Lantern Riddle

By Kez Sharrow

Straightening her shoulders, Lani stepped into the chilly palace hallway. One last banquet. She could do this.

She remembered Lantern Festivals of old, giggling with her brothers as they stuffed themselves with sweet rice-ball soup and ran from one glittering event to the next. Now, after two weeks of festivities, she felt as empty as those rice wine bottles the servants were carrying back to the kitchen. The more crowded the banquet, the more invisible she felt. Tonight, in her white robe, she could be a ghost. If it snowed, she’d completely disappear. She glanced back at her guard. “Sendai, will it stay clear for the fireworks?”

“Smells like snow.” He extended a thin ribbon of paper. “Princess, this came for you.”

She brightened. “A riddle of my own!” As a child, the best part of Lantern Festival was competing with her brothers to solve the riddles dangling along lantern-lit corridors. This year they’d all been too busy, or so she’d thought. Here one of them had made the effort to send her a riddle! Warmth trickled into Lani’s hollow chest.

She read the paper while she walked, trusting Sendai to keep her from bumping into anything. “On helmet’s rim, flowers stun. In crowdless bower, midnight sun.”

Hmm, tricky. Interpretation depended so much on which brother wrote it. The characters were solid and carefully formed, neither Adon’s rushed, slanting handwriting, nor Rai’s elegant, practiced calligraphy. But neither brother was above using someone else as scribe during the busyness of Lantern Festival.

“Princess, the step.” Sendai gripped her elbow, stopping her from tripping over the high threshold of the Hall of Heavenly Brightness.

“Thank you.” She pocketed the riddle and stepped inside the banquet hall. Delectable aromas of garlic and cilantro rose from twelve round tables piled high with fragrant dishes. She wended through to the central table, mulling over the riddle. “Midnight sun” could point to the brightness of the midnight fireworks, possibly. That would also fit with “flowers stun.”

Sendai stood behind her as she took her seat. Adon nodded a greeting without pausing his conversation with Lord Chisu across the table. Something about silk tariffs. Adon’s restless fingers folded his napkin into a sea dragon.

On Adon’s other side, Rai listened with a tight jaw to Lord Qaziki’s complaints. When Qaziki bowed to Lani, Rai turned.

“Lani, you’re late.”

Lani took a deep breath. He probably didn’t realize how critical that sounded.

“Her Imperial Majesty and Prince Consort,” boomed the herald. The hall quieted as everyone bowed.

Mama and Baba proceeded to their places of honor. Chatter resumed, along with the clatter of chopsticks. Lani picked a piece of abalone from her soup and dropped it in Adon’s bowl. He flashed her a smile.

Taking advantage of his attention, she slid the riddle toward him. “Adon, look at this.”

He scanned it and handed it back. “Something about the fireworks at midnight?”

Lord Chisu asked a question, and Adon turned to answer.

“That much I’d figured out.” Lani took a sip of soup. “‘Helmet’s rim’ has me stumped, though.”

She pushed the riddle past Adon toward her older brother. “Rai, what do you think?”

Rai frowned at her interruption, but glanced down at the riddle.

Lani grinned. Solving a riddle tempted even Rai to break etiquette.

Rai turned back to Qaziki.

Or maybe etiquette did rule, now they were all grown up.

Lani nibbled at a dumpling. The conversations around her felt like chickens pecking at her brain. A crowdless bower, whatever that was, sounded very appealing right now.

***

When Mama and Baba finally rose to end the banquet and move to the firework viewing, Lani was no closer to cracking the secret of the helmet rim. Soup tureen? Swan’s wing? Was it a place? Something outside the palace?

Rai stood, and Lani reached for her riddle. He leaned down and said softly, “I’ve often thought the upper balconies, with their swooping eaves, looked like an imperial guard’s winged helmet.”  They stared at Sendai’s silver helmet, its curved feathers swooping into the rim.  Below the helmet, amusement sparkled in Sendai’s brown eyes.

Lani turned back to Rai. “You’re right.”

“Don’t sound so surprised.” Rai followed the others out of the hall.

Lani paused. Did that mean Rai wrote the riddle? Hmm. “I think I’ll detour toward the upper balconies, Sendai.”

He bowed. “Lead the way, Princess.”

***

Snowflakes were falling, fat and slow, when Lani stepped out onto a balcony. “Your nose was right, Sendai!”

Tugging her robe tighter, she glanced around. Bonsai in clay pots were dusted with white. Below, snow streaked the roof of the viewing pavilion where Mama and the others prepared for the fireworks, and the crowd in the central courtyard was obscured by colorful parasols. Even the sound of courtiers solving riddles in the long, lantern-lit corridors was muted by distance.

Lani breathed in quiet, and something inside unwound. These weeks of banquets and entertainments, of noise and crowds, her soul had lagged behind her body, and here, finally, she felt it return. The moon shimmered in the sky. Bonsai smelled fresh as new beginnings.

A boom startled Lani from her revery. Red and blue chrysanthemums exploded over the rooftops. So beautiful. “On helmet’s rim, flowers stun.” The rightness of the solution struck her. She glanced across the bonsai to share her joy with Sendai, the only other person around.

“In crowdless bower…” Her throat went dry.

There were just the two of them alone up here.

She swiveled slowly away from the fireworks and snow, her heart beating fast. Light from the fireworks glinted on Sendai’s winged helmet.

Her gaze dropped from the helmet to his dark eyes, fixed on her.

“My brothers didn’t write this riddle,” she whispered.

Fireworks exploded above them, a shower of gold.

Sendai, who’d been behind her for the last—how many years?—stepped forward. Sendai, who’d known what she needed, who’d seen her soul when she couldn’t catch it herself.

“Midnight sun,” he smiled.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kez Sharrow is an emergent unicorn living in Wuhan. By day she dabbles in the alchemy of human transformation as a leadership coach. Early mornings and weekends, she creates worlds out of smoke and dragon’s breath. Kez belongs to the tribe of the uprooted and transplanted, those who live between cultures, and she writes stories of travelers in fantasy worlds.

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