by S. C. Emmett
The mourner’s black hair held blue highlights and a single hairpin thrust into carefully coiled braids, the stick crowned with an irregular pebble wrapped with red silken thread. Neither ribbon nor string dangled small semiprecious beads or any other tiny bright adornment fetchingly from that pebble, for mourning did not admit any excess.
At least, not in that particular direction.
Komor Yala’s chin dropped over her folded hands. The hem of her unbleached dress fluttered, fingered by a hot, unsteady breeze. It was almost the long dry time of summer, but still, in the afternoons, the storms menaced. The lightning was more often than not dry, leaping from cloud to cloud instead of deigning to strike burgeoning earth. At least the harvest would be fine, or so the peasants cautiously hoped.
A bareheaded man in very fine leather half-armor waited at a respectful distance, his helm under his left arm, while the dragon carved upon his swordhilt peered balefully over his shoulder. He stayed motionless and patient, yet leashed tension vibrated in his broad shoulders and occasionally creaked in his boots when he shifted his weight.
For all that, Zakkar Kai did not speak, and if it irked him to wait on a woman’s prayers, he made no sign. The head general of Zhaon’s mighty armies had arrived straight from morning drill to accompany Crown Princess Mahara’s lone lady-in-waiting outside the city walls, and his red-black topknot was slightly disarranged from both helm and exertion.
Finally, it could be put off no longer. Komor Yala, her lips moving slightly, finished her prayers, and she brushed at her damp cheeks. She had swept the dimensions of a Khir pailai clean in front of Mahara’s wall, and took up the small broom again after another trio of bows. Her clear grey eyes, glittering feverishly, held sleepless smudges underneath, and her cheekbones stood out in stark curves.
She backed from the tomb’s august presence, pausing to bow again; when she turned, she found Zakkar Kai regarding her thoughtfully, his deep-set eyes gleaming and mouth relaxed. He offered his armored arm, still silent.
The absence of platitudes was one more thing to admire in such a man. Her brother would have liked him very much. A slow smolder and a hidden fire, that had been Komori Baiyan, but he had been struck down at Three Rivers, and Yala could not decide if he had likely faced Zakkar Kai upon that bloody field, or not.
She also could not decide how to feel about either prospect. It was not likely Kai would speak of such an event, even if he had noticed a particular Khir rider during the screaming morass of battle.
Yala placed her fingers in the crook of his right elbow, and the general matched his steps to hers. Finally, he spoke, but only the same mannerly phrase he used every other time he accompanied her upon this errand. “Shall we halt for tea upon our return voyage, Lady Yala?”
“I am hardly dressed for it,” she murmured, as she did every time. Near the entrance to this white stone courtyard, in the shade of a long-armed fringeleaf tree, her kaburei, Anh, leaned against the wall like a sleeping horse, leather-wrapped braids dangling past her round shoulders. “And your duties must be calling you, General.”
“They may call.” He never left his helm with his horse, as if he expected ambush even here. Or perhaps it was a soldier’s habit. “I am the one who decides the answer, though.”
A man could afford as much, of course. Yala’s temples ached. She made this trip daily; it was not yet a full moon-cycle since her princess’s last ride. Yala herself had attended her princess’s dressing upon that last day, grateful to be free of the dungeons.
Had she still been imprisoned, or had she not avoided a whipping, would Mahara still be alive?
“I am not dressed for it either,” Kai continued, levelly. “We make a strange pair.” He halted inside the fringeleaf’s shade as Anh yawned into alertness.
“Very.” Yala’s throat ached. The tears came at inopportune moments, and she wondered why she had not wept for Bai so. The grief of her brother’s passage to the Great Fields was still a steady ache, but Mahara… Oh, the sharp, piercing agony was approaching again, a silent house-cat stalking small vermin. Yala forced herself to breathe slowly, to keep her pace to a decorous glide.
“There is a cold-flask tied to my saddle,” Kai said, almost sharply, his intonation proper for commanding a kaburei. “Our lady grows pale.”
“I am well enough,” Yala began, but Anh bowed and hurried off down the long colonnade. It would take her time to reach the horses, but her mistress and the general would still be in sight.
Zakkar Kai was careful of Yala’s reputation, though it mattered little now. Nothing truly mattered, with her princess turned into ash and fragments of bone.
The general fixed his gaze forward as if upon parade. They walked through bars of sunlight and shade in silence, and Yala kept herself occupied in counting the columns, the numbers pushing away the black cloud seeking to fill her skull. When he halted between one step and the next, half turning to face her with a sharp military click of his boots, she did not look at him, studying instead the closest carven pillar.
So much room; Zhaon was a country of wastage and luxury, even with their dead.
Kai’s gaze was a weight upon her profile. “Yala.”
“Kai.” Her hand dropped to her side, hung uselessly. What now? Was he about to observe that he could not, after all, accompany her here every morning? He had been silent well past the point of politeness, today.
“I must eventually ride north.” His jaw tightened, and the breeze played with his topknot, teasing at strands. “The Emperor…”
No more needed to be said. “Of course,” she replied, colorlessly. Khir, hearing the news of the princess’s death, had reoccupied the border crossings and bridges. The entire court of Zhaon was alive with rumor, from the lowest kaburei to the princes themselves; no doubt even the Emperor heard the mutters upon his padded bench-throne high above the common streets. “He is your lord.”
“He is also my friend, and he is dying.” Kai did not glance over his shoulder to gauge who might be in earshot, but here among empty apartments eventually to be filled with only shades and incense, who would gossip?
“Yes.” The rai gave up its fruit for eating and next year’s crop, children died before their naming-days, men rode to war and women retreated to childbed, and every street was paved with thousands of smaller deaths—insects, birds, beasts of burden and cherished or useful pets.
Death had its bony fists wrapped about the world’s throat, and its grasp was final.
“I may speak to him before I leave, should I find opportunity.” Kai’s gaze was unwontedly heavy. “But not unless you tell me plainly whether or not I may hope.”
What was there to hope for, with Mahara gone? Yala blinked, and his features came into focus, swimming through the heavy water in her eyes. A single traitorous drop slipped free, tracing a cool phantom finger down her cheek.
She studied him afresh—long nose; deep eyes; the usual hint of a sardonic smile absent from full, almost cruel lips; mussed topknot. The heat-haze of a male used to healthy exertion tinged with a breath of leather enfolded her, without touching the chill streamlets coursing through her bones. “Should I ask you to be plainer in turn?”
“I’ve been exceedingly plain.” A faint ghost of a smile touched one corner of his mouth, but he continued. “I can offer you protection. I have estates; they are modest, but I could well acquire more.” The wad of pounded rai in his throat, meant to keep a man from choking on what he must do, bobbed as he swallowed. “And… there is much affection, Yala. Even if I am loathsome to a Khir lady.”
Was that what had held him back? She could not ask. “Loathsome is not the word I would use, General Zakkar. Even if my Zhaon is somewhat halting.”
“Your Zhaon is very musical, my lady.” The compliment was accompanied by a slight grimace, as if he expected her to bridle at it. “Dare I ask what word you would use?”
“Kind.” She thought for a moment. “And deadly, when you see the need.”
“Anoth
er strange pairing. Yala, will you marry me?”
Finally, he had said it directly. She could now answer I am still in mourning and be done. She could turn her shoulder and deliver the cut with the calm chill of a noblewoman well used to clothing a sharp edge in pretty syllables.
Instead, she watched his eyes, muddy like a half-Khir’s. His face was not sharp enough; he did not have mountain bones. Gossip spoke of some barbarian in his vanished bloodline, of a foundling taken up by a warlord who became Emperor.
His careful generalship—standing fast to bleed his enemy, breaking away to replenish his army and make his foe tire by chasing—had broken the back of Khir’s resistance, and the victory at Three Rivers had brought her princess to wasteful, perfumed Zhaon as a sacrifice. That Crown Prince Garan Takyeo had been kind to his foreign bride was beside the point. This terrible country had swallowed Mahara and her lady-in-waiting whole, and now Yala, bereft, was a pebble in the conqueror’s guts.
Another traitorous tear struggled free and followed its sister down her cheek.
Leather made a soft noise as Kai’s callused fingertips brushed the tear away. It was the first time a man other than her own brother had touched her thus, and Komor Yala almost swayed.
His was the hand that had wielded that dragon-hilted sword, cutting down many of Khir’s finest sons. It was the same hand that had sent the sword-point through an assassin in a darkened dry-garden upon a wedding night, defending Yala. That he had thought her the Crown Princess was beside the point as well; it was also Zakkar Kai who had brought her back to the palace after tracking her captors, who had definitely mistaken Yala for her princess.
How could she possibly put each event onto scales and find their measure? She was no merchant daughter, used to weighing.
“If I were free to answer,” she said slowly, “I would marry you, Zakkar Kai.” There was little point in dissembling. He was, she supposed, not the worst fate for a Khir noblewoman trapped in a southron court, and she—oh, it was useless to deny it, she rather… liked him.
The more he showed of the man behind his sword, the more she found him interesting and honorable, until she could not be sure her estimation of his actions was from their merit or her own feelings.
A high flush stood along his cheekbones, perhaps from morning drill or the heat. “But you are not?”
“I must write to my father.”
He nodded. “Of course. I will not speak to the Emperor until you have word.” His throat worked again, and he did not take his rough fingertips from her face. A strange heat, not at all like Zhaon’s sticky, hideously close summer, spilled from that touch down her aching neck, and somehow eased the terrible hole in her chest. “I will wait as long as I must.”
It was the warrior’s reply to the Moon Maiden. A smile crept to her lips, horrifying her. How could she, in the house of the dead, feel even the palest desire to laugh or seek comfort? “You are quite partial to Zhe Har, scholar-general.”
“Only some few of his works.” Kai still did not move, leaning over her in welcome shade, the rest of the world made hazy and insignificant by the mere fact of his presence.
Why had he not been born a Khir? Of course, he would have been dead at Three Rivers, or Komori Dasho—as he had told his daughter once—might have refused any suit for her hand. It did no good to wish, or to ask uncaring Heaven for any comfort. A single noblewoman’s grieving was less than a speck of dust under the grinding of great cart wheels as the world went upon its way.
He leaned forward still farther, and Yala felt a faint, dozing alarm.
But Zakkar Kai the terror of Zhaon’s enemies, stern in war and moderate in counsel, merely pressed his lips to her damp forehead before straightening and stepping back, leaving her oddly bereft. “Come.” He offered his arm again. “We must see you home, my lady.”
Home. If her father sent word quickly enough, she could plead filial duty and no doubt Crown Prince Takyeo would provide an escort to at least the border. She could be in Hai Komori’s dark, severe, familiar halls by the middle harvest, facing her father’s disappointment.
Yala bowed her head and once more took Zakkar Kai’s arm. Her head was full of a rushing, whirling noise, but she held grimly to her task, placing one foot before the other on bruising, sun-scorched stone.
After all, she had been sent to protect her princess, and had failed.
if you enjoyed
THE THRONE OF THE FIVE WINDS
look out for
THE RAGE OF DRAGONS
The Burning: Book One
by
Evan Winter
The Omehi people have been fighting an unwinnable fight for almost two hundred years. Their society has been built around war and only war. The lucky ones are born gifted. One in every two thousand women has the power to call down dragons. One in every hundred men is able to magically transform himself into a bigger, stronger, faster killing machine.
Everyone else is fodder, destined to fight and die in the endless war.
Young, giftless Tau knows all this, but he has a plan of escape. He’s going to get himself injured, get out early, and settle down to marriage, children, and land. Only, he doesn’t get the chance.
Those closest to him are brutally murdered, and his grief swiftly turns to anger. Fixated on revenge, Tau dedicates himself to an unthinkable path. He’ll become the greatest swordsman to ever live, a man willing to die a hundred thousand times for the chance to kill the three who betrayed him.
PROLOGUE
LANDFALL
Queen Taifa stood at the bow of Targon, her beached warship, and looked out at the massacre on the sands. Her other ships were empty. The fighting men and women of the Chosen were already onshore, were already killing and dying. Their screams, not so different from the cries of those they fought, washed over her in waves.
She looked to the sun. It burned high overhead and the killing would not stop until well past nightfall, which meant too many more would die. She heard footsteps on the deck behind her and tried to take comfort in the sounds of Tsiory’s gait.
“My queen,” he said.
Taifa nodded, permitting him to speak, but did not turn away from the slaughter on the shore. If this was to be the end of her people, she would bear witness. She could do that much.
“We cannot hold the beach,” he told her. “We have to retreat to the ships. We have to relaunch them.”
“No, I won’t go back on the water. The rest of the fleet will be here soon.”
“Families, children, the old and infirm. Not fighters. Not Gifted.”
Taifa hadn’t turned. She couldn’t face him, not yet. “It’s beautiful here,” she told him. “Hotter than Osonte, but beautiful. Look.” She pointed to the mountains in the distance. “We landed on a peninsula bordered and bisected by mountains. It’s defensible, arable. We could make a home here. Couldn’t we? A home for my people.”
She faced him. His presence comforted her. Champion Tsiory, so strong and loyal. He made her feel safe, loved. She wished she could do the same for him.
His brows were knitted and sweat beaded on his shaved head. He had been near the front lines, fighting. She hated that, but he was her champion and she could not ask him to stay with her on a beached ship while her people, his soldiers, died.
He shifted and made to speak. She didn’t want to hear it. No more reports, no more talk of the strange gifts these savages wielded against her kind.
“The Malawa arrived a few sun spans ago,” she told him. “My old nursemaid was on board. She went to the Goddess before it made ground.”
“Sanura’s gone? My queen… I’m so—”
“Do you remember how she’d tell the story of the dog that bit me when I was a child?”
“I remember hearing you bit it back and wouldn’t let go. Sanura had to call the Queen’s Guard to pull you off the poor thing.”
Taifa turned back to the beach, filled with the dead and dying in their thousands. “Sanura went to the Goddess on t
hat ship, never knowing we found land, never knowing we escaped the Cull. They couldn’t even burn her properly.” The battle seemed louder. “I won’t go back on the water.”
“Then we die on this beach.”
The moment had arrived. She wished she had the courage to face him for it. “The Gifted, the ones with the forward scouts, sent word. They found the rage.” Taifa pointed to the horizon, past the slaughter, steeling herself. “They’re nested in the Central Mountains, the ones dividing the peninsula, and one of the dragons has just given birth. There is a youngling and I will form a coterie.”
“No,” he said. “Not this. Taifa…”
She could hear his desperation. She would not let it sway her.
“The savages, how can we make peace if we do this to them?” Tsiory said, but the argument wasn’t enough to change her mind, and he must have sensed that. “We were only to follow them,” he said. “If we use the dragons, we’ll destroy this land. If we use the dragons, the Cull will find us.”
That sent a chill through her. Taifa was desperate to forget what they’d run from and aware that, could she live a thousand cycles, she never would. “Can you hold this land for me, my champion?” she asked, hating herself for making this seem his fault, his shortcoming.
“I cannot.”
“Then,” she said, turning to him, “the dragons will.”
Tsiory wouldn’t meet her eyes. That was how much she’d hurt him, how much she’d disappointed him. “Only for a little while,” she said, trying to bring him back to her. “Too little for the Cull to notice and just long enough to survive.”
“Taifa—”
“A short while.” She reached up and touched his face. “I swear it on my love for you.” She needed him and felt fragile enough to break, but she was determined to see her people safe first. “Can you give us enough time for the coterie to do their work?”
