by Joan He
She waved her guards onward.
The residential wards were next. Again, Hesina wasn’t prepared. A shoeless child wandered through the crowds, bleeding from a long cut on his arm. Magistrates and their residents clustered the limestone corridors and their moon gate cutouts. Some sought her blessings, but many more simply continued their fights.
“Oh, so you think I’m a sooth?” screamed a woman. “You’re the one who proposed joining our families through marriage!”
“Marriage?” The man had a kitchen cleaver in his hands, and only his children were holding him back. “Forget about marriage. I’ll have your life!”
Hesina intervened where she could. But some battles were already lost. At the moat, vigilante groups circulated pages torn out of the Tenets and spewed their convictions. A number were about Hesina. If she wasn’t secretly backing the perpetrators, she was conspiring with the Kendi’an Crown Prince and plotting ten other things. Whoever this queen was, she surpassed Hesina.
“Don’t engage,” she warned her guards. The tour had to go on. Still, she gritted her teeth as they left the moat. The muscles of her face ached from maintaining a mask of indifference, and she almost cracked when they came to the Eastern Gate.
Three bodies swung like tassels in the archway’s crown. One was badly burned. The others had been cut so many times that they were equally unrecognizable.
One sooth.
Two colluders.
People like her.
You deserve the same fate, their mangled faces said.
Anger, sorrow, and fear brewed up Hesina’s throat. “Take them down.”
A crowd gathered to watch as the guards cut the ropes.
“Should have let them hang longer,” spat out an old man. Others echoed his sentiments, but followed the palanquin when it continued to the terraces.
A crowd had already gathered on the Peony Pavilion. Many wore white hanfu cuffed and collared in black—the uniform of young scholars and civil service examinee hopefuls.
“Dianxia!” they cried. “Dianxia! Dianxia!”
Hesina ordered the litter to halt and stepped out.
“Dianxia!” People craned their necks to see her. “Dianxia!”
The guards pressed them back, but Hesina held up a hand. She approached a girl near the front of the crowd. “What is your name?”
The girl blinked, then bowed over her clasped hands. “Family name Bai, given name Yuqi.”
“Do you have a favorite text, Bai Yuqi?” asked Hesina, nodding at the sack of books slung over the girl’s shoulder.
“T-the Tenets, dianxia.”
Of course. What had Hesina expected her to say? Assassins through the Ages? “And why is that?”
“The past is a timeless teacher, dianxia.”
“Raise your head.”
Hesina touched two fingers to the girl’s temple once she did. “The mind is a timeless teacher.” She tapped the girl’s collarbone. “And the heart. The past must be filtered through both to mean anything in the present.”
“Bai Yuqi will commit that to memory, dianxia.”
Hesina tucked her hands into her sleeves as she turned. “I’ll walk the rest of the way,” she murmured to her guards as they came forth to help her back into the palanquin.
Her legs were still weak. By the time they made it to the terraces, Hesina had cold-sweated through her underrobes. Still, she rejected any assistance. There was a time to lean on others, and a time to stand alone.
She raised her gaze.
The steps, swept clean in preparation, were already dusted with fresh snow. Imperial guards outfitted in ceremonial jade laminar flanked the ascent, the crimson-dyed tassels of their halberds stirring in the wind. The palace loomed over them all, growing larger and larger as Hesina huffed and puffed her way up. She braced a hand on her thigh once she reached the landing, caught her breath, and straightened.
Caiyan was here as promised. So was Lilian, her chin smudged with soot. She gave Hesina the smallest of nods. No matter what happened today, Mei’s parents and the others were out of this city. They were safe.
Relief bolstered Hesina and gave her the courage to remove the hand scroll from her sleeve.
She faced the pavilion. The sky teemed above their heads, a billowing sea of gray. Her people stood miniscule beneath it. They shouldn’t have had to claw for air, yet when Hesina opened her mouth, she suddenly felt like she was suffocating.
Then wind blasted through the crowd, cleaving Hesina’s core with icy clarity.
There’s a tale. The tale of Yidou.
A tale of a life for a life, flesh to sustain flesh.
But feeding the people’s fear wasn’t giving them sustenance. It was poisoning them.
She clenched the scroll shut. She wouldn’t read it. She wouldn’t divide this kingdom any further. She wouldn’t be like her father and give up her ideals.
“When the Eleven created this new era,” she began, “they simplified the language so everyone could learn. The ability to think for oneself is the kind of power neither blood nor status can confer.
“To learn, we must understand the facts. I won’t hide them from you. Twelve days ago, the palace dungeons were breached—”
“By sooths!”
“—by unidentified persons,” she continued over the shout. “One of the elite guard was injured; three were lost, their bodies unrecoverable. Their names shall go down in the Imperial Histories, and their families will be honored.
“We also failed to recover the bodies of the convicted and the perpetrators. I know this is a frightening time.” She raised her voice to be heard. “An unprecedented time. But in the absence of information, we mustn’t draw dangerous conclusions.”
“So who killed the king?”
Who killed the king?
Who killed the king?
Who killed the king?
I don’t know: the truth. Xia Zhong: a lie. Mei: a lie the people would take as truth.
“Was it the convicted?” they cried when Hesina stood silent, paralyzed by the choice facing her. “Was it the sooths?”
“It was the sooths!”
“The sooths! The sooths!”
Truth or lie.
Before Hesina could decide, the cold edge of a knife sliced her throat.
TWENTY-SIX
WHAT YOU VALUE MANIFESTS IN THE WAY YOU TREAT YOUR BLOOD.
ONE OF THE ELEVEN ON FAMILY
WHAT CAN I SAY? I ABANDONED MY FAMILY TO PROTECT THEM.
TWO OF THE ELEVEN ON FAMILY
The hand on Hesina’s shoulder held her still, even though she couldn’t move. The other edged the knife closer. Warmth trickled down her neck.
“It was I.” A gale buffeted them, tossing strands of black walnut-colored hair against Hesina’s cheek and wrapping her in the scent of osmanthus and peach blossom. She knew it as well as her own. The winds strengthened but failed to steal away Lilian’s voice. “It was I who killed the king!”
The ground dissolved. Faces merged, shades of skin becoming one. Commoners, guards…everything was gone, eroded by Hesina’s horror. “Lies,” she whispered.
Lilian replied in a shout that tore right through the blanket of silence. “I killed him for this kingdom!”
“Qui—”
The knife cut deeper. The trickle quickened, slipping past her sternum. Her thoughts ran with the blood. Lilian couldn’t really mean it. This was a script. An act. It had to be. Her sister couldn’t have “killed” their father. She—
“I, too, thought the king was benevolent and righteous. I thought of him as a father. But his benevolence hid his ineffectiveness. His righteousness was an excuse for his past crimes.”
The world bled back in: the hundreds crowded on the pavilion below, the guards on the stairs, their halberds and gazes pointed at the knife at Hesina’s throat.
“This kingdom is my home.” Lilian’s voice pealed above the wind. “I wanted better for it, so I ended him.”
Hesina’s min
d thawed. Whatever Lilian’s motives, she had to silence her, stop her from condemning herself any further.
“I placed my hopes in this queen,” said Lilian.
Elbow to the ribs, hand to the wrist. Seize the knife. Everyone is watching; you have one chance.
“Again, a mistake—”
A shudder rocked through Lilian before Hesina could act. Her sister’s gasp warmed her cheek.
The knife fell.
Lilian fell next. Hesina barely caught her, staggering to the ground under her sister’s weight. Her perfect features crumpled in pain, and Hesina’s heart spasmed. “Speak to me, Lilian, Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Na-Na.” Lilian grimaced, her teeth inked in red. Hesina’s mind iced back over. No. No, no, no. She frantically searched for the source of the injury. Her hand knocked into an oblong object in Lilian’s back. Her trembling fingers curled around a handle, a hilt—a dagger planted beside the left shoulder blade.
The snow’s descent slowed.
This…wasn’t happening. Not for real. This was just pretend. Any moment now, Lilian was going to leap up and cry Surprise! I got you!
But the terrible, sticky wheeze of her sister’s breath went on and on. A shadow waxed over them, and Hesina’s gaze lifted, climbing the length of a black-and-gold hanfu, stilling on a pair of hands.
Caiyan’s hands, right hand clasped over left, knuckles flecked with blood. He was the only one who’d been standing behind them, the only who could have…who could have…
Who could have…
“Na-Na.” The rasp of her name rescued Hesina from the torrent of the truth. “All the ministers—” wheezed Lilian.
“S-shhh. We’ll get you to the Imperial Doc—”
“—are stone-heads. They couldn’t even think of this solution…”
Solution. The word threshed the breath from Hesina’s lungs. Solution? What sort of solution was this? What could this possibly accomplish? “H-hush.”
Lilian smiled that horribly red smile. Then, with a gasp of effort, she flung out a sleeve.
A package tumbled down the steps. The guards rushing toward them barely had enough time to stumble away before it exploded. Chunks of stone rocketed into the air, and the commoners screamed even as the smoke cleared. The resulting damage was incomparable to what happened in the tianlao cells.
But the people didn’t know that.
The people would link the two as congruent events.
The smoke of Hesina’s confusion cleared, too, and comprehension flayed her.
Lilian was scapegoating herself before an audience of hundreds. Word of her confession would flood the provinces, the streets. Who killed the king? None other than the queen’s adopted sister. They had all the evidence they needed. The knife to Hesina’s throat. The scripted confession. The bomb, a prop.
“Why?”
Lilian closed her eyes. “Now you can protect them…all of them…”
“Shhh.” Tears spilled over Hesina’s cheeks, hot like the blood soaking her skirts. Tell me you’re not doing any of this for free. Tell me you want your payment of candied hawthorn berries. “S-shhh.”
“You’re ruining another…gown…” Lilian’s lips quivered with a smile. “Though…it was bland anyway…”
Voices swelled from down below. Blood…not burning…not a sooth…
Hesina’s jaw trembled as she bit back a howl of rage. The people could have her heart. They could have her life. They could have everything she had to offer, but Lilian wasn’t theirs to take. She wouldn’t allow it.
“You’re going to be okay. The Doctress will make you okay. Stop talking,” she said as Lilian opened her mouth.
“Promise me…” The boots of the imperial guards pounded around them, nearly drowning out Lilian’s whisper. She raised a hand, struggling to reach Hesina’s cheek. “Promise…you’ll finish this…in style.”
Her hand wavered. Hesina clasped it before it could fall and squeezed, just like she had when they’d waded into the ponds together, or flown down the corridors with hot mantous clutched in their skirts, the cooks in fierce pursuit. She held on so tightly that she never felt the exact moment when Lilian stopped squeezing back.
Hesina didn’t change. Didn’t have someone see to her neck. She finally looked the part she deserved: bloodstained.
She swept into the throne hall like a squall, her ministers scrambling to assemble in her wake. From the dais, she ordered members of the Investigation Bureau to search Lilian’s chambers and return with an immediate report. As they waited, a few of the younger vassals snuck glances in her direction. If they were hoping to see a reaction, they’d sorely be disappointed. Hesina was amber and stone, a fossilized cicada shell with dust for innards, a cavity for a heart, and a single thought for a mind:
Finish this in style.
The thought anchored her when members of the Investigation Bureau came back carrying gilded trays.
“Dianxia,” addressed the director. “Per your orders, we searched the kingslayer’s rooms and found the following items.”
He proceeded to identify them: a vial containing crane’s crest, an arsenic-based poison, and a forbidden tome criticizing the Eleven and the new era.
Hesina gripped the arms of her throne as the items emerged. Lilian had staged her exit well. Too well, for the girl who wore ribbons in her hair and dye on her apron, shunning politics and its players.
But she had played them all.
“Excellent,” said Hesina, her voice hollow, hurt dripping into her heart like water in an empty cave. She should have grown accustomed to people keeping secrets from her by now. “Today marks the conclusion of this case. Vigilante groups who fail to disband will face death by hanging. The same goes for anyone carrying out an unauthorized cutting. Grand Secretariat Sunlei, see that these penal laws are posted throughout the city within three days.”
“Understood, dianxia.”
Hesina moved on, issuing reparations to businesses and vendors, matching the silver outflow with a tax raise on millet, and backing a public effort at reclamation and restoration of destroyed property. Word by word, decree by decree, she stitched her kingdom back together.
“And what of the disposal of the kingslayer’s body?” asked Xia Zhong from the ranks.
Hesina met his eye unflinchingly. “That matter falls under your jurisdiction, Minister Xia. By the Book of Rites, how should the body be disposed?”
“They are to be burned in public, their ashes scattered into Tricent Gorge to be forever tormented by the rapids.”
No tomb. No ceremony. Nothing to bury or to mourn.
Hesina forced her fists apart and flattened her hands upon the throne. “Then see that the rites are observed.”
It wasn’t Xia Zhong who made her falter, but Caiyan, whom Hesina summoned from the ranks next. She thought she could barrel through what needed to be done, but as he stepped before the dais and bowed, time slowed as it had on the terraces. A hundred heartbeats raced by before Hesina tore her gaze away from his hands—clean now, but bloodied in her memory—and managed to speak.
“Kingslayer or not, she should have faced trial like everyone else. That is the law of the Tenets. You”—killed her. Killed her killed her killed her—“didn’t afford her the chance.”
“Forgive me.” Caiyan’s head was still bowed; the ground received those two words, not Hesina. It gave her small relief. She wasn’t sure if she could forgive him, even if Lilian had willed her twin’s actions. Lilian had damned herself, but Caiyan had driven in the knife. Hesina couldn’t forget this any more than she could bring her sister back to life.
The Minister of Works stepped forward. “If I may, dianxia,” he ventured, breaking the extended silence. “I’d like to defend Viscount Yan Caiyan. He acted as he saw necessary. No one else was in the position to do the same, not without putting your life at risk.”
The others echoed in agreement. They could just as easily have been demanding Caiyan’s arrest, but by quite literall
y cutting his blood ties, he appeared to have dodged any and all suspicion.
Unnerved, Hesina raised a hand, and the assembly quieted. “What Minister Zhou says is true,” she forced out. “For saving my life, I am in your debt. You shall have anything you request.”
Caiyan deepened his bow. “I’d like to be granted command of the city guard.”
She stilled. “You are a court official of great learning.” You are inexperienced with martial matters.
“They require a disciplined leader dedicated to maintaining the newfound peace.”
“You are currently overseeing the examinations.” You are preoccupied.
“The first round is set to begin tomorrow.”
Her eyes narrowed. You are in mourning. But she couldn’t say it. No one in this hall was supposed to mourn a kingslayer, not even her.
There were a hundred other things she couldn’t say: Who are you, Yan Caiyan? My advisor? A viscount of the court? A brother—who killed his own sister? Why do I find it harder and harder to read you?
But it was too late to retract her offer. “Then the city guard is yours to command.”
Caiyan lifted his head. For the briefest of moments, an indescribable emotion darkened his features. But maybe Hesina was seeing what she wanted to see, because by the next second he was kneeling in koutou, rising, and melting back into the ranks without so much as a flicker of remorse.
The director of the Investigation Bureau came forward to take his place. “There is one last matter, dianxia.”
“Speak.”
He turned to the guards flanking the doors. “Bring him in.”
I am amber. I am stone. But then the double doors opened and the guards dragged in Akira. Two shoved him before the dais. Another threw down his rod. Reflexively, Hesina rose.
“At the fifth gong strike this morning,” said the director, “this young man was caught in an act of thievery.”
“What did he steal?”
Xia Zhong stepped forward. “My finest collection of Tenets.”
There was something lewd about the minister and the director standing side by side, both knowing very well that Hesina could do nothing to stop them. Her gaze tore to Akira, who’d dragged himself up. He didn’t look at her. He must have learned of Lilian’s fate, must have realized that Hesina would fail him like she’d failed her own sister. Wiping the blood off his split lip, he reached for his rod.