Steel Crow Saga

by Paul Krueger

  Who was to say Ruomei truly had to be the next Crane Empress?

  As quickly as she entertained the thought, she dismissed it. For all the pain Lee Yeon-Ji had caused her, at least she’d given Xiulan a hard lesson: She could never be a champion of the people. She was the least favorite princess, perhaps, but the least favorite princess was still a princess.

  She shrugged off her overcoat and folded it neatly over one arm as she fiddled with her room’s lock and slid the door open.

  The room was much smaller than her previous accommodations. And it felt smaller still, because it was currently occupied by a tall, angular woman in a sleek black dress.

  Xiulan froze in the doorway.

  Lee waved sheepishly. “Afternoon, Princess.”

  Xiulan’s entire body tensed. She wanted to hurl her pipe right in Lee’s face, or order Kou to bound forward and attack.

  Instead, her arm fell limp at her side as she turned on her heel and left.

  “Wait! Xiulan, wait up, you brat!” A hand placed itself firmly on Xiulan’s shoulder and spun her back around so they were face-to-face. Xiulan’s nostrils filled with an aroma: smoky, earthy, intoxicating. “I can explain—”

  “Remove your hand from my person this instant, or Kou will remove it from yours,” Xiulan snarled.

  Lee’s hand withdrew. “Sorry. I know this looks bad. But I need you to hear me out here. You’re the cleverest woman I know. Think it through: If I was really looking to get away from you for good, why would I ever come back?”

  “Because you missed the comforts of royal company,” Xiulan jeered. “Because a new angle occurred to you, one you hadn’t yet seen fit to work with regard to me. Because you remembered I owe you money. Those all seem like perfectly tempting reasons to break your vaunted ‘one law’…not that law has ever amounted to much for you to begin with.”

  She had honored her promise never to lay a hand on Lee again, but the thief looked as if she’d been slapped anyway. She swallowed hard. “Look. I get it. It’s not like I’ve got a clean record with you. But I’ve got a good reason for it, and I just need five minutes to explain myself. When I’m done, if you’re still pissed, I’ll leave for good and never look back. Thieves’ honor.”

  Leave for good and never look back. How could such a thing be so appealing, but also the opposite of everything she’d ever wanted?

  Xiulan nodded to Kou, dismissing him. As he disappeared, she swept past Lee into the room. “I forgave you, Lee,” she said. “I forgave you because I believed we wouldn’t have reason to revisit this conversation. And certainly,” she added, raising her voice, “not a mere day later.”

  “I know, I know,” Lee said, shutting the door. “But I had to go. It was the only way I could get your badge back.”

  Xiulan had been ready to do a bit more shouting, but that brought her up short. “You…you what?”

  Lee reached into the front of her dress, producing a shiny bronze pentagon that she tossed to Xiulan. Without adrenaline to steady them, her clumsy fingers failed to close around it, and it clattered to the floor.

  Lee chuckled. “Guess we’ve still got some work to do on catching.”

  Xiulan ignored the jibe. She knelt and plucked it off the floor. Her jaw dropped. It was no mere badge. The exact dents and scratches were present in its face. This was Xiulan’s specific badge, which she’d been issued the day she’d been recruited into the Li-Quan.

  “How did you get this?” she said quietly. Then, after a moment’s thought: “And where were you hiding it?”

  Lee’s grin was fleeting and foxlike. “Tricks of the trade, Princess. As for the how…”

  Fear gripped Xiulan’s heart as she considered the worst-case scenario. “Please tell me you didn’t simply steal it back,” she said. “You do understand that this is an affecting keepsake, but on its own…”

  “You really trying to explain how cops work to a thief?” Lee said. “Yeah, I get it. What you’ve got there is the real deal, with all the fun rights and privileges and all that, guaranteed. I…” For the first time, she looked furtive. “I went to see Ruomei.”

  The bottom of Xiulan’s stomach fell away. “You what?”

  “Yeah,” Lee said. “I had to. It was the only way. That’s why I didn’t tell you I was doing it. You’d have tried to stop me.”

  Xiulan’s entire mouth went dry. Lee had taken on Ruomei by herself. Unthinkable. Unimaginable.

  And yet here she stood.

  She didn’t know how to feel. Never had Xiulan been brave enough to directly defy her sister. For her, it had been all about embodying the white rat: skittering between walls, gnawing on the wiring and pipes, so that one day Ruomei’s house would all come crashing down. So there was a small undercurrent of bitterness that Lee had turned out to be the kind of woman born lucky enough to stand against Ruomei openly and walk away unscathed.

  But that bitterness was swept away by the overwhelming burst of affection that she felt for her partner now.

  “Do I want to know?” Xiulan said at last, her voice soft with disbelief.

  Lee shook her head. “Best not. But you can know this much,” she added with a gleam in her eye. “I fought her. And I won.”

  HOURS AGO

  Lee’s eyes snapped open, and she knew in her bones that she had two minutes before the fighting would start.

  She blinked once to adjust to the darkness of the room, but she already felt all the way awake. You could never sleep too deeply, leading a life like hers, unless you wanted it to be a short one.

  The door wasn’t visible from the bed, so she sat up and listened carefully. As she strained to hear even the slightest creak that would have been out of place, she glanced back at Xiulan’s sleeping form. Her breath caught as she took in the princess’s tousled and tangled hair, and the sight of her petite body at ease. With her eyes closed, her face had an appealing symmetry, but that only made Lee appreciate all the more how much the asymmetry made her heart race.

  She reached over and shook Xiulan. “Princess,” she whispered. “On your feet. We’ve gotta move.”

  Xiulan’s head lolled every which way, but she showed no signs of waking up. The brawl in the garden had taken everything out of her, apparently.

  Normally, Lee would’ve tried again, but she felt that tightness in her gut again and she knew she was out of time. Like a knife from its sheath she slid out of the bed, snatching her dress off the floor and tossing it over herself as she crept to the door.

  She felt another anxiousness inside, something separate from her own. Bootstrap. Lee wanted to call her, but she knew that doing it now would tip her hand, and surprise was the only advantage she currently had.

  Gingerly, she eased the door open, and to her relief didn’t come face-to-face with a glittering gun barrel. Instead, she saw an empty hallway. The sight seemed inviting enough, but Lee was convinced it wasn’t about to be empty for long.

  The only cover she had was the three elevators at the far end of the hall. She darted for them, a shadow within a shadow, and threw herself flat against the doors of the farthest elevator. She reached for the button to summon it, thinking she could set up an ambush from inside it whenever their company arrived.

  But before she could hit the button, she heard a car arrive in the shaft just behind the closed doors at her back.

  She bit her tongue to stop a curse from escaping and dove to the side, pressing herself against the middlemost elevator just as she heard the far one open with a soft ding. She heard two soldiers—who else would have such a measured step, even when sneaking?—step out, and a moment later the first one walked right by her. His coat was black and bore no rank or unit insignia, but the cut of it could only have come from a Shang clothier.

  So, Lee thought as she took note of his black-masked face. This was Ruomei.

  When the second soldier,
a similarly masked woman, stepped into Lee’s field of vision, the thief swung herself into view. With an outstretched arm, she hammered at the woman’s throat. The woman clutched at her neck, gasping and rasping, but by then Lee had grabbed her by the shoulders and shoved her toward her startled comrade. The man bunched his shoulders and blocked with his forearms, so his partner bounced off him and into a wall. But Lee took advantage of his wide, rooted stance to close the distance and bring a shin straight up between his legs. Even though she wore no boots, he collapsed with satisfying suddenness.

  You’d think someone would armor that bit, Lee thought.

  “Knives, not guns, eh?” she said as her downed foes fumbled for the blades sheathed on their belts. “Ruomei wanted you to do this nice and quiet, then. She should’ve warned you that I’m a contrarian shit.” She raised her voice. “Bootstr—”

  From behind, a knife appeared at her throat. She felt the keenness of its blade as it pricked a tiny wound.

  The knife’s wielder spoke in accented Shang. “Stop this nonsense immediately. Our orders were to refrain from killing you if necessary, but you are an acceptable casualty, Lee Yeon-Ji. Call your slave or alert Her Majesty in any way, and I’ll invoke those orders. Nod if you understand; don’t speak.”

  Lee swallowed carefully, then nodded. This was hardly the first time her life had balanced on a literal knife’s edge. This was a game where she knew how to play her cards. If she kept saying yes, eventually she’d get an opportunity to turn the tables.

  And when that time came, every Tomodanese son-of-a-bitch here—she hadn’t missed that word slave—would be grateful they’d worn a mask tonight.

  The soldier seemed to accept her nod. “Blind her,” he said.

  The bag swallowed her head, turning her world inky and black. And as she felt him prod her toward the elevator, she spared one last thought for her Lady of Moonlight, tangled in the sheets as the mattress next to her grew cold.

  I’ll come back to you, she promised as she heard the elevator doors shut.

  * * *

  —

  By her estimation, she spent about an hour with the bag on her head. She felt herself being led down hallways, down stairs, down other hallways, before she was eventually stuffed into the backseat of a car. Honestly, it wouldn’t have been that bad. They were brusque but not terribly rough, which meant she could at least rest easy knowing her life was safe.

  The real problem was that the bag smelled like someone had washed it with sour goat’s milk instead of water.

  That, she promised, would be the first thing she said when they yanked the bag off her head. Something quick and pithy that would immediately put her kidnappers on the defensive. There was no point in making them feel bad about kidnapping her, but she could make them feel stupid for not knowing how to launder a bag.

  The car glided to a halt, and she was herded into the chilly morning. The cicadas had just begun to sing, as had the birds, but the sound echoed strangely in her ears. Then she felt the texture of the ground beneath her feet. It was concrete. So she was still in the city. And based on the kinds of birds she was hearing, probably somewhere near the Hagane waterfront. The question was: Why?

  When the bag finally came off, she saw she’d been seated in a chair in that old classic, an empty warehouse. But she was surprised to see that her hands were free. She was more surprised still to see that instead of some kind of torture device or something, there was a table set in the Jeongsonese style: with a hot metal grill in the center, bowls of raw meat and vegetables carefully arranged around it in a circle, and smaller bowls with rice and soup at each place setting.

  Sitting on the other side of that table, smoking a long, thin cigarette, was a plump, beautiful woman who had all of Xiulan’s beauty and none of her warmth. This, Lee knew, had to be Shang Ruomei. But the man at her side was far more surprising: a short, handsome Tomodanese man with close-cropped hair and slanted eyebrows. They’d never met, but Lee had seen him from afar. He was easy to recognize as Kurihara Kosuke.

  Pieces slotted into place, and Lee gave a slow nod. “Right,” she said without preamble. “You and your Cicadas give the princess here some deniability. Anyone catches you trying to break into the Twenty-Eighth Princess’s rooms, it’ll be easy to pin it on you being a well-known lunatic.”

  Kurihara bristled. “I’m a warrior fighting for the survival of his people,” he said. “I would’ve thought I’d have the sympathy of a daughter of Jeongson, at least.”

  Lee snorted. “You’re not gonna get far with me, comparing our history with whatever bill Heaven’s about to make you people settle.”

  Her dismissal seemed to only incense him further, but when he opened his mouth to retort, Ruomei raised a hand to silence him. “We’re not here for one of your fiery speeches, Lord Kurihara,” the Second Princess said in flawless Tomodanese. “We’re here for breakfast. A breakfast for two.”

  For a moment, Kurihara’s outrage persisted. But then Lee saw the man visibly swallow his pride, before bowing deeply and respectfully from the waist. “Your Majesty,” he said with an admirable lack of venom in his voice, then turned to leave.

  “Hang on,” Lee called after him, and he stopped. “You say you fight for your people, but you’re doing Shang’s dirty work. How’s that square away, exactly?”

  Slowly, Kurihara turned around and drew himself up proudly. “Once, Tomoda was the steel that suspended the weight of the world. In my pride, I fought to recapture those days. Now I understand there’s a more important fight to be had…one that can’t be won without allies.” He was talking to her, but for the first time he met her eyes, and Lee was struck by how resolute he looked. “I’ll crawl through whatever mud I have to if it means the Tomodanese people remain clean.”

  Ruomei’s cigarette glowed orange as she inhaled. “Comparing an ally to a mud pit doesn’t say much for your diplomatic acumen, Lord Kurihara…” She exhaled a silver-blue cloud. “…but I appreciate the sentiment. Now, I believe you were going…?”

  “Not far, Your Majesty.” He gave Lee a small nod. “Thief.”

  The bastard almost made it sound like a compliment.

  Once he’d gone, the half smile slid from Ruomei’s face like rain off a window. “Your entanglement with my sister is an embarrassment to my family. I know you’re for sale, Lee Yeon-Ji. What price will buy your disappearance?”

  Though she completely believed Ruomei was capable of offering up a blank check, Lee folded her arms over her chest and said nothing.

  Ruomei studied her a long moment, then nodded. “Good. You’re not susceptible to the obvious.” She nodded to a nearby servant. “Now, I don’t have time for further displays of defiance, so let’s get down to the real business.”

  The servant took up a pair of tongs and began laying thin slices of meat on the griddle, where they sizzled and curled. Their smoke mingled with the thin tendrils of it emanating from Ruomei’s cigarette. When Ruomei caught Lee eyeing it, she said: “I went to great expense to have this food imported and properly prepared, so you’re going to eat it, Lee Yeon-Ji.”

  Lee blinked. Then she said: “If your spread’s anything like your bag, I won’t be impressed.”

  Ruomei rolled her eyes and took another drag.

  Disappointed she hadn’t gotten more of a reaction, Lee turned her attention to the spread in question. She had to admit, it was pretty impressive. The kimchi smelled right. The beef looked like it’d been properly marinated. Even the chopsticks were pointy and metal, in contrast with the long, blunt bamboo ones typical of Shang dining. The familiar smells twisted her tired stomach into knots, and she reached for her soup spoon. “Bit early in the morning for a full grill-up.”

  “I’ve yet to encounter a bad time of day for bulgogi.”

  Lee quirked an eyebrow. “How long’ve you been eating Jeongsonese food, Princess?”

&nb
sp; “Long enough,” said Ruomei, resting her cigarette in an ashtray and sampling some of her soup with a spoon. Lee followed suit. The spicy, salty warmth of the broth was almost enough to make her forget the predicament she was in.

  Almost.

  “I figure you’ve got to like it quite a bit, to have it brought all the way to Hagane just so you can keep on eating it.”

  Ruomei shrugged, then nodded to her servant gratefully as he peeled strips of pork belly away from the grill and laid them atop a bed of rice on Ruomei’s plate. As the servant moved to tend to Lee’s plate, Lee watched the princess casually roll the rice and pork into a lettuce leaf with some kimchi and eat it.

  Lee raised an eyebrow. “You eat like a proper daughter of Jeongson.”

  Ruomei frowned. “You’ve now found three ways to state what are essentially the same single fact,” she said impatiently. “I’d thought you were supposed to be astute, Lee Yeon-Ji. Yes, I enjoy Jeongsonese food. You’d be surprised to learn that I have a great appreciation for the rest of Jeongsonese culture, too.”

  Lee’s spoon clattered back to the table. Smoothly, mid-sentence, Ruomei had just switched from Shang to Jeongsonese. Her accent was thick, but her grammar and tone were impeccable.

  Even Xiulan couldn’t speak Jeongsonese.

  “What is this?” Lee said, switching to Jeongsonese herself. Being able to speak it felt like stretching her legs after a long, cramped car ride.

  Ruomei reached beneath the table and produced a familiar bronze badge. She slid it across, so it was within Lee’s reach, then let it lie there. Lee stared at it.