by Fonda Lee
“Doru is like an old vine in the clan; there’s no getting around him.”
Wen sat up. Her glossy black hair tumbled over her back, and the morning light illuminated the flawless curve of her cheek. She said to him, “You have to start preparing to defend No Peak on your own, then. Doru has his connections, his informers, his sneaky ways. But all the Fists, and the Fingers under them, are yours. Green Bones are warriors first, businessmen second. If there’s a war to come, it’ll go to the streets—and the streets belong to the Horn.”
“My kitten.” Hilo wrapped his arms around Wen’s shoulders and kissed her neck from behind. She put some of his Fists to shame. “You have the heart of a jade warrior.”
“In the body of a stone-eye.” Her sigh was lovely even though her voice was bitter. “If only I was a Green Bone, I could help you. I would be your most dedicated Fist.”
“I don’t need another Fist,” he said. “You’re perfect the way you are. Leave the Green Bone worries to me.” He cupped her breasts, holding their pleasant weight in his hands, and craned in for another kiss.
She pulled her face back, refusing to be diverted. “How many Fists do you have—good ones you can count on? Kehn tells me some of them are soft; they’re used to peace, to policing and taxing, not fighting. How many of them have won duels? How many of them carry more than a few pebbles?”
Hilo sighed. “We’ve got our most green, and we’ve got some dead weight, same as them.”
She turned to face him. Wen possessed features that were not conventionally beautiful but that Hilo found endlessly interesting—wide feline eyes and dark slanted eyebrows, a slyly lascivious mouth and almost masculine jawline. When she was particularly serious, as she was now, he thought she ought to be the subject of an art photography portrait—her straight gaze so coolly intense and enigmatic it defied a viewer to guess if she was thinking about sex or murder or grocery shopping.
“Have you stopped in to the Academy lately?” she asked him. “You could go see your cousin, take a look at the year-eights. Get a feel for which ones you can use when they graduate next year.”
Hilo brightened. “You’re right—it’s been a while since I’ve paid Anden a visit. I’ll do that.” He pinched her nipples gently, gave her a final kiss, then stood up and reached for his clothes. He hummed as he pulled on his pants and adjusted the sheath of his talon knife. “That boy is really going to be something,” he declared, buttoning his shirt in front of the closet mirror. “Once he gets his jade, he’ll be like a Green Bone out of a legend.”
Wen smiled as she pinned up her hair. “Just like his Horn.”
Hilo winked at her flattery.
CHAPTER
6
Homecoming
Kaul Shaelinsan arrived in Janloon International Airport with the vaguely hungover cotton-headed feeling symptomatic of all thirteen-hour flights. Crossing the ocean, staring out the window at the passing expanse of blue, she’d felt as if she were turning back time—leaving behind the person she’d become in a foreign land and returning to her childhood. She was confused by the combination of emotions this aroused in her: a poignant, bittersweet mixture of elation and defeat.
Shae collected her baggage from the carousel; there wasn’t much. Two years in Espenia, an unaccountably expensive university degree, and all her worldly possessions fit into a single red leather suitcase. She was too tired to smile at this pathetic irony.
She picked up the receiver of a pay phone and began to deposit a coin into the slot, then stopped, remembering the bargain she’d made with herself. Yes, she was returning to Janloon, but she would do so on her own terms. She would live as an ordinary citizen of the city, not like the granddaughter of the Torch of Kekon. Which meant not calling her brother to send a chauffeured car to pick her up from the airport.
Shae replaced the phone receiver in its cradle, caught off guard by how easy it had been to slip into old behaviors within minutes of setting foot on Kekon. She sat down on a bench in the baggage claim area for a few minutes, suddenly reluctant to take the final steps through the revolving exit doors. Something told her that when they spun her around and pushed her out, the journey would be irrevocable.
Finally, though, she could delay no longer. She stood up and followed the stream of other passengers out to the taxi line.
When she’d left two years ago, Shae had never intended to move back. She’d been full of anger and optimism, determined to forge a new life and identity for herself in the great wide, modern world beyond Kekon, away from anachronistic clans and the outsized male egos of her family. Once in Espenia, she found it harder than she’d expected to escape the stigma of being from a small island country known mostly for one thing: jade. Indeed, Shae learned that the name Janloon often provoked blank looks. The foreigners called it something else: Jade City.
When people abroad learned she was Kekonese, their reactions were comically predictable. Initially, surprise. Kekon was an exotic, make-believe place in the minds of most Espenians. The postwar boom in global trade was reversing its centuries of isolation, but not yet entirely. She might as well have said she was from outer space.
The second response: eager jesting. “So can you fly? Can you punch through this wall? Show us something amazing. Here, break this table!”
She’d learned to take it with grace. At first, she tried to explain. She’d left all her jade back on Kekon. She was no different from them now. Whatever advantages in strength, speed, and reflexes she possessed were accounted for by the fact that she still woke early and trained on her apartment patio every morning. Lifelong habits persisted, after all.
The first two weeks had been almost unbearable, the feeling of being in a deprivation chamber of her own making. Everything so much less than it used to be—less color, less sound, less feeling—a washed-out dreamscape. Her body slow, heavy, achy. A nagging suspicion of having lost something vital, like looking down and noticing you were missing a limb. The nighttime panic and the sensation of being adrift, of the world not being real.
It would all be bad enough even if she wasn’t surrounded by boisterous young Espenians who had the attention span of monkeys and were always talking about clothes, cars, popular music, and the vagaries of their shallow, convoluted relationships. She almost relented; she even booked a flight back to Kekon after the first term. But pride overcame even the near-debilitating horror of jade withdrawal. Fortunately, the flight had been refundable.
It was far too complicated to explain to her few college friends what it meant to be jaded, to come from a Green Bone family, and why she’d given it up—so she just smiled innocently and waited until their curiosity waned. Jerald always teased her. “You walk around acting all normal, but one day you’re going to bust out doing some crazy shit, aren’t you?”
No, she’d already done that. He was the crazy shit.
The sky was that odd mixture of haze and waning light. The concrete was damp with Northern Sweat—the incessant drizzle and mist that pervaded the coastal plain around Janloon during monsoon season. It was late, past dinnertime. Shae stood in line and waited for a taxi. The other people in line did not pay her any attention. She was dressed in a colorful, short summer dress that was fashionable in Espenia but felt too clingy and garish in her home country, but excepting that, she blended in, looked just like any other traveler. Jadeless. It was with relief and a twinge of self-pity that she realized there was little chance anyone would recognize her.
The next taxi arrived. The driver put her suitcase in the trunk as Shae climbed into the back seat and rolled down the window. “Where to, miss?” he asked.
Shae considered going to a hotel. She wanted to shower, to decompress from the long flight, to be by herself for a little while. She decided against showing such disrespect. “Home,” she said. She gave the driver the address. He pulled away from the curb and into the streaming jostle of cars and buses.
As the taxi crossed the Way Away Bridge and the steel and concrete skyline of the city came int
o view, Shae was struck by a sense of nostalgia so profound she found it difficult to breathe. The humid air through the open window, the sound of her native language being spoken on the radio, even the terrible traffic … She swallowed, close to tears; she had only the vaguest idea of what she was going to do in Janloon now, but she was undeniably home.
When they entered the Palace Hill neighborhood, the taxi driver started glancing back at her in the rearview mirror, eyes flicking up every few seconds. When the taxi arrived in front of the tall iron gates of the Kaul estate, Shae rolled down the window and leaned out to speak to the waiting sentry.
“Welcome home, Shae-jen,” said the guard, surprising her with the now-inaccurate suffix as well as the sense of familiarity in attaching it to her given name. The guard was one of Hilo’s Fingers. Shae recognized his face but could not remember his name, so she merely nodded in greeting.
The taxi drove through the gates to the roundabout in front of the main house. Shae reached for her purse to pay the driver, but he said, “There’s no fee, Kaul-jen. I’m so sorry I didn’t recognize you at first in those foreign clothes.” He turned around to smile at her with earnest hopefulness. “My father-in-law is a loyal Lantern Man. Lately, he’s having a little business trouble. If there was a way you—”
Shae pressed the money into the driver’s hands. “Take your fee,” she insisted. “I’m only Miss Kaul now. I don’t have any say in the clan. Tell your father-in-law to send word up the proper channels to the Weather Man.” She suppressed her guilt at the man’s disappointed expression, got out of the taxi, and hefted her suitcase up the steps to the entrance.
Kyanla, the Abukei housekeeper, met her at the door. “Oh, Shae-se, you look so different!” She hugged Shae and held her out at arm’s length. “And you smell Espenian.” She laughed gaily. “But I shouldn’t be surprised, now that you’re a big-shot Espenian businesswoman.”
Shae smiled weakly. “Don’t be silly, Kyanla.”
Through sheer workaholic grit, she’d graduated in the top third of her class despite the fact that she’d been studying in her second language and, having been schooled at Kaul Du Academy, found the Espenian classroom environment utterly bewildering. So much sitting around in large rooms and talking, as if every student wanted to be the instructor. In the spring, she’d interviewed with some of the big companies that recruited on campus. She’d even received an offer for an entry position at one of them. But she’d seen how the interviewers looked at her.
When she walked into the room, the men around the table—they were always men—assumed she was Tuni, or Shotarian, and the first glimmer of prejudice would come into their eyes. When they looked at her résumé and saw she was from Kekon, that she’d been raised to be a Green Bone, their expressions would cloud with outright skepticism. The Espenians might be proud of their military might, but they had little regard for her martial education. What use would it be in a civilized, professional place like an Espenian corporation? This wasn’t Kekon, where the name Kaul was golden; the right word from grandfather wouldn’t get her anything. In those moments, her romantic notions of making it on her own felt foolish. Foolish and lonely. Now, here she was: back in the house she hadn’t been able to leave fast enough a couple of years ago.
Lan was standing at the bottom of the staircase. He smiled. “Welcome home.”
Shae went to him and embraced him tightly. She hadn’t seen her older brother in two years and was overwhelmed by the rush of affection she felt for him. Lan was nine years older than she; they had never been playmates, but he had always been kind to her. He’d defended her from Hilo, had not judged her when she’d left, and had been the only member of the family to write to her while she was studying in Espenia. Sometimes, his letters, in their precise, even handwriting, had felt like the only link she had to Kekon, the only evidence that she had a family and a past.
Grandda is not doing so well, he’d ended simply at the end of his last letter. The decline is more in his spirits than his health. I know he misses you. It would be good of you to come back to see him, and Ma as well, after you graduate. With the sting of splitting from Jerald still as fresh as an oozing burn, she’d reread her brother’s letter, turned down the lone job offer, and booked a flight back to Janloon.
Lan hugged her back and kissed the center of her forehead. Shae said, “How’s Grandda?” at the same time he said, “Your hair.” They both laughed, and Shae suddenly felt as if she’d let out a breath she’d been holding for two years.
Lan said, “He’s waiting for you. Do you want to go up?”
Shae took a deep breath, then nodded. “I don’t suppose it’ll get any easier if I wait.” They climbed the stairs together, his hand on her shoulder. So close to him, she could feel the tugging hum of his jade, a barely perceptible texture in the air that her body responded to with a yearning squeeze of the stomach as she leaned in closer to him. It had been such a long time since she’d been affected by jade that she felt light-headed. She forced herself to straighten away from Lan and face the double doors before her.
“He’s gotten worse lately,” Lan said. “Today’s a good day, though.”
Shae knocked. Kaul Sen’s voice came back with surprising vigor through the door. “I could Perceive you, you know, even without your jade, coming through the door and dawdling your way up here. Come in, then.”
Shae opened the door and stood in front of her grandfather. She should have changed her clothes and showered first. Kaul Sen’s piercing gaze took in her bright, foreign attire, and the corners of his eyes tightened in a mess of wrinkles. His nostrils pinched, and he leaned back in his chair as if offended by the smell of her. “Gods,” he muttered, “the last couple of years have been as unkind to you as they have been to me.”
Shae reminded herself that despite his tyrannical faults, her grandfather had been one of the most heroic and respected men in the country, that he was now old and lonely and deteriorating, and that two years ago, she had broken his heart. “I came straight from the airport, Grandda.” Shae touched her clasped hands to her forehead in the traditional sign of respect, then knelt in front of his chair, eyes downcast. “I’ve come home. Will you please accept me as your granddaughter again?”
When she looked up, she saw that the old man’s eyes had softened. The stiffness of his mouth melted and his lips trembled slightly. “Ah, Shae-se, of course I forgive you,” he said, even though she hadn’t actually asked for forgiveness. Kaul Sen held out his gnarled hands, and she took them as she stood. She felt his touch like an electrical jolt; even at his advanced age, his jade aura was intense, and the bones of her arms prickled in memory and longing.
“The family hasn’t been right without you,” Kaul Sen said. “You belong here.”
“Yes, Grandda.”
“It’s all well and good to do business with foreigners. I said it so many times, the gods know it’s true, I said it to everyone: We must open up Kekon and accept outside influence. I broke my brotherhood with Ayt Yugontin over it. But”—Kaul Sen stabbed a finger into the air—“we’ll never be like them. We’re different. We’re Kekonese. We’re Green Bones. Never forget that.”
Her grandfather turned her hands over in his own, shaking his head sadly and disapprovingly at the sight of her bare arms. “Even if you take off your jade, you won’t be like them. They’ll never accept you, because they’ll sense you’re different, the way dogs know they’re less than wolves. Jade is our inheritance; our blood isn’t meant to mix with others.” He squeezed her hands in a papery gesture meant as comfort.
Shae bowed her head in silent acquiescence, concealing resentment of her grandfather’s obvious pleasure that Jerald was now a fixture of the past. She’d met Jerald on Kekon. At the time, he was stationed on Euman Island with fifteen months left in his deployment and plans to go to graduate school afterward. The instant Kaul Sen learned of Shae’s relationship with a foreign sailor, he furiously proclaimed it doomed. Even though his reasons had been mostly racis
t—Jerald was Shotarian (even though he was born in Espenia), he was a water-blooded weakling who was beneath her, he was a shallow bastard—it galled Shae that the old man’s prediction had proven true. Come to think about it, the shallow bastard part had been correct as well. “I’m glad to see you looking so healthy, Grandda,” Shae said mildly, trying to derail his monologue.
He waved away her attempt at redirection. “I haven’t touched a thing in your old room,” he said. “I knew you’d come home once you’d gone through this phase. It’s still yours.”
Shae thought quickly. “Grandda, I’ve been such a disappointment to you. I couldn’t presume I’d have a place in the house. So I rented an apartment not far from here and sent my things there already.” It wasn’t true; she’d made no living arrangements and had no things to send. But she certainly didn’t relish the idea of moving back into her childhood bedroom in the Kaul house, as if nothing had been gained or changed by two years and an ocean of distance. Living here, she would have to endure the jade auras of Green Bones coming and going, and her grandfather’s condescending forgiveness. She added, “Besides, I could use a little time by myself to get settled. To decide what to do next.”
“What is there to decide? I will talk to Doru about which businesses will be yours.”
“Grandda,” Lan interrupted. He’d been standing at the entrance of the room, watching the exchange. “Shae’s come off a long flight. Let her unpack and rest. There’ll be time to talk business later.”
“Huh,” said Kaul Sen, but he let go of Shae’s hands. “I suppose you’re right.”
“I’ll come back to see you soon.” She leaned in to kiss his forehead. “I love you, Grandda.”
The old man grunted, but his face glowed with a fondness she realized she had desperately missed. Unlike Lan, she had never known their father; Kaul Sen had been everything to her when she was a little girl. He had doted on her, and she on him. As she left the room, he mumbled after her, “For the love of all the gods, put your jade on. It hurts me to look at you like that.”