The Warrior Moon

by K Arsenault Rivera

  Shefali journeyed eight years to return to a woman lost in her cups. Will she return now to a child unable to defend what she loves?

  She closes her eyes.

  The Traitor is right: what needs to be done is simple.

  But it makes her want to die.

  Yet it is the place of a god to die for her people, and the place of an Empress, and the place of any dutiful servant of the greater good. So long has she thought of herself as above these laws. So long has she thought of herself as the most important person in the room—but in the grand scheme of things, her suffering matters little.

  The thought is a spark on the kindling of her soul; the flames rise again within her, burning whatever they find.

  When she opens her eyes once more, they are no longer amber but a terrible, unyielding gold. Gold, too, the stitch across her face; gold, the insides of her mouth as her lips part and she speaks.

  “You have mistaken me, Yamai.”

  As the gong in the center of the Jade Palace—so Shizuka’s voice. How clearly it rings, though her throat is in her father’s iron grip! This is not the voice of the Peacock Princess or the temple acolyte; this is not the voice of General Dog-Ear or the drunkard atop the Phoenix Throne.

  It is the voice of the god.

  Yamai is no longer laughing.

  She does not turn her attention to him. He does not deserve any of it—not now—and he will have all of it the moment she is done with what needs doing.

  She meets her father’s eyes. Wide, they have gone, and though the Traitor holds his body, the awe on his face is plain.

  So, too, the regret.

  Shizuka covers her father’s hand with her own. Within her, the flames burn white-hot; the whole of her soul is in absolute agony.

  “Father,” says the god.

  He says nothing, for there is nothing he can say—but the bulb of his throat bobs as he swallows.

  And she thinks, then, of the dogwood tree and the poetry, of the late dinners and the jokes that had always made her groan. She thinks of the mourners swarming Fujino—so many that it was impossible to move through the main streets at all.

  The flames consume these thoughts like tinder. In their wake, there is only numbness.

  But there is one memory more precious to her than all the rest, one she holds above the fire like a treasure: her father and her mother drunk in Burqila Alshara’s ger, their faces red, singing a rousing song neither of them truly knew. Her mother leaning her head on his shoulder when it was done; her father taking her hand. The glance they shared then, so close to their doom, full of absolute love.

  “Mother has missed you for too long,” she says then, and anyone who heard her would say that her godly voice cracked on the words—that they heard only the orphaned girl instead.

  “What are you—?” begins the Traitor, but Shizuka has no room for his words and his wants in her mind. She grabs the dagger and drives it into her father’s chest.

  And the gold fills him then, the way it has filled her: his eyes shine bright with it. The hand holding her throat goes limp and falls away. A sharp breath from him, another—gold spilling forth from his mouth, gold seeping from the wound.

  The Poet Prince O-Itsuki slumps over, clutching at the dagger embedded in his chest with one hand. With the other, he holds the face of his daughter, and it is then that he sees her truly.

  Pale as winter’s first snow, he smiles at her.

  “‘Long sought and hard won, / Paid for in blood and sweat, the / View from rolling hills. / Home is calling to me now, / And who am I to refuse?’”

  As the last words leave him, so, too, does the light: a shimmer in the air flies up from his lips to the false sky.

  O-Itsuki falls—and his daughter is there to catch his body. She has never thought of herself as a particularly strong woman; apotheosis has not lent her any might. She kneels to the ground and cradles him.

  As the gold leaves him, as the shimmer soars higher and higher, as his blood seeps onto her clothes—she cradles him.

  It needed to be done, she tells herself. You needed to save your people.

  But holding him now as she is, she cannot stop the Traitor as he bounds through the portal, cannot stop him as he plucks the violet on the other side. The whole of the window snaps shut behind him: the last thing she sees of him are his eyes, burning in anger.

  LAI BAOYI

  TWO

  Lai Baoyi does not remember much of her birthplace, the Bronze Palace—but she’s come to know the Jade as well as she knows her own hand. Surrounded at all hours by courtiers and advisers and guards, it is only natural that she learned to evade them. With excuses and feigned sickness at first: simple things, easily conceived of.

  The hiding places came after: the apartments in the library, where only her father might find her; the scullery, where a maid of about her size and age had worked, and she might remain for hours until her accent slipped or the other girl showed up; the hunting grounds, where the Eternal Phoenix had once slain a tiger.

  All of these locations served her well, but it was not until her investiture as Empress that she learned of the hidden chamber. Her father had pulled her aside after the ceremony. She’d thought, at first, that he meant to speak to her about her marriage prospects. They’d managed to go her entire life without broaching the subject, and he was half-drunk—this was the blow she’d expected.

  But instead, he had taken her to the plaque, and he had shown her what lay beneath it, and he had called full-eight Phoenix Guard to lift it. No less than eight could lift the door from the outside, he said.

  “But if you’re ever in the position to need it, there will be at least sixty-four to defend you,” he said. The smile was meant to be comforting. It was not. Her head hurt from the weight of all her clothes, from the music, from the questions carefully deflected.

  “This isn’t one of your puzzles, is it, Papa?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “This is a safe room, Baoyi. The only thing that should ever drive you here is invasion.”

  How seriously he’d spoken! But the idea was as distant as Axiot: they would not be invaded. Young Lord Fuyutsuki had new eyes for her; her grandfather kept a tight hold on Oshiro; her mother ruled Xian-Lai to the south; Shiratori Rin disliked her almost as much as she loved her poetry; the North had not posed a threat since the Eternal Phoenix had raised the Wall of Flowers.

  Hokkaro would not be invaded.

  But she’d indulged her father all the same, and down into the chamber they went. It smelled of dust. An old suit of armor, a zither, eight waist-high jars of wine—were these meant to keep her company in case of the worst?

  The next day, she’d asked Kobayashi-zun—the captain of the Phoenix Guard—to see to it there were books added to the chamber. Paper and ink, too. Rations came third in her mind; clean water, fourth. With this done, she was happy never to think of the place again.

  On the first of Qurukai in her twenty-second year, someone grabs her by the shoulders and shakes her awake. She’s so shocked by this—by the contact—that she thinks she must be dreaming. That it is her father in armor does little to dissuade the notion. This must be a dream. Her father has never been a warrior.

  “You aren’t going to believe this when I tell you about it later,” she says, for surely the dream will not care what she does.

  But it is about then that the first arrows land outside her window—thunkthunkthunk.

  “We’re taking you to the chamber.” She has never heard her father sound so gruff.

  Words catch in her throat. She looks around only to find that there is no one else in the room with her. Where are Akishika and Momiji? Her handmaidens sleep in the same room, only a little removed, but they aren’t here. Outside, eight Phoenix Guards stand shoulder to shoulder, blocking the door. As she takes a sharp breath, she finds that the air tastes of smoke and metal.

  “Papa, what’s going on?”

  He flinches a little when she calls him that—
she had long stopped using such childish nicknames. The words leave her father now like wounded soldiers climbing a hill. “The enemy is attacking us.”

  “The enemy?” Baoyi says. “But the Wall of Flowers—”

  She is on her feet, scrambling for something halfway decent to wear. Her robes are all near Akishika and Momiji’s rooms; she grabs the first she sees as she peeks in. Their sheets are strung wildly across the room, their drawers open.

  Baoyi swallows. Her friends. Where have they gone? No—she cannot think of them when the Empire itself is under attack.

  “They’ve arrived in the gardens somehow,” her father says. In the time it’s taken her to find her robes, her father’s gotten hold of her ceremonial armor. He holds the cuirass up now. “Come. We don’t have much time.”

  “You can’t be—” she begins, but she hears a howl from the roof outside, and decides it is best not to question him at the moment. On goes the cuirass, strapped hastily together; one of the guards produces her boots and the Phoenix war-helm. All of it feels heavy, all of it feels wrong.

  “Your aunts will be coming to help,” says her father. Hope soothes the frayed edges of his nerves—he is speaking to himself as much as he is to her.

  But she does not want to hear him. “Who are you talking about? My aunts all live in Xian-Lai.” There is a memory briefly there, tugging at the back of the empress’s mind, a woman who smells of peonies—but the unfamiliar shape fades. “Father. I have to muster the army. No one can stand before the Phoenix Guard and live.”

  Those selfsame guards cluster in around her as they leave the room. A stench hits her, like rotting meat but worse. Tears sting at her eyes. In the distance someone screams; Baoyi knows that voice. The scullery maid.

  Her knees are weak.

  Kenshiro, though—her father is there to catch her. He slips his arm beneath her just as she starts to buckle. “The Phoenix Guard can hold for a while, but … you don’t remember the enemy. No one does anymore. You’ve done such a good job of keeping the peace.”

  This does not feel like peace. The throne room is not far from her personal chambers, though it is well guarded—and even this distance has become one of ten thousand li. The halls Baoyi once thought of as properly cozy now show their true purpose: to force any attackers into as small a space as possible.

  And there are attackers. An awful snarl comes to her ears from somewhere up ahead. The crunching that follows is worse, a wet sound that reminds her of the butcher’s cleaver at work.

  “Don’t look,” her father says to her. “Keep your eyes on your feet. One step in front of the other, sprout. That’s how we’re going to do this.”

  “Lances ready!” say two of the guards.

  Her eyes fall to her feet. Forward, forward. They are coming to the stairs now. Whatever it is that’s causing all this ruckus must be perched atop them.

  Her father’s quiet Qorin cursing tells her she is right. So, too, do the war cries of the Phoenix Guard, their feet on the ground as they charge. Arrows whistle toward the stairs. Something—it is not human, it cannot be human—laughs.

  The creature speaks in old, heavily accented Hokkaran. It sounds like a man—like one of her old mentors—and yet she knows it is anything but. “Is that what she looks like? The pretender to my throne?”

  “Lances, again!”

  Don’t look, she tells herself. She is dizzy already, dizzy with all of this, and she wants more than anything to wake from the nightmare she’s found herself in. This cannot be real. There cannot be demons in the Jade Palace. How would they even get here? Through the gardens …

  There was something in the gardens once, wasn’t there? A golden flower?

  Her head hurts.

  More war cries, but they are short lived—one stops with an audible crunch. Red splatters the floor before her. It takes her a moment to recognize it as blood and not as ink—Baoyi had always thought blood spray would be brighter.

  Don’t look.

  “Get her downstairs!” shouts Kobayashi. She’s here? Baoyi hadn’t recognized her in full armor—but of course she’d come, of course she’d be here. “We can hold it off for now!”

  “May the birds find you,” her father says, and she realizes in a distant way that he is talking about Qorin funerals.

  None of this is real.

  The shadow of the lancers as the creature lifts them. The sounds, the smells. These guards are dying for her sake, and she cannot even stop to properly honor them, cannot even stop to collect their bodies. Her father is pushing her forward, forward, down the steps. What she first takes for wind in her hair she realizes to be a swipe from the creature, foiled by Kobayashi’s strong sword arm.

  “Listen to me. Your aunts are coming. Even if you don’t remember them, even if no one does—they would never let the enemy win. They’ll save you, but you have to give them time.”

  The empress stumbles on the staircase—there is someone lying at the foot of it. Facedown, a sword just out of his hand, the bright red armor of the Phoenix Guard. Her eyes find the pit in his chest without meaning to. Like a brush rammed through paper. It is then that she realizes he is dead.

  “Papa, he’s—”

  “I know, sprout. We have to keep moving.”

  But she can’t. Her feet aren’t listening to her. That soldier’s dead, and the eight guards outside her room are dead, and Kobayashi’s probably dead—

  Her father scoops her up, as he hasn’t done in years. Down the stairs they go. Baoyi looks up at him and tries not to look at anything else—the smears of blood on the walls, the distant shadow of the creature—but it is hard to ignore them. The creature especially. Just as her father reaches the foot of the stairs, just as he steps over the fallen soldier, the creature fills the threshold above them.

  Two seasons ago, an awful plague spread among her hunting dogs. Many of them lost patches of fur, many of them wasted away, many of them became thin parodies of their former selves. The creature looks much as they did— but it is as tall as two men stacked together, and with eyes like red coals. Spittle dribbles from its toothy mouth onto the ground. The broken shafts of two lances are embedded where the collarbones would be on a normal dog.

  Don’t look, her father had said, but she cannot look away. This is the thing that is destroying her palace; this is the thing that is killing her soldiers. What sort of Empress would she be if she could not face it? The horrors of this place have reduced her to her childhood, but she will not let the enemy see her in such a state.

  All at once, she jumps from her father’s arms. At his hip hangs a wide sword, a Qorin sword, which she draws now from its sheath. The weight of it strains her arms—she cannot level it at the creature as she meant to.

  “You shall never conquer us!” she shouts up at it.

  But the creature laughs at her as her father pulls her by the collar.

  “A fool, like your predecessor,” says the creature. Its mouth does not move. “Conquest is the soul of Hokkaro.”

  Her father’s hissing in her ear, but Baoyi cannot hear him. Dragging her farther and farther along, farther and farther from the creature. Her body tenses. It will follow. It will follow, and it will tear them apart, and—

  An arrow whistles over her, passing so close to the bridge of her nose that she thinks for a moment she must have been hit. Her hands fly to her face and find only sweat there—no blood at all. In a daze, she follows the arrow’s trail: another company of Phoenix Guard are up ahead, bows aimed at the creature on the stairs. Five arrows land in its chest, and it only smiles.

  “Baoyi,” her father says, taking the sword from her hand. “This isn’t your fight.”

  “They’re my people!” Her throat hurts. “Of course it’s my fight, people are dying—the empire—”

  “Baoyi,” Kenshiro says again, this time shaking her. “If you do not get to the chamber, then you will die, and they will no longer be your people. Do you understand?”

  The words are not wha
t sways her: it is his tone that does, the half-frantic look in his eyes as he speaks of her death.

  She swallows, looking at her army and the creature in turn. “I…”

  He takes her by the hand. They are walking again, toward the army. When he holds the sword, it looks light. “There is no one in all creation bolder or more foolhardy than your aunt, and if she saw what you just did, she’d shrivel with worry. You are no god!”

  But I am the Daughter of Heaven, she wants to say.

  The words are lost as they make their way through the columns of Phoenix Guard. To her shock, they are wearing their masks, every one of them. More than one whispers to her as she passes: “Our lives for yours.” “They will not pass.” “Get to safety.”

  The last time she walked between their ranks like this, the newest recruits had just been formally sworn in. They’d looked on her with admiration then, with love.

  It would be easier, she thinks, if they looked on her with hate now—but they do not. It is that same admiration, that same love.

  They are all going to die for her, aren’t they?

  “Take courage. Hokkaro will remember you,” she says, but this is not the voice of an Empress at all.

  Beyond them, the throne room. Her father pulls her along toward it, his steps as sure as they are quick. Eight guards break off from the back of their column to join them as they make their way to the jade plaque. There aren’t any bodies here, she notices, there aren’t any dead. The air doesn’t taste of death.

  She is ashamed at the gulps she takes of it.

  “Your Imperial Majesty, Most Serene—”

  “Don’t bother with propriety,” Baoyi says. “What is going on? How many are there?”

  “You won’t want the answer to that,” her father rasps, but Baoyi does not look away from the soldier.

  She, in turn, does not look away from Baoyi. Perhaps the long shadow of doom gives her the courage to look Baoyi in the eye as she speaks. “We are not sure. Thousands, at minimum.”

  A crash. When she looks over her shoulder, the creature from atop the stairs is at war with the front of the column. Ten, twenty soldiers attack it from all sides, and yet it shows only mild fatigue.