Descendant of the Crane(13)

Hesina’s temples tensed as she ground her teeth. She began to lower the bowl.

The weight of it suddenly lightened in her hands.

The porcelain parted from her fingertips.

“If this is what you want, then take the crown. Take my blessing.”

Head still bowed, Hesina dared to hope.

“You can bring this kingdom to its knees, for all I care.”

The bowl, concoction and all, crashed to the floor as her mother let go.

The queen laughed, and coughed, and coughed as she laughed. Half the maids tended to her while the other half huddled around Hesina to clean up the shards.

Hesina remained kneeling. There was a time when she would have cried as she blamed herself, the illness, anyone and anything but her mother for her porcelain heart.

That time had passed. As the dark green liquid spread over the varnished floor, Hesina laid one hand over another, pressing them palm down to the floor and her forehead to their backs in a final koutou to the queen. Because of her, Hesina could risk everything and more for her father. Because of her, she had no regrets.



“Xia Zhong! Wait!”

It wasn’t queenly to shout, but Hesina didn’t care. The minister turned as she hurried down the covered gallery.

“Thank you,” she said when she reached him. For someone who supposedly subsisted on tofu and leeks, he walked at an impressive speed. The Northern Palace—home to the relic emperors’ harems in the past, now the offices of ministers—lay just past the rock gardens.

Xia Zhong bowed, the wooden beads at his neck clicking as they swung forward. “A minister does what duty demands.”

“Please, at ease.” Hesina helped him upright.

The minister hadn’t aged well. His nose was sharp and defined, his frame tall and thin, but his skin was creased and sagging, his bald scalp dark with liver spots. His eyes bugged, draped with bags so heavy that they pulled red into the rim, giving them a fishlike quality.

His court robes, too, had seen better days. The black cloth had faded to charcoal, the malachite cuffs bordering on mold green. The smell of damp tea leaves enveloped Hesina again. She tried not to gag.

Xia Zhong took a step back as if sensing her discomfort. “Can I help you, dianxia?”

Her automatic answer was no. She’d come to thank him, not to flaunt her incompetence.

But he’d already seen her at her lowest. He’d spoken for her. His words had carried a torch down to the deepest, darkest dungeon of her self-doubt. He wasn’t a friend, but perhaps, if Hesina played her cards right, he could be an ally.

“I’d like some advice.” She invited Xia Zhong to walk, and they started down the gallery and through the rock gardens. The twisted pumice boulders on either side of them were supposed to evoke auspicious characters such as longevity, but all Hesina could see were the nooks and crannies where she and her father had played hide-and-seek. “If, let’s say, my father didn’t die a natural death…”

She braced herself for derision, for scorn.

None came.

“If he were murdered,” she ventured, “would the people have the right to know?”

“Passage 3.4.1: ‘A suspected case of misdemeanor, private or public, personal or institutional, must be forwarded to the Investigation Bureau of the province in question.’ The Bureau deliberates, not you or I. If the Bureau can find enough evidence and suspects, then the case goes to trial, and the people must be notified by the law of the Tenets.”

If only she’d had Xia Zhong to convince her brother. “What if the political climate is…unstable?”

“Passage 3.4.2: ‘Justice is a muscle. Without faith, it weakens. Without use, it decays. Without challenges, it does not strengthen.’ Small cases have their challenges, dianxia. So do large ones.”

Hesina always considered the Tenets, with their sooth-hating passages, as propaganda. Even her father had cautioned her against reading the book too literally. But the passages were like weapons in Xia Zhong’s hands. It stunned her. It awed her.

“If there’s nothing else,” said the minister as they neared the end of the gallery, “I must be going now.”

“There is something else.”

They came to the Northern Palace moon gate. Through the circular opening of cutout limestone, Hesina glimpsed the minister’s residence. Just like rumors claimed, the roof was missing half its tiles.

Xia Zhong didn’t invite her in. Hesina didn’t blame him.

They stood under the gallery eave, the minister waiting for her to speak. She collected her courage, building it like a house of twigs. “I have a favor to ask you.”

“Is it in accordance with the Tenets?”

She could not lie. “I don’t know.”

“Then I can’t help.”

“Wait,” Hesina said as Xia Zhong started to go. She thought she caught a flash of annoyance in his red-rimmed eyes, but it was gone when she looked again.

“I know a boy. A boy of immense talent and skill.” The lies came easily this time. Too easily. Hesina almost grimaced when she imagined what her father would think. “He made some mistakes. His life was hard, and he was desperate. But his dream always was to pass the civil service examinations. Become a servant of the state.”

She layered emotion to her voice, infused the story with truth. She’d known a boy like this, after all. It was Caiyan.