Shao’s featureless face unnerved me. But I knew my mother’s face so well that the smallest glimpses of it beneath her war mask spoke volumes to me. In the crinkles near her eyes hid a thousand words.
For the first time I hated my vision. If I were normal, if the night did not favor me, I never would have seen that look in her eyes.
I cowered. I do not like to admit it, but I cowered at the sight of my mother astride her liver mare.
With her sword hand, she beckoned me to stand.
I feared I could not do it—my legs were still shaky—and no one was going to help me up when I was covered in demon blood. In the back of my mind, I knew this was bad. My armor soaked up most of it.
Except for my head. My uncovered head.
That man two years ago, lying on a bed just before your mother killed him. Glassy eyes. A fever. Black veins pulsing. His whole body struggling to rid itself of the Traitor’s influence.
Shaking, I ran my hands through my hair. When my gauntlets came off, I tried not to scream. I huddled in on myself, cold and clammy, and rocked back and forth. Blood. So much blood, on me, just looking for a way to get in and …
My mother dismounted. The demon’s head fell into the snow. She swaddled me in a blanket pulled from her saddlebags, scooped me up, and started walking.
If I told you she did not speak to me, you’d laugh and say of course. Such a thing is obvious. But when I write these words now, take heed: My mother did not speak to me for days. Not through Otgar. Not in hastily scrawled letters on her sheet of slate. Not in gestures.
No one else was permitted inside the ger. Only me, only my mother. More than once, I opened my mouth to speak to her. She’d fix me with a look, and I’d swallow my tongue. I felt so small, Shizuka. I felt so small and so scared. At night with the winds whistling outside, I’d hug myself tight and pray to Grandmother Sky that I would stay myself.
I tried to write to you. My mother kept a writing set in the ger, for she is fond of letters. On that first lonely evening, I sat in front of it and thought of all I might say to you. Yes, we might be gods, but I might be dying. If I do, you can keep my horse.
That is what I wanted to say.
But you know well, Shizuka, the struggle it is for me to write in Hokkaran. Frustration only set fire to my fear, to my anger and shame. I fell asleep with smears of ink on my hands, and unreadable scratch on my mother’s fine paper.
On the morning of the fourth day, Otgar came into the ger, and it was then I breathed a heavy sigh of relief. For when I awoke, my mother was gone, too, and this meant I could finally talk to someone.
But Otgar wasn’t pleased with me either.
“Barsalai Shefali,” she said. “Do you have any idea just how much of an idiot you are?”
I stared into my bowl. It was one of the plain ones, not the painted ceramic from Sur-Shar.
“Mongke died,” she said. “Temurin didn’t notice a ten-year-old among her group, and so she can’t return to the camp until she skins ten wolves. The riders won’t stop talking about it, not for a moment. They all saw that thing grab hold of you. Five minutes, they said. You held your breath for five whole minutes, and they could not get it off you. Anyone else would’ve died. Yet here you are, staring into your soup.”
The more Otgar spoke, the more I longed for silence again. All I wanted to do was help. All I wanted to do was prove that I was … that I was something more.
Otgar shook her head and kicked the carpet. Then she tapped the bowl I stared into, to get me to meet her eyes.
“That being said, I am glad you lived.”
I tilted my head. After the danger I’d put myself in? After the way I acted—she was glad I was alive?
“When you grow up, Needlenose, you will be a fine warrior. You’ll have more sense then,” Otgar said. “People cannot decide whether they are upset with you for endangering yourself, or if they admire you for fighting against so wretched a beast. Me? I think you are ten, and my cousin. If I had the same Sky-given luck you did, I’d try to kill a demon, too.”
Sheepish, I looked away.
Otgar ruffled my hair. “When you are feeling up to it, you will tell me what happened,” she said. “Someone has to know the true story. All the riders are saying you spoke the name of the Mother.”
There she was, my cousin, whom I’d ignored in favor of my foolish crusade.
I slumped forward.
She hugged me. Then she patted me on the shoulder. “Come on, Shefali,” she said. “Don’t think you’re out of the woods yet. Your mother is going to punish you.”
Otgar helped me up. She led me to the seat of my mother’s war council—her and four or five riders clustered around a fire.
My mother held my bow. When she saw me, she lifted it above her head with one hand and held it there, so that everyone could see that it was mine. There were the beads I made from clay I found near the sands. There was a paper charm you made me, kept safely inside a jade cat no larger than my thumbnail. Vulture feathers. Pieces of silk from Sur-Shar in colors I’d never seen before.
My mother’s fingers spoke. Otgar cleared her throat.
“Barsalai Shefali,” Otgar said. “A man is dead because of your reckless actions and insubordination. Had you stayed behind as instructed, Mongke would not have had to leave the group to escort you back. Temurin failed to spot you among her number, yes, and she made the decision to send Mongke back with a ten-year-old. She’s already faced my justice for that. If you want to bear an adult name, you must bear adult consequences. You must think beyond your own lust for glory. You faced a tiger in combat and did not think it enough. This behavior—this recklessness—ill suits you, and ill suits a future Kharsa. You must relearn patience and humility, since you seem to have forgotten them. Perhaps making a new bow will teach you.”
And with that, she threw my bow—the bow Kenshiro and I made together—onto the fire. I watched it burn and covered my mouth to keep from screaming. In front of the war chiefs, I could not allow myself to cry, but my eyes watered anyway. I tried to be stoic, Shizuka, I did, but I hadn’t seen Kenshiro since I was six, and that bow was the last thing we made together.
Watching it go up in flames pierced through me.
Years.
It would take me two months to make a bow, and almost as long for Temurin to return from her hunt. When she returned, she gave me a skin filled with what I thought was kumaq. It was, mostly. But there was enough raw milk mixed in to banish me to the latrines for a day and a half.
When I survived, Temurin decided we were even.
She did not help me with the bow, and I did not ask for her assistance. You’ve seen me make them enough times—the whole process is a personal one for me, and one that always brings me peace. So, while the clan did their best to avoid me, I sneaked out at night and worked.
You might find it strange that I chose to work in the dark, alone, when being alone is so abhorrent to my people. When I’d just had such an awful experience.