But she would, of course, have to pay a price for it. No woman could be both the Lady of Oshiro and the Grand Kharsa. Thus, she would renounce the latter title. All of the Qorin remaining in Oshiro would return to the steppes within a week. Her firstborn child would be born in the Empire, to be raised by Oshiro Yuichi—yet there was a mutual promise in that arrangement at least. After all, just as no Qorin would dare to attack a child of Burqila Alshara, no Hokkaran child would dare to attack their own mother. For the next three generations, all of Burqila’s lineage would be both Qorin and Hokkaran for all rights and purposes and thus free from Hokkaro’s conquering grasp.
It was a wise deal on both accounts—but especially on Burqila Alshara’s. That was the trick of it, the trick of her—she was as canny as any courtier. If Qorin was her first language, and Hokkaran her second, then negotiation was surely her third. This was the woman who somehow persuaded the Merchant-Prince of Sur-Shar to provide her with wagons full of Dragon’s Fire; this was the woman who established a system of messengers much faster than our own; this was the woman who sought out engineers as eagerly as she sought out soldiers. She knew precisely what she was doing, and this deal was emblematic of her forward-thinking nature. Burqila knew the limits of her people, and could read the currents of war. My father was going to throw army after army at her, and she had only three thousand within the Wall. Better to surrender now than risk losing so many.
And so as her people returned to the steppes, she stayed behind in Oshiro with her new husband—a man she did not know and certainly did not care for. Still, it was a fate she accepted without reservation, so long as her people were safe. Anything to keep the peace.
But it was an uneasy peace, at best. Many of the returning soldiers felt there was unfinished business between them and the Qorin—debts that could only be paid in blood. Though no one called for an invasion of the steppes, they found other ways to release their tension.
While I was sitting in a teahouse in the city I myself witnessed the end result: five former soldiers came over to a darker-skinned man and spat out all sorts of vitriol. As far as they were concerned he was spying for the enemy, his mother was a horse, and he needed to return to his own country. Now, this man wore Hokkaran clothes, and he was drinking Hokkaran tea in the Hokkaran capital. He had brown eyes, not green; dark hair, not light. In short there was nothing Qorin about him except for the color of his skin.
But that was enough for these men.
The man for the most part ignored his harassers. He sat by his table with a young woman in Xianese clothing. She squirmed in her seat, leaning over every so often and whispering to him.
The moment one of the soldiers grabbed him I knew I couldn’t just sit idly by. I commanded my bodyguard to break up the fight—but to my horror half the teahouse was in support of the soldiers. The only solution was to shut the whole thing down until the city guard picked up the rowdy soldiers. I stayed the whole time. If I was present—and all those involved knew I was present—then the situation would not escalate again to the physical.
But there are many ways to hurt a person, and though I endeavor to do the best I can, I am only one man—and a far removed one, at that. What did I know, really, about the sort of struggle displaced Qorin were going through? I’d never gone hungry a day in my life. Few people so much as disliked me. How could I know?
More importantly—how could I help?
I attempted to bring the issue to my father’s attention, but it was no use. Any Qorin blood made Hokkaro weaker in his eyes. My brother agreed with him. It was no use arguing with them.
And so I decided I did not need them. My poetry has won me friends in many circles. I called upon those connections, then, forming a covert network within Fujino. There were roughly three hundred Qorin within the province per the last census. A large number, certainly, but only a small percentage of Fujino’s many-thousand residents. We would only need to cast a small net.
Lawyers were our first targets. Whenever a Qorin—or someone mistaken for one—was arrested on trumped-up charges, an exceptionally expensive attorney would materialize out of thin air to defend them. Sometimes all those allegations fell away the moment our lawyers turned up. Sometimes they didn’t. Either way, our clients had the best defense I could afford.
Next, doctors and surgeons. No healers, as despite reports to the contrary, the Imperial Treasury has its limits. Still, a good doctor could serve an entire community—and it was their attention I sought. Some physicians in Fujino refused to serve anyone darker than sackcloth, and my father had done little to discourage them. So, whenever I heard tell of someone doing this, I added another doctor to my own payroll, and promptly sent them over.
Food, too, was important. Thankfully it was also both the cheapest to acquire and the easiest to distribute. All it took in that case was a network that ran from the Imperial kitchen out onto the streets and into eager hands.
I do not want to sound as if I fixed the problem single-handedly. I did not, and surely all of my efforts would have been in vain if not for the contribution of hundreds of others. Doing my best to help brought me comfort, and gave me something to focus on besides the war. I asked for nothing more than this.
In my other hours, I chained myself to the page, rewriting and editing “Queen of Crows.” More than anything, I tried to convey the senselessness of the Qorin war—the despondency. I told the entire story as plainly as I could. Seven hundred lines of spare metaphor and cold truth.
By the time I released the thing, it had drained me of all my life and energy, in the best possible way. Within two days I received my first letter, from one of my old calligraphy instructors. Ikuhara Ryuji’s hand was widely considered the finest in the Empire at the time.
The letter was as brief as it was cutting.
I wish you’d sent me only the hundred lines about Minami Shizuru. You are a creature of beauty; bleakness does not suit you.
It hurt, of course—and then there was no one to discuss it with. If I told Iori that my latest work was ill-received he’d never let me hear the end of it. My father didn’t even bother listening to me whenever I spoke about it.
So, there I sat, those two lines cutting through my stomach lining, my guts spilling out for all to see.
It couldn’t be true, could it? Perhaps that was just his opinion. Perhaps others who had seen the things I’d seen would appreciate it.
But every day more letters came in deriding the thing, each one another needle in my flesh. It seemed this poem I’d been so enamored with was little more than an amateur’s scribbling. Everyone seemed to agree that this was my worst work yet—with one equally unanimous exception: the depiction of that glorious warrior. My readers delighted in her. In letter after letter they commended me for capturing such a perfect image of that noble heroine, Minami Shizuru. Other poets seized that title, that imagery, and ran with it—by the end of that year there were at least a hundred works about the Queen of Crows.