Yet still she sits and watches. Watch—that boy’s sister has turned on him. Head down, she charges straight toward him, sending him tumbling onto the earth.
All of them will.
“Except Otgar,” Shefali says.
Even her, says the gray. You should listen to your wife. She has a good head on her shoulders.
“She lit herself on fire once,” Shefali says. Much as she loves Shizuka, sound judgment has never been among her virtues. A twinge of worry comes to her with the memory. Everyone who spoke of the incident did so in passing. What were those days like in the palace, if lighting oneself on fire merited only a little attention?
Shefali lifts her mask enough to palm the lower half of her face. Still cool to the touch from yesterday’s incidents, though at least the snow has melted enough that she can speak. Only a thin layer of frost clings to her skin, as if she is a pond in the first days of winter.
The gray mare huffs. Suddenly, she takes a step forward—and then another, and another. Shefali jerks up in the saddle.
“What are you doing?” she says, leaning over so that she can whisper into her horse’s ears.
I told you, you’re too stubborn, says the horse. If Temurin’s still riding that handsome seal bay, then you aren’t going to keep me waiting here all day.
Shefali grits her teeth. She can yank on her gray’s reins; she can hop out of the saddle and stop her. Both would keep her right in that spot near the outcropping, where she can safely observe her family.
Until they find her, that is.
A hunter who does not leave his ger is no hunter at all. Shefali steels herself. They are your family, she thinks. They will be happy to see you.
Closer and closer, her gray carries her. The two children she was watching earlier are now rolling in the mud. The girl is on top, but the boy’s limbs are long and whip lean; he will have the upper hand soon.
She tries to keep her eyes on them, and not on the green and violet banners of Kenshiro’s messengers.
Her mother will know she is coming. Otgar, too, will know.
Are they waiting for her? Shefali has told her mother of her exploits—but Otgar, too, was there. “Soul” and “story” share a word in Qorin. That is no coincidence. Whatever story Otgar told Alshara of their travels, she has told her aloud, breathing her own soul into it, shaping it into a living thing.
Shefali’s tale is only ink on paper. It will not be alive until someone reads it aloud, until the winds carry it to the Sky.
Her Hokkaran side again.
Who among the Qorin would prefer the living to the dead?
Shizuka likes my writing, Shefali thinks. It comforts her more than she would like to admit. Her wife, who has been swamped with love letters since the moment of her first bleeding—she liked Shefali’s letter. Loved it, even.
So it is only ink and paper. It is alive enough.
A familiar scent jolts her from her thoughts: campfire smoke and polished metal; resignation and dedication.
Temurin.
Shefali’s throat closes up. She can see her now, standing at the very edge of the camp. Someone not far away is playing the horsehead fiddle, and she is tapping her feet to the rhythm. Time wisely took one look at Temurin and decided to find easier prey elsewhere—the years have not changed her at all. Gaunt as ever, tall and thin, her sword still hanging at her hip, she is as lean as a hunting hound.
And keen eyed, still. It is she who first sights Shefali approaching on her mare. Surprise cuts through her scent like a blade through felt.
“Barsalai? Is that Alshara’s girl?”
The name is rough on her lips—ill used and coated with rust. Hearing it makes Shefali wish she’d said Barsalyya instead. That is who she was when she last visited the camps.
“Can’t be Barsalai—look at that mask. That’s Hokkaran made,” says her partner. Standing next to Temurin makes her look younger than she is, though she is young. Pale skinned, her thick hair cropped short—a Hokkaran. Strange. Foreigners often came to join the clan. If they had useful skills, they were welcomed; if not, then they had to pay a bride-price.
But Shefali cannot remember the last time she saw a Hokkaran show up at the edge of the camp. Ren had, yes, but she did not stay with the Burqila clan, and the business of sanvaartains is theirs alone.
This woman’s even wearing a deel. No braids in her hair, so she has not done anything of note, but perhaps her standing there at all is notable enough.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” says Temurin. “Look at that mare. Star, strip, and a snip. She’s lighter than the last time I saw her, but that is Barsalai’s horse.”
Ah, so the years have not blunted her, either. Shefali smiles beneath the mask. Temurin’s temper is funny when she isn’t the one on the receiving end of it.
Perhaps this will not be so hard as she thought.
“How was I supposed to know,” says the Hokkaran girl under her breath. Temurin glares at her for only a moment—Barsalai stops in front of her not long after.
Temurin stands tall. Shefali, still mounted, shrinks in her saddle.
“Barsalai Shefali,” says Temurin. Her eyes narrow as she crosses her arms. “Burqila gave strict orders. You are not to return to the clan until you have mastered yourself.”
Shefali does not want to remember that day at Imakane—but she does. Her aunts and uncles gathered together in her mother’s ger. The scent of blood, the taste of it.
She says nothing. Temurin is not yet finished, judging by the set of her shoulders.
“Understand this: She has given you your name, and she has told all of us here to wait until you arrived, and so we have. But I remember that village, and I remember the way you staggered back to camp like a mangy wolf. Prove to me you have mastered yourself, or I won’t let you among our people. Burqila’s trust is valuable, but our children’s lives are worth more.”
A painted opera singer slinks onstage with a dagger in hand. The lead, a promising young woman from Fuyutsuki, is in the middle of the most famous song in the work. Listen to her as she laments her fallen lover, listen to her as she asks the Mother to take her, for she cannot bear to imagine life alone. How smooth her voice! How full of emotion! Gently she sways upon the stage, her eyes wide, her face pale even beneath the layers of paint.
Closer creeps the man with the dagger.
The lead staggers. In her sorrow—her character’s sorrow—her voice cracks. Somehow, it is more beautiful than awful. She falls to her knees.
The man with the dagger, having raised it to stab her, stops. The lead has fallen flat on her back. She reaches out for him and he can only stare down in horror. He drops the knife, scooping her up in his arms though he is her sworn enemy, and she expires on the spot.
The crowd cheers, not realizing yet that the girl is well and truly dead.
So it is for Shefali.
Our children’s lives are worth more.
A dead woman astride a horse.
Barsalai reaches for her boot knife. She hands it to Temurin, the point facing in, and waits.
Temurin takes it. There’s no need for any more talking. Temurin undoes the clasps on her deel. The chest and shoulders of it hang around her waist, leaving her wiry arms exposed to the rising sun. With her right hand she draws the knife across her left arm. A cut the size of her own severed fingers begins to weep.
Morning light makes blood shine like Ikhthian rubies. Hunger twists at Shefali’s stomach again; her jaw tingles beneath the ice.
But the ice holds. She breathes of it now and reminds herself: She is Barsalai Shefali, not Barsalyya. The tiger holds no sway over her.
One hundred heartbeats, two hundred. Barsalai does not move from her saddle.
Temurin’s flint-hard face softens. “Oh,” she whispers. “Oh, it is you.”
Shefali nods.
“Get off that horse,” Temurin says. Her voice cracks. Has it ever done that before? “You fool girl. Running off for eight years; a
bandoning us for the northerners…”
Luckily for Shefali, she took her medicine less than a Bell ago. It’s dulled her pain enough that she can dismount on her own, that she does not flinch as Temurin throws her arms around her and draws her close.
“Take off that mask and let me smell you,” says Temurin. She has not bothered to put her deel back on; Shefali can feel the rapid beat of her heart.
But can she take the mask off? For surely once Temurin sees her, she will run, she will run …
Shefali swallows. She shakes her head. “I look awful,” she says.
Temurin tilts her head. “You won’t let me smell you?”
“That means she’s a—” begins the Hokkaran girl, but Temurin cuts her off with a glare.
Shefali squeezes Temurin’s shoulder. “She isn’t wrong.”
Peppery anger; sour confusion. Temurin’s scent swirls. Now she draws away; now she slips back into the sleeves of her deel. “Your horse has not left you,” she says. “Let me smell her mane, at least.”
It is a fair compromise. Shefali takes her boot knife back and cuts a small lock of her mare’s mane. This she offers to Temurin, who takes a deep whiff of it and hands it to the Hokkaran girl. She, too, takes a breath of it. Shefali feels a little strange, having her soul offered to a stranger in this way—but if she is part of the clan, this unmet young woman is not truly a stranger.
Temurin looks Shefali up and down. For a moment, Shefali worries she will find something to say—that she holds herself like a northerner, or that the tiger-striped deel does not suit her.
Instead, she nods.
“You’ve grown,” she says. “Come. Your mother’s waiting. Cheregaal, here, can handle your gray.”
Shefali swallows. The fear she’d conquered rises up again—she is so close now. In her mind she composes all the things she will say, as if she is writing a letter.
They walk past the children wrestling. The boy is on top, laughing, and the girl is laughing with him.
“Are you really the Beast of Rassat?” the Hokkaran girl asks. The question is like a lightning bolt from a clear sky. How does she know about that? Otgar is the only one who knows the truth of that story, which would mean …
“Could you transform for me?” says the girl. “I don’t have any money, but I can make you a bow, if you’d like. Dorbentei says you have a bow nicer than any I could hope to make. But, well, I thought I’d offer.”
Otgar is telling stories about her?
Quicker and quicker Shefali’s steps. Up ahead is the horsehead banner of her mother’s ger. Each step sends another jolt of lightning through her.
“Barsalai?” the girl repeats. “Are you listening?”
“No,” says Temurin, who is not wrong.
Three dogs lie in the sun outside Burqila’s tent. As one they roll over, tapping their feet against the earth. Tongues loll out of their mouths and they bark in the way they have always barked, low and rumbling. Burqila’s hunting dogs run to Shefali’s side. Fearless as always, they lap at her hands. None Yesterday threatens to bowl Shefali over; Less Today keeps running between her legs like an overgrown cat.
She is coming home.
The bright red door looms before her. Through it, her mother; through it, her cousin.
Barsalai throws it open. “Catch your dogs,” she says. The point is moot but she must say it all the same; the words leave her without her thinking.
And then—then she is among them.
Here is her uncle Ganzorig, sitting by the fire with a knife in one hand and a rack of ribs in the other.
Here is her aunt Zurgaanqar, beating a length of felt.
Here are her cousins, five of them together, playing anklebones near the bookcase.
And sitting to the east is Burqila Alshara.
Hokkarans have found beauty in transience for the better part of two thousand years. The Qorin have their own thoughts on the matter. Is it beautiful to move from one place to another, desperately attempting to keep your family fed? It is necessary, but not beautiful. Romance creeps in over the generations, as does poetic dedication to this culture they’ve chosen, but is that beauty? The songs that spring from horsehead fiddles are beautiful; the stories told in hushed voices around a fire are beautiful; the delicate embroidery that tells their story across every deel is beautiful.
But there is nothing appealing about transience itself. One moment you are enjoying yourself, and the next you are not. This is an ineffable law of creation. The sun rises and sets; the moon takes its place; everything you know and love will one day die. It is a Qorin’s place to exist in spite of all this.
And exist Burqila has. This is the woman from Shefali’s memories, and this is not. When did her mother grow so much older? For there are crow’s-feet at her eyes now, and the pale straw of her hair has begun to go silver. Burqila Alshara took a world that wanted to kill her and broke it over her knee—how is it that time’s hunting dogs have finally found her?
Shefali opens her mouth. There is no air to form words, even if she knew the words to say. Pressure mounts behind her eyes and she knows, she knows, that the tears will soon well out.
Burqila once rode half a day away from the clan to weep where no one could see her. A Kharsa must be as unyielding as the lands that birthed her, she’d said. If anyone thought differently, they must be shown otherwise.
What will the clan think if they see her weeping? If this is the thing to bring her to tears—the sight of her mother after so many years?
Twenty years ago they had called her weak for crying from pain.
She finds she does not care what they think anymore.
Barsalai Shefali, twenty-three years of age, runs to her mother’s arms with all the grace of a newborn fawn. In the five steps it takes her to close the distance, all her worries fall away, all her self-consciousness, all her doubt.
“Aaj,” she says. “Aaj, I’m sorry.”
Silence, her answer, but not silence alone. Burqila Alshara squeezes her daughter tight, rocking her back and forth as she does. Shefali’s ribs hurt and she feels she cannot breathe but she does not pull away—her mother smells of horses and wind and campfire smoke. How can she pull herself away?
This moment, too, is transient. Let her enjoy it.
It is Burqila who separates them in the end. She holds her daughter at arm’s length. She taps her fingers against the muzzle of Barsalai’s mask. Though the years have written their tally on her face, Burqila’s eyes are as piercing as ever.
Shefali swallows. Can she … Can she expose her face to her family? Can she bear it if her mother finds her horrifying?
Shizuka did not find me terrifying, she thinks. Ren didn’t either, or Kenshiro, or Baoyi.
And if a child did not find her frightening, what are the odds that Burqila will?
Shefali lifts her mask. Her heart is beating like thunder drums.
Burqila holds a hand in the air. Her fingers move in quick shapes, and it is then Shefali remembers that her cousin is also in the room. Dorbentei Otgar wears five braids in her hair now—two more than the last time Shefali saw her. She can hazard a guess as to the reasons. One for returning from the Womb, and the other for, well …
Shefali braces herself for the arrow. Any moment now, her cousin will berate her for what she’s done—for taking so much time to return to her own family, and for letting herself grow roots. How much longer will that smirk stay on Dorbentei’s face? She must be preparing something cutting indeed.
“Burqila says that you need to spend more time in the sun. You are too pale; you look like a dying woman,” says Otgar. “For my part, I say that you could not pay me enough to return to the desert. Not you, not your wife, not Halaagmod’s southern flower. I’ve had my fill of it forever.”
Dorbentei’s grin brings out the dimples in her cheeks. Shefali half laughs, half snorts. To her surprise, Burqila mirrors her.
The truth can be the funniest thing in the world.
Soon, s
he’s walking over to slap her cousin on the back. “Welcome home, Needlenose,” she says. “If you ever leave us again, I’ll throw you off a cliff myself.”
One by one, Shefali’s aunts and uncles join in, until all of them are bundled up together—laughing, and crying, and squeezing.
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” says Shefali.
* * *
THERE IS NO feast, for there is no time. Qorin cooking is an all-day affair—and if they are to meet Shizuka by the Kirin’s horn, then they must leave at moonrise.
Yet the evening is not a complete culinary loss. Barsalai’s uncle Ganzorig has been slaving over his stew all day in anticipation of his niece’s return. The whole ger is thick with the smell of it; Barsalai is convinced that if she cut a swath of felt from these walls, they would hold that scent for years. Once everyone has been served—and greeted, of course—Shefali’s youngest cousin, Soyiketu, puts out the firepit. Aunt Zurgaanqar puts a table down over it.
Burqila Alshara brings her folding seat closer to the table. She looks over it expectantly, signing in deliberate motions. Otgar starts translating only after tipping the bowl up and drinking the remnants of her meal.
“Burqila says,” she begins, but a burp interrupts. She beats her chest a little. “Sorry. Burqila says that your wife sent you here to gather us for war. The messengers said as much, anyway, before they turned tail and ran back to the South.”
“Their banners?” Shefali says, narrowing her eyes. Her uncle gave her a bowl of stew, too. To refuse it would earn her a heckling—she forces herself to drink it down. The thick texture combines with the taste of ash to clog her throat.
Dorbentei leans over and slaps Shefali on the back. “Don’t go getting yourself killed just yet,” she says.
“You’ve spent too much time away,” says Ganzorig. He clucks. “If you’d stayed with us, you could eat by now.”
Aunt Zurgaanqar slaps him on the shoulder, but he does not seem remorseful. A year ago such a comment would have bothered Shefali—now she is happy she is around to hear it.
“We told them they could leave if they wanted, but that they had to leave their banners,” explains Otgar. “You’re a hunting dog, Needlenose. I figured you were following their scent.”
The Warrior Moon Page 8
