I embraced my mother.
She stroked my hair and pressed a kiss into it. It was a good embrace—warm, loving, and strong. Tears dropped onto my deel; I pretended they were not there. A Kharsa does not cry in public.
But then, my mother never assumed that title.
Otgar soon joined us, wrapping her arms as best she could around Alshara and me. “Be safe, Shefali,” she said. “We will be waiting for your return.”
No, they won’t.
I squeezed them tighter.
They won’t mourn you, Steel-Eye.
I bit into my tongue. No. I wanted to enjoy this moment while I could. I wanted to remember my mother’s smell, remember Otgar’s. For just two minutes, I wanted to forget what I’d learned.
Don’t they smell alike?
Bile rising in the back of my throat. Within this warm embrace, I began to shake.
Otgar drew away first. She frowned. “Are you all right?”
But as she spoke, her face changed. A second mouth opened up; a fat gray tongue the size of my arm rolled out of it. Slobber drenched her deel. Now her teeth came to a point as mine did.
“Are you all right?” she said with her first mouth.
“Thank the Sky you are leaving,” said the second.
I freed myself of them, covered my ears with my hands.
“Shefali?” you said, but I was already going. Eyes closed. Do not open them. Opening them meant seeing things I knew weren’t real.
No.
Better to pack up my tent, throw it onto my packhorse, and mount Alsha. Better to feel her heart thrumming between my legs, hear her nickering, better to strap myself into the saddle.
But as I neared the tent, you took me by the wrists. “Shefali,” you said, “look at me.”
But what if it wasn’t you? What if the Not-You learned how to speak in your tone, what if I was still in my tent and this was all a nightmare?
By all the gods in the world, Shizuka, there is nothing worse than doubting your own senses.
“Look at me,” you said again.
When my eyes remained fixed on the ground, you took my right hand, turned it upward. With your fingertip you traced the thick white scar on my palm. Nail dragged across skin. My palm tingled the longer you touched it.
I took a deep breath and focused on that, instead of the voices.
“Together,” you whispered. “Come what may, we will always be together.”
The words are so bitter to me now, Shizuka, that I fear they will burn the paper I write on. The scent of dried pine is nowhere to be found here.
Together.
We left not long after that. I could not bring myself to return to the ger and face my family after being so overcome. My mother did not get to sniff my cheek for one last time. We bundled our tent, our meager belongings, and we rode away from my mother’s ger.
It was only once we were gone that I opened the package. Pangs of sorrow twisted my stomach. There, neatly folded, was the tiger-skin deel I’d made for my mother when I was eight. A small piece of parchment lay atop the deel, bearing my mother’s neat Qorin handwriting.
Tiger stripes, for the woman who earned them.
I wore that deel all throughout our journey to Xian-Lai. In the cold of the winter, I wore it. When the last snows began to melt, I wore it. My mother wore it so long that it still smelled of her. In that way, I did not feel quite so abandoned. If I could smell her, then a piece of her soul traveled with me, after all.
IF IT WERE MY WISH TO PICK THE WHITE ORCHID
Has anyone ever told you that you are awful at camping?
This is, I think, the first you’ve heard of it, and for that I apologize. You know my love for you is boundless; you know I would condemn the entire Heavenly Family if only you asked me. That is why I am telling you now, from several thousand li away, that you are terrible at camping.
Well—all right. Terrible is an overstatement. I have to remind myself that you spent most of your life cooped up in the Jade Palace, or within the walls of Fujino. That’s no place to learn basic survival skills. My mother tried to teach you, and I think you might have tried to listen despite your arrogance (remember that I love you), but you were not yet up to Qorin standards when you left. Even when we were children it was like this. I would do all of the hunting, and the skinning, and set up the fire, and everything required for a comfortable existence. You set up the tent, you kept the fire going, and I think you’d learned to tell poisonous berries from safe ones. By the time we were adults you’d learned a little more: you could hunt small game, but not skin it; you could start a fire without any of your godly tricks, but only on a sunny day; you knew how to navigate, but only with a compass. By Fujino standards you were a hardened ranger.
By Qorin standards, you’d passed the standard weeklong test of not dying in the wilderness. My mother, exasperated at how long it had taken you to reach that level, probably would have left you to your own devices for an entire month if we’d stayed with her. Little did she know you’d cheated the first time, anyway.
Whenever we passed a tree, if it was the sort that bore edible fruit, you’d run your hands over its branches. Without fail, at least one fruit would grow right there before our eyes. You’d pluck it and toss it into my saddlebags (always mine), smirking at your little display of divinity. Sometimes you didn’t wait for us to see a tree—if you were in the mood for a particular herb, you’d grab your brush and paint the character for it on the ground. Over the course of an hour the named herb sprouted from the ground ready for harvesting. In this way you helped provide—your calligraphy was valuable, yes, but so were the spices you conjured up from nothing.
Not that many people wanted to trade with us.
“We wish we could,” said one farmer. “But the Yellow Scarves are passing through, looking for a Hokkaran noble and a Qorin girl.”
All through the side roads, we heard this. It gave us reason enough not to try the main roads; what if a patrol stopped us? If common farmers knew we were wanted, then I shuddered to think of guards. The good ones would avoid us. Corrupt ones might well try to take us in for the bounty.
Two weeks in—two weeks of sleeping in a tent, two weeks bathing in streams when we found them, two weeks of stringy rabbit and hard rice—you were fading.
I remember the morning I returned with one lonely hare hanging from my belt. I sat down by the fire to skin it. You practiced sword forms near the tent. When you saw me cut into the rabbit, you could not hide the disappointment on your face.
I stifled a flare of anger. Venison. You wanted venison. Had I seen a single deer roaming the tall emerald forests, we’d have venison. I spent all night and the better part of the morning stalking through the woods.
This rabbit was all I had to show for it.
“Shizuka,” I said.
You turned mid-stroke to face me and the fire. You did not stop your forms; of course you did not.