by Jay Kristoff
They’d sat and talked at first—or more truthfully, he had talked and she had listened. He spoke of his dreams, to see his Imperium stretch to every far-flung nation. And she’d pictured herself on a throne of gold—a Queen of the civilized world. And when he kissed her, she’d kissed him back, teasing at first, tasting at last, melting from the heat inside her.
This was bliss, she thought. This was love.
But he wouldn’t stop.
His hands began roaming, clutching, squeezing, and though he was moving too swiftly, he was her Lord, and she wanted desperately to please him. He tore at the outer layers of her jûnihitoe, and she said nothing. He pawed at her breasts and she breathed not a word. But inside, her melting warmth turned to horrid chill. This was brutish. Ugly. And when he forced his hand between her legs, his fingers, Gods, his fingers …
She screamed. Cried no.
And he’d laughed.
The sound was a knife in her chest, as cold and hard as his hands. And she screamed again, louder, NO, slapping as hard as she could, fingers hooked, nails across his cheek.
He drew back, eyes wide, bringing those awful fingers up to touch the three ragged gouges in his face. She’d turned away, terrified, waiting for him to cry for his guards. Would she be arrested? Exiled from court? They’d know she’d come here unaccompanied. She would shame her father’s name. Gods, what would he say?
But she heard no cry for the guards. Instead, he struck her. A closed fist sending her sprawling, a terrified cry on her lips. And then he was sitting on her chest and she couldn’t breathe to scream again. She struggled, arms pinned, and as her lungs began burning she saw the blade in his hand, sharp enough to cut the air in two.
No breath to beg him.
No breath to scream.
“You deny your Shōgun?” he’d hissed. “You dare?”
He pressed the blade to her throat and the tears came then, black light burning before her eyes. And though it shamed her near to dying, though in years to come, she denied it to herself with everything inside her, she would have let him, then. She would have turned her head and closed her eyes and let him do what he wanted if only he’d have put the knife away. She was so afraid. Small and frightened and completely alone.
Sixteen years old.
“Have no fear.” Amusement in his voice. “The mood has fled. I have no wish to take your maidenhood any longer.”
Momentary relief evaporated as she felt the knife being pressed against her forehead. Hard enough to cut her. To make her bleed.
Gods, oh gods, it hurt …
“But I think no other man should want for it either.”
And she couldn’t even scream.
* * *
Kaori sat alone, staring at the empty pit where fire once burned. Listening to the rain’s spatter-patter, footsteps, hushed voices, sky-ship engines idling amidst the shifting sea of leaves.
Exodus.
It was better, she told herself. War was coming, and she needed only warriors. Not bakers or carpenters or seamstresses. Not children or old men or babe-laden wives. Men and women prepared to do whatever it took to free this nation from the Guild, the Imperium, the blood lotus. Let the weak hide with the Stormdancer in Yama city. The warriors would remain—Maro, Michi and the others. They remembered her father. They remembered the cause.
The lotus would burn.
“Kaori.”
“Michi.” She didn’t look up from the firepit, black coals reflected on steel-gray. “When they’ve left, we must take stock of those who remain. There will be—”
“Kaori, we need to talk…”
She turned then, saw the girl in the doorway. Pale skin and bee-stung lips, chainblades crossed at her back. The girl Kaori had turned from a simple peasant child into one of the sharpest blades in the Kagé armory. The girl she’d trained to infiltrate the Shōgunate court. After years at Aisha’s side, Michi had returned home. Older. Harder. So sharp the air fairly bled where she walked.
But there was a crude wooden scrollcase tucked under one arm, a satchel over her shoulder. And the look in her eyes nearly set Kaori’s heart to breaking.
“… You’re leaving?”
The girl nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“But why?”
“Aisha wouldn’t have wanted this. It shames her memory.”
“You think this sundering is my doing?” Kaori climbed to her feet. “Yukiko is the one leaving. I would have us stay and fight as we always have.”
“It’s more than this, now.” Michi gestured around them. “Daichi always said this was never about us. The Kagé were about opening people’s eyes, showing them they need to fight. We have a chance to win, with the Guild rebels on—”
“Rebels? Gods, call them what they are, Michi. Cowards.”
“You don’t know what it’s like. To live in the quiet. To sit surrounded by brutality and injustice, knowing if you speak a word, as every part of you screams to do, nothing happens save that two die instead of one.” A sigh. “But I know. I lived it every day for the past four years. And it takes a strength you wouldn’t believe.”
“When it comes to these Guild pigs? No. I wouldn’t.”
“Aisha showed me how to hide it. ‘Let it burn slow,’ she said. ‘Keep it hidden until the day it will truly matter, when risking all will actually be worth the blood you wager. The day we can win.’” Michi shrugged. “This is the day we can win, Kaori. But not without Yukiko.”
Kaori took one long, measured breath, exhaling poison. “You godsdamned traitor.”
Michi stepped back as if Kaori had struck her.
“I brought you in here!” Kaori shouted. “I treated you as blood! I taught you everything, and this is how you repay me? You leave us now? Now, Michi?”
“There’s something wrong in you, sister.” Tears welled in Michi’s eyes. “Something broken. I don’t think you see the same world I do at the end of this. I see blue skies, and green fields and children dancing in clean rain. And I don’t pretend it comes from someplace good and pure. It comes from hate, same as you. I want them to suffer, same as you. For my uncle. For my village. But I want something better afterward too. And all you want is to breathe the smoke. You don’t even care if there is an afterward, as long as you can watch everything burn.”
Tears spilled freely down Michi’s face now, reaching out to touch Kaori’s hand.
“And I want to fix you, and I don’t know how…”
Kaori slapped Michi’s hand aside, features contorted with fury.
“Don’t touch me.”
“Come with us.”
“No. I will not stand beside the Guild. Not now. Not ever.”
“Please, Kaori…”
“Begging? You shame yourself, sister.”
The false smile dropped from her lips as Michi dried her tears, staring for what seemed an eon. But at last the girl turned, stalking from Daichi’s ruined home. Kaori stood and stared, biting wind blowing the fringe back from her skin.
Everywhere she looked, she was reminded of her father. The chess set he’d brought with him from Kigen. The leather glove hanging on the wall, soaked with screams and scorched flesh stink, the memory of the day she’d asked him to burn off her tattoo still crystal clear in her mind. A handkerchief, soiled with black stains.
Gods, where was he? Already dead?
He’d been all she had left.
She sank to her knees, trying to breathe.
Gods, help me …
She heard footsteps on the decking outside, too heavy for Michi, too clumsy for one of her warriors—the tread of a man with a limp. She turned expecting to see Akihito, instead found herself looking into an eye of sapphire blue, another as white as sun-polished bone. Short dark hair and a pointed beard, a wisp of honey-and-cinnamon-scented smoke on his lips.
Yukiko’s gaijin. The one called Piotr.
She stood, faced the round-eye, pushing the grief down into her feet.
Breathe.
She folded
her arms, stared cold.
Just breathe.
“What do you want?”
“Yukiko,” the gaijin said.
“She’s not here.”
“Da,” he nodded. “Am knowing. But she wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“Da.”
“You surprise me, round-eye. I thought you a faithful dog. Is there no room on her lap for both you and the bastards in her belly?”
Sometimes the words just fell from her lips, cold and cruel.
Sometimes she didn’t know where they came from.
Piotr shook his head. “No, on Guild, Yukiko is speaking true, and this is Kaori knowing, I am think. But Yukiko is wrong of saying Kaori ugly.”
Kaori caught her breath. Whispered. “What did you say?”
He motioned to her face.
“Beautiful,” he smiled.
Piotr turned to stare out at the village, the Iishi forest, the rolling storm clouds overhead. He seemed to be burning the picture in his mind, the sea of dead and evergreen leaves, the ancient trees, the jagged spires reaching toward the booming heavens overhead.
Finally, he turned to look at her again, honey-and-cinnamon smoke drifting from his smile. He clomped across the boards toward her, reaching down to take her hand. And staring into her eyes as she frowned in confusion, he brought her knuckles up to his lips.
“Good-bye, beautiful lady,” he said. “Hoping I will see her near.”
With a grimace, he turned and limped away, pistons at his broken knee hissing, heavy boot dragging across unfinished boards. She watched him go, not breathing a word. The wind danced amidst the trees, a gust pushing her fringe away from her face, cold and laden with rain. She reached toward it with outstretched fingers—the same fingers he’d just pressed to his lips.
It would have been a simple thing then, to tuck the hair behind her ears, to let the wind and the world see the scar he’d left her with. It would have been a simple thing, to exhale the vile inside, to accept and breathe and be. A simple thing. And the hardest thing in the world.
Her fingers clawed her fringe back down over her face.
And she sat alone in the dark, staring at the empty pit where the fire once burned.
5
WAKING
Hana squeezed her brother’s hand, wrapped in the scent of new rain.
The siblings sat on the landing outside the guesthouse, feet dangling over the edge. Hana peered down to the dizzying fall between her toes. The wind howled like a wounded oni, the rain a constant drumbeat, drowning the sounds of the village around them. There was some kind of ruckus going on near the heart of town, but Hana couldn’t bring herself to care. She swung her feet back and forth, letting tears tumble and misery roll over her in cold, lonely waves.
Poor Daken …
He’d been only a kitten when they found him, chewed by corpse-rats inside a Kigen city drain. He’d loved them, and they’d loved him back. He was Hana’s best friend in the world.
And now he was gone.
She wiped at her good eye and hung her head, watching her tears spiral into the void. She tried not to think about how he’d ended, how she might have stopped it, how the yakuza who’d stomped him underfoot had died far too quickly at Akihito’s hands. The bandage over the left side of her face was crusted with dry blood, the agony from where her eye had been ripped from her socket still gnawing and real. She tried not to think about that either.
Failure on both counts.
Yoshi had it worse. His skull was still wrapped in gauze from his beating, and his headaches weren’t going away. Concussion, they said. It’ll heal in time, they said. But when Hana looked into her brother’s eyes, she didn’t see the same Yoshi anymore. She saw the memory of a beautiful boy, cold and dead in a pool of coagulating red.
A smile with no lips.
A face with no eyes.
Poor Jurou …
She wondered what they’d do. Where they belonged. The few days since they’d landed in the Kagé village had been all blurred visits to the healer, draughts of medicinal tea and pain. Hana hadn’t had a chance to speak to Yukiko yet. She hadn’t even really spoken to Yoshi about Jurou’s death. Everything was happening so quickly. She just needed a minute to breathe …
A rush of wind blew her ragged bob around sodden cheeks, the thunder above sounding far closer than the clouds. She heard claws scrabbling on thatch, a tortured timber groan. Peering over her shoulder, she saw a pair of slitted amber eyes peering back. The female arashitora was perched on the guesthouse roof, half-spread wings dancing with faint electricity. The sight of her might have taken Hana’s breath away, if she hadn’t already spent it all on tears.
“Yoshi,” she whispered.
Her brother turned and saw the beast, breath catching in his lungs. The hairs on Hana’s arms stood rigid, ozone tickling her nose. And as she’d done with rats and cats since she was a child, she reached out to the heat, afraid it would be too hot for her mind to touch.
Hello.
– HELLO, MONKEY-CHILD. –
She blinked at the beast, wiped scabbed knuckles across her eye. Its voice was a thunderclap in her head. She squeezed her brother’s fingers, whispered in amazement.
“Yoshi, she’s talking to me…”
Yoshi turned away, staring out over the forest. “You been beast-speaking since you were a sprat. No news there.”
“Her voice, gods, it’s like a storm inside your mind. Try it.”
Yoshi scowled, pointed to the gauze wrapped around his brow. “Headache.”
Hana turned back to the arashitora, reaching gingerly toward its heat again. The sensation was like nothing she’d ever known, storm clouds in her mind, electricity dancing on her skin.
Your name is Kaiah, right?
– YES. –
I’m Hana.
– WHY YOU CRY? –
Hana blinked, taken aback. She sniffed, tucked her tangle of hair behind her ears.
No foreplay first, eh? No poetry or flowers. Just jumping right into it there.
– WHAT? –
… Doesn’t matter.
The arashitora began preening, straightening the coverts of her left wing with a cruel black beak, the same color encircling those wonderful amber eyes. Hana watched her, fascinated, as if a picture from a children’s tale had stepped off the paper into wonderful, full-color life. Her thoughts rang in Hana’s skull; strobing, violent, deafening.
The beast blinked, tossed her head.
– WHY YOU CRY? –
Because my friend is dead.
– YUKIKO USES THIS WORD. NOT KNOW MEANING. –
Friend? You don’t know what a friend is?
The thunder tiger tilted her head, tail switching side to side.
– FATHER OF YOUR CUBS? –
He was a cat.
– HOW CAN MONKEY-CHILD MATE WITH CAT? –
… What?
– WAS HE TALL CAT? –
Gods, no … look. He was my friend. We talked together, hunted together …
– AH. HUNT. YOU MEAN PACKMATE. –
… I suppose.
The thunder tiger puffed herself up, spread her wings.
- PACK I UNDERSTAND. THIS IS GOOD. –
Glad to help.
Hana heard raised voices over the driving rain, the thunder of wings. Yoshi quirked an eyebrow, looking toward the growing disturbance, the running footsteps and shouts. A sky-ship engine sputtered to life somewhere in the distance, the propeller’s drone chopping through the thunder. He put his hand to his brow and hissed.
“What the hells is going on over there? No respect for a body’s aches, these yokels.”
The siblings looked into the sky as another thunder tiger swooped overhead, coming in to land on the decking with a crunch. Hana knew from the tales the beast’s name was Buruu. He was magnificent—broad chest and rippling muscle and fire flashing in his eyes, lightning flaring along his clockwork wings. But Hana was even more fascinated by the girl ridi
ng him. Yukiko. The girl she’d first seen in Kigen’s Market Square. Blood streaming down her nose. The iron-thrower in the Shōgun’s fist, leveled at her head. She could hear the words in her mind again, as clearly as if Yukiko had spoken them aloud.
“Let me show you what one little girl can do…”
Her hair flowed about her face in black waves, held in check by the goggles above her brow. She walked amidst the flurry of leaves that marked their arrival, pale as ashes. Hana could see why people spoke about her the way they did. There was something beyond the superficial beauty, a fierceness in the way she moved. An electricity humming in the air around her.
Yoshi inclined his head, a small crooked smile on his lips.
“Stormdancer.”
The girl smiled back. “It’s just Yukiko, Yoshi-san.”
Kaiah locked eyes with Buruu, and Hana sensed disdain in the female’s mind, a low growl in her chest. Hana looked between the pair, then to their savior. The girl who’d rescued them after the attack on Kigen. The girl Hana owed her life to. She saw Yukiko’s face was flushed, her eyes wide. Somewhere in the Kenning, she felt anger. Anguish. Sorrow.
“Are you all right, Yukiko-san?”
The girl sighed, crouched beside the siblings. She dragged a stray lock of hair from her mouth, rain beading on her skin like jewels. Her voice was heavy as lead.
“I’m sorry to do this to you. I’m sorry you haven’t had time to rest. But something’s happened. The rebellion is splitting. I’m leaving here today. I want you two to come with us.”
“Splitting?” Hana blinked. “Why?”
“There’s an insurgency inside the Lotus Guild. I think we can use them as allies, but other Kagé refuse to stand beside them. It’s all hatred and grudges and politics. Point is, Buruu, Kaiah and I are taking a ship and some of the less militant Kagé to Yama city. The Fox Daimyo slighted the Shōgunate by refusing to attend the royal wedding. He’s no friend of the government or the Guild. And I’m hoping that’ll make him friend to us.”
“You’re lighting out on your little rebel friends,” Yoshi said. “Just like that.”
“I’m going to keep fighting. But I can’t be part of a rebellion that murders innocent people. I hope you can understand that. I hope you’ll come with me.”
