It’s a risk she’s willing to take.
The muscles of Shefali’s shoulder fray. She cannot hold herself here for long—but she needs only a moment.
One moment to bring their lips together, one moment to remind herself why she is collecting her mother’s army for a suicidal attack, one moment to stretch into an eternity.
Their hands link; their scars grow warm.
“Together,” whispers Shefali, her breath on her wife’s lips.
“Like two pine needles,” Shizuka answers.
And so it is—they share their last kiss in Xian-Lai. Who can say how long it lasts? For Shefali has no need of breathing, and Shizuka has no breath while Shefali is near her. Together they are in that raucous downpour; together they are in the early light of the morning; together they are, and let the gods try to pry them apart.
But even gods can be slain, and even this moment must pass.
When at last they part, Shizuka holds her wife’s gaze for several heartbeats.
“Come back to me,” she says.
“Always,” Shefali answers.
It’s time, her horse mutters. Your mother’s liver mare isn’t going to stand around all year.
It is true—that mare is all fidgets.
Shefali kisses her wife once more. As she leaves, she hums to herself an old Qorin song, its words more sound than lyrics. No one remembers what they mean anymore.
But they remember. Still, they remember.
* * *
SHEFALI DOES NOT sleep.
She tells herself it is because she does not need to, has not needed to, in four years. This Shefali knows in her bones to be a lie. When she was a child, there was talk of a man in another clan who lost the ability to fall asleep over two years. Like rainfall eroding a fine bow—so the lack of sleep eroded his mind. His temper frayed down to a single strand waiting to be snapped; he lost all track of time and said the strangest things in the middle of the day. When his clan set out along the Burqila trade route to Sur-Shar, he remarked that he had never made the trip before; this, in spite of making it twice in his lifetime.
There was little the sanvaartains could do. Sleep drafts worked at first, until his body became accustomed to them and they lost their potency. Many volunteered to solve things the Qorin way—hit him hard enough and he was sure to get some measure of rest. In his desperation, he allowed this.
Still sleep eluded him. Still he sat in his family’s ger, staring at swirls of felt, swearing to anyone who would listen that there were people trapped within. That he could hear them.
After three months with no sleep at all, his clan took him hunting, and that was that. He died atop his horse; he died with bow in hand; his body was laid out beneath the sky. In the end, the crows carried him to Grandmother Sky’s arms. What more could a Qorin ask for?
This is only a story she has heard, but all stories are true in their own ways, and it is not the sort of thing the Qorin would lie about.
Besides, she has felt the truth of it herself. In the four years since Barsalai Shefali left the Mother’s Womb, she has slept precisely twice. There is, she thinks, one more sleep left in her. Her bones are heavy enough for it; she can see its paw prints in the snow of her mind. One night it will come to her and she shall not fight it.
But until then her days and her nights are as the head and tail of a false-faced serpent. Every morning its fangs sink deeper into her temples, until she has trouble stringing together thoughts. Every evening its hiss crackles over her memories.
She repeats the important things to herself over and over, in soft Qorin syllables: You are going to meet your mother, and your cousin, and the clan that loves you; you promised your wife you would stay safe; you are going to war; you are dying.
These things are impossible to forget—but Shefali is worried, all the same.
Twice while she is traveling her body loses its shape. The first happens thankfully—if anyone can be thankful for such a thing—in the middle of the night, when there is no one around to see. The serpent coils itself around her arm in the morning; by nightfall, she can hardly feel her fingertips. It is not until she reaches for the golden flower tucked into her belt that she realizes her right arm has shriveled into a husk. Skin clings to bone like old leather wrapped about knobby twigs.
She looks down on this shriveled hand, and she thinks: At least my scar is still there.
For it is—a single line of silver amid the gray of what was once her palm.
Shefali decides this is as good a time as any to let her mare rest for the night. There is no rest for her, of course—there is never any rest for her when she is so far estranged from her wife—but she acts as if there will be. With her shriveled hand and the ache in her joints, she has no hope of assembling her ger; instead, she lays out a roll of felt, and lays herself upon it, and imagines she can hear the voices of her ancestors as she sees them shining overhead.
We will remember you, they say. Here—right here—is the spot we’ve saved for you. The view is beautiful in the mornings.
Yet Shefali is in no rush to join them. However beautiful the view from the stars might be—the whole world spread out beneath her like a masterwork of glass, the steppes forever shining in the morning light—it cannot hope to compare to the sight of Shizuka sucking her thumb in her sleep.
Hours pass. When the sun rises, Shefali reaches for the golden flower again, and finds her hand has returned to her.
* * *
THE SECOND TIME her body betrays her, she is riding through a small village. She does not know its name, or even whether it is Hokkaran or Jeon. Wide, cuffed sleeves; patterned clothes—these things speak to Hanjeon more than Fujino, but then, she has been away so long that perhaps these are the newest fashions.
Whoever they may be, the people here are not fond of her. Who would be? A lone Qorin riding through a village, along no major road, in a war mask though there are none of the enemy to be seen. Their eyes are needles digging into her shoulders, into her chest, into her sides, and into her thighs.
Are they jealous of me? asks her mare.
Beneath her mask, Barsalai Shefali smiles.
It is this that dooms her. Like paper torn across, her lips and mouth; she hisses in pain as the skin peels off. Wet and cool, the skin slaps against her neck, dangling below the lip of her mask.
The villagers have not yet noticed.
She has only moments. A rattling breath, a command in a tongue of swaying grass—her gray mare knows it is time to leave. With every fall of her hooves, the muscles of Shefali’s jaw grow thinner and thinner.
Yet what is stranger than a lone Qorin riding through a sleepy Jeon village in the middle of the day?
That same Qorin tearing through the village at a full gallop, letting out quiet gurgles of pain, her hand beneath her mask as she desperately tries to keep her jaw from falling off.
“Blackblood!”
The first to shout is a woman weaving; she leaves her loom, scooping up her child in her arms and running into her house. The cry spreads: “Blackblood! Blackblood!” shouts a man playing at dice with his friend; “Get away!” shouts the friend. In their haste, one of them knocks the board over; dice scatter upon the earth.
It will not be long now.
Fear is thick as fog in the air. Sweet. Terribly sweet. Spit drips onto her bloody hand; her top teeth ache in anticipation. Her tongue, thin and rapidly growing longer, wraps around her wrist to better taste it all.
And yet to scent something is not the same as to taste it. Barsalai Shefali has known the taste of fear. It has burst beneath her teeth like fruit; it has filled her mouth and dribbled down her chin.
Lust for it threatens to overcome her. As the village’s warriors grab their bows and nock their arrows, she thinks of how easy it would be, how simple, to taste their fear again.
How long she has hungered.
Barsalai Shefali presses her eyes closed, knowing it will do little to help—her sense of smell is vision
enough. Behind her there are three archers. She sees them as clearly as if she stood among them, sees their bodies young and old like shadows at midday.
Three whistling sparrows, three arrows in flight.
If she wanted to, she could turn and catch them. If she wanted to, she could throw herself from her gray mare and land as a wolf. If she wanted to, she could devour everyone in this village.
But though her sleepless years have worn her, though her blood runs black as ink, though she lopes closer to death every day, and her stomach rumbles for something succulent—Barsalai Shefali is no monster.
With no way to speak to them, she cannot tell them who she is; she cannot tell them not to worry. If she fights, she will kill them.
Hokkarans do not retreat. To do so is seen as a great weakness: If you do not have the conviction to die for your beliefs, then why are you on the battlefield at all? This practice has won them wars and earned them a reputation for fierceness on the continent.
But they still lost to a nineteen-year-old Qorin who knew that if you retreated—if you allowed your troops to regroup—you could come back stronger the next day.
Shefali, like her mother, knows the value of retreat. Three arrows are a small price to pay, in comparison.
She braces herself for them. One screams over her shoulder, landing with a thud in the earth; one pierces the back of her right arm. The third is the last to launch—and its archer a novice who forgot to account for distance. If Shefali does not do something to stop it, it will hit her mare.
No. Shefali would rather swallow molten glass than let her mare come to harm.
Feet still in the stirrups, Shefali throws herself backwards so that she covers as much of her horse’s back as possible. Now she opens her eyes, now she sees the arrow plummeting, plummeting—
Chnk.
Bone piercing bone.
She coughs. The arrow, lodged in her chest, wobbles with the motion. With her left arm—the arm not ensnared by her own tongue—she holds it in place. It’ll be easier to remove it when she can safely shift.
And she cannot safely shift her form here.
As she forces herself back upright, she can feel the arrowhead grind, the awful sensation traveling all the way up to her teeth. What remains of her teeth. Blood drips onto her thighs and she hopes—how she hopes!—that none has landed on the ground.
But there is little time to worry about that now. She sucks in a painful breath and gives her gray mare a kick. There are only three archers and no one here owns a horse—if she can crest the next hill, she will be free.
You didn’t have to do that, the mare says to her. Aren’t you in enough pain already?
What’s a little more? Shefali thinks. In truth, she is more worried about keeping together than she is about the pain. The pain at least gives her something to focus on. Her pierced arm feels very much hers when there is a piece of bone slicing through her triceps.
Cresting the hill makes everything worse—her tongue tightens around her wrist; her stomach is threatening to tear itself apart. Galloping full tilt away from a fine meal, though she dares not think of it that way, is taking its toll on her. How much longer can she stay mounted? How much longer can she cling to the saddle?
Sky. She is a doll stuffed too full of felt. Weeks from now her seams are going to burst—but how it aches to feel them strain!
Over the hill, careening down—her horse knows well enough to slow down, now that they are out of eyesight. She cannot yet dismount, cannot yet truly tend to herself until there are at least two li between them. Breathe. Breathe, and the rest will follow.
Kumaq, she thinks. To help me focus.
With her free hand she reaches into her saddlebags. There—a full skin, the liquid sloshing as she pulls it free. Shefali flicks it open with her thumb. The acrid scent of fermented milk fills the air. She breathes deep of it—breathes deep of home, of the steppes. Cool air fills her lungs and freezes there. The cold radiates outward—up her shoulders and down her arms, rolling like a stone down into her belly.
Another breath, another.
I am Barsalai Shefali Alsharyya, and this body is my own.
Again and again she thinks it, again and again she forms herself from snow and ice and hardship. With both hands she sets her jaw back in place.
Will is the key, isn’t it?
She focuses all of hers—all the cold, all the prickling energy it brings with it—onto the tips of her fingers. These she presses against either side of her jaw and—
There.
Frozen in place.
It aches, of course, with the numbing ache that only cold can bring, and she likely could not open her mouth if she tried at the moment.
But she has a mouth, and it is not falling onto her neck.
She takes another breath—through her nostrils this time, cool at the back of her throat—and focuses on the shedding skin. As if she is wiping the snow from a tarp, she wipes across the glistening skin beneath her mask. Cold as a fifth winter, cold as a sixth. How strange, to feel the frost forming beneath her hand! As if she is summoning glass from the ether, as if she is …
As if she is a god.
By the time Shefali is done, there is a patch of ice the size of her hand covering the bottom of her face. She cannot move it; she can feel nothing but acute, throbbing numbness.
Yet it is whole. And it is her.
She would laugh if she could. Where did she get such an idea? From listening to her wife, no doubt. If Shizuka can hold a branding iron bare handed, then perhaps summoning ice is not so strange at all.
Still. It feels … It feels as if she has left part of herself behind with the skin she shed. The Barsalai of a year ago would never have attempted such a thing.
Don’t forget your other wounds.
Her horse is sensible, as always, but there will be time to deal with the arrows. Compared to losing control of her body, they are a mundane worry at best.
Barsalai Shefali taps her horse’s flank twice. Two more li. She hopes the message is clear without her having to say it.
There are few people who know Shefali well. Her wife, her mother. Otgar, perhaps, though they did not part on good terms.
Her gray mare, though not a person, counts among them.
Two more li they travel, Barsalai clutching at the arrow in her chest the whole way. Dismounting is simple enough—all the excitement has granted her the energy to do so with little trouble.
It is the healing that will be the issue.
She slumps against a tree. Her blood drips onto the earth and she curses. Trees may be eternal symbols of everything the Qorin dislike, but that is no reason to poison them. When she is done, she will see if the kumaq can cleanse it.
But there is the matter of the arrows first. She snaps the shafts between her fingers. Shoddy craftsmanship, to start. Fletching with sparrow feathers is always bad luck. That the arrows are bone tipped and not metal should make this a little easier—they’re narrower. If she focuses, she can feel its shape.
Another deep breath.
Shefali stares at the arrow in her chest, at the wound around the base of the shaft, and wills the laceration to expand. Shifting her form like this takes focus—but it is easiest when she can stare down at the thing she wants to change. Holding the image in her mind is the integral part, after all.
Widen.
Grinding bone, creaking muscle—the sounds soon reach her ears as her pain spikes. If it were not for her frozen face, she’d be grunting with effort. Slowly, like a potter shaping a bowl, she shapes the hole around the arrow.
When at last she pulls it out—what relief washes over her! She cannot sigh, only puff through her nostrils, but even that feels a little satisfying.
Her arm is shorter work—she’s reshaped that more times than she can count. In truth, after all the commotion, she is of half a mind to leave it there. What is it going to do—go sour on her? She isn’t going to die for another three weeks; surely it can wait.
>
A breeze carries the scent of foxes to her. Shefali shudders. Her lack of sleep has taken much from her, but she remembers clearly that day in Salom—the fox woman’s teeth at her throat.
Everything about you is rotten.
Perhaps she really should leave the arrowhead in. If she got any more rotten, it might serve as fox repellent.
Yet she promised Shizuka she would stay safe. Out it goes.
It takes hardly any time at all; the soft flesh of her arm is far more responsive than the bone and cartilage of her chest. If anything, it is too responsive: the hole she makes is wide enough to fit two of her fingers together.
Despite her earlier misgivings, it does feel good to be rid of the arrowhead. As if she has expunged the last of the incident, the last of that animal hunger is gone with a spurt of black as the wound closes up.
Something deep in her wants to thank the Sky for this. Knowing what she does—that Tumenbayar is Grandmother Sky, that Grandmother Sky is no single person, that she, too, will take up the name—makes no difference. The Sky has watched over her all her life, no matter what names they both wore. To thank her is only natural.
Shefali glances up to the cloudy sky—and that is when she catches the second scent.
Horses.
Not one, or two, or three—enough of them that she can smell them though they are at least five li away.
And though she has taken an arrow to the chest today, though her mouth is sealed shut—it is this that makes her heart stop, it is this that robs her breath.
No one in the Empire has so many horses except the Qorin.
They’re close.
If she tries, can she…? No, she is too far still. Only the scents of the horses are coming to her.
How much longer will it be before she sees them again? Her mother, her cousin. Temurin, Uncle Ganzorig, and all her cousins …
Shefali gets to her feet, her chest rattling with a cough she cannot properly air, and reaches for her saddle.
The Warrior Moon Page 5
