by Jay Kristoff
Misaki hugged her daughter, smoothed hair from the child’s brow. “I cannot believe we triumphed over the Guild and the Tora, only to be struck down by a mad goddess.”
“Can’t fault her, really,” Yoshi shrugged.
“What?”
“Think about it. She dies giving birth to creation, and her husband leaves her in the Hells to rot.”
“Lord Izanagi tried to rescue her,” Kaori said.
“And he failed,” Yoshi shrugged.
“So you think it right for her to destroy the world in retaliation?”
“Well, she’s the one who had to squeeze it out. Can you imagine what it’s like popping seven islands out of your delightfuls? Hells, give the woman some sympathy.”
“Madness,” Ginjiro breathed. “Blasphemy.”
“All I’m saying is betrayal like that leaves a scar.” Yoshi shrugged. “If it happened to anyone here, they’d probably go mad too. I’m not saying I’m all for dying or anything. Just saying I feel sorry for her, is all…”
Hana was watching her brother, firelight gleaming in her eye. “Did you find what you were looking for in Kigen? Did it help?”
“Didn’t help. But I did find something. An answer maybe.”
“To what question?”
The boy chewed his lip, saying nothing. He passed his cup to the Blackbird for a refill.
“So,” Kaori said. “What do we know of hellgates?”
“Legends,” Blackbird said. “Children’s tales.”
“Tora Takehiko,” Yukiko nodded. “One of my father’s favorites.”
Piotr finally stirred from amidst his cloud of honeyweed. “He stormdancer?”
Yukiko nodded. “He ended the last hellwar. Lady Izanami tricked a young boy into moving the boulder sealing Yomi shut, unleashing her hordes upon the world. Tora Takehiko flew inside the hellgate and closed it again.”
“He died in the process,” Kaori said.
“But saved the Seven Isles by doing so.”
“Sacrifice,” Hana nodded.
“My father once told me, ‘One day you will see that we must sometimes sacrifice for the sake of something greater,’” Yukiko said. “I can’t think of much greater than the lives of every man, woman and child in Shima.”
“You mean to do this?” Kaori frowned. “Fly into the hellgate?”
“I don’t see a better option, do you?”
Misaki shook her head. “But once inside, how will you close it?”
“I don’t know,” Yukiko sighed. “The legends don’t ever say how he did it.”
“Yukiko, you are pregnant. And you are not the only stormdancer at this table.”
All eyes turned to Hana. The girl met their stares, one after the other, then turned to Yukiko. She nodded, jaw set, lips thin. Unafraid.
“Kaiah and I can do it.”
“No,” Yukiko said.
“Yukiko—”
“No, Hana. I dragged you into this. And you and I are not going to sit here arguing about who gets to kill themselves.”
“Who says I plan on dying? Just because Tora Takehiko fell, doesn’t mean one of us—”
“We place the rickshaw before the runner,” General Ginjiro said. “The point is moot unless we have an army with which to fight the Yomi hordes. Sealing the gate alone will be pointless. From what you say, the legion already spat through the hellgate would be enough to wreak untold havoc. They must be dealt with also.”
“Two days,” Yukiko nodded. “As I said, we repair the fleet, march south with everything we have. Buruu and I deal with the gate once we get there. Agreed?”
Uncomfortable silence fell, dissent bubbling just underneath. It was obvious none at the table were keen on the idea of Yukiko or Hana sacrificing themselves in some suicidal charge, but no other option presented itself.
Blackbird finally knocked back his saké and sighed.
“A long day. I think we’ll all see clearer on the morrow.”
The council-goers left in silence, each burdened with dark thoughts. Yoshi remained at the table, staring into his empty cup. Hana hovered by the door, pale and fragile.
“Are you coming, brother?”
“… Hai.”
Running his palm over the stubble on his scalp, he heaved a sigh, scooped up the saké bottle and went in search of sleep he knew would never come.
* * *
Lightning from his father’s hand, etching blue-white poetry across the clouds above. The warmth of his bucks at his side, gathered like crows for a feast on the eaves of the Daimyo’s palace, black and white, eyes gleaming with every arc thrown across the heavens. Watching the females descending slowly, coming in to land on the roof opposite the Kitsune garden. Angry growls. Rumbling discontent. Awful sorrow in the eyes of those who had lost mates or kin.
Mocking amusement in Sukaa’s glare.
Buruu stared at Shai, watching as she settled on the rooftop, preening with a beak like a saber. Tail switching, breathing slow, as if this were any other day.
He roared that he had commanded them to stay in Everstorm. That it was not a female’s place to fight. That they endangered their race’s future by coming here.
Shai glanced at Kaiah, and made no reply.
That is different, Buruu roared. Kaiah is different.
Niah and Aael awoken. Black and white share one Khan. Endsinger rises. All is different.
Buruu glanced at the assembled pack, growling softly.
Fly with me.
Shai’s eyes glittered.
As Khan commands …
The pair took to the sky, circling into the storm, static electricity building and bursting along their quills. Shai flew close enough that the outstretched tips of their feathers touched.
You disobeyed me, Buruu growled.
I am Shakhan of Everstorm. My place to challenge, when no other will.
I will not see you fall here.
Nor I you. Pack needs you. Rhaii needs you.
The future of our race lies with mothers, not fathers.
No future if Dark Mother ends world. Without us, the silver-tongue monkey-child would have died. He spoke in my mind. May have a way to save this place.
What way?
Did not speak it. But certain in his heart.
… Where is our son?
The Elders watch. Watch them all.
That is wise.
I know.
Thunder rocked the skies, thrumming in his bones.
… I am glad you are here, my heart.
She dipped her wing, glided closer.
Know this also.
Is there anything you do not?
Shai looked to the south, to the cold and rising dark.
How this will end …
48
BEFORE THE DAWN
She wept.
She wept until her voice was splinters and her throat was chalk. Until Yoshi’s uwagi was soaked through, her face pressed to his chest, his arms around her shoulders.
They sat on her bed. The same bed where she and Akihito had lain the night before, now cold and empty, ten miles wide, the thought clawing the inside of her chest, leaving her hollow.
Yoshi said not a word. Didn’t breathe platitudes or sympathies or promises everything would be all right. He simply held her, his warmth keeping the predawn chill away. And after an hour of emptying herself, she found it all too much to hold on to, and he laid her down with a pillow beneath her, pulling up her blankets, still touched by Akihito’s scent.
He knelt beside her, whispering in the gloom.
“Dark now. Blacker than black, I know it. And words are tiny things in the face of all that dark and all that cold. But hear these words, little sister. Hear and know. Tomorrow is coming, just as fast as the turning of the sky. And as sure as it’s black now, the sun will rise. Always. No matter how faint the glow.” He leaned in and kissed her brow. “I love you, Hana.”
“I love you too, Yoshi,” she whispered. “Don’t ever leave me again
.”
“I’ll try my best.”
“You promise?”
“Doubtless.”
He kissed her brow again, gentle as feathers.
“Go to sleep.”
And into the dark, she fell.
* * *
Smooth, polished pine beneath her feet, singing in time with her tread. Drowning in the crushing dark before the dawn, sleep a thousand miles away, wandering aimless through the halls. Buruu’s thoughts echoing in her own.
I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE THINKING.
Do you.
YOU CANNOT THINK I WOULD HELP YOU.
No. But I can make you. Whether you want to or not.
YOU CAN. BUT YOU WON’T.
What choice do I have, Buruu? Can I ask Yoshi or Hana to give up their lives?
YOU DO NOT HAVE TO ASK. BOTH WOULD BE WILLING.
Yoshi doesn’t seem the heroic sort.
THOSE HEROES ARE THE GREATEST KIND.
Hana has lost too much. We can’t take her brother away too.
SHE WOULD GLADLY GIVE HERSELF.
She’s heartsick over Akihito. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.
AND YOU DO?
I started this war. I should finish it.
AND WHAT OF YOUR CHILDREN? THE ONES INSIDE YOU?
What of the thousands of children who will die if the Endsinger rises?
YOU WILL FIND NOT ONE THUNDER TIGER TO BEAR YOU TO THE HELLGATE.
Sukaa would carry me gladly.
HIS KHAN WILL FORBID IT.
We must close the gate. One of us must die, or this whole country dies instead.
IT WILL NOT BE YOU.
Buruu, I—
IT WILL NOT BE YOU.
Yukiko winced, hand to brow, the force of Buruu’s thoughts overcoming her wall. Thunder rolled inside her mind, the fury and heat of a lightning barrage, strobing bright as he shut himself off; a sullen, seething fury pushing her out into the cold.
She closed it off, everything, stepping out of the Kenning and into herself. And there she stood in the empty hallway, struggling just to breathe.
Gods, how did it come to this?
A servant shuffled past carrying an apology and an armful of bloodstained linen. Looking up, she realized she’d wandered to the makeshift infirmary. It stretched the entire western wing of the palace, filled with the wounded and dying. Gaijin. Guildsmen. Kitsune. And reaching out into the Kenning, feeling room to room through the hundreds of pain-stricken lives, she found him, stirring in fitful sleep, his mind haunted by a familiar, terrifying dream.
Lashes fluttering against her cheeks, she walked toward the sound of his thoughts.
* * *
He held his arms wide, fingertips spread, the lights of their eyes glinting on the edges of his skin. The gunmetal gray filigree embossed upon his fingertips, the cuffs of his gauntlets, the edges of his spaulders. A new skin for his flesh; the skin of rank, of privilege and authority. Everything they had promised, everything he had feared had come to pass. It was True.
This was Truth.
They called his name, the assembled Shatei, holding their hands aloft. And even as he drew breath to speak, the words rang in his head like a funeral song, and he felt whatever was left of his soul slipping up and away into the dark.
“Do not call me Kin. That is not my name.”
In the dream, he felt his lips curl into a smile.
“Call me First Bloom.”
Kin awoke with a start, eyes wide, groaning as the pain took hold. He considered calling out to the guards on his door, demanding more opiates to numb it. But the drugs made him sleep, and sleep meant the dream, louder and more insistent than ever before.
“That’s what you see every night…”
He opened his eyes again, saw Yukiko beside him, hair framing her face and draped across her shoulders like a wave of black velvet. His pulse quickened, tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth. And then he looked lower, to the small swelling beneath her kimono, cold rising to still the lurch of his heart, twisting and tearing it wide open.
“That was the future you’d never speak of,” she said. “Your What Will Be.”
He frowned. “You can see my dreams?”
“If I try hard enough. I can see the thoughts of everyone in this palace.”
“A wondrous gift.”
“To some.”
“A shame you didn’t use it before you tried to kill me.”
“I’m sorry, Kin. I thought—”
“Don’t,” he sighed. “Don’t make excuses. At every turn, you’ve thought the worst of me.”
“Gods, can you blame me? You fooled everyone, Kin. People who’ve known you your entire life. How can you hold it against me that I believed you too?”
“Because I promised I would never betray you.”
“I know.” She knelt beside him. “And I’m sorry. I swear I’ll never doubt you again.”
“Even when my dreams show you I will one day lead the Guild?”
She reached out, brushing his bandaged fingertips. “I swear it, Kin.”
“No one can stop What Will Be, Yukiko.”
“You will,” she insisted. “You won’t let it be. I believe in you.”
“Gods, I wish I understood you.” He blinked at the ceiling. “I wish I could see inside your head the way you see in mine.”
“Be careful what you wish for.”
He glanced at her stomach, then to her eyes. She met his stare, unashamed and unafraid.
“… Ask me. I know you want to. I can feel it.”
“It’s none of my business.”
“I thought I loved him.”
“You don’t owe me explanations, Yukiko.”
“You said you loved me once.”
He said nothing. Felt nothing. Nothing at all.
“You don’t feel that way anymore?” Yukiko asked.
“… Do you care?”
“Of course I care…”
Kin sighed, ran a hand over his stubbled scalp. “General Ginjiro came to me earlier. He told me you want us to march south and detonate the Earthcrusher. Incinerate the demons already born from the hellgate.”
“What does—”
“I already agreed to help. You don’t need to maneuver me onto your side. You don’t need to pretend.”
She shrank back as if he’d raised a hand to strike her. “… You think I’d do that?”
“Honestly?” He met her horrified stare. “I don’t know what you’d do. I don’t know what you’re thinking. I don’t know you, Yukiko. And it’s obvious you don’t know me, either. So I don’t know why every time I close my eyes I see you there. But still, I do.”
“So you do love me. Still.”
He looked down at his bandaged hands, licking at cracked lips. “I think I love the idea of you. The thing you represent. The life I could never have. The person I could never be.”
“… And that’s all?”
“I don’t know.” His gaze roamed her face. “I don’t know.”
“I know when I thought you’d gone back to the Guild, it felt like someone had cut my heart out.” Her voice was small in the dark, as if a weight crushed the breath from her chest. “I know you risked everything for us. I know you’re the most courageous person I’ve met. I know there is a strength in you that puts me to shame. I know you make ten of me.”
She touched a patch of bare skin on his arm, the brush of her fingertips bringing up goose bumps on his flesh.
“I know I’m sorry we left things … the way we did.”
He looked up into her eyes, wide and hopeful.
“I know I missed you,” she whispered.
He looked at her fingertips, the static electricity crackling between her flesh and his. The pain of his burns a distant memory. The pain in his chest too real to believe.
“I don’t know how all this is going to end, Kin. I know I’m not the person you wanted me to be. I know I made mistakes. But they’re my mistakes. I chose them. I own th
em. But I know I don’t want to add to them by leaving us like this. Because if I did, I know I’d never forgive myself. I’ve lost enough today. Enough in the telling of this story. I can’t lose you too.”
It seemed an age passed, there in the guttering light, as the wind sang in the rafters and the black snow danced in the clouds above. The weight of yesterday and the threat of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and the clutch of his chest and the tightness in his throat and the thought that all of it might be over soon—that they both could be skirting the edge of their last dawn, discolored by the anger and disappointment and pain of it all. But he looked up, and there she was, in full and blinding color. This girl who’d been just a dream—the promise of a life he could never live. But beneath that impossible, shattered facade, there she was still, pale as Iishi snow and stronger than folded steel, standing tall no matter how small she felt inside. Beautiful and frail and flawed and perfect. And just a heartbeat away.
His hand found hers; a feather-light touch of his fingers on her skin.
“I missed you too,” he said.
Her eyes flooded with tears and she bowed her head, waves of raven black spilling forward to cover her face. Her hand was trembling, and he squeezed it tight, heedless of the pain.
“Don’t cry,” he pleaded. “Don’t cry, Yukiko.”
“Will you do something for me?” she whispered.
“Anything.”
“Will you hold me?”
“… I’d like that.”
She crawled onto the bed, careful of his injuries, resting her head against his shoulder. The burns on his arms, the torn cable plugs in his chest, the iron-thrower wound in his thigh, all of it faded away as he lifted his hand, smoothed her hair from her face, closing his eyes.
“Would you do something for me?” he asked.
“Anything.”
“Wake me up. If I start to dream.”
“What if you dream of this? Of us?”
“I won’t. I never do.”
“Maybe one day?”
“One day.”
She sighed from the depths of her, her tension melting in his arms. He lay there, listening to her breathing slow, her body against him, his arms around her. Leaning down, he kissed her brow; a long, silent moment, skin to skin, eyes closed, breathing her in.
She sighed, the shadow of a smile on her lips, pressing tighter against him.