YOU TOOK MY hand in yours. How was it that I never noticed how tiny your hands were?
“If you do not want to come,” you said, “then you may stay, and I will go alone. I feel this in my bones, Shefali, there is something for us beyond the flowers. If I must find it myself and bring it back for you, then I will—but I cannot sit here and watch my people suffer. If the blackbloods are going north to join his army, then we must stop them.”
You met my eyes with your fierce determination, but behind it was … a depth of yearning. As if you were throwing yourself off a cliff and hoped that I would have rope for you to cling to. And no matter how foolish I thought your ideas were, I always did have a length of rope ready for both of us.
I sighed and pulled myself into the saddle. “We will gather our things first,” I said.
Tension melted off you. You would never admit you were afraid I was going to let you go alone, but your shoulders gave you away.
It took only an hour to gather the things we needed. Two or three days’ worth of jerky and mare cheese. Two skins of kumaq. Two more empty waterskins. A single bedroll; we would be sharing now, and no one could stop us. One spare horse to carry our tent and camping equipment. No ger, since I had not started making my own yet.
People in camp asked us where we were going, you said we were going for a hunt—but my mother did not check on us.
We left that afternoon, and we spent that night lying together in the tent just past our usual grounds. Whatever awkwardness I felt that first night melted away on the second. Now with a better hold of yourself, now with more strength, you showed me all the ways you’d longed to touch me.
That first week was poetry. Before dawn I woke and hunted. When I returned, we broke our fast together. After that, we set out to do our day’s riding. When we were done, we crossed swords, so that you would not lose your talents. That was the excuse you used. You always won, so I am not sure how your talents were at all tested against me. Maybe you wanted to smack me with a sword a bit. That was all right. I raced you back to camp each night, and not once did you win.
I tried to teach you how to talk to my horse. If you could talk to the Sun, you could talk to a horse. One was much farther away than the other.
“You must call her by name,” I said.
“Your horse has a name?”
“Of course she does,” I said. I rubbed her long face and kissed the blaze on her forehead. “Her name is Alsha.”
At the sound of her name, my horse whickered. I whispered to her in the tongue of swaying grass: This is Shizuka, you know her well, do not be so dramatic.
You’re calling me dramatic? she said back to me. I have seen the way you act around her.
“You named her after your mother?” you said. You, too, touched the blaze on her forehead.
She did not whicker when you touched her.
“She has always been named Alsha,” I said. “As my mother’s horse has always been Nadsha. A Kharsa’s mare is always named after her mother.”
You smirked. “Yet in sixteen years, I have never heard you say that out loud,” you said. You ran your fingers through my horse’s dark mane and toyed with her ear.
“Bad luck,” I said, “for anyone but the rider to say her name.”
To anyone else, my horse nickered just then. But to me she spoke, plain as day: Shizuka may say it.
I nodded, both to you and the mare.
“Well, Alsha,” you said, “will you let me ride you?”
She stomped her right hoof twice. Grinning like a child, I helped you into the saddle. I handed you the whip and helped you get situated on the high Qorin seat.
Alsha danced with you. I know of no other way to put it—she trotted this way and that in complicated steps, showing off just how smart she was, how graceful. Thinking of that moment puts me in a state of peace.
After our sword lessons, and our races, and our archery practice, we settled in the tent and went about our business. We’d work on our strange little language together, or I’d sit on the northern side of the tent to finish your deel. Little use it would be to you now that we’d be leaving the steppes, but I both wanted you to have it and wanted to finish what I’d started.
You wrote letters. Some you wrote on my behalf, to my brother. Kenshiro read Qorin just as well as I could, yes—but having a letter written by O-Shizuka was a valuable present. I asked him when he planned on marrying that girl of his, and if we would be invited. I told him how our mother fared, and asked after our father. And though you warned me against it, I told him of our plans.
“It is just Kenshiro,” I said. “We could trust him with our lives.”
“You have not seen him in how many years?”
“Eight,” I said, pouting.
“Eight years is plenty of time for a person to change,” you said. Nonetheless, you inked your brush. “My uncle, for example. Eight years ago, one could hold a conversation with him. Now all he ever speaks about is siring an heir, or proving to the people that he is not so weak as he seems, or eradicating the Qorin for crimes you have not committed.”
You wrinkled your nose. Your uncle’s hatred of the Qorin was not a secret. Your grandfather, Yorihito, was the one who started the Qorin war in the first place. As the blackbloods and demons first began their return, Yorihito demanded their bodies be studied. When he realized what a plague it was—worse than anything the legends told us—he made his grand decision.
The study of blackblood bodies would continue. But it would be done by flinging the corpses over the Wall of Stone, into our camps.
And at the time, no one had seen a blackblood for at least four hundred years. Even the most wizened matrons remembered only the vaguest warnings. They did their best to pass these on to the rest of the clan. Do not touch them. Burn them on sight.
But you cannot stop the curiosity of children.
That is how it spread, Shizuka. Did you know? Children found the bodies lying out in the sun. They saw the black blood seeping out into the earth and they touched it—for it could not really be blood, could it? Perhaps paint, or ink, or sweet sap the Surians bring from the land of Pale People. And so they touched it. So they tasted it.
So they changed.
It did not take long to discover what the cause was, but that did not mean it was a problem easily solved. Qorin do not burn bodies, nor do we bury them. Our custom is to leave them out beneath the Eternal Sky. We read portents based on what happens—whether an animal eats the body, or it decays; if anything grows where the body once lay. This is one of our most sacred rites.
It was … difficult convincing the clan to burn their loved ones. We are a practical people, yes, but we take comfort where we can. All of us wish for the birds to come for us once we’re gone; all of us wish to join the sky.