by eden Hudson
“Groom, Chieftain Ji Yu Raijin escorting bride, Lilac of the Valley, Second Princess Shyong San Koida,” the court speaker said.
As she and her betrothed walked side by side to the dais, Koida told him, “I will speak familiarly to you outside of training if it pleases you, but I won’t be disrespectful of your superior rank in the Path while you instruct me.”
“Gratitude for the compromise,” Raijin said, pulling out her chair as was expected of his lower rank.
“Gratitude for the seat,” she clipped off smartly.
His lips twisted into a grin. “It was your unexalted husband’s pleasure.”
Koida covered a traitorous giggle with her sleeve.
Servants spread through the feasting hall, filling cups with the palace’s signature blood orange wine and carrying golden and jade platters of fattened calf, towering displays of exotic fruits and vegetables, and elaborate braids of spiced breads. They served first the emperor, then down through the ranks, a waiting servant bowing up the steps to do the same for the bride and groom.
Koida watched them go, wondering if everything had been as beautiful and appetizing the night before or if she had been too occupied with fear of her future husband to notice it.
“May we begin training tomorrow morning?” she asked. In the royal waiting room, Raijin had spoken as if her crippled Ro would not be the barrier she’d always been told it was, but only a hindrance. If it took years to advance on the Path of the Thunderbird, then she wanted to begin immediately.
Raijin shook his head. “My sincere apologies, but we can’t begin tomorrow. I have something very important to see to. When I return, we’ll begin.”
Courtesy would not allow Koida to ask where Raijin was going, but she was only concerned with his destination insofar as it affected her future training, anyway.
Instead, she asked, “Is there anything I can do until you return to prepare myself?”
“Do you know how to meditate at rest?”
Koida shook her head, taking care not to disturb the bell cascades. She had read about meditation in ancient legends, but had never known anyone to practice it in modern times.
“I can ask Hush to teach you the correct form while I’m gone, but the important part of meditation is cultivating your Ro. The first exercise most students learn is Pouring Ro into Itself.”
At her confused look, Raijin smiled.
“It sounds strange, but it’s actually fairly easy. Focus some of your Ro into a ring. Send the rest into the hole at the center, then catch it on the other side, and cycle it back around. Try to get it circling continuously, so that it looks as if you have two rings linked together.”
“I think I understand. I’ll begin practicing tonight if Hush can spare the time.” Koida realized that in her excitement about the new Path she’d forgotten to inquire about the woman’s rooftop pursuit. “Is she well? How did Lao escape her? Did he defeat her?”
“There aren’t many warrior artists who can defeat Hush in a fight, and Lao isn’t one of them.” For a moment, he fell silent, as if deciding how much to tell Koida. “We think—well, I think and there’s a good chance Hush agrees with me—that he had a secret way into and through the palace.”
“You think he planned for a day when he would need to escape.”
“This isn’t the first time he’s needed to disappear. Hush has been hunting him for years and gotten much closer than I have.”
Koida twisted her wine cup as she considered this. “It’s eerie knowing someone for such a long time only to learn that you never knew them at all.”
When she looked up again, she found Raijin staring at her.
He smiled, clearly embarrassed. “Imagine meeting someone and feeling as if you already know them.”
A blush heated Koida’s face. She took a sip of wine to hide it.
“How long will you be gone?” she asked afterward. This time, she wasn’t asking entirely out of eagerness to begin training.
“Not long, I hope,” Raijin said, his jade eyes searching the sea of faces below. They fell on Yoichi’s plum gaze. Neither man made any effort to convey the slightest amount of cordiality, and neither man looked away.
Another servant bowed up the steps, this one carrying a silver platter like the one that had contained the sunbright the night before. Tonight, however, the cups were the only things on the platter.
“Is this another of the Ji Yu wedding rites?” Koida asked as the servant set it on the table between them.
The question tore Raijin’s attention from the stare down with Yoichi.
“Breath of the Underwater Panther,” Raijin said, lifting one cup for her inspection. Inside, an eddy of liquid swirled, blue and gold battling for control of the surface. Koida could hear the trickling babble of a shallow creek against the sides and bottom of the cup. “It isn’t an imitation like the sunbright pill, but the real thing, from the Dead Waters Kingdom. It will protect you from malicious harm for seven days. More than enough time to—” He faltered. “—to complete the wedding rituals and make it back to my village safely.”
Koida lifted her cup. She could feel the whirling of the current in her finger pads.
“Will it make me sick?”
“Not this,” Raijin said. “It isn’t like a demon’s core stone. Your body consumes this, not your Ro. You don’t have to do anything except drink it.”
With both hands, he raised his cup to her, then swallowed the eddying liquid inside. Koida spent a moment watching Raijin for signs of illness before she did the same. The Breath of the Underwater Panther was cold, and it tasted like the icy melt that ran down from the mountains and swelled the river and creeks during the spring.
Belatedly, she remembered the pill from the night before.
“I forgot to thank you for the sunbright,” she said. “It was awful, but I feel like it changed my Ro somehow. Made it stronger.”
“Sunbright cleanses and refines the Ro,” Raijin said. “There are certain items that will strengthen Ro enough to speed progression, but those are of no use until the higher levels. Most are potentially deadly to anyone who hasn’t advanced, and each one affects the Ro differently.”
“Levels?” Koida asked.
Raijin shook his head. “In the Path I follow, the students are ranked based on how many times their Ro has advanced.”
Now she was utterly confused. In the Path of the Living Blade, there were no ranks, only students and masters.
“But Ro can only advance once,” she said. That was common knowledge. Ro advanced one time. In the Path of the Living Blade, that advancement allowed the student to manifest the bladed weapons that gave the Path its name.
“Apologies, Koida, but you’ve been misinformed. Depending on the Path you’ve chosen, Ro can advance many times, each new level granting the student new abilities. In the Path of the Thunderbird, there are nine stages of advancement.”
“The Path of the Thunderbird is not one I’ve heard of,” she said.
“It’s an offshoot of the Path of Darkening Skies.” He hesitated, then added, “I couldn’t complete my training on that Path, so I had to create a new one.”
It was as if he couldn’t stop making unbelievable statements.
“What? How?” Koida demanded.
“Largely by trial and error.” Raijin grinned sheepishly and cleared his throat, though the gravel in his voice remained the same. “More error than I’d like to admit, honestly.”
“But all Paths were created by the ancients millennia ago,” she said. “You can’t just create a new one.”
Raijin laughed. “Every Path was young sometime.”
“And what about other students and masters? If you’re the only one who follows it, then it’s just another Path executed incorrectly.”
“The people of my tribe are all students of it,” he said. “Though I only require them to learn enough to defend themselves. Whether they choose to study it further is their decision. A great many of them do. As for ot
her Thunderbird masters, there are two besides me. Both mastered it much faster than I did, though Hush was already a full master of another Path when we began training together. I think it becomes easier to master secondary Paths once you’ve mastered the first...if you can swallow your pride enough to start over at the bottom of a new one, that is.”
“What about Lysander?” Koida asked, nodding at the yellow-haired foreigner. Shingti had left their father’s side to join the raucous group gathered around the man. The two of them seemed to get along strangely well, perhaps helped along by the fact that as soon as he saw the first princess, the foreigner offered her a drink from his ivory flask. “Is he the other master of your Path?”
Raijin shook his head. “Lysander could follow the Path of the Thunderbird if he chose to, but he’s not convinced it’s a real Path yet. So far, you and he agree on that much.”
“If you can teach me to fight as well as you do, then you’ll change my mind,” she said.
He grinned. “If you work as hard at training as you do trying to disprove everything I say, then you’ll be besting me in no time.”
They turned to their food for a time in companionable silence, Koida turning over and over all that she was learning about her future husband.
“Your parents must have been very proud to leave the tribe in the hands of a son who created his own Path,” she said.
Raijin finished his bite, then took a sip of wine. He seemed to be in no hurry to speak.
“The tribe wasn’t left to me,” he said.
“Did you defeat the previous chieftain?”
“There was no previous chieftain.” Raijin twisted his wine cup. “I’m the first. I didn’t intend to start a tribe...” He shrugged. “It just happened.”
Koida raised an eyebrow at him. “You accidentally started a new tribe?”
“People kept coming,” he said. “People who were missing something or searching for something. We couldn’t turn them away.”
“You started your own tribe, you created your own Path.” She could hardly comprehend having the power to change not only your own life, but the world. “You’re like the heroes from the old legends.”
“Let’s hope this hero doesn’t fail.”
Raijin looked so grave that Koida grabbed his hand.
“He won’t,” she said. “Whatever his journey is, his future wife will help him to the end.”
A strange shadow crossed Raijin’s face then. His eyes bored into hers.
“I know,” he said, his cool fingers squeezing hers.
Chapter Twenty-Two
6 YEARS AGO
A misty drizzle began to fall as Raijin made his way down the mountainside. With the thick scrim of clouds covering the moon, the night was dark and lonely. Once he passed outside of the area that could be reached in a thirty-minute run, the well-worn paths around the school disappeared. Grass and small shrubs carpeted the earth between massive, moss-covered boulders, their odd shapes casting strange shadows by the light of the lantern Raijin had taken on his way out of the school.
Though Master Chugi had insisted he leave without packing, Raijin had little besides spare uniforms to take with him. The only personal possessions students of the Path of Darkening Skies kept were the sashes denoting their rank and the sturdy martial meditation uniforms given to them by the school. With the addition of the lantern and the pill Master Chugi had pressed into his hands, Raijin now had more possessions than he’d ever had in his life.
Closer inspection told Raijin the capsule was a Breath of the Underwater Panther pill. It would mimic the protective properties of the water demon’s exhalation, shielding him for a full day from anything malicious that might try to harm him.
As he reached the tree line of the forest, his lantern light reflected back at him from the eyes of unseen creatures. It was well known at the school that these woods were filled with deadly guai. Raijin considered taking the pill then, but told himself it would be better to wait. The journey down the mountain was long. It could take days. If he wasted the protection now when there was no immediate threat, he might find himself in peril and empty-handed later.
The undergrowth and trees seemed to close in behind him, the canopy overhead easing the drizzle slightly. Rain pattered against the leaves overhead. The loam squished beneath his feet like a springy wet cushion. No night animals called to one another in the darkness, but he heard them scamper through the brush now and again.
The sun would rise in a few hours, he realized. His daily tasks would go undone for the first time since he was six years old. Once that agreement was broken, he would never be allowed back in the school. That part of his life would be over. Sixteen years of training and work done. What would he do with the next sixteen?
Raijin pulled his robes tighter against the cold. He wished he could have woken Yong Lei to say goodbye. Would Master Chugi tell his friend where he had gone? Would they ever meet again?
As he traveled deeper into the woods, the eyeshine and movement sounds of the smaller forest animals disappeared. The hairs on the back of Raijin’s neck prickled. It felt as if he were being watched. When he turned to look, however, he found nothing. Perhaps it was only his imagination. Thoughts of the demon beasts frightened him out of his wits. He swallowed and continued walking, one hand on the blue-and-gold pill in his robe’s pocket.
Then he heard it—the rattle of a branch scraping over a wide back. Using a burst of Cyclone Speed, he whirled.
A huge ray, with a wingspan easily the length of a bison, drifted in the air behind him, the creature identical to the river rays that filled the muddiest waterways in the mountains. Except, of course, that it was swimming through the air rather than water. Its scar-crossed skin shined with silver-gray Ro, and on the top of its head, its eyes glowed like molten platinum. Raijin could smell the beast’s musk, the salty, wet, burning ozone stink of a lightning strike on the ocean. A long, deadly stinger trailed the ray like a barbed cane pole, razor sharp and crackling with electricity.
The raw, deadly power of the sight made Raijin’s heart stutter and his bowels weak. He was standing face-to-face with a guai—a demon beast—the type of creature that had killed more humans wandering the mountains than anything else, and there were no masters about to help him fend it off. He forgot the pill in his hand, forgot his purpose in the forest, forgot even his name in that sudden wash of terror.
The guai-ray sensed his fear. It shot toward him, slashing its stinger through the air.
Just before he was impaled, Raijin remembered Straight Line Winds. He sprinted, his speed boosted by the Wind technique. He nearly bashed into the trunk of a dead evergreen, but escaped the ray’s wicked stinger.
The beast gave no howl of chase as it cut through the night behind him, but Raijin heard the crackling sizzle of the ray’s electrical appendage slicing madly through the air. The hair on the back of his head stood up as the stinger’s current passed too close. A moment later, he smelled singed hair.
Raijin’s mind churned frantically. How could he escape this creature? Demon beasts never tired and didn’t require sleep or food. It could chase him to the school and back easily. At best, he could sprint Straight Line Wind speed for ten minutes before his Ro exhausted itself. But then what? Even if the exhaustion of Ro wouldn’t leave him weak and fatigued, this was as fast as he could run, and still he could feel the creature just over his shoulder, could see its silvery Ro lighting up the trees and undergrowth just ahead.
A Shield of the Crescent Moon would only protect so much of his body from the razor-bladed stinger, and an electrical current could travel through his body and stop his heart no matter where it struck.
Raijin dodged the knotty bole of an ancient oak, then leapt over a fungus-covered deadfall. Funny, in his panic he could see the lacy pattern of every lichen and the velvety texture of the resident mushrooms as if he’d stopped to study them for hours.
Through the trees to his left, he caught sight of a tight stand of white bi
rches and tangled briars, their pale bark ghostly in the darkness. Raijin grabbed the trunk of a rafter pine, using it to turn his momentum sharply, and sprinted toward the birches. He ducked under a low-hanging branch and into the brambles, thorns and cutleafs tearing at his skin and uniform. Immediately, he dropped the speed-enhancing ability and skidded to a stop.
The ray slammed into the ghostly birch trunks with a splintering crash, and for a brief, thunderous heartbeat, Raijin thought the beast would smash its way in, but there were too many of the trees spaced too close together. It couldn’t break through with sheer brute force.
Raijin dropped to the ground, his head spinning with relief. He was safe.
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!
The guai-ray chopped at the brambles and trees with its bladelike stinger.
Raijin scrambled back to his feet. Run or stay?
If he ran, the ray would flit around the side and catch him. If he stayed, it would cut its way into the thicket and catch him.
Thwack! The scent of burning birch filled the air as the demon ray’s lightning stinger blackened the trunks. Thwack!
If he hesitated much longer, the decision would be made for him.
“Please!” Raijin yelled. Shaking, he pressed his fists together and bowed, keeping his eyes on the creature’s lashing, sizzling stinger. “Honored ruler of the Shangyang Forest, please do not kill this pathetic child! I cannot provide any challenge for your hunting and would only be a waste of your great might!”
The ray froze mid-swing of its arcing stinger.
Encouraged, Raijin went on. “If I have done something to offend, I apologize and declare my debt to the honored guai. Is there no way your servant can make amends?”
This proved to be the wrong thing to say. Wings flapping with rage, the guai-ray slammed its head and shoulders against the trees, trying to batter its way in once more.
“The legged creature kills and butchers my mate and destroys my nest, then it asks to make amends?!” the demon roared in a voice like a mountain crumbling into a sea.
