Mongke knew better than to pat me on the shoulder, but as soon as we were out of earshot he leaned toward me. “You should talk to your mother about a suit of armor. Can’t have our future Kharsa clanging around like this.”
And—well, it was silly. Only the dark made my disguise passable, and it was dark.
Wait. Shouldn’t the moon be shining bright, as it was when we began this expedition? My eyes were playing tricks on me. I must have seen the wrong moon overhead. It must be a new moon, and not a full one, for it to be this black. Mongke’s torch was a pinprick at best.
Something was wrong. I stopped, looked back toward the rest of the group. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. Five minutes away, no more, and yet the distance between us felt as profound as the distance between my ger and your rooms at the palace.
But the darkness didn’t bother Mongke. He reached into his saddlebags for a skin. “Though, if you keep this stuff up, people are going to start calling you—”
But screaming drowned out his words. I reached for my bow and nocked an arrow before I began to process what was happening.
It was as if he’d fallen into a pit of ink. The darkness itself swallowed him up so quick and so sudden that he was gone in a blink. From the bubbling scar of black before me emerged a smooth sphere, about the size of a man’s head. Another blink. The surface bubbled again, and now the thing was growing, and growing, and the horse …
I screamed. I screamed as loud as I could. You might think I wanted to alert the others, but in truth there is little that frightens me like the death of a horse. No—this was not simply death; this was consumption. One moment the horse was there and then it was not. Not even hoofprints remained.
Riders scrambled. Someone pulled a horn from their pack and sounded an alarm. Hooves against snow. My heart hammered in my chest.
I fired a shot at the sphere. It swallowed my arrow, too. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. Weren’t demons supposed to be person shaped? How were we meant to kill that?
And what was it going to do next?
The sphere hurtled straight toward me.
When you take a hard enough blow to the head, darkness comes upon you. You do not expect it, you do not foresee it—one moment you see color, and the next you do not. So it was when the sphere enveloped my head. Cold, wet, slimy. I could not breathe. I tried and tried, but I might’ve been breathing in rocks for all the good it did me. My lungs burned. I heard nothing but a churning sound, a gurgling sound that made me sick to my stomach.
And there was Shao’s voice in my mind again.
Steel-Eye. You’re going to have to do better than this.
That name again. Why did it hurt whenever I heard it?
My hands were still free, and so were my legs. Beneath me was my horse, solid and warm and breathing. As long as I had my horse, I could live through this.
You hardly fought at all.
Arrows plinked against the sphere’s smooth surface. I tried to pry it off my head, but the damned thing clamped on tighter, and as brave as I was trying to be, I could not hold my breath forever. Was it the sphere making me dizzy, or the lack of breath? Hard to tell, but it did not stop my struggling. I pulled and pulled, the muscles in my arms screaming in agony, but I could not break free. Someone tried to cut me loose. I could not hear their shouting, but I did feel the flat of their blade stuck to the sphere.
Do you have anything to say for yourself before you die here, an untested child?
Panic’s cold fingers around my throat. What if I couldn’t do it? What if I was—we were—wrong all along? What if we weren’t gods, Shizuka, what if I was going to die there on my horse with a demon eating my face and my mother found my corpse and it was burned, burned, not fed to the steppe animals as it should be, what if what if what if—?
No.
No, I would not allow it.
You would not allow it.
In that moment, I swear I heard your voice in my head. Perhaps it was the lack of air. Whatever the cause, I heard you: No, no, you must fight.
In a blind frenzy, I reached for the knife on my belt and plunged it into the sphere, without a care in the world if I hit myself. The pressure on my head tightened. Again, I stabbed, again, again, again. My hands were going numb, but I bent them to my will.
After perhaps the fifth strike, the sphere uncoiled just enough for me to catch a breath. As a man lost in the sands guzzles water, so did I greedily slurp down this air. It gave me life enough to keep striking back.
The next time I plunged the knife into it, the sphere flew off my face. Gasping and dizzy, I tried to take in what was going on. There it was, there she was: the woman-shaped shadow standing in the center of the riders. Shao.
She held the sword she’d stolen in one hand. I did not recognize her stance, but I did know that graceful ease she held herself with.
She was staring at me. I cannot tell you how I know this, Shizuka. Have you ever felt someone staring at you? Felt eyes on you, though no one was watching? If a thousand such eyes watched me, they would not equal Shao’s intensity. She did not stare only at me. She stared through me, through all the versions of myself at once.
Shao held out her sword in challenge. “Steel-Eye!” she called.
This time everyone heard her. The warriors around me recoiled, the sound of her voice like falling glass.
“Is that a knife, Steel-Eye, or a tooth? Tiger’s Daughter, using your milk teeth on big game—”
Here it came, my inglorious end—
My mother charged toward us.
I had to keep Shao distracted. If she moved, my mother wouldn’t be able to behead her.
So I did what any foolish, angry, ten-year-old Qorin would do.
I jumped off my horse and I tackled her. I didn’t bother trying to steer myself at all; I was not interested in kicks or strikes or anything fancy. Only the brute force of my falling weight. I slammed into her. Like slamming into a hill, it was, like crashing against unturned earth. My teeth rattled in my skull.
I could not stagger a thing with no breath, but it seemed I could surprise it. Shao dropped her sword. Shadows wrapped around my throat. I held my breath and braced myself. Either I was going to hurt very much, or I was going to feel nothing and my story was going to end.
I did not see my mother behead the demon, as I was facing down at the time. I could tell you in great detail how my boots looked against the snow. I could tell you about the horses embroidered in dull yellow thread. I could tell you how the toes curled up.
But I can tell you how my whole body shook with the strength of the blow. I can tell you how coldness splattered onto me thick as blood, heavy as iron. I can tell you of how I fell face-first into the snow when the demon ceased to exist.
When I rolled over, my mother held Shao’s head in her hand. It was a shriveled thing, not much bigger than her fist—a lump of coal with hair attached. Far more frightening was the look on my mother’s face. Far more terrifying, the striking green of her eyes against her dusky brown skin; far more terrifying, the anger, the fear.
Shao’s featureless face unnerved me. But I knew my mother’s face so well that the smallest glimpses of it beneath her war mask spoke volumes to me. In the crinkles near her eyes hid a thousand words.
For the first time I hated my vision. If I were normal, if the night did not favor me, I never would have seen that look in her eyes.
I cowered. I do not like to admit it, but I cowered at the sight of my mother astride her liver mare.
With her sword hand, she beckoned me to stand.
I feared I could not do it—my legs were still shaky—and no one was going to help me up when I was covered in demon blood. In the back of my mind, I knew this was bad. My armor soaked up most of it.
Except for my head. My uncovered head.
That man two years ago, lying on a bed just before your mother killed him. Glassy eyes. A fever. Black veins pulsing. His whole body struggling to rid itself of the Tr
aitor’s influence.
Shaking, I ran my hands through my hair. When my gauntlets came off, I tried not to scream. I huddled in on myself, cold and clammy, and rocked back and forth. Blood. So much blood, on me, just looking for a way to get in and …
My mother dismounted. The demon’s head fell into the snow. She swaddled me in a blanket pulled from her saddlebags, scooped me up, and started walking.
If I told you she did not speak to me, you’d laugh and say of course. Such a thing is obvious. But when I write these words now, take heed: My mother did not speak to me for days. Not through Otgar. Not in hastily scrawled letters on her sheet of slate. Not in gestures.
No one else was permitted inside the ger. Only me, only my mother. More than once, I opened my mouth to speak to her. She’d fix me with a look, and I’d swallow my tongue. I felt so small, Shizuka. I felt so small and so scared. At night with the winds whistling outside, I’d hug myself tight and pray to Grandmother Sky that I would stay myself.
I tried to write to you. My mother kept a writing set in the ger, for she is fond of letters. On that first lonely evening, I sat in front of it and thought of all I might say to you. Yes, we might be gods, but I might be dying. If I do, you can keep my horse.
That is what I wanted to say.
But you know well, Shizuka, the struggle it is for me to write in Hokkaran. Frustration only set fire to my fear, to my anger and shame. I fell asleep with smears of ink on my hands, and unreadable scratch on my mother’s fine paper.
On the morning of the fourth day, Otgar came into the ger, and it was then I breathed a heavy sigh of relief. For when I awoke, my mother was gone, too, and this meant I could finally talk to someone.
But Otgar wasn’t pleased with me either.
“Barsalai Shefali,” she said. “Do you have any idea just how much of an idiot you are?”
I stared into my bowl. It was one of the plain ones, not the painted ceramic from Sur-Shar.
“Mongke died,” she said. “Temurin didn’t notice a ten-year-old among her group, and so she can’t return to the camp until she skins ten wolves. The riders won’t stop talking about it, not for a moment. They all saw that thing grab hold of you. Five minutes, they said. You held your breath for five whole minutes, and they could not get it off you. Anyone else would’ve died. Yet here you are, staring into your soup.”
The more Otgar spoke, the more I longed for silence again. All I wanted to do was help. All I wanted to do was prove that I was … that I was something more.
Otgar shook her head and kicked the carpet. Then she tapped the bowl I stared into, to get me to meet her eyes.
“That being said, I am glad you lived.”
I tilted my head. After the danger I’d put myself in? After the way I acted—she was glad I was alive?
“When you grow up, Needlenose, you will be a fine warrior. You’ll have more sense then,” Otgar said. “People cannot decide whether they are upset with you for endangering yourself, or if they admire you for fighting against so wretched a beast. Me? I think you are ten, and my cousin. If I had the same Sky-given luck you did, I’d try to kill a demon, too.”
Sheepish, I looked away.
Otgar ruffled my hair. “When you are feeling up to it, you will tell me what happened,” she said. “Someone has to know the true story. All the riders are saying you spoke the name of the Mother.”
There she was, my cousin, whom I’d ignored in favor of my foolish crusade.
I slumped forward.
She hugged me. Then she patted me on the shoulder. “Come on, Shefali,” she said. “Don’t think you’re out of the woods yet. Your mother is going to punish you.”
Otgar helped me up. She led me to the seat of my mother’s war council—her and four or five riders clustered around a fire.
My mother held my bow. When she saw me, she lifted it above her head with one hand and held it there, so that everyone could see that it was mine. There were the beads I made from clay I found near the sands. There was a paper charm you made me, kept safely inside a jade cat no larger than my thumbnail. Vulture feathers. Pieces of silk from Sur-Shar in colors I’d never seen before.
My mother’s fingers spoke. Otgar cleared her throat.
“Barsalai Shefali,” Otgar said. “A man is dead because of your reckless actions and insubordination. Had you stayed behind as instructed, Mongke would not have had to leave the group to escort you back. Temurin failed to spot you among her number, yes, and she made the decision to send Mongke back with a ten-year-old. She’s already faced my justice for that. If you want to bear an adult name, you must bear adult consequences. You must think beyond your own lust for glory. You faced a tiger in combat and did not think it enough. This behavior—this recklessness—ill suits you, and ill suits a future Kharsa. You must relearn patience and humility, since you seem to have forgotten them. Perhaps making a new bow will teach you.”
And with that, she threw my bow—the bow Kenshiro and I made together—onto the fire. I watched it burn and covered my mouth to keep from screaming. In front of the war chiefs, I could not allow myself to cry, but my eyes watered anyway. I tried to be stoic, Shizuka, I did, but I hadn’t seen Kenshiro since I was six, and that bow was the last thing we made together.
Watching it go up in flames pierced through me.
Years.
It would take me two months to make a bow, and almost as long for Temurin to return from her hunt. When she returned, she gave me a skin filled with what I thought was kumaq. It was, mostly. But there was enough raw milk mixed in to banish me to the latrines for a day and a half.
When I survived, Temurin decided we were even.
She did not help me with the bow, and I did not ask for her assistance. You’ve seen me make them enough times—the whole process is a personal one for me, and one that always brings me peace. So, while the clan did their best to avoid me, I sneaked out at night and worked.
You might find it strange that I chose to work in the dark, alone, when being alone is so abhorrent to my people. When I’d just had such an awful experience.
I say this: The Moon kept me company for two long years. We have always been good friends, she and I. And—well. There was something else.
You wrote to me, of course. You always wrote. I took your letters with me whenever I ran off at night. If I grew lonely or frightened, I’d hold the paper beneath my nose so I could smell your perfume. Often I’d take a break from bow making just to drink in your calligraphy. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t read the characters themselves when I’d had Otgar read them to me so many times.
That was how I’d learned that you challenged your mother to a duel after five years of sword-training lessons. O-Shizuru broke your arm in a single stroke, and still you were not discouraged.
“One day,” you wrote to me, “I will defeat her. One day I will tap her throat with my wooden sword and she will be forced to acknowledge what I have always known: I was born to hold a sword. I was born to duel. I live for that day, Shefali. It is coming. Soon.”
I smiled when Otgar read that, for I knew you were right—but at the same time, I felt a heavy dread I could not explain.
Long after I shot my first triumphant arrow, a messenger came from Fujino.
He wore all white, and he carried with him no letter. Among our brightly colored people, he was a ghost.
He entered my mother’s tent. I was out riding with Otgar at the time.
She stiffened. “Shefali,” she said, “when was the last time you got a letter from that friend of yours?”
“Hai-tsu,” I said. Three months ago. A month late. You did not deviate from your schedules, and you wrote back as soon as you received my letters.
Ice in my heart.
I kicked my horse into a gallop. When I dismounted, it was more leap than step, and when I opened the tent, I heard him say the words.
“O-Shizuru and O-Itsuki are dead.”
THE EMPRESS
THREE
; She must stop. Those characters are arrows in her heart, nails through her fingers. O-Shizuka drops the book and presses her palms against her eyes. Still she sees the words. Still she hears them in Shefali’s soft voice.
It has been ten years since they left. (O-Shizuka will use that word, for now; the other one will cut open her tongue if she thinks of it.) Ten years without her father’s hand on her shoulder, ten years without her mother shouting at her about her sword forms, ten years since she …
A throbbing pain starts up at her temple when she tries to remember. A sharper ache rises to meet it when she tries to forget. The ninth of Nishen is a firebrand within her mind, painful to behold and painful to ignore.
Before the ninth—before the day her mother left—there was the fifth. Even if her parents had lived to this day, the fifth of Nishen would be a sword against their flesh for all their days.
That was the day O-Shizuru had enough of her brother-in-law.
It had happened at court. Itsuki coaxed Shizuka into going by allowing her a day off from zither lessons. Court was the lesser of the two evils at the time.
Things began in the normal manner. Everyone milled about, exchanging pleasantries while they waited for her uncle. But there was already one difference—suitors. Shiratori Ryuji, lord of Shiratori Province, asked her father, with a smile, when Shizuka could meet his son.
“A quiet little tomcat,” he said, “to balance out your tigress.”
Shizuka opened her mouth, but her father squeezed her shoulder.
“You’re right, Ryuji-tun!” he said. “Shizuka is at her best with someone quiet to balance her. Is your son quieter than Oshiro-tur’s daughter?”
And Shizuka covered her mouth to keep from laughing, covered her cheeks to hide when they turned red.
Shiratori Ryuji’s smile grew strained all of a sudden, but Ituski’s did not falter. He clapped Ryuji on the shoulder. As they walked away from him, Itsuki and Shizuka shared guilty smiles at Ryuji’s expense.
But neither of them laughed when, later that evening, Yoshimoto introduced Uemura Kaito as his new Champion. Shizuka’s brows climbed halfway up her forehead. She and Uemura studied with the same sword tutor. He was a baby-faced seventeen, if she did not miss her guess; the hair on his upper lip looked more like dirt than a beard.
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