“Good morning to you, too,” Sakura says. “If you can call any mornings here good.”
“Or mornings,” says Shefali. That Sakura does not immediately condemn her is a weight off her shoulders.
“You’re onto something there, Barsalai,” Sakura says. She slips the tip of her brush between her teeth again. “Have you had your rice? Your proverbial rice, I mean. Your cup of stew that you sniff at a little while the rest of us listen to your relatives argue.”
“They don’t always argue,” Shefali says. Though it must seem like it to someone who can’t speak Qorin—Hokkarans tend to think of it as an aggressive language. The people who think so often haven’t heard Qorin lullabies.
“Could have fooled me,” Sakura says. She sighs. Up ahead of them, the air around Shizuka shimmers. If Shefali narrows her eyes she can almost see a shape to the haze—an arc floating a little bit above her. Though Sakura says nothing, she wears an expression Shefali’s seen often enough on her wife.
“You’re worried,” Shefali says. “I am, too.”
“There’s a lot to worry about, between the two of you,” Sakura says. “At least with her it’s obvious what’s wrong.”
Shefali lets the silence speak for her. She watches as Shizuka grows angrier and angrier—as she jabs her finger at the map her captains have cobbled together of the surrounding area.
“She fell into the water,” Sakura says. She keeps her voice low, as if she is worried the winds will carry the words to Shizuka’s cropped ear. “The bay, I mean. At Nishikomi. I got my ass out of my mother’s pleasure house to save her, but by the time I got there, she was already…”
Who is the unseen god who twists Shefali’s heart in their vise? For even hearing those words causes her agony. Imagining Shizuka beneath the water, reaching up for help …
And where has Shefali been as her wife confronted her nightmares? Transforming herself into a giant wolf. Did they not swear they’d face their demons together?
“She hasn’t been drinking, at least,” Sakura says. “So I’ll give her that. But I think she’s going off anger now, instead of doing what’s right.”
If we find them.
Shefali frowns. The pain of having abandoned her wife mingles with a new ache—Sakura is right. Anger rules her now.
“Keep an eye on her,” Sakura says. “She’ll listen to you.”
Will she?
Shefali hums in affirmation. She does not like lying—so she chooses not to think of this as a lie.
“But, like I said, at least I know what’s fucking with her,” says Sakura. She turns now, to look Shefali in the eyes. That she has to crane her neck to do so does nothing to diminish the fierceness of her gaze. “You’re a different story.”
Shefali purses her lips. She’d rather talk about Shizuka, but she knows better than to try to throw a Minami off topic.
“There’s something about this whole venture that doesn’t make much sense to me,” Sakura says. “You’re leading all your people here to liberate the rest of you, right? But we don’t see anyone here. And we haven’t, for days now. What makes you so confident we’ll find your people out here?”
It is difficult not to find the question insulting. Shefali tells herself that Sakura means well, that she volunteered to come along as Shefali’s historian. At least—that is why Shefali assumes she is here. It is a little unclear to her why Sakura chose to follow Shizuka when it came time for battle—but she is glad that Sakura made that choice. Who else would have dared to save Shizuka’s life?
She means well. This is important, for historical record.
And yet Shefali cannot tell her that she knows the Qorin are here because Maki Sayaka wrote in great detail of their torture. In the letter that her daughter could never see.
“Something I read,” Shefali says. It is true enough.
“And what was it that you read?” Sakura says, narrowing her eyes. “People care an awful lot about citations.”
Shefali shifts. Sakura wants the truth of the letter—but who wants to know their mother came to such an ignoble end? Minami Shizuru’s death left cracks in Shizuka’s soul that, to this day, have not been mended. Sakura never knew her mother—but to know her through that letter …
“A story,” Shefali says. She picks up one of the gers, grateful that her condition has granted her another functioning day.
“What kind of story?” Sakura asks. There’s an edge to her voice, an insistence. She sets down her lectern just to help gather up the pikes and ropes for the gers. “I just find it weird that you’d gamble your people’s lives on something like this, but you won’t even tell your personal historian where you got the idea.”
“I did,” Shefali says. “Something I read.”
Please don’t ask me anymore, she thinks, but she knows this plea will go unanswered.
“But if it was something you read, you have no way of knowing whether or not it was true,” Sakura says. “You said so yourself: you can smell lies. It’s my pleasure-house cousins who can spot a cooked book from twenty li away.”
“Sakura—” Shefali begins, but the clatter of pikes and rope hitting the cart cut her off.
“We’re in the middle of enemy territory, Barsalai,” she says. “You told me that we’d be surrounded, but there’s no one else here. What am I supposed to think? The most reasonable answer to this is that they know we’re here, and they’re waiting for a good chance to strike. How am I supposed to feel about that, besides scared shitless? I’ve got no clue what’s going on, because you conduct all your meetings in fucking Qorin.”
Fear and anger mingling together—Shefali’s ears tell her what her nose cannot. Sakura’s voice is near breaking toward the end.
Shefali swallows. Words fail her, as they so often have. She picks up the pikes and ropes Sakura dropped instead, and squeezes her shoulder with her free hand.
The contact upsets Sakura more than it comforts her—she closes her eyes and takes a long breath. Shefali remembers too late what sort of life she led, and what touch means to Hokkarans. Quickly—as if she’s burned herself—Shefali removes her hand.
“Thank you,” Sakura says. She regains a little of her proud posture now that the hand’s gone. Once again, she stares Shefali right in the eyes. “I’m not asking for you to move mountains. All I ask is that you tell me what’s going on here, so I can try and figure out a plan.”
“A plan?” Shefali says. But she’s a—a scholar. That’s what she is.
“What did you think I was doing all this time, getting married?” Sakura says. When she is met with a blank stare, Sakura shakes her head. “I meant—ask my cousin later, all right? I’m just saying, I’ve been busy. Burqila knows war, Shizu-lun knows war. I know history. And I’m the only one in the Empire who knows what happened the last time a bunch of gods ran up here.”
Kenshiro’s influence on that girl is obvious—but it is not entirely his voice Shefali hears in Sakura. He’d be more preoccupied with the numbers and absolute facts of the march than its purpose.
Sky, why didn’t Shefali think to ask Sakura? She feels a fool and a half now. You’ve been here once before. Of course she has. Or, rather, Tumenbayar has.
“There was a wolf,” Shefali says.
“Yes, I’ve heard the story,” Sakura answers. “You became a huge wolf and ate a bunch of the enemy—”
“When I got here,” Shefali says. The prospect of getting answers emboldens her. “It was the only thing I saw.”
Sakura narrows her eyes. She looks to either side of them and leans forward. “Did the eight-fingered scowler see it?”
“No,” says Shefali. “It spoke to me. Said I’d forgotten.”
“That’s because you fucking have,” says Sakura. “Both of you have. Did it say anything else?”
Shefali shakes her head. If only apparitions were more useful with their warnings. They’ve brought Shefali nothing more than confusion and misery.
“What did it look like?” Sakura
asks.
“Black,” Shefali says. “With silver fangs.”
“Well—that isn’t much, but it’s something,” Sakura says. She picks up her brush again. “If you see any other shit like that, let me know. I have some ideas about killing him, but I need to be sure.”
Was it the Minami blood, and not the Imperial, that lent Shizuka her obsession with godslaying?
“And one other thing,” Sakura says.
“Hmm?”
“I will need to know what’s in that letter sometime,” she says. “Don’t think your wolf can throw me off.”
She breaks her stare only to look down at her paper. Characters form beneath her brush. Shefali cannot read them. Even if she were familiar with the language, Sakura’s handwriting is … creative.
“Sometime,” Shefali answers. She fights the urge to say that she will tell her in five days. This talk has taken far too long already—she wants to return to her wife’s side.
Sakura knows well enough when a conversation is over, though she is fond of ending them herself. “If she gets rowdy, call me over,” Sakura says, eyeing her cousin. “If not—I’ll see you in the ger tonight.”
Shefali nods to her. “Don’t trouble the surgeons.”
She’s been riding with the surgeons in the Hokkaran army—that is the safest place for her, or so Shizuka claims. Shefali’s convinced there’s no safer place than with the Qorin engineers. Aunt Dalaansuv would rather be cracked open like a deer than let the enemy anywhere near her precious cannons.
“And don’t die before you tell me what was in the letter,” Sakura says.
Shefali watches her saunter off. She turns her attention to the makeshift Hokkaran war table, where Shizuka glows like a Jubilee firework.
Hm.
Come to think of it, it’s the first day of Jubilee, isn’t it?
Five days of celebration.
Five days from now is the First of Qurukai, after all—Shefali’s twenty-fifth birthday.
Perhaps she will make time to enjoy the holiday—perhaps the two of them can watch Dragon’s Fire burn.
* * *
NOTHING ASSAULTS THEM for most of the day.
Nothing about the landscape changes.
Nothing, apart from the river, makes a sound; nothing, apart from the traveling army, lives and breathes. In her desperation, Shefali has started to look on the river, to see if they are as alone as she thinks.
She finds only water.
Her stomach twists. It is one thing to ride into enemy territory, dust clouds rising up at your back and thunder between your legs, and find the enemy waiting for you. That’s a deed as foolhardy as it is heroic. To drag half your people through Hokkaro and up over a mountain pass only to ride for three days in utter silence …
When she was young, the clan whispered that she was not fit to be a Kharsa. That she was too soft; that she’d been born with roots sprouting out from her ankles.
They do not whisper such things now, but they whisper all the same.
Where has Burqila’s girl brought us?
Load of horseshit, this whole trip.
Why’d we even come out here?
She does not hear these words often. To speak ill of Burqila’s daughter is to invite Burqila’s wrath, after all, and that of her sisters. One of Shefali’s aunts rides with each of the major companies. They, too, would brook no slander of their niece’s good name.
Yet it is not slander if it is true, and the truth lends bravery to cowards.
Five days remain.
If they do not find something soon, Shefali worries the Qorin will leave as soon as she has died. What, then, of Shizuka? Alshara would never abandon her—but how many of the Qorin can she convince to stay just so Shizuka can have her revenge on the Traitor? Shizuka is family in more ways than one—but will saving her hold any water for the Qorin?
Shefali swallows. She feels sluggish, all of a sudden. Her vision blurs. Is the Traitor sapping at her strength to lend it to his own army? This is his realm, after all—does he not control everything within it? Perhaps she is the marionette in the fog, perhaps she is the scourge that will tear through this camp.
She rolls up her sleeve. Tiger fur on the deel gives way to charcoal black of skin—the only brown remaining is in her palms and fingertips. Thick, her veins, like cords beneath her skin, waiting to be deployed.
When did she become this person? She is surprised anyone in the camp recognizes her at all after so many years in Sur-Shar, so many years fighting this curse. Pointed ears, teeth more like fangs than not, skin so much darker and hair going whiter with every passing day—what is it that she is becoming? What is it that he wants to make of her?
They say the blackblood twists you according to your failings. Knowing as she does its source, Shefali doubts that. It must work according to what he thinks your failings are.
And what does he imagine to be hers? Why has he granted her such strength?
Keep your eyes on the horizon, her horse says to her. At first Barsalai thinks it little more than her gray’s maternal instincts kicking in—but soon she hears the reason.
The scouts have returned.
Temurin leads them, riding hard, cutting straight across from the northeast. Or is that the southeast?
There’s no time to dwell on her faltering sense of direction. Temurin’s coming quick. Shefali glances to her left, where her mother leads the clan; Burqila nods. It’s all the permission Shefali needs. She gives her gray a kick, riding out to meet Temurin halfway—
Temurin, who bolts right past her.
Shefali half stands in the saddle. Temurin didn’t even look at her. What is going on? Is the enemy coming? Shefali turns to face the horizon once more. There are no blackbloods, no demons—only idyllic hills, only the towers of Iwa.
Realization dawns on her. Where are the other scouts?
She swallows. With her hips she urges her gray back toward the clan, toward the army, toward the lone returning scout. Temurin is dismounting already, pointing over in the direction whence she came. Now that she is standing still, Shefali can see gouges in her three-mirror armor. Deep as her fingers and as long as Shefali’s arm, the gouges wrap around from right breast to left kidney. Were it not for the armor, she would not be standing.
“… head of a bird…”
“Slow down,” says Dorbentei. She waves to their aunt Khadiyya, one tumen over, who sends out the call to halt. “What’s going on? Where’re the others?”
Temurin earned her name during the Qorin invasion. She hadn’t been much older than Burqila at the time—but she’d been angrier, and stupider. During their initial attack on Oshiro, Temurin broke from her tumen and took it upon herself to claim as many Hokkaran ears as possible.
She did not return to camp until she had fifty ears, a dagger embedded in her shoulder, and two stumps where her fingers should have been.
Temurin, Alshara named her. Iron woman.
For all Shefali’s life, Temurin has lived up to her name. It seems it shall remain that way until the day Shefali dies—though Temurin’s sword is bent back like a misstruck nail, she holds it up with more anger than fear.
“I’m going to kill it,” she says. “Whatever that thing was. We’re going to kill it. Give me twenty men, Burqila—”
Burqila makes a cutting gesture. Temurin shuts up. The signs come quickly after that.
“Burqila wants to remind you that I asked you a question, Temurin—”
“I know what she’s saying,” says Temurin. “And I meant what I said. Give me twenty men, and I’ll have our scouts back.”
“So it took them,” says Dorbentei.
A murmur starts to spread. Shefali can watch it happen, if she cares to—but she watches instead for Shizuka’s arrival.
“Where?” says Shefali. The creak of bows, the rattle of arrows being drawn—her people will soon be out for blood.
“Don’t,” says Dorbentei. “I don’t care if you are a god; we’re not risking you
.”
“I’m not dying today,” Shefali says. There—the dazzling feather is making its way toward her.
“Did I stutter?” Dorbentei says. “I don’t care if you’re dying today or not. I’m not watching you get your throat torn out again.”
Shizuka is nearly with them now. Shefali decides to let that argument lie before her wife arrives—it’s best to decide what they will do about the missing scouts with Shizuka present.
“Let Barsalai come, if that is what she wants,” says Temurin. “We’ll need the wolf to kill that damned thing.”
Not Barsalai—the wolf. So this is what her people think of her?
Five days.
Whatever they think of her, they will not have to think about it for long. Let her be useful to them, if that is what they want.
“Stop complaining and tell us what you saw,” says Dorbentei. She’s gone back to reading Burqila’s signs. Burqila, for her part, is leaning forward in her saddle, as if she means to strike at Temurin.
“Wait,” Shefali says. “Shizuka.”
Burqila’s eyes narrow. Nevertheless, she nods, and the Qorin wait on broken eggshells for Shizuka to join them. She brings Captain Munenori with her—a man who keeps his eye on the horizon while Shizuka does all the talking.
“Where are the rest of the scouts?” Shizuka asks as she arrives. It is the first thing she says. Her abruptness should not bother Shefali—the Qorin prize getting to the point—but it stings that Shizuka does not address her in any way.
Then again, they are dealing with the Phoenix Empress now. She has not raised her mask. The queer violet light plays upon the enamel and bronze, making her look more a peacock than a raptor.
“Temurin was just getting to that,” says Dorbentei. Then, more sharply: “Wasn’t she?”
Temurin doesn’t bother to acknowledge Dorbentei’s needling. She delivers her report facing Burqila, and not her interpreter.
“We were thirty li out, maybe thirty-one. A half hour’s ride, no more than that; Checheg wanted to start heading back, and I thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea. An hour of scouting’s plenty when there’s nothing to report.
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