Descendant of the Crane(4)

TWO





TOO MUCH OF A THING—BE IT SUCCESS OR POWER—ROTS THE HEART.

ONE OF THE ELEVEN ON SOOTHSAYERS


THEY HAD NO HEARTS TO BEGIN WITH.

TWO OF THE ELEVEN ON SOOTHSAYERS

With shaking hands, Hesina pushed back her hood.

She had come to see the future. The unknown. Yet for a second, all she could see was her father, lying in the iris beds, wearing his courier costume. She wasn’t sure how long she’d waited. Waited for him to rise and yawn, to tell her how lovely it was to stroll through the grounds in disguise. Waited for herself to wake when he never did.

That day, Hesina had watched as the Imperial Doctress took up a scalpel, splitting the dead king’s stomach like a fish. There was nothing to find, not at first. The Imperial Doctress concluded that the king’s death was of natural causes before puttering off to the adjacent chamber.

If only she had stayed a second longer to witness the golden gas rising from the slit. If she had believed when Hesina tried to show her the wisp in the vial, then Hesina wouldn’t be here. Her hands wouldn’t be clenched in her skirts just as they’d been clenched around the Doctress’s robes.

Her voice wouldn’t be so strained when she asked the Silver Iris, “Who killed my father?”

The Silver Iris blinked once. “Killed?”

“Yes, killed!” Hesina choked up. “The king didn’t die a natural death. The decrees lie.”

But she would show the kingdom the truth. With the Silver Iris’s Sight, she would find the assassin, press them into the tianlao dungeons, and maybe then, when she had a life for a life, this nightmare would—

“I See golden gas rising from a pile of shards,” the Silver Iris started. Hesina leaned in. “But I can’t See who killed the king.”

Hesina’s heart dove like a kite without wind.

“What I can See is the person who will help you find the truth.”

“A representative?” Hesina couldn’t mask her disappointment.

“Yes.” The Silver Iris smoothed an embroidered sash over her knee. “You could call him that.”

Hesina wound the cord connecting the vial to her broad-belt around her thumb. If she chose to follow a path of formal justice for her father’s killer, the Investigation Bureau would look into Hesina’s claim that he’d been murdered. Once they’d officially forwarded the case to the court, the Minister of Rites would assign a representative to both the plaintiff—in this case, her—and the defendant.

“Well?” prompted the Silver Iris. “Would you like to hear?”

Princesses were not so different from beggars. Hesina had learned to take what she could get. “Yes.”

The Silver Iris’s doe-like eyes roved over her. Hesina squirmed, well aware there was nothing impressive about her appearance. She lacked the hunger for knowledge that flamed in Caiyan’s eyes, the mirth of Lilian’s lips. A visiting painter had once said that Hesina had her mother’s face, but they both knew she’d never wear it as well as the queen. Hesina thought she heard similar sympathy in the Silver Iris’s voice when she finally said, “A convict.”

“A…convict.” The cord had cut the circulation to Hesina’s thumb. She unwound it, pins and needles replacing the numbness. Her father’s justice…handed to a convict.

She almost laughed.

“I’m sorry.” Hesina’s composure would have made her tutors proud. “There must be a mistake.”

The Silver Iris drew back. “No mistake. A convict will represent you in court.”

“That’s impossible.” Only up-and-coming scholars, selected from a pool of hopeful civil service examinees, acted as representatives in trials. The court was a stage on which to prove their intellect; the reward for winning the case was a free pass through the preliminary rounds of the examinations. The Eleven had made it so to give every literati a chance to rise, regardless of family background. But what did a criminal have to gain from such a system?

Hesina’s disbelief condensed. “Please look again.”

“You think I’m lying.”

“What? No.” Hesina didn’t believe the Silver Iris would lie, not really, for the same reason people trusted sooths in the past. Though books and libraries on the specifics of their powers had been destroyed in the purge, select legends had lived on to become common knowledge. One was that sooths couldn’t lie about their visions without shortening their life spans. How else, argued scholars, could the relic emperors have controlled them?

“Why not?” The Silver Iris rose and turned her back to them. A cascade of colors tumbled out from the hidden layers of her lilac skirt. “Do you think I’m scared of shaving a few years off my life?”

She loosened her sash, and the ruqun puddled onto the lacquered floor.

First came the hand-shaped bruises, flowering over her bare back. Then came the burn marks. Hundreds of thin, puckered lines, as if someone had bled her with a knife and watched her smoke for the fun of it.

“Some would rather see us alive than cut to a thousand pieces or charred at the stake,” she said as Hesina’s throat closed. “You assume I tell the truth because I fear death, but the dead are lucky. They cannot squirm or shudder.” She made for her wardrobe. “Nor can they be forced to say the things you want to hear.”