Shefali rides at the forefront. Her fingers are stiff around her saddle horn; she hopes that she will not have to draw her bow today. As the wind whistles through the pass, she flares her nostrils and breathes deep.
When Shefali was twelve, her uncle Ganzorig forgot to empty the pot before they broke camp. For three days, they wandered. It was the middle of summer, and so it did not take long for mold and rot to stake their claim on what was once a splendid stew. By the time they opened the pot back up, the smell was so rank, Temurin threw up on the spot. She swore the pot would never be clean again—it was better to throw the whole thing away.
“Steel won’t hold a scent, you idiot,” Burqila said in Otgar’s voice. “Wash it out, and it’ll be fine.”
Temurin, in spite of the wisdom of her years, was skeptical. Yet she was the one who threw up in the pot and so she was the one tasked with cleaning it. On her hands and knees, with wads and wads of old felt, she scrubbed away. The pot was free of its tyrannical oppressors—but the smell lingered in the air for the rest of the day.
The wind here is like that pot. Shefali can smell neither blackbloods nor demons, but the scent of corruption remains. Perhaps it is the bodies of the beetles—some half-crushed beneath cannonballs, some pierced through—that produce it; perhaps it is their proximity to the Traitor’s Lands. What soil remains beneath their feet is dry as bone. The trees clinging to life by the rocks more closely resemble errant brushstrokes than anything alive—and there’s no livestock to speak of, either.
It is the lack of livestock that most worries her. Those who go where goats will not are foolish indeed.
Yet worry alone cannot stop her; she must continue. Farther and farther between the mountains ride the five scouts. As a tapestry left out in the sun goes paler and paler, so, too, do the mountains and the earth, the farther along they go. By the time they’ve traveled five li, their deels, their horses, the brown of their skin and the green of their eyes—these are the only colors in a world of gray.
After the first hour, Shefali sends back the other four riders. It’s safe enough for the army to follow, after all, though she means to find the exact point of entry. She and Temurin are the only two remaining.
Eight years ago, she would have pressed on alone. Now, Barsalai is wise enough to know it is good to have company, and she trusts Temurin’s sword more than her own right arm.
Two hours of riding with no sign of the enemy, save their rotting bodies; two hours of riding with no sound save those caused by the horses. To wander into an inkwash painting—that is what it is to scout out the pass.
At last, the air grows thicker; their ears pop as they begin their descent. The scent of flowers overpowers the rot of their surroundings. Her gray comes to a stop just as a thick fog rises up before them.
Shefali thinks to herself: Here.
A deep breath. The fog rushes down her throat and into her lungs. She can taste it—the rot, the salt water, the ashes of a broken promise.
Him.
“I don’t trust this, Barsalai,” Temurin says. Her horse stomps his hooves, shakes his head. Shefali does not comfort the poor gelding—how could she? They are driving him straight into the Traitor’s clutches.
“You shouldn’t,” Shefali answers. “String your bow.”
Temurin sucks her teeth. “Can’t shoot what I can’t see,” she answers.
“Then stay close,” Shefali says. “We have to go through it.”
Temurin curses. Shefali wishes something as simple as thought would bring her any relief. She tries it, all the same, but it does nothing for her pain and less for her fear.
For she is afraid then, as the fog grows thick around them. Shizuka spoke of demonic marionettes, of possession, of brutal slaughters in fog just like this. Fear is a stern parent.
Not that Shefali will let her fear rule her. Even fear is no match for Burqila Alshara—and Shefali spent sixteen years disobeying her mother.
I’ll give you a sweet if you go ahead, she says to her gray.
There aren’t enough sweets in the world, says the gray, but I suppose you’re going to hop off and go on your own if I refuse.
Beneath her mask, Shefali smirks. She says nothing, because there is no need for words.
Her horse sighs—but she goes on. Shefali holds on with her thighs, reaching for her bow with her stiff right hand. Normally she holds it with the left and strings it with the right. Today, it is her left side that is behaving; today, she awkwardly braces the bow against her body to get it strung.
But it is strung, the bow that no man can fire, and the arrows are within easy enough reach. The prospect of drawing with her right and nocking with her left doesn’t excite her, but the necessary does not need to be exciting.
Deeper and deeper they go. The silence wraps about their throats and squeezes. Around them, nothing but the gray, nothing but the fog—they have stopped seeing even the bodies of the fallen.
“Barsalai,” Temurin calls.
Shefali grunts. There is something prickling at her nose, something like the rot in an unwashed cauldron.
“Barsalai, how much farther do we have to go alone?”
Only a little, Shefali wants to answer, for the fog is about to break. With her free hand, she holds out a skin of kumaq to Temurin—one of the ones she has spent her nights working with. Frost rimes the skin even now.
“If there’s trouble,” Shefali says.
Temurin sniffs. Her brows come together, but she takes the skin all the same.
Together, they continue.
Up ahead there are shades of green, of violet, of red. The fog is as a veil before them—Shefali cannot make out what is truly behind it. From reading Sakura’s letters, she’s got some idea: a bounteous, scintillating land of lies.
Those lies must be what’s rankling her nose.
“When we cross,” she says, “don’t trust your eyes.”
“Never have,” says Temurin.
TEMURIN, THE IRON WOMAN
ONE
So rarely does one get the chance to outrace a god—not that Temurin pays any mind to that. The god follows, close behind, as Temurin lets her lungs sing a war cry. It’s been years, she thinks, since she’s made a sound like that. Temurin is the first to pierce the veil.
It had always scared the Hokkarans; maybe it will scare the demons, too.
But the true purpose of the Qorin war cry is to lend its bravery to those who hear its call and join. So it is with this: as Temurin’s voice echoes through the valley, Barsalai kicks her own horse into a quicker gallop.
The sky is bruise-violet, the sun an angry wound; the brilliant flowers an assault on her eyes.
It strikes her as the work of a child given a basket full of exotic beads and told to make whatever they like.
A river cuts across the landscape, ending just to the right of the two Qorin. In the face of all logic, it flows directly into the fog. Something tells Temurin this won’t be anything like the Rokhon—she does not look on it. That much water’s never sat well with her, anyway. You could trust the Rokhon—you cannot trust anything west of the wall.
She directs her gaze to the horizon instead. There was supposed to be some sort of castle where the Traitor was keeping all of the other Qorin, from what Barsalai had said. It boils her blood just to think on it. Years ago—when the girls were young—she’d gone with Burqila to the Jade Palace. The ceiling in that place was painted to look like the sky. She wonders if the ceiling in that terrible demonic palace is the same—if the Qorin trapped within have any idea what the sky even looks like anymore.
She can see the castle. Temurin’s never liked Hokkaran castles, with their roofs stacked on one another like autumn leaves, but even Fujino pales in comparison with this place. With Iwa. If her eyes do not betray her they are hundreds of li away from it, and yet she can count its roofs from here if she wanted to. Seventy-four adorn each of the six towers of Iwa.
Perfectly spaced, perfectly arranged—it is a won
der to behold.
But Temurin does not go far into this world, this creation. No more than ten minutes of riding into the strange world, she sees the child.
Eight, perhaps, or maybe a little older. Difficult to tell—he is tallish, but his face is younger than the rest of him, his cheeks still round and full. In any other instance she might find him adorable, for there’s something endearing about how perfectly round his face is, or the dimples in his cheeks when he smiles.
But she does not find him adorable in this instance.
For he is a Qorin boy beyond the Wall, a Qorin boy with his white hair cropped at the pate, a Qorin boy in Hokkaran robes, a Qorin boy who speaks with a man’s voice. Worse: when that voice—and how awful it is, how deep and echoing!—speaks, it is in Hokkaran.
A language she has never learned.
Temurin grips her bow. She notches an arrow and yet cannot bring herself to draw the string all the way back, not when faced with a child. What was he saying? What did he mean? She knows from his blackening eyes, from the sharp teeth she now sees within that smile, that this is no mere child. She knows this is the Enemy.
Temurin Baterdene Enkhjaryya rode to war at Burqila’s side when she was twenty-two. By then she’d already lost all of her brothers, her father, and three aunts to the blackblood. She had seen some of them die with her own two eyes: she knew the suffering it brought, knew how it twisted the body into a perverse parody of what it once was.
But she had never seen the blackblood affect a child.
And being confronted by one now … she cannot bring herself to fire.
Even when the child splits down the middle into a giant mouth and launches itself at her.
As it flies through the air Temurin raises her arms and thinks to herself: this is what I get for riding so far ahead of the others. Her body braces for pain; her mind braces for the possibility that she may die here.
But in the end it does not come. She stays with her arms up for what feels an eternity, and when she lowers them there is nothing before her except flowers too bright for the season and a river that should not exist.
There is no boy.
Temurin’s tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth. Her teeth are clamped so tight together that it would take five men to pry her jaws apart. Fear … she is not used to fear.
It was there only a moment ago.
When Barsalai comes riding up behind, Temurin tries to open her mouth to say something. She cannot. How is she to say it? There was a demon here and then there was not—and worse, she wasn’t even able to fire upon it.
What sort of bodyguard, what sort of company is she?
Temurin swallows. As Barsalai studies her she feels uncomfortably as if she’s being appraised, as if Barsalai can read her thoughts. The wind through the flowers sounds too much like the wind through the silver steppes; she wants to plug her ears and run from this place.
“Go and find the others,” Shefali says.
Temurin tilts her head. “And you?”
“Don’t worry about me,” Shefali says. “Go. The kumaq will keep you safe.”
She does not stop to explain how it will do that. If she does, there might be questions, and questions might shake her faith in her own abilities. Without faith, her abilities are nothing.
Temurin’s brows come together. The corner of her mouth rises up in a smirk. She waves a finger at Shefali. “You’re telling, not asking,” she says. “Wherever you went, Barsalai, it made you a better leader.”
“Go,” she repeats.
Temurin gives her horse a kick. Together, they turn; together, they go into the fog.
* * *
TWO HOURS LATER, Temurin finds the army. From three li away, she can see them: thousands of horses and the proud Qorin atop them; the swaying banners and feathers of the Phoenix Guard making up the rear. She can hear them, too, in the perfect silence of the pass: the clattering of their armor, the thunder of their hooves and footsteps. The Qorin are singing an old war song—and the Phoenix Guard sing along to the melody, though they do not know the words.
She returns, as she has for the past thirty years, to Burqila Alshara. It is easy enough to find her—there is no other woman in the world who wears a war mask of her own face, no other woman in the world who rides a liver mare like hers. This is to say nothing of Burqila’s bearing: she holds herself at all times as if she were listening to the groveling of her enemies.
Yes, it is easy enough to find her, and to find Dorbentei, too. Temurin rides up to them with hardly a thought.
Yet the moment she lays eyes on Temurin, Burqila calls for a halt. All at once, the army stops. Clouds of dust clot the artery of the pass. She holds up her hand to sign something. Temurin squints to try to make it out.
What did you see?
“Burqila wants to know why you took so damned long,” calls Dorbentei, riding as always at Burqila’s side. That girl acts as if Temurin does not understand Burqila’s signing. Too cocky, by far.
And yet there is something strange about all of this. Closer, Temurin comes, and she sees that Barsatoq is not riding with the Qorin. Fine enough, she has her own army to lead, but …
“I had orders to follow,” Temurin answers. She is close enough that they can talk now. She flips up her war mask. Dorbentei and Burqila do the same. Good. Temurin wants them to see her smile. “Your girl’s gone and become a Kharsa while she was away.”
And that is when it happens: Dorbentei and Burqila blink. Silence, as their brows furrow; silence, like an arrow landing in the base of Temurin’s throat.
“Temurin,” says Dorbentei. Burqila has not signed anything—whatever she is about to say is her own. “Who are you talking about?”
They can’t possibly mean … “Your girl,” Temurin says. “Barsalai Shefali.” Her voice wavers. Demons wear the skin of mortals often enough—what if she’s wandered back into a trap? Her eyes dart from Burqila to Dorbentei, to the confused faces of her clanmates. The air doesn’t smell of evil, but she doesn’t have Barsalai’s nose.
But this awkwardness is a cloud drifting on the wind. Dark and strange though this moment may be, it is fleeting. Burqila’s posture relaxes; realization dawns on Dorbentei’s brown face.
“Ah, Barsalai,” she says. The name sounds strange, as if she were speaking it for the first time. “How could we forget that oaf?”
Dorbentei laughs.
Temurin does not. She reaches for the skin of kumaq Barsalai gave her. It is cold in her hands, unnaturally so, and she wonders whether or not that is Barsalai’s doing. Her palm sticks to it as she uncorks it, as she tips the skin to her lips and drinks.
Kumaq has a particular taste. Sour and sweet, the scent of it pricking your nose long after you’ve swallowed. It coats your tongue and stays there for hours.
This tastes nothing like that. Cool and smooth, it’s more reminiscent of water—if water were transcendent. The rivers of the Rokhon are not so refreshing as this. The cool spreads through her chest and settles into her stomach.
Burqila signs. Her hands move quickly, expertly, and her eyes are as clear as ever. Where the fuck is my daughter?
“Burqila wants to know why she didn’t come back with you. Has she gone off to be a hero on her own?”
Temurin takes a breath. A cool mist leaves her nostrils as she does.
“She’s waiting,” Temurin says.
And you let her? Burqila signs. There—the fire, the way she is stabbing at the air with her fingers.
Yes—the cloud has truly passed now.
“I’ll tell you all about it,” Temurin says, “but let me smell you first.”
They agree quickly enough, and it is only when she is sure they smell like themselves that she tells them of what she saw.
But they do not speak of the woman left behind—the woman they forgot.
BARSALAI SHEFALI
SIX
Barsalai Shefali waits for her wife in this land of her enemy’s making. She does not know how long it
will be before Shizuka and her army arrive. The only thing to do—the natural thing to do—is to tend to her horse. If anything dares to attack Shefali, she will kill it; if nothing does, then she will at least have repaid her horse a little for all this trouble.
And so she dismounts, and fumbles removing the saddle with only one good arm, and then retrieves the brush. The world does not want her here—she can feel it in the wind, hear it in the sway of the flowers—but as the feeling is mutual she pays it no mind. The scent of rot grows stronger with every passing moment—Shefali wonders if she’ll be able to smell anything at all over it.
But she continues to work. It’s difficult work, to massage one’s horse with only one working hand, but Shefali throws herself into it. Hard work builds character. Her mother always told her so.
You’re mad, says the gray.
Her own blood tells her the same thing. Shefali can feel her heart beat strangely in this place—just off rhythm, scrambling to catch up. The veins and arteries, so stuffed up with black, pain her now more than ever; she can feel her own blood straining against her flesh.
Stop resisting, it says.
But Shefali continues to work. It is not the first time he has tried to assert himself, and it will not be the last. With her stiff right hand, she caresses the golden flower her wife gave to her, and she thinks to herself: I am the master of my own body.
* * *
HOW LONG IS it before she sights the army? It is impossible to tell in a place like this. The sun—if you can call that open wound a sun—does not move at all. Does that mean it has been less than an hour, or that time here holds no meaning? For she finishes dressing her horse and takes to tending to her bow. Surely it’s been more than an hour, more than two. It must have been a Bell.
And yet the sun does not move.
She thinks of hunting. For a long while Shefali considers her surroundings, both the real and the imagined. What is there to hunt here? The creatures in the river, and the creatures roaming farther in—but she knows the former will not give her any usable meat and she has seen no trace of the latter.
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