Perhaps you sensed I was not done speaking. You scratched my head and whispered to me that it would be all right, that you would wait as long as I needed.
But there was so much I wanted to say. My mother loved yours and never told me. My cousin speaks of my mother in terms too familiar; my thoughts weren’t my own anymore; my mother didn’t know what happened to me, and I did not want to tell her.
There was just so much going on.
Wet lips against my ear. The smell of soggy death.
“Why not leave?” it said. “You can distract that cousin of yours easily enough. Leave, Steel-Eye. Why face such foul people ever again, when you can do so much more on your own?”
I forced myself to swallow the razors in my throat, grabbed handfuls of your beautiful robes. My decision was made.
I would not be the person my demons wanted me to be. I would not run from these mounting problems.
I held you at arm’s length. When I spoke, it was more clearly, more loudly. “She said my mother loved yours,” I said.
You leaned in, cocked a brow, parted your lips. The sort of face one makes when they are sure they’ve misheard something. “As more than a friend?”
I nodded.
Fingers flew to lips. Your delicate brow furrowed in thought. “My mother loved my father,” you said. “They did not stray. They could not tear their eyes from each other.”
“Your mother did not love mine,” I said.
Your shoulders slumped. You sat on the bed, head perched on your hand, the bells in your hair singing a bright song. “Do you remember, Shefali,” you said, “when we were eight?”
“The tiger?”
“The feast,” you said. “Or the next morning. You were in your ger at the time, and your mother, too. My mother got it in her hungover head to say good-bye to Burqila’s mare.”
I flinched. One did not touch a Kharsa’s horse. Not unless one had a death wish, or … well, a husband could touch his wife’s horse. No one would question that. But Shizuru’s husband was a Hokkaran poet, not the Kharsaq.
“I told her it was a fool thing to do, since horses cannot speak. She ignored me. I remember she touched that mare between the eyes, fed it a sweet, and told it to behave.”
How on earth did no one see that? But, then, most of us were hungover that morning, and we left very early on.
“My father saw her do this, too,” you said. “And this is the only time I can recall he ever raised his voice to her. ‘Shizuru,’ he said, ‘you would not do that if you knew what it meant.’” You paused. “I do not know what it means.”
“Married,” I said.
At this, you spared a bitter smile. “Is that why you insisted we ride together?”
Ah, I’d been discovered. To hide my guilt, I kissed you.
“You could have just proposed and saved us all the time,” you said.
We were thirteen then! You would not have said yes. In no way would you have said yes. Even if you had, that was entirely too young to enter a marriage.
Except I knew full well it would’ve given you three years to pay your bride-price, and you would’ve said yes without a moment’s thought.
Your voice stayed warm as tea when you continued. “When my mother heard my father, when she heard his tone, she rounded on him. One finger in the air, like she was reprimanding me for breaking pottery. ‘Itsuki,’ she said, ‘it means nothing, and will never mean anything, save that Alshara is my dearest friend.’ My father said nothing to that, but the ride home was the quietest it has ever been, and my mother did not come to dinner that night. I thought it strange at the time.”
Now it was you who leaned on me.
“I suppose it makes sense now.”
We sat in the silence of our shared shock.
Then, as always, you spoke first. “I feel sorry for her,” you said. “It is an awful thing, to long for someone you cannot have.”
You did not look at me; instead, you focused on the box I kept my bow in, hanging from a hook across the room.
“Do not let it get to your head, Shefali,” you said, “but I do not think I could ever live without you.”
And yet on this very night, my Shizuka, you lie in the palace in rooms of your own choosing. On your grand bed covered in silk and flowers, you read this. Perhaps there is another woman at your side—I will not fault you if there is. It has been so many years, hasn’t it? Of course there is someone else warming your bed. You have always been more physical than I am, have always longed to sink your teeth into the flesh of another. No, I cannot fault you.
If we were like any other Qorin couple, such things would be commonplace. We have a saying, you see—you can never have one horse. Your sprinter is not your packhorse is not your long-distance steed. How different would things be, then, if we were together? Would I be your packhorse, Shizuka—or your sprinter?
Tumenbayar herself had more than one husband—did you know? Batumongke was her favorite, but there were others.
One day, Ages ago, when there were only two hundred stars in the sky, Tumenbayar was riding her horse and exploring the northern steppes. She found a man half-buried in the dirt, with hair the color of leaves, handsome as a man can be. He called out to her for help, for he’d been stuck in that spot for years now.
Tumenbayar took pity on him—and on his good looks—and threw her pure-white rope around him. She hauled him up out of the ground. That was when she saw the man’s bottom half was thick with gnarled roots, and his skin was rough as bark.
“I thought I might take you as my lover,” she said, “but if I took you in my arms, you’d tie me to this barren place.”
The man pleaded with her. He sang her songs sweet as the first blossom of spring. Poetry dropped from his lips as easily as dewdrops. Over and over he promised that he would not tie her to the north.
And so Tumenbayar indulged him, and she married him for a night—but before the morning light could find them, she mounted her mare and left him there.
The man was so distraught that he tore his hair out and threw it, and wherever it landed, new trees grew. Every morning he’d hobble a little bit farther south, closer to the steppes proper, and every morning, he’d pull his hair out.
So the northern forests came to be.
I wonder, my Shizuka—have you sprouted any forests for me? Though you know how I hate trees, I think I might enjoy wandering through yours.
*
I THINK WE would’ve kissed each other all that day and into the night if left to our own devices.
Otgar knocked on the door after perhaps five minutes. “Are you done in there, Barsalai?” she called in Qorin. “You are not going to make your cousin wait while you rut, are you?”
I grimaced. You did not need to speak Qorin to know when I was being summoned back. We pulled away; I fixed your hair as best I could, you smoothed my dress—another you’d lent to me. We’d not gone further than kissing, and we hadn’t since my injury. Blackblood is a volatile thing—I could not bear the thought of infecting you.