The girl pointed to the gryfon circling overheard. “The Mother says you must bring the girl to her with all haste. That when you see, you will understand. It must be you. You alone.”
Aleksandar sighed, ran one hand over the long stubble on his cracking cheeks. He watched the beast, sweeping in a broad spiral overhead, a murmuring dread in his gut. And finally, giving orders to each column commander that his men were not to engage the gryfon, no matter the promise of its skin, he set about finding a white flag to wave.
*
“Kapitán,” Piotr whispered. “Leader. Soldier leader.”
Hana sat on Kaiah’s back beneath her oilskin, eye hidden behind polarized glass, watching the man approaching over muddy ground. They’d landed far from the gaijin line, Kaiah ready to take flight again if trouble reared. The arashitora growled as the gaijin slogged closer.
“We can talk to him?” she asked over her shoulder.
“I will for the speaking.”
Piotr grunted with effort, slinging his bad leg over Kaiah’s back and slithering down into the mud. He limped a dozen yards closer and performed some kind of salute; fist to chest and then to the air.
The Kapitán returned the gesture.
Hana squinted behind her goggles, looking the man up and down. Early thirties, long blond hair, covered in filth and old blood. He carried a massive warhammer connected to some kind of generator on his back, oilskin wrapped over a night-black animal pelt—a wolf or bear that might have been as big as Kaiah when it was alive. There was something about his gait, the set of his shoulders. Something about him reminded her of Yoshi. The way he moved. Like a man born to be a dancer who’d never been shown the steps.
The Kapitán stopped twenty yards from Piotr, pulled down the swathes of cloth he’d wrapped his face inside, and Hana’s heart almost stopped beating. Gods, his face. Square jawed, certainly, dirty and crusted with stubble. But still, it was a face that haunted her dreams, Mother lying on the kitchen floor, Father looming over her with the saké bottle in hand, screaming.
“Look what they took from me!” Face purpling, skin taut and blood-flushed. “Look at it! And all I have to show for it is you!”
“You pig.” Mother’s words were slurred around her broken jaw. “You drunken slaver pig. Do you know who I am? Do you have any idea what I was?”
Hana put her fingers to her lips. Trembling.
Mother …
The gaijin began talking in their alien language, thick and harsh as winter snow. A cold gust of wind caught the Kapitán’s pelt, whipped it away from his chest, exposing the standard embossed on his iron breastplate. And Hana was sliding off Kaiah’s back, the beast roaring warning as she sank ankle-deep in the mud, stumbling and scrambling, calling Piotr’s name. The men turned toward her as she clawed at the leather thong about her neck, snapping it loose, tearing the scarves from her face. And as she stumbled closer, she held it up: the amulet her mother had given her on her tenth birthday, the little golden stag with his three crescent horns.
The same sigil adorning the gaijin’s breastplate.
The Kapitán looked at her, sapphire eyes widening as she pulled the scarves from her head, jagged blond tresses flowing loose. His gaze flickered from the amulet to her face, his own turning pale as old starlight as he snatched the medallion from her hand, anger turning him hard and cold.
“Where did you get this?” He spoke in perfect Shiman, his accent dragging the words down into the earth. “Where did you get this?”
He grabbed Hana’s shoulders. Kaiah’s roar echoed across the ruined plain, wings spread, thundering through the mud toward them both. But the man’s eyes were locked on Hana, heedless of the death approaching on crackling, silvered wings, the warning cries from the men behind him, the whine of motors, the ring of steel on steel.
“Where?” he shouted.
“My mother.” Hana winced in his iron grip. “My mother gave it to me.”
The Kapitán looked like someone had scooped out his insides.
“… Your mother?”
“Anya.” Hana pulled down her goggles, exposing her glowing eye. “Her name was Anya.”
It lasted a moment more. The disbelief. The rage. He reached up to her face—that pointed, impish face with its too-round eye and the high cheekbones so like his own. And as Kaiah arrived in a hail of mud and wind, roaring as if the sky were falling, he pulled her close, kissed her brow, her cheeks, and holding her so tight she thought she might break, he began laughing, laughing even as the tears streamed down his face, as the storm rolled and roared, sinking to his knees in the mud, bringing her with him and rocking her back and forth like her mother had when she was a child, and all the hurt and dark in the world could be chased away by the sound of her voice.
“I found you,” he whispered. “My blood.”
She put her arms around him, closed her eye, lost in the sound of his voice.
“Goddess be praised, I found you…”
29
ANEW