But Minami Sakura knows what she wants—and if this is it, well, Otgar is glad to have her.
Barsalai pokes at the fire. Though she is trying to hide it, her fingers are stiff; she has to close them around the stick with her other hand. “I want you to take care of each other,” she says. “The Qorin understand what you saw, Sakura-lun, and they will respect you, Otgar. It will be hard—it’s better here.”
Neither says anything. Before them, the crowd is banging on the solid darkness. Shefali does not stir—not for them. “I ask one thing.”
“Name it,” says Sakura.
“Come to Fujino on the double eighth.”
Otgar and Sakura exchange a look. There can be only one reason they’d be summoned to Fujino on that day.
Shizuka.
Otgar swallows. It takes her too long to think of an answer; Sakura beats her to it again.
“We will,” Sakura says. “And I’ll try and think of some way to save her. There has to be something. I can’t believe that she’s—”
Barsalai’s response is the thud of an arrow into wood. “She isn’t.”
“No,” says Sakura. “She isn’t.”
And who is Otgar to argue? She looks up through the hole in center of the ger’s ceiling, the moon shining down on her. So long as it hung in the sky, then the Sun would, too.
And so long as there was sun—there would be Shizuka.
“Thank you,” Shefali says. A small smile comes across her face then, as she reclines with a quiet groan. “Now—let’s eat.”
SOMEDAY
Together
On the double eighth, the Undying Moon visits the Imperial Palace.
It is not the first time she has done this, nor the second, nor the seventh.
In the six months since the Day of Mourning she has missed only twenty-four days of visits—whenever the moon vanishes from the sky, so does the Moon vanish from the palace.
The servants are by now accustomed to the sight of her: her silver hair in its thousand braids; the way she towers over even the Phoenix Guard; her silent, wolfish walk. Rarely do they see her coming—she simply steps out from one shadow or another, fully formed, her silver eye gleaming.
Like a ghost she moves, like a predator. The guards know well enough not to get in her way—not that any of them would dream of antagonizing the Moon. That the palace stands at all is a testament to her might. Ask one thousand soldiers where they were on the Day of Mourning, and you will receive two thousand stories—but the Moon is always the hero.
“I saw her. She had a curved sword, the kind the Qorin use, and she rode by on her white horse and decapitated him.”
“I saw her. In her hands was the silver bow she crafted from her own home’s soil, and with it she put eight arrows in the back of the Traitor.”
“I saw her. She was a twisted thing, halfway between human and beast, and she tore off his head with her own two hands.”
So the stories go.
They do not question her as she walks through the halls, as she nods to empty air, as she makes her way ever higher. They do not question her as she approaches the Empress’s chambers, and they do not question her as she stops outside of them.
But they do whisper that her limp has gotten worse again, that she is walking as if there are boards on either side of her legs, that she is stiff and old.
“She’s going to miss three days next week,” says one of the servants—but only after she has passed. He and his colleagues are mopping up the trail of frost that always follows in her wake.
“No,” says the eldest among them, a woman named Chihiro. “It’s going to be this week. Just look at her.”
It is First Bell, as it always is when she visits. The priests are still wandering the halls, making their announcements. A pack of them pass her just before she makes it to the Empress’s chambers. As one, they bow.
“Undying Moon, Laughing Fox, Silver-Eye—” begins the priest, but the Moon grunts, and he stops. Haltingly, he continues. “H-Have we offended you?”
How brave of him—he looks up at her, bowed though he may be. Ice crystals refract in the air around her. When she shakes her head, these motes fly through the air.
“Is there anything we can do to assist you?” he says. “Please, only name it. The Empire is forever in your debt, as you well know.”
There is a hardness to her regard—a winter that threatens to freeze him where he stands. It is like this every time he sees her. Five years he has trained as priest of the Moon, and five years he has endured the worst of the winter clad only in his foundational garments.
But the Moon’s regard is colder than even that.
He does not know if he will ever grow accustomed to it.
“You know already,” says the Moon.
He bobs again. “If a Qorin woman on a liver mare arrives at the palace, I am to immediately beseech you.”
She nods. The cold in him melts.
“But is there anything else?” he says. “You’ve visited so often—”
“No,” she says.
Away she goes, walking down the halls. He and the others watch her go, wondering how they might have helped her, wondering why it is she is so terse with them.
The Phoenix Guard are the next to glimpse her. She stands before the door to the Empress’s chambers and therefore before them.
She does not say a word to them—they simply part. The Moon is mysterious only when she is unfamiliar, and they know precisely why she is here.
“There hasn’t been any change,” says the younger of them.
There—the icy glance. He swallows and says nothing more as she walks into the Empress’s chambers.
The Empress herself does not sleep well. She has not slept well since that day, and who could blame her after what happened? But she is always awake at First Bell, for she knows the Moon is coming. On this night—the twenty-eighth—she is not alone.
There are two others in the room with her. Both women. One is Hokkaran. Dark circles under her eyes speak to her sleeplessness; the hair she once took such pride in is dull and messily piled atop her head. That said, she wears finer robes than the Empress herself: gold-trimmed black, with phoenixes painted in gold foil. She sets aside a scroll as the Moon walks in.
The other is a Qorin, and dark even for that—wide and solid, thick about the middle like a tree. When her eyes fall on the Moon, she stands and takes three limping steps toward her. How grim her countenance!
“There isn’t any news,” says this woman. “We would have sent for you if there were, you know that.”
The Moon says nothing. She removes her bronze war mask and sets it on the Empress’s counter, next to a writing set with which she is all too familiar. The finely dressed woman notices her flinch at the sight—but the finely dressed woman notices everything.
“Aunt,” says the Empress, who stands before the threshold to a room farther in. “Our cousin speaks true—there hasn’t been any change at all.”
And it is then, at the Empress’s voice, that the change happens. In the same way a block of ice and puddle contain the same water—so, too, does the Moon contain Barsalai Shefali.
And it is Shefali that they see then. There is no mistaking the way her features soften, the way she seems to shrink, the desperate hope in her green eye. “Let me see her.”
“Are you certain?” says the Empress.
Barsalai nods. The finely dressed woman—Minami Sakura—sighs. “Nothing to be done about a romantic, I suppose.”
“You know she’ll be back,” says Barsalai. Her eyes flick between all the others in the room. “All of you do.”
No one says anything to argue this—though the Empress, in truth, does not know this. She steps aside with a short bow.
The room is glowing gold, as it is every night, but the breath catches in Barsalai’s throat all the same. Anyone may wake early enough on any given day and see the sunrise across the Silver Steppes—that makes the sight no less beautiful.
<
br /> So it is that she stands in the doorway, lovestruck and speechless, though she has seen this face nearly every day of her life.
Lying in bed—the sheets pulled up to her chin—is Minami Shizuka. She is not sleeping. If she were sleeping, she’d be sucking her thumb. Instead, she lies motionless on her back, eyes closed but moving beneath the lids, dreaming of better places than this. She smells of peonies and light, of the sharp tang of metal, of a warm fire and thick blood. Shefali breathes deep of it.
Her wife.
In three steps, she is by the bed. It takes only one more for her to sit at Shizuka’s side. How delicately she caresses her wife’s face! One finger along the thick scar, another clearing the hair from her brow! Who could watch them dry eyed? For there on Barsalai’s face, hope and agony mingle. When she presses her lips to her wife’s brow, it is with a tenderness often sought but rarely found.
The Empress cannot bear to watch. “The surgeons say there is nothing wrong with her, but they are not accustomed to dealing with … with your sort.”
“Gods, Baoyi. You can say the word,” says Sakura.
The Empress shows no sign of her discomfort. “Gods, then. The surgeons are not familiar with gods.”
“Sanvaartains won’t touch her,” says Dorbentei Otgar. She leans against the threshold. “You know how superstitious they’ve always been about the two of you.”
Barsalai only partly hears them as she lifts the blanket. Quickly—softly—she searches her wife’s body for any trace of her old wounds. They’d healed in the better part of two days—there are no traces left save a thin line of gold at her throat and a starburst of the same on her ribs. And there is, of course, the pit where her heart once was—a cavity filled with gold, flush against the rest of her skin.
Barsalai presses her lips together. She does not cry. Not tonight. She lifts her wife’s head onto her lap. Idly she runs her fingers through the hair she has always loved.
“There is the possibility that she may never wake,” says the Empress. Her voice is shaky, as if Shizuka’s waking is a thing she does not want to confront. “If that is the case—will you continue to visit?”
“Every day,” says Shefali without hesitation. “Every day until she does. Eight months, eight years, eight decades, eight centuries.”
* * *
AND WHO AMONG them can argue with the Moon’s rousing proclamation? For each of them know that she is serious, and each of them have their own thoughts upon what that might mean.
But it is Sakura who has a plan of action, and so it is Sakura who elbows her way past the Empress—the Empress!—and sets a large scroll down on the bed next to Shizuka. It takes up most of the bed—and so, too, do the two characters written upon it. “I had an idea earlier.”
“She spoke to me about it,” says Dorbentei. From her deel, she pulls a skin of kumaq, and this she lays next to the scroll. “I thought it sounded sensible.”
“What is it?” says Barsalai. “Please, whatever it is—if it could help—”
“It might,” says Sakura. “Baoyi, could you get your great-uncle’s inkstone?”
Is it deference, the speed with which the Empress moves—or is it annoyance? Perhaps it is instead shame, or guilt. Whatever the truth of the matter, she does as Sakura has instructed. Moreover, she begins grinding a large batch of ink.
The Moon watches them. She wants to thank her niece, but the words die in her throat. There is a constant note of resentment in Baoyi’s scent.
She presses her eyes shut, as if to drive away the image of Kenshiro’s body that comes to her—but some things will never really leave you. Her brother. Her only brother. What was he doing in armor? Why did he fight? If he had hid with Baoyi, they might have been able to save him, but …
Running a horse to death. Studying for days on end, negligent of his own body.
Kenshiro always had something to prove.
Her poor, idiot brother. Being a god did no less to dull the ache of his absence. She half expected to see him rounding the corner at any given moment with another ridiculous theory. He had never even gotten to see her like this in life.
She’d gone to look for him, of course, when the time came for her to die again. Immersed as she was in the fathomless depths, she could not feel his familiar presence—and the Mother was recalcitrant when pressed. It took until the second visit for her to find him hovering near his inkstone at the bottom of the sea.
He called her a slowpoke.
She made him into a star.
What a difficult thing, to be hated by your own family. When Baoyi returns with the readied ink, Barsalai tries to catch her eye, but the girl will not even look at her.
“What is your plan?” Barsalai says, watching her niece leave the room.
Sakura follows along with Barsalai’s gaze. She nods to Dorbentei, who squeezes her cousin’s shoulder and tells her that it is not her fault.
But it is.
“It’s simple enough. Based on an idle theory I had,” says Sakura. “There were two characters written on Yamai’s chest when you ate him, you said. They must have been his name—you’d need a true name to kill a god.” She opens the kumaq, wrinkling her nose a little at the scent, and drops a little of it into the ink. “I don’t think he knew Shizuka’s.”
“It’s a common name,” says Barsalai. She is so tired of disappointment.
“But not a common spelling. Hardly anyone throws in Excellence as the second character. He’d know the first, since it’s the same as Minami Shiori’s, but how many people see the Empress’s name with the last stroke included?” Sakura points to the second of the characters and a large line running across it. “This particular character isn’t even old; it’s fairly new. He might not even have known it. Before it was Excellence it was used as a counter for weights of gold.”
Shefali swallows. The woman in her arms seems so small and frail like this. “He was in my head.”
“And you can’t read this,” says Sakura, gesturing at the scroll. Her shoulders slump. “I might be wrong. He might have gotten it from O-Itsuki-lor, but I doubt he would have given it up to a stranger. He might have gotten it from the Toad, and—well. I don’t have a good counterargument for that. The Toad was a piece of shit.”
Barsalai looks down on Shizuka—on her peaceful expression, on the curve of her lips. With one finger she traces the line across her neck. “What do I have to do?”
“Bless this ink,” says Sakura. “Then, we take some of Shizuka’s blood—just a drop, don’t look at me like that!—and mix that in. Lastly, you paint these characters on her.”
“We made them nice and big,” says Dorbentei, “so you could follow them more easily.”
Calligraphy. If Sakura had told her to bring back a dragon’s heart, Barsalai would not have faltered—but her old insecurities find her again. “And if I can’t?”
“You will,” says Dorbentei. “We’ll guide you.”
No mocking, no teasing. War has changed her cousin.
Softly, softly, she lays Shizuka back in bed. Blessing the ink takes the barest of thoughts—she dips her finger into it and ice soon blossoms on the surface. Getting Shizuka’s blood is more difficult. It is Barsalai herself who does it, bringing her wife’s delicate hand to her face. With her sharpened nail, she makes a small cut on the back of Shizuka’s hand. This she holds over the ink until that sacred drop of gold mingles with the gray.
Barsalai Shefali has held stars in her hands, has held the Moon’s reins, has spent her nights among the heavenly bodies and her days crafting miracles.
But holding the brush is difficult all the same. Her stiff hands are part of it—she must close the fingers of one with the other. Old anxieties nip at her heels like dogs. She could not even read her own wedding oaths—how is she to get something so important, so delicate, right?
But if it is for Shizuka’s sake, she would lop the heads off the other gods right this moment.
A brush is nothing.
�
�First stroke from here to here,” says Sakura, pointing with her finger. “Make sure you’re imbuing it as you go.”
She follows that line, and the next, and the next, breathing cold into the ink with every exhalation. The characters are not perfect—but they are readable, or at least she thinks they might be. Her heart leaps as they take shape, and she hopes, she hopes—
“Last stroke,” says Sakura. “Down and to the right.”
Hold your breath. Move the brush only when your hands are steady. Do not let them shake. That is what Shizuka told her of calligraphy, and so that is what she does. The last stroke falls into place.
She sets down the brush, cradles Shizuka’s head.
“Did it—?”
Dorbentei’s words are lost in a shout when the room floods with blinding light. If the sun itself were rising from the gardens, it would not be so bright—but that is because the Sun is rising now from the bed in the center of the room. Light from the characters, light from the eyes that soon fly open, light from the mouth of the wakening god.
To stand in the center of a storm while the winds and rain rage on around you, yet to be untouched by them—that is something like what happens to Barsalai in that moment. The woman in her arms is fire and war and anger. A blaze envelops her, but she feels only the warmth of a campfire, only the warmth of her wife’s regard.
For Shizuka has opened her eyes again, and they are trained straight on Shefali’s.
How sacred, how sacred, the look that passes between them! Twenty years of dreams and war, twenty years of longing, twenty years of oaths, twenty years of love—communicated without a word. What is joy if not this? What is love if not the way Barsalai holds her wife, the way her grip tightens, the way her mouth opens to speak the silence of their love?
Tears well in the eyes of the Moon. Barsalai Shefali throws her arms around her wife, Minami Shizuka, and rocks her tight. Her hands tangle in Shizuka’s hair, her nose is full of Shizuka’s scent. When Shizuka’s arms wrap around her in turn, Barsalai thinks to herself that all the world could fall away and she would not care.
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