Was that voice human? For it sounded so much like mine, so much like the ones I heard in my head …
You drew your sword in a flash of light. “You’ve come to claim me, haven’t you? Draw your sword, then. Draw your sword and let all of Hokkaro see what sort of man you are.”
Have you ever missed a step, Shizuka? Climbing down on a set of stairs—have you missed a step? The fear that shoots through you, the chill, the tightening of your chest: I felt it then.
And when I watched the two of you walk to the arena, my stomach sank to my ankles. Cold sweat trickled down my forehead; my mouth went dry.
“Don’t worry, Shefali,” Kenshiro said to me. I hated Nozawa more than I hated him at the moment—but only barely. “Nozawa-zul has never been known for a duelist.”
The two of you took your places.
Some noble’s wife approached us. From the corner of my eye, I saw a blooming flower painted in red between her brows, in Xianese fashion.
She bowed to my father and smiled. “Oshiro-tur,” she said. “You must be so proud of O-Shizuka-shon. Such a shame, what happened to her parents—but she has grown into a fine young woman.”
And my father beamed with pride, as if he were the one who raised you.
“She has,” he said, “and it’s as I always told her father over tea: The only thing she is lacking is a good husband. Today, she will be complete.”
“She already is,” I said. The words left me without my thinking them. I was trying hard to ignore him, Shizuka. My father has always been this sort of man. Whenever you stayed with us in Oshiro, he’d throw feasts just to be seen with you. When your birthday came, you’d always find a new set of robes from him.
I do not think he has ever gotten me anything.
I am happier for it. To receive a present from such a loathsome, simpering sycophant would be more insult than joy.
The noble’s wife raised a brow at me. “Who is this?” she said.
“Oshiro Shefali,” said my father.
“Your daughter? But she is so dark.…”
I walked away, before I let my anger get the better of me. I wanted no part of noble conversations.
Already, the duel had begun. I paced around the edges of the dark circle of dirt. You stood at the east. Kagemori stood on the west. You cast a shadow toward him. He’d drawn his blade, and you had not.
“Shizuka-shan,” he called, “if you surrender, this will be less painful.”
“You know nothing of pain,” you said. “Allow me to teach you!” And with that, you charged at him. One of your viper-quick lunges, to start with.
Kagemori moved away and parried. “I know pain,” he said, pointing to his face, to the scar you gave him. “What a great teacher you were, Shizuka-shan.”
Again, a charge; again, a thrust. This time he countered your thrust with his own. You quickly jumped back.
“I’ve learned so much because of you,” he said.
And he lunged with such speed, it was hard to follow him. Where was his blade? I couldn’t see in the swirl of silk.
But you did. I heard steel against steel. Flashes of gold against gray. I balled my hands into fists.
The two of you parted. There was a tear in your robe, in the sleeve. You were unharmed, but it was the closest anyone ever came to hurting you.
And …
Shizuka, it hurts to write things like this. But I must. Even these painful memories are ours, aren’t they? Even these painful memories are a comfort to me, so far from your arms.
You were so scared.
No one likes to talk about it when they bring up this duel. In all the retellings I’ve heard, you keep boasting and taunting him.
But that isn’t what happened.
Anyone else who watched would say you stood tall, but I saw your toes curl. I saw doubt’s ghost possess you.
And my heart was in a vise.
“For all your talk,” said Kagemori, “in the end, you are just an orphan with her mother’s sword.”
For a moment, you froze. You opened your mouth, but nothing came out. Nothing save wordless growls.
Kagemori walked closer to you, drew his finger across his ruined face. “Look at what you did to me,” he said. “Do you think your mother would be proud of such behavior?”
“Silence!” you screamed.
“Do you think your father would write poetry about you, when you cut a man across the face because he dared to long for you?”
“I was a child!” you said. Your voice cracked. “I was thirteen! You had no right to speak to me in such a way, you had no right—”
“If I had no right,” Kagemori said, “then prove it.”
You charged again, like some fool recruit, like some ten-year-old playing with a wooden sword. There was no grace. No elegance. It was not you.
And you were easily parried, easily riposted, easily …
Easily cut by the man you hated most.
Two-thirds of your right ear hung uselessly from a thin flap of skin. The cut that severed it continued across your face, crossing over the bridge of your nose and nearly hitting your eye. It was an awful thing, a foul cut that wept the second it was created.
You screamed. I do not blame you, Shizuka, but you screamed and held your ear.
“My face!” you said. “My ear!”
Everything from your cheeks down was red, red, red. You kept screaming, Shizuka, and you fell to your knees clutching your face in agony and he …
Screams, gasps from the onlookers. Imperial Guards gripped their spears with white knuckles, waiting for the order to take him in.
Even your uncle stood. Even he looked to Kagemori in horror. How dare he hurt a member of the Imperial Family in such a way? He had the chance to give you a small, harmless injury—and he severed your ear.
But he laughed. Nozawa Kagemori laughed, and I roared.
Pain. Gods, it hurt. My jaw snapped and grew. Fangs pushed their way up through my gums. Crimson clouds swirled before me. Snapping bones; a sudden push.
Was I getting bigger?
I do not know. To this day, Shizuka, I do not know what I looked like at that moment. Some fearsome thing far from the girl you grew up with. Those crude talons were not the fingers that ran down your back at night. That jagged-toothed mouth was not meant for kissing.
No, I’d become something great and shadowy and awful.
And I was livid.
I did not see in the normal way. When you see a thing, you use your eyes. Demons do not. The best way I can describe it is to say that I was imagining people. My sense of smell was so acute, I could smell everyone, everything. A guard’s rancid armpits, a savory roll tucked into a noble’s pocket for later, the perfume of a rich singing girl clinging to a warrior’s sweat.
Sweet fear. Bitter anger, stuck in my throat with every breath. Ten. Ten, twelve? Maybe twelve. Hard to tell. Fear. Fear everywhere. Breathe deeper. You. You, find you, must find you, if I didn’t know which one was you, I might hurt you—
Deep breaths, Steel-Eye. I needed time to think, time to orient myself, but I could not make myself stop. It was as if I were locked within a puppet, watching someone else tug my strings. Only the most primal, shallow thoughts remained.
All around me, the clatter of steel, of wood. Boots on the hard ground. Dust in my nostrils, then in my lungs.
“Blackblood!”
“Beast!”
“Demon!”
Me, they were talking about me, and yet—not me, not Shefali.
Steel-Eye.
Yes, that was my name, wasn’t it? It had always been my name, though there were years I’d never acknowledged it. Steel-Eye. The woman you loved was someone different.
Howls. Screaming. I let the sound peal from my throat, louder than all of them combined. They wanted something to fear? All right. Steel-Eye was horrifying, wasn’t she?
Yes, she was. I smelled sticky, stale urine; fear fear fear.
How intoxicating it was, to know how much
they feared me! At last, I was giving them a reason!
But—
Was that really how I felt? How Shefali felt? Or was it only Steel-Eye?
Speak. I had to force myself to speak. Remember the still water, remember who I was, remember you standing in front of the butcher’s desk, cutting meat so I’d have company.
“Leave!”
The others were still here. Easy to forget them when my own thoughts were so disturbing. I saw them staring back at me. I saw them bringing the story of this moment back to their families, to their loved ones. I saw myself through their eyes, but it was not I, it was not—
Had that been my voice? Had I said “leave”?
Fists meeting dirt. My fists? They had to be; I knew all those scars. Why didn’t it hurt? I felt pain, but not much. Someone was laughing laughing laughing, screaming, screaming, and with a dull horror, I realized—
That was my voice.
Visions of the guards before me. I smelled their histories, smelled their souls, and my mind built some sort of image to match. Little girls with wooden swords. Old men with canes. Boys wearing girl clothes, before they knew they were boys.
“Kill it!” they shouted.
“No, don’t!”
Your voice. That was your voice!
A whistling spear flew toward me. I raised my hand, let it through; pain does not matter, to survive is Qorin. My bones shook, my flesh split—but the shaft was still there. I tore it out. Black blood coated the wood; I broke it and threw it away before it infected someone.
There were more coming.
I ducked down, closer to the ground. Instinct drove me. I ran forward. Charged through them. How easy it was! What if I rammed them against the wall, what if I bit into them, what if—?
They were so soft!
No, I couldn’t kill them. That was not me. That was not Shefali thinking. But I could not stop—the bodies slammed into my back and I reared up and roared as loud as I could. Maybe they’d run. I hoped they did. If they ran, they’d be safe from me.
But he wasn’t.
Closer. I could smell you, smell him.
Smell the thing inside him.
That is the thing about how demons see the world, Shizuka. We do not much care for your physical appearance. We learn everything we need to know about you, everything that ever was or would be about you, from smelling you.
Part of a person’s soul is in their scent.
And where Kagemori stood, I smelled rot. If Grandfather Earth yawned and freed two dozen corpses from his grasp, it would smell the way Kagemori did. Ash and cinders. Wet stones. Mold. Dark, dark, dark.
Kailon.
I saw the demon so clearly, I wondered how I’d ever missed it. Not tall. A small thing, young and untested. Knee-high. Large nose taking up most of its face. Two teeth jutting out from its lower lip like tusks, on either side of its drooping nose.
Young. Untested. But a demon nonetheless, a creature lovingly crafted by the Traitor’s own hands to wreak his vengeance upon the world. One of his children.
And he’d been wearing Kagemori’s skin this entire time.
I was not lucid then. I would’ve wondered when it happened. What had driven him to this? There are stories of it; you spoke of them around the fires we once shared. Minami Shiori was said to have loved a man before she left for her wanderings, only to discover when she returned that he’d given up his body to a demon for the promise of her safe return.
Demons can do many things. We are everywhere. We do not exist as you do, bound to one time and place. We are constantly flowing from here to then, from now to there. And there are few creatures with the temerity to approach a demon.
Yes, it is a thing peasant wives do when their husbands leave for war. If a demon keeps the man safe for a specified time, it’s entitled to possess the wife. It never ends well. Without fail, the demon will kill the husband the second it is free of the bargain.
Nozawa Kagemori sold his body.
But he did not sell it to a very powerful demon. He sold it to a child wearing its father’s britches.
And the trouble with wearing a human body is you’re trapped in the current time and place. If someone kills you …
I lurched in front of you. Gods, how I longed to be near you. The smell of you! You were gold and dawn and warmth. I could not see you, Shizuka, not the way I saw the others. I saw only a silhouette blazing bright.
But I stood before you nonetheless, and I raked my chest and roared at the invader. “Kailon!”
Ripples. In my mind’s eye, the true image of him flickered into Kagemori’s body. Yes, bind him. Bind him to that flesh. If I just reached forward …
He was skittering like a frightened bug.
“Steel-Eye, I’d heard stories, but I didn’t know, I didn’t know—”
I didn’t have to listen to him. I grabbed for him.
No, it jumped, he jumped, where did he go? Deep breaths. There. To the right, no, above, no—
There were feet on my shoulders, hands on my face. It craned over me, a wave of scent and emotion. Fury. Fear. Panic. Was this its only chance, to cling to me like a child clinging to its mother?
Claws raking against my skin; burning trails where its nails had been. Pain. Pain. I stumbled forward, stumbled back, trying to shake him off. He held on, dug his claws in deeper, took a handful of my hair.
No. Stronger. I was stronger. I felt it in my veins, Shizuka, with every beat of my heart.
I reached overhead—grab it, grab him by the neck—
Blinding pain, a dagger rammed into my skull. No—talons. Its filthy talons digging into my eye like a knife into a ripe plum.
My eye. A piece of me gone, forever; a piece of me staining this demon’s hand.
* * *
DIDN’T MATTER. Just a bit of pain. It wouldn’t stop me. Not right now, at least.
I throttled him with one hand. With the other, I got a good grip on his scalp, a good hold, as fine as any hunter could ask for. And then?
Then I pulled.
* * *
MUSCLES RESISTED BUT eventually gave in. Skin tore. Its head came off with a wet sound that thrilled me. Hot blood cascading over my body, a waterfall of ink. I threw the head to the ground.
But its face. Its face, Shizuka, staring back up at me!
I couldn’t stop myself. I fell to the ground and I bashed that head in, bashed it as hard as I could, bashed it until its bones were a fine paste and its brains were thin as leaves of seaweed and—
* * *
“SHEFALI!”
Someone grabbed my back. You.
“Don’t touch me,” I snarled. Blood, I was covered in it, black as pitch. I couldn’t let you come near me in such a state or you’d get sick. Instead, I rolled away from the demon’s head and curled up on my side, like an injured wolf.
You came creeping toward me. Bright, so bright. I covered myself. When I blinked, I could almost see your lovely face.
Darker.
Colder.
Something wet on my face, dragging along my cheekbone. When I touched it, it was …
It was what was left of my eyeball.
And that is the last thing I remember.
IF I COULD, I’D COME TO YOU
When I next opened my eyes—ah, I must switch to “eye,” now—I found you sitting in front of me. I could not make out where we were, but it was not the arena. A great pounding ache in my head dulled what sight remained. As long as I saw you, and you were safe, nothing else mattered.
But as you came into focus, I saw your bandages. One strip ran across the bridge of your nose. A thick patch of cotton covered a gash beneath your eye. And the entire right side of your head was covered, probably to support what was left of your ear.
A sheet of paper distracted you. You scowled at it as hard as you could in spite of all the wrapping on your face.
“Shizuka,” I said, “are you well?”
As soon as you heard my voice, your whole manner change
d. In an instant, you went from a scowl to a euphoric smile.
“Shefali!” you said. You squeezed me tight. I felt your heart against my chest, and it was then I realized I wasn’t in my deel. Instead, I was in a set of loose Hokkaran robes. “My love, how are you feeling? How is your head? Have … Have they been troubling you?”
I ached. I licked my cracked lips, pressed my fingers to my temples. Think. Did the demons speak to me during that span, however long it was?
No.
No, they didn’t.
What happened? Think. Go out into the fog of memory with a lantern. Kailon cut you, I tore his head off, and …
Oh. That was right.
Slowly, hesitantly, I reached up and touched my fingers to my left eye. To where it had been.
“Shefali,” you said, wincing, “please. Dear one, you have returned to me; we are together; let us not worry about our injuries.”
“Show me,” I said.
“My love,” you said, “you are still my living poem. Don’t trouble yourself with the mirror.”
I forced myself upright. Dizzy. One hand on the bed, the other on your shoulder. On my left, only darkness; I had to turn my head if I wanted to see. That was the last thing I wanted to do.
There it was. The mirror. Couldn’t see much from this distance, but it hung in the northern corner of the room. I took a deep breath and stepped out of bed. Besides the dizziness and the headache, I felt all right. Well. Not completely all right. I felt as if I’d lost a fight, yes, and as though there was something wet on the left side of my face.
One foot in front of the other. The mirror came closer and closer.
“Shefali—”
“Have to see.”
There. That ashen creature in the mirror, with the pale brown skin, must be me. Once, my hair was the color of fresh wheat. The limp strands against my forehead were as white as Alsha’s mane. The robes I wore had opened as I walked. If I wanted to, I could trace the dark veins now visible on my neck and temples.
But I was more concerned with my eye. Thick white bandages covered it. With my claws, it took little effort to peel it all off.
It was gone.
There was nothing left, nothing at all, of my left eye. That side of my face looked sunken in. Before this, I didn’t realize just how much space an eye took up; when closed, it was obvious it was missing.
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