I say this: The Moon kept me company for two long years. We have always been good friends, she and I. And—well. There was something else.
You wrote to me, of course. You always wrote. I took your letters with me whenever I ran off at night. If I grew lonely or frightened, I’d hold the paper beneath my nose so I could smell your perfume. Often I’d take a break from bow making just to drink in your calligraphy. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t read the characters themselves when I’d had Otgar read them to me so many times.
That was how I’d learned that you challenged your mother to a duel after five years of sword-training lessons. O-Shizuru broke your arm in a single stroke, and still you were not discouraged.
“One day,” you wrote to me, “I will defeat her. One day I will tap her throat with my wooden sword and she will be forced to acknowledge what I have always known: I was born to hold a sword. I was born to duel. I live for that day, Shefali. It is coming. Soon.”
I smiled when Otgar read that, for I knew you were right—but at the same time, I felt a heavy dread I could not explain.
Long after I shot my first triumphant arrow, a messenger came from Fujino.
He wore all white, and he carried with him no letter. Among our brightly colored people, he was a ghost.
He entered my mother’s tent. I was out riding with Otgar at the time.
She stiffened. “Shefali,” she said, “when was the last time you got a letter from that friend of yours?”
“Hai-tsu,” I said. Three months ago. A month late. You did not deviate from your schedules, and you wrote back as soon as you received my letters.
Ice in my heart.
I kicked my horse into a gallop. When I dismounted, it was more leap than step, and when I opened the tent, I heard him say the words.
“O-Shizuru and O-Itsuki are dead.”
THE EMPRESS
THREE
She must stop. Those characters are arrows in her heart, nails through her fingers. O-Shizuka drops the book and presses her palms against her eyes. Still she sees the words. Still she hears them in Shefali’s soft voice.
It has been ten years since they left. (O-Shizuka will use that word, for now; the other one will cut open her tongue if she thinks of it.) Ten years without her father’s hand on her shoulder, ten years without her mother shouting at her about her sword forms, ten years since she …
A throbbing pain starts up at her temple when she tries to remember. A sharper ache rises to meet it when she tries to forget. The ninth of Nishen is a firebrand within her mind, painful to behold and painful to ignore.
Before the ninth—before the day her mother left—there was the fifth. Even if her parents had lived to this day, the fifth of Nishen would be a sword against their flesh for all their days.
That was the day O-Shizuru had enough of her brother-in-law.
It had happened at court. Itsuki coaxed Shizuka into going by allowing her a day off from zither lessons. Court was the lesser of the two evils at the time.
Things began in the normal manner. Everyone milled about, exchanging pleasantries while they waited for her uncle. But there was already one difference—suitors. Shiratori Ryuji, lord of Shiratori Province, asked her father, with a smile, when Shizuka could meet his son.
“A quiet little tomcat,” he said, “to balance out your tigress.”
Shizuka opened her mouth, but her father squeezed her shoulder.
“You’re right, Ryuji-tun!” he said. “Shizuka is at her best with someone quiet to balance her. Is your son quieter than Oshiro-tur’s daughter?”
And Shizuka covered her mouth to keep from laughing, covered her cheeks to hide when they turned red.
Shiratori Ryuji’s smile grew strained all of a sudden, but Ituski’s did not falter. He clapped Ryuji on the shoulder. As they walked away from him, Itsuki and Shizuka shared guilty smiles at Ryuji’s expense.
But neither of them laughed when, later that evening, Yoshimoto introduced Uemura Kaito as his new Champion. Shizuka’s brows climbed halfway up her forehead. She and Uemura studied with the same sword tutor. He was a baby-faced seventeen, if she did not miss her guess; the hair on his upper lip looked more like dirt than a beard.
“Uemura-zun?” Shizuka called. “You?”
He offered her a friendly smile and wave. Yes, he was just a boy.
“How old are you, then? Eleven? Twelve? Maybe a full thirteen?” O-Shizuru said, for she had never been one to keep her thoughts bottled up inside her, and Uemura did not quite look his age. Until that moment, Shizuru stood at the Emperor’s side in silence. The white robes of her station stood in stark contrast to her charcoal hair and ink-dark mood.
When she heard a boy proclaimed the new Champion, O-Shizuru clapped once, twice, thrice, as loud as she could. One by one, the others gawked at such a brazen breach of etiquette.
“Ara, ara,” she said. “Let’s hear it for Yoshimoto’s newest guardian—a child! Have you ever been cut in a duel before, boy? Not a scar on you. Look at that.”
The young Shizuka-zul covered her mouth to stifle a laugh. She didn’t quite succeed. Uemura seemed to grow more nervous than he already was, standing in front of the throne in armor that flapped against his bony frame.
“With all due respect, O-Shizuka-mor,” he stammered, “I won my position in a duel like every other Champion—”
“I could beat you,” Shizuka cut in from the crowd. “You lack decisiveness, Uemura-zun, you know that. Batting away your sword is as easy as—”
Itsuki squeezed her shoulders. “Is this wise, Brother?” he asked. “Surely there is someone more experienced to guard your honored head?”
“He doesn’t want someone more experienced, Itsuki,” said Shizuru. “He wants someone too scared to question him.”
Shizuka had said a great many insulting things in her life—but then, she had the benefit of divine blood.
O-Shizuru, who was born Minami Shizuru, who later married the poet prince Itsuki, did not.
Yoshimoto clapped. Silence overtook shock. He drummed his fingertips on the arm of the Dragon Throne, his fat pink lips like a gash on an overripe fruit. “You question us enough for any twenty people, our honored sister-in-law,” he said.
The way he had pronounced the word “honored” made Shizuka’s skin crawl.
“This attitude is unbecoming of a northerner. With such a boorish role model, it is no wonder your daughter acts more like a horsewife than a proper lady. You’ve left her in the company of Oshiro’s wife—”
For many years, it was illegal to speak of what happened next—of Shizuru drawing the Daybreak blade and leveling it at the Emperor himself, of the words that left her lips.