It is a song about Tumenbayar, a song about the falling of the sun.
And it is her cousin who starts to sing.
Dorbentei, who has lost so much already. Her cousin, tears streaming down her face, her voice as boisterous as it is raw from the tears.
What is Shefali to do but join her? For her heart catches at the sight, and she knows this song as well as she knows her own names. The words come naturally to her. They fill her lungs with their old magic, their old stories, and they pour from her throat like proclamations, like prophecies.
Teach us to saddle thunder,
Teach us to fly!
When the veil is torn asunder
We’ll follow you into the sky!
The chorus rises higher and higher. Part of her worries that the enemy will find them and attack them in the middle of all of this, but this is the human part of her, the mortal part of her. She knows they will not. Rikuto swore its eightfold oath. And even if it were to break that oath—the Warrior Moon can break the Demon General.
She is confident of that now.
As the song rises to the false heavens, violet and pink give way to the deep blue and silver. Barsalai Shefali’s veins prickle with the cold.
Her mother finishes her last braid.
Shefali stands. She whistles for her horse, and her horse trots up to her. Shefali formed her anew herself from clay and milk.
It is the third day of the full moon. Tomorrow, she will start to ache again. Tonight, she can swing into the saddle. Tonight she can draw herself up and sit tall upon her horse’s back. Tonight she can ride at full gallop around the camp and throw kumaq in her wake; tonight, she can bless the entirety of the Qorin.
Her people, her family.
Their voices rising into the night, their hopes swelling in her breast.
Tumenbayar’s song is an old one.
But it is the one that Shefali sings that third night as she makes her rounds, as she looks on her people the way Yusumi Shoteikai looked on his paintings.
O-SHIZUKA
TWELVE
She does not sleep.
It isn’t because she doesn’t want to. She does want to, very much so—but the idea of sleeping in this place terrifies her more than she is willing to admit out loud. If she sleeps, she will leave herself vulnerable to him. He will slink into her room, and he will pour ink and water and blood in her ears, and she will lose all that she has worked for.
So no—she does not sleep.
But she does try to count the hours as well as she can. Every Bell, the Qorin servants recite their own strange versions of the Mandates. Her mother always told her routine is important—the same way she’d talk about cleaning or taking control of your own space. She cannot control her space here, not really, and so she counts the hours.
It has been sixteen Bells since she woke. Forty-eight hours. Two days, and too much of all of this already. Her head injury’s healed, for the most part, but the sleeplessness has taken hold of her. By the first day without rest, she was a groggy, sluggish mess; somewhere along the line, a second wind had seized her and now refuses to let her go. Awake, her body tells her, we must be awake—if we are not awake, then we are dying.
And she has done enough dying for now.
So she is awake, and she is doing, doing, doing. The Traitor likes to keep her busy, she has learned. All proper women are busy in his point of view—idleness leads to wandering minds, and wandering minds list ever toward rebellion. For the first time since her childhood, she must endure the lectures of tutors—but he has not even sent her anything amusing.
Rikuto teaches her history in the morning, or tries to; she pays no attention to its ramblings. The cities it speaks of and the peoples it refers to have no bearing on her and her life. Her Hokkaro exists below the Wall; her Hokkaro always has. The lost cities are no more than curiosities; the people who now fill them a twisted insult. The rice and plain soup it brings her at the start of the lesson remain uneaten. It leaves on both mornings with plumes of smoke coming from its ears.
Her father visits afterwards. He asks her why she is not eating. “Shizuru,” he says, leaning close, “are you … are you well?”
She tells him that she is, and she holds the rice in her mouth. She even mimes swallowing. The thought of him worrying over her is too much to bear, which is of course why Yamai has sent him.
“And you? You won’t leave me to break my fast alone, will you, Father?”
She knows that it’s a mistake as soon as she says it. He does not think of her as his daughter; he is expecting his brash and unkempt wife. If she tells him the truth of where he is—where they are—it will break him. See how he purses his lips!
“Is it the air here?” he asks. “There’s a chill to it I’m not fond of. It’s Nanatsu; it should be warmer than this.”
Shizuka flinches at the mention of Nanatsu, at the memory of the ninth.
“It must be,” Shizuka says. “Never had this problem in Nishikomi.”
She’s been to Nishikomi perhaps twice in her life, both times at the behest of her mother, and both times in the middle of the summer, when it was about as hot as Hokkaro ever got. But it seems like the sort of thing her mother would say.
“Your accent’s fading,” her father teases her, and she pretends to laugh along, murdering a little of herself in the process. “If your mother were here, we’d never hear the end of it.”
Shizuka never met her grandmother—Shizuru had never been fond of her to begin with, and visiting was a difficult thing to do given all their collective responsibilities. She’d gotten word at fifteen that her grandmother had died and thought little of it save to send handwritten prayers to the family estate.
How cold that feels now. How final.
She watches her father eat. Part of her wants to find some flaw in it. If this man is not really her father, then she has no obligations to him, after all, and can proceed with her plans unbothered.
But—there. He drops a grain of rice onto the back of his left hand. Instead of simply raising his left hand to his mouth and scooping it up with his tongue, he picks it up with his chopsticks—a single grain of rice.
Yes, he really is her father.
There is so much she wants to say to him. So little of it are things she can actually say, given the circumstances. She wants to tell him that she begins every day by writing his poetry for practice. She wants to tell him that she is grateful that he is so famous, for she sees and hears him everywhere, and in some ways they have never really been apart. She wants to tell him that is a lie, and that she has missed him the way she now misses the heart that used to beat in her chest.
But all he wants to do is plan out the rest of their year.
“Yuichi’s boy is getting married soon,” he says. “He sent me an invitation. I know how you feel about weddings, Zuru, but it would mean the world to him.…”
“Will there be wine?” she asks. This lie, at least, comes effortlessly.
O-Itsuki chuckles to himself. He finishes the last of his soup. “Somehow I doubt there will be enough to appease you,” he says.
An animal craving settles in her gut. She wants wine. If she drank enough, perhaps her slurring would come close to her mother’s accent, and he would not question her so much.
“Well, they can try,” says Shizuka. “And so long as Burqila is there, it is bound to be enjoyable.”
He tilts his head. “Burqila?” he says. “And here I used to worry about how close the two of you were.”
Like stepping into what you think is a puddle only to sink in knee-deep. Shizuka drinks of the tea on her plate. Eating is the terrible thing to do when you’re in another world, so the stories go—but drinking is fine.
It does nothing to clear her mind.
“I…”
Four knocks at the door. Her next tutor has arrived. She wonders briefly what her father thinks is going on. O-Shizuru never took meetings and did not have any tutors at all.
“Yo
ur Eminence, Prince O-Itsuki-lor,” calls the servant in her borrowed voice, “your next appointment awaits the honor of your presence.”
Ah. So that is how the Traitor is playing this.
Her father sighs with resignation—only partly exaggerated. He scoops the last of his rice into his mouth. As genteel as ever, he waits until he is done chewing to speak once more.
“I am coming,” he says. Then, more quietly: “I am sorry for all of this, Zuru. I’ll be with you as soon as I can, but there’s so much to deal with. You know how everyone hates discussing anything important with Iori.”
“I hate even to look on him,” says Shizuka, “and so I cannot blame them.”
“Is that why you think they’re after me? My good looks?” Itsuki teases.
Shizuka’s stomach twists. She does not know what to say. Tears well up behind her eyes, the pressure mounting without a suitable escape. Her head hurts.
Every day since his death, Shizuka has wished for her father to return to her—but as her father. Not like this.
The words catch in her throat. Overcome by shame and revulsion, she can say nothing to him at all. This, too, is its own suffering: to see his eyes narrow, to see the smile melt off his face, to know that she is the cause. In all her memories, he is so happy, so serene …
“Try not to get into any fights while I’m away,” he says, rising. Shizuka recognizes this, at least—it is an old joke her parents used to share.
“So long as you don’t seduce any of your fans,” she answers.
“I’d never dream of it,” he says, but the words leave him like a strained reflex.
The door slides open. She watches him go, biting her finger to keep from making any sound.
It is then that she smells the burning.
Something about the scent of burning has always fascinated Shizuka, from her childhood. She does not remember her early attempt on her future wife’s life, but she does remember the scent of her own burning flesh as she knocked over the nearby brazier in her passion. How young she had been then—her resistance to fire had not yet blossomed within her. There is something precious about that awful smell, something transient and mortal.
And there is something precious in this scent too. Shizuka checks to see if she is burning now, with a level of resignation most often seen on provincial bureaucrats: what is it this time?
Fire will not hurt her—but it might entertain her.
Yet when she looks down, Shizuka sees that it is not her own flesh that is burning but the flowers tucked into her belt: the violets she’d given Baoyi.
If you ever have need of me …
Can Shizuka even do much to help from a place like this? Yamai’s power may well override her own; it may be that she is forced to watch as Fujino burns.
But her niece is calling for her, and Shizuka has so little family left.
If this fails, at least she will have tried.
With her bare hands Shizuka plucks the burning violet. She expects that the fire does not burn her, and it doesn’t—but she does not expect for it to feel so cool against her skin.
Shizuka tilts back her head and drops the flaming flower into her mouth. When she swallows, she feels the cold flames tickling their way down her throat.
A blink.
When she opens her eyes, she is in Fujino.
Two things occur to her.
First: this is not her parents’ apartment within the palace. This is a room she’s visited perhaps twice in her life—the archivist’s quarters. Tall stacks of scrolls line the walls, with some unrolled and displayed. The air here is stale; she smells old paper and older ink.
Second: it is not her niece who called her.
The years have been kind to Kenshiro. The close-trimmed beard he now keeps has filled in, giving him the look of an old general. Crow’s-feet make the green of his eyes more vibrant. For some men, time is a sculptor, and it seems as if that is the case for him. Where is the shy young father Shizuka left behind? Even his bearing has changed: he sits straight-backed and imperious, his robes trimmed with Imperial Gold.
“Shizuka-lun,” he says. “It’s really you.”
Before she can say anything to this, he has stood from his proper seat and thrown his arms around her. She expects that he will pass right through her—but instead she feels his arms as if he stood with her beyond the Wall. He has gotten more solid, somehow.
She isn’t sure what to do. Embraces are not … She hasn’t had to deal with them very often in her life, and particularly not embraces from men. She finds herself going stiff in his arms simply because she does not know how to hold herself. When at last he holds her at arm’s length, she almost wants to sigh in relief—but to do that would be heartless.
There is such wonder in his eyes, after all. And that he is able to touch her … her mind is beginning to buzz with possibility. Whatever hold the Traitor might have on her, he cannot stamp out the embers of her power.
In that way, it is thrilling to be here among the things he cannot touch.
“You haven’t aged at all,” Kenshiro says with a broad smile. “The scar! Your ear…”
“I’m happy that you remember,” says Shizuka, for she can think of little else to say. Was there a reason Kenshiro used one of the three remaining violets, or does he just miss her? She finds that she does not care either way. If he has need of her then she has an excuse to stay, an excuse to leave the false Palace behind for a few hours. How long will it be before she is noticed? Time passes slowly there. She might be here for days, poring over old tomes, having tea with her niece …
And if Kenshiro simply missed her? Well, for once, she would not mind his wanton abuses of privilege.
“I drew you,” he says. He shuffles through some papers on his desk. Shizuka notices, as he walks to it, that there is a stiffness to his right leg. She’s seen that sort of limp before—on rainy days she develops it herself. An old war injury.
But Kenshiro, with a war injury?
Just what has happened in their absence?
At last he finds the page he was looking for. Pages, really. He holds up four large sheets with portraits drawn upon them. Kenshiro is no artist—the likenesses are clumsy, at best, but he’s gotten the important parts. Shizuka’s scar and mangled ear, her dark hair and sharp features, large whorls of orange for eyes. Shefali’s face, though … It is different in each image. In some she has the full cheeks of her youth; in some …
“Every week,” Kenshiro says, “I draw the two of you. It forces me to remember what you look like. I also write out our family history every month and reread all the previous entries, checking for any discrepancies. I … it’s been so long. I thought…”
“I stand corrected,” Shizuka says. “If you’re doubting me, you mustn’t remember me very well at all.”
He laughs, the sort of laugh that draws tears in the midst of it. How precious this laughter is to him! For his eyes go wide, as if he has seen something more sacred than the god manifesting in his archives.
And in this earnestness he does at last what he has tried to do for all of their lives: he wins Shizuka over, and makes her smile. For in spite of where her body may be, her soul is still with her family.
Though, she supposes—something of her body, too. It is strange, being partly corporeal.
Curious, she begins to pace around the room. Or, well, attempts to. She has manifested in her war boots and she does not dare walk around in them. Shefali spoke of will being paramount in situations like this—she looks down at her armor and wills herself into something more suited for the occasion. Imperial Gold, Sunset’s Promise Amber, Light of Morning Yellow …
One moment she is in armor; the next she is in her robes. Gone, her boots. She may wander at her leisure.
How strange. This doesn’t feel at all like manifesting for war, or when she’d done so to raise the Wall of Flowers.
“Look at you!” Kenshiro says. “How did you do that? Come to think of it, your scar—it’s g
one gold now, and the tips of your hair…”
Shizuka pinches a few strands between her fingers. Small fires swallow the ends. Watching the colors move reminds her of the feather Shefali had brought back from Sur-Shar. Part of her is sad she cannot see her hair swish about as she walks; it must be mesmerizing.
“I told myself to, I suppose,” Shizuka says.
“Oh, you can’t say it as simply as that,” says Kenshiro. He’s scrambling for his brush, grinding up the ink. “There must be more detail. For the records.”
She takes her first steps through the room. The mats feel cool against the bare skin of her feet. As she approaches a desk stacked high with texts in Old Hokkaran, she lets her knee knock against the corner. Her robes absorb most of the blow—but she feels it all the same.
“Is that why you’ve summoned me, Kenshiro?” she asks. “For your records?”
He stops grinding his ink. His shoulders slump, and for a moment, he looks like his old self. “It isn’t like that,” he says. “I thought … I hadn’t seen you in so long. I didn’t want to forget. And there’s so much we need to talk about.”
“Yes,” she says. She had only meant to tease him earlier—but she should have known better, given their past. “Much has changed, no? I’m sure you are eager to tell me everything.”
Down, the brush and the ink—he sits near his desk and shrinks. “Yes and no,” he says pensively. “No one remembers your name, or … Is my sister with you?”
Shizuka busies herself looking at a stack of old poetry scrolls so that she does not have to look at her wife’s brother. With one finger she pushes at the edge of one and it goes tumbling down, unspooling itself along the way.
“She is elsewhere, Kenshiro, and if you question me any more about it I will leave.”
When he makes that face, he looks just like Shefali. “Shizuka-lun—”
“Don’t make a habit of questioning gods,” Shizuka says. She makes herself sound confident, sound assured.
He could press the issue—she does not have it in her to leave, in truth. Not when she is so desparate for real company. That he allows her time to gather herself instead is a testament to his growth.
The Warrior Moon Page 46