Deep breaths, she takes, of the air around her, hoping to find some trace of life—but the rot here is too strong.
She takes to counting, to have a vague sense of how much time has passed. She reaches five hundred thousand with no one for company but her horse.
The sun does not move.
What sort of insult is this? The longer she looks on it, the more it rankles her. The Sky is not his domain. It has never been his domain. Why does he seek to exert himself in this way, to claim what is not his? So he and the other gods stopped the sun from falling to the earth—that does not give him the right to pluck it from the sky!
Too long. Too long has Shefali endured this. Anger makes her head spin. She takes her bow from its case and strings it once more, never mind the agony it causes her.
He thinks he can cage a wolf and name it his dog.
She nocks an arrow, draws back the string, and takes aim at the sky. She looses without much thought for how far it will fly or where it may land—only that she wants him to know what she thinks of him.
As the arrow launches past the curve of her bow, it goes ice white.
As it arcs through the sky, it leaves a silver trail behind.
Shefali stands and watches, wondering, wondering—can it reach that wound?
In the end, it is an errant breeze that dislodges it. The arrow sinks to the ground, far enough away that she cannot see where it lands.
Shefali grunts.
Next time—next time it’ll strike true.
But she’s wasted enough arrows on childish outbursts today. She sets down her bow and sits on the grass, the skulls, instead.
It is then that Shefali sees the approaching army. Like an inkwash painting of a forest somehow lurching to life—their spears and banners against the gray. Her heart feels near to bursting—she can see the faint golden glow of her wife.
Barsalai Shefali pushes herself up to her feet. How long has she been here, in this place? Too long already, too long. Her remaining days are precious to her—how many has she sacrificed sitting here, waiting for her wife?
Too many, too many.
* * *
THE QORIN ARE the first to break through the fog—Burqila and Otgar leading the way. Shefali expects them to make straight for her—but when Burqila’s eyes fall upon her, it is five heartbeats before she makes any sort of motion.
How long those heartbeats feel. Why is her mother looking at her in such a way, as if they have never met? As if she is trying to remember something. What happened while Shefali stood here waiting?
A whisper of a thought soon becomes a shout: What if it’s been years already? What if she does not recognize me?
“Aaj?” Shefali calls. She flares her nostrils, but it is no use—she cannot smell anything at all. The rot, the rot! If the Traitor had torn her right arm off, she would feel less out of sorts. How is she meant to navigate if she cannot smell? The true sight of this place overlays the false—that is all her nose will grant her here.
No explanation for her mother’s confusion.
On the sixth beat of Shefali’s withered heart, Burqila Alshara nods. She raises a hand and signs, and Dorbentei speaks for her.
“Needlenose, you’re an idiot,” says Dorbentei. Shefali lets out a breath. That must be her cousin, to address her in such a way. “Sending Temurin back on her own! Barsatoq near died on the spot. Worrying us like that!”
Burqila’s eyes flick over to her niece. Shefali has the feeling not a word of what she said was actually translated.
“Sorry,” Shefali manages. “How long?”
“A few hours,” says Temurin. There’s something in the set of her jaw—a residual discomfort. “Not long at all.”
A few hours?
All of that—and it had only been a few hours?
Shefali presses her eyes closed. Around her the landscape assumes its true form. Is it her mind playing tricks on her, or are the skulls facing her now?
“Nothing’s come for you?” says Dorbentei. “Burqila says she’d fought five of them, lost a horse, and fallen into a pit by this point.”
“Nothing’s come,” Shefali echoes. “Everything here is dead.”
“Not everything,” says Dorbentei. “Remember why we’re here?”
But how is Shefali meant to forget? Not once in her time here did she spot any of the trapped Qorin. Sayaka’s letter mentioned they lined the river, in particular—fishermen and washerwomen all the way to Iwa.
Shefali sees none of them now.
What if this is a trap?
No, no. Even if it is, Shefali would rather have her head torn off again than let the Qorin suffer for her mistake. She will save them. No matter the cost—she will see to it that her people return to the steppes.
“Shefali!”
She opens her eyes in time to see her wife clearing the last column. What a sight she is, in her golden armor! The phoenix feather Shefali brought back dances atop her helmet; matching enamel decorates her phoenix war mask. She looks nothing at all like the pampered princess Shefali left behind—this, without a doubt, is a general.
Except that her horse is half as tall as the Qorin steeds surrounding it, and so she looks a little childish all the same. The sight brings a smile to Shefali’s face.
She does not stay mounted long. With a swing that makes Alshara beam with pride, Shizuka leaps from the saddle. Shefali is quick to catch her. It is a good thing her condition has made her so strong—she can hold Shizuka up with only her left arm.
And how wonderful it feels to hold her! What did the eternity Shefali spent waiting matter, when this is her reward? She holds her wife close and nuzzles against her, as much as the armor will allow. How tightly Shizuka holds her! And listen, too—how sharply she’s breathing, how the scales of her armor tremble with her hands!
“Please,” she whispers. “Please don’t worry me like that.”
Shefali can only lift her mask and kiss her forehead. In truth, she had not considered that she might be worrying anyone. Her only concern had been Temurin and the wolf.
Yet how can she admit that now—that she was worried about an attack that never came? Like a child constantly crying out about wolves. She felt silly.
It is better to say nothing at all. She holds Shizuka until her wife gently hops out of her arms. Shefali wonders what the army will make of the sight—their general so small and vulnerable.
Perhaps it’s best to make Shizuka look a little more powerful.
Shefali pounds her fist to her chest in a Hokkaran salute. “General Dog-Ear,” she says. “Your orders?”
Shizuka’s smirking, but Otgar’s rolling her eyes. Let her.
“Report, Captain Steel-Eye,” Shizuka says. She does it in her best general’s voice.
“I waited an eternity,” says Shefali, “and didn’t see a thing.”
“Not a thing?” asks Dorbentei. “You’re sure?”
Shefali nods—but she does not look away from her general.
“Well,” says Shizuka. “This place is as awful as I remember it—though much emptier. That changes nothing of our plan. We continue, toward Iwa. Toward him.”
“And when we find our people, we set them free,” says Dorbentei. Now she is reading Alshara’s signs, now at last she is not simply speaking for herself.
“Yes,” says Shizuka. “When we find them.”
There it is once more—the harshness, the char to her voice that has turned up so often of late. It cannot be that she’s forgetting why Shefali has come. It cannot be that she is forgetting the sacrifices involved in Shefali being here. An easy life was well within their reach—they could have stayed at the Bronze Palace with Baozhai.
Instead, they chose to do what was right and rescue those beyond the Wall.
Surely, the woman who holds Shefali’s heart would not disregard a thing like saving the Qorin.
Shefali shoves the thought away—it is not worth the dignity of consideration.
“We continue,” s
ays Dorbentei. This is her rendition of two solid minutes of Burqila’s signing. An oath of silence is difficult to keep when your translator vexes you like this—Burqila lifts her mask just to pinch her nose.
Shizuka nods. That is all the convincing Shefali needs—she hefts her horse’s saddle off the ground with her left hand. Her gray knows well enough what is about to happen, and trots over to Shefali’s side.
Yet as Shefali throws the saddle on over her gray’s blanket, she cannot keep herself from glancing back at her wife.
The Phoenix Empress, looking out on the flames that sought to consume her.
* * *
SHIZUKA WAS NOT exaggerating when she spoke of the miseries of riding with an army. Back in Xian-Lai, Shefali could not imagine how it would be much different from traveling with a clan. There are several thousand of you all going to the same place. Some of you are mounted. Every night you make camp, and every morning you break it down again. In all respects, it seems exactly the same.
It is not.
To start with, there is the issue of pacing. The Qorin are accustomed to traveling with their horses, the warriors and their herds riding off ahead of the noncombatants. With three horses apiece, they could cover a hundred li in a single day easily.
That is a fine pace, a commendable one, and one that is absolutely unsustainable by the Phoenix Guard. The Hokkarans have only two horses each, if they have horses at all—most of them trudge across the skull-ridden landscape on their own two feet. To see so much gold approaching, to see their spears like the spines of a massive creature—these things are intimidating.
But to see how slowly they move …
It is only two days before the Qorin begin to complain. In the Burqila clan’s ger, on their second night beyond the Wall, Uncle Ganzorig spits on the ground.
“We’d be knocking that bastard’s teeth in already if it weren’t for the—”
“For the infantry,” says Shizuka. She is speaking in Hokkaran, though no one else bothers to switch languages for her. Shefali wonders idly how often she has seen the Qorin. How is it that they know Shizuka can understand them? Eight years is long enough to learn a language, she supposes; better still if she spent much time tracking down Qorin messengers to ask if they’d seen Shefali. And poor Sakura, sitting near Otgar with a book, unable to follow the conversation save for Shizuka’s interjections. “You’ll have to forgive me for taking care of my soldiers. To face down the Traitor is bold enough; to do so with bloodied feet and flattened arches is more than I can ask of them. We continue at the current pace.”
Shefali sits on a folding stool, her eyes flicking from her mother to her wife. There is a saying about this—there must be. Enough Qorin kept their wives, lovers, sisters, aunts, and mothers all under the same ger that there had to be a saying about this.
Eight years abroad have dulled her mind.
She sniffs at her kumaq and waits for one of the queens to crack.
In the end, it is Burqila who relents. She leans back onto her seat and signs as if she is swatting away insects.
“If that is what your softhearted people require, who are we to argue?” says Dorbentei in her best imitation of Burqila’s voice.
It is a joke, told in good humor—but Shizuka does not find it funny. The paper she’d been folding into a crane ignites; her soft face goes hard as she sets her jaw.
“Aaj,” she says, her voice a blade. “Say what you will about me. Mock me for my softheartedness, if you must—but leave my army out of it.”
There is no such thing as silence in a ger—there are too many mouths, too many stomachs, too many hands and feet. This ger is no exception. In the aftermath of Shizuka’s challenge, no one speaks—but Ganzorig’s stew continues to bubble in its cauldron, and the dogs growl as they fight.
Shefali bites her lip. Starting a fight with Burqila Alshara—what is Shizuka thinking? Though she is not wrong; Burqila should have known not to joke about a thing like the army.
But what does Shefali say at a time like this?
Nothing, thankfully—with Sakura around, there is never much empty air.
“If you two are going to start posturing, I’m going to need you to do it in Hokkaran,” says Sakura. “Xianese works, too, if you’re feeling saucy.”
Dorbentei scoffs. For her, this is a joke—no more, no less. How often has she teased Shefali about having such a sensitive wife? “You think Xianese is saucy?” she says. “Try Surian sometime.”
“I’d rather not,” says Sakura flatly.
“Are you sure?” Otgar says, smirking. “If Surian doesn’t work for you, I know Ikhthian, too. Fair warning, Needlenose hates Ikhthian.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t blame her,” Sakura says. “Had to translate it once. Never again. Twenty-five different ways to say ‘I.’ Puh!”
The subject’s gone by now. Though Burqila glances at Shizuka over the flickering flames of the cauldron, she signs nothing more.
Shizuka flings her burning crane onto the fire. She, too, has nothing more to say of armies.
And nothing to say later that night, when the others have gone to bed. When Shefali pulls her close and asks her what happened in Nishikomi, her wife presses a fingertip to Shefali’s lips. Shizuka’s head rests on Shefali’s chest. For three breaths, she says nothing.
Then, quiet as a whisper: “I’ll tell you about it after your birthday.”
To be bitten by the dog you raised—what misery.
Shizuka will not speak about it, and Shefali will not force her.
She lifts Shizuka’s wrist. When she brings it to her lips, she imagines the blood coursing through her—red, red, red.
And, eventually, when the nightmares come for Shizuka—Shefali holds her, and does not question where they came from. Shizuka has enough to contend with. Three hours of rest are all that she can manage before she starts to scream, before she starts to thrash, before Shefali carries her out beneath the stars and sings to her a song without words.
Even that does not soothe her. Not beneath this sky, not beneath these stars. When Shizuka wakes, her eyes scan the horizon and she curls up again, doubled up in misery.
“Get him out of me,” she whimpers.
Shefali would forge a chain of silver and bring down the sun, if that was what Shizuka wanted—but she has never enjoyed lying to her. And it would be lying to say that it was as simple as piercing a vein and letting the skulls drink.
What can she say to assuage her wife? That it is not the first time she’s had to acknowledge her bloodline’s atrocities? Yoshimoto, who sent the Sixteen Swords and Sixteen armies to their deaths; Yorihito, who spread the blackblood to the Qorin.
What is one more stain?
No—she cannot say this, no matter how much it rankles her to think of her wife’s lineage.
“You are not like him,” Shefali says.
But these are only words, only words. How can she convince her wife of such a thing, when she is so lost in the forests of her own emotions? All she can do is show her the north star—it is up to Shizuka to navigate.
Shizuka is in no mood for it. Curled up in Shefali’s arms, she looks steadfastly at the violet sky, at the sun that is not a sun.
She says nothing more until morning.
Or, at least, what they are calling morning here. Time has little meaning in a place where the sun does not move, and yet it is of vital importance to Barsalai Shefali. Thankfully, surrounded as she now is by people who have need of sleep, it is a little easier to keep track. One day is the amount of time they can travel before Alshara calls for a stop.
There is one problem with this: by Shefali’s count, this leaves her only five more days before she will die.
Five days.
Her wife is heavy in her arms, but Shefali does not care. She holds her. With every breath, she tries to commit the smallest things about her to memory: the way her sleeping robes crinkle up, the rise and fall of her breathing, the exact way this false light falls upon her lips.
>
Five days.
If they are five days spent holding Shizuka, then they are well spent.
Even if Iwa seems to be getting no closer.
Every morning, when they break up camp, Shefali holds up her hand to the distant towers. Every morning, their height remains unchanged.
They are making no progress.
By this morning—the third—Shefali’s stomach is starting to turn. Not once in her life has she gotten lost. Her mother used to joke about it when she was younger—that if being a Kharsa did not work out for her, she might become a messenger instead.
Her arrows never miss, the cold never truly bothers her, and if you ask her which direction southwest by south is in the middle of the day—she will know. All these things have been true since her childhood. As a sparrow thinks nothing of flying, so she thought nothing of these talents. They do not require her to think of them.
It is the same here, or so she’d thought—easier, even, with something like the towers to guide her at all hours. She points her mare in the direction of Iwa, and the army follows.
Yet they are getting no closer.
Her blood is thick in her veins.
The captains come to find Shizuka as the Qorin go about breaking down the camp. Munenori—the tan man with the crane-shaped mask—stands foremost among them. Shefali tries not to listen in as her wife takes her morning war meeting, tries to focus on hefting the disassembled gers into their carts, but it is easier for the sun to set in the east than it is for Shefali to look away from her wife.
Munenori holds his hands up to the tower. He says something to Shizuka—Shefali cannot hear it from this distance—and Shizuka’s aura flares again. When she answers him, it is with a firmness he does not deserve from her.
Shefali swallows.
This life of hers is wind; how can she be expected to contain all of it?
“Stubborn, isn’t she?”
Shefali starts. Hokkaran, from behind her—but she hadn’t smelled anyone coming. Her first instinct is to swat at the voice of an unseen demon. Thankfully, Minami Sakura spent most of her life learning how to avoid wandering hands. She sways to the side, and Shefali’s claws rake only air—leaving Shefali herself gray faced with embarrassment.
The Warrior Moon Page 18