And when O-Shizuka throws open the doors to the palace, when she gazes upon the expansive courtyard and gardens her ancestors built, she has eyes only for one.
Bare feet against stone.
First Bell rings inside the palace. The sky above is rich with stars, each one the soul of an honorable person, each one looking on in envy as the two lovers are reunited.
For, yes, there is Barsalyya Shefali, wearing her tiger-striped deel. Strapped to her back is the bow no man can fire. Her left eye is a steel peony covered in filmy black. Hanging from a cord around her neck is the laughing fox mask. An iridescent phoenix feather is tucked behind her ear, though the feather pales in comparison to the laughing green of Shefali’s right eye.
And, yes, she has changed a bit. Her full cheeks are hollowing out; her warm brown skin is turning charcoal gray. Pointed ears peek out beneath her now dull blond hair. And when she sees O-Shizuka, when she smiles wide as the Wall of Stone, her teeth are all pointed.
But it is Shefali all the same.
O-Shizuka runs into her wife’s embrace.
The rest can wait.
Read on for more in the world of
THE TIGER’S DAUGHTER
An early found remnant of the unfinished memoir by the Poet Prince, O-Itsuki
CREATURE OF BEAUTY, CREATURE OF TRUTH
If in twenty years I die, with Minami Shizuru at my side, then I wish for two things to be made known to the whole Empire.
First: I died happy.
Second: I tried to talk her out of it.
How easily she unravels me. In the fierce brilliance of her presence, even my finest poetry is the work of a lovesick novice. Worse! All these years I thought I wrote of brightly burning flame, when in truth I was writing only of the shadows cast by her absence, as yet unknown to me.
It is my great sorrow that I heard of Minami Shizuru for the first time during the Qorin war. Ah, but at what use my laments? The gods themselves cannot change the past to suit them; I am a fool for dwelling. There must be a reason I only heard of her then.
I can tell you exactly where I was the first time I heard her name—three hundred li from Fujino, nestled deep within the rolling hills of Hanjeon. My brother and I were on our way to Oshiro under order from my honored father. He, in all his Imperial pragmatism, knew the people would care for us more if they saw us at the front lines.
Iori could not contain his excitement. My brother, the Crown Prince, insisted on wearing his solid gold show armor and Dragon helm at all times. Briefings in the war tent were no exception.
There are lengths even I will not go to for aesthetic’s sake. That helmet blinded the wearer to anything except that which was directly ahead of him. Supposedly this was meant to be a metaphor—the Emperor looked only to the future.
And though there is a time and place for metaphor, war is not it. Of course, I should not have expected anything different from Iori, who spent the majority of his time sparring with anyone who would have him. He was so inflated with his own glory that he didn’t realize he won only because his opponents allowed him to.
I stood to the right of my brother whenever I could, so that I would not have to look on his excited face whenever the reports of battle came in.
On that day we were the highest ranking officers present, thanks to our prestigious birth and the fact that all real commanders had already been sent to Oshiro. General Kobayashi of the East had been among them, and so she’d sent us one of her captains—a man named Sato—to inform us of the situation and keep us from charging headlong into danger. He wore unadorned armor and the sword at his hip had come straight off the armory racks; the war mask hanging from its cord around his neck was a bog-standard wolf.
In short, Sato was the exact opposite of my brother, and I loved him for it.
A map lay spread out before us. A dozen or so figurines stood atop it, gathered in a half circle near Oshiro Castle, facing out toward the Wall of Stone. The invading Qorin forces were represented by little wooden cubes. There weren’t many of them, but they were positioned all over the province. Past the Wall of Stone there were far more cubes, clustered close together near the hole.
“Tell us the truth of it, old man! How will we turn the tide?” said Iori. He picked up the dragon figurine that represented us and used it to push the nearest cube—situated at the border with Hanjeon—off the table. “That is where their leader is, isn’t it? That is why we’re attacking from this angle?”
Captain Sato, to his credit, did not react to this foolish display. “Their leader is here,” he said, tapping a square much closer to the palace. “That was one of their smaller forces, your Imperial Highness.”
“How many months can we maintain the siege?” I asked. I knew Oshiro Genichi only in passing, but I knew his son Yuichi well. He’d come to Fujino to study law, at great cost to his father. He was no warrior. I wondered how he felt, surrounded on all sides by attackers who would not listen to any of his elegant arguments.
“Half a year, given current conditions, your Highness. Assuming General Watanabe’s emergency barricades hold and the bulk of their forces do not breach the Wall,” said Captain Sato. He did not address whether or not the Qorin had any more explosives. “However…”
He pushed one of the figurines north of the castle toward a cache of wooden cubes.
“Captain Araya is attempting to liberate the river and surrounding areas.”
“Then we must go north!” said Iori, banging on the table. “We will provide reinforcements to him, and break the siege of Oshiro!”
Captain Sato’s brow twitched. “Your Imperial Highness,” he said, “I’m certain you know far more people than I will meet in my entire life, among them Captain Araya’s father—but the Captain I speak of now is his daughter. Her unit is quite far removed from this one. To join with her we would have to march through much of Fuyutsuki; it is more efficient to flank the enemy from the south.”
Iori grimaced. Not yet on the battlefield and his pride was already wounded.
“Besides,” said Captain Sato, “the Minami family is with Captain Araya.”
The name instantly conjured clouds of legend in my mind. “The Minami family? Is there a fox woman among the Qorin?” Ikuhara Ryuji, one of my childhood mentors, wrote a fine poem about Minami Shiori’s famous rescue of First Emperor Yamai. Most people remembered it for its use of an all-new meter, but I remembered the confrontation at its climax. In all the Empire only Minami Shiori has ever resisted the charms of a fox woman.
“No one’s seen a fox woman in centuries,” sneered my brother.
It was a silly thing to say. Toy dragons should not question old soldiers. I regretted my words immediately.
But it was then that Captain Sato finally let out something like a laugh.
“Even if the enemy had a squad full of demons, I would not worry. Minami Shizuru would cut right through them.”
Yes—her. Captain Sato said her name as if he were a small boy bragging about the strength of his father. This hardened veteran spoke of her in such a way!
Hearing her name soon became a familiar song. Captain Araya broke the siege of Oshiro within the week, and all reports sang the praises of Minami Shizuru. A woman too poor to afford a proper horse—she rode a mule—had unseated expert Qorin riders. A woman who wore smelly armor at least two generations old continued to fight in spite of her injuries, fiercer than ever. A woman who had the unbelievable audacity to feed crows whenever she encountered them, thinking of it only as a good luck charm. Crows! Most refused to go near those ominous birds, and yet she often started her mornings seeking them out with her excess rations.
But my favorite thing about her was that she didn’t want to be there any more than I did. My father had forcibly enlisted her and all of her siblings. He’d called on their oath of fealty, knowing full well that they had nothing else to offer save their own service. A single soldier’s paltry salary would have been a blessing to them, let alone six.
How could they refuse?
Alas, half the other Minami children had already fallen. Eldest brother Goro was found facedown on the field with six arrows in his back. Masaru, the middle brother, sustained a nasty leg wound while riding in the cavalry, which soon soured his blood. Only her brother Keichi, youngest of the Minami boys, survived to accompany her that day.
If Shizuru was a beacon, Keichi was only a paper lantern. Lack of charisma was his plague. He lacked the heroic bearing that made Shizuru so popular, and lacked the braggadocio that made her controversial. No one could remember any details about him.
Indeed, when Shizuru asked who among the army would stay with her after Captain Araya had called for a retreat, Keichi was the first to answer. Everyone agreed on that, yet not a soul could remember what he said.
And yet I could not imagine vouching for Iori in such a way.
My own brother proved my misgivings during our first battle, a smallish skirmish two days after Captain Araya broke the siege. Again he insisted on that ostentatious armor, despite the arrows flying through the air and screams of the dying all around us.
One of those arrows landed in his side—and then it was his voice screaming, a memory from our childhood tuned to the present. Bright gold is no bulwark against sharp stone and wood.
It took five heartbeats for me to realize anything had gone wrong. I had heard the sound, the wet thunk next to me, but I did not really believe we could be hurt, not until I saw Iori swaying in his saddle.
My mouth went dry.
We were in the center of a storm, the two of us—thundering hooves, whistling arrows cracking against shields, swords crashing against armor. None of this was real. None of it could be. I was the Poet Prince, second to the crown, playing war games with my brother.
Iori, wan and glassy-eyed, rivers of red spilling from his veins over the famed Imperial Gold.
I must be Minami Keichi, I thought, though he is no Shizuru.
And so I rode to him, and I pulled him onto my saddle, and I broke off the arrow shaft with my bare hands. Then I wrapped his arms around me as best I could and galloped back to camp.
I will remember, always, the fallen in my path. Men and women I’d sat with around a fire now lay at my feet gasping for breath. More than one grabbed at my horse as I ran past, or shouted for me to stop. Some rasped my name.
There is nothing—nothing—so haunting as the look in a dying man’s eyes when he realizes you are not going to save him; when he realizes you will not even give him the dignity of his final drink of water. Here he has fallen. Without eight coins for the Mother, here he will stay, his spirit forever bound to the field of rot. How many centuries would it be before someone found his forsaken bones and gave him the proper rites?
By the time I reached the surgeon’s tent I was trembling like the last leaf of spring in autumn. As soon as the surgeons took my brother away, I emptied my stomach.
And that was the first battle. There were two more before we reached the front, but my brother’s injury precluded him from fighting. Iori spent those weeks recovering.
I do not think it’s shameful of me to say I was too afraid to return to the front lines. I was not born to be a soldier. Instead, I spent my time at my brother’s side, bleeding out my fears onto whatever scraps of paper I could find. Mind—it was not good writing. But I was trying, at least.
“Why did we get stuck with these cowards?” Iori complained. “If we had the Minami woman with us, we’d already be at the White Palace.”
Her name sounded wrong on his tongue, as if it were a foreign word he’d not yet mastered and not the name of the Empire’s oldest vassal family.
“And if you were Yusuke the Brawler, you could do it yourself. The Gods have their plan, Iori; we are here and she is elsewhere, doing important work.”
He glared at me over his shoulder. Iori and I both have amber-colored eyes, but his are darker—meant for glaring and sneering. “We are the princes of the whole Empire. What could be more important than doing our bidding?”
I could not hide my frustration with him. “We may be princes, but she is the Queen of Crows.”
Inspiration struck me as the arrow had struck Iori. Though I was seated I staggered, swaying under the weight of this new idea—the image of Minami Shizuru walking in the Mother’s shadow, a crown of black feathers on her proud brow. My hand began writing though the lines were not yet fully formed in my mind. For the first time in what felt like an eternity I was alight with passion.
This, I thought, was going to be different from anything I’d written before. These lines would be spare and unflinching. Instead of toying with meter as I so often did, here I would pray at its altar; instead of dwelling on the beauty of nature, I would turn my lens toward the frantic chaos of war—
And the woman who cut through it the way her sword cut through flesh.
Iori, of course, did not share my vision.
“I don’t know why I bother talking to you about anything important,” he said.
I paid him no mind. The poem was already forming. Within it I would find my solace, my comfort. Even if the Qorin pillaged this camp, then so long as this poem survived, I would live on.
Two weeks after that last battle—the very day I finished the first full version of the poem—we received word that the war was over. Oshiro Yuichi—son of Genichi and future lord of the province—was to be given in marriage to the Qorin warleader Burqila. Bringing Oshiro and the steppes together in such a way would help smooth relations, was the thinking, and no one could say Yuichi was an unsuitable husband. Even then he was known for his essays on legal matters; more than once he’d been called on to tutor my brother. Who could reject a lord, a scholar, and a friend to the crown? By Hokkaran standards, Burqila’s marriage was enviable indeed.
But she would, of course, have to pay a price for it. No woman could be both the Lady of Oshiro and the Grand Kharsa. Thus, she would renounce the latter title. All of the Qorin remaining in Oshiro would return to the steppes within a week. Her firstborn child would be born in the Empire, to be raised by Oshiro Yuichi—yet there was a mutual promise in that arrangement at least. After all, just as no Qorin would dare to attack a child of Burqila Alshara, no Hokkaran child would dare to attack their own mother. For the next three generations, all of Burqila’s lineage would be both Qorin and Hokkaran for all rights and purposes and thus free from Hokkaro’s conquering grasp.
It was a wise deal on both accounts—but especially on Burqila Alshara’s. That was the trick of it, the trick of her—she was as canny as any courtier. If Qorin was her first language, and Hokkaran her second, then negotiation was surely her third. This was the woman who somehow persuaded the Merchant-Prince of Sur-Shar to provide her with wagons full of Dragon’s Fire; this was the woman who established a system of messengers much faster than our own; this was the woman who sought out engineers as eagerly as she sought out soldiers. She knew precisely what she was doing, and this deal was emblematic of her forward-thinking nature. Burqila knew the limits of her people, and could read the currents of war. My father was going to throw army after army at her, and she had only three thousand within the Wall. Better to surrender now than risk losing so many.
And so as her people returned to the steppes, she stayed behind in Oshiro with her new husband—a man she did not know and certainly did not care for. Still, it was a fate she accepted without reservation, so long as her people were safe. Anything to keep the peace.
But it was an uneasy peace, at best. Many of the returning soldiers felt there was unfinished business between them and the Qorin—debts that could only be paid in blood. Though no one called for an invasion of the steppes, they found other ways to release their tension.
While I was sitting in a teahouse in the city I myself witnessed the end result: five former soldiers came over to a darker-skinned man and spat out all sorts of vitriol. As far as they were concerned he was spying for the enemy, his mother was a horse, and he needed to return to his ow
n country. Now, this man wore Hokkaran clothes, and he was drinking Hokkaran tea in the Hokkaran capital. He had brown eyes, not green; dark hair, not light. In short there was nothing Qorin about him except for the color of his skin.
But that was enough for these men.
The man for the most part ignored his harassers. He sat by his table with a young woman in Xianese clothing. She squirmed in her seat, leaning over every so often and whispering to him.
The moment one of the soldiers grabbed him I knew I couldn’t just sit idly by. I commanded my bodyguard to break up the fight—but to my horror half the teahouse was in support of the soldiers. The only solution was to shut the whole thing down until the city guard picked up the rowdy soldiers. I stayed the whole time. If I was present—and all those involved knew I was present—then the situation would not escalate again to the physical.
But there are many ways to hurt a person, and though I endeavor to do the best I can, I am only one man—and a far removed one, at that. What did I know, really, about the sort of struggle displaced Qorin were going through? I’d never gone hungry a day in my life. Few people so much as disliked me. How could I know?
More importantly—how could I help?
I attempted to bring the issue to my father’s attention, but it was no use. Any Qorin blood made Hokkaro weaker in his eyes. My brother agreed with him. It was no use arguing with them.
And so I decided I did not need them. My poetry has won me friends in many circles. I called upon those connections, then, forming a covert network within Fujino. There were roughly three hundred Qorin within the province per the last census. A large number, certainly, but only a small percentage of Fujino’s many-thousand residents. We would only need to cast a small net.
Lawyers were our first targets. Whenever a Qorin—or someone mistaken for one—was arrested on trumped-up charges, an exceptionally expensive attorney would materialize out of thin air to defend them. Sometimes all those allegations fell away the moment our lawyers turned up. Sometimes they didn’t. Either way, our clients had the best defense I could afford.
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