The Warrior Moon

by K Arsenault Rivera

  She tells herself that it can’t all be bad for them. A life without the fear of infection is a good one, for one thing. With fewer people competing, there’ll be plenty more marmot and lamb to go around. Fewer arguments over campsites, too.

  To survive is Qorin, as the saying goes. They’ll find the good wherever they go.

  Nevertheless, she sends her letter.

  To the acting Kharsas and Kharsaqs of the Qorin,

  I am Dorbentei Otgar Bayasaaq, niece of Burqila Alshara Nadyyasar and her chosen heir. You might remember I went north with the rest of us fourteen years ago. You probably thought you were rid of me.

  You aren’t.

  I’m hereby announcing my return and that of the Burqila clan. On the authority granted to me by Burqila and her daughter Barsalai, I’m calling a meeting at the base of Gurkhan Khalsar.

  We have some matters to settle.

  She hands it to the first Qorin messenger she sees: a girl of about twenty sat atop a wiry gray that reminds her too much of a young Shefali. The girl squints at her a little when Otgar calls to her—more so upon receiving a stack of letters in Qorin.

  “I don’t know you,” she says. “Are you from the northern clans?”

  Otgar tries not to let it stick in her teeth, but those three words are a chip of bone digging into her gums. “You know me,” she asserts.

  “Patterns on your deel are so … simple,” says the girl.

  “Because the Burqila clan doesn’t need to scream out who we are,” answers Otgar. She can’t help but notice the needlework at the girl’s collar: intricate knots and vines. Vines, of all things.

  The girl whistles. “Burqila clan, huh? Thought you guys disappeared.”

  “Then you thought wrong,” Otgar answers. “Get those to whoever’s in charge these days. Might want to hang around the mountain yourself; there’ll be a show.”

  The girl tucks the stack of letters into her deel with a wolfish grin. “Yeah, I bet there will be,” she says. She gives that wiry gray a solid kick, and off she goes, the forests outside Fujino swallowing her like a hungry fish.

  It isn’t until she’s left that Otgar realizes the girl never introduced herself, never offered her cheeks. What is the world coming to? She leaves for a little while, and now the youths think they can go gallivanting around like that, disrespecting their elders. Never would have happened in Otgar’s day. The fear of Burqila alone was enough to keep anyone in line.

  But Burqila isn’t here anymore.

  She’ll be back, Otgar thinks. The alternative isn’t worth considering.

  The trip to the steppes goes by quicker than she thought it would—though that isn’t very quick, considering the sheer number of people that are moving. Many of the liberated Qorin don’t have horses, and many of the Burqila clan lost at least one when the Spider attacked. Half of them move on foot. Those mounted can’t leave behind their trudging companions, and so the whole process slows to a painful extent.

  But they are able to cross the river without issue, and no one in Oshiro gives them any real trouble. The night they camp within sight of the palace, Otgar gathers the older Qorin and tells them about Burqila’s conquest. She points to the Wall of Stone, to the seams still running through it after all these years, and she tells them this is the mark the Qorin have left on the world.

  “And you say everyone followed her?” asks one of the old hunters. “You’re not feeding me a skull with the cheeks carved out?”

  “I’m not,” says Otgar. “Everyone followed her. Northern clans, the Arslandai. Even had a couple of defectors from the Rassat.”

  “Why follow some punk who couldn’t even talk?” asks another.

  Otgar’s mouth twitches. Who in creation thought of Burqila Alshara as a punk? “Because she was right. Because too many of you had died for us to keep going the way we were, raiding one another and dying in droves. Because we needed to make the Hokkarans feel the way we had when we lost more and more of you every day.”

  The hunters go silent. She’s won them back over, she thinks, and continues with the story: Burqila’s marriage, her daughter’s birth, Shefali’s childhood encounter with the tiger.

  Let the sanvaartains say what they will: there is a magic in storytelling more powerful than any they can call upon. Look on the gathered Qorin and see. What draft could enchant thousands at once? What poultice could hold their attention? Place a stick of incense at the center of the gathering, dip it in the elixir of immortality, set it alight: the crowd will not look on it with half the wonder they look on Otgar as she tells this story.

  For it isn’t just any story—it is the story of a girl who lived among them, the story of a girl born in Ninth Winter, the story of a girl who became a god.

  Their god.

  They know her, all of them. Memory may dull much, but it cannot blunt the image of Barsalai Shefali: of her silver hair and eye, of the stars shining above her, of her silver bow and earth-crafted horse.

  They listen until the early hours of the morning. Not once does anyone see the moon—overhead or otherwise. As Otgar comes to the end of her story—Shefali’s death in the cave and mysterious rebirth, for which she had to invent a few details—someone raises their hand. A boy of perhaps eight. How did he end up infected? Otgar decides not to dwell on it.

  “Why isn’t she here with us now?” he asks.

  “Because it’s the new moon,” Otgar says. “My poor cousin’s dead. She’ll be back when the next phase starts.”

  It bothers her a little that, after all of that, they should ask her where Shefali is. It isn’t a reasonable annoyance. Of course they’d ask about her, she’s the god of the Qorin; of course they’d want to know where the woman who saved them has gone.

  But there is this small voice in the back of her mind: They won’t follow you.

  She doesn’t need them to for very long. Burqila will be back, and when she is, she can take control once more. Even the young Qorin wouldn’t dream of overruling her, not when her memory looms so large in their minds. All she needs is a little bit of buy-in; all she needs is for them to hold on until Burqila can make it back from over the Wall.

  The farther they travel, the more she finds herself asking what Burqila would do. Kill the usurpers, likely enough, and from their bones forge something new. But that strikes Otgar as the wrong thing to do here—to the young Qorin, their new Kharsas and Kharsaqs are the only ones who have any hope of understanding them. To kill them would be to galvanize the youth against the whole. After all, Burqila herself didn’t take up arms until her elder sisters were murdered, and she was about their age at the time.

  So she can’t kill them—but she can’t truly allow them to continue claiming their titles, either. Feathers serve a purpose when they’re on an arrow or a bird, but you scatter them everywhere, and they’re just fluff. So it will be with the Qorin: the Hokkarans will see an opportunity. No—it will be the Surians. Otgar can’t imagine Baoyi will allow her grandfather to muster an army against her grandmother’s people.

  She cannot kill them, she cannot let them continue.

  The idea of what to do follows at her heels like a hungry dog the whole way through Oshiro. All thought promptly falls out of her mind, however, when she sees the gate.

  Nearly as tall as the Wall of Stone, with two massive wooden doors, it is a mountain among doors. Two teams of aurochs are yoked on either side simply to pull it open. Not that there is any need to do so now: the gates are wide open, providing an excellent view of the farmland outside them, and a touch of silver on the horizon beyond that.

  Where are the guards? There are so few that at first she misses them: four by the doors, a dozen walking the parapets with bows in hand. Sixteen guards for the most hotly contested border in all the Empire.

  Or at least, what was once the most hotly contested border.

  It can’t possibly be so now. The last time Otgar was here, the gates were hardly wide enough for three mounted; now the whole army can march righ
t through with no trouble at all.

  There’s a sinking feeling in her stomach. It must be some sort of mistake, some sort of trick. She searches the gates for any sign of hidden blades, searches the ground for trapdoors. After the Spider, she never wants to feel the ground give way again.

  She sends Temurin and the scouts out to investigate—but they come back with trays full of dumplings instead of any dangerous tiding. “Gifts from Oshiro Province,” says the scout who brings them.

  “From Lord Oshiro?” Otgar asks. “Oshiro Yuichi?”

  A stamp on one of the trays gives her the answer: they are indeed from Oshiro Yuichi. How old is that man? Seventy? She forgets, at times, how much longer people live when they don’t have to struggle against the steppes.

  But why is he giving them gifts? Her first thought is that they must be poisoned; her second thought is that Oshiro Yuichi, for all he hates his wife’s people, has never lifted a finger against them. And now they are not simply his wife’s people—they are his granddaughter’s, as well.

  When Otgar catches Temurin’s eye, the older woman gives her only a resigned shrug.

  They might be poisoned—but they probably aren’t, and Otgar isn’t going to risk losing anyone in case they are. She picks up the first dumpling herself. Soft meat and spices melt in her mouth; she thinks of her uncle’s stew and feels a wave of guilt for even thinking of the comparison. There will never again be anything like Ganzorig’s stew.

  But these dumplings are good. She gestures for the others to help themselves. How Oshiro managed to make so many of them in such short notice boggles her mind, but she will not argue the comfort they might bring.

  She picks up a second dumpling from the top tray—the one she and the captains are eating from—and realizes there is something smudged on the cloth. Ink? Waving Temurin and the scouts away from having any more, Otgar pinches the cloth between her fingers. One character is only the start—there is a letter there, written in Oshiro’s own hand. Otgar recognizes it from his letters to Halaagmod.

  To Burqila Alshara,

  We of Oshiro heard of your service during the Day of Mourning. As you return home with your people, please accept a small token of our gratitude.

  In my old age, I can no longer bear you a grudge. You have kept our granddaughter safe, and you are the reason my son died a hero’s death. Though I shall feel his lack the rest of my days, I have you to thank for knowing him at all.

  And so—a token.

  Your husband,

  Oshiro Yuichi

  Reading it staggers her. She thinks of Halaagmod dying to keep his daughter safe—thinks of Baoyi’s anger when Shefali said there was nothing she could do to save him. She thinks of Burqila and her twenty years of loneliness—her devotion to a woman who could never love her, and her disgust for the man who was the same.

  What will Burqila do, reading this? Has age softened her?

  No, Dorbentei decides. It hasn’t. If Burqila were here, she’d send all the food back the instant this letter was discovered.

  But Otgar looks out over the Qorin biting into this gesture of goodwill, she watches them laugh and smile and brag about their own cooking in comparison. She hears the lift in their voices. When she turns, the gate lies before her, larger and more peaceful than ever.

  Dorbentei folds the letter and tucks it into her deel.

  “What’d it say?” asks Temurin.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  * * *

  THERE ARE, AS it turns out, three new Kharsaqs and one new Kharsa.

  Ganbatar Khurchig Batbolor is the first to arrive, and with good reason. His clan is the smallest of the five. Only twenty gers between them, compared to the hundreds of banners atop the Burqila camp. He and his people arrive two days after Otgar and the Burqila do, and the first thing he does is visit her.

  Or ask to, at any rate. Otgar’s stationed Temurin outside. Burqila said it was always better to make people wait a little before they talked to you, so it seemed as though you were busy. Burqila spent that time complaining to Otgar about whoever it was she thought it would be; Otgar spends it now getting in a few more lines of reading.

  When she calls for him to come in, she doesn’t bother moving the scroll. It’s some of Sakura’s work in Hokkaran. If he can read it, then let him take heart: they’ve been through too much to endure any foolery here.

  He’s short for a Qorin boy, maybe Barsalai’s size, but with the husky build of someone who has never had to struggle for a meal. White dusts his skin where he’s attempting to grow a beard. In his hair—close-cropped, for some reason—there is a single braid. Otgar cannot imagine how he might have earned it. Still, he wears it proudly as he strides into the ger. His eyes land on the book with curiosity; they stay long enough that Otgar knows he can read Hokkaran. He comes with no guards and no sword at his hip: a good sign.

  “Dorbentei,” he says. “We got your message.”

  “Try starting out with something less obvious,” she says.

  He clears his throat. “Like?”

  “Like what you’re going to do about our return,” Otgar says. “You’re Kharsaq, aren’t you? Or at least think you are. How’d you earn that braid?”

  “I fought off twenty Surian raiders,” he says, straightening his shoulders.

  “Twenty?” Otgar says.

  “I am a good wrestler.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Otgar says. She can’t stop herself from bragging. “You haven’t wrestled any demons. So. The Surians are raiding us? What have you done about it?”

  “Killed a few of them,” says Ganbatar. Talking doesn’t come easily to him; his words are rough and clumsy. “They don’t come so often now.”

  That they’re coming at all is decent enough knowledge. “That’s good work, but we’ll need more than that if we’re going to keep ourselves safe. You don’t have that many people. Why is that?”

  “Because I left Sarangarel’s clan,” he says. To his credit, he doesn’t look away when he says this.

  “Sarangarel, she’s running one of the others right now?”

  He nods. “The largest.”

  “Why’d you leave?”

  “She wanted to raid the farming villages,” he says.

  The farming villages? When they have so much more food available to them? On the way here, Otgar saw more marmots than she had in her entire life. Did kids these days not like marmot?

  The confusion on her face must be obvious: the boy continues. “She said it’s what Qorin do.”

  “What Qorin did,” Otgar says. “What we do is survive, and we don’t need to attack some poor farmers to do that anymore. If that’s true, I can see why you left.”

  He says nothing. She wonders for a moment if this isn’t Shefali in disguise. It isn’t like her cousin to test people, though. “So—what are you going to do, you and your little band? Are you going to stop her?”

  “No,” he says. His eyes are the green of the northern forests. “You are.”

  She has to chuckle. He knows how to ingratiate himself, at least. “Share this kumaq with me, and I’ll consider it.”

  He has no problems doing so. She has to admit, it’s a bit of a relief that he doesn’t recoil from the smell—with no one sniffing anyone else’s cheeks anymore, it’s hard to predict what traditions have fallen by the wayside. When she asks him to swear that he holds no power over Dorbentei, and none over Burqila Alshara, he repeats after her with a heavy sort of determination. Like a hammer, this boy.

  But hammers can make excellent tools. Over the next three days, she puts him to use, questioning him about the current state of things. It’s simpler than she thought. Sarangarel was fourteen already when the Qorin left; she rose to prominence not long after their return to the steppes. Ganbatar says she’s beautiful, but Otgar doesn’t believe that’s all there is to it. He doesn’t seem to know what else it might be. She’s beautiful, she speaks well, she’s a fast rider.

  None of those make fo
r a good leader.

  Otgar listens all the same. Sarangarel came to power by fending off the first Surian raid. Ganbatar was there with her, as were the other three new Kharsaqs, but she got the wolf’s share of the credit for it. Her tactics, she argued, and her having spotted them while she was out on a ride. Ganbatar didn’t argue, because he got a braid; the others very strongly did. This was the first and most significant split: Borma Nergunser Montaq, the eldest of the boys involved, said he could not conscience such behavior, and took with him half the new Qorin.

  Borma arrives within three days. Otgar half expects that he will demand to speak to the nearest man in charge; she gets the feeling he must not be fond of women from the story.

  But it is a foolish assumption. It is not women that Borma dislikes, it is a woman. He arrives with two scarred lieutenants, both girls, and asks if he may have a meeting with Dorbentei.

  She grants it, of course, though she does make him wait. When he enters, he sits cross-legged on the floor and bows from the shoulder.

  “Dorbentei Otgar,” he says. “We met once when I was a young boy—or I met Burqila, and you happened to be there.”

  “Honest of you,” Otgar says. “Did I make a good impression?”

  “You threatened to box my ears in if I didn’t help loading the carts.”

  “And did I?”

  “No, you didn’t,” says Borma.

  “Then we’re off to a good start,” Otgar says. “So—tell me. Are you going to cause me any trouble?”

  He has to think about the answer. That would have upset Burqila, and probably Barsatoq, too—but Otgar likes it when people think things over. It’s a rare sight in her family.

  “There are so many of you, I couldn’t,” he says.