The Moonburner Cycle

by Claire Luana

  “Your Majesty…”

  Kai had stopped listening, intent on her own thoughts. She sorted through the discussion she had half heard. Master Vita had asked what they should do. Another pointed look. Perhaps…she could exploit her knowledge without having to share it. The situation was growing more dire by the day, and if she was infected…

  “I don’t want to face the possibility of the gods turning against us, but I don’t think we can ignore it anymore,” Kai said. “Master Vita, find every book in the library that tells you anything about Tsuki, Taiyo, the formation of the world, the origin of the burners, or anything even close to those topics. Bring me the most interesting to keep me busy until this quarantine business blows over. Look through the rest. Enlist the help of some novices if you must; I’m sure Nanase can spare them. Let’s educate ourselves as much as we can and consider all possibilities.”

  This seemed to please her council. They all settled back in their chairs, relaxing slightly.

  “That’s all for now,” Kai said. “Everyone has their orders. Unless anyone has an issue to raise?”

  “I do,” Chiya said, almost apologetically.

  “What?” Kai asked, her mouth turning dry. Chiya? Apologetic?

  “What is the succession plan if you…pass away…of spotted fever?”

  Hanae tsked, crossing her arms with a huff.

  Chiya’s words hit her like a punch in the gut. It wasn’t a tactful question, but it was a fair one. Kai hadn’t invited Chiya to join the council for her tact. A ruler needed brutal honesty sometimes.

  “I don’t know,” Kai admitted. “There is no heir to the Shigetsu line. I don’t know who would be next in line for the throne.”

  “I can look into the lineage to see if there is a cousin or aunt somewhere who could serve,” Master Vita said.

  “Please,” Kai said. “And what happens if we can’t find that person?”

  “I don’t think there is a protocol for that. If…the worst were to happen,” Hanae said, glaring at Chiya, “the best chance of avoiding a fight over the throne would be for you to announce your successor and make sure your choice has the backing of the citadel and as many others as we could muster.”

  “Bring me candidates then,” Kai said. “To the next meeting.”

  Her council nodded grimly in agreement.

  Nothing like planning your own funeral, Kai thought.

  Kai strode from the council chamber to the hospital ward, Quitsu flanking her like a silver shadow. They took the back way, trying to avoid any of her friends or subjects. As she exited an alley across from the hospital ward, her vision swam for a moment, and the earth seemed to tilt sideways. She placed a steadying hand against the stone of the building. The feeling passed.

  “Quitsu,” Kai said. “I don’t feel so good.”

  Her seishen was standing stock still, all four paws planted firmly on the ground, staring at the cobblestones below him. “I don’t either.”

  “You can get sick?” Kai asked.

  “I didn’t think so,” he admitted.

  “Hospital ward. Now.”

  Kai’s heart raced and her vision blurred as she continued across the cobblestoned courtyard. A wave of heat rushed through her body, a flush of fever that left her panting. She staggered against the door of the hospital ward, opening it and nearly falling inside. The blood was rushing to her ears, a raging ocean inside her head.

  The nurses hurried to her side but she shooed them away.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said, her voice sounding strange and hoarse. “Spotted fever. Quarantine.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Hiro sat in an oversized velvet armchair in front of the empty fireplace. It was too hot for a fire. Hiro’s room at the citadel faced the east, so while he was greeted by the sun’s golden rays each morning, the room heated up like a greenhouse, too hot by midday to continue to sleep. The thick curtains that hung to black out the sun helped a little, but he had never fully adjusted to the upside-down Miinan schedule, where day was night and night was day. He was perpetually groggy.

  Hiro turned a ring over and over, worrying it with his fingers. It was made of two bands of silver and gold, twined together and studded with tiny diamonds.

  “You keep playing with that ring and you’ll wear it down to nothing,” said his seishen, Ryu, in a deep baritone rumble. Ryu sprawled on the floor, his pink tongue lolling out of his golden lion muzzle.

  Hiro leaned forward, resting his head in his hands. “Why did she have to go into that house? Why did I let her? She worries about everyone’s safety but her own,” he said. “And the timing! The timing could not be worse.”

  Hiro peeled himself off the chair, stalking to the window, unable to contain the nervous energy pinging about inside him. “I had just firmed up my arrangement with the biwa player… The florist was all prepped to decorate the barge tomorrow, and the chef… It would have been the best food either of us had ever tasted. It would have been perfect.”

  He looked at the ring in his hand, curling his fist around it. “She’s been so worried lately, so busy…She deserved something special when I asked her to marry me.”

  Ryu sat up from his position on the floor, peering at Hiro with imperious golden eyes.

  “What?” Hiro said. “Do you think I’m being an ass because Kai is probably dying and I’m complaining about how my proposal got ruined?”

  Ryu just blinked.

  Hiro threw up his hands. “I know! I am being an ass. No need for you to rub it in. But Kai practically slammed the door to her council chamber in my face and there’s nothing for me to do but sit here and worry.”

  “So you’d rather act like an ass,” Ryu said.

  “It does occupy the mind,” Hiro said wryly. “And another thing. Now if I propose, she’ll think I did it because I’m afraid she’s going to die! What’s romantic about that?”

  “She’s not going to die,” Ryu said softly.

  Panic seized him, wrapping his chest in a vise grip. “What if she does?” Hiro thumped down into the chair, his face ashen. “I can’t lose her.”

  “You won’t,” Ryu said. “You don’t even know if she was infected.”

  Images of Kai flashed through Hiro’s mind. There were bright brilliant memories there. Dancing under the flickering sparkbugs at the Longest Night Festival. The rice pudding fight that had gotten them banned from the kitchens for a week. Standing shivering and wet under the waterfall below the citadel, his limbs freezing, but his core warmed by the heat of Kai’s kiss.

  There weren’t enough happy memories though, not nearly enough. Not as many as Kai deserved. There were too many memories of her face lined with weariness as some servant reported the next piece of bad news, dark smudges under her eyes from the worry and bad dreams that kept her awake. Kai poring through piles of books in the library, desperately searching for a way to fix the latest disaster. Pretending not to notice her quickly-brushed-aside tears after some cruel Miinan shouted obscenities at her while she passed by. The sorrow Kai had seen since he had known her far outstripped the happy times, yet still she bristled with optimism, wore it like armor. There had to be more happiness, more joy, more love in store for her. For them. Anything else wasn’t right. Surely, the gods wouldn’t be so cruel.

  “She won’t die,” Hiro whispered. “She’s the strongest woman I know. This will pass by and we’ll look back and laugh at how worried we were. And then I’ll ask her to marry me the right way.”

  A knock sounded on his door and Hiro flew to his feet. “Come in,” he said.

  The door opened to reveal Hanae. The look on her face was grave. “You had better come with me.”

  Hiro watched helplessly as Kai thrashed in her bed. Her sheets were drenched with sweat, and she looked as pale as a corpse. She twitched, moaning and holding her hands up to fend off some invisible foe. “No…Tsuki…stop.” The words wrenched from Kai’s lips were laced with terror.

  Kai had been moaning and screaming Tsuki’s n
ame for hours now, unnerving everyone in the room.

  Quitsu lay on a bed next to Kai, limp and quiet. Though no one would admit it, the fact that the disease was harming Quitsu was almost more worrisome than its impact on Kai. No one had heard of a seishen getting sick, even if its burner did. Certainly, the burner and seishen were linked, but even the most experienced moonburner healers hadn’t seen anything like this before. It was a disturbing omen.

  Hiro had sat by Kai’s bedside for the last day and night, watching the woman he loved grow sicker and sicker. The healers had tried everything. Herbs, tonics, poultices. Every form of healing the citadel moonburners knew. Master Vita was poring over his tomes, searching for any evidence of a previous outbreak of this type, grasping desperately for a clue to a cure. They had consulted the best of Kita’s healers through Nanase and General Ipan’s bowls. They had mobilized every resource they had to help Kai. Nothing had worked. Hiro had never felt so helpless.

  Hiro sat with Hanae on one side, Ryu on the other. Hiro stroked the thick fur of Ryu’s golden mane absentmindedly, his seishen’s solid presence comforting him. Hanae had matched Hiro’s vigil at Kai’s side with her own, refusing to leave her daughter. She had seemed annoyed by Hiro’s presence at first but had grudgingly come to accept that he had as much a claim to Kai’s bedside as she.

  “Have you tried praying?” Hanae asked softly, startling him. She hadn’t spoken in hours. He thought she might have dozed off.

  “Yes,” he admitted. “Though I don’t think I have enough faith in Taiyo to make much of a difference.”

  “Isn’t that the rub,” Hanae said. “You have to have faith in your faith. Hard thing sometimes.”

  “Have you prayed?” he asked.

  “I’ve thought about it a hundred times, but somehow it doesn’t feel right. She keeps screaming about Tsuki… It’s like she’s being tortured by her. Maybe it’s superstitious, but I don’t want to attract any more divine attention.”

  Kai whimpered again, moaning Tsuki’s name.

  “Whatever she’s dreaming, it doesn’t seem pleasant,” he admitted. “Is it always this bad?”

  Kai had admitted to him that she often had trouble sleeping, even had nightmares on occasion, but she had brushed it off as stress and worry.

  “No,” Hanae said, frowning. “At least, I don’t think so.”

  “Do you really think…the gods caused this? That Tsuki is trying to destroy our alliance?”

  Hanae looked at him thoughtfully, her perfectly-smooth doll’s face disguising her age and wisdom. “Yes,” she finally said.

  “Yes?” he repeated, his heart sinking.

  “I think it’s time we face it. This summer is not natural. Neither is this disease. The sooner we face reality, the sooner we can figure out how to fight.”

  “How do we fight a war against the gods?” Hiro wondered, more to himself than Hanae.

  “I don’t know,” Hanae admitted. “But we’d better figure out fast. Because the opening blows have been thrown. And they’re not holding back.”

  It was as if the goddess herself heard Hanae’s words.

  Kai spasmed in her bed, beginning to shake and convulse. A nurse with thick gloves hurried to Kai’s side, trying to hold her down against the worst of her convulsions.

  Hiro and Hanae stood, watching helplessly. Hiro grasped the ring in his pocket, squeezing it so tightly that he thought he might crush the metal.

  Quitsu too started to shake, his furry body twitching angrily.

  Hiro and Hanae looked at each other sharply. That was new.

  Hiro grasped desperately for a solution in his mind. Think. Think. Kai would have known what to do. She would have figured it out. She didn’t give a damn about protecting herself, but she would never forgive him if he let anything happen to Quitsu. He thought of her face on the battlefield after Quitsu had been struck by lightning. Wild and fearsome, like an animal. She had saved Quitsu though, had brought the spark of life back into his body after it had gone.

  “Idiot!” he hissed, smacking himself on the forehead. “Why didn’t I think of it before?”

  “What?” Hanae asked, startled by his outburst.

  “Just keep her alive! I have to go get something!”

  Hiro sprinted through the corridors and courtyards of the citadel, out the hospital ward and across to the queen’s tower. How could he have been so blind? When Quitsu had lay dying, he and Kai had used the solar crown to blend their moon and sunburning into something new, a white-hot power unlike any he had experienced. Maybe the same could save Kai. Since that day, they had tested the power a few times, explored the bounds of their link. They couldn’t burn the white light just by linking the two of them. They needed some sort of conduit, like the crown.

  He dashed into the queen’s tower and around a corner, screeching to a halt to head up the stairs to Kai’s chamber. He almost ran headfirst into Emi coming out of another room in the hallway.

  “Get to the hospital ward,” he instructed Emi, grasping her by the shoulders.

  “What? Why?” she asked, her dark eyes wide against the scarred half of her face.

  “No time to explain,” he said. “Hurry!” He dashed past her, taking the stairs up to Kai’s chamber two by two. He burst through the door and skidded to a stop before Kai’s armoire. He threw open the dark wood double doors and opened the drawer that he knew contained the lunar crown. Kai had given the solar crown back to his father, King Ozora, as a sign of good faith after their peace accord had been signed. But the lunar crown had the same mysterious ability to access both sun and moonlight. It should work.

  Crown in hand, Hiro ran back to the hospital ward, trying not to think of what a long shot this plan was. He hoped the crown was charged… Kai had explained that it needed a full day and night outside to fill with sun and moonlight. She must have charged it, he thought. Kai was practical like that, methodical. She thought of details he never would.

  As he made it back through the doors of the hospital ward, Hanae turned to meet his gaze, her bottom lip quivering. Emi’s face was ashen and her eyes brimmed with tears.

  Kai’s convulsions had grown more violent. Sweat poured down her face, drenching her clothing and her silver hair. She looked possessed.

  “They say she isn’t going to make it,” Emi said.

  “Not if I have anything to say about it,” Hiro said, grabbing Emi’s hand and pulling her forward.

  Hiro held up the crown to Emi. “We’re going to link and make the white light. Like Kai and I did at the Battle at the Gate. She saved Quitsu with it. Maybe…maybe we can recreate its healing effect.”

  Emi nodded, grasping one side of the crown with both hands. “It’s worth a try.”

  Hiro opened his qi, that part of his spirit that connected him to the sunlight and allowed him to burn its power into heat and light. He pulled in sunlight that was pooling through the hospital ward windows, filling his qi with it. Through the power of the crown, he linked with Emi, connecting his qi to her own. Yes. It was working in the same way it had for him and Kai so many months ago. Through his link with Emi, he could see the quicksilver moonlight stored in the crown beckoning him, pooling in a doorway opened by Emi’s spirit.

  Hiro wasn’t a strong healer, but he knew how burner healers worked. He had learned the rudiments of the art, how healers used heat to destroy infection, to mend wounds, to encourage the body’s own healing process. Hiro began to explore Kai’s physical body with tendrils of magic, looking for the sickness within her. Though her body was fevered, he couldn’t pinpoint the disease. Was he missing it? Where was the illness?

  But Hiro knew that there was more to a person, to a burner, than the physical body. He looked at Quitsu, Kai’s spirit animal, sick and dying beside her. Perhaps the illness wasn’t just physical.

  Hiro directed his and Emi’s energy to join with Kai’s own, to explore her qi, to lend it their strength. As soon as his energy touched Kai’s, he recoiled in shock. He and Emi exchanged
a wide-eyed look. Kai’s qi was much changed from the silvery fresh spirit he would have expected, that he had felt when he had linked with her in the past. Now, it was a mottled, withered, dry thing that he hardly recognized. No wonder they were losing her. Losing Quitsu. Would the white light be able to fix such a disease of the spirit? He didn’t know.

  Hiro pushed these thoughts aside and turned to the task at hand, weaving his sunlight through the crown’s moonlight. The energy combined in an explosion of pure white light, arcing from Hiro, Emi, and the crown to Kai. He squinted against the glare, ignoring the brilliance, instead focusing his efforts on pushing heat and energy into Kai’s qi, willing it to heal.

  And it did.

  Through their link, he could feel Emi’s elation mirroring his own. Wherever the white light touched, Kai’s spirit seemed to regenerate, cleansed and new. Her thrashing died down until she lay still on the bed.

  Hiro and Emi continued as long as they could, bathing Kai’s body and spirit in the radiant light. Finally, there was no more to give; the crown had run out of moonlight. They broke their link and Emi sighed heavily, stumbling slightly against his shoulder. He put his arm around her to hold her up. His own legs felt like rubber, and his head pounded. But Kai looked as good as new. Her color had returned, and her breathing was deep and even.

  “We did it,” he said.

  “Thank the goddess,” Emi said.

  No sooner had the words left Emi’s lips than Kai began quivering again. Her skin, having returned to a normal even tan color, began to fade, turning a sickly shade of gray once again. She spasmed like a rag doll and then fell still.