frozen fingers.
Kill it, urged a voice in her ear.
Kill it, or be killed.
She bared the blade, and the wolf stopped short. Its raised haunches lowered. It sat, black lips pulling back over teeth as it spoke.
It spoke.
“Hey.”
Hesina opened her eyes to a pair of pale ones peering down at her.
She bolted up. Her head cracked into something hard, and pain watered her eyes. Even then, she made out his lean shape, ash-colored hanfu, and tail of darker ash hair falling over his shoulder.
“Akira? What time is it?”
“Early. Or late.”
“And what are you doing here?”
He rubbed his temple. “Waking you up from a nightmare, unless I guessed wrong.”
“I mean, what are you doing here?” Hesina gestured at the infirmary, then flushed, as if he could see into her mind and count all the times she’d waited for him to step through those sliding doors.
He sat at the foot of the bed and placed a ceramic jar on the sheets. “I meant to deliver this. Earlier. It took a couple tries to get right.”
Either she was groggy, or he was more disjointed than usual, because she struggled to understand what he was talking about. “What is it?”
“Ointment.” He rubbed the back of his neck as she removed the lid. “Or should be. I’m out of practice.”
It looked like ointment, which was more than she could have said for his flute. “Um, thank you?”
“It’s for your back.”
“Oh.”
“Er, you should probably test it…”
Hesina turned her back to him and loosened the sash of her underrobes.
“…later,” Akira finished.
“Close your eyes.” If her words didn’t fail her tomorrow, her back might. She’d do whatever needed to be done—including baring her hideous blisters and taking a chance on Akira’s ointment.
Applying it to her lower back hurt only a little. Reaching her middle back was trickier, and her scars protested against the contortion.
“Here.” A hand brushed Hesina’s arm. Her gaze whipped to Akira, but his eyes remained closed as he took the ointment pot from her palm. “You can guide me.”
Her pragmatic side approved of the plan, and an “okay” slipped past her lips. Having Akira apply ointment for her was efficient, expedient—and not embarrassing at all! No, further left, to that grosser scar! Yes, that’s the one!
“Actually—”
Hesina’s thoughts petered out at his touch. The air in her lungs solidified, leaving no room for breath. Goose bumps erupted across the small of her back, along her shoulders, over her knees, for Eleven’s sake.
“Actually…?” His finger stopped between her shoulder blades; her whole existence boiled down to this point.
Hesina moistened her lips. “Actually, I…I didn’t know merchant robbers made ointment.”
For a second Akira didn’t speak. “I’m not a merchant robber.”
She’d guessed as much, but she couldn’t say that. Couldn’t admit that she’d been making up his life story all this time. “What about your friend? The one who stole too much?”
“My friend.” His fingers skipped down her spine; her heart doubled its pace. “That was me.”
His voice sounded strained, as if he didn’t want to be talking about this at all. But Hesina played along. “What did you steal?”
Slowly, he lifted his hand. “Lives.”
Akira was talking about his past. The sun was setting in the east. Akira was an assassin. Hesina’s silly little story about him had been right.
Akira was an assassin.
She was sitting on a bed with an assassin.
Nothing had changed, she tried to tell herself. He was still Akira, her representative.
He went on to say how he’d specialized in poisons. It was so obvious in hindsight. His knowledge of them, his relative immunity to them, his skill at making antidotes—and now ointments. But:
“Why are you telling me this?”
Akira fell silent.
Hesina turned, remembering to clutch her collar shut, and watched as his eyes lifted to the ceiling.
“I never got the chance to tell someone else,” he said to the ginseng sachets. “They died thinking I was someone I wasn’t.”
Then his gaze swung to hers. In it, she read everything he couldn’t express. Fear—I thought you were going to die. Resolve—I had to tell you. Rue—even if I lost you.
“Okay,” Hesina managed, feeling just as defenseless.
“Okay?”
“Yes. Okay.”
His gaze hardened. “I’ve killed people.”
“I know.” Well, now she really did.
“Nobles. Serfs. Elders. I killed them just because I could.”
“I don’t believe that.”
The corner of his mouth jerked up in cold amusement. “It’s the truth.”
“Then what about the monsters that roam at night?”
“I am the monster.”
“What about the ghosts that haunt you to this day?” Hesina pressed. “Without remorse, you think you’d still have nightmares about your past?”
Akira didn’t speak for a long time. “You should be scared.”
Are you? his eyes asked.
Hesina was scared of her people. She was scared of herself. But Akira? She looked at him and all his little imperfections, like the nick interrupting the arch of his right brow, the scar breaking the dip of his upper lip, the blue tinge of a vein lurking under his left eye, almost covered by the fall of his bangs.
She gave her answer—by curling a
hand into the front his hanfu and rising up on her knees. She cut short his intake of air and spoke it to him without words.
A thousand moments fused into one. Maybe it was a second—maybe it was a hundred—before Akira reacted.
He jerked back. They were both gasping. The shine of moonlight was on his lip. The taste of him was on hers.
Hesina caught her breath. “You’re the one who’s scared,” she realized out loud. You’re scared of being accepted as you are.
Akira passed a hand over his eyes as if he didn’t want to see her, or for her to see him. “I’m really not the person you think you know.”
“Neither am I.” Who was she? What was she? If she told Akira the truth about her father, would he think of her as the descendant of a murderer or the descendant of a savior? Or would he think of her as just…her?
“I can’t change how people see me,” Hesina said. “Just as you can’t change your past. But I can choose to accept.”
Akira got off the bed.
She lurched to follow. “I accept you.”
He walked to the doors.
She stumbled in front of him. “As you are, as I am, I accept you.”
He tried to cut around her. Hesina backed up against the fretwork, one hand still clutching her collar shut, the other spread out beside her to block his escape.
“So please—”
Her breath hitched as he braced a forearm above her head, gray eyes locking on hers.
—Stay.
He did.
He carried her back to the bed and sat on the floor beside it. They stayed in each other’s silent company. There was so much that Hesina wanted to ask, but she didn’t press for more, and eventually Akira began speaking on his own.
He told the story of a boy, orphaned by the Kendi’a slave trade, raised by a poison master, a boy just shy of eleven who’d joined a guild of twenty-three other assassins. By day, he killed for the usual clientele—paranoid princes, greedy barons, estranged lovers. By night, he killed for a sect called the Red Amaryllis. Anyone connected to the Kendi’an slave trade was fair game. The masters and their families. The landlords and their overseers. The accountants and shippers and secretariats. Evil must be weeded by the root, the sect leader often reminded the gray-eyed child, a child who listened closely and took the words of others as his truth.
The people renamed the child the Specter because he killed without a sound. Even his own guild brothers and sisters regarded him as a threat. None of the twenty-three noticed when the boy didn’t show up at the mess hall one night, or saw the blood on a brother’s hands. They laughed and joked as a family while the boy lay in the gutter of some sandstone alleyway, split from throat to navel like a hog, silent as always because he didn’t think anyone would come.
He was wrong.
From the start, the boy and the girl lied to each other. She wasn’t the manor’s healer that she pretended to be, but the daughter of a baron who’d died some months prior. He wasn’t the alchemist’s apprentice that he pretended to be, but the assassin who’d poisoned that baron at the sect’s bidding. Theirs was a friendship born out of ignorance. He recovered under her care and stayed at her request. They passed the days on the manor grounds, climbing pear trees and looking for treasure in the sandstone wells. He didn’t contact the sect. He didn’t return to his guild.
The servants liked him because he lacked the usual airs of apprentice boys. One evening, he overheard them speaking of an appreciation banquet the manor’s young heiress was throwing for twenty-three scholars. The boy thought twenty-three was a strange number.
A familiar number.
He arrived too late and not late enough. He saw his guildmates slumped over the banquet table, punished for the murder of a baron that was his alone to bear, killed by a tasteless, scentless poison he’d created out of simple curiosity in the manor’s workrooms. When a masked figure approached the last breathing guildmate, the boy acted without thinking. He saved the brother who had once tried to kill him. He killed the masked one, the girl who’d saved him, and with her penultimate breaths she had asked: Was he dead? Was the Specter dead?
The boy lied.
“As for the rest,” said Akira, “well, it’s not that interesting. You already know it. Merchant robbing. Touring the realm, prison by prison—”
“You didn’t lie.”
A beat of silence. “The last time I checked, I was still alive.”
“But the Specter died.” Hesina pictured Akira as the boy he had been, a boy swallowed by a cause. She didn’t know what it meant to be an orphan or an assassin, but she knew how easy it was to adopt another’s values. “He died when you left the name behind. It’s why you won’t touch a real weapon, why you question things and think for yourself.” She dangled a hand over the bed and onto his head. “Why you’re Akira now.”
“Am I? You can bury a body,” Akira continued, “but the bones don’t go away.”
That’s not true. But who was she to say what was?
“Will you show me the tattoo on your back?” Hesina asked instead. She didn’t know where her inhibition had gone, and she didn’t much care. She’d already confessed to watching him sleep.
“It’s only fair,” she added sternly when Akira said nothing.
“It’s not pretty.”
Then her back must have been ghastly, because she thought the tattoo—which was of some sort of flower, yanked up by the root and clenched in a fist—almost looked noble. It spanned from Akira’s shoulder to the curves of his ribs. He stiffened as she covered the tattooed hand with her own.
Hesina thought of all the ways stories could be conveyed. Inked on flesh. Sewn on silk facades. She thought of her father, beheading the relic emperor. Purging the sooths. An era drawn from blood. A throne erected upon bones.
If she could extend acceptance to Akira, but not her own father, did that make her a terrible daughter?
“Not sleeping?” asked Akira some time later.
“Thinking.”
“Sleep,” said Akira. “Thinking can wait.”
Nothing can wait. A queen cannot stand still as everything and everyone rushes past her. But that had already happened, and Hesina, though arguably worse off than before, had survived. So she listened to Akira and closed her eyes.
Come morning, the skin on her back felt supple, and the blisters were no longer unpleasantly tight when Hesina raised her arms.
It worked, she wanted to tell Akira, but he was gone. The only physical evidence of his visit was the jar on the floor. Hesina’s hand drifted to her lips, then quickly dropped. It was morning. Time to be queen again, and to stop a citywide massacre.
She dressed herself and twisted up her hair without Ming’er’s help, steeling her heart as she dabbed vermillion onto her lips, polishing her words as she swiped her cheekbones with the pearlescent powder of crushed dragonfly wings. Identifying the sooths and placating the masses was only the first challenge. The next—wiping out the masses’ hatred—would be even harder. To think she could do it was perhaps downright naive.
Hesina snapped the powder box shut. The opposite of naive was jaded. Her reign had just begun, and her one talent was her bullheadedness. She owed it to the Silver Iris, to Mei, to all the sooths in this kingdom to make full use of it.
Mask perfected, she exited the palace by way of the Hall of Celestial Morality. In the mist-swathed courtyard, two lines of guards stood at the ready by the palanquin. It was a jewel box of a thing fashioned out of lacquered zitan, with rounds of jade implanted beneath the pole brackets, the imperial crest of the water lily and the serpent rising in low relief from the green stone.
Hesina was pleased to find the litter uncovered; she wanted the people to see her for themselves. But she began having second thoughts after they went down the terraces and took the main boulevard to the eastern market sector. Stakes had been driven into the roadside, and skewered objects—pigeons, she realized with a lurch of nausea—topped them like human heads.
“Kendi’an,” whispered the guard on the palanquin’s right. “It’s the people’s response to their leaflets about the sooths.”
The messenger pigeons were hard with frost, their necks twisted at odd angles. Plaques hung from the grasp of their claws:
LET NONE ESCAPE
LEAVE NONE ALIVE
It was the beginning of a very long tour.
The imperial guards announced their arrival at the market sector. Hesina hardly recognized it. Vendor stalls had been burned or picked clean like chicken carcasses. Broken curios littered the icy ground. The few remaining sellers had set up makeshift tarps.
“The queen’s ashes!” hawked one such merchant. Customers were pulling out banliang for the little silk pouches he offered. “Her only remains! Retrieved from the depths of the dungeons!”
If only. Then Hesina wouldn’t have to suffer through this. “Why haven’t these ventures been stopped?” she asked the guard sharply.
“We shut them down, but they pop up again overnight because…” He trailed off.
Because there was a demand. Even with all the notices papering the limestone walls, how many still thought she was char on the ground?
“Bring me to him,” she ordered.
As her palanquin drew close, the bystanders fell to their knees. “Dianxia!”
“D-Dianxia!” stuttered the merchant.
She considered his prostrate frame. A man in his midthirties and in decent health, robust enough to withstand a lesson. “You dishonor your name by profiting off lies.”
“I-I’ll pack up my wares—”
“No, leave them. Watch him,” she ordered a guard. “If anyone touches his wares, treat them as robbers.” Then she addressed the bystanders. “The rest of you are relieved.”
They wished ten thousand years unto her life and rose. The merchant started to follow.
“Halt.” Hesina sounded so much like her mother that she shivered at her own voice. “Did I say you could rise?”
“N-no, dianxia.”
“Remain as you are, and meditate on your crimes for the next four hours.”
“Thank the queen for her mercy,” ordered the guard.
The merchant’s jaw snapped shut. “T-thank you for…”