“It might not be the Sun for you,” you had said then, “but still, there must be something. You’ve heard it, haven’t you? It says to go North. Every few days, I hear it again—go North, where the blackbloods go, find your fortune there. This time it’s the loudest it’s ever been.”
I frowned again. Yes, I had heard that voice on the wind. Less often than you had, it seemed. My mother always liked having me around when plotting our routes, for I knew which way north was without consulting a compass. My uncles used to spin me around until I was near vomiting, then ask me to point north.
I was always right.
My mother said I had a fine career ahead of me as a Qorin messenger, if I could not make ruling work.
But the flowers themselves turned to face you. You could change their color. Wherever your bare feet touched Earth, blossoms appeared, though it often took a few days.
And I’d never missed a shot in my life, my horse spoke to me, and I never returned from a hunt empty-handed. I’d killed a tiger at eight years old. When I was ten, a demon had spoken to me as if she knew me.
How long could we profit from these small miracles, Shizuka, without paying the price for them?
* * *
NORTH.
I was an arrow trembling against a bowstring, and you were pulling me back.
* * *
YOU TOOK MY hand in yours. How was it that I never noticed how tiny your hands were?
“If you do not want to come,” you said, “then you may stay, and I will go alone. I feel this in my bones, Shefali, there is something for us beyond the flowers. If I must find it myself and bring it back for you, then I will—but I cannot sit here and watch my people suffer. If the blackbloods are going north to join his army, then we must stop them.”
You met my eyes with your fierce determination, but behind it was … a depth of yearning. As if you were throwing yourself off a cliff and hoped that I would have rope for you to cling to. And no matter how foolish I thought your ideas were, I always did have a length of rope ready for both of us.
I sighed and pulled myself into the saddle. “We will gather our things first,” I said.
Tension melted off you. You would never admit you were afraid I was going to let you go alone, but your shoulders gave you away.
It took only an hour to gather the things we needed. Two or three days’ worth of jerky and mare cheese. Two skins of kumaq. Two more empty waterskins. A single bedroll; we would be sharing now, and no one could stop us. One spare horse to carry our tent and camping equipment. No ger, since I had not started making my own yet.
People in camp asked us where we were going, you said we were going for a hunt—but my mother did not check on us.
We left that afternoon, and we spent that night lying together in the tent just past our usual grounds. Whatever awkwardness I felt that first night melted away on the second. Now with a better hold of yourself, now with more strength, you showed me all the ways you’d longed to touch me.
That first week was poetry. Before dawn I woke and hunted. When I returned, we broke our fast together. After that, we set out to do our day’s riding. When we were done, we crossed swords, so that you would not lose your talents. That was the excuse you used. You always won, so I am not sure how your talents were at all tested against me. Maybe you wanted to smack me with a sword a bit. That was all right. I raced you back to camp each night, and not once did you win.
I tried to teach you how to talk to my horse. If you could talk to the Sun, you could talk to a horse. One was much farther away than the other.
“You must call her by name,” I said.
“Your horse has a name?”
“Of course she does,” I said. I rubbed her long face and kissed the blaze on her forehead. “Her name is Alsha.”
At the sound of her name, my horse whickered. I whispered to her in the tongue of swaying grass: This is Shizuka, you know her well, do not be so dramatic.
You’re calling me dramatic? she said back to me. I have seen the way you act around her.
“You named her after your mother?” you said. You, too, touched the blaze on her forehead.
She did not whicker when you touched her.
“She has always been named Alsha,” I said. “As my mother’s horse has always been Nadsha. A Kharsa’s mare is always named after her mother.”
You smirked. “Yet in sixteen years, I have never heard you say that out loud,” you said. You ran your fingers through my horse’s dark mane and toyed with her ear.
“Bad luck,” I said, “for anyone but the rider to say her name.”
To anyone else, my horse nickered just then. But to me she spoke, plain as day: Shizuka may say it.
I nodded, both to you and the mare.
“Well, Alsha,” you said, “will you let me ride you?”
She stomped her right hoof twice. Grinning like a child, I helped you into the saddle. I handed you the whip and helped you get situated on the high Qorin seat.
Alsha danced with you. I know of no other way to put it—she trotted this way and that in complicated steps, showing off just how smart she was, how graceful. Thinking of that moment puts me in a state of peace.
After our sword lessons, and our races, and our archery practice, we settled in the tent and went about our business. We’d work on our strange little language together, or I’d sit on the northern side of the tent to finish your deel. Little use it would be to you now that we’d be leaving the steppes, but I both wanted you to have it and wanted to finish what I’d started.
You wrote letters. Some you wrote on my behalf, to my brother. Kenshiro read Qorin just as well as I could, yes—but having a letter written by O-Shizuka was a valuable present. I asked him when he planned on marrying that girl of his, and if we would be invited. I told him how our mother fared, and asked after our father. And though you warned me against it, I told him of our plans.
“It is just Kenshiro,” I said. “We could trust him with our lives.”
“You have not seen him in how many years?”
“Eight,” I said, pouting.
“Eight years is plenty of time for a person to change,” you said. Nonetheless, you inked your brush. “My uncle, for example. Eight years ago, one could hold a conversation with him. Now all he ever speaks about is siring an heir, or proving to the people that he is not so weak as he seems, or eradicating the Qorin for crimes you have not committed.”
You wrinkled your nose. Your uncle’s hatred of the Qorin was not a secret. Your grandfather, Yorihito, was the one who started the Qorin war in the first place. As the blackbloods and demons first began their return, Yorihito demanded their bodies be studied. When he realized what a plague it was—worse than anything the legends told us—he made his grand decision.
The study of blackblood bodies would continue. But it would be done by flinging the corpses over the Wall of Stone, into our camps.
And at the time, no one had seen a blackblood for at least four hundred years. Even the most wizened matrons remembered only the vaguest warnings. They did their best to pass these on to the rest of the clan. Do not touch them. Burn them on sight.
But you cannot stop the curiosity of children.
That is how it spread, Shizuka. Did you know? Children found the bodies lying out in the sun. They saw the black blood seeping out into the earth and they touched it—for it could not really be blood, could it? Perhaps paint, or ink, or sweet sap the Surians bring from the land of Pale People. And so they touched it. So they tasted it.
So they changed.
It did not take long to discover what the cause was, but that did not mean it was a problem easily solved. Qorin do not burn bodies, nor do we bury them. Our custom is to leave them out beneath the Eternal Sky. We read portents based on what happens—whether an animal eats the body, or it decays; if anything grows where the body once lay. This is one of our most sacred rites.
It was … difficult convincing the clan to burn their loved ones. We
are a practical people, yes, but we take comfort where we can. All of us wish for the birds to come for us once we’re gone; all of us wish to join the sky.
There were some who refused to be burned. Some who wandered farther and farther from the clan. North, they went. Always North. Hunters leaving in the middle of the night became a commonplace occurrence, second only to morning funeral pyres.
And when my mother learned of the source of this unspeakable evil—my mother, with a newly united Qorin people at her back—she promised to wreak vengeance upon the wall-sitters. The horde rode to Sur-Shar. When we returned from the land of a thousand spires, my mother blew a hole in the Wall of Stone and collected a scalp for every one of us who had died.
This was your grandfather’s doing, Shizuka, though I know you’ve done your best to distance yourself from it.
Your uncle, on the other hand …
“Eight years,” you said. “He used to send me gifts, eight years ago.”
I did not want to think of the sort of gifts such a man might send you. I did not want to remember that you shared his blood.
We rode through Oshiro with little trouble. I know the roads there well. But given how long it’d been since my last visit—and given my province’s mixed population—no one recognized me. Did they not remember what I looked like? Did they know who I was? Did they care? If my brother rode out in the open like this, he’d be mobbed.
Their adoration painted you in bright tones. You cloaked yourself in their attention; wrapped yourself in it; wore it as a mantle. Oh, you hated when they actually spoke to you—but you basked in their gazes. And though it was only you and I and the horses, you rode as if the entire Hokkaran army was at your back.
We stayed in warm homes when they were offered to us, inns when they were not. I preferred the inn rooms. Enclosed though they were, their walls provided some modicum of privacy. We could be together there, as we were meant to be.
It was during one of those nights I asked you what you thought would happen when we reached Shiseiki.
“We will find the blackbloods there and we will kill them,” you said.
“Why?” I asked.
You turned in my arms. Inky black hair hung over your shoulders; your eyes shone in the dark like twin moons.
“Because we must show them,” you said. You touched my face with one hand. “Because to them we are only girls, only mortals. Because they doubt us. If we do this—if we strike down enemies grown men fear to name—then we take our first step. Then they shall see.”
You say the Sun speaks to you, my love. You say she pours her golden words into your ears and sets you alight with purpose. I say that I do not need to speak to the Sun to know how that feels.
What little light there was in the room strove to illuminate you.
“I will follow you,” I said. “Wherever you lead.”
You grabbed me by the ears and brought our lips together. “You had better,” you said. “Whom else can I trust at my side?” More laughs left your plum-flavored lips. You spread your arms wide. “In all Hokkaro!” you said. “In all the world, only you and I are worthy!”
I did not know much about the world. I knew there was Hokkaro, large enough that it would take nearly a year to cross from east to west, and more than that from north to south. I knew that four Ages ago, Hokkaro consisted only of Fujino Province. Once, the eight provinces were four countries, until your ancestors saw fit to stitch them all together.
The steppes sat directly to the east of your great empire. Half a year’s ride from east to west, a bit more than that from north to south. To the east of us is great Sur-Shar, a land whose eastern border I had not yet seen. Beyond Sur-Shar was Ikhtar, which I’d never seen at all. To the south of the steppes were the Golden Sands; beyond them I did not know. Somewhere lived the Pale People. There were many things about this world I did not know then.
But still something of what you said rang right to me. If there were other warriors in the world of our caliber, they had not made themselves known. We may not have been the strongest. But we were the strongest we knew.
So I followed you.
* * *
FOUR MONTHS, I followed you. Four months, we traveled great Hokkaro. From the cliffs of Tsukaido to the wide mouth of the Kirin River we traveled. Do you remember how pale I went when we had to take a boat across the river? The Rokhon is a quarter as wide at most. We pulled up to the riverbank and there was just so much water, all moving at once, like swaying grass except wetter and deeper and smellier. Like all the rain in the world held in one place.
So what if I vomited?
You would have, too, if you hadn’t seen a river like that in your life.
And the boat! I spent the entire day in bed. No. I was not going to stand on some rickety wooden things held together by nails and goodwill. Why was this floating? What made it float? Why did it exist? These are all questions I asked myself as I emptied my stomach again and again into a pail by the bed.
“If we were in the Imperial barge,” you said, “you would not feel so terrible. It is much larger and does not sway so often. We keep both singing girls and actual musicians on board; you can hear the music rise and fade with the water—”
I groaned. Facedown in the blankets, I waved at you to stop talking. “I think,” I said, my already quiet voice muffled by the pillows, “the Traitor invented boats.”
“We’ll have to take one back…,” you teased.
At that point, we’d been on the gods-forsaken wood-chip pile for half a day. I wasn’t even vomiting up food anymore. Only bile. The back of my throat burned. With every rock of the boat, I thought I was going to slide off the bed. Looking around sent the whole room spinning; I had no sense of balance. And there was nowhere I could go to escape it all.
“I would rather die,” I said. And I was sure of this. I would rather die than suffer through riding a boat again.
When we made shore on the other side of the river, I fell onto the ground and kissed it. I swore to Grandmother Sky that I would never again abandon her husband. I didn’t even care when my back screamed with pain as I leaped into the saddle. I was mounted again, off that boat, and I would never be stepping foot in one again.
So I told myself.
Four months, we traveled. Four months together without anyone watching over us. Four months with you. Four months of restful nights spent together, four months I could stay out in the sun, four months without hearing that awful sound in my head, four months without seeing the Not-You, four months …
I can hardly believe it is real, looking back on it.
I remember the night we arrived at the Wall of Flowers. I remember the sight of it—half-wilted and sagging in places. One thousand years ago, the Daughter made this wall herself, summoning it after the Traitor slew her Brother. It was said a single petal contained so much of her presence, it would cause an entire field to spring up, if planted. Desperate farmers tried to steal petals so often, an entire branch of the Imperial Guard was dedicated to the Wall.
A thousand years ago, the Daughter painted the Wall of Flowers in all the colors she knew. But time and sunlight and rain washed them away, and now we were left with pallid blossoms clinging to the vine like drunken vagrants clinging to railings.
I had never been one of those who dreamed of seeing the Wall, and I knew it would no longer be as the stories told. Not with things the way they were. Not with the constant cloud in the North, not with babies being stillborn more often than not, not with all the blighted fields we saw on the way here.
No, I was not expecting the Wall to be glorious.
But the sight of it still struck me hard in the gut.
We arrived in the middle of the night again. Upon seeing us, the guards here raised their spears and called for us to halt.
“Who approaches the Wall?”
“O-Shizuka, Imperial Niece,” you said. Your voice was rough; we’d been traveling all day and you were saddle-sore. “Traveling with Barsalai Shef
ali Alsharyya, daughter of Oshiro Yuichi and Burqila Alshara.”
Tired though you were, you sat straight in the saddle. Any second now, you must’ve thought, they’d explode in gratitude. They’d lead us to the barracks. You’d give them an inspiring speech. All of us would ride out with the dawn and trample blackbloods beneath our feet.
But that was not what happened.
Instead, the guards called for reinforcements.
Instead, ten men surrounded us. Instead, the lead guard spoke with borrowed authority.
“His Majesty the Son of Heaven has decreed no one will enter the border village,” he says. “We are to detain you until His Serene Highness can send someone to retrieve you.”
You reached for your sword. “My uncle,” you said in a level voice, “is not here.”
“The eyes of Heaven see all, O-Shizuka-shon,” said the guard captain. The gold stitching on his armor distinguished him. Around his neck hung a bronze war mask carved in the shape of a snarling dog. “We cannot let you pass.”
“You can,” you said. “You simply choose not to.”
You waved a hand toward the gathered spears. As if you pulled their strings, the guards took several steps back. I laughed, softly, at the magic of your station.
“All of you will stand down,” you said. “Your captain and I are going to duel.”
The captain clenched his jaw. No sword hung at his hip. His spear was his only weapon. Before the troubles began, such a thing would’ve been unheard of. All warriors carried swords back then, as symbols of their station. Only the very rich and the very arrogant did so now.
Which meant you carried two: your mother’s Daybreak blade, and a short sword you kept just to show everyone how rich you were, how ready to duel. The last person to wear two swords in their belt was Minami Shiori.
You dismounted. I did, too, though I hated leaving my horse. A mounted Qorin is as much a threat as a naked blade.
“Do not look so frightened,” you said to the guard captain. You smirked. I think you did this on purpose. You just looked so comfortable in your own skin—your confidence exuding from you like heady perfume. “It is only a duel to first blood.”
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