And—well, it was silly. Only the dark made my disguise passable, and it was dark.
Wait. Shouldn’t the moon be shining bright, as it was when we began this expedition? My eyes were playing tricks on me. I must have seen the wrong moon overhead. It must be a new moon, and not a full one, for it to be this black. Mongke’s torch was a pinprick at best.
Something was wrong. I stopped, looked back toward the rest of the group. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. Five minutes away, no more, and yet the distance between us felt as profound as the distance between my ger and your rooms at the palace.
But the darkness didn’t bother Mongke. He reached into his saddlebags for a skin. “Though, if you keep this stuff up, people are going to start calling you—”
But screaming drowned out his words. I reached for my bow and nocked an arrow before I began to process what was happening.
It was as if he’d fallen into a pit of ink. The darkness itself swallowed him up so quick and so sudden that he was gone in a blink. From the bubbling scar of black before me emerged a smooth sphere, about the size of a man’s head. Another blink. The surface bubbled again, and now the thing was growing, and growing, and the horse …
I screamed. I screamed as loud as I could. You might think I wanted to alert the others, but in truth there is little that frightens me like the death of a horse. No—this was not simply death; this was consumption. One moment the horse was there and then it was not. Not even hoofprints remained.
Riders scrambled. Someone pulled a horn from their pack and sounded an alarm. Hooves against snow. My heart hammered in my chest.
I fired a shot at the sphere. It swallowed my arrow, too. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. Weren’t demons supposed to be person shaped? How were we meant to kill that?
And what was it going to do next?
The sphere hurtled straight toward me.
When you take a hard enough blow to the head, darkness comes upon you. You do not expect it, you do not foresee it—one moment you see color, and the next you do not. So it was when the sphere enveloped my head. Cold, wet, slimy. I could not breathe. I tried and tried, but I might’ve been breathing in rocks for all the good it did me. My lungs burned. I heard nothing but a churning sound, a gurgling sound that made me sick to my stomach.
And there was Shao’s voice in my mind again.
Steel-Eye. You’re going to have to do better than this.
That name again. Why did it hurt whenever I heard it?
My hands were still free, and so were my legs. Beneath me was my horse, solid and warm and breathing. As long as I had my horse, I could live through this.
You hardly fought at all.
Arrows plinked against the sphere’s smooth surface. I tried to pry it off my head, but the damned thing clamped on tighter, and as brave as I was trying to be, I could not hold my breath forever. Was it the sphere making me dizzy, or the lack of breath? Hard to tell, but it did not stop my struggling. I pulled and pulled, the muscles in my arms screaming in agony, but I could not break free. Someone tried to cut me loose. I could not hear their shouting, but I did feel the flat of their blade stuck to the sphere.
Do you have anything to say for yourself before you die here, an untested child?
Panic’s cold fingers around my throat. What if I couldn’t do it? What if I was—we were—wrong all along? What if we weren’t gods, Shizuka, what if I was going to die there on my horse with a demon eating my face and my mother found my corpse and it was burned, burned, not fed to the steppe animals as it should be, what if what if what if—?
No.
No, I would not allow it.
You would not allow it.
In that moment, I swear I heard your voice in my head. Perhaps it was the lack of air. Whatever the cause, I heard you: No, no, you must fight.
In a blind frenzy, I reached for the knife on my belt and plunged it into the sphere, without a care in the world if I hit myself. The pressure on my head tightened. Again, I stabbed, again, again, again. My hands were going numb, but I bent them to my will.
After perhaps the fifth strike, the sphere uncoiled just enough for me to catch a breath. As a man lost in the sands guzzles water, so did I greedily slurp down this air. It gave me life enough to keep striking back.
The next time I plunged the knife into it, the sphere flew off my face. Gasping and dizzy, I tried to take in what was going on. There it was, there she was: the woman-shaped shadow standing in the center of the riders. Shao.
She held the sword she’d stolen in one hand. I did not recognize her stance, but I did know that graceful ease she held herself with.
She was staring at me. I cannot tell you how I know this, Shizuka. Have you ever felt someone staring at you? Felt eyes on you, though no one was watching? If a thousand such eyes watched me, they would not equal Shao’s intensity. She did not stare only at me. She stared through me, through all the versions of myself at once.
Shao held out her sword in challenge. “Steel-Eye!” she called.
This time everyone heard her. The warriors around me recoiled, the sound of her voice like falling glass.
“Is that a knife, Steel-Eye, or a tooth? Tiger’s Daughter, using your milk teeth on big game—”
Here it came, my inglorious end—
My mother charged toward us.
I had to keep Shao distracted. If she moved, my mother wouldn’t be able to behead her.
So I did what any foolish, angry, ten-year-old Qorin would do.
I jumped off my horse and I tackled her. I didn’t bother trying to steer myself at all; I was not interested in kicks or strikes or anything fancy. Only the brute force of my falling weight. I slammed into her. Like slamming into a hill, it was, like crashing against unturned earth. My teeth rattled in my skull.
I could not stagger a thing with no breath, but it seemed I could surprise it. Shao dropped her sword. Shadows wrapped around my throat. I held my breath and braced myself. Either I was going to hurt very much, or I was going to feel nothing and my story was going to end.
I did not see my mother behead the demon, as I was facing down at the time. I could tell you in great detail how my boots looked against the snow. I could tell you about the horses embroidered in dull yellow thread. I could tell you how the toes curled up.
But I can tell you how my whole body shook with the strength of the blow. I can tell you how coldness splattered onto me thick as blood, heavy as iron. I can tell you of how I fell face-first into the snow when the demon ceased to exist.
When I rolled over, my mother held Shao’s head in her hand. It was a shriveled thing, not much bigger than her fist—a lump of coal with hair attached. Far more frightening was the look on my mother’s face. Far more terrifying, the striking green of her eyes against her dusky brown skin; far more terrifying, the anger, the fear.