Your hand in mine.
“My uncle does not care,” you said. There it was, the crack in your voice, like porcelain shattering. “You are all I have.”
For a moment, you went silent. Then you began to shake, too; then tears fell from your eyes.
“In all the Empire,” you croaked, “beneath sky and stars, I swear it eight times—you are all I have.”
I closed my eyes.
Fire in my lungs, fire in my veins, everything was burning.
When I opened them next, you loomed over me. Floating behind you were three severed heads, ghastly and dripping with gore. Toothless mouths cackling.
“Steel-Eye!” said one of them. “Did you know your mother lies with your cousin?”
“Steel-Eye!” said the other. “Your father complains about how dark you are! Perhaps if you were light as snow, he’d care about you.”
The first one cackled. “Or if you could read!”
I growled at them.
But you recoiled, and guilt stabbed into me. For your lips quivered with unspoken fears, your cheeks were puffed and red from crying, and in your eyes my own anguish was reflected.
“Shefali,” you said, your voice low. I could hardly hear you over the demon’s cackling. “Barsalai Shefali Alsharyya, I call you now. Eight times I call you. Eight times I beg for you to return. On this, the fourth day of your sickness…”
You swallowed. You licked your cracked, swollen lips.
“On this, the fourth day of your sickness, you must be killed,” you said.
A shout died on my lips: No, not yet.
But yours was the expression of a young woman who knows her children will not remember their father. Wrath and fury; sorrow and despair; all these mingled together.
You cupped my face and pulled me up toward you. “But I know you are still there, my bullheaded love,” you said. “I know you are not dying!”
Spittle flew from your lips. “I have watched the blackblood take a life, and it looks nothing like this!”
So loud, so vehement were you that I thought you were going to slap me.
You did. I did not much feel it; do not let it weigh on your conscience.
“You swore to me we’d be together for all our lives!” you roared. “Are you a woman of your word, or are you a coward?”
Speak. I had to speak. Though I could not breathe, I had to find the wind to shape my words; though fire coursed through me instead of blood, I had to find the will to live.
Speak. Fight. Return.
Over and over I repeated this, over and over I tried to drown out the voices.
No one survives the blackblood. It is an awful disease; in three days, the victim is dead, and on the fourth, they rise as something different.
But I had not died, had I?
No, this could not be death. We were together and I refused to believe that you’d died, too. So I was alive. And if I was alive, then …
Then I had already lived longer than anyone else with this affliction.
My mother once attacked a Hokkaran border village. The first time she attacked, she was young and unlearned. While the Qorin made camp at night, the Hokkarans diverted a river toward them. Alshara had to leave in shame—for how could she attack them after such an incident?
But the next village she raided, she made sure to flood beforehand.
So it is with all Qorin. We take the things that defeat us. We use them. We master them.
And I resolved in that moment as you held me that I would do the same for the blackblood. I would not let it kill me. No. I had too much to do. I had a people to rule; I had to ride with you against the Traitor.
No disease would slay me.
I would take this weapon the Hokkarans used against my people, and I would welcome it into myself. I would strike fear into their hearts.
I would become something more than human.
I coughed. I coughed, and coughed again, black spewing out of my mouth. I sat up. With one hand I braced myself; with the other, I cleared the hair out of my face.
I opened my eyes, and there you sat on top of me. And as the dawn breaking over Gurkhan Khalsar, so was your smile.
“Shefali,” you said, “you’ve returned to me.”
I ached to kiss you. I could not—if my lips touched yours, they’d bring with them my affliction.
“I would not let it kill me,” I said.
You wrapped your arms around me, and I smelled peonies. You pressed your lips to my forehead, and I swear to you the laughing stopped, if only for a moment.
“Good,” you said. “I will not allow you to die. Royal decree.”
And somehow, despite the color of the blood seeping from my wound, despite the pain and the fever, despite your exhaustion and mine, we laughed.
It did not last long. Knocking on the door roused us from our reverie.
“O-Shizuka-shon! You cannot keep us from entering!”
I looked toward the door. You’d piled all the furniture in the room in front of it. Whoever was on the other side was pounding so hard, everything rattled.
You bit your lip. “I could not let them near you,” you said.
I nodded. I needed new bandages; you had no idea how to bandage to begin with, and could not touch me as I was. This was not our bed, and so I did not care what happened to it. I tore cloth from the sheets and set about bandaging myself.
“When I’m done,” I said. You nodded. My head throbbed and throbbed. That awful taste was still in my mouth.
But I was alive, and that was all that mattered.
As I finished, you tossed me one of your robes. It was far too small for me—the sleeves ended half past my elbows, and it covered me to the knee only. To say nothing of the fact that you could never wear this again, and it must’ve cost you more than some villages produce in a year. We had other things to concern ourselves with.
Like what they would say when they saw me standing and breathing.
You helped me to my feet. Again, the doors rattled.
“O-Shizuka-shon, the Emperor’s Champion is here to collect you. You will allow us entry, and you will allow us to remove the corpse from this room!”
You winced.
You tried to move the heavy desks and wardrobes you’d forced in front of the door. I think you must’ve put them there at night, and it must’ve taken you hours—you struggled against them now, your meager weight not enough to move them.
The wound in my side burned. All of me burned, and my limbs were wrought iron. But I wanted to help you. I grasped one of the desks by its leg and pulled. As easily as a child moves a toy cart, I moved that desk. It felt so light!
You stared at me. “Shefali?”
I cleared my throat again. Do not think about it. There was a reason for it. Probably just my greater size. And I have always been stronger than you. That was surely it.
But I moved the dressers, too, with hardly any effort, and the wardrobe taller than I was. Cold fear prickled the hairs on the back of my neck.
I was still myself. Of course I was. My body was not distorted. I was still Shefali.