Sunburner (Moonburner Cycle Book 2)

by Claire Luana

  “You don’t think…” Kai hesitated, afraid to voice her fear. “That it makes me like Airi?”

  “No,” Hanae said, taking Kai’s hand in her own. “If I thought for one second that you made this decision for yourself, I would fight against it. But I know you do not. You make this decision for all of us. And that makes you nothing like Airi.”

  “I was so quick to condemn her, to call her evil. But I never knew what it was like to rule a country. To feel pressed upon by enemies at every turn. Maybe she was doing the best she could,” Kai said softly.

  “I never thought my sister was evil the way others did. But she isolated herself from everyone who could have guided her, helped her see right from wrong, see outside her own fears and prejudices. She was adrift in a sea of her own morality with Geisa’s twisted agenda as her only compass. You will not become her. As long as you listen to the wisdom of those around you and seek aid from varied and diverse viewpoints that challenge your own, you will stay true.”

  Kai nodded, pondering her mother’s words.

  “It might matter little in the end,” Kai whispered. “What if we can’t free them? What if we fail?”

  “Then we keep fighting. Until we can’t fight anymore.”

  Hiro sat on the floor eating a mealy pear with one hand, stroking Ryu’s golden mane with the other.

  His mind played over the journey in the forest a hundred different ways as he ate the sorry little fruit, trying to figure out what he could have done differently. To keep Kai from running off. To prevent Emi from being clawed by the tengu. To keep Daarco with them. A hundred decisions, split-second moments that spelled life or death. Luck had gotten them out of the forest alive. But they may not be so lucky next time.

  And then there was the fight with Kai, their angry words, striking each other as surely as sword-blows. He knew he should have told Kai about his father’s contingency plan, but he hadn’t wanted to heap more trouble on her already-full plate. Now, it looked like he had been keeping it from her purposefully, which he would never have done. He prided himself on his honesty, and the fact that she thought he was capable of duplicitous double-dealing… Maybe she didn’t know him. But perhaps he didn’t really know her, if he had truly been driving her crazy when he was simply trying to protect her and watch her back—

  “You will pet me bald,” Ryu rumbled, though the tilt of his head showed he was still enjoying it.

  Hiro let out a half-chuckle and withdrew his hand. He had come too close to losing Ryu to the tengu on the shore of the lake.

  “I can’t help but feel that I failed in the Misty Forest.”

  “Because you couldn’t keep her safe,” Ryu said.

  “I know Kai wants to do everything herself, but what good will I be as a husband or a king if I can’t keep her or the people she loves from being harmed?”

  A female voice sounded from the doorway to his room. “If that’s all you think a husband is good for, you’re in for a very boring life indeed.”

  Hiro whirled and stood. Emi leaned against the doorjamb, bathed and dressed in a fresh uniform. Her skin glowed with health from the healing waters of the lake.

  “Kai didn’t pick you so you could protect her,” Emi continued. “If you haven’t noticed, she can look out for herself.”

  Hiro’s face burned as he thought of his failure in the forest. “She shouldn’t have to look out for herself. I should be there for her.”

  Emi cocked her head, examining him. “You really don’t understand, do you?”

  Hiro bristled. “No, as Kai was quick to inform me, I don’t. Please enlighten me.”

  “Kai picked you to be her partner. Her equal. Don’t protect her like some weak porcelain doll or put her on some pedestal to be worshipped. Stand beside her. Fight beside her. That’s what she wants.”

  He did see Kai as an equal. He had never met a woman as fearless and inspiring as she was. But wasn’t it the husband’s duty to provide and protect?

  “Forget whatever you’re thinking,” Emi said. “Whatever lessons you learned from your father, or the generals, or while bounced on your Kitan nanny’s lap. You and Kai are making a new story. A new path. Equals.” She held her index fingers up next to each other for effect.

  A smile quirked on his face. “I pity the man who ever tries to tame you.”

  “A moonburner is not a horse to be broken.” A feral smile played on her lips. “Nor is any woman, for that matter.”

  Hiro held up his hands in surrender. “Very well. Equals. I will try to remember.”

  “See that you do, and you’ll be fine,” Emi said.

  “Hypothetically, if Kai and I had a heated argument about this very issue, how would you recommend I make amends?” Hiro asked.

  “Groveling. Profuse apologies. Admitting your foolishness. More groveling. Honeycakes. She loves those.”

  “Honeycakes, eh?”

  “The honeycakes are the least important part, man. Groveling, profuse apologies, admitting your foolishness.” Emi ticked them off on her fingers.

  “I appreciate your counsel,” Hiro said with a chuckle.

  “You’re welcome. I imagine it won’t be the last time you need my sage wisdom. Now, I came here to talk to you.”

  “You didn’t stop by just to berate me for being a foolish man?”

  “That was for fun. This is business. I’m here because Daarco is gone.”

  Hiro’s eyebrows shot up. “What?” he said. “How do you know?”

  “I went to see him,” she said. “I went in the back way because I didn’t want the guards hassling me.”

  Back way? he thought. Emi sneaking in to see Daarco? He filed the information away.

  “He wasn’t in the room. The window was open. I think he climbed out.”

  Hiro sat down heavily on the bed. “Gods. This doesn’t look good! If he ran away, he looks even more guilty.”

  “You don’t think he did it, do you?” Emi demanded.

  “I…don’t want to believe it,” Hiro said. “But I hardly know him anymore. He did a lot better when life was just about killing moonburners. No offense.”

  “None taken,” Emi said. “But I think… I think I saw something in him. In the forest. He might be able to find a new path.”

  “Why do you care?” Hiro asked, honestly curious. “Daarco’s never been anything but an ass to you.”

  Emi sat down next to him, wringing her long, silver hair in an unconscious gesture. “Our whole generation—on both sides—grew up thinking that all we could ever do was kill. We were weapons with a single purpose. I lost my best friend because of that kind of thinking. Because she dared hope that her life could be about more than death.”

  “Maaya,” Hiro said, the memory of her red blood pooling on dark stones surfacing in his mind’s eye.

  “Yes,” Emi said, her jaw set. “We’re not weapons. We’re people. No one should think that all they have to live for is death. There’s more in each of us. I owe it to Maaya to help others see that. Others like Daarco.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Hiro said heavily.

  “We have to at least try. If we bring him back before Kai knows he’s gone, it’ll be like it never happened. Plus, he’s a good sunburner, and we’ll need all the soldiers we can get in the days to come.”

  Emi had carefully schooled her face for nonchalance, but he could see something there. A crack. Concern. Worry. She truly cared about him.

  “I’m not sure Daarco deserves you,” he said, standing up, “in fact, I know he doesn’t. But if anyone can help him find his humanity again, you can. I’m in.”

  “Good,” she said, ignoring his comment. “Do you have some water? I’ll scry for him and see if we can find where he went.”

  He brought his washbasin over to the small table in the corner of his room and poured the pitcherful of water out.

  Emi closed her eyes and pulled in moonlight. He couldn’t see it, but he could feel the charge of energy in the air. She began tracing
designs across the surface of the water as he watched, fascinated by the symbols she used. He had seen moonburners scry a handful of times, but the silver on the water still seemed strange and foreign. Sunburners could scry in flames, but the result was unpredictable, not nearly as effective as scrying with moonlight. The connection between the moonburner, the water, and the earth was steadier than a sunburner’s tenuous control over the wild flames.

  An image of Daarco appeared on the surface of the water and Hiro breathed a sigh of relief. He wasn’t galloping away on horseback with Geisa at his side. In fact, the scene was a sad one. Daarco sat, hooded and alone, at a dingy bar, nursing a glass of what looked like sun whiskey. From the way his head hung, he had been there a while.

  “Oh, Daarco,” Hiro said softly.

  “See,” said Emi, tracing a squiggle of silver across the water, making the picture zoom out to show the front of the bar. “If he had freed Geisa, he would have fled, not stopped at some bar in the Meadows to get drunk.”

  Hiro had to admit the logic in that. “Let’s go get him.”

  Emi assured him that it would be quicker to move through the city on foot, and so Hiro found himself stooping through the low door of the citadel crypt, stumbling in the darkness.

  “You don’t think we can just…walk out the front gates?” Hiro asked.

  “Sure.” Emi looked back at him, rolling her eyes. “If you want Kai to know exactly where we’re going and why.”

  He followed silently, content to let her lead the way. It was fortunate this area hadn’t collapsed completely from the earthquake. It must have been sturdily made.

  Ryu had grudgingly agreed to stay behind after a significant amount of cajoling. He was too conspicuous. Hiro had dressed in nondescript clothing and had loaned Emi a cloak. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if they were recognized as burners, but it was better if they went without notice.

  As they made their way through the dark crypt, Hiro reveled in the cool air on his skin, despite the musty smell. It was still unnaturally hot outside. As they reached the corner of the crypt, Emi whispered a word while pressing on a stone statute of a sleeping woman. With a grinding noise, a piece of the wall slid back obediently.

  “Afraid to give away all your secrets?” he joked.

  “We have to keep some mystery,” she retorted smoothly, but her cheeks had colored under the light of her moon orb. Old prejudices were hard to kill.

  The dark tunnel from the crypt opened into a stone courtyard nestled in the shadow of the citadel’s white walls.

  Hiro fought down his growing sense of unease as he followed Emi out of the tunnel. Kyuden had never been a utopia, even in the best of times. But now, it seemed degraded, its civilization unraveling even in the few days since the earthquake.

  Many of the oldest buildings had been shaken off their foundations, crumbling into the streets. People had moved the rubble to open narrow paths through the mess, but Emi and Hiro found themselves clambering over fallen stones, mortar and wood. There was no way a horse, let alone a cart, could get through the city, and they were trying to follow a once-busy road.

  They passed through a market square and the scene was even more troubling. Many of the stalls sat empty and hollow, others smashed or upended. Those vendors that remained offered no more than limp vegetables or small bags of grain. Burly bodyguards bristling with steel were necessary to keep the hungry masses from even these meager offerings.

  As Hiro watched, a young boy darted past one guard and managed to grab a small, sickly crab apple. Retribution was swift. The guard neatly bludgeoned the boy with a stout stick the length of his meaty forearm, and the boy crumpled to the ground like a paper doll.

  Hiro halted, eying the bodyguard, who now stooped to retrieve the apple. Hiro could take him.

  Emi grabbed Hiro by the arm and tried to pull him along. “We can’t get involved in every sob story,” she said. “The boy should have known better than to try something with the guard right there.”

  “He’s hungry,” Hiro said. “He’s only a boy.”

  “They’re all hungry,” Emi said. “The kid won’t last five minutes on the street if he doesn’t learn to use his brain. He’s probably new hungry. He’ll either learn or die, whether we help him or not.”

  Hiro raised an eyebrow at Emi as she dropped his arm and continued up the street. Her cold regard for the boy’s foolish gamble gave him new insight into her past. With a final guilty glance at the boy moaning on the cobblestones, he jogged after Emi.

  As they passed through the Meadows, the normal foul smell of the area was compounded. For now there was not just human waste in the street, but bodies.

  He covered his mouth, feeling the bile rise in his throat.

  “Spotted fever,” Emi said. “They’re supposed to be burning the bodies. I’ll have moonburners sent in here to move them.”

  As they continued walking, Hiro grew numb to the suffering around him. Hungry. Homeless. Dying. Displaced. Angry. He saw sorrow and weariness in many eyes, but in others he saw violence. Outrage. Those emotions always found an outlet.

  And it seemed they had found it as they rounded a corner into a large square filled with a torch-wielding mob. A dirty man was standing on a chair at the far side of the square addressing the crowd.

  Emi pulled her hood lower over her silver hair. “The bar Daarco’s at is right through here.”

  “Let’s stick to the shadows,” Hiro said. He took her hand. “Stay close.”

  As they wove along the edges of the crowd, Hiro caught snippets of the speech.

  “These natural disasters, the hunger, the heat—they are a divine judgment against us! Tsuki has turned her back on us because we have displeased her! We have abandoned our divine calling to kill the sunburners! Tsuki commanded us to destroy them and instead we lay with them!”

  Hiro glanced at Emi, whose look of disgust mirrored his own. “This guy knows nothing,” she growled. “He’s riling everybody up for no good reason.”

  “People grasp for power where they can,” Hiro whispered.

  They passed through the crowd unmolested and slipped through the thick tavern door of the bar.

  Hiro’s eyes adjusted to the dim light of the tavern after a moment, but he couldn’t say the same about his nose. Smells of stale beer and urine, unwashed bodies and pipe smoke assailed his senses.

  “There,” Emi said, seemingly unfazed by the dingy bar or its even dingier patrons.

  Hiro followed her finger and saw Daarco, his cloak dark in the grimy candlelight.

  They wove through the tables, boots crunching on nutshells and gods-only-knew-what-else.

  They sidled up to the bar on either side of Daarco. His eyes were closed and his head hung.

  Hiro placed a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Daarco.”

  Daarco whirled upright, laying a wicked-looking blade against Hiro’s throat in a blink.

  Hiro held his hands aloft, not daring to move. “Easy, friend. We come in peace.” The sour smell of whiskey lingered on Daarco’s breath, exuded from his very pores.

  Daarco’s bloodshot eyes registered recognition, and he returned the knife to a sheath hidden in his sleeve. When he turned around and saw Emi, he grunted in surprise, smoothing a hand over his greasy hair.

  “What’re you doing here?” Daarco said.

  “We’re here to bring you back to the citadel before anyone realizes you’re missing,” Hiro said.

  “Back?” Daarco said. “Why would I go back? They think I freed that moonburner general. They’ll string me up.”

  “By disappearing, you look doubly guilty,” Emi said with an exasperated sigh. “We were ready to plead your case, find out who really did it, and now you go running off, making it seem like you have something to hide.”

  “Nothing to hide,” he said. “Just done. Besides. If I got anywhere near that general, I wouldn’t have freed her. I woulda killed her.”

  “There’s truth to that,” Hiro muttered.


  “What do you plan to do?” Emi asked, forging ahead. “Where will you go? You don’t even have money to buy your own whiskey.”

  Daarco shrugged. “I’ve got a sword. There’s always work for a man who can kill.”

  “Come back with us,” Hiro pleaded. “Kai has a necklace that tells truth from lies. If you truly didn’t free Geisa, she’ll believe you.”

  “Even if she did believe me, what’s the point? Nothing for me there. I’m a liability. The forest showed me that. Had to be rescued by women.”

  “The forest kicked all of our asses,” Emi said. “I almost died. You don’t see me slinking off.”

  Daarco rounded on her, his voice steely. “All I’m good at is killing moonburners. And if I can’t do that, it’s time for me to go.” Their noses almost touched now, but Emi didn’t back down. Hiro found he had his hand on the dagger at his waist.

  “Just because you’ve never done something else doesn’t mean you can’t,” Emi said, her voice strangely kind, considering the menace in her posture. “Doesn’t mean you couldn’t find something new to live for.”

  “I’m a soldier without a war,” Daarco said. “It’s better I leave.”

  “There’s a war left to fight,” Hiro said, his voice low and hard. “The war that’s been waged against us for centuries, but we were too ignorant to see it. You didn’t see the seishen elder, but it explained everything to us. The tengu have been pitting the sun and moonburners against each other for generations. The very reason we were at war, that we hated each other, was because of them. They’re trying to destroy our world, and we’re the only thing that can stop them. So they turned us against each other. The reason your father was killed by a moonburner…was because of them. Because they desired our suffering, our destruction,” Hiro said. “And now they mean to finish the job. Unless we stop them.”

  “We were enemies,” Emi said. “But only because we were too blind to see who the real enemy was. No longer.”

  “Help us kill the tengu,” Hiro said. “If you truly believe that all you can do is kill, then you were born for this. This will be the most important battle we ever fight.”