by JY Yang
She told her brother as much. I was in her chambers when she lost her temper, a rare occasion where she raised her voice to him. This is an attack on our family—on your family! she said. Will you let this stand? We must find these perpetrators and make sure justice is meted out. Harshly, so that no one thinks they may strike our family and live!
But her brother took her aside. Gently holding her hands in his he said, Dearest sister, my sweet Hekate, the sorrow burdened upon you has been great. But you have let your grief drive you mad. You are seeing things where there is nothing! What happened to Nengyuan was a tragedy, but one that is all too common. Children are so vulnerable at this age! Do you not remember what happened to our cousin Sushila, who passed before they were six months old? And poor, poor Shaoyun, to follow his child after! He was such a sensitive soul. To lose him this way—what a blow to the Tensorate. What a blow to all of us.
I cannot let the same to happen to you, he told her. I cannot lose you as well. You must get better, Hekate. You must recover from these wounds upon your heart.
Hekate quieted at his words. But after he was gone, she turned to me, her anger renewed. She said, I know who did it now.
I was surprised by this. Who? I asked.
She spat: Lian.
Lian was Hemana’s wife. They had been married since long before I came on the scene. She was willowy and delicate as the flower she was named after, with roots as thick and murky. Twenty years old, skilled in all the relevant arts, no prospects other than to be bartered for familial prestige. Like all the highborn women I knew, she was excellent at concealing herself behind silk screens of modesty and politeness.
I was naturally shocked by Hekate’s conclusion. Lian had always been cordial to us. She asked after me every now and then, took the trouble of learning my name, and I was on good enough terms with her maid, Aisha, that the girl even helped out with the cleaning and washing when Nengyuan got to be too much.
Lian was a quiet girl, distant from everyone. But during the pregnancy and after the birth she retreated into herself. She hardly left her wing of the palace. I never saw her call on Hekate after Nengyuan’s birth, even as her husband spent more and more time with his sister and heir-to-be.
Hekate said, She didn’t show her face at either of the funerals. She hasn’t sent condolences. I know it’s her.
I said, I understand she has reason to hate you—after all, her sole job was to produce a royal heir, and you did it first. I’m sure she resents you. But someone like her? I cannot imagine she could do something like this.
What I meant was: This girl is a mere fox, she cannot roar like a tiger. How could something so timid and retiring strike at the Protector’s own sister?
Hekate said, You don’t know her whole situation like I do. She’s been under immense pressure since I conceived. Her one duty as the wife, and she failed? She didn’t just shame herself; she shamed her family name. You can’t imagine the kind of judgment she’s getting from her entire family. From all of Protectorate society. She loathes me for doing this to her. This is her revenge.
I trusted Hekate’s intuition completely. If she said so, it must be true.
I said, There’s one way to know for sure.
So, just like old times, she sent me to Lian’s room to ferret out the proof. Called Lian away from her quarters in the evening, gave me a couple of hours with which to work. The woman’s room was protected by warding spells, of course, and servants weren’t supposed to have slackcraft ability. But I wasn’t an ordinary servant, was I? It took me no effort to disarm the warning system, dissipating the threads of slackcraft strung across the door.
I searched her room. I found her private diaries, and they were exceedingly dull reading: full of angst but empty of murderous intent. Not the slightest clue of treason and betrayal. Just the dregs of a sad, frustrating life and a woman too soft to do anything about it.
Then I got to the last few months of entries, and found them written in a code I could not read.
This is it, I thought.
I couldn’t steal the entire diary without being found out. So, I lifted pages, undoing the binding and pulling a good chunk of sheets from the beginning of the coded part. This was what I brought back to Hekate.
Under lamplight, Hekate took one look and said, This is the women’s hand. It was an archaic system of writing developed hundreds of years ago and mostly fallen out of use but kept as tradition in some noble families. No wonder I couldn’t read it.
But Hekate could, and the first few pages she read drew a gasp. She was pregnant, she said. Her astonishment turned quickly to anger. See! This is why she killed my child! My husband! She wanted to get rid of the competition!
She flipped through the rest of it. Her frustration grew. There’s nothing here! No plans, no intents! Just . . . her stupid hopes and dreams. Are you sure you got everything?
I said, Of course I didn’t take everything, I was trying not to get caught! I left the last month or so still in the book. I gritted my teeth. I’d thought I was being smart, not taking everything.
Hekate said, Looks like you have to go back and get it, don’t you?
But that didn’t happen. See, what I didn’t realize at that time was that the Palace was under constant attack. Rebels in the southern regions had been sending assassins. The rebels needed to destabilize the country to break free of their chains, and a death in the Protector’s family might do that for them. But the assassins, skilled as they were, still couldn’t get past the slackcraft wards in the palace.
Guess who just disrupted one?
They were so fast. They must have been sending a dozen assassins every night. I broke into Lian’s room in the evening, right before the first night cycle, and by the second sunrise of the night cycles, she was dead. No one had time to spot and repair the broken threads that would have killed an intruder and set off the alarm. I killed her.
I was certain I was doomed. The assassins had been able to break in because while I tried to restore the protections around Lian’s quarters, I did a shit job of it. I’d never been trained! Skilled Tensors would be able to figure out who had been the culprit. I’d been caught with my ass unwashed, and small people like me are the first to be broken on the spearpoints of history and discarded by the powerful. I was sure Hemana would never forgive me for what I had done. Maybe he would not even forgive his sister.
Hekate told me, Don’t worry. You wait here for me. I will sort this out.
Her jaw was steel and her eyes were the red of a forge. Even with all the turmoil around us, she was so steady. So calm. No typhoon could move her. God, I loved her.
She gathered the pages I had stolen from Lian’s room and set off to confront her brother.
After about an hour, the summons beacon in my pocket lit up. I’d been quietly trembling in Hekate’s quarters, and I thought, This is it. Here comes the end. I followed the charm’s glow to the Protector’s private chambers.
Hekate was in that room. So was the Protector, but not seated in the judgment I expected. He was dead, and she was holding the knife.
She hadn’t shown him any mercy. He lay on the ground like a gutted fish, cut from collarbone to navel. The floor looked like a slaughterhouse.
He did it, Hekate hissed.
I was speechless. A murder! She’d just committed a murder! Why? I didn’t understand her words at all. I thought she meant that he’d killed Lian, but even that thought was meaningless nonsense. I just stood there, blinking like an idiot.
I can’t believe it, she said. My own brother. How could he do that to me?
That got through the thick molasses of my brain. She meant Nengyuan! Her brother had murdered her child. All the time we wondered who might have reason to have the baby killed, we never suspected their uncle. Of course. Of course. The firstborn of every generation inherits the throne. Lian was pregnant, a fact that he hid from us. He wanted the next Protector to be his own child.
I thought we were flesh and blood, He
kate said. She might have been crying, I don’t remember. My brain was like dumb cabbage. My memories got saved all slanted and skewed. Just fragments here, fragments there. She said—she said, I thought there were no divisions between us. I thought—my good was his good—
No, she was definitely crying. I remember the way my shoulder got wet.
No, you’re thinking about it wrong. I didn’t say anything to solve the puzzle for her. How did she find out? He told her. It turns out she bloody turned me in. Just straight-up said, I had my girl break those wards because I thought Lian killed my son and my husband. And he said, You fool, it was me who did it.
Ironic, isn’t it? She trusted him so much. She thought he would listen to her, forgive her for Lian’s death, if only she told the truth. And she never imagined that he could do something like kill her child. All for his own vanity.
She thought he was wise enough to accept her child as the logical heir to the throne. But he had not. She had never mattered to him as a person. All he saw in her was a tool. Someone who was perfectly loyal to him, someone whom he could use. She was smart and strong and one of the most talented Tensors in the land, even more than he was. She had been doing his dirty work for years.
So, she killed him. That was her true nature, rearing up when provoked. I don’t think he expected that. I don’t think he expected his own dear sister to turn against him that way. Fool. He didn’t understand her at all. She fought him, and she won. As I said, she was strong. And once he was dead, once his limbs had stopped thrashing and the light had fled from his eyes, she called for me. Her trusted servant. The one person left in the world she could rely on. And dutifully I came.
All these years, she said, I thought I knew him. But I never did. And now I never will.
I looked at the body in front of me. A third dead Protector before the ink on seals had time to dry. What would people say?
What happens now? I asked her.
Now, she said. Now I am in charge.
Chapter Eight
Of course it wasn’t that simple. Of course there were consequences for killing a Protector. If it were that simple, none of them across history would have lasted a month. Before she could take control and reshape the world, Hekate went on trial for the murder of her brother.
Back then, there was a council of senior magistrates who handled the most serious cases in the land. They were empowered to pass judgment on anyone, even the Protector themselves. The High Council, they were called. They had been around for several dynasties. And sure, they were mostly ceremonial in cases involving the Protector, because who else put them in their positions? This situation was different, though. Hekate might have been the Protector by name, by rule of law, but she was a usurper to the throne. Her hands were stained with the blood of the man who put them in their positions. I don’t know if they had a plan for after they got rid of her and ended the line of the Conqueror—who did? During those months, it was all chaos, all the time. I only know they hated her.
They imprisoned Hekate in her chambers and set a trial date. Five days. A short call, but the Protector was the axis around which the empire spun, and without someone in that position, it was all coming apart, very quickly. As her servant, I was the only one allowed to see her. I would bring her food, clean her room, bring her news of the outside world. I was there when the call arrived, and I watched her shoulders set. We knew that also meant they had already made up their mind.
Hekate said she wanted a public trial. Five days was enough for administrators from all over the Protectorate to travel to the capital. And she wanted citizens of every class to be able to watch.
Of course, said the High Council, let everyone bear witness. They saw her as a soft, naive girl. They were eager to doom her before an audience of the entire Protectorate.
I thought she was crazy. She was risking so much. But she never did anything halfway. And this was her life, her history, her legacy at stake. I asked her, Are you sure about this?
She told me, Don’t worry. This is my plan.
The day of the trial came around. It felt like spring, that festival energy in the air, you know? The streets packed with people, the gossip, the smell of food cooking. The trial was held at the grand pavilion square in front of the Great High Palace, the place that had that year seen two coronations and three funerals. Hekate was calm. The High Council sat on a dais specially constructed for this occasion. Thousands packed the square. Thousands more filled the space around the Great High Palace. In those days, they didn’t have the technology to broadcast to distant places as they do today. Otherwise, more could have watched it.
The audience was just what she wanted.
The High Council set to work. It was obvious that Hekate had killed her own brother, the Protector. All the evidence pointed that direction. There were witnesses, the guards at the door, the servant who found us there. She didn’t deny it. They laid out their case and said, The punishment for this crime should be death.
And then it was Hekate’s turn to defend herself, as was the right of the accused.
She knelt before the dais. There were Tensors there to amplify her voice so it could be heard across the city. She was ready.
It was decades ago, but that memory stays as clear in my mind as a light capture. How small she looked. How human and fragile, a young girl set against the backdrop of the hungry crowd, the steel-eyed men set to judge her. Yet how unafraid she looked. How unbowed.
She said, My brother killed my son. I had to avenge my little boy. So, I killed the man who had him murdered. If it is justice to kill a murderer, and murder to spill royal blood, then I carried out justice.
There was shock. The crowds watching gasped.
One of the councilors said, And what proof do you have of that?
And so, she summoned me.
See, when she called me to the Protector’s chambers that fateful day, it wasn’t just idle fancy. She wanted to give me something.
Hekate had sneaked a light capture device into her robes. She always recorded everything that happened in high-level meetings, and this time was no different. He should have known that. Maybe he thought she trusted him enough to make a mistake. When I came to the room, she gave the device to me. And it was that recording that I played for the High Council and the gathered crowd. They saw Hemana say, with his own mouth, I was the one who killed your son.
You can only imagine the reaction. How unforgivable of him! How cruel! How little remorse he showed! Of course she would have reacted the way she did. It was only natural. Only a mother’s instinct.
I was there; I felt the shock in the crowd. The raw anger. There were mothers in the crowd, parents, people who loved their parents. The parental bond is such a primal force, isn’t it? People understood at once. It wasn’t murder—it was punishment! Justice! How powerful her love for the son she lost, that it drove her to do such things. The light capture turned her act of slaughter into something noble. Something heroic. Tragedy to answer tragedy, the only possible response after her own brother delivered such a blow.
The High Council was doomed the moment the light capture began to play. For them to condemn Hekate while the public felt so strongly for her would have caused outrage. The mob would murder them on the spot for their injustice! Given the choice between suicide and absolution, they absolved her.
For their wisdom, Hekate rewarded them handsomely. She didn’t have them executed when she disbanded the Council. I suppose they were grateful, but I don’t waste much time imagining their feelings. The story doesn’t end with their disposition.
That light capture was not just an absolution for Hekate’s actions. It was also a warning to those who would be her enemies, and those who hadn’t decided if they would oppose her. That light capture said, See how swiftly she moves, see how unstoppable she is! This is not a woman to be tangled with; this is not a woman you want to anger. She will show you no mercy. She will come for you, and she will not stop until you are dust.
After all—if she could take the blade to her own brother, the man who raised her, the person she was closest to in the world, who wouldn’t she kill? Who wouldn’t she sacrifice to her wants and her ambitions?
That tumultuous month was her turning point. She became the Protector, yes, but not only by ascending the throne. She also became the woman we know as the Protector. See, before this, she was just like any other highborn Tensor. A shitbucket through and through, but one who still had a soft, human core. A woman with weaknesses, who would succumb to those weaknesses on occasion. Someone whom you and I could understand, someone whose feelings I could understand. The Hekate who emerged from that trial . . . was not that kind of person. My lover was gone; I just hadn’t realized. I wouldn’t realize for many years.
I can never trust again, she said one night as we lay in bed. Under the right circumstances, even the most loyal and loving dog will turn and bite you. Even the most trustworthy person will betray you. And I will not suffer the wounds of another such surprise.
I will never betray you, I said. And I’ll tell you, at that moment, I believed it truly and sincerely. I loved her so much, and I had so much sympathy for her and anger at what she’d been put through. I wanted to protect her. I wanted to be by her side forever.
She laughed. Even you, my precious peony. Even you will turn against me when the time is right.
I thought, You’re wrong. You’re wrong about me. You don’t see how much I love you. I’m the closest one to you now; I’m the one who knows you best. You need me. I’ll never betray you. You’ll see.
Lying there with her breath against my skin I vowed that I would the one who would be the most devoted, the most trustworthy, the most truthful right hand she could have. I would prove her wrong. I lived for her.
Chapter Nine
Hekate knew she was in a precarious position. Lian’s murder and the subsequent mess had done exactly what the southern rebels had wanted: it had wrecked the structure of the Protectorate and put everything into chaos. She knew that if the empire she ruled were to survive, she would have to act swiftly and decisively. She could not purge the administration as her brother had done. Not again. For one thing, her brother had killed or disposed of hundreds of perfectly competent officials and Tensors. She didn’t have the numbers to replace his appointments and run a functional bureaucracy. Also, she didn’t have a ready-made network of cronies like her brother did. His network had been her network. They’d built it together, and it had all been compromised.