Otgar is wrong. Standing in the empty lot, Sakura thinks to herself that Otgar is wrong. Perhaps there’s an element of truth if you’re a Qorin, your only markers the hills and river and mountain—but if you put enough people together, then they’ll change any place over time.
Twenty-two years since she last set foot in Nishikomi.
Why did she ever think it could be home again?
* * *
SHE SELLS PAINTINGS for a day up by the Academy. What she really wanted was a chance to present her work on the Day of Mourning, on the journey she’d been on for the past fourteen years, but the dean has no great want to hear her.
“If you are truly Minami Sakura, you would have come with Queen Lai’s recommendation,” he says.
“I just got back from the North,” Sakura says. “I haven’t had time to visit the South yet.”
He smacks his lips and strokes his beard. “It will do you no good to go now. The Queen is in mourning; her son is accepting visitors on her behalf. Prince Lai Yangzhai is not kind to those who mean to defraud his mother.”
Yangzhai? Was that what they’d named him? She wonders if he takes after Kenshiro at all—if he is soft and kind and in far too deep. From the sound of things, he takes after his mother, which means this man is right: he will never accept a visit from her.
“Minami Sakura would be near fifty, at any rate,” says the man.
She wants to tell him about the way time works over the old Wall, in the place that was once so thoroughly under the thumb of evil that the hours themselves could not escape.
He will not understand. He is simply here to preside over his students—a body of scholars to whom Sakura has never belonged.
She thanks him for his time, she leaves, she sells the paintings. In one day, she earns enough to have someone take her to the swamps.
To the Minami lands.
Though she has served as the steward of the manse and its surrounding property for eight years, Sakura has never been there herself. There was never any reason to visit as a child; that manse belonged to Minami Shizuru, and the Queen of Crows was known to make periodic visits. Woe betide anyone she caught lurking in the dark on such occasions. Later—after O-Shizuru-mor’s passing—only her elderly grandparents remained, and who would rob an old couple?
But it has been years now, and they are probably as dead as all the other Minami.
She must see it for herself.
It takes less than a Bell to reach the Minami lands from Nishikomi. She feels guilty for commissioning this carriage at all—surely she could have walked. It is only when the solid ground gives way to filmy green water that she realizes she has been right all along.
The carriage driver knows a ferryman, and the ferryman promises to take her to the manse. It lies a little farther in, surrounded on all sides by nose-deep water.
“Careful, Sakura-lao. Lots of beasties in a place like this, ya know?”
So he speaks to her.
She sees them, the beasties: two golden eyes just above the water, a ridged back. She hears them: the snap of powerful jaws, the hiss of an unseen serpent.
“Frankly,” she says to him, “I wish they’d try me. They wouldn’t like what they found.”
He laughs at this, and she knows that she has her in. She asks him a little of what he’s heard. The ferryman’s quick to tell her that Dao Doan’s army grows by the day, that he doesn’t trust them, that they must mean to seek vengeance—but she is just as quick to cut him off.
“Tell me about the manse.”
“It’s haunted,” he says, as if describing the color of the sky. “Has been fer years, now. Kinda sad, ain’t it, when a whole family dies out like that? I mean it’s no wonder the last few of ’em never stuck around.”
“The last few?” Sakura asks him.
“That old couple, and the historian, too. She had the same name you do, I think—Minami Sakura. Singin’ girl, they said.”
“It’s a common name,” Sakura says. “Especially with singing girls.”
She asks him no more questions, and he gives her no more answers. When at last the manse itself rises ahead of them, she thanks him and tells him to wait. He gives her a bow from the waist.
“Whatever you say, Sakura-lao,” he says. “Just remember, you gotta pay me again for the ride back.”
It strikes her as unfair. Two weeks ago, she would have argued the point, but she no longer has the will for it. This is the way of the world now—everything keeps getting more expensive, and she has so little to pay with.
But the ferryman soon falls from her mind. Comparing the dilapidated pile of wood in front of her to the sketches she received every few weeks is a troubling exercise. The manse was never a large one, not even when it was granted to the family, but this … If a child dropped shattered tiles on a pile of twigs, it would have gotten a similar effect. Strangely, only half the manse has been so crushed: the western wing remains standing just as she’d imagined it.
She wonders if some unseen giant stepped on her ancestral home. There isn’t any way to know—the trouble with invisible giants is that you die if you see them.
For a moment, she stops before the manse and admires what there is left to admire: the corner guardians, of which only kirin and dragon remain; the fine red lumber they’d used for the flooring; the lacquer on the door. Half a gilt fox head escaped the destruction: its single eye stares back at her as she approaches the door.
Within, it is dark; within, it smells like the belly of a whale. Sakura covers her nose and mouth with her unmarried sleeve. There is a lantern hanging by the door—she picks it up and, without thinking, asks for Shizuka to light it.
Idiot, she thinks.
A sigh.
She puts the lantern back on its hook. It swings, the hinge squeaking, and she resolves herself to stand in this very spot until her eyes adjust well enough to see.
The Shrine of Jade Secrets may have been destroyed—but she can salvage something here. These are her lands now. Baoyi would not deny them to her if she asked. It seems a tragedy to let a line as old as theirs die off. Hokkaro treasures its traditions; surely there is still a place for the Minami clan.
Of course, all of this means she’d have to have children, and she isn’t certain how to feel about that. The idea of something growing within her for nine months makes her skin crawl; the idea of pushing it out … no.
Perhaps Otgar will want to speak to a sanvaartain.
She gives that thought no more room to grow, for if she does, she is afraid there will be a place for it. Already this one is ruined.
Darkness takes shape before her: a screen, crushed as if in some unseen hand; a flower vase dashed against the wall, the pebbles within it like the scales of a slumbering serpent; empty sheaths hanging from the wall. She notices with something like pride that the bamboo mats beneath her feet are perfectly dry. At least something in this place lived up to its name.
But this is only the entry room: there should be five more, with the servants’ quarters in a separate building a li away. She turns the layout of the place around in her mind: What has the collapse ruined? The kitchen, of course; she realizes with a lurch that the reading room was beside it and must also be gone. That leaves two rooms of personal quarters and a small shrine.
There is a sliding door to her right—it leads to the shrine, which branches off into the two personal rooms. She steps toward it as carefully as she can—over the pebbles, over the chunks of broken wood. This is the last place in the world that is truly hers; she must know what has come of it.
And yet Minami Sakura is no Barsalai Shefali: her vision at night is no more special than any woman’s. So it is that she steps on one of the shards of the broken vase; so it is that she yelps with pain; so it is that she falls to the ground and more shards find their way into her shoulders.
As if the pain of having her homes taken from her were not enough, as if the pain of solitude were not enough, as if the pain of being forgotten
were not enough: she must bleed.
She curses, sucks in a breath, and curses again. It does little to alleviate her suffering. She thinks to herself that the right thing to do is to get the shards out and find a walking stick to stand with, but that seems an insult after all she has been through. For four minutes, she lies there as the tears well up, as she cries onto the mats her ancestors wove, as she wonders what it was she did to deserve all of this.
In truth, she knows the answer: she made the choice to leave with her cousin.
And now she lies bleeding in their clan’s own broken manse.
But it is the fifth minute that truly drives despair into her heart—for five minutes after her injury, she first hears the breathing.
A dog that has run for three li in search of its master, only to find him a corpse on the battlefield; a murderer, slathered in the viscera of their passion; a demon leaping onto the back of Burqila Alshara’s horse.
All of them made this sound.
Cold familiarity strikes her. Her heart has fallen into a vise; her body has turned to stone. She cannot move for fear of what she might find if she turns around. “Who is that?” she asks.
There is no answer—only more of that rasping.
Worse: it rises and falls, rises and falls. A bellows emptied over the fire; the snort of a boar on a lance; the death scream of an oak tree: all these things resemble the laugh of the creature. “Company.”
“I don’t want any company!” she shouts back. Her voice has gone shrill as glass. The thing’s voice is enough to kindle her body’s survival instincts: she scrambles backwards, the shard driving itself farther and farther into her flesh. Her hands land on something hard and smooth, and she thinks that it must be a table—she tries to hoist herself up only for the shelf to give out beneath her weight.
Thud, thud, crack.
Whatever it is, it’s coming closer.
Sakura swallows. There is no Burqila with her now, no Shizuka; the evil that lurks here is something she must confront alone. Only the ferryman even knows she is here, and he won’t be able to hear anything that happens in the manse—he’s too far off.
“You’re my company.”
What will happen to her if she dies here?
What manner of creature is this?
She feels for something else to stand on even as she trains her eyes before her, where the shards of pottery shatter beneath the unseen footsteps of the creature. It occurs to her then that she has already seen it, that it was here all along: the darkness itself is marching toward her, solid as ink, a shadow living and hateful.
A scream dies in her throat, for she realizes then what this is—not a demon, not a god, but a ghost of formless hatred. If she could make it outside the manse, then she might have some hope of escape, but even that would be short-lived: this thing would cling to her no matter where she went. She had shed blood within the Minami clan’s mansion.
At last her hand finds a solid plank of wood. Thrusting it against the ground, she pulls herself up. The exit is close enough, she could probably run it; she needs to run it, she did not make it through fourteen years of demon warfare only to die here in an old abandoned manse; she does not want to die; she cannot make that run.
Crack, crack, huh huh huh. Rank breath washes over her; she can feel its evil coating her skin, her hairs standing on end.
“It’s been too long,” says the creature. “Too long since I tasted—”
The last word is lost in a scream—the creature’s. Sakura plugs her ears as a silver bolt pierces straight through the center of the dark. Like string around a spool, the silver bursting forth. Though she covers her eyes and turns away, she knows somehow that it will not harm her—even as the temperature in the room drops to a winter chill. Soon she can no longer feel her injured foot at all, for the cold has sapped away all the feeling in it; soon she is breathing in daggers and breathing out desperation.
Only when she hears the next voice, only when the evil has left her skin, does she open her eyes once more. “Always a Minami to save.” Like temple bells, like quicksilver.
The Warrior Moon stands before her.
For the second time in only a few moments, Sakura swallows. “Barsalai,” she says. “I thought … thank you.”
The Moon tilts her head. “No jokes?” she says.
“Don’t have any in me,” Sakura answers. How could Barsalai think this was a time for jokes? Even Otgar would have held back. But, then—who can know the mind of a god?
Barsalai says no more. She kneels down in the ruins of the manse—the moonlight filtering in through the windows—and reaches into her deel. The pungent smell of kumaq conquers the wet musk of the manse. Eight white drops land on Sakura’s injured foot.
Sakura waits for something to happen, anything. Though the shadow of death has left a bitter taste in her mouth, there’s a morbid curiosity to this. What will it feel like to be healed by a god? Kenshiro told her once that Shefali had helped him in this way, and that was before she’d fully ascended. What will it be like now? Will it leave a scar?
But in the end, nothing happens.
Barsalai purses her lips. “Sorry. Only Qorin.”
Sakura winces. Disappointment after disappointment. “Can you keep it cold, at least?”
A nod. Barsalai’s hand skates over Sakura’s skin, leaving a thin layer of frost in its wake. Then she sits up and looks around. In silhouette, her nose stands out like a needle—she has not left that part of herself behind. “Why here?”
The question comes as a surprise. It’s a fair one, she supposes, and deserves an answer. “This place is mine. My cousin left it to me. I … I wanted to see what was left of it. If I could make something out of it, you know?”
She hates how childish she sounds—but Barsalai does not make her feel childish for saying it. Instead she nods once. “Two bodies,” she says, pointing. “Get a priest to lay them to rest.”
It is then that Sakura laughs, for the idea of a god—her personal friend, the god—asking her to summon a priest is preposterous. A smith asking someone else to make him a nail.
“Death isn’t mine,” says Barsalai. “It’s Akane’s.”
“Yeah, it’s just…”
“Silly.”
“Yeah,” Sakura agrees. “All of this is silly.”
Another small silence. Barsalai Shefali, the Warrior Moon, clears away the shards and sits next to her wife’s cousin. Her friend.
Sakura has found it easy to speak to others her entire life, but no words come to her now. The food merchant, the shrine, the Academy, and now this: four defeats have left her cracked and broken. Tears flow through the cracks now; gulping cries soon follow. Barsalai listens as her sorrows carry her away—but she says nothing, for there is nothing she can say.
“I just wanted to go home,” says Sakura. A child, a child—that is all she is. “I just wanted to go home, for once, to have some time for myself…”
“Home isn’t a place,” Barsalai says.
“It was once!” Sakura answers. “You don’t understand. You didn’t grow up the way I did. For you, it was always the people, wasn’t it?”
Barsalai nods.
Sakura sniffs. “It wasn’t just that for me. It wasn’t just the people I knew. It was the city itself. Nishikomi was a friend to me. It had its salty side, sure, but…”
Another stretch of silence. Barsalai’s white brows are knitting together over her eyes, as if she’s trying to imagine how anyone could possibly love a city.
“Wherever I went, I kept thinking: ‘When this is done, I’ll go back home to Nishikomi,’” she says. Her voice is a creak. “I kept planning it out in my head, the places I’d go, the things I’d do, the people I’d see. But none of it … None of it’s the same now. Everyone got old and left without me. My favorite place is gone because some asshole couldn’t get his temper under control, and even this stupid fucking wreck…”
She can’t keep talking; her throat’s closed. Thankfully,
Barsalai doesn’t press her. There’s another silence, another chance for Sakura to catch her breath.
And it is in that moment—with the moonlight shining into the wreck of the Minami manse—that a question slithers its way up her throat. In voicing it, she makes real a thought she isn’t brave enough to name.
“Barsalai,” she says. “Was it like this for my mother?”
This time, there is no silence. “Yes.”
Days folding into years, a city whose face you no longer recognized, the ruins of a dream long gone. She understands. At long last, she understands. “She killed herself, didn’t she?”
“Yes,” says Barsalai.
Sakura laughs, but there is no mirth in it. Her head hits the wall; a snow-devil of dust coats her shoulder. “You told me to light prayers.”
“Everyone deserves to be remembered,” Barsalai says. “In any way they can be.”
A pause. The words hang in the air, echoing as they always do, and Sakura wonders how she is ever going to capture the sound of it.
“I could take you home,” Barsalai says.
Sakura chuckles again. “After all that, home?”
Silence.
Sakura wants to ask her what she means—where she could possibly say is home. Does that mean the steppes? Some ger half-frozen in the wilderness? Does she mean Oshiro, where she spent part of her youth? What is home to a god?
She doesn’t care.
It’s better than here.
“Yes,” Sakura says. “Take me home.”
DORBENTEI OTGAR
TWO
Dorbentei Otgar Bayasaaq is no idiot—she sends word ahead.
It’s the sensible thing to do. Fourteen years separate her from the Qorin waiting on the steppes. Given that many of them were elderly when she left, she doesn’t know how many there even are. The Qorin dwindling down to just under a thousand must have been a tempting opportunity for Oshiro, too—part of her worries there won’t be any left at all.
If that’s the case, then she and whoever rules Oshiro are going to have some words.
But if there are remaining Qorin—and she refuses to believe there won’t be—they will all be adults by now. The newborns will be fourteen, old enough to start paying their bride-prices or entertaining the courtship of whatever snot-nosed brat was picked for them. It is these new adults who truly concern Otgar, for they will have grown up in a world without Burqila Alshara—a world with so few of their fellows.
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