Raikama, everyone called her behind her back. The Nameless Queen. She’d had a name once, back in her home south of Kiata, but only Father and a handful of his most trusted officials knew it. She never spoke of it or of the life she’d led before becoming the emperor’s consort.
I avoided her gaze and stared at my hands. “I am truly sorry if I have shamed you, Father. And you, Stepmother. It was not my intent.”
Father touched my shoulder. “I don’t want you going near the lake again. The physician says you nearly drowned. What were you thinking, running off outside the palace in the first place?”
“I…” My mouth went dry. Kiki fluttered under my palm, as if warning me not to tell the truth. “Yes, I…thought I saw a sna—”
“She said she saw a dragon inside,” Andahai said in a tone that made it clear he didn’t believe me.
“Not inside the palace,” I cried. “In the Sacred Lake.”
My stepmother, who had been so still and silent until now, suddenly stiffened. “You saw a dragon?”
I blinked, startled by her curiosity. “I…yes, yes I did.”
“What did it look like?”
Something about her pale, stony eyes made it hard for me, a natural liar, to lie. “He was small,” I began, “with emerald scales and eyes like the red sun.” The next words were hard for me to utter: “I’m sure I imagined it.”
Ever so slightly, Raikama’s shoulders dropped, then a careful composure settled over her face again, like a mask that she’d inadvertently taken off for an instant.
She offered me a pinched smile. “Your father is right, Shiori. You’d do well to spend more time indoors, and not to confuse fantasy and reality.”
“Yes, Stepmother,” I mumbled.
My response was enough to satisfy Father, who murmured something to her and then left. But my stepmother remained.
She was the one person I could not read. Flecks of gold rimmed her eyes, eyes that ensnared me with their coldness. I couldn’t tell whether their depths were hollow or brimming with an untold story.
When my brothers teased me for being afraid of her, I would say, “Only of her snake eyes.” But deep down, I knew it was more than that.
Though she never said it or showed it, I knew Raikama hated me.
I didn’t know why. I used to think it was because I reminded Father of my mother—the light that made his lantern shine, he would say, the empress of his heart. When she died, he had a temple erected in her name, and he went there every morning to pray. It would make sense that my stepmother resented me for reminding him of her, a rival beyond her grasp.
Yet I didn’t think that was the reason. Never once did she complain when my father paid homage to my mother; never once had she asked to be named empress instead of consort. She seemed to prefer being left alone, and often I wondered if she would have favored being called the Nameless Queen to her official form of address, Her Radiance, a nod to her beauty and title.
“What is that under your hand?” my stepmother asked. My bird had crawled almost to the edge of my bed, and I only now realized how awkward I looked still trying to cover her.
“Nothing,” I said quickly.
“Then put your hands on your lap, as is proper for a princess of Kiata.”
She waited, and there was nothing I could do but obey.
Stay still, Kiki. Please.
As I lifted my hand, Raikama plucked Kiki from atop my blanket. To my relief, Kiki didn’t move. Anyone would think she was only a piece of paper.
“What’s this?”
I bolted up. “It’s nothing. Just a bird that I folded—please, give her back.”
A mistake.
Raikama raised an eyebrow. Now she knew Kiki meant something to me.
“Your father dotes on you. He spoils you. But you are a princess, not a village girl. And you are far too old to be playing with paper birds. It is time you learned the importance of duty, Shiori.”
“Yes, Stepmother,” I said quietly. “It won’t happen again.”
Raikama held Kiki out. Hope flared in my chest, and I reached to retrieve her. But instead of handing her over, my stepmother ripped her in half, then half again.
“No!” I cried, lunging for Kiki, but Andahai and Benkai held me still.
My brothers were strong. I didn’t wrestle against them as a sob racked my chest. My grief was overwhelming. To anyone who didn’t know what Kiki meant to me, it might have seemed too much.
Raikama regarded me with an indecipherable expression: her lips pursed, those cold eyes narrowing into slits. Without another word, she tossed Kiki’s remains onto the floor and left.
Andahai and Benkai followed, but Hasho stayed.
He waited until the doors were closed, then he sat beside me on the edge of my bed.
“Could you do it again?” he asked in a low voice. “Could you reenchant the bird to fly?”
I’d never meant to bring Kiki to life. All I was trying to do was make paper birds—cranes, since they were on my family crest—so the gods might hear me. It was a legend all Kiatans knew: if you made a thousand birds—out of paper or cloth or even wood—they could carry a message up to the heavens.
For weeks I’d labored alone—not even asking my brother Wandei, who was best at all sorts of puzzles and constructions, for help coming up with the folds to make a paper crane. Kiki was the first bird I’d succeeded in folding, though to be honest, she looked more like a crow with a long neck than a crane. I had set her on my lap and painted a red spot on her head—so she’d look more like the cranes embroidered on my robes—and said:
“What a waste to have wings that cannot fly.”
Her paper wings had begun to flutter, and slowly, hesitantly, she lifted into the air, with the uncertainty of a nestling just learning to fly. In the weeks that followed, when my lessons were done and my brothers were too busy to see me, I would help her practice in secret. I took her out to the garden to fly among the pruned trees and stone sanctuaries, and at night, I told her stories.
I’d been so happy to have a friend that I didn’t worry about the implications of having magic.
And now she was gone.
“No,” I whispered, finally replying to Hasho’s question. “I don’t know how.”
He drew a deep breath. “Then it’s for the best. You shouldn’t be dabbling in magic you can’t control. If anyone finds out, you’ll be sent away from Kiata for good.”