“For all your talk,” said Kagemori, “in the end, you are just an orphan with her mother’s sword.”
For a moment, you froze. You opened your mouth, but nothing came out. Nothing save wordless growls.
Kagemori walked closer to you, drew his finger across his ruined face. “Look at what you did to me,” he said. “Do you think your mother would be proud of such behavior?”
“Silence!” you screamed.
“Do you think your father would write poetry about you, when you cut a man across the face because he dared to long for you?”
“I was a child!” you said. Your voice cracked. “I was thirteen! You had no right to speak to me in such a way, you had no right—”
“If I had no right,” Kagemori said, “then prove it.”
You charged again, like some fool recruit, like some ten-year-old playing with a wooden sword. There was no grace. No elegance. It was not you.
And you were easily parried, easily riposted, easily …
Easily cut by the man you hated most.
Two-thirds of your right ear hung uselessly from a thin flap of skin. The cut that severed it continued across your face, crossing over the bridge of your nose and nearly hitting your eye. It was an awful thing, a foul cut that wept the second it was created.
You screamed. I do not blame you, Shizuka, but you screamed and held your ear.
“My face!” you said. “My ear!”
Everything from your cheeks down was red, red, red. You kept screaming, Shizuka, and you fell to your knees clutching your face in agony and he …
Screams, gasps from the onlookers. Imperial Guards gripped their spears with white knuckles, waiting for the order to take him in.
Even your uncle stood. Even he looked to Kagemori in horror. How dare he hurt a member of the Imperial Family in such a way? He had the chance to give you a small, harmless injury—and he severed your ear.
But he laughed. Nozawa Kagemori laughed, and I roared.
Pain. Gods, it hurt. My jaw snapped and grew. Fangs pushed their way up through my gums. Crimson clouds swirled before me. Snapping bones; a sudden push.
Was I getting bigger?
I do not know. To this day, Shizuka, I do not know what I looked like at that moment. Some fearsome thing far from the girl you grew up with. Those crude talons were not the fingers that ran down your back at night. That jagged-toothed mouth was not meant for kissing.
No, I’d become something great and shadowy and awful.
And I was livid.
I did not see in the normal way. When you see a thing, you use your eyes. Demons do not. The best way I can describe it is to say that I was imagining people. My sense of smell was so acute, I could smell everyone, everything. A guard’s rancid armpits, a savory roll tucked into a noble’s pocket for later, the perfume of a rich singing girl clinging to a warrior’s sweat.
Sweet fear. Bitter anger, stuck in my throat with every breath. Ten. Ten, twelve? Maybe twelve. Hard to tell. Fear. Fear everywhere. Breathe deeper. You. You, find you, must find you, if I didn’t know which one was you, I might hurt you—
Deep breaths, Steel-Eye. I needed time to think, time to orient myself, but I could not make myself stop. It was as if I were locked within a puppet, watching someone else tug my strings. Only the most primal, shallow thoughts remained.
All around me, the clatter of steel, of wood. Boots on the hard ground. Dust in my nostrils, then in my lungs.
“Blackblood!”
“Beast!”
“Demon!”
Me, they were talking about me, and yet—not me, not Shefali.
Steel-Eye.
Yes, that was my name, wasn’t it? It had always been my name, though there were years I’d never acknowledged it. Steel-Eye. The woman you loved was someone different.
Howls. Screaming. I let the sound peal from my throat, louder than all of them combined. They wanted something to fear? All right. Steel-Eye was horrifying, wasn’t she?
Yes, she was. I smelled sticky, stale urine; fear fear fear.
How intoxicating it was, to know how much they feared me! At last, I was giving them a reason!
But—
Was that really how I felt? How Shefali felt? Or was it only Steel-Eye?
Speak. I had to force myself to speak. Remember the still water, remember who I was, remember you standing in front of the butcher’s desk, cutting meat so I’d have company.
“Leave!”
The others were still here. Easy to forget them when my own thoughts were so disturbing. I saw them staring back at me. I saw them bringing the story of this moment back to their families, to their loved ones. I saw myself through their eyes, but it was not I, it was not—
Had that been my voice? Had I said “leave”?
Fists meeting dirt. My fists? They had to be; I knew all those scars. Why didn’t it hurt? I felt pain, but not much. Someone was laughing laughing laughing, screaming, screaming, and with a dull horror, I realized—
That was my voice.
Visions of the guards before me. I smelled their histories, smelled their souls, and my mind built some sort of image to match. Little girls with wooden swords. Old men with canes. Boys wearing girl clothes, before they knew they were boys.
“Kill it!” they shouted.
“No, don’t!”
Your voice. That was your voice!
A whistling spear flew toward me. I raised my hand, let it through; pain does not matter, to survive is Qorin. My bones shook, my flesh split—but the shaft was still there. I tore it out. Black blood coated the wood; I broke it and threw it away before it infected someone.
There were more coming.
I ducked down, closer to the ground. Instinct drove me. I ran forward. Charged through them. How easy it was! What if I rammed them against the wall, what if I bit into them, what if—?
They were so soft!
No, I couldn’t kill them. That was not me. That was not Shefali thinking. But I could not stop—the bodies slammed into my back and I reared up and roared as loud as I could. Maybe they’d run. I hoped they did. If they ran, they’d be safe from me.
But he wasn’t.
Closer. I could smell you, smell him.
Smell the thing inside him.
That is the thing about how demons see the world, Shizuka. We do not much care for your physical appearance. We learn everything we need to know about you, everything that ever was or would be about you, from smelling you.
Part of a person’s soul is in their scent.
And where Kagemori stood, I smelled rot. If Grandfather Earth yawned and freed two dozen corpses from his grasp, it would smell the way Kagemori did. Ash and cinders. Wet stones. Mold. Dark, dark, dark.
Kailon.
I saw the demon so clearly, I wondered how I’d ever missed it. Not tall. A small thing, young and untested. Knee-high. Large nose taking up most of its face. Two teeth jutting out from its lower lip like tusks, on either side of its drooping nose.
Young. Untested. But a demon nonetheless, a creature lovingly crafted by the Traitor’s own hands to wreak his vengeance upon the world. One of his children.