“You will be fine!” you shouted. “Shefali, you will be fine, but I need you to stand. We are going to your horse. We are going to your horse and you will see a healer and you will be fine—”
I tried to stand. I managed it, barely, and vomited when I did. The burning spread out from my wound. Soon I could feel it: the blackblood, the corruption. The Traitor’s evil flowing through my veins and multiplying. Anger, hatred, greed, jealousy—all these emotions swirled within me.
“Look at me!” you said. “Whatever is going on in that thick skull of yours—look at me!”
You kept shouting at me as you led me to my horse.
Except it was not my horse waiting outside. The guard captain and his men were there.
“O-Shizuka-shon!” he shouted. “Your clothes—”
Blood got on you, too, but Leng had not hurt you. “I am all right!” you said. “You insolent fool, you see her struggling and ask after me? Get us a healer!”
But there were no healers for four li in every direction. You knew this. You knew no one was going to be able to help me.
I knew it, too.
My thoughts raced like wild horses. Demon blood. Demon blood in my wound. I was going to die. This was it. In three days, if not sooner, you’d be standing in front of my funeral pyre. I thought of the man your mother killed. I thought of him lying in bed, I thought of the fear on his face, I thought of the panic.
I was going to die.
And suddenly I couldn’t breathe.
Suddenly my lungs closed up on me; suddenly I felt as if I were not in my own body anymore. Like a bird looking down on this strange scene. “Die.” That word, over and over. I was going to die at sixteen before I got my second braid. I was going to die without marrying you. I was going to die without seeing my brother ever again. I was going to leave you alone and …
Yes, I heard you calling.
But as the dark took me, I could not answer.
IT WAS NOT FOR THIS I PRAYED
Imagine you are underwater. Not something I like to imagine, of course, but I am not the one imagining it. You are.
Imagine you are floating in the water, completely submerged. Light filters down onto your face. The water’s cold, horribly cold. Shadows play upon your eyelids; strange shapes and colors come into existence. You want to name them, but your mouth is frozen shut. You want to breathe, but you realize your lungs are heavy, realize your chest is full of water. The longer you float, the paler the light on your eyelids.
Imagine that, Shizuka. A peaceful way to die. I wish I could tell you it was like that.
But it was not.
Instead, I floated in a sea of flames. Instead, constant cackling, constant growling filled my ears. Rot and death and burning threatened to empty my stomach. Smoke made my eyes water and my lungs burn. Whenever I coughed, the foulest taste coated my tongue. Like swallowing funeral ashes, Shizuka. Like a ripe plum suddenly gone rotten.
I threw up often. I threw up more than I thought I could. Instead of food, thick, oily black filled the buckets you held out for me.
Worst of all, I could see, and sometimes hear—but I could never speak.
Yes, Shizuka, I saw everything. Through the suffering, I clung to the fuzzy sight of your face. As terrible as I felt—and “terrible” does not begin to cover the anguish I suffered in that bed—you looked worse.
I did not need to sleep, for instance. The fever kept me awake. Or the screaming did; it is hard to tell. But though I felt exhausted, I never felt tired.
I think you wanted to keep me company—to be there when I fell asleep and when I awoke. Insomnia disagreed with your plan. The first time you helped me vomit, you were yourself; the second time, your cheeks sank in a bit; the third time, I thought I must’ve been sick for five years—how else would you look so different? No, I did not see you sleep in the three days I lay in bed. Nor did I see you eat.
I saw your altercation with the guards. I will say I saw it, at any rate; I saw blurs more than anything. Did they try to take you away from me? For I saw the flash of your blade, and I saw crimson spraying out. Later, I saw flecks of brown-red on your cheeks.
“Come back to me,” you said.
You held my hand. Did you wash me before you touched me? I hope you did. I hope you did not touch my marbled blood; I hope you kept yourself safe.
You hung your head. You still wore the butterfly ornaments from the day we went to the temple; their wings fluttered as you moved. In my haze, I swear I saw them fly right off your hair. They landed on my cheeks, turned black, and died.
“Come back to me,” you said, and your honey-sweet voice cracked. “Shefali. Please, if you have ever loved me, come back.”
I tried to open my mouth, Shizuka, I did. I tried to summon the strength to touch you, but even that was beyond me.
The demons laughed at me. “Look at Steel-Eye, laid so low!” they said. “Are you happy to join the family?”
The voices. The gravel, the rusty knife, the high squeal of a pig in heat. I heard them as if they were in the room with us. As you spoke, I saw them flickering in and out of existence. Shadows in full armor. A woman in robes with tentacles for arms and two mouths lined with needlepoint teeth. A man with a half-bare skull, the tendons and ligaments of his jaw holding on to bone. Laughing.
I forced myself to look away from them. You. Focus on you.
“Shefali,” you said. You cupped my cheek. I coughed; you did not draw your hand back. Instead, you sat me up and held a rag to my mouth. You kissed the tips of my ears. I was limp in your arms; you turned me toward you, and my head lolled backwards. With one hand you held up my head just so you could speak to me properly. “You cannot leave me.”
Again, I coughed; again, you reached for the rag.
“Listen to me,” you said, halfway between angry and afraid. “I…”
So exhausted. So hot. So much pain. My blood burned, Shizuka; with every pump of my heart, it seared my veins. A scream welled up in my throat; I writhed because I could not free it.
You wrapped your arms around me and squeezed. “I’m here,” you said. “I don’t know what’s going on behind those eyes of yours, but I’m here.”
But I could not stop squirming like a dying serpent. Wet gurgles left me; black spilled from my mouth and trickled down my chin. Shaking. I was shaking, I think.
“Shefali, please,” you said. You sniffed. I tried to look at your face, but my eyes did not listen to me; I couldn’t focus on anything at all. “This is my fault. Oh, my love, this is my fault.…
“Come back,” you whispered again, soft and desperate. “You are all I have left.”
Fingers going through my hair.
“My mother is dead. My father … I hope he is dead, it is better that way.”
Your hand in mine.
“My uncle does not care,” you said. There it was, the crack in your voice, like porcelain shattering. “You are all I have.”
For a moment, you went silent. Then you began to shake, too; then tears fell from your eyes.
“In all the Empire,” you croaked, “beneath sky and stars, I swear it eight times—you are all I have.”
I closed my eyes.
Fire in my lungs, fire in my veins, everything was burning.
When I opened them next, you loomed over me. Floating behind you were three severed heads, ghastly and dripping with gore. Toothless mouths cackling.
“Steel-Eye!” said one of them. “Did you know your mother lies with your cousin?”
“Steel-Eye!” said the other. “Your father complains about how dark you are! Perhaps if you were light as snow, he’d care about you.”
The first one cackled. “Or if you could read!”
I growled at them.
But you recoiled, and guilt stabbed into me. For your lips quivered with unspoken fears, your cheeks were puffed and red from crying, and in your eyes my own anguish was reflected.
“Shefali,” you said, your voice low. I could hardly he
ar you over the demon’s cackling. “Barsalai Shefali Alsharyya, I call you now. Eight times I call you. Eight times I beg for you to return. On this, the fourth day of your sickness…”
You swallowed. You licked your cracked, swollen lips.
“On this, the fourth day of your sickness, you must be killed,” you said.
A shout died on my lips: No, not yet.
But yours was the expression of a young woman who knows her children will not remember their father. Wrath and fury; sorrow and despair; all these mingled together.
You cupped my face and pulled me up toward you. “But I know you are still there, my bullheaded love,” you said. “I know you are not dying!”
Spittle flew from your lips. “I have watched the blackblood take a life, and it looks nothing like this!”
So loud, so vehement were you that I thought you were going to slap me.
You did. I did not much feel it; do not let it weigh on your conscience.
“You swore to me we’d be together for all our lives!” you roared. “Are you a woman of your word, or are you a coward?”
Speak. I had to speak. Though I could not breathe, I had to find the wind to shape my words; though fire coursed through me instead of blood, I had to find the will to live.
Speak. Fight. Return.
Over and over I repeated this, over and over I tried to drown out the voices.
No one survives the blackblood. It is an awful disease; in three days, the victim is dead, and on the fourth, they rise as something different.
But I had not died, had I?
No, this could not be death. We were together and I refused to believe that you’d died, too. So I was alive. And if I was alive, then …
Then I had already lived longer than anyone else with this affliction.
My mother once attacked a Hokkaran border village. The first time she attacked, she was young and unlearned. While the Qorin made camp at night, the Hokkarans diverted a river toward them. Alshara had to leave in shame—for how could she attack them after such an incident?
But the next village she raided, she made sure to flood beforehand.
So it is with all Qorin. We take the things that defeat us. We use them. We master them.
And I resolved in that moment as you held me that I would do the same for the blackblood. I would not let it kill me. No. I had too much to do. I had a people to rule; I had to ride with you against the Traitor.
No disease would slay me.
I would take this weapon the Hokkarans used against my people, and I would welcome it into myself. I would strike fear into their hearts.
I would become something more than human.
I coughed. I coughed, and coughed again, black spewing out of my mouth. I sat up. With one hand I braced myself; with the other, I cleared the hair out of my face.
I opened my eyes, and there you sat on top of me. And as the dawn breaking over Gurkhan Khalsar, so was your smile.
“Shefali,” you said, “you’ve returned to me.”
I ached to kiss you. I could not—if my lips touched yours, they’d bring with them my affliction.
“I would not let it kill me,” I said.
You wrapped your arms around me, and I smelled peonies. You pressed your lips to my forehead, and I swear to you the laughing stopped, if only for a moment.
“Good,” you said. “I will not allow you to die. Royal decree.”
And somehow, despite the color of the blood seeping from my wound, despite the pain and the fever, despite your exhaustion and mine, we laughed.
It did not last long. Knocking on the door roused us from our reverie.
“O-Shizuka-shon! You cannot keep us from entering!”
I looked toward the door. You’d piled all the furniture in the room in front of it. Whoever was on the other side was pounding so hard, everything rattled.
You bit your lip. “I could not let them near you,” you said.
I nodded. I needed new bandages; you had no idea how to bandage to begin with, and could not touch me as I was. This was not our bed, and so I did not care what happened to it. I tore cloth from the sheets and set about bandaging myself.
“When I’m done,” I said. You nodded. My head throbbed and throbbed. That awful taste was still in my mouth.
But I was alive, and that was all that mattered.
As I finished, you tossed me one of your robes. It was far too small for me—the sleeves ended half past my elbows, and it covered me to the knee only. To say nothing of the fact that you could never wear this again, and it must’ve cost you more than some villages produce in a year. We had other things to concern ourselves with.
Like what they would say when they saw me standing and breathing.
You helped me to my feet. Again, the doors rattled.
“O-Shizuka-shon, the Emperor’s Champion is here to collect you. You will allow us entry, and you will allow us to remove the corpse from this room!”
You winced.
You tried to move the heavy desks and wardrobes you’d forced in front of the door. I think you must’ve put them there at night, and it must’ve taken you hours—you struggled against them now, your meager weight not enough to move them.
The wound in my side burned. All of me burned, and my limbs were wrought iron. But I wanted to help you. I grasped one of the desks by its leg and pulled. As easily as a child moves a toy cart, I moved that desk. It felt so light!
You stared at me. “Shefali?”
I cleared my throat again. Do not think about it. There was a reason for it. Probably just my greater size. And I have always been stronger than you. That was surely it.
But I moved the dressers, too, with hardly any effort, and the wardrobe taller than I was. Cold fear prickled the hairs on the back of my neck.
I was still myself. Of course I was. My body was not distorted. I was still Shefali.
You must have thought the same, for you squeezed my arm. “Do not worry, my love,” you said. “You have not changed in your appearance.”
And it was then that they burst open the doors. Two dozen armed guards just to retrieve you. Two dozen armed guards who stopped in their tracks when they saw me.
I met their eyes, each and every one of them. Some were afraid. Others angered. But that did not change the state of things.
I held up my hands, palms out, to show I was not going to hurt anyone.
You stepped in front of me. “Barsalai Shefali lives,” you said.
The guard captain stepped forward. Slack-jawed, he stared at me. With the butt of his spear, he moved my head this way and that. I suffered this, though I know you rankled at it. I did not particularly feel like being impaled that day.
“Oshiro-sun,” he said, despite my proper name being used not two moments before. “I saw your wound myself, three days ago. You have the blackblood. How is it you stand here before me? Have you risen?”
A voice in the back of my mind shouted that I should tear his heart out for questioning me. I closed my eyes long enough to banish it. My hand twitched. The guards fell into position as one.
I opened my eyes to find two dozen pikes leveled at my face.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t die.”
“Impossible!” shouted the guard captain. “I saw it myself—”
“And now you see us standing here, Captain, and hear her words,” you said. You stood between the two of us, your arms on your hips. “If Uemura-zul is here, then you may bring us to him. But you are not to restrain Barsalai in any way. Am I understood?”
“She’s a demon!” shouted one of the men. “Look at her eyes!”
“Sir! We have to kill her, she’s enspelled the Imperial Niece!”
I wanted so badly to roll my eyes. As if magic were real, beyond the simple things healers could do. As if we lived in the Age Long Gone, as if anyone had seen a fox woman or a phoenix or even a lion dog in centuries.
“She has not,” you said. “I will offer you any proof you like.”
You reached for your short sword and pricked your finger. A single ruby of blood flowed from the tip.
It looked delicious, like a cherry ready to be eaten and …
I am sorry, my love. My affliction is … it is like hearing your most base urges shouted back at you by an entire army. Things that would normally be fleeting distractions become horrible drones.
But if you have read this far, then you deserve to know what I thought, and when I thought it, and all the terrible things that came to mind. As I have wondered what went on behind your amber eyes, so you must’ve wondered what went on behind my green ones.
And so I say to you now that since my infection, blood has not looked the same. It has not tasted the same, either, on the few occasions I’ve been made to taste it. Gone is copper, gone is metal. Instead, it is sweet as the first fruits of spring.
I do not consume it. I will not reduce myself to such acts. But I have had to leave a room more than once.
At the time, this was not so familiar to me as it is now. I was sickened by myself. How could I think such a thing about you? About your blood?
What if this was how it started?
You smeared the blood in a lotus shape on your palm and named the Heavenly Family as you did. Your last petal was the Daughter’s, and you kissed that one when you were done with it.
“I swear it to be true in blood and spirit, and if I am wrong, may I wilt where I stand. Barsalai has not bewitched me.”
A moment of silence. I think they were waiting for you to wilt. Occasionally it has been known to happen with false oaths. Or at least it did, when the gods-in-flesh still roamed.
When you did not wilt, the party relaxed as much as they could when confronted with someone who is possibly a demon.
“Now, Captain,” you said, crossing one arm across your chest and gesturing with the bloody one. “Lead us to Uemura-zul. And do be sure to introduce us properly.”
The guard captain grit his teeth.
But he did lead us through the barracks; he did lead us out near the Wall. A large pavilion tent with Imperial flags stood not far away. Such tents have always puzzled me. The felt walls of a ger are more warm, more comfortable, than canvas could ever be. Why, then, do outlanders insist on canvas tents? A small tent is one thing. If only one or two people are traveling, a tent is preferable. But any tent large enough to fit four or more should be a ger.
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