The tutor is watching. If she does not take his hand …
She wants to close her eyes, but she does not. She looks her father right in the eye as their hands meet.
And it is then that the lights flicker. Outside, the perpetual day goes dark—a curtain of night drawn across the horizon. The room is plunged into black within an instant. To her right, the tutor crumples to the ground, her tongue lolling out of her mouth.
What?
A curious feeling fills Shizuka’s chest—a familiar cold. She takes her father’s hand as she flies to the window. There, in the distance—plumes of white smoke, and at their center a single figure in silver.
Like water to the dying.
She has never been so happy to be so cold.
For she knows that silver as well as she knows her own gold.
Barsalai Shefali.
Her wife. She’s alive!
Shizuka covers her mouth to stifle the sound that comes out of it. The reasonable part of her knows that she must move quickly—for how long will this darkness last? Yet this is at odds with the part of her that wants nothing more than to stay at this window and speak to her wife forever. If she opens the window, then surely the winds will carry her words.
But what will she say?
The words come to her. She throws open the shutters. Cool wind musses her carefully prepared hair, caresses the scar that she earned so many years ago.
“Shefali, I—”
But just as soon as the moment begins, it ends—the false sun returns to the sky, the tutor stands behind her. Two guards rush into the room.
“Four-Petal!”
“There is nothing to see. Come with us—”
“She isn’t going with you,” says Itsuki, his voice low. “You are guards. Do not forget your place. If you touch her, then you will have to contend with Imperial justice.”
He stands slightly before her, this wispy poet, his arm spread out in front of her as if he will be able to stave these guards off single-handedly. It’s a farcical gesture. If she were seeing this onstage, she’d laugh.
But there is nothing to laugh at now. Her father might not know who she is, but he is still there, buried beneath the dirt the Traitor has laid upon him.
She risks another glance over her shoulder. Sure enough, the plumes of smoke are still there. No wonder she missed them earlier: the Traitor has tried to mask them as clouds, but a shimmer of silver gives them away as anything but. And there is the silver shard at the base of them.
Her wife.
Minami Shizuka has not slept in two days. She has not dreamed in longer. But at that moment, while her father argues the guards down, she allows herself a moment to do just that.
My wife is alive, she thinks, so I will free my father, and I will return to her.
Order is restored shortly thereafter. She pretends she has not seen anything. Her zither tutor tells her it was only a trick of the light, and nothing to concern herself over.
But she thinks of the garden she saw on the way to the terrace.
And she knows exactly what she’s going to concern herself with every minute of every hour until Shefali arrives.
Together, they swore.
THE WARRIOR MOON
FOUR
Barsalai Shefali has heard in her travels the music of many nations: the delicate melodies of Ikhtar, lively Surian drumming, even the strange paeans of Axiot. If you were to ask her what she liked best, she might answer her wife’s zither playing, or her cousin’s throat singing, depending on her mood.
But on this day there is no zither, no throat singing, no horsehead fiddles nor bamboo flutes.
On this day there are the drums of war and the roar of the cannons, and she finds this suits her well.
All through her childhood she had wondered what it would be like to ride in her mother’s stirrups, to see the Wall of Stone come crumbling down before her. How dizzying to wield such power! And yet now that this and more have been granted to her, she feels like a child granted a toy.
Did you really think that would stop me?
She does not speak the words—for if she does, he will hear, and she is not in the mood to speak with him at present. But she does think them as loudly as she can. Let the cannons drown her out.
And they are doing so. Dalaansuv’s precious creations bring light to the divine darkness with each bark. This to say nothing of her aunt’s laughter, the peals of which hit Shefali’s ears the way the cannons hit the walls.
“I fucking love these things!” she says.
And, well, Shefali is not going to argue the point.
“On your order, Needlenose!” Otgar shouts from behind her. A passing breeze carries her scent to Shefali’s nose: bitter hatred and resignation, but also something light and floral. Sakura, no doubt, joining for history’s sake.
But it is difficult to think of this as history. Someday it will be—but today, it is only a series of obstacles to overcome before her people can be free. Before she can save her wife.
There: a shimmer of gold to the north. Pulsing in time with a frantic heartbeat, beautiful and fragile and unyielding. Shizuka. The sight of her fills Shefali’s cold chest with warmth.
And it occurs to her then, as she gazes on the towers of Iwa and the army rushing to defend them, that this is the moment she has been waiting for all her life. This: the arrows whistling through the sky toward them, the cries of the enemy, the chants of the Qorin behind her. The Qorin—she can feel the thrill of their hearts like goose bumps against her skin. Two thousand, three thousand, all of whom have already endured so much to be here—all of them wait for her command.
This realm—everything beneath the night sky—is her creation, and so the breeze that tousles her hair must have come from her as well. Nevertheless, it surprises her—not simply the breeze but also the way her braids sound as their beads clink together. When she turns her head, they sing: Today is the day, Barsalai.
It is a song, but it is one that lurks beneath the surface of things, hiding in the bray of horses and the creak of bows, the whisper of leather and felt, the rasp of thirsty blades calling out for blood.
And there is one woman who sings it louder than any of the others—one woman who sings in perfect silence.
To Barsalai’s right, atop a liver mare, is Burqila Alshara. The wind’s sending her braids clattering, too, but the rest of her is as solid and unyielding as ever. Her eyes are fixed on the explosions ahead of them, on the massive hole that will soon welcome them. The bronze war mask so many have learned to fear sits atop her head, yet undonned.
Barsalai Shefali, the Moon Incarnate, presses her tongue to the roof of her mouth. Then, in the voice of a girl seeking a new blanket in the depths of winter: “Aaj. Attack?”
And it is then that her mother turns—but only her head. Burqila’s gaze fixes on her daughter’s. Godhood has done nothing to inure Shefali to the intensity of her mother’s eyes; she feels at once as if she has been caught doing something untoward.
But it lasts only a moment. Her mother shakes her head, a small, sad smile tugging at her lips.
“Needlenose? You can’t keep us waiting,” says Otgar. “The forest clans are champing at the bit.”
Otgar is, too, though she won’t say it. Shefali can smell her thirst for vengeance. It’s a common scent among her people.
No, she really can’t deny them much longer.
Barsalai stands in her saddle. From the quiver at her hip, she draws a windcutter arrow—this with one hand. With the other, she raises the bow. Arrow meets bow. She draws back the string—see how the shoulders of a god strain to draw it!—and aims.
To the north. To the shimmer of gold. To the sky she has reclaimed, and its blanket of stars.
She looses the arrow.
Silver streaks out, trailing ice in its wake. High, high, higher it soars! See the snow landing on the faces of the Lost Qorin—the blackbloods—who cease their snarling to stare upon it! See the flakes fall upon the m
imicked city, upon the food stalls and the houses and the eaves of false temples! See it fall on the tips of the towers, on the pine veranda!
Yes—see it as the Qorin see it, feel the cold as the Qorin feel it, know it as the Qorin know it:
The Warrior Moon has come to Iwa.
O-SHIZUKA
FOURTEEN
There is no night here. Not consistently. That does not stop Shizuka from imagining one, or from longing for it. Not an hour passes without her looking out her window, where she sees that shining silver on the horizon.
I will wait, she thinks.
But in truth, it is not waiting—it is planning. With Shefali still alive, there’s no doubt in her mind that the two of them can kill the Traitor. How she lives is irrelevant; why she lives is also irrelevant. If she can see her wife’s smiling face one more time, it will erase the other memory.
The Traitor calls her for dinner at a little past Fifth Bell. The meal is a sedate one, perhaps because of the earlier incident. She expects him to lecture her on the finer points of rulership, or to enumerate her many mistakes, but he does no such thing. Instead he simply sits on his side of the table upon the terrace and eats his seaweed rice in silence. Distantly, Shizuka wonders where he got the salmon and tuna that complement the dish. Neither species is native to the northern reaches of Hokkaro as far as she knows.
But then, there is no guarantee the food here is real at all.
She will not risk it. Before her is the very same meal—seaweed rice with glazed salmon and four tuna rolls—but she eats none of it. If the Traitor notices her holding the same mouthful of rice for two minutes before discreetly spitting it out, he says nothing.
Silence from him. Terrible, contemplative silence. He is watching her every move. She is conscious of his evaluating her—the angle at which she holds her chopsticks, the amount of rice she scoops into her mouth, how she holds the hem of her robes back so that they do not get dirtied. She is conscious of these things and so she pretends to be the sort of woman he wants her to be: delicate and precise.
Yet that sort of woman is a difficult sort to be. Even Baozhai—so often lauded by the Hokkarans and her own people alike for her delicate nature—does not come by it naturally. It is a concerted effort. Theater, like so much of ruling is.
Shizuka is not well suited to the role. She drops her rice more than once, and more than once speaks with her mouth still full. With every breach in etiquette, the Traitor’s lip goes a little stiffer; his eyes go a little harder. The tension on the terrace is thick enough to drown in.
To everyone except O-Itsuki, who wants nothing more than to discuss his day speaking to imagined courtiers. Shizuka indulges him, for Yamai certainly won’t, and Rikuto looks as if it would rather die than exchange words with the Poet Prince. She is practiced at these sorts of conversations. She can keep them going without really thinking.
And she can watch the Traitor and his General as she does so.
They have to have spoken about what happened. Rikuto is holding itself awkwardly, as if the seat is burning it, constantly glancing in the direction of the steppes. It does not drum its fingertips on the table—to do so would be impolite—but it does sniff far more than anyone should, even with a nose that large.
The Traitor, too, occasionally glances toward the clouds. He has the look of a man trapped in a conversation he cannot escape. Shizuka wonders—if his domain is the mind, then how many conversations is he having at present? How many eyes does he see through, how many ears is he hearing with?
Dueling is about assessing your opponent—their weaknesses, their openings.
As her father concludes his story about a Minister Fujiwara of the Interior, Shizuka decides it is time to do a little testing.
“Honored Ancestor,” she says, for she does not want to lend the man the courtesy of his name, “there is something that weighs heavily on your mind. I don’t suppose you’d care to share it?”
He does not respond. Indeed, he makes no motion as if he has heard her at all.
“Honored Ancestor,” Shizuka says more firmly. “You would not turn away your descendant when she seeks your wisdom, would you?”
“Ancestor?” says Itsuki. Shizuka curses her own lack of guile.
“We share one, he and I,” she whispers to her father. “In the Minami line. A little playful teasing.”
Itsuki nods as if he believes this, and Shizuka thinks to herself that her father would believe nearly anything her mother told him. Then, to Shizuka’s amusement, Itsuki taps the Traitor on the shoulder. Only a prince could be so bold, and only after years of marriage to Hokkaro’s least polite woman. “My dear guest! Share your problems with us; they’re clearly burdening you.”
The Traitor starts. In that instant, Shizuka realizes something vital: he is not a warrior at heart. This she knew on some level from Sakura’s stories, from Shefali’s visions of the man, but it is possible to be a scholar who has hardened to battle. It is possible to wear that armor. The Traitor does not; even a simple unexpected touch is enough to make him jump.
Twice, the Traitor blinks, before the reality of the conversation and its particulars seep into him.
Rikuto clears its throat to try to draw attention. “His Lordship does not like to be touched,” it rumbles.
Itsuki’s smile is easy and carefree. “Ah, you must forgive me! How often I forget my manners. With my wife once more at my side, I find all the more onerous details slipping away. Please, I beg your pardon.”
He inclines his head. The Traitor watches him, eyes burning, and Shizuka thinks for a moment that he will say something harsh. Instead: “Freely forgiven, so long as it does not happen again.”
“You’ve my word,” says Itsuki. “As a gentleman and a poet. The word of a poet is worth much.”
Perhaps it is her father’s lack of concern for the danger at hand, perhaps it is the knowledge that her wife is coming—Shizuka feels bold now. It is time for more testing.
“I was curious,” she says. “You’ve spoken so much of giving me advice, and you’ve done so little of that. Is it my stern demeanor that’s throwing you off?”
She’s trying to sound like her mother, but it’s difficult to imitate Minami Shizuru’s precise swagger. The woman had a way of speaking as if you were at once her closest friend and utterly irrelevant to her.
“Your demeanor has nothing to do with it,” the Traitor answers. His tone says otherwise. Still, there is a softening to him, as if he has been waiting for her to ask this question. He drops a piece of tuna into his mouth and waits until he is done with it before continuing. “You must open a scroll before you may write upon it. Minds are much the same.”
There is a perverseness to the way he says “minds,” a barely masked arousal.
“Do you not think my mind is open?” Shizuka says.
“It is not,” says the Traitor. “You are too focused on yourself. There is an old poem—”
“‘It is the mind that is the enemy of the mind,’” Itsuki says. Shizuka has not heard the poem but despises it already—one of those built largely upon repetition. If you are given thirty-one syllables, you should endeavor to use different ones where possible.
“Thank you, O-Itsuki-lor,” the Traitor says, his words clipped. Shizuka notes that he does not like being interrupted. “I have found wisdom in those words, albeit with one important modification: It is the mind of the common man that is the enemy of progress.”
“That line needs work,” says Itsuki. The Traitor squirms. She wonders with a sort of childlike hope whether her father is doing this on purpose.
But it does not last. The Traitor’s squirming soon changes to something else, something sharp and awful, and with a snap of his finger, her father falls silent and still. Itsuki’s expression is frozen on his face; an awful mask of what was once genuine mirth. The Traitor meets Shizuka’s eyes.
“Let this be a lesson to you,” he says. “Do not interrupt me.”
Shizuka swallows. She
knows now where the line is. Her father … It was a joke. A good-natured joke. He’d said worse than that to his brother on many occasions, and everyone loved him for it.
“As I was saying—your mind is closed. You do not see the greater good, you see only yourself. In this way you are much like the commoners subsisting harvest to harvest, wondering only where their next meal will come from. You have not risen above your base instincts—and so I cannot share my wisdom with you.”
A man so selfish as to kill his own brother because he did not get the kingdom he wanted is telling her about selflessness. The irony of it is a knife, but she cannot feel the cut of knives anymore, not when her heart is missing from her chest.
Shizuka is trying to think of what she might say to him—of how she might temper her own anger, her own disgust—when darkness falls upon the terrace. How suddenly it happens! As if the hand of an unseen god drew the shades of the heavens! Yet it is not an unseen god at all—a needle of silver light pierces the dark just to the southeast.
Shizuka’s breath catches in her throat.
Shefali, she thinks.
“Your Majesty,” says Rikuto, standing.
“Take care of it,” the Traitor grumbles, waving the Demon General away.
“As you command,” it answers. Without so much as a bow to Shizuka, it walks to the edge of the terrace. She expects it to fly—to ride the same winds that brought her to this place—but instead it simply leaps off into the dark of the city. She does not hear it land.
“This is exactly the sort of thing I mean,” says the Traitor. “The conquered people thrive under my care. You have seen them yourself. Are they not cared for? Do I not provide for them? They are free from the burdens of their harsh lives, Four-Petal, and immortal under my care besides. And how do they repay me?”
She cannot peel her eyes from the wall, from the silver light coming closer and closer. The Traitor’s words pour into her ears only to pour right out the other end, and yet Shizuka dares not interrupt him, for fear of what he might do to her father.
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