She passes into the palace itself soon after. There are no courtiers here, only bones. The halls are silent, the halls are still, the halls are dark. Only the bow in her hand provides any light at all. Its silver light bounces off the polished walls, casting the skeletons in an eerie glow. As she walks among them, she swears that she sees them whole—but only from the corners of her eyes, and only briefly.
Up and up she goes, sniffing at the air around her. There are no scents here—or perhaps the problem is that she cannot smell anything over the souls she now comprises. Nevertheless she continues, picking her turns out of instinct.
There is no way for her to know how long she has wandered—only that it is too much time spent away from her wife. She thinks of her body lying headless in the cavern, thinks of Shizuka trapped within the Traitor’s clutches, and finds herself running through these foreign halls. Her footsteps, her breathing, her heart—these are the only sounds.
Five floors up, she catches the scent of burning. This she follows like a dog hunting a fox. Three turns later, a heavy iron door confronts her, its handles wrought into the twisting coils of a dragon on one side and painted gold into a phoenix on the other.
She grasps it by the dragon handle and pulls.
The room before her is a parody of Shizuka’s—there is even a clock taking up most of one wall. Hokkaran robes hung for display take up the opposite side. The wall directly across from the door—the eastern wall—has a circular window in the center that spans the height of the room. From it she can see the eastern shore—the campfire where she first met Akane so many years ago.
But the woman herself? Yes, she sits by a fire now, too. There’s a firepit in the center of the room. Akane herself sits on western side of it, her back to Shefali. She does not turn when the door opens; she does not turn when a draft whips her fire higher and higher.
“You have come to argue with me,” she says.
Shefali crosses the threshold. There is nothing to fear from this woman, this god—not when her wife’s life hangs in the balance.
“I have,” says Shefali.
Akane’s right shoulder slumps with a sigh. The left remains stiff. “Sit. Let us talk like equals, Moon.”
Moon.
When someone calls your name, it knocks against your bones. Shefali can feel the knocking, now, stronger than ever.
She walks to eastern side of the fire and sits cross-legged on the floor. From here she can see Akane clearly: see the melted flesh that remains from Yamai’s successful attempt on her life. The first time she saw Akane’s face was shocking—now it is routine. This is not the first or the second time they have spoken, but it is the only time they have spoken in this tower. The light of the fire lends her brown eyes an Imperial look.
And so, too, does the set of her mouth, the narrowing of her remaining brow. “You want to save her.”
“I’m going to save her,” Shefali says.
Akane smacks the corner of her lips. “So determined. Just as you were four years ago.”
Shefali says nothing to this, for there is nothing to say, and Akane is not yet done speaking besides. It is just that she will need some time before she addresses the subject at hand.
Shefali spends that time studying her. She flares her nostrils, hoping to catch a secret or two from Akane’s scent, but the fire conceals it.
At length, Akane sighs. “Everything dies. Everything. We are no exception. Your proper place is in the sea, or in the stars if you’d prefer. The latter is the only kindness I can grant you.”
The thought of returning to the sea fills her with dread. She’d been so close to forgetting who she was—and now she can never return. Not when she’d used the lives of the dead to revive herself.
Perhaps it is the silver bow in her hand that calms her, perhaps it is the whispered wisdom of the lost souls that guides her, perhaps it is simply her own stubborn refusal to let Shizuka be hurt that clears her mind—but she has an answer. “What about you?”
Akane’s eyes go hard. She reaches with her right hand for a bit of firewood. “I am Birth and Death,” she says. “I cannot leave.”
But Shefali will not take this for an answer. “Cannot or will not?”
Akane throws the twig on the fire. “The answer is the same,” she says. “So long as I am here, holding up a slot, I will remember the rest of you. All of you.”
“How many?” Shefali asks, for the question has long vexed her.
“You are the fifth,” Akane says.
“And the other four?” says Shefali. “Are they stars?”
“Some,” answers Akane, with a dismissive wave. “Their stories are old, Moon—older than you by far. This is the way things have always been. You will die, and your Sun will too.”
Shefali does not need to think to answer. “Together.”
“Hm?”
“We die together, or not at all,” Shefali says. Her voice is firm, but polite. “I won’t die now.”
Akane laughs. There is a bit of a wet sound to it, with half her mouth sealed shut as it is. “Ridiculous. You are a ridiculous woman, Moon.”
If that was meant to be comforting, it’s missed the mark. Remembrance will mean nothing if her wife is dead, if her people are dead. The souls within her roil at the very thought.
“I can swim to the other shore,” says Shefali.
Akane’s lip curls. “Ah, but that will lead you up the cavern. You’d be on the other side of the world, if you did that. And that’s presuming you got past the guards.”
“I can get past them,” Shefali says, a little too quickly. In truth, she had no great want to kill the crane or the stoat, but if she had to—well. To survive is Qorin. “I could kill you, too.”
“You don’t want to,” says Akane. Then, with another sad laugh: “And you couldn’t if you tried. I’m already dead.”
Another pause between the two of them. Shefali’s patience, practiced though it may be, is wearing thin. Every moment she spends here is another moment her people are dying and her wife is suffering. Just as she opens her mouth, Akane speaks once more, looking over Shefali’s shoulder.
“Listen to me, Moon,” she says. “The sea swallows whatever passes across it. You can no more reach that shore than a sparrow could.”
Barsalai stands. She turns toward the window, nocks an arrow, and fires—it surprises her how smooth the draw on the bow is.
It does not surprise her how far the arrow travels. She watches it soar higher than it has any right to. Cold trails in its wake, giving it a tail much like a comet’s. Ice falls on the ocean of souls. For one hundred heartbeats she waits—until at last the arrow lands on the eastern shore.
It is then that she turns. Akane glares at her.
“You have some nerve,” she says.
“The starling made it,” Shefali says. She holds up the quiver, the fletching of the arrows plainly visible. “Sparrows are bad luck.”
“So it did,” says Akane. “But that means—”
“The starling made it,” Shefali repeats, “and you remain. If you have special rules, then I want the same.”
Akane closed her good eye. Barsalai could see that she was thinking it over—it was written there on her face. If she spoke any more, she might upset the matter, and so she simply waited with the arrows in hand.
But at length the silence grew too much to bear—and looking on the bow gave her an idea.
“Let me be like the moon,” Shefali says.
Akane tilts her head, her one good eye still closed. “How do you mean?”
“You said we all must die. I will die. Every month, for three days, I will die. But the rest of the time—the rest of the time I will be alive.”
“Poetic of you,” says Akane. She opens her eyes and beckons Shefali over. She cannot stand under her own power without great difficulty—Shefali knows this well enough.
Shefali helps her, for she knows what it is like to struggle in such a way. Akane loops her burned arm through S
hefali’s and points, with her good hand, to the window. Together they make their way toward it.
“It will hurt every time,” she says. “It will hurt the way it hurt this time.”
“I don’t care,” says Shefali. “She needs me. You’d do the same for your husband.”
“And that’s another thing,” says Akane. The mention of her departed husband unhorses her; her voice wavers a little. “I can tolerate this only while she’s alive. The moment she goes, you’re coming here with her.”
But she can tolerate it. Shefali’s heart swells, disregarding the latter part of Akane’s statement entirely.
“Swear it to me, Moon,” Akane says, half-turning toward her. There is a surprising amount of fire in her earthy eyes. “Swear that you will stay here forever when the time comes. That you will let your successor take their rightful place without a struggle.”
At that moment Shefali would have sworn to almost anything. “Yes,” she says. “You will put us in the Sky?”
“If that’s what you’ve earned,” says Akane. She sniffs. “The two of you are making me go soft in my old age.”
“How old are you?” Shefali asks. The question springs to her lips before she can stop it.
“You won’t be getting your old body back, either,” says Akane, dodging the question. “It will be this one. You’ll be tied to the phases of the moon—your condition will worsen as it wanes.”
All of this was sound, all of this was logical—though she admittedly had no great want to see her old body. And where would she manifest? It had to be somewhere near enough that she could help the army, that she could save Shizuka.
As if reading her mind, Akane continued: “Your birth was a strange one, and so it’s easy for me to find your body. That will be where you reappear. I can’t control anything that happens after that, do you understand? If you get yourself killed, you’ll be dead until the next waxing phase rolls around.”
Shefali nodded. So she will have to see it. Well. It is a small price to pay.
“And you will get yourself killed following her.”
“As long as she’s safe,” Shefali answers. “Is she … Will this happen to her? Will she have to die, as well?”
Akane glances to the window. A small harrumph leaves her. “No,” she says. “Did you know, of all the five in your place you’re the only one who has needed to die to figure things out?”
It should not be surprising. “I’m stubborn.”
“So you are,” says Akane. “But she is worse. It will not take dying for her—she is so near to her powers already. All she has to do is stop sabotaging herself.”
She thinks of Shizuka—of her bragging, of her arrogance, of the shards of herself she so desperately keeps together. Akane’s proclamation sounds strange in the face of that at first.
But only at first.
The more she thinks of it—yes, Shizuka has spent all of her life loudly proclaiming things that she fears to be true. Acceptance is far rarer with her.
And it is acceptance that she will need.
Akane gestures toward the cabinets along the western wall. Shefali helps her to them. Under her direction she picks out two saucers and a bottle of what must be rice wine. Akane pours one and gives it to Shefali before telling her to do the same.
“We’re going to throw these on the fire,” she says. “I will throw mine first, and then you will throw yours. When the wine touches the flame—then you will be birthed again. Do you understand?”
What is it with her and asking for understanding? She might’ve been speaking old Hokkaran, but communication between gods is a simple thing, as Shefali learned in Ikhtar. She herself is speaking Qorin, and Akane understands everything she says.
But, regardless, she understands—and she is eager to return.
“Thank you,” says Shefali.
“Don’t tell the others,” says Akane.
She empties her saucer into the flames. They leap high, so high that Shefali worries the roof will catch and the whole place will be consumed. But that isn’t her concern, is it? That Akane would work so closely with fire after what it has done to her …
Fire cleansed me, she’d said four years ago. It burned away what I didn’t need.
What will Shefali lose in these flames?
She does not care. If all the gods that have ever lived materialized before her then and challenged her, she would kill every single one with her bare hands.
She is going back.
Barsalai Shefali tips her saucer into the flames.
MINAMI SAKURA
SEVEN
It happens quickly.
The shadows are there, and then they are not. The wind scatters them as easily as it scatters dried petals.
It happens all at once.
The sky is bright violet, and then it is not. Night comes for the lands beyond the Wall.
It happens … it happens in the way that dying does.
The waxing silver moon hangs in the sky at daybreak.
Minami Sakura, scrambling to Burqila Alshara’s assistance, stops in her tracks to marvel at it. Never has she seen the moon as close as this. Every crater, every canyon, every crest is clear to her. If she were to reach out, she would surely feel its crevices beneath her fingertips. Curiosity compels her to do so.
All around her, the army shifts. The drummers falter and hesitate before finally coming to a stop. So, too, the horns. The initial celebrations at the enemy’s sudden retreat die down as the darkness falls, as the impossible moon swallows the spires and the castles on the horizon. No one dares to disturb this silence—for it must be the work of the gods.
And there is this feeling at the back of Sakura’s mind, as if there is something she is forgetting.
She isn’t sure what it is, and she isn’t sure she cares.
A pillar of moonlight shoots down from the sky like a battering ram. The earth shakes. Another pit—this one far smaller and far deeper.
This—this sight—is what she came here to remember.
THE WARRIOR MOON
ONE
The earth craters beneath her. With her first conscious thought as a woman reborn—as a god—Barsalai Shefali apologizes to the Grandfather for hurting him. Her second thought is one of amusement, for she knows now that the Grandfather has never really heard her—some other person among the stars must be hearing her instead. No matter. She is sorry to them, too.
Her third thought—and this comes to her only as she opens her eyes—is that she is going to kill the Spider.
She draws herself up to her full height as the Spider skitters backwards. “Skitters” is the word for it—all eight of its legs move at once, carrying it at full speed away from Shefali, away from what she represents. The horror that’s dawned on the spider woman’s face is almost as delectable as the sweet fear in its scent.
“Y-You’ve returned?!”
The spider hides the blood-slicked bottom of its face behind its white sleeves.
Shefali’s words are precious; she does not grant them to this demon. Forward, forward, nocking a windcutter arrow to her crescent moon bow.
“But your head…!”
Backwards, the Spider—its back legs carrying it up onto the web that lines the walls.
Barsalai looses. She does not stop to look at the crumpled mess of her own headless body; it does not matter at present.
This is the thing that hurt Shizuka.
It will die.
As simple and inevitable as that.
And so, too, is it a simple thing for her to control the arrow. She wills it to circle the room, to sever the webs that bind the spider to its perch.
Tumbling forward now, the spider shoots a desperate strand up at the ceiling.
Shefali makes a cutting motion with her free hand. The arrow heeds her, slicing clean through the new strand before burying itself in the spider’s chest. Black blossoms on the white. As its fine robes stain, Shefali thinks to herself that it looks quite like a chrysanthe
mum.
The Spider thumps against the ground. Its body curls in on itself, a bit like a scorpion, and Shefali nocks another arrow. Frantic, now, the Spider pushes itself back up.
“W-wait,” it says.
Shefali does not heed it.
The second arrow does not soar across the room. It does not need to. It lands square in the Spider’s throat.
It cannot speak now, and that is likely for the best. Howling in pain, the Spider thrashes. Its sharp legs slice through web in search of Shefali—who continues walking straight toward it.
A desperate lunge, a desperate swipe. Shefali avoids them. The same is true of the venom the Spider spits out, mixed as it is with its own demonic blood.
Shefali’s right in front of it.
“You,” the Spider says. “You dog.”
There is little lower to a courtly Hokkaran than a dog. Shefali’s never understood why—but she is in a generous mood. A giving mood.
And what she wants to give—well.
With her eyes set on the Spider’s, she sets down the bow and quiver in front of it.
“The moon isn’t a dog, Hiba,” Shefali says. The Spider’s name was hiding in its scent—how clearly she can breathe now that her blood is free of the Traitor’s influence.
A thought is all it takes to shape herself, all it takes to summon the wolf. To her surprise—to her delight—it does not hurt when she shifts. She is one thing and then she is another, as simple as that. Her bones and body are happy to rearrange themselves.
The great black wolf looms over the Spider.
Fear in its eyes, fear in its scent, fear in the quivering of its eight legs—but not a drop of regret, not a drop of contrition.
It tries to run, but eight legs cannot outpace four.
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