It placed its hand on the small of my back and I thrashed, I spun, I punched and clawed. I screamed. It melted away from every blow like a flickering shadow. Like Leng, like Shao, like the thing I was becoming.
“Leave me! I do not want you!” I yelled, pressed up against the tarp, clutching my bedroll. “Haven’t you bothered me enough? Haven’t you … I do not want to be like you!”
The Not-You sat laughing at my misery. How cruel it is, Shizuka, to see a face so like yours in such a state. How cruel to have the one person you love above all others laughing at your pain.
Someone opened the tent flap. I braced myself for Otgar or Temurin or my mother. Instead, it was you. The real you, bandaged and swaying. At the sight of your radiance, the Not-You dissipated.
I scrambled for you and embraced you.
“Shefali,” you said, cupping my ear, “what is the matter, my love?”
“Your wound…”
You kissed me. A measure of my panic slipped away, as if you breathed it in. “It is a small thing,” you said, “soon healed. Wounds do not bother us. Remember the tiger?”
I touched my own bandages. The skin beneath felt solid and whole. I frowned. With my knife, I cut through the gauze.
Sure enough, the gaping gash I’d gotten earlier that day was already healed. Only a faint line remained, a bit lighter than the rest of my skin. I tore off the bandages and tossed them to the edge of the tent, far from you.
You reached out to touch the skin, but I waved you away. No. Too risky. You could not touch me. Not yet. Not until I was sure that I wasn’t contagious. You drew away only slightly.
“Shefali,” you said, “I heard you screaming.”
“Nothing,” I said, wrapping my arms around my knees.
“Nothing,” you repeated. You laid your head against my shoulder, the one that had not had a knife in it earlier. This I allowed, if only to feel your hair against my skin. “Awful lot of noise, for nothing.”
I stared at a spot on the floor.
“Nothing,” I said.
You sighed. “My love,” you said, “I am yours, no matter the circumstances. You know this, yes?”
I flinched. “Do you know?” I asked. “About today?”
Your grip relaxed. Pensive was your gaze. You, too, had picked a spot on the floor to stare at. Perhaps the same spot.
“I do,” you said. “And I am still here. We will find someone who can help you. You are Barsalai Shefali, you slew a tiger at eight, a demon at sixteen! This…” You gestured to the bandages soaked in black. “This is something to slay. We will face it. Together.”
You shifted, so that you were in front of me, and you took my face in your hands. The tips of our noses touched. Your brown-gold eyes warmed my spirit.
“And no matter what happens, Shefali, I know who you really are,” you said. You brushed your fingertips over my heart. “The person who killed those people was not you. I will have relief brought to the town. But you and I, we are going to Xian-Lai. We are going somewhere far away from prying eyes. Somewhere quiet, where the voices cannot rule you.”
And then you chuckled.
“After all,” you said, “I should be the only Empress on your mind.”
We laced our fingers together. You cleared the hair from my face and kissed my forehead.
“What if I never get better?”
“You will,” you said.
I do not know what imbues you with your confidence. I think I trust more in your decisiveness than in the sun rising every morning. I have never seen you falter, never seen you think anything over for more than a few seconds at a time.
At times your confidence is a terrible thing. It’s what led us into Imakane bathhouse, what led us into the abandoned temple, what led us into that clearing in Fujino where the tiger found us. But it is also what makes your calligraphy so prized, why you are without equal as a swordsman. It is why I have always trusted you.
Of course I would get better. You will not allow anything else to happen.
And yet we sat in the tent near Imakane. There was blood beneath my dark fingernails and flecks of bone in my hair.
“Together,” you said. You lay in my lap. The thought occurred to me—it would be so easy to snap your neck. You knew what I’d done, and you lay there anyway.
But you fell asleep in my lap without a trace of fear.
On that day, stories began to spread. The Demon of the Steppes. The Living Blackblood. The Manslayer. We would not hear the first of these until we were in Xian-Lai. We would not know how the villagers perceived me.
For in their eyes, I was as terrible, as awesome, as frightful as the Mother in all her fury.
And yellow-scarved bandits, for the first time since your mother’s death, kept watch all through the night, afraid that I would come for them.
In the morning, when dawn’s fingers crept into the sky, Otgar came to the tent. Red pinpricks dotted her face, mostly below the eyes; her already full cheeks were puffier than usual.
“Barsalai, Barsatoq,” she said. “Burqila wishes to speak with you.”
I squeezed your hand. You shook the sleep out from your head and stood. When I thought you might fall—you’d lost a lot of blood the day before—I offered you my arm. Did you notice how I trembled?
The ger was only a few steps away, but we might as well have been walking to Gurkhan Khalsar. White felt was not so far from white snow. Kharsas retreated to both when they needed time to think. If mountains were made of felt, they’d be gers, I think.
When someone is summoned to Gurkhan Khalsar, it is a momentous thing. They must take the winding path around the mountain, not the one carved into it by Grandfather Earth. Half a day it takes to climb the mountain this way. Some fall. The path is narrow. The summons always comes in the middle of the night—stepping on the bones of your predecessors is a real danger. After all, no one can remove anything from the mountaintop. The whole of it is sacred, even the bodies of those who died climbing it.
No bones barred the path to my mother’s ger. No real ones. But I swear to you, I saw them all the same. Faded deels and clumps of hair; off-white bones turned black with dirt and grime. I stared at my feet the entire time we walked, not out of nervousness, but out of fear. With each step, I hoped I would not hear crunching beneath my boot.
Yet I knew the bones were not there. In my mind, I knew they were not there, that they could not be real—what were Qorin corpses doing so far north? They’d not been here yesterday. No, I was seeing things again.
But Shizuka, it was so real to me. More than once, my boot met something hard, something that creaked when I put my weight on it. I jumped away, staring at the spot.
“Shefali,” you’d whisper under your breath, “they are only shadows, my love. Walk in the light with me.”
You took my hand.
In full view of Temurin and Qadangan, in full view of my aunt and uncle, in full view of Otgar, you took my hand.