Shefali picks it up and stands.
“He was a good man,” she says, “and this way, the wolves will never find him.”
With this, she flings the star into the sky. How impossible, its ascension! Watch as it soars straight up from her hand, as it careens upward and upward, as it winks out of existence only to wink back in hundreds of thousands of li away.
A star, in truth.
When she turns to Shizuka, she finds her covering her mouth, her face wrenched once more in sorrow—but she looks up at the sky, the place where the star now shines.
“Shefali…”
She wants to pick her wife up. She wants to scoop her up in her arms and carry her somewhere far away from here—the two of them wild horses.
But that is a mortal want, and the army is coming.
And so instead, Barsalai Shefali simply kneels in front of Minami Shizuka, this woman for whom she has sacrificed so much: kisses her eyes, kisses the bridge of her nose, kisses her mangled ear.
“When this is over,” she says, “I will find your mother and do the same for her.”
“When this is over…” Bitterness returning; the last dregs of tea. “I have ruined it for all of us, I’m afraid. Yamai’s army runs rampant in the palace.”
As a sheep knocked with a club before its slaughter, Barsalai and this news. “What?”
Shizuka presses her lips together. Now, for the first time, she breaks eye contact with the Moon. “It is true. I … I conjured a portal there, with the flowers—I meant to send my father home, so that I might deal with Yamai myself. But he set my father upon me instead, and marched his own army through.”
The dog you raised has the most vicious bite.
Bile rises at the back of Shefali’s throat. How she loves her wife! How she loves her! For if anyone else had told her this news, she might well have berated them, but knowing what Shizuka had been made to do tempers her reaction. To think—if she had struck quicker, if she’d struck harder, perhaps they could have caught him in the act.
“Shizuka,” she rasps.
“It is my fault,” Shizuka answers. “He knew. He knew that I would try and save him.”
Of course he had. Shizuka, for all her many virtues, is the most predictable woman in Hokkaro. She will always try to do the impossible thing, no matter the odds set against her; she will always try to save her family.
And, it seems, she will always end up killing them.
Such cruelty. How long did he keep O-Itsuki here, waiting for Shizuka to arrive? It was the demons who told the Toad to send the armies north—had it been demons, too, who told him to send Shizuru to her death?
For how many years did he plan this torture?
No, no, Shefali cannot truly be angry at her. She did what she has always done and will always do. Killing him after reuniting with him …
Shefali thinks of her mother. She swallows.
Temurin and Dorbentei—Shefali can smell them now. They will be here at any moment, and they will want to know where their quarry has gone. She cannot tell them he escaped, and she especially cannot tell them he has gone to Fujino thanks to Shizuka’s actions.
She closes her eyes. The crown is there, if only she will reach for it.
It is then, in setting her hands on her hips, that the answer comes to her—for it is then that her palm brushes the golden flower she took from her corpse. An answer! “Can you make another portal?”
“I would need another flower from Fujino,” Shizuka says. “I think whatever I use must be tied to the place I am going—and I used all the violets I gave Baoyi already—”
Shefali plucks the golden flower from her belt. She places it, stern but loving, into her wife’s hands.
Fire blooms behind Shizuka; her eyes flare bright. It occurs to Shefali that her wife has not much transformed, physically, since her ascension: it affected her eyes and clothing alone. The armor she once wore has gone pure gold, the clothing beneath it scarlet and beautiful vermilion. “You kept it?”
“I keep all your gifts,” says Shefali. She kisses Shizuka’s forehead. “Qorin are coming now. We will take back Fujino.”
Already the golden daffodil sprouts new roots, already it opens and turns in Shizuka’s hand. She walks to a spot a horselength away and thrusts it into the ground. When her eyes meet Shefali’s, they are like the sun on the ocean—but Shefali will never tell her this.
“Your mother,” says Shizuka. “Is she—?”
“Nothing can kill her,” Shefali says.
It is a simple truth. The sun rises in the east. There is a rider for every horse. The moon dies every twenty-eight days, and Burqila Alshara never will.
“Make the portal,” Shefali says.
She refuses to dwell in this uncertainty.
O-SHIZUKA
SIXTEEN
In some ways it is fortunate that the Spider ate Shizuka’s heart. If she hadn’t, then the sight of Fujino under siege might well have ended her.
War is one thing. She knows war. She has seen both its heroic face and its true one; she knows its stench. If it were only war, then something within her, surely, would be able to comprehend what she is seeing.
But this is not war.
When the blackbloods burst from their mortal skins and descend upon their victims, they are not attacking soldiers. They are attacking servants.
And they have claimed so many already. Bodies like fallen leaves litter the gardens; the green ground has gone brown and wet with their blood. Here, a severed hand holding a sprig of laceflower; there, its half-eaten owner. Dull horror strikes her when she realizes that she recognizes the body, headless though it may be, by the tattoo on its bared shoulder: Hisao-zun, who once served as a temple guard in Nishikomi, and told her all sorts of tales about her mother. When she was a girl, he would sneak her saucers full of rice wine.
“It isn’t fair that she gets it all to herself,” he’d say.
Now he lies dead, a goat-headed blackblood tearing at his flesh.
The gardens are only one part of the grisly sight before her. Blood stains the walls of the Jade Palace; blood pours from its sloped roof. The enemy lope along the rafters with bits of flesh clamped in their mouths. A noblewoman is trying to force herself through a window meant only for arrows, and Shizuka cannot tell if she is doing so of her own volition.
This is your fault, she thinks to herself.
“You’re sending us into that?” says Dorbentei.
Shefali—her Shefali, her moon!—crosses her arms. “I am,” she says. “Anyone who does not want to fight can take the long way; the fog won’t trouble them anymore.”
There are a few murmurs of dissent, but mostly there is silence. The Qorin, better than anyone, know the horrors of the blackbloods. Yamai saved the worst obstacle for last—to go against them is as good as suicide. Their blessed weapons cannot save them from the corruption of their blood. Shefali may be able to break their hold—that is where Alshara has gone—but not before the pain sets in.
Shizuka thinks of Shefali sweating in bed—dying as Minami Shizuru had, years ago.
She closes her eyes.
How is it possible to hurt this much?
“How many?” says Sakura. To hear her—yes, it is possible to hurt even more. The fear in her voice, the distance! Something in her has broken through all of this.
Shizuka pinches her nose. “Thousands.”
“Thousands?” says Dorbentei. “We barely have that ourselves.”
“The Hokkarans will come,” says Shefali. She gestures to them—Shizuka can barely see the tips of their banners. There are fewer of them. Did Munenori-zul fall, too? Will she paint her hands with his blood?
Temurin sucks her teeth. Clipped Qorin syllables leave her. Something about Burqila.
“Burqila will join us,” Shefali says. How different she sounds—Shizuka keeps expecting her to sound as quiet as ever, but there is nothing quiet about the woman before her. So much of her has changed. Oh, her cheeks have
returned, and her good eye is the same shade of green it has always been, but …
All her life, Shefali has been steady in the way of warhorses. Now she is steady in the way of mountains. It is impossible to look away from her. Shizuka’s soul swells with pride and love to see her—her silver hair and her black skin—but she wonders, she wonders.
Will they be the same two women they were before all of this?
“You’ve lost your goddamned mind, Needlenose,” says Dorbentei. “I’ll follow you—of course I will—but I want you to know what you’re asking for. We are going to die.”
“Not if they kill the Traitor quickly enough,” says Sakura. Her eyes flick over to Shizuka’s, and Shizuka must force herself not to look away. This is what you have done. “If he falls, then his will does, too. It might be enough to stop them.”
“‘Might be’?” says Dorbentei. There is a head hanging from her belt. Rikuto’s, no doubt. Perhaps that is what’s making her bold again. “We’re gambling our lives on a ‘might be’?”
Voices rising. Shizuka does not need to understand the language to understand the tone of them. Knives, every one of them, each one held right at her throat.
“Argue later,” Barsalai says. As if sensing Shizuka’s distress, she squeezes her hand. Their scars touch. “To survive is Qorin. Shizuka and I will kill Yamai. Until then—we hold the palace.”
Temurin says something then. Syllables leave her throat like cannonfire. Not for the first time, Shizuka wishes she’d taken the time to truly study Qorin—but her drinking habit had taken up so much of her precious time. She looks to Sakura out of reflex, as if she were already fluent, and is horrified to see the blood fading from her face.
More horrified still, when her cousin marches across their little gathering, her shoulders held low as a fighter’s, her neck straining with anger. When she slaps Temurin right across the face, no one stops her—not Dorbentei, not Shefali, not Dalaansuv or any of the other war council Qorin.
Temurin stares back at her. No one speaks, no one dares—Sakura is on the verge of tears. Her hand trembles as she draws it back up. “Dorbentei. Translate for me.” It is not a question. Dorbentei’s eyes flick over to Shefali, as if for approval, before she nods. Minami blood is half flame, so the saying goes: all of it burns in Sakura’s voice. “There are good people in that palace. Serving girls, students, traveling families paying a visit on an unlucky day. Children. Tell me again that they deserve to die. I fucking dare you.”
Much must be said of a good translator: Dorbentei mimics Sakura’s tone precisely. Shizuka learned the Qorin word for “fuck” long ago—it lands with all Sakura’s venom.
“If she tries to kill you for that,” says Barsalai, “I won’t stop her.”
That, too, gets translated—Dorbentei adopts a new voice for Shefali, though she cannot quite mimic the metallic tone her godhood has lent her.
The air goes taut as a wire, but Shefali does not wait for Temurin to snap it. There are more important things to settle. She whistles, and her horse comes—a stately gray nearly white with age. To see her swing into the saddle with ease warms Shizuka’s heart.
Or it would.
How much has she given to this war already? How much more is there to give? Despair threatens to swallow her; she closes her eyes once more. When she opens them, Shefali’s hand is outstretched before her.
And, yes, it is a god who reaches for her now. See her night-dark skin, see her hair and teeth and eye of silver.
But that smile, the one that hides her eyes behind her cheeks—that is her Shefali.
“Together,” Shefali whispers.
For that had been the plan for the majority of her life: the two of them together riding against the Traitor, the two of them against the world, the two of them with an army at their backs.
All the mistakes of her life have led her, somehow, to this point. And there will be an eternity to fix her wrongs.
An eternity with her wife. An eternity with her people.
“Together,” Shizuka answers.
She takes Shefali’s hand. So quickly, so easily, Shefali pulls her into the saddle. From her horse’s saddlebags, she draws the Daybreak Blade, and this she lays in Shizuka’s lap.
How like a serpent, that sword. The sword Minami Shiori once wielded to save the man they are going to kill. The sword she reached for so often as a child—the sword her mother never wanted her to wield.
Shizuka swallows at the sight of it, at the weight of it on her lap.
So many years she fought to be able to use it—and now she wants nothing more than to cast it aside. If she never again drew the Daybreak Blade, that would be reward enough. Godhood paled in comparison to the idea of a peaceful life.
But she cannot have a peaceful life while her people are suffering—while her niece is in danger.
For they will be going after Baoyi as surely as moths to the flame.
She closes her hand around the pommel. A rush of warmth fills her, as if she has just drunk her fill of boiling tea. An ivory sheath cannot hide the sword’s flare.
Palaces hold nearly as many secrets as spies. In the throne room, there is a jade plaque extolling the Father’s Wisdom. Beneath the plaque, a wrought iron handle; beneath the handle, a heavy stone door. The chamber it opens into was installed twelve generations ago, during the war with Dao Doan, in case the palace should ever be taken. Shizuka herself has been there only four times in her life, and three of them were to get drunk in peace—so few people know of the place that she could lie there for hours at a time. The seals and statues meant to ward off evil and arrows never warded away her hangovers.
But they might ward off the Traitor.
In the grand scheme of things, it is a recent addition to the palace. The Traitor will not know it is there. What few artifacts remained to Hokkaro of its former protectors—shards of the Brother’s armor, a zither that once belonged to the Sister—are kept there. It will be the first place Kenshiro thinks of to keep his daughter safe.
And so it will be the first place she and Shefali will go.
The Traitor, after all, cannot truly seize the throne without killing its current occupant.
The sword flares once more in Shizuka’s hand. She holds it at her side, the tip pointing to the ground. A line from Shefali’s letter comes to her: Hokkaran swords are awful on horseback.
Perhaps that is true.
But she will have to try, all the same.
Shizuka wraps one arm around her wife’s waist. “Let’s go.”
“Aunt Dalaansuv!” Shefali shouts. “When the artillery’s through, let them sing. The rest of you, with us. Can I count on my cousins, or will I have to carry you all to battle myself?”
From the sound of it, she won’t. By and large, it is a Qorin war howl that answers her. Shefali nods. “Stamp out the flowers once the army’s through,” she says.
And it is then that the thought occurs to Shizuka, then that she thinks to ask: “But what of Aaj?”
“She will go with us, or she will go the long way,” Shefali says. She is not looking at Shizuka as she speaks, but instead at the carnage that awaits them.
The light lands on her good eye. As they ride through the portal into the bloodshed that awaits them, that eye is viper green.
O-SHIZUKA
SEVENTEEN
This place is not her home.
Together, through the portal—and the moment they are all through, Shizuka wishes she had instead kept her eyes closed. The shattered tiles, the smoke sticking to the roof of her mouth, the bodies like fallen leaves … This must be the banks of the Kirin, this must be Onozuka Village, even Iwa—but it cannot be the Jade Palace.
What remains of Shizuka’s heart is caught in her throat the moment they pass through the gate. As Alsha’s tail clears it, the two blackbloods nearest them rise from their macabre meals. Like lion dogs, both of them: short, four-legged creatures with stout chests and manes of rippling black smoke. Gore slicks their jaws; t
he low growl that leaves their throats speaks to their hunger.
She has just enough time to think to herself: They’re people, we cannot kill them. In the time it takes her to have that simple thought, they pounce.
Her throat closes. In her hand is a sacred sword, a holy sword, but how is she meant to defend herself without harming them? The second thought comes like an assassin in the night: The Daybreak Blade did not save Shizuru from these same horrors.
One stroke and she can kill them both.
One stroke and Minami Shizuka can sever their arms, one stroke and she can draw blood however she wishes—but she cannot stop this assault without hurting the people committing it. Too many departed souls weigh on her already—she cannot raise her sword, cannot bring herself to strike them.
In all of the Empire there is no one more Hokkaran than Shizuka, after all—and hasn’t Hokkaro tormented the Qorin enough? For not only were these creatures once people—they were more than likely Qorin. And it is a Qorin army at their back now, led by Qorin women, for the purposes of liberating those stranded beyond the Wall.
How, then, can Shizuka kill any of the blackbloods?
To do so would be to commit the same violence her ancestors had.
It is her wife who saves her, as she has saved her every day they’ve ever spent together. Shefali wields her skin of kumaq like a dagger; a savage swipe sends drops flying out onto both blackbloods. Their human eyes go wide as Shefali bellows a single word with a mountain’s voice.
Ice covers their bodies as it does the ponds in winter. Within a heartbeat, they are encased; the next, they fall to the ground. Ice cracks. When Shizuka looks down at her would-be opponents, she sees only two Qorin flat on their stomachs.
“How did you…?” she begins, but she realizes the folly midway through. Shefali is the god of the Qorin now, and there is little more Qorin than a harsh winter.
“Hold on!” Shefali shouts.
For to say that these were the only two enemies they faced was to say a woman takes only two breaths in her life. Shizuka takes another now as Shefali urges her horse forward. To her shame, she presses her head against Shefali’s strong shoulders rather than confront the sight before her.
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