Yukiko stared at the old man, mute and still. It wasn’t so long ago she was standing over him in this very room, knife at his throat while he demanded she kill him. But it seemed every time Daichi spoke, some new facet of him came to light. His hatred of the Guild and government was tempered by steady hands and a fierce, calculating mind. She could see why the Kagé followed him. Why they were willing to risk their lives for his vision.
The truth was, he was a natural leader—the leader she feared she’d never be. All she had was the desire for revenge. The memory of her father’s death, his blood warm and sticky on her hands, bubbling on his lips as he died. The thought of it threatened to overwhelm her, pulsing in time with the headache splitting the bone at the base of her skull.
“It seems somehow out of balance, does it not?” Daichi coughed hard, cleared his throat as he looked around the council. “To spare the boy and end the girl?”
“We can always kill them both,” Kaori said.
Yukiko rubbed her pounding temples, closed her bloodshot eyes. She could feel the forest all around her, the myriad lives just beyond the window, the heat and chatter of their minds rising in her own. A barrage. A bedlam. Concussive and sickening, pouring over her like scalding water. And as she closed her eyes, tried to stifle the fires burning in her head, to her amazement, her absolute horror, she realized she could sense other pulses within the Kenning. Something beyond the fluttering thoughts of birds, the faint and furtive impulses of small warm things, the boiling heartbeat of the thunder tiger just outside the door.
She could feel the Kagé too.
Blurry and indistinct, all heat and light, alien shapes and impossible tangles of emotion. Everywhere. Like the answer to a perception puzzle that, once seen, can never be missed. She remembered reaching out to Yoritomo’s mind in the Market Square, trying to hold on to him like a handful of sand. But now, effortlessly, she could feel every person in the village. A low-level hum stacked upon itself, one person at a time, until the entire world was shapeless noise. She bent double, blinking hard, Buruu rising to his feet and whining.
SISTER?
Daichi took another sip of tea, his voice a dry whisper.
“Are you well, Stormdancer?”
She smoothed the hair from her brow, the sensation of her fingertips like sledgehammers across her skin. She tried to close herself off, to force the noise and heat away, curling up inside herself and closing down the Kenning completely.
Gods, what’s wrong with me?
“Yukiko,” Daichi said. “Are you well?”
She took a deep breath, exhaled slow. The world had fallen quiet, and yet she could still feel it, just outside her skull. The tide of it rushing back out to sea before its next surge, a tsunami rising to blot out the sun. She in its shadow, standing an insect high.
“I have a headache, Daichi-sama.”
“Perhaps you should rest?” Kaori asked.
“How can I rest?” She blinked at the older woman, out of breath as if she’d been sprinting. “The Lotus Guild is trying to reforge Kazumitsu’s Dynasty and you’re talking about killing Kin? We should be talking about Hiro. The wedding. What are we doing to stop it?”
“The Kuro Street cell are already at work,” Kaori said. “We have an operative inside the palace walls. The ceremony is weeks away. Calm yourself.”
“I am calm!”
“Yukiko…” Daichi said.
SISTER.
“No, godsdammit!” she shouted. “The whole nation was ready to rise a few days ago, and now you’re sitting on your hands while it all slips—”
“Yukiko!”
Daichi shouted this time, graveled voice like a slap on her skin. She forced herself to be still, caught her breath, felt Buruu’s concern flooding her receptors. The world pulsing, the thoughts of everyone in the room building against her crumbling little dam as the whole earth beneath her swayed.
“What?” she hissed.
“Your ears are bleeding,” Daichi said.
She reached up to her head, felt the flood of thick warmth down the sides of her neck, spattering on the floor. Black suns imploded in her vision, tiny singularities folding in upon themselves and drawing her with them. Buruu was at the doorway, his thoughts a storm in her skull, the crunch and crumble of thunder interspersed with white strobes of crackling lightning. She fought for breath, for space, for a moment’s silence inside her head.
The tide came rolling in.
The walls trembling, the floor beneath her rolling. She sank to her knees, clutching her temples, heard the clatter of the tiny ornaments on Daichi’s shelves, chess pieces tumbling and falling. People on their feet, shouting, their thoughts impossible to keep at bay, flooding into her and out of her nostrils in scarlet floods. A teacup smashing on the boards. Daichi’s sword falling from the wall. Cries of alarm from the villagers outside as the trees literally trembled in their roots, and in her head a tangle, a briar, thorned and tearing, all of their thoughts, their hopes, their fear (gods, their fear), everything they were and could have been and wanted to be filling her up and pulling her down to the dark beneath her feet.
YUKIKO!
Buruu, help me!
WHAT ARE YOU DOING?