“What else is new?”
They pushed through the cloth panels into the iz and found a seat at a table in the corner. A boy a few years younger than them appeared and asked for their order. He also appraised Daemon’s shirt and, after a second, nodded, a silent compliment.
Daemon really hadn’t needed garish pants to blend in.
Sora perused the menu. “We’ll have two orders each of bacon-wrapped shrimp, mushroom beef, and the ginger-honey chicken skewers, please.”
“And a carafe of cold sake and some tea,” Daemon said.
The serving boy had been gone hardly a minute when he returned with their drinks. Daemon poured. “Cheers to us finishing our first mission.”
She clinked her cup with his.
Soon, their meal arrived. The skewers were perfectly charred, each with a different sauce drizzled over the meat. Sora picked one and put it to her lips. Daemon watched, mesmerized by her mouth. Heat flushed through him.
Damn it! He jerked up his mental ramparts to block their bond, hoping Sora hadn’t felt his reaction through their connection. It’d been harder and harder recently to see her simply as his gemina. Everything he’d taken for granted about her in the past had started to captivate him—her sharp intelligence, her ferocious chokehold, even the way her pinkie stuck out a little when she held a skewer in her hand.
He flinched, though, at what those feelings meant. It would be disastrous if a romantic gemina relationship failed, because you’d still be bound to that taiga for life—sharing emotions, working with each other, together despite the desperate or angry desire to be apart. That’s why the Society forbade it.
Daemon poured himself another cup of sake and swallowed it in a single gulp to wash away the heat of his feelings for Sora.
At the bar behind her, shouts broke out. A glass shattered. Six men began to advance on each other, fists clenched.
Thank the gods, Daemon thought. A distraction.
He and Sora both stood.
“May I?” Daemon asked.
She flourished her arm in front of her. “Please, be my guest.”
He grinned, hopped over his chair, and pushed his way into the fight. He bounced on his toes. This was part of what had been missing today. Adrenaline. The feeling that he could do something.
“Gentlemen,” Daemon said, “would you kindly take it outside? You’re ruining the atmosphere in here.”
Two of the men who’d been in each other’s faces spun around and sneered at him. “If you knew what was good for you, you’d stay out of this, boy,” the bearded one said.
“Actually,” Daemon said, “if you knew what was good for you, you’d leave like I asked.”
“Smart mouth,” the other man said, “but not such a smart brain.” He wound up and took a swing.
Daemon dodged easily, grabbed the man’s arm, and hurled him through the air. The man sailed toward the exit, landing with an ungraceful flail as he hit the ground under the blue curtains at the door of the iz.
“Now, you can leave quietly,” Daemon said to the five others, “or I can throw you out like that fellow.”
The men’s faces turned bright red, and despite fighting each other only a minute ago, they now united against Daemon. They all pulled out knives.
“Right,” Daemon said. He could pull out a weapon too—gods knew he had enough little daggers, darts, and throwing stars hidden on his body—but he didn’t want to hurt them much. They were just drunkards getting a bit out of hand. Instead, Daemon cracked his knuckles and smirked while they approached. The rest of the iz had gone silent in tense anticipation.
The first man charged at him with a knife raised above his head. Amateur, Daemon thought as he sidestepped while simultaneously smashing the side of his hand like an ax into the man’s forearm.
The man immediately dropped the knife and fell to the ground cradling his arm. It wasn’t broken, but it would feel that way to him for a little while.
The next man advanced on Daemon with quick, continuous slashes.
Daemon stepped backward, straight into a bunch of huddled diners, too frightened to be caught up in the fight but too paralyzed to flee. Daemon had to adjust his path, arcing away from the table and back toward the bar.
Of course, that’s where the other three men were waiting. Their knives were out and pointed at Daemon as he backed toward them, like bayonets ready to impale him.
Daemon continued to edge closer and closer.
“He really is an idiot, isn’t he?” one of the men said.
At that moment, Daemon slid himself backward, taking out the man directly behind him. Daemon swept his leg right and then left, knocking out the feet of the other two. They landed with profanity-laden crashes at the base of the bar.
Daemon spun to meet the lone man standing, who was advancing faster now. The slashing of his knife grew quicker but also sloppier, driven by rage and likely several ounces of fear.
So predictable, Daemon thought.
He lunged forward and slammed a fist to the man’s throat while simultaneously grabbing and twisting the knife arm. He locked the arm, kneed the man in the ribs, and stripped him of his knife.
Only now did Daemon unsheathe a short sword from the scabbard strapped to his calf, hidden beneath his trouser leg. He brandished it at the five men on the ground.
“I’ll give you one last chance to get out of here with your limbs and innards intact,” Daemon said.
They glared at him, pride severely wounded. But all five of them—excluding the one already thrown to the exit—hustled out of the tavern without any further threat.
The iz erupted into hoots and applause.
Daemon nodded his head in a small gesture of acknowledgment and went back to his table, where Sora waited.
She was smiling. “You really are art in motion when you fight.”
He flushed from the tips of his ears down to his neck.
Luckily, he was saved by the bartender, who set another carafe of sake on the table. “You two are taiga apprentices, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Daemon said, beaming proudly. “You could tell?”
The bartender chuckled. “Normal people don’t fight like that, and they aren’t as honorable. Thank you for keeping the peace.”
“It was my pleasure,” Daemon said, his cheeks beginning to hurt from smiling so hard. “And thank you for the sake.”
Chapter Four
Finished with their mission and officially on Autumn Festival break, Sora and Daemon rode all the next day to Samara Mountain, and then up dusty switchbacks, passing only a handful of people with their mules, and even fewer houses. The mountain sliced into the cerulean sky like jagged shards of slate, its crooked pines tucked into crevices and clinging to the steep rock. It was always with mixed emotion that Sora returned here. She loved her parents, but she’d spent her whole life with the Society of Taigas, and after eighteen years, the Citadel felt more like home than this place where she’d been born.
Across Kichona, the other taiga apprentices were also home to celebrate the Autumn Festival. They would light lanterns with their families and hang them over their doorways. There would be feasts to pay homage to the major gods—steamed whole fish to honor Nauti, god of the sea; bowls overflowing with noodles for Silva, goddess of wealth; platters of sautéed morning glory stalks for Sola, goddess of the sun; and a variety of stewed vegetables on beds of rice for Emmer, god of the harvest.
Daemon had come home with her because he didn’t have family to return to. Unlike the other apprentices, he hadn’t been brought to the Citadel by adoring parents and dedicated to service to the kingdom. Rather, until age five, Daemon had lived in Takish Gorge, a remote, uninhabited part of Kichona, with a family of wolves, eating, hunting, and playing in the forest with his lupine brothers and sisters. The trapper who found Daemon would have left him in the canyon—ferocious as he was, with his snapping teeth and his nails grown out long and sharpened like claws—if not for Luna’s silver triplicate whorls on the small of his back, a mark that glittered even when the sun was gone.
Daemon was well aware that this sounded like a fairy-tale trope. But he wore the badge with amused pride, at least outwardly. Only Sora knew that he hated not knowing who his parents were, why they’d left him, and how he’d come to be raised by wolves.
Nevertheless—or perhaps because of this—Sora and Daemon spent the second half of their Autumn Festival break in Takish Gorge every year, visiting the only place he knew as his. And if he wanted to find his parents this year, Sora would help him.