She could see him in her memory, lying on sweat-stained sheets, the light of a choking moon playing on planes of smooth skin and taut muscle. His lips, soft as clouds and tasting of salt, pressed against hers in midnight’s hush. Peeled back from his teeth as she drove her blade into his chest, as Buruu’s beak sheared his right arm from his shoulder in a spray of hot crimson.
How could it be? He was dead. They killed him.
I killed him.
“Gods,” she whispered. “My gods…”
“I am sorry,” Kaori said, still staring into the dark. “We hear but whispers. We only have one operative left who can move freely within the palace grounds. But we know Hiro is one of three seeking the title of Daimyo. Rumor tells he has the full backing of the Lotus Guild. Once he secures position as clanlord, he will claim the Shōgun’s throne.”
“But that’s madness.” Yukiko tried to swallow, her mouth dry as desert dust. “Why would any of the other clanlords support him?”
“Their oaths of fealty bind them to the Kazumitsu Dynasty.”
“But Hiro is not of Kazumitsu’s blood. The dynasty died with Yoritomo.”
“There is one of Kazumitsu’s line who still lives.”
Yukiko frowned, trying to clear her thoughts. To focus. Buruu was on his feet, growling, his heat echoing through the corridors of her mind. She could feel the nightbirds beyond the window glass. Monkeys flitting across the trees. Tiny lives and tiny heartbeats—hundreds of them, bright and burning in the Kenning. So hard to think. To shut them out. To breathe.
“I don’t…”
“Aisha lives.”
A flash of memory in her mind’s eye. Yoritomo in Kigen arena. His eyes dancing with hate. Wiping his hand across the bleeding gouges on his cheek.
“No, my sister refused to betray you. And still she dared to beg me for mercy.”
Yukiko bent double, hands on her knees.
“She found none.”
Black flowers bloomed in her eyes, unfurling in time with the strobing pain in her skull.
YUKIKO?
“Hiro will cement his claim by joining the dynastic bloodline through its last surviving daughter.” Kaori spoke as if her words were a eulogy. “He and Aisha are to be wed.”
The dark fell still. Sudden and silent as death. No nightsong. No wind. A wet thump rang out in the room and Kaori flinched, squinting through the bedroom window to the black beyond. A small splash of blood was smeared on the glass. Another thump, against the far wall. Another.
And another.
She turned toward the girl, saw her doubled over in pain.
“Yukiko?”
YUKIKO!
A sparrow smashed itself against the window, colliding headfirst and dashing its skull open against the glass. Another bird followed, another, as dozens upon dozens of tiny bodies slammed into the bedroom walls, the ceiling, the glass. Kaori drew her wakizashi, blade gleaming in the candlelight, turning in circles, her face thin with fear as the pounding of flesh against wood became thunderous. A rain of soft, breathing bodies and brittle bones.
“Maker’s breath, what is this devilry?”
Yukiko was on her knees, hands pressed to her temples, forehead to the floor. Eyes shut tight, features twisted, teeth bared. She could hear them all—a thousand heartbeats out in the dark, a thousand lives, a thousand fires, hotter than the sun. Their voices in her skull, nausea rising black and greasy in the pit of her stomach, overlaid with the taste of his lips, the bitter words he had spoken right before she killed him, she killed him, gods, I killed him.
“Good-bye, Hiro…”
SISTER.
Buruu. Make them stop.
THEM? IT IS YOU. THIS IS YOU.
Me?
YOU ARE SCREAMING. STOP SCREAMING.
“Stop it,” she breathed.
Kaori took hold of her shoulder, squeezed tight. “Yukiko, what is happening?”
Hearts beating in thin, feathered chests. Blood pumping beneath fur and skin. Smashing themselves against the walls, falling broken and bloodied toward a grave of fallen leaves. Eyes burning bright, teeth gnashing, the girl inside their head screaming and screaming and screaming and they had to make it stop because it hurt what does she want why won’t she stop make her stop make her stop.
“Yukiko, stop it.”
SISTER, STOP IT.
Knuckles and pulses and a thousand, thousand sparks.
“Stop it!”
Her scream rang out in the darkness, her eyes wide and bloodshot, hair splayed in dark tendrils across her face. Silence fell like a hammer, broken only by the sound of small, still-warm bodies tumbling down into the darkness below. Bright spots of red spattered on the boards between her knees. She reached up to her nose, felt sticky warmth smeared down her lips. Pulse throbbing in her temples in time to the song of her heart, Buruu’s thoughts cupping her and holding tight, the Kenning’s heat receding like floodwaters out into a cold and empty black.
Kaori knelt beside her, blade still clutched in one trembling fist.
“Yukiko, are you all right?”
She dragged herself to her feet, smudged blood across her mouth with the back of one hand. Stumbling out the door, she wrapped her arms around Buruu’s neck. Sinking to her knees again, him beside her, wrapping her beneath his clockwork wings. Salty warmth on her lips, clogging her nose. Echoes bouncing inside her skull. The sparks of every animal out in the forest, out there in the dark, flaring brighter than she could ever remember.