Descendant of the Crane(16)

She could wait. Wait for a trial to be declared. Wait for her skill to sharpen. But all she wanted was to fight. With swords, not feelings, and with someone she could win against, someone other than her brother.



In the prison exercise yard, sunlight highlighted the half-healed cuts and bruises on the convict’s face. He shifted his hold on the wooden sword’s hilt, the sleeves of his dungeon fatigues in tatters.

Hesina adjusted her own grip, ignoring the sweat on the wood. She wasn’t nervous. Couldn’t be nervous. She would have this convict as her representative, or she would have no one at all.

She drew her sword and judged the distance between them.

Steady.

Breathe in.

Hold it.

Now.

She dashed.

Crack. Wood struck wood. Gravel flew out from under their feet as they spun. She pressed into the gridlock of their swords to test his strength. His sleeves gathered at the elbows as he returned the effort.

Measuring them to be equally matched, Hesina whirled backward, recovered her stance, then lunged again. They crossed once more. Sequence after sequence unfolded, and she fell into the rhythm, timing his blows and matching them. The darkening sky drowned out their shadows. The first few droplets pattered onto the gravel, right before sheets of rain split the clouds.

With renewed vigor, Hesina pressed the convict onto the defensive. She knocked his sword upward, creating an opening. He slipped as he stumbled back. The opening widened.

She danced behind him and slashed in from the right. He struggled to maintain his grip. Victory was all around her. Hesina pressed on, backing him into the wall. But as she thrust her blade forward, she saw all the things the rain had brought into sharp relief: his knobby wrists, his bony chest, his eyes, sunken and bruised with sleeplessness.

Equality is not the natural way of the world, whispered her father’s voice. It must be nurtured.

Her sword struck stone.

The convict’s wooden blade streaked her way. Instinct kicked in; Hesina shoved her sword up just in time, but the impact slammed into her shoulder. She braced her palm to the flat of her blade and he leapt away, then came at her as an entirely different swordsman.

His first slash drove her against the wall. His second had her trembling. His third wrenched the hilt from her hands and sent the sword flying across the exercise yard, where it snapped upon striking the cinder-block wall.

He lifted his sword and touched its wooden point to her throat.

Hesina wheezed. How? How had she not read his true ability? Why had he hidden it? Who was he, this self-proclaimed merchant robber who could fight with such power and grace? But the answers were inconsequential. She had lost. The rain rinsed out the world, drenching her.

She had come this far for nothing.

She moved out of the fighting stance, then held still, waiting for him to do the same.

He didn’t, not at first. His wooden blade remained pointed at her throat, prolonging the burn of her humiliation. Then he lay down the sword and sighed. “Okay.”

Hesina stared.

“You won,” he went on. “Well, technically you lost—”

“You’re fluent?”

“Huh?”

“You can speak Yan?” Elevens, he could speak at all?

“Oh.” He scratched his head. “I learned it a year ago. There’s not much else to do in prison.”

The tips of Hesina’s ears warmed. “Then what was all…this”—she waved her hand—“about?”

“To make you go away.” He shrugged. “As I was saying, you lost, but you threw.”

“What…Why…Wait…I didn’t throw.”

“I’ve looked better, I’ll admit. Attacking my opening probably didn’t seem fair.”

He closed in, and she stumbled back. The rain had filmed his clothes over his skin, highlighting the raised old scars on his arms and the fine, pointed angles of his face, fox-like in their definition. His eyes were young, yet dark with a lifetime’s worth of wins and losses.

Hesina took another step back. “That doesn’t answer my question. Why give me a chance to duel at all?”

He stopped several reed lengths away. “Why not send a champion in your place? Why not threaten me when you thought you had lost?”

“That wasn’t what we agreed on.”

“Yes. But I didn’t expect you to be so—”

He opened his palm. Intersecting the fate lines was something silver and shaped like a dragonfly. The prison master key, freed from the cord of Hesina’s sash.

“—honorable.” Key in hand, he strode across the exercise yard. “Ideals aren’t worth it. Yours cost you the duel.”

He was a convict. She was to be his queen. She could have ordered him back or, better yet, had him whipped for his insolence. But instead Hesina sloshed after the convict, mud splattering her ruqun skirts as they made for the steps leading back to the underground dungeon. “Why, then, are you agreeing to represent me?”

“Would you believe me if I said that I feel bad for your loss?”

“No.”

“I have a hunch that you’re going to pardon me. I’m in it for the freedom. Do you believe me now?”

The hunch was correct, but: “No.”

“Then how about this? I’m curious.” The dungeon’s darkness solidified like lard, melted intermittently by torches down the cinder-block tunnel. “A dead king,” said the convict. “A deceived populace. A truth seeker. Sounds like a story that could end very well or very poorly, and I want to spectate. Believe me now?”