“Fuck Rikuto,” Shefali says.
“Plenty of people willing to do that, I’m sure,” says Sakura. “But I think it has a point, Barsalai. I think it might be right about all this god shit. The blackblood makes people into the worst versions of themselves—it exaggerates their flaws and sends them running north to join … to join whatever this is.”
They did no more traveling after their return from the mountain, but it has been hours and they’ve yet to see anyone else.
“But that’s not what happened to you. You got stronger, you got faster, you learned to change your shape. You didn’t grow any extra limbs, you didn’t go running off to the North—”
“You can’t seriously be suggesting that Shefali’s condition is a gift,” says Shizuka. How grateful Shefali is to have a wife who can read her mind. “Every day she is in agony. Every day she must fight with him for control over her own body. It is only my presence or the flower’s that allows her to remain herself—it takes two gods to thwart him. Two.”
With her eyes closed and her nose not working as it should, Shefali has no way of knowing what is going on between the two Minami women. It is quiet, whatever it is. A mutual glare, perhaps.
After a small span, Sakura sighs. “Well. We won’t find any answers if you’re in that much pain, Barsalai, and we need you in good shape for tomorrow. The Hokkaran scouts say the landscape’s actually changing when they move now.”
Hokkaran scouts, because they’d already lost four Qorin. Strange to celebrate a victory when you’d lost soldiers. On top of the scouts, they’d lost sixty Qorin and fifty Phoenix Guard.
No—there were no celebrations, no true ones. Even Dorbentei settled down when it came time to count heads. Even Dorbentei had cried when they realized sixty Qorin were never going to return to the Sky.
The numbers would have been worse if Shefali had not torn through so many of the enemy, if she had not become the wolf. Munenori found her with ten shadows in her massive jaws, a pine tree snapped under her forepaw like a matchstick. Adopting the form a second time when Rikuto taunted her had felt like the right thing to do—but, Sky, it had left her so drained.
“Your leg,” Shefali mumbles, for it is then that she remembers Shizuka’s injuries.
“Healing well,” answers her wife. She picks up Shefali’s taloned hand, lays it on her thigh. Even beneath her riding pants, it should be easy to feel the wounds—but Shefali feels only smooth skin. “There are benefits to our state. But don’t let that give you any ideas—you’re done for the evening. No more shifting.”
“But—”
“No buts,” says Shizuka. “I’m the Empress, you know. That means you have to listen to me.”
It is a joke, but one she does not quite have the spirit to land.
Shefali smiles anyway. She cannot think of anything to say, any joke to diffuse this miasma surrounding them, but she smiles. It is what her wife needs.
“I’ll tell everyone to get their shit together,” Sakura says. “Me and Dorbentei, we’ll get all the weapons sorted out for you two. In the morning, you’ll bless them, however it is you think you can do that.”
Kumaq, Shefali thinks, but will there be enough?
What is she talking about? With thousands of Qorin in one place—of course there will be enough. But what will Shizuka use? She’s been conjuring fires and light beyond the Wall, but no flowers—has she lost her link to them so far to the north? The flowers surrounding them are aberrations to the word; Shefali can see their true forms well enough when she blinks.
What is it like for her wife—being surrounded by such a blatant perversion of her domain?
A thought for later. Shefali can deal with only so many injustices at once.
“Sakura-lun,” says Shizuka. Shefali can feel her voice. “Thank you for today. Truly. You … I would have killed it, given one more moment.”
“And trapped us all on the mountain,” says Sakura. She sounds smug, and so Shefali imagines her as such, fanning herself despite the perfect weather. “I know.”
Again, Shefali does not want to open her eyes—whatever is passing between the two cousins is lost to her.
But she does hear Shizuka swallow, does feel her take a breath, does instinctively squeeze her hand.
“It was wrong of me to insist you come,” says Shizuka.
A pause. “Worked out all right, in the end.”
“But this isn’t the end,” says Shizuka. “This isn’t even near to the end. We’re beyond the Wall, where anything might happen, and all of us may well—”
“We won’t,” Shefali says. Speaking hurts, but the pain is worth it. In the same way that a blade is sharp until wear makes it dull, Shizuka is confident only until reality wears her down. Shefali has always been her whetstone. It is a role she is happy to play even now.
“Listen to your wife,” says Sakura. “Aren’t you the one saying you’re always certain? Be certain about this. You’ll kill that bastard demon.”
“We will,” echoes Shefali. She forces herself to squeeze Shizuka’s hand again. At least the contact of their scars grants her some small relief. “We promised.”
Shizuka’s breathing goes ragged. If Shefali did not know better, she would assume her wife is crying—but those tears will never come. Only this rough gasping, only the sniffing.
To move her own body is to sling Gurkhan Khalsar across her back and carry it for twenty horselengths.
And yet—let no one doubt Barsalai Shefali’s strength: she pulls herself up higher onto Shizuka’s lap, her head against her wife’s chest, and squeezes her as tightly as she can.
“We did,” repeats Shizuka. “Together.”
And in that word there are promises, in that word there are oaths, in that world is a pact sealed by sun and moon. Together. Across the sky, one chasing after the other, the stars trailing in the wake of their eternal dance—together. Through the heavens and beyond, cloaked in darkness that could not conquer them—together. In these mortal bodies, on this mortal plane, after the lives that they’d lived, steeped in regret and exultation …
“Together,” Shefali repeats.
But the cosmic, the universal, the eternal—all of these things wear on her. Perhaps it is as the demon said: perhaps this flesh cannot hope to contain the truth of her power, perhaps this was always meant to be her fate.
Five days until the first of Qurukai—and by her reckoning, it is already Last Bell. Breaking down the camps, riding to the mountains and then through the forest, the battle, the shifting—how much can a dying woman stand in a single day?
Her pain is a weight. Down, down, she is sinking; her eyelids are starting to droop. When did she get so tired? For she feels it now the way she felt her old form only moments ago—how aware she is of this sudden lethargy! At her joints and along her back, as if some creature has sapped the strength from her very bones!
“Shefali,” Shizuka says. Her voice is low, little more than a whisper, and Shefali has the distant thought that Sakura must have left them. Close as she is, Shefali can hear her wife’s breathing—the staggered intake, the ragged out—her thundering heartbeat. What troubles her so, that she should feel this way even when they are alone together?
Shefali sniffs the air, but there are no answers to be had. Only rot.
“Shefali, I failed today.”
“You didn’t,” Shefali mumbles. Ridiculous of her to suggest it. Loss of life is never to be celebrated—but all of them could have died today, instead of only some. If Shizuka had acted on her more rash impulses, they would not be here beneath the false sun, Shefali would not be listening to that beating …
“I … When the battle came, I couldn’t … I froze. I let my fear win.”
“It didn’t,” Shefali says. She’d muster more of an argument, but a fogbank has consumed her thoughts. Thud-thud, thud-thud, thud-thud …
“But it did,” says Shizuka. “If I’d been thinking clearly, I would have mustered us all at the foot of the moun
tain and waited for it to come find us. No one would have died, then. That’s what Xianyu would have done. But instead, I—”
“We went first,” says Shefali. Splitting into smaller groups so that they could more easily navigate the strange forest had saved the lives of many of the Qorin—but condemned others. It had been Burqila’s decision. The right one, so far as Shefali is concerned; the forest is no place for cavalry.
“I should have—”
“You survived,” Shefali says. “We survived. Tonight we mourn; tomorrow we fight again.”
Shizuka says nothing to this. She does not need to. Her breathing is getting steadier. She traces circles on Shefali’s open palm.
“Shizuka.”
“Yes, my love? Is something wrong?”
How concerned she sounds. If something were wrong, there is not much Shizuka could do. Hold her hand and whisper to her, perhaps.
But … but perhaps that will be enough. The two of them.
“I’m falling asleep,” Shefali says. The words come out garbled—and in Qorin, at that.
She hears Shizuka smile. “Rest, then. I’ll keep you safe.”
Her Qorin is almost as garbled as Shefali’s.
They are half a li from the camp, half a li from their ger, half a li from their bedroll, but there is no use fighting it. Sleep is coming for her like a pack of hunting dogs, and she is backed into the corral already.
“I love you,” Shefali says, switching to Hokkaran.
“And I love you, bright star,” Shizuka says. She kisses Shefali’s forehead. “Sleep. We can talk more in the morning.”
It does not occur to her then that Shizuka is saying she won’t be sleeping. It does not occur to her what effect that might have on a general, on a warrior. It does not occur to her that perhaps Shizuka does not want to sleep because she knows—she knows—how bad her nightmares will be if she attempts it.
All that Shefali thinks, as she drifts off to sleep, is this:
She called me her bright star.
DORBENTEI OTGAR
ONE
The Qorin language assumes all singing girls charge, for a single night of their service, their own weight in gold. Altanai is the word for them—golden women—and Dorbentei has never liked it until just recently.
When the Altanai comes to visit, Dorbentei Otgar is reading. She likes to read. Not in the way Halaagmod does, or the way the Altanai does: they’re always neck deep in some scroll full of some old Hokkaran’s ranting. There’s too much of that in the world already, so far as Otgar’s concerned; she doesn’t need to read a book about how the Hokkarans came to power to know the ramifications of it. Even as far as Ikhtar, Hokkaran prejudices and propaganda outweigh reality: more than once, she and Shefali were asked if a horse had given birth to them.
Of course, that is why Grandmother Sky gave them each two fists and strong arms. People only say that sort of thing once.
But Sakura—it feels odd to use her name, even in Otgar’s own thoughts—is different.
When she opens the door, for instance. Hokkarans don’t have solid doors the way the Qorin do; they have no real concept of knocking. But Minami Sakura, who spent several years in a Xianese palace—she knows what knocking’s all about. Three quick raps, a pause, and then: “Roast meat your bones.”
Otgar guffaws before she can stop herself; the air leaves her as though she’d been kicked in the gut. Roast meat your bones! The woman’s Qorin is worse than a Surian merchant’s. Only when her shoulders settle and her cheeks start to hurt does she realize how badly she needed a laugh like this.
“What? Isn’t that what you say?”
“It’s close enough,” Otgar answers. “Come in.”
The door opens and shuts. Otgar sets down her book on the small folding nightstand she picked up in Salaam. Sakura’s still in her oversized armor, though she’s left the war mask and helmet aside. The sight nearly kindles another laugh from Otgar; it is only by biting the inside of her cheek that she keeps it in check. What is it with Hokkarans and wearing so much metal? No wonder their horses are so small; they are weighed down by living boulders.
Yet the look on Sakura’s face does not lend itself to laughing at her. It’s hard to see, in the dark, but there’s something a little frantic about her. That she is carrying a bottle of rice wine and two saucers—instead of her usual lectern—only emphasizes this. The bottle clinks against the saucers as she steps into the ger. Sakura’s head turns as she sweeps the place: the makeshift bed; the few carved wooden sculptures she carried back from her father’s homeland; the books; the little figurines Barsalai whittled during their travels scattered like ants wherever best struck Otgar’s fancy at that particular moment.
Things to be proud of. Her things. She admits, she is excited to hear what Sakura thinks of them.
“You have only one chair?”
Otgar sucks her teeth. “I’m only one woman. I don’t often have guests.”
“Well, tonight you do,” Sakura says. “I need a fucking drink.” She sits right there on the carpets. Otgar half expects her to sit cross-legged, like a Qorin, but she sits on her ankles instead. Must be an old habit. Likewise, when she pours the wine, she does so in practiced, graceful motions—including holding back a sleeve that is not long enough to require holding back.
It’s presumptuous to walk into a woman’s ger and announce that you’re visiting, to leave no opportunity for argument. A woman beats her ger into existence; she should have some say in who gets to stay within it.
And yet Otgar cannot summon the will to argue the point. She, too, needs a drink. Standing, she folds her chair back up and leans it against the nightstand. Sakura’s shoving the saucer of drink at her before she’s even sat back down.
“I thought you were the one who needed to drink,” Otgar says.
“I can’t drink alone,” Sakura says. “You start drinking alone, that’s when you have a problem.”
“So you came to me,” Otgar says. With a smirk she tosses back her head and drains the saucer. Rice wine is boring and flavorless; a lingering burn. At least that makes it easy to drink. “What can I say? I’m a popular woman. They should start calling me Demon-Wrestler Otgar.”
It’s an easy, casual brag, the sort of thing that would invite banter from Shefali or any of the others. On a better day, it might have done the same for Sakura.
But today is not that day. Today, Minami Sakura shrinks; today, she pours another cup the moment the first is done. “I saw people die today.” As silk on silk, her whispered words.
Dorbentei Otgar, woman of many tongues, finds that all of them have now fallen silent.
Sakura finishes her second cup. “No one told me about the smell. Or the screams. Well, you hear about the screams, everyone writes about them, but you don’t really know what they’re like until you hear, and…”
The first time Otgar saw a man die she was five. One of her cousins was dying of the blackblood in the sanvaartains’ ger. She remembers distinctly that her mother told her not to watch—but how was she to stifle her own curiosity? The man was screaming day and night, howling like an animal, and she could not believe that it was her cousin causing all that racket. In the middle of the night, she’d left her mother’s ger. Cloaked in two deels to keep out the cold, she waddled over to the sanvaartains’ ger and opened the door just a crack.
She heard him then. The sound. It so horrified her that she screamed and fell backwards onto the grass. The sanvaartains took her to her mother, who switched her so hard she could not sit for two days. In truth, there was no need for such punishment: Otgar had learned then that death was not something you sought out.
That it has taken Sakura so long to reach this point—she finds herself thinking Hokkarans live pampered lives. Otgar’s story is not unique; she has heard similar from the mouths of everyone her age. Everyone who lived, at any rate.
And here is Sakura, tears falling like glittering rain onto her saucer of rice wine.
“The
sound’s awful,” Otgar says.
Sakura nods, too plagued by her memories to say much of anything. She pours Otgar another saucer full of wine.
What to say in a situation like this? Otgar knows what Burqila would do: tell Sakura that she is being a child, that she has chosen to be here, and that she must accept the consequences of that choice. She knows what Barsalai would do: sit and listen the whole night through, stopping here and there to say something so insightful you almost hated her for it.
But she is neither of them. “Can I ask you something?”
Sakura’s brows come together. “… yes,” she says. “You know, normally you let a person talk about their problems more, before you start asking them things.”
“If you wanted that, you wouldn’t have come to me. You would have gone to Barsalai,” Otgar answers. This she does not need to think about. “You came to me because you wanted someone to talk to. So, I’m talking to you the way I’d talk to anyone else.”
Silence. Then, spoken over the rim of her third cup: “You got me.”
Otgar nods. She continues only when Sakura finishes that third cup, when their eyes meet in the relative dark of the ger. She half expects to see a touch of yellow when the candlelight catches Sakura’s eyes—but they are as brown as the earth itself, brown as soft soil.
Otgar has always liked brown eyes.
Perhaps the vehemence with which she shoves aside that thought comes across in her voice, for the next sentence leaves her more sharply than she imagined it would.
“Why are you here?”
Sakura sets the cup down. She does not refill it, not immediately; instead, she traces a fingertip along the rim. Otgar follows it while Sakura gathers her thoughts. “I told you I came here as a historian. That’s only part of the story.”
Her shoulders go tight. If Sakura is about to admit she’s here as some sort of spy … But no, Shefali would have caught that. Needlenose likes her.
And Otgar doesn’t believe that she could be. She’s too different.
“I never knew my parents,” Sakura says. “When I was a baby, my mother left me in the entry hall of a pleasure house in Nishikomi. I was raised there.”
The Warrior Moon Page 27