In the shadow of the great white tree, I saw him tug at the corners of his mouth, saw the disappointment on his face. What a quandary he faced: If he struck first and you countered him, this duel would be over in a single stroke.
Minutes passed. A quarter hour he circled you. A quarter hour you stood unmoving, your gold eyes fixing him with feline malice. Your breathing was shallow and unnoticeable.
Then he got tired of waiting.
Then he raised his sword high overhead. A bloodcurdling scream left his painted mouth. He ran toward you.
And then …
As a man lost in the sands signals to a passing caravan with a mirror, so you signaled your victory with the flashing of your blade. You drew your sword, slashed him clean across the face, and sheathed. One smooth motion too fast to follow with the naked eye, and it was over. Kagemori stopped. The sword fell from his hands and clattered to the ground. Red seeped from his wound like juice from a fresh-cut plum.
“You do not deserve to hold a sword,” you said.
He screamed. “My face! You cut my face!” He clutched the gash as if it were a seam he could hold closed. A man in doctor’s robes ran to his assistance, but Kagemori pushed him away, shambling toward you with one hand on his face. “You insolent brat!”
“Insult me again,” you said, “and I will have your tongue. You’ve been defeated. Continue your aggression, and I will not be so kind to you a second time.”
But still he lumbered for you. “My face,” he muttered, over and over. “You took away my face!”
Guards leaped rows of chrysanthemums, surrounding him within seconds. A ring of pike blades pointed straight at his throat.
“Stop where you are!” shouted the captain. “You threaten the Imperial Family!”
“I threaten a puffed-up child,” he snarled. “Can you not see what she’s done to me?”
“What sort of a man enters a duel and expects to escape unharmed?” you said. As you spoke, your voice grew louder and louder. “A coward. A simpering coward. Your presence offends me!”
For a moment, you stared him down, one hand white knuckled, holding your mother’s sword. I glanced toward your uncle—how could he abide this in silence?
And yet he sat on his dais and he watched, and he did nothing.
You spoke through teeth clenched tight. “Take him away.”
Guards tied rope around his hands. Roughly they dragged him away, likely to throw him into the infamous Hokkaran prison system. In the south of Fujino, a fortress nearly the size of the palace loomed like a noose at the gallows.
In the days when your mother acted as the Emperor’s Executioner, the prisons were always empty. After her death, they began to fill again—and I do not envy the thought of returning to them. Your uncle will throw anyone in the fortress, for any reason at all. With my own two eyes, I have seen a man hauled off in chains for having the audacity to call your uncle Iori. The name he was given at birth. The name he wore until he put on the Dragon Crown.
I have seen women arrested for stealing a handful of rice; I have seen hunters locked away for killing the wrong color stag.
Your uncle likes to say he is civilized—that your mother’s death enlightened him, that he realized executioners were a base thing for an Emperor to have.
But there is nothing civilized about flinging someone into a dark room, with no windows, for the rest of their life. There is nothing civilized about letting them stew in their own excrement and beg for week-old bread.
But I am only an illiterate brute. What do I know of civility?
I watched him go. Already gossip flew from mouth to mouth to mouth; by nightfall, you would again be a legend. A girl of thirteen who struck down a grown man with a single stroke. Your mother’s sword flashing in the light; her Daybreak blade come to life. More than one of them joked that you’d already slain a tiger, so a man was no trouble.
You stood proud in the face of it all. As sycophant after sycophant sang your praises, you nodded and smiled and thanked them in a distant way. For hours I stood by your side. When you needed a moment to yourself, you’d casually tap my leg with your sheath, and I would pretend I had something to say in private. And so we’d steal moments from the crowd.
“Bees,” you muttered. “With their incessant buzzing. Why should a phoenix concern herself with the buzzing of bees?”
I had some idea. Though your uncle did not speak to you, he made a point of looking in your direction. Every quarter hour, a messenger jogged up to you and whispered something in your ear. You never reacted well to that.
“Too mouthy,” you said to me after one such occasion. “Too unladylike. As if he has any right to define what a lady should be.”
I pressed my lips together.
By the end of Sixth Bell, purple fingers crept across that beautiful blue sky. Moon reaching for Sun. Courtiers began to make their excuses. Wives waiting in their rooms. Children who needed to be put to bed. Would they have the pleasure of your company, should they wish to call on you?
The answer, universally, was no. And you made no excuses when Seventh Bell rang. You walked right out of the garden, leaving a collection of awestruck faces behind you. Your guards followed; as did Temurin and I. And so you led us back to your rooms, where Temurin again waited outside.
When the door closed behind us, you let out a groan. “Shefali,” you said, “I think I would rather live on the steppes than let those fools nip at my toes.”
You sat before your mirror. With sharp motions, you removed the peacock feathers from your hair, removed the ornaments and the bells. These you set on your table. You yanked a cloth from its hook and wiped off your makeup. At least, you tried. Though you swiped only once, smearing blue and black and green across your painted-white face.
But you tossed the cloth at the wall anyway, rather than continue.
I sat on the bench next to you.
You held your head in your hands and slumped forward, as if your skull suddenly was very heavy.
“Meaningless,” you mumbled. “Meaningless tripe. Our crops are blighted, our livestock die in droves. Our fishermen bring up hundreds of terrible, blackened things. Every day peasants gather outside the palace and beg to be heard. But instead, we let grown men harass thirteen-year-old girls. Instead, we parade about in our finest and do our best to ignore the problem. ‘We will endure.’ What tripe.”
My throat hurt.
My people, too, had seen such things. Wolves that did not die when we shot them, that did not stagger. Dogs that laughed like men in the dark. Some of my clanmates’ horses died overnight, and in the morning, only their heads remained. The rest of their once-proud bodies was reduced to …
It was like stew. Raw meat stew, left out in the sun to rot.
I cannot describe to you the anguish on my clanmate’s face when he discovered his horses in such a state. For days he screamed at the sun. Foul blasphemies left his lips: How could Grandmother Sky allow this to happen? She saw all, did she not? She sheltered the souls of the fallen Qorin on her starry cloak—why did she not strike down the attacker with lightning?