Descendant of the Crane(10)

Think before you act, Hesina’s tutors always said. They made it sound so easy. In reality, Hesina acted more often than she thought, and her cheeks warmed as she recalled the course of their conversation. “He seems honest enough.” And shady enough. “I think I can trust him to keep his word.” Though she didn’t even know if he could speak.

But the Silver Iris hadn’t lied about the rod, the one and only in the entire dungeons. And the convict was clearly more than the merchant robber the prison documents claimed he was. Hesina remembered the strokes of his finger. The flush on her face extended to her neck. She quickly pushed her chariot three squares over, lining it up with another and entrapping Caiyan’s emperor.

“I’m still peeved that you met him without me.” Lilian’s voice rose from the daybed, where she lay on her back, an ankle propped on one knee and a cat’s cradle made of hair ribbon webbed between her fingers. Cyan and ochre blotched her apron. It’d been a dyeing day at the workshops.

“With any luck, you’ll see him in court,” said Hesina.

“Rod and all?”

“Please,” said Caiyan as he blocked the course of Hesina’s chariot with a black-powder keg, simultaneously endangering her steed. “It’s barely midday.”

Lilian snorted. “Says the reader of erotica.”

Caiyan sighed, but Hesina thought she caught a glimmer of a smile in his dark eyes. With a tug of jealousy, she looked back to the game board. Bickering was never so simple between herself and Sanjing.

“I’d recommend brushing up on your swordsmanship if you’re going to duel, milady.”

“You’d recommend?” Lilian hooted with laughter. “At least Na-Na can use a sword.”

“That’s debatable,” reminded Hesina. She was a flapping yuanyang duck next to Sanjing’s hawkish skill with the sword. But Lilian had a point. Hesina had never witnessed Caiyan holding a weapon, and she’d seen him injured only once. It wasn’t a memory she wanted to revisit.

With her double chariot formation foiled, Hesina resorted to the black-powder keg reserved for protecting her own emperor.

Caiyan advanced a foot soldier. “There’s a hole in your plans, milady.”

Hesina half-heartedly defended her emperor with a chancellor. “Do tell.”

Caiyan’s foot soldier crossed the river running down the middle of the board and was promoted. “Let’s say a trial is declared after the Investigation Bureau reviews the evidence and narrows down the suspects. You win the duel, and the convict agrees to be your representative. How will you convince Xia Zhong to pick him for you?”

“That’s easy.” Lilian fluttered a hand. “Spout something convincing from the Tenets. Passage 1.1.1. ‘A minister must serve!’ Passage 1.1.2. ‘A queen must have a convict with a rod as her representative!’”

Caiyan shook his head at Lilian’s impersonation while Hesina suppressed a giggle. Xia Zhong did, in fact, interpret the Eleven’s teachings of asceticism to the literal extreme. Word in the palace was that his roof was leaking; there were more mice droppings in his rice bags than rice; he slept on a praying mat, kept only one brazier running in the winter, and had been wearing the same underwear for ten years. For the minister’s sake, Hesina hoped the last one wasn’t true.

“I’ll think of a way,” she said to Caiyan. Hopefully soon.

“You won’t be able to bribe him.”

Even a monk had to want something.

“Sure,” said Lilian when Hesina voiced as much. “He’d probably ascend if you brought him the original Tenets.”

He wouldn’t be the only one. Scholars all over Yan would worship Hesina if she recovered the version penned by the Eleven themselves. It had disappeared shortly after the fall of the relic reign, and Hesina was as likely to find it as she was to find the mythical Baolin Isles.

Caiyan won the game, and Hesina rubbed her temples. “Only the Tenets?”

“I mean, it’s Xia Zhong.” Lilian flung away the cat’s cradle and stretched out on the daybed. “Elevens. I could never live like that.”

Yet she had. The twins didn’t share much about their past, but Hesina saw its fingerprints whenever Lilian took up the warmest spot in any room, and whenever Caiyan filled his empty rice bowl with tea and drank down the last grains. They lived life as if they might lose its comforts someday, as if they remembered what it was like to be without shelter, food, and father.

But Hesina wasn’t like the twins. Losing her father wasn’t like returning to a world she’d once known. She’d been unprepared.

She was alone.

Slowly, she pushed away from the square zitan table. She climbed a short set of stairs to the floor-to-ceiling windows lining the study’s upper half.

The sweet smell of overripe peaches rose from the imperial gardens below. Each palace followed the same layout: courtyards placed within courtyards, halls nested within halls. Her father’s study was the exception to the standard sprawl. Half of it rested atop an outcrop of granite, giving Hesina her favorite views of the four gardens—koi, silk, rock, fruit—and their respective ponds, connected by covered galleries zigzagging between mountain formations and thickets of jujube trees.

Hesina’s chest locked. Had her father looked out these windows eight days ago as she was looking now? Had the smell of summer peaches lured him to the gardens through the secret passageway behind the shelves? He had left his favorite tortoiseshell chair askew, his wolf-hair brushes dipped in ink. Abandoned on his desk, scattered and waiting, were a three-legged bronze goblet, a snuff bottle, a copy of the Tenets, left open to One of the Eleven’s biography. Hesina had agonized over whether to leave them be or accept that her father was never coming back.