A direct attack would force his hand.
But there is the question of direction.
She taps the door with one finger. “Strong?”
Burqila gestures, and Dalaansuv speaks. “Strong enough. Thick, too. The walls are a better shot, if you ask me; he won’t be expecting us there.”
Shefali nods. She reaches into her deel for the horses she painted in Xian-Lai, only to realize those had belonged to her old body. Looting her own corpse had seemed a blasphemous thing to do—but Shefali spares a thought for the keepsakes now lost in that grotesque cavern.
And so instead, the Moon breathes into her curved palm and wills the cold to form into a horse’s shape. Her mother’s eyes go wide; Sakura smiles in spite of her tiredness; Dalaansuv, it seems, cannot yet be bothered to summon any wonder.
Shefali places her little horses down—one at the gates and two eight li away.
“We blow the wall here,” she says, gesturing to the two. “If we have explosives.”
Dalaansuv’s answer is hers alone: she huffs in mock offense loud enough to stir Dorbentei. “We have explosives. Don’t you worry about that.”
Burqila laughs a little as she signs something. Before Dalaansuv can interpret for her, Sakura speaks.
“Like mother, like daughter,” she says.
Burqila’s fingers fall still. She jerks her head in Sakura’s direction, looking pleased with herself.
“Oh, is that what you were saying?” says Sakura. “I think I might be getting the hang of this.”
It feels comfortable in a way that it perhaps shouldn’t, considering all that has happened. Already she thinks of everything before her death as her former life. Keenly she feels the wants and desires of the Qorin—but the personal tragedies are a distant consideration.
Except for getting her wife back.
Burqila’s hands are moving again.
“The foreigner says he will lead the forward army,” says Dalaansuv. “We don’t need to send our people there. Focus them all on blowing the wall.”
The Hokkaran army did move as a single organ. It would be good to have them front and center, where they might absorb the brunt of Yamai’s welcoming party. Shefali nods—and only then realizes that her mother is taking orders from her, and not the other way around.
Yes—this really is strange.
“Inside?” she asks, rather than focus on it.
“Not many people, from what we saw,” says Dalaansuv. “A few thousand, maybe. We think there are more in the towers, and more farther back in the city itself. At least one of those things has got to be a barracks.”
“We will find it,” says Shefali, “and destroy it while they sleep.”
“They don’t,” says Sakura. “At least, they won’t if they’re anything like you. Once infected, it’s rare that a blackblood sleeps at all.”
Shefali purses her lips. “Then we destroy it while they’re awake.”
“Or,” says Sakura, “you use some of that godly power of yours to conjure up darkness. You’re able to see in it because you’re the moon. My cousin doesn’t have the same gift, so he won’t either, and that means none of his people will.”
Well considered. The Moon nods. Conjuring a darkness—a task insurmountable not long ago, now as easily conceived as opening a jar.
“You’ve blessed all of us already, so with any luck, the whole … darkness thing … won’t bother us,” says Sakura.
Burqila gestures again. “My sister says that we should test it,” says Dalaansuv.
Cold still clings to Shefali’s lungs. She expels some of it in a breath, and the fire they’re gathered near is extinguished. It is dark in the ger then, but it is not absolute darkness. The false sun still shines in through the roof, for Shefali has not been extending her will to countermand it.
But she does then, at that moment, the way she had earlier while her mother braided her hair.
Come, night, she says, and the night heeds her. The sky above goes near black.
And yet the moon hangs in the sky! The ger is not truly dark. To banish the moon would kill her, Shefali knows this, but the army will need true dark if this is to work.
If she cannot banish the moon, then she can steal its light into herself. She pops her silver eye from its socket and holds it in her mouth. Nothing tells her that this is the right thing to do except her own instincts—it feels right. If her eye is the moon, then she need only swallow it.
But the human part of her is terrified at the idea of swallowing the moon.
So she simply holds it instead, and waits. The smooth metal of her eye goes craggy the longer it is in her mouth. Cold seeps into her like mint. She lets out a breath through her nose and it, too, is chilled.
Slowly the light of the moon fades. A deel thrown haphazardly over a lantern suppresses most of its light: so it is the case here. A fuzzy ring of silver surrounds the celestial body, but it banishes no shadows.
Darkness takes the ger.
But it has never troubled Shefali, and so she has no idea if her blessings are working. She crosses her legs and waits. There: her cousin shifts in her sleep, and Minami Sakura frowns at her for it—not with displeasure, but in sympathy. Only a moment later, Burqila begins to sign and Dalaansuv speaks for her.
“We can see,” says Dalaansuv. “It’s still dark, but…”
“It’s as if we’ve been in the dark for years,” says Sakura. “As if we know it.”
Because I have lived in the dark for years, Shefali thinks. Because I know it. She does not say this, for it would be a smug sort of thing to say, and she does not want to be a smug sort of god.
“It works, then,” Shefali says.
“Your mother says that she will do all her hunting at night, with the eyes that her daughter has given her,” says Dalaansuv.
It’s enough to rattle Shefali’s focus. The night flickers; Sakura flinches and raises her arm.
“Barsalai?” asks Dalaansuv. “Did you mean to do that? If you want to give us cover, you can’t have it giving out. The enemy will see us.”
Burqila Alshara shakes her head with a bit of a smirk. She signs again. Dalaansuv rolls her eyes. “She says she’ll try to be meaner to you on the battlefield.”
The thought brings a small smirk to Shefali’s lips. Even so, she does not allow the happiness to touch her overmuch—Dalaansuv has a point. Her focus will need to be absolute.
And so it shall be. She cannot disappoint her people.
“So—under the cover of your darkness, the Phoenix Guard attacks the gates while you and the Qorin make a gate of your own,” Sakura says. “What happens when you get inside?”
“We free our people,” Shefali says. She holds up a skin of kumaq, one she has already blessed. At her touch, it glows silver. Dalaansuv is still not impressed. “Using these.”
Sakura’s face goes hard. It is then, when she is scowling, that she looks the most like Shizuka—but perhaps that is because Shizuka has not done much else of late.
“And what is to stop the Traitor from killing my cousin in the meanwhile?”
Shefali sets down the skin of kumaq. The light goes out from it like an extinguished lantern.
“Shizuka will,” she says.
“You said that demon took her sword,” Sakura argues. “What’s she going to do without a weapon?”
It is Shefali who looks a little self-satisfied now. “She’s the Sun. When she awakes, she will make her own.”
How sure she is of everything. It is … Shefali cannot see the future. To do so would go beyond her domain, beyond the realm of her powers. What is yet to come approaches like a beast in the night—but Shefali can see the shape of it.
And she has always been an excellent hunter.
“When she ascends?” Sakura asks. “You mean she hasn’t already? But out on the bay—”
“Sleepwalking,” Shefali says. Tapping her lungs, she continues. “She needs to wake here.”
“Regardless of whether or not B
arsatoq wakes from her nap,” says Dalaansuv, “we need a workable plan. Who gets those skins? How do they use them? You’re going to head straight for the palace—”
“No,” says Shefali. “People first.”
Sakura tilts her head at this—and it is then at last that Shefali earns her aunt’s wonder. Dalaansuv’s mouth hangs open to catch flies. Burqila’s brows furrow, the green of her eyes muted in the shadow.
“You’re not … You’re not rushing headlong into danger to save her?” says Sakura. “After all she’s done?”
They do not understand. They cannot feel the cold; they cannot hear the song of the stars or the rallying cries of the moribund sea.
“You were not listening,” she says. She does not feel tired, but there is tiredness in her voice, as if she were explaining astronomy to a toddler. “The Sun needs no one to kindle her fires. So, too—she does not need me to save her. She will save herself.”
It’s the sort of grandiose statement Shizuka might make. A pot remains hot long after the flames have left it. So, too, does Shefali feel her wife’s warmth out beyond the city’s walls. She lives. She will live. She will burn bright, if only she remembers how. This flickering she’s doing ill suits her.
“I will go to her,” Shefali says. “She is the light of my soul—I will go to her. But if I neglect my people to do so, I am lower than shit.”
Sakura clenches her delicate hands into fists. Shefali does not blame her for this. To her, it must look cold and distant, this decision. As she speaks, her shoulders tremble. “She would run to you. She did. When the pit opened up, she was … There wasn’t any stopping that dumb-ass. And now you’re going to take a detour before you save her? I thought you loved her—”
“I do. Gurkhan Khalsar will crack in two before I stop loving her. The rivers will flow to their sources, and there they will freeze, if my love for her should ever falter,” says Shefali. “But you are treating a wolf like a dog.”
Her voice is calm and level, but in her green eye is a queer fire, cold burning. Mist forms about her shoulders like a cloak.
And yet Sakura does not falter. It must be the Minami blood, holding as true as ever.
“I don’t know if I like you as a god,” she says.
Dalaansuv speaks, reading signs that Burqila shapes as she stands between Sakura and Shefali. “She isn’t your god.”
Like tearing a painting in two—the look on Sakura’s face.
And yet Shefali cannot say her mother is wrong. She’d hoped that Sakura would be able to understand.
Perhaps that simple statement is the slap she needed. Sakura bites her lip. “I…,” she begins. She looks away, pinching her eyes and nose. “You’re right. I just…”
Barsalai Shefali stands. She squeezes her mother’s shoulder. Something in her is laughing—even as a god, she is not taller than Burqila. Burqila turns. The same thought must occur to her, for she smiles a little as she steps aside.
The Moon walks to her wife’s cousin. She does not embrace Sakura this time—but there must be some gesture.
It is Shefali’s Hokkaran blood that guides her. She bows from the shoulder. Her new braids shift against one another.
Sakura’s scent goes sharp with disbelief. Shefali remains there long enough for that to fade—for the swell of emotion to overwhelm it.
“She and I will be as inseparable as two pine needles,” Shefali says.
She means it, of course.
She has meant it every day of her life. She has meant it even when she did not know the words for it.
And it is that sincerity, in the end, that wins Sakura over.
More planning follows—but there passes not an hour in that ger without Shefali glancing to Iwa, to her wife’s faint light.
O-SHIZUKA
THIRTEEN
A new tutor walks in—a Qorin woman in five lush robes, white hair styled into a Hokkaran fan. Shizuka dislikes her on sight.
“Four-Petal,” she says, “I am your zither instructor.”
Play the zither for your mother, won’t you? It’ll make her so happy to hear you.
He knows what he is doing, sending in a zither tutor so soon after her father has left.
Shizuka swallows. She hates this woman. No—that is not quite right. This woman is not acting of her own accord. Those eyes, that voice, these clothes—all of them are borrowed from the root of this evil.
It is the Traitor who looks on her now.
“I know how to play the zither,” she snaps. “Leave me be.”
“Four-Petal,” says the tutor, smiling in the way of court women, “it would so disappoint your father if you did not take your lessons. He is so proud of—”
The fire gets the better of her. She flips the serving tray. Her anger tells her to do something, anything; the thought of immolating the servants occurs to her.
No.
They are only vessels for him.
Teeth clenched tight, she pulls at her hair and walks to the burning column.
“Do not speak to me of my father,” she says. “You, who have muddled his memory!”
Rice, sauce, and clear soup darken the woman’s robes. She smiles all the same, having not moved at all during Shizuka’s outburst. “Is that any way to speak of a gift? Your ungratefulness knows no bounds.”
“Ungratefulness?” she says. “You have taken my mother, you have taken my wife. Now you give me this shadow of my father and expect me to bow before you? To thank you?”
The woman stands, straight and abrupt, as if pulled by a wire over her head. She walks in small, delicate steps toward Shizuka. The column of flame roars louder the nearer she comes.
Once more, Shizuka thinks of burning this intruder. Once more, she decides it would be an unacceptable crime.
“We expect you to behave in a manner befitting a ruler,” says the tutor. “We expect you to listen. To learn. To care for your father, as is any child’s place in the world, regardless of his condition. But if you would prefer your freedom from him—that can also be arranged.”
The woman’s smile does not change at all. Footsteps in the hall, a struggle outside, a strained shout from what must be Itsuki—but she does not stop smiling.
Not when the doors slide open again.
Not when Itsuki is thrown in and lands on his knees, his hair falling from its bindings.
Not when he draws the short sword all nobles carry.
His bright eyes are cool and distant—he is staring at the window and not at Shizuka. His hands do not tremble at all as he holds the short sword to his throat—
“Stop!” Shizuka shouts. It is too much to bear—her father holding a blade to his own throat! She pushes past the tutor and to the kneeling man. He does not fight her when she pulls the dagger from his hand; he hardly even keeps himself sitting up. Her father’s eyes roll back in his head; he slumps, limp, against her.
Now panic truly closes its hands about her neck. “Father?” she says. She starts shaking him by the shoulders, but it is no use; his head lolls to and fro. “Father, please—”
“He cannot hear you,” says the tutor—but though her mouth is shaping the words, it is not her voice that speaks them. “Not that you’d want to reach him. Weren’t you complaining just now, Four-Petal, of how much you disliked having to care for him?”
If she had her sword … But no, no. Even that is secondary to seeing if her father is all right. She presses two fingers along the side of his throat. Steady, if weak, his pulse.
“What have you done to him?” she asks.
“Reminded you of your place,” says the tutor. “There are consequences to your actions, Four-Petal. Somehow this has escaped you all your life. Take this as a lesson: if you contradict us again—if you let that childish rebellion rule you—then it is he who will pay the price. We have no need of him save to keep you in line.”
She’d known, of course. Itsuki’s existence here beyond the Wall is a miracle—but it is not one freely granted, not one freely ea
rned. How long has the Traitor kept him here? How long has he waited for Shizuka to arrive? All the while thinking he was waiting for his wife …
Her father, who has never done anything wrong in his life. Who hesitates to swat flies.
She bites her lip. Copper fills her mouth. It aches, this weight; it aches. “Bring him back.”
“Will you take your zither lesson in peace?” asks the tutor.
Her father stirs in her arms. His lips shape a single syllable. Ow? He is in pain, and she is the cause. A fresh wave of shame fills her lungs.
How low she feels.
“I will,” she says. “Just … restore him.”
The tutor taps her fan against the butt of her palm. The motion is jerky and unnatural—just as the way her father sits up straight in her arms and turns toward her. This is not the way people move.
And yet in spite of this, there is something in his eye that is different now. O-Itsuki cups his daughter’s face, his touch light. In a voice as low as the whisper of silk on silk, he speaks to her.
“Am I forever to gaze upon the blue sky and dream of better? The memory of the sun keeps me warm through the winter.”
“Father?” Shizuka says, for her father had been fond of saying such grandiose things when he was … When he was well, and perhaps this is a sign. Her soul grows light at the idea. She hopes, she hopes—
But then that hardness returns to his expression, and he looks on her as if he is seeing her for the first time. “Shizuru? What are you doing here?”
Minami Shizuka screws her eyes shut. She takes her father’s hand and sets it down into his lap. It is heavier, she thinks, than the crown she has borne her entire life.
“Your Eminence,” says the tutor. “Everything is well. Her Excellence the Mother of Dawn only wished to see you again before departing. The rice wine must be getting to your head!”
The rice wine …
“Ah,” he says, “that is what I get for trying to keep pace with Minami Shizuru!”
He scratches the back of his head, as if this were all some funny joke, and gets to his feet. He offers a hand to Shizuka, who looks back on it the way a woman in search of death might look on a venomous serpent.
The Warrior Moon Page 48