The Warrior Moon

by K Arsenault Rivera

  Shefali is alone for only a few minutes. Soon, someone else calls for her to catch her dogs. This time it is Sakura, making a valiant effort at a notoriously difficult Qorin phrase. It shares no syllables at all with anything in Hokkaran—all voiced deep in the back of the throat, wet and alive.

  “There still aren’t any dogs,” Shefali calls in Hokkaran.

  The door opens once more. Otgar and Sakura are there, but so, too, are five Qorin Shefali has never met before, dressed in Hokkaran robes. She realizes who they are the moment she gets a whiff of them: castoffs from the Northern Qorin, who lived just south of the pine forests. They’d given in to the Traitor’s influence, and it had led them over the mountains to this foul place, where he had given them these clothes. Their eyes are glassy and distant, focused on the struts of the ger instead of the silver god within it; they do not move except when Otgar shoves them forward. One by one, the captured Qorin stumble into the ger, and one by one they stand stock-straight as if nothing has happened.

  The Queen of Ikhtar could not hope for such wonderful pets.

  The sight of them brings Shefali to her feet at once. The heat of her anger threatens to melt the chill of her divinity, and yet this passes in a flash of vapor from her open mouth. His time will come.

  But until it does, she has her people to care for.

  “Where?” she asks. The lost Qorin all turn toward her as she speaks, though she cannot say any of them are looking at her.

  “The scouts picked them up from within the city walls. They were going on about that wretch, but they shut up and went limp the second they left through the gates.”

  The second they left the Traitor’s most potent sphere of influence. All the lands behind the Wall were his creations—Shefali could feel his putrid touch in all things—but only the towers were the seat of his power. He might do anything he wished there.

  “Are you going to help them?” says Sakura. In her tiredness, she is slurring. “Maybe the kumaq would help?”

  Shefali nods. “Get me three skins.”

  Sakura bows from the shoulders and heads back out. Otgar stays, watching Shefali as she circles the five lost Qorin.

  The scent of the Traitor is upon them like a burial shroud—but they are not dead. Something of their old selves, their old scents, remains underneath. Her nose itches. Shefali pulls the nearest one close to her and sniffs his cheeks.

  Barshikigur, that is his name, of some northern compound Shefali can’t quite make heads or tails of. She hears it all the same when she breathes of him, though—she sees him stalking through the forests in the dead of night. Her stomach rumbles along with his. It has been twenty days since his wife had a good meal, and ten since they were able to feed his son anything but a mouthful of jerky.

  Hunting so late at night has its own risks. His clanmates have a false bird cry they use to differentiate between a night stalker and a night predator, but Barshikigur has never been fond of it. You start crying like a bird in the middle of the night, and you’ll scare away the stags.

  But he’s willing to risk being shot by someone else’s arrow.

  He’s heard the others whispering, too. Something else lurks in the forests these days. A spider, they say, as tall as the tallest pine. He doesn’t believe such talk. The people who believed that sort of thing also believed there were still dragons and lion dogs if you knew where to look.

  And so he hunts.

  Hours it took him to find something worth killing—and even then, it is a wolf. To kill one would bring bad luck and misfortune down upon him. Eating a wolf is the same as eating a Qorin, so far as the sanvaartains are concerned.

  But he cannot care. He has lost too many children already.

  Forward.

  He draws his bow, nocks an arrow.

  It looses into the night as the spider’s mandibles hook into the back of his neck.

  All of this Shefali sees as clearly as if she were Barshikigur, all of this she experiences. She rubs at the base of her spine, half-expecting to feel two scars there, but this new body of hers has only a few. Her missing eye, the half circle on her palm, the starburst at her shoulder, and the line around her neck—only these remain to her.

  None from the Spider.

  She presses her lips together.

  “Barshikigur,” she says to the man. He does not move, though his ears jog up and down as if he is unclenching his jaw. “You may not be able to hear me now—but hold on.”

  “Is that his name?” says Otgar. “You just know names now?”

  “I can smell them,” Shefali says.

  Otgar puffs. “Guess it’s convenient,” she says, “for a demonslayer.”

  Not for a god. She can’t bring herself to say it, Shefali knows. Not even when her cousin is so drastically transformed.

  Another call to catch their dogs. Otgar answers this time, telling Sakura that she can stop trying so hard. It’s Otgar who opens the door and Otgar who gingerly takes the skins from the much smaller Sakura, setting them down at Shefali’s feet. The lost Qorin stand unmoving through all of this—even when Sakura bumps into one and hastily bows in apology. It is a little strange to Shefali: in many ways Sakura is nothing like the uptight courtiers she’s known in Fujino, but in many, she is not so different at all. Shefali cannot imagine a Qorin apologizing for that light brush against someone’s shoulder. In a ger, there is no such thing as privacy.

  And she is in a ger now—that will make this easier. She thinks it will, at any rate. To aim at an iron ring suspended from a branch atop a mountain and know you will not miss: this is godhood. As impossible as the thought of freeing them may be, she is certain that she can do it. Not certain in the way that Shizuka is: all bluster and arrogance, all fire and denial of her own fears. No, this is the quiet certainty that never needs to assert itself.

  Shefali picks up one of the skins of kumaq. With her thumb, she pops off the lid.

  “Bowl?” asks Shefali. Otgar walks to her nightstand—a tiny thing scarcely used. After a few seconds of rooting around, she produces a Hokkaran-style rice wine saucer. Shefali and Sakura both tilt their heads.

  Otgar glowers. “It was a gift.”

  “From whom?” Sakura asks before she can stop herself from asking such a question.

  Otgar looks straight at her. The air goes thick with the weight of things she wants to say but, for whatever reason, will not. She smells of hardwood and regret. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” she says at length.

  Sakura’s shoulders slump a little.

  They really will have to talk, the two of them, when they are ready.

  But that is a concern for another day. Shefali swirls the kumaq in the skin before pouring some out into the bowl. The Traitor created his affliction with blood, seawater, and ink. The seas have no influence over the Silver Steppes, over the Qorin people, and so Shefali will forsake its inclusion. Blood and kumaq—that is all she will need.

  It takes only a thought to grow her nails into talons. How it still surprises her! There is no pain, no stiffness accompanying the small transformation. The Mother spoke of her body mirroring the Moon—perhaps the full moon is what grants her such comforts. She thinks for a moment of what the waning moon will be like. A shudder overtakes her.

  But it is a sacrifice worth making.

  Pain is never something to aspire to, never something to desire—but sometimes, just sometimes, it is something to accept.

  The cut Shefali makes along her forearm is one such pain. Quick and sharp, already burning a little. It occurs to her just before she wipes her finger along its length that she has not seen her own blood since her ascension.

  She tells herself that if it is black, it is the depths of night, not the shade of the Traitor’s influence. She tells herself that she is ready for whatever the outcome may be.

  When Shefali holds her bloody hand over the bowl of kumaq, she sees silver. Bright silver, at that, swirling with potential and power. A smile spreads across her face.

&nbs
p; This body is hers, truly hers.

  A deep breath fills her lungs with cold. For eight heartbeats she holds it there. For eight heartbeats she thinks of what it means for her to be here, in a ger her cousin beat into existence, among people who would give their lives to save one another. She thinks of her family: of her mother’s pragmatic decision to kill her brothers if it meant uniting them; of her grandmother’s recalcitrance; of her great-great-grandmother, an Ikhthian storyteller who longed for silver and blue; of her brother, trapped in Fujino, and the niece she does not really know, and in Xian-Lai, the nephew she has never met.

  The souls that granted Shefali this new body hum like strings in perfect tune. They, too, know these things. The note they play is one that cannot be sounded by mortal voices—but it is one that leaves Shefali’s lips as easily as her wife’s name.

  And as it leaves her, so, too, does her breath; so, too, does a small part of her fathomless soul. The temperature in the ger plummets. Hackles rise on Otgar’s and Sakura’s skin; the lost Qorin shiver though they do not know why; a thin layer of snow coats Otgar’s nightstand. Ice floats atop the milky white in the saucer.

  Two drops of blood land atop its surface. How like the moon, this image! Yes, it is ready.

  Shefali stands. Barshikigur does not move, does not look at her, but she can smell something in his scent quickening. Hope, perhaps. She dips two fingers into the mixture and smears it across his upper lip, where the scent will reach him.

  One breath, two. She watches with the saucer in hand, eager for the moment of severance. To ease the pain of another, to shift her form—these are simple miracles.

  To break the Traitor’s control? If she managed that, she may well live up to being Tumenbayar’s successor.

  Three breaths, four. Silence in a ger is a strange thing, as foreign as an Axion sword, and yet that is what prevails now.

  Five breaths, six. Her heartbeat is heavy as a horse’s.

  Seven breaths, eight—there.

  It happens quickly enough that if she had not been studying Barshikigur, she would have missed it. Like the last snowfall of the year melting off the branches of a pine tree—a silver rim around his eyes dissolving into green. His lips part as he sucks in a breath, as he lets out an awful groan. His hands fly out to his sides to grasp something that is not there—and he falls backwards as his legs give out from under him.

  The Warrior Moon is quick to catch him. She slings his arm around her shoulder and helps him up. Shaking, quivering—is this a man who has been liberated, or a man who has discovered he is accused of murder? Her heart sinks at the sight, at the sound.

  “Barshikigur?” she says. “You are safe here.”

  “This is my own ger,” Otgar offers. The sight of one of their countrymen in distress is a catalyst for her; she’s tucked her pipe back in her deel. “Beat it with my own two hands. You’re welcome here, as long as you’d like to stay.”

  Barshikigur’s eyes flick from Otgar to Shefali and back before settling on Shefali. It is as if he sees her then for the first time—he quiets as he realizes it is no ordinary woman who holds him up. Once more the snow melts for him, but this time it is the frost of his own fears, leaving only awe in its wake.

  “Tumenbayar?”

  Shefali smirks. “Something like that,” she says.

  But it is Otgar who shakes her head, Otgar who sucks her teeth. “I just told you, you’re in my ger, and there you go insulting my cousin. This is Barsalai Shefali Alsharyya, and she’s our new god.”

  “New…?” he says, but he uses an old word for it—one Shefali hasn’t heard since she was a girl and her grandmother was flinging it about. New, new, new, that’s all you care about, Alsha.

  Yet revulsion is the farthest thing from Barshikigur’s face. Awe, yes, but joy lends color to his cheeks as well. A wide grin breaks out across his face like the first rays of dawn. He looks her up and down—really seeing her this time—and squeezes her around the waist.

  “Let me smell you,” he says. “The woman who came to save us.”

  * * *

  HEALING THE OTHERS is much the same.

  The finest painter in Hokkaran history is Yusumi Shoteikai. In the Jade Palace, there are two of his originals framing either side of the entrance to the Emperor’s chambers. Both depict the pine forests of Shiseiki in an abstract fashion—dramatic smears of ink, with the white of the paper suggesting morning fog. Both are as tall as Shefali. The differences between the two are slight—the slope of the branches, the curl of the unseen fog clouds, the tiny needles falling in one of them. Such simple images should not be able to stop one in their tracks as readily as they do—but there is beauty in that simplicity. There is confidence in it, there is faith, there is the sublime wonder of nature itself.

  The woods on a cloudy morning, perfectly captured.

  Yusumi Shoteikai painted nothing but this image. There are hundreds of them scattered all over Hokkaro—black trees, white fog. Twenty years he painted them, until his fingertips carried a black stain no matter how often he washed them. Thirty years, forty—when his eyes started to give, the trees grew as fluffy as the clouds they suggested, and yet he kept painting.

  Shefali often wondered how anyone could do something so many times and still love it.

  She does not wonder that anymore.

  Two hundred Qorin she heals that first day—and she delights in meeting each one for the first time. In learning their names and hearing their stories. In telling them that she is here now; that she will not be leaving them; that together, they will crush the man who did this beneath their horses’ hooves, and they will drink kumaq from his skull.

  She speaks two hundred promises—and she means every one.

  In and out of her ger, they come, filing in like ants. The scouts find more and bring them to the ger just as Shefali finishes freeing the latest arrivals. Burqila and Captain Munenori had intended to move out that day, but confronted with the stream of incoming Qorin—what are they to do except accept them? To argue otherwise flies in the face of common decency and notions of honor both.

  But it is not just the lost Qorin who gather outside the ger. The clan does, too. It is a Bell before Burqila Alshara is called away from the war room, a Bell before she goes to see for herself what all the commotion is about. When she does, the sight almost brings her to her knees. There is her daughter, her own flesh and blood, silver-haired and shining in the darkness of the ger. There is her daughter, who suckled at her breast, freeing her ancestors and clansmen with the milk of a mare.

  Astonishment and pride, nostalgia and hope, these things color her scent. One breath, and Shefali can see her own birth playing out across her eyes. Her mother stayed in the saddle until the very last moment. Two legs spread out in front of her, two knobby brown knees; the night sky stretched out above, hoary with winter frost; Tsetseg and Zurgaanqar telling her when she needed to breathe and when she needed to push. A wrinkled, purple child emerging. Two pine needles falling from a clear sky onto the girl’s forehead.

  It is a strange thing to see one’s own birth. Stranger still after shucking off her old body. She tells herself that it is still her, still Barsalai Shefali, and the way her mother throws her arms around her confirms this.

  Burqila runs her fingers through her daughter’s silver hair. The lost Qorin Shefali has just freed—a messenger from the eastern clans—grins.

  “This,” she says, “this is why our people will survive.”

  And perhaps she is right.

  For there is something to be said about it, this closeness. Later that night, when Burqila braids her daughter’s hair, she binds together more than those wild shocks. The whole clan is gathered around.

  All of them.

  Those who survived the great pit only a few days ago, those who survived the Qorin Invasion of Oshiro, those who fell to the plague only to break free of it—all of them gather around Burqila’s folding chair. Shefali sits between her mother’s knees with her head incl
ined a little forward as her mother twists and twists. The braid she earned for killing the tiger, the braid she earned for mastering herself, the braid she earned for killing a demon—each is as wide as her thumb.

  But these new braids are thin, almost impossibly so.

  There will need to be room for two hundred.

  Her mother’s deft fingers fly through their work. She speaks not a word through the Bell and a half it takes her to braid what remains of Shefali’s hair, though Shefali does not expect her to. The songs of their people fill the silence. There is a song for this occasion, a song for a warrior getting a new braid, but it is a short one, and they will be here for hours. It is the song that begins the occasion, but not the one that ends it.

  One of the younger Qorin sings a song of Burqila’s long-ago military victory: of the flames licking at the walls and the explosion that broke them, of the Qorin pouring into Oshiro like grains of rice through a funnel, of the rage that lent their sword arms strength, and the sorrow that bound them for surrender. It is a powerful song, a familiar one, and though the lost Qorin do not know the words, they lend their voices to the melody. But this is not the song that ends it.

  A dirge rises from the weary souls of the lost Qorin. The melody is as old as it is heavy—a plodding thing, each syllable landing like the foot of a mourner walking to her mother’s grave. Heavier, still, for the voices singing it. Shefali heard this song often as a child—sung whenever one of the infected was put down—and often wondered at the archaic turns of phrase it used. All her life she had thought it distant from real emotion—but hearing it now from the throats of those who wrote it convinces her otherwise. The doubled voicing, the buzz of traditional singing—these pierce her to her soul, and her shoulders shake with tears at the thought of those who could not join them here. But this—this is not the song that ends it, either.

  The song that ends the evening is the mortar of their resolve.