Shefali’s heart sings watching it—sings to be part of it.
She draws her bow. Another shot, another—the movement is as familiar to her as stroking her wife’s delicate cheek. Here, an arrow lands in the skull of a shadow mid-swipe, and one of Temurin’s riders gets to live another day. There, another pierces the hand that holds a fatal lance.
One by one, they are falling.
Close, now—so close that she can see the hairs of its chest beneath the layers of its robes. Its nostrils flare, its lips curl, it lifts a finger to point at her. “Moon.”
Shizuka would boast in a situation like this. “I am the Sun, great and terrible,” she’d say, and in a single beautiful stroke, she would part its head from its body.
But Shizuka is not here at the front. A bright flash of gold to the northwest is all Shefali can see of her wife, and all she needs to see—her love yet lives.
There is time, then, to give Rikuto a proper punishment.
And so Barsalai does not reward it for recognizing her.
Silver streaks from her bow and buries itself between the knuckles of its outstretched hand. Howling, it draws the hand back. Two shadows leap to its defense, hurling javelins at her—she catches them and flings them back as easily as a child skipping stones across a lake. The javelins find the heads of their former masters and impale them.
Barsalai draws herself up—now standing not only in her stirrups but atop the saddle itself. Her horse whickers, but bears her as she has all their lives.
Rikuto reaches for its sword.
Barsalai leaps. A mountain goat could not hope to match her, nor a hare or gazelle—five horselengths she leaps, and the whole while stays eighteen hands in the air. Rikuto readies a slash to greet her—and it is then she realizes precisely the mistake she has made.
If it were a normal blade, Shefali could bear its kiss, but it is the Daybreak Blade, and only agony awaits her.
Yet it is too late to turn away from the path she’s chosen now.
Any swordsman would be proud of the blow the demon lands. It is said that to practice the simplest slash one million times can transform one into a sage—and Rikuto is, if nothing else, a sage of war. Clean and crisp, the arc: it cuts the descending god from forehead to navel. Silver sprays over gold.
This, she feels; this, she hates. If only it were a sharp pain! That at least would be bearable. The edges of her flesh bubble and simmer like fat on a griddle. She’d intended to land on the demon’s shoulders, to tear its head from its shoulders the way she’d torn foul Nozawa’s, but the cut throws off her focus—she lands curled on the ground before it instead. The ground drives the arrows farther into her chest. She coughs. Should have snapped them off.
“I don’t know what sort of bargain you made with the hag, but consider it ill advised.” Pride and arrogance—how giddy Rikuto is to have struck her. “You are a dog. You have always been a dog. The heavens chose wrongly when they anointed you.”
Around her—around them—the battle rages on. Two horses go down to her right—she knows them well, a dusky spotted Surian and a white gelding named Lumps who had always been too meek for his own good. Their cries of agony echo the ones she must now swallow. She is a god; who ever heard of a god crying out in misery?
No, no, she cannot.
Nor can she fail here.
Two spears thrust in at her from right and left. The right finds its home in her shoulder, but she grabs hold of the shaft. She takes a sharp breath. Cold fills her lungs. Pain dulls in its wake. With a howl to match any wolf, Barsalai Shefali swings the spear—and the attached shade—into the opponent on her left.
And yet that is no true respite. More spear tips lunge for her; these she rolls to avoid. Dirt and wildflowers dig into the cut across her middle. A tear bites at her green eye. Another sharp breath. In the way of fighters and soldiers, she kips up to her feet. Silver once more stains her deel, dripping from her split lip.
Rikuto fixes its eyes on her. A circle’s formed around them, though only wide enough for two horses strung together. Outside its bounds, the Qorin swing their blessed swords against the spears of darkness; within it, the demon wields its stolen blade. The shades on either side of it retreat back into the melee when it nods in their direction.
“You bleed well,” it says.
She half coughs, half laughs. If only she didn’t hate Rikuto so much—it is a very Qorin joke to tell someone she bleeds well when you are yourself wounded. Evil ink smears itself across the rayskin handle of the Daybreak Blade.
The Demon General falls into a dueling stance—the blade held at its side, the tip nearly touching the ground.
Ah, so that is its game. It must think itself terribly clever.
One step, two steps forward, she takes. From the corner of her eye, she sees Dorbentei’s familiar shape. A heartbeat later, she hears her cousin’s famous war shout as she drives a sword into a shade’s neck.
“I had wondered about your blood.”
So do most Hokkarans, Shefali wants to say to it. “You are not special.” The words come out clear in spite of her injury. Part of her takes pride in this, and part of her finds it amusing she’d take pride in something so superficial.
On her third step forward, she staggers—it is only partly artifice, only partly the wily fox at work. A wide upward slash across the chest is her reward. Pain blossoms in her breast.
But Barsalai Shefali is old friends with pain, and so she continues onward, the old demon warrior’s face growing more and more self-assured.
Fourth step. It’s returned to its proper stance, whipping the Daybreak Blade clean of silver.
Fifth step. “Again you are mistaken.” Like a man of middle age, the demon has a way of sounding as if it knows everything. “There is no one like me.”
Sixth, seventh—
On the eighth, she mocks stumbling toward it.
Rikuto seizes the advantage: it raises the sword and holds the blade straight out before it, the tip level with Shefali’s eyes. From this position, it lunges forward.
Here is the trick of it, the trick of its stance, the trick of its strike: Rikuto does not think she knows the length of the Daybreak Blade. Forged as it was in older times, it is shorter than most Hokkaran swords; to conceal this failing, the Minami family often used this very stance. Shizuka thus rails against it. Why wield a godly sword if one cannot do so proudly? Its length is not a failing, not something to be ashamed of, so far as she is concerned.
And so whenever she had sparred with Shefali, she used far more open stances than this. Barsalai Shefali sparred with her wife every morning for the better part of three years. You learn quickly, in those circumstances, the length of your opponent’s weapon—not that it ever helped her win a bout.
But that was when they’d both faced each other with swords. The things always felt so clumsy in Shefali’s hands. She’d never understood why until her infection: there is a particular rush to fighting unarmed, a particular thrill to using your own two hands to end your enemies.
Rikuto lunges for her—but the demon is a little too far for the blow to be a comfortable one, a sure one. She has more room to maneuver than it wants her to believe. Leaning forward as she is, she conceals her own movement until it is too late for Rikuto to do anything about it: she clamps the sword in her armpits and twists from the hips.
It is said that you must hold a sword the way you hold a bird: lightly, but so that it cannot escape. In its confidence to strike at her, Rikuto relaxed its grip. The Daybreak Blade falls to the ground after Barsalai twists. She plants herself over it and grins.
“Wrong,” says the god to the demon.
Such consternation! See how its nose grows longer, see how its skin goes violet with fury! It wastes no more time trading barbs. Boulder strong and bull quick, it ducks its shoulder and charges her, raising its arms as if to grab at her leg. It means to take her down? Why attempt something so amateurish? All she must do—and what she does do—is lower hers
elf to anticipate it. She slams her shoulder against the demon’s to stop the charge, grabs it about the waist, and lifts.
And it occurs to her then, as she sees its eyes widen in fear and realization, what its strategy is.
It thinks the steel eye has affected her vision—that she cannot judge distances. In such cases, straight strikes are brilliant, but ah! It is funny, truly, that the demon has overthought the issue.
That eye is no longer simply steel. Of course she can see through it. Not well, but well enough.
There is a grin on her face as she hefts it overhead, one hand knotted in its hair and the other grabbing the waist of its wide-legged pants. The awful clatter of battle goes silent if only for this. Shades flicker in place as Rikuto’s focus—its will—falters; the Qorin turn toward her, hungry for hope, hungry for vengeance. Among them: her cousin and Shizuka’s, watching with wide eyes.
Were she the many-splendored dawn, it would be time for a speech.
But she is the Warrior Moon.
Five women emerge from a ger clad in their celebratory best. One of them holds in her hands the spine of a ram. A young couple, newly married, sits on a hastily prepared dais festooned with gifts. The bride smiles as her friends approach.
“We’ve come to test your husband’s strength,” says the girl with the spine.
“A husband must be able to defend you,” says another.
“Let us see if he can bend a ram’s spine; you deserve no less.”
The young man picks up the spine. Its heft shocks him, for he has slaughtered his share of livestock and knows the weight of a spine. This is far heavier. All the same, kumaq makes him a braggart: he tries to break the spine over his knee.
Unbeknownst to him, the young women ran an iron bar through the ram’s spine. When he tries to break it, he succeeds only in hurting himself. The women laugh.
Shefali has seen this happen half a dozen times at least. After her infection, when she in her daydreams entertained the idea of her own wedding to Shizuka, she’d imagined being handed the iron spine. It would not be difficult for her to break it. She was, in fact, eager for the opportunity.
Rikuto’s spine breaks over her knee as easily as the ram’s spine would have. Crack! The sound of it! The howl that follows! Were it the voice of her own general, it would curdle her blood, but it is the voice of the enemy, and so instead it thrills her.
Smiling, the god surveys the battlefield, holding her enemy by the scalp. Half the shadows wink out of existence as Rikuto continues its howling, as it claws up at her like a child. That is the trouble with immortals, she thinks: so few of them understand pain.
The Spider begged, too, in the precious seconds before Shefali swallowed it.
She will give Rikuto more opportunity to do the same—not because she means to grant it mercy, but because her people deserve to see this. A thousand years and more as the enemy, a thousand years and more as the uncivilized scourge of the world, a thousand years of hatred and oppression—to survive is Qorin.
She would see them thrive.
And—loathe as her people would the metaphor—for them to thrive, she must water them.
How it struggles, this barrel-chested sack of water.
The battle is dying down now as the combatants fade away. One by one, her army lowers their weapons; one by one, they turn to watch her. Their eyes upon her make the souls within her sing.
High, she holds it, high and by the hair: the General who caused them so much trouble. The creature of shadows. Steam rises from its ears. Its nose, swollen and purple tipped, looks malformed on its once-handsome face. Its hands bat at hers, but it has no more hope of disturbing her grip than a child has of dislodging a boulder.
“How should I kill it?”
The air goes sweet with their hunger, with their joy. Let them remember this always.
“Roll it in felt and drag it behind your horse!” shouts a woman in a stoat mask. Age is a varnish on her voice.
“Lash it and let us trample it!” cries a young man, one of her cousin’s cousins, if she does not miss her guess.
But it is the third voice that catches her attention, the third voice that wins her. Like an old friend returned after many years, that voice: transformed by the things it has seen, the things it has done.
“Give it to me.”
So speaks Dorbentei Otgar Bayasaaq.
There is a moment of silence between them, a moment where their eyes meet. Dorbentei has asked her for so little during the course of their time together. Shefali cannot recall another time like this.
“Its head, or its heart?” Shefali asks her.
Minami Sakura squirms behind Otgar. The mask might hide her expression, but it does not hide her soul: this turn in Otgar disgusts her. Violence disgusts her. She has no stomach for it, yet here she is. What has happened here will change her.
Brave, Shefali thinks again.
“Its head,” Dorbentei says. The word comes out like smashed pottery.
A Kharsa does not turn away her people when they come to her; she grants their requests when they are reasonable and boldly sought. So it is with Barsalai.
“Sharpen your sword,” she says, “and come.”
Now fear sinks its claws into Rikuto. Though it cannot move its legs, the demon digs its nails into her arm. Silver drops fall onto its forehead. Barsalai does not let go.
“Unhand me,” it demands.
Dorbentei dismounts. An errant spear lunges for her; her younger brother chops the arm off the offending shadow. There is not yet hair on him. Barsalai feels a pang of regret for the childhoods she has ruined.
But she does not let go.
“You would throw away eternity?” says the demon.
Dorbentei reaches in her deel. When she withdraws her hand, there is a whetstone in it. This she uses to stroke the long, curved blade she favors—a sword from her father’s nation. Sur-Shar.
“If you strike down the Eternal King, another god will take his place. There will be six others, Steel-Eye. One of them will try to kill you eventually.”
There is a harshness to Dorbentei as she walks to them. Shefali tamed her own wildness with butchers and hunters; she forged it in the fires of the desert.
Her cousin will have to tame it at blade’s point and forge it from this demon’s blood.
Its nails hit bone. Still she does not let go.
“You cannot love the sun,” he says. “She will burn you.”
And it is this at last that inspires her to answer. Her cousin arrives, laying her sword at the demon’s throat. Barsalai shifts her grip—she holds Rikuto in a great bear hug so that Dorbentei may hold it by the hair as she makes her cut.
It is broad in her arms, broad but not strong. It does not struggle.
“Who can burn the eternal sky?” she whispers to it.
Dorbentei knots her fingers in its hair.
“Please—”
Dorbentei hears it. Shefali sees a flicker across her wide, dark face.
And she sees, too, the spurt of black as she makes the cut.
O-SHIZUKA
FIFTEEN
“What was that?” asks Itsuki. He’s rushing over to help her up, and she is too much in pain to refuse help. As she gets to her feet, she turns toward the south. There, rising from the wall: two licks of flame, dancing like singing girls. “What’s going on?”
“My friends are here,” Shizuka says to him. She does not chide him for leaving; there is little time for that now. The Qorin—Shefali’s Qorin—will be pouring into the city now. Yamai will be distracted. That means …
The guards are frozen in their positions atop the walkway. What a cruel joke! The woman with the sword is stuck with her arms splayed behind her, and the other is doubled over. Like two figures from a woodcut, forever trapped in their positions, never moving no matter how the woodblock itself did. Their eyes stare unblinking out on Shizuka—but she is confident they are not really seeing her.
Good, good. It is just
like her wife to save her.
And yet they do not have long. Shizuka knows well the sound and rumble of an army—and there is one afoot somewhere near her. She can feel their footfalls if she lays her hands on the rafters. Arakawa taught her she has no hope of fighting off an army alone—it will have to be now.
“Your friends?” says Itsuki. “Shizuru—they just blew a hole in the wall, didn’t they?”
“Yes,” Shizuka says, “but trust me, they’re friends.”
With the guards frozen, there’s little time to waste. Roses, camellias, lilies, and sunflowers—all turn to face her as she makes her way to the center of the garden. Another round of cannonfire sends all the flowers swaying; when she looks to the walls, she sees streaks of fire crashing over them. The trebuchets have joined in, too. How much longer will the Traitor be able to hold this place?
“You would let an army crash into Fujino while the two of us go for a walk through the garden?” says Itsuki. The hurt in his voice! She does not dare look back on him.
“I thought you said you trusted me,” she says. Giving him any more attention than this will ruin her focus. The fires within her need stoking if she is to do what she means to do. “Please, Father. We’ll be safe here.”
Father—a crucial mistake. Just as she feels the fires rising in her breast, he pulls her back. “Why do you insist on impersonating my daughter?”
“I’m not—” she begins, but as the heat swells in her throat, the words leave her with a thundering resonance that is too harsh for her own father. Yet it is too late to stop herself—the words have already left her, the fire’s filled her. Her soul is all flames now, and her eyes are the surest window.
What pain, what misery it is to see the realization on her father’s face! The way his lips open in surprise, his mouth hanging open in shock! Slack, his noble features, as his mind races to find some sort of explanation for what he is seeing.
The Warrior Moon Page 51