“Then you shall provide us rooms in the barracks. Private rooms. In the morning we will speak at length, and by nightfall your problem will be solved.”
As if you were Tumenbayar herself. As if you could guarantee such things. The captain’s doubt was plain to read. When he called for his men to lead us away, it was tinged with defeat, with bitterness.
“By nightfall,” he echoed. “You will solve our problem by nightfall.”
And yet you believed it. I knew you did with all your heart. As you lay in my arms that night, I could almost hear your thoughts. We will kill them, we will slay them, we will be the heroes we were meant to be.
And I believed in you.
*
I WOKE BEFORE YOU. No hunting to be had here—the Wall once played host to a variety of game, but I saw none. Instead, I rode around the camp. Even the soil was dark here, Shizuka, even the grass gray and dying. The Wall stretched for miles in either direction; I rode two miles east and back. In that time, I cannot remember seeing anything green, save the occasional petal on the Wall.
What I did see was decay.
What I did see were once-proud trees now blanched and hollow. What I did see were hovels and mansions alike abandoned, with only dust to inhabit them.
An old temple stood at the center of town. My curiosity drew me there. I am going to use that word, “curiosity,” though I am no longer sure it was something so simple.
Inside the temple, a thick blanket of dust kept the relics warm. My footsteps summoned small, dusty tornadoes. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. Something holy once shed its skin here. Remnants of divinity filled my lungs with every breath.
So did the smell of rot.
They say when your hairs stand on end, Grandmother Sky is calling you. She must’ve called very loudly then. I remember it—I tiptoed through the ruins, muttering prayers under my breath. I do not know what drove me on save …
I shall call it curiosity again.
When I saw him, I was standing near the upended offering bowl. Tattered prayer tags fluttered like dead moths in the wind. I heard him before I saw him, heard the soft whoosh of dust flying into the air.
“Steel-Eye.”
That name again. The name that was, and yet was not, mine. I reached for my bow. Leaning against a jade statue of the Daughter was a man in ancient armor. A thick, curved sword hung at his hip, the sort of thing far heavier than it had any right to be. Black and violet, he wore, and a sinister black war mask. Fire pits sat where his eyes should be. I could see no trace of skin. At his neck and wrists and beneath his ears, there was no flesh at all. Only shadow.
“Steel-Eye,” it rasped. It had a voice. It had a name, too, that popped into my mind without my asking. Leng. “Home at last. How does it feel?”
I fired. In a swirl of black vapor, it vanished. As I ran toward Alsha, I heard laughing.
“I will see you again,” it said. The sound of his voice was a bitter taste in the back of my mouth. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. The last time I’d seen someone like that, we’d been attacked. Leng was a demon, not a blackblood.
Was it not blackbloods you said we were going to kill?
When I came back to camp, you were already awake. The captain was in our room. Excitement and fear at once dulled my senses and heightened them. I was aware, for example, that you wore the deel I made you instead of your robes. But I did not know what the captain was saying as I burst in, and I did not care to listen.
“The temple,” I gasped.
“You went to the temple?” said the captain. “You idiot! He lives there. Do you have some kind of death wish?”
“Watch your tongue, Captain, or I will liberate you of it,” you said. Concern written on your expression, in characters only I could read. “Who lives in the temple?”
“The Old Commander,” he said. “We do not know his name, or we would’ve bound him. Shadows in the shape of a man. He’s swallowed good soldiers whole. I have seen him only once with my own eyes, and once is enough.”
You listened to this. Your amber eyes met mine once more. I licked my lips.
A child is playing near the fire. The flames are warm and the night is cold. It reaches for the flickering flames in an attempt to keep warm. For just the smallest moment, the sensation feels pleasant. Refreshing, even. But then the burning starts, and the child scrambles away.
So it was for me. Afraid as I was, I could not deny the thrill of fighting such an enemy—I just wished I had you by my side to face him.
You rose. “I am going to the temple,” you said. “You can come if you wish.”
The captain shot to his feet. “As guard captain of the Wall of Flowers, I cannot allow you to do that,” he said. “Given the Emperor’s trouble, you are the only heir we have. If you go into that temple, you will die, O-Shizuka-shon, despite your great skill.”
You laughed and shook your head. Laughed, Shizuka. I came in pale faced and slick with sweat—and here you were, laughing at the idea of your death. Had you ever seen a demon before making this plan?
“I will not,” you said. “The gods will not allow me to be hurt today.”
So you hadn’t seen one, then.
Yet I would follow you still. Someone had to.
The captain gawked. “O-Shizuka-shon, I am sorry,” he said, “but this I cannot allow. Your uncle would have me executed.”
“‘Cannot allow,’” you repeated with scorn. “Very well. I am sorry, Captain, but I cannot allow you to bar my path.”
You struck him in the head with your short sword’s hilt. He swayed, swayed, then fell over. I looked from him to you.
“Do not look at me like that,” you said. “I am sorry. He is a good man, for all his stodginess. But we have important work to do, you and I.”
Something shifted in my chest when you spoke. A weight, I think. To tell the truth, I did not feel myself that morning. I could not name the feeling exactly, but …
A shamed noble wakes before First Bell. He bathes in ritual water, with the herbs of death to give it scent. He cloaks himself in white. He sits in an empty room. Before him: a blank sheet of paper, a brush, an inkblock, a bowl of water. Whatever he has done in his life, he must condense into three lines of poetry. Grass on his knees, a kiss from his wife, blade meeting flesh.
After he leaves that room, he will commit public suicide.
I felt like that man.
Important work to be done.
“Armor,” I said. If you were so insistent on facing Leng, then I would not let you do it in a deel.
“I do not—,” you began to say, but you stopped when you saw the look I gave you.
The quartermaster provided us with one suit of armor for you. He did not offer one for me, and I did not think to take one. I did not intend to be close enough for the demon’s blood to be a problem. I would pelt it with arrows. You’d give it the final killing stroke.
That was the way of things. I did not need armor, and I did not much think of it.