The Last Stormdancer

The Last Stormdancer The Lotus War 0.6 by Jay Kristoff

All I taste is blood.

All I see is red.

All I know is rage.

I plummet from the sky, wind clawing at my eyes. Warm and scarlet painted thick upon my tongue. Wings pressed tight to my flanks, lighting crackling along my feathertips. My beak is open and I am roaring, bellowing like the storm itself, impossible brightness cracking the skies, black clouds closing at my back as if I were a player stepping out for one last turn upon the stage. My talons locked with his. My friend. My foe. Our plumage dipped in crimson and fluttering in our wake as we flail and bite and kick. Descending.

Mountains loom below us. Jagged peaks rising from the rolling mist of rain and ashen smoke, snow-clad teeth set to tear us to pieces. But still we struggle. Chained together by this, my rage, my hatred. Unwilling to let each other go. At the last, he breaks away, kicking loose in a shower of blood. I spread my wings, feel ragged wind cup my feathers, distant pain from the wounds he has torn in me stealing my breath. He was ever my match. Even when we were cubs, the stripes at our haunches still muddy gray. Not my blood. But yet my brother.

And now, my enemy.

We level out, circle each other through the hissing sleet. He calls to me, voice as loud as the storm, my blood in his mouth.

“Stop this, Koh. Stop this madness.”

I growl reply between the thunder claps.

“Only three ways this will end.”

“I am Khan here,” he roars. “Khan’s word is law.”

“Then kill me.”

“Never.”

“Then die.”

I tear across the sky toward him, tempest at my back. All around us is chaos, the voices of our packmates raised, eyes watching the drama unfold. The air itself pregnant with knowledge that this battle’s victor will decide all our futures—to remain and fight the Lotus Guild, their poison, their lies, or have us abandon these shores and all within them to their fate.

We collide like comets, like falling, burning stars. I dig my talons into his flesh, knuckle deep. He tears at my shoulder, blood brighter than the poisoned sun, and we are snarls and shrieks and roars, all a-tumble across the sky. Lightning rocks the clouds, gleaming in his eyes as we plummet toward teeth of stone. His beak closing about my throat. Mine about his.

My friend. My enemy. My Khan.

How did it come to this?

Ninety-nine years after the birth of the Kazumitsu Dynasty, in the midst of a too-warm spring, I watched an eighteen-year-old boy limp to the highest summit of the Four Sisters Mountains.

Not the most spectacular of beginnings, I will grant you. Not one to bring audiences to their feet, hands to their mouths in shock. Not the way stories about heroes should begin. But if this introduction strikes you as simple, monkey-child, avail yourself of these three facts:

First, that the Four Sisters are the highest mountains in all the lands of the Tiger clan, and truly, all the Shima Imperium. They stand so far above the sea that fully half their height is veiled in snow, even in the warmest summer months. In those days, the Four Sisters were home to my kind—thunder tigers, or arashitora as some among you name us—and the tallest peak was the seat of the Khan. The ruler of all our race.

Monkey-children such as yourself were not welcome there.

Visitors had come to us in days past, of course. Samurai mostly, warriors true, flying up the mountain in bloated, wingless birds to seek audience with our greatest. Steel in their hands and fire in their hearts, these men of pride would seek the right to ride one of us in battle—as if we were kin to the poor beasts of burden coughing and wheezing in the fields below. Your kind gifted a name to warriors who had sat astride thunder tigers in ages past; Stormdancers, you called them. And though the last of them had perished generations before, though such tales were slipping from the scrawlings of history into the mists of legend, there was no shortage of brave monkey-children in iron suits who would travel to the Aerie and seek to make their own names myth.

The polite ones we simply sent packing with scars enough to remember us by. The arrogant among them (and they were plentiful), we would take high up into the heavens, where the clouds pressed their lips to the edge of the sky. And there, we would try to teach them to fly.

You note that I say “try.” Perhaps you wonder how the lessons fared?

Locals around the mountains had a saying. When the rain hammered down in sheets thick as city walls, when the deluge beat upon their roofs with all the fury of the gods combined, Four Sisters folk would not say it rained cats and dogs, no.

They would say it rained samurai.

Fact, the second: the boy did not fly to the mountains, as most who sought audience with our Khan did. He did not skulk aboard some bladder of hydrogen and twigs, pushed up into the reddening sky to be set alight by capricious lightning. He did not travel from his home by motor-rickshaw, nor hunched on the spine of some poor, suffocating horse, miserable in the spreading pall of strange blue-black smoke.

No, the boy walked. All the way from the Blessed Plains in Kitsune lands. A journey of something close to one thousand miles, with only a stick of lacquered pine in his hands and a small winter sparrow sitting on his shoulder, white as newborn snow.

And the third fact you should be availed of, little one? The most important of them all?

The boy was blind.

The scruffy locks overhanging his lashes could not hide the vacancy of his gaze from my eyes. The cloud-white film over iris and pupil. The way he kept his head tilted, staring into nothing. He was wrapped in heavy black cloth and tattered furs, travel-worn boots held together by rags and prayers. He did not hide his eyes from the burning sun behind goggles of black glass as many monkey-children now did; the damage was already done, I supposed.

Snow swirled about him, caked in his locks. He was lean, hardened by the miles beneath his feet, soft whiskers at his cheeks, crusted with frost. The tiny snow sparrow nestled in the blood-warm crook of his neck shivered, blinking at me with eyes deep and black as midnight. The boy trudged up the slope, miserable boots scrunching and crunching, walking unerringly until at last he stood before the seat of the Khan.

Four dozen thunder tigers crouched atop the stones around him. A dozen more stalked through the snow behind him. The monkey-child could not have known it, but he had stumbled into the largest gathering of arashitora to take place in decades. A Skymeet we called it—where the Khan called his subjects to his side and asked counsel before making decision on matters of greatest weight. For good or ill, it was a meeting that would live in the history of the thunder tiger race for generations.

The boy’s timing was … less than exemplary.

Our strength had been gathered from the Four Sisters, the Iishi Mountains, Earthsky and Kogane Isle. Proud and fierce we were, with talons like razors and beaks as sharp as any monkey-child’s katana. The heads, wings and foreclaws of mighty white eagles we had, eyes gleaming like embers in a fire wind. The hindquarters of great white tigers, stripes black as midnight etched upon our fur, claws that could rend rock to ribbons. And behind us, loomed he to whom all paid heed.

Kreii was his name in our tongue; a word for “wind” (we have fourteen). But to all thunder tigers in Shima, he was simply Khan. The rule of us had been his for near twenty winters. Longer than any Khan in remembrance. And looking down on this little blind boy traipsing so blithe into our home—right into the middle of a Skymeet no less—the Khan spread his wings, thirty feet of gleaming feathers and crackling current, and opened a beak sharp enough to bite the horizon in half. His roar shook the earth. Stilled the blind monkey-child in his frozen tracks.

At this point, our wide-eyed visitors from the lands below would usually speak with their jabber-tongues. Make the sounds of rutting hogs and expect us to understand—as if arashitora had a caring for the language of things crawled but newly down from the trees. They would kneel and draw their swords and make nonsense with their mouths until one of the bucks would blood them and send them on their way. Either that, or make it rain.

And here now, this boy. This blind one. Crawled up the mountainside with a tiny bird at his shoulder and a stick in his hand, twig-thin limbs all a-shivering. The bucks around me growled and tore the earth with their talons. Their rage plain for any with eyes to see. Interloper. Monkey-child. Prey. But looking down at this boy, this blind child of men, something inside me stirred. I say not for certain what it was. Curiosity, perhaps. The muddy stirrings of prescience?

And so, though it was far from my place to do so, I fixed to be the one to make him feel unwelcome. Tempers in the Skymeet had been running hot, roaring and crackling and bloody-red, and I thought it better my talons gift the boy a little bleeding than another’s fling him screaming from the mountainside.

I sprang down from my stone near the Khan’s left flank and bellowed. Wings spread in threat. Buffeting the snow about the boy into tumbling flurries. He did not flinch. Did not tremble, save for the cold. He did not fear. This took me aback. Made me look small in front of my kin. Set my hackles to rippling.

And so I sought to teach him what fear was.

I stretched out with my talons, quick as hummingbird’s wings, intent on brushing foreclaw’s edge through his frost-pale skin. Nothing too deep. Nothing to bring a killing. Just a hurting he would feel in place of hubris for the rest of his living days.

Yet the boy moved.

Quicker than hummingbird’s wings. Quicker than the kiss of blinding lightning to scorched earth. Quicker than I could blink, he stepped aside, and around, and tapped my hindparts with his walking stick. Just once. The sound of lacquered pine striking my haunches louder than thunder.

Swack!

A moment of stillness. Glances among my packmates, incredulous. Grim amusement rippling amongst the Skymeet, gleaming in scores of amber eyes. Sudden rage swelling in my breast, blinding and red, settling me now not for the scarring, no, but for the teaching—to drag this monkey-child up into the sky, and see if his arrogance would gift him wings enough to hold him aloft. Blind or no. Boy or no. I would be his ending, true.

My roar shook the very stones, reverberating across the mountainside. A roar to begin avalanches, to send boulders of ice crumbling free and crashing into the canyons below, all Four Sisters trembling with the fury of it. And I raised my talons, set to seize and tear and shake like a doll of rags and bones and bloody—

Please stop.

A voice in the back of my mind. Gentle as spring wind’s kiss upon newborn buds. Never had I heard the like in all my life.

I mean no offense, great one. Forgive me. Please.

I blinked. Shook my head. Talons ripping furrows through the ice at my feet. The boy stood before me, hand outstretched, head tilted still, frozen breath hanging in rolling white drifts between us. And in all of me, from the bottom of my belly to the tips of my wings, I knew—somehow knew—that the voice I heard in my mind was his.

YOU …

I looked to my Khan. My kin gathered on the rocks about me.

YOU YŌKAI-KIN?

Murmurs and growls among the Skymeet, elders looking on the boy in wonderment. And he spoke then, this boychild, though his lips did not move. And amongst the tempest of my own thoughts, his were birdsong and beauty; a melody I had never heard, and yet knew as if by heart.

I speak to the minds of beasts, if that is your meaning. Though I claim no kinship with you or any other spirit-beast, great one. Of that honor, I am unworthy.

My eyes narrowed. Growl bubbling and bursting in my chest.

WHO ARE YOU?

I fear I do not yet know the answer to that question. But my mother’s people, the Kitsune clan, they call me by name of Jun.

He pulled aside the heavy cloth at his shoulder, revealing a simple scribble in the shape of a nine-tailed fox on his right arm. I am told you monkey-children put stock in the ink in your skin—I tell you now, his was none to speak of.

I looked to my Khan. Uncertain. Back to the boy, whose eyes stared at the ground beside my feet as if some secret were buried in the frost below us.

WHAT YOU WANT, MONKEY-CHILD?

Ah. Now that is a far easier question to answer, great one.

A smile lit his lips, just the beginnings, curling at the edges with a hint of what tasted like arrogance. He drummed his fingers upon the haft of his walking stick.

I want to save the world.

His lightless gaze roamed the faces of my brethren, each in turn, as if he could truly see.

I am hoping you will help me.

Three figures sat vigil over the Fifth Shōgun of the Kazumitsu Dynasty. Three companions to keep the great Sataro-no-miya company in this, his final hour of life.

The first of course, was Death. Hovering beside the bed, dampening every faint exhalation, creeping through the old man’s veins with every beat of his struggling heart. Patient as glaciers. A pale smile on bloodless lips. Death knew it would be soon.

Oh, yes.

The second and third participants in the closing moments of Shōgun Sataro’s life were his two sons, Tatsuya and Riku. The boys were twins, handsome as devils paired. Jaws you could break bricks on. Long dark hair swept back from widow’s peaks, ink-black and luxuriant. Bow-shaped lips and high cheekbones and bottomless eyes, skin the color of melting gold.

Though identical in seeming, the brothers shared temperaments disparate as dawning and dusk. Riku was known around court as the Bear—swift to anger, often irritable, armed with thin patience and no humor whatsoever. Tatsuya was called the Bull—stubborn, staunch, and if rumor was to be paid heed, prone to rutting with anything not nailed to the floor. And yet both twins were possessed of a regal bearing. Confidence and assurance. Nobility, born and bred.

Killers, also.

The terminal difficulties of their delivery into this world accounted for the absence of Sataro’s wife, Eri, from his bedside (why the Maker does not allow you to deliver your young in eggs baffles me, monkey-child). Lady Eri’s final exit during the entrance of her two bouncing baby boys also provided quandary that had plagued the ministers of Shōgun Sataro’s court for twenty years. For in all the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth following Lady Eri’s death, the midwives who delivered Tatsuya and Riku could not say, for sure and certain, which of the boys had arrived first. And since rulership of the Imperium was seen as a mandate handed down by the Maker God himself, no one in court dared name the true firstborn and risk the Maker’s wrath by choosing the wrong son.

As a result, Tatsuya and Riku were … wary in each other’s presence.

To say the Bull and the Bear disliked each other would be unkind. To say their father was reluctant to incur the Maker’s wrath by settling the matter of succession right before he shuffled off this mortal coil would be understatement. And to say either Tatsuya or Riku would be unwilling to murder his sibling in exchange for absolute rule of the Shōgunate would be an outright lie.

Wary in each other’s presence, as I said.

I was not there, of course. The presence of a two-ton thunder tiger in the bedchambers of the Lord of the Shōgunate would be somewhat conspicuous. And if you find yourself now wondering how I tell this side of the tale when I was not there to witness it, I will save you the suspense and offer simple explanation.

Death told me.

“My sons…”

Shōgun Sataro’s voice was a feeble wheeze, flecked with bloody spittle. Tatsuya and Riku both moved closer, one on either side, hands clasped with their father’s. They leaned forward, into the cancer and bedpan stink, the old Shōgun’s lips rasping against their ears.

“We are here, Father,” said Tatsuya.

“What would you have of us, Shōgun?” Riku asked.

“One thing,” the old man breathed.

“What is it?” asked the twins.

“Forgiveness…”

The old man inhaled once.

Softly sighed.

And there, he died.

Riku stood, swift as blinking, the Bear’s knuckles white upon his katana hilt. Tatsuya stood slower, tears in his eyes, stare locked on his twin. The Bull’s hand drifted to his own sword, but his stance spoke of an unwillingness to draw it.

His brother decided for him.

A flash of folded steel, the ringing hymn of blade’s edge on scabbard’s lip, and Riku’s katana was in his hand. Tatsuya’s weapon was drawn a moment later, the young Lord barely warding off his brother’s blow. A bright rain of sparks, the ringing clash of steel on steel. Riku pressed, striking at his brother’s head, throat, chest. Each parry ringing a different note; a tiny orchestra, bright and gleaming and deadly.

The brothers moved as twins would, mirroring the other’s advance, strike, lunge, feint. Breathless in but a moment, both hearts pumping with the knowledge that the victor of this fray would sit upon the Four Thrones, would rule the Imperium from the tip of Shabishii to the shores of Seidai, while the other burned beside their father on the pyre. The Bull ducked a vicious blow, sidestepped another, smashing his brother’s katana aside as the Bear overextended. But instead of a counterstrike, Tatsuya took a moment to breathe soft words through gritted teeth.

“Not like this, brother,” he said, gesturing to their father’s corpse. “Not here.”

Riku clenched his jaw, face grim. He struck again, blindingly swift, sparks lighting dark eyes as his katana danced. Again. Again.

“Better it be just you and I, brother,” he said. “Just the two of us, without the nation beside us.”

Another succession of blows. Furniture smashed, tables upturned, vases shattered. Sparks and spit and blood.

Ragged breath.

Narrowed eyes.

Pause.

“You speak true, brother.” Tatsuya nodded, chest heaving. “But will you murder your own twin at the foot of your father’s deathbed for the right to sit in his still-warm chair?”

Riku’s grip upon his katana slackened. He glanced at the body of the man who had made him. The portrait of his mother over the bed—killed in the act of bringing him and Tatsuya into this world. Once the brothers had been all to each other; the first nine months of their lives floating in the same lightless warmth, drifting off to sleep to the song of each other’s heartbeats.

And now?

And now …

“… No. I will not.”

Riku backed away, lowering his sword, slow and measured, eyes upon his twin’s. But Tatsuya made no attempt at treachery, lowering his own katana and glancing at the body now cooling between the sheets. He wiped the back of one hand across sweat-slick lips.

“We will burn him,” Tatsuya said. “Bury him. Grieve him. As honorable sons should.”

“And then?”

“And then…” Tatsuya paused, meeting his brother’s eyes.

They spoke as one, a single word, floating in the air like lead.

“War.”

I am hoping you will help me.

Our Khan peered at the boy who could not peer back. I noted throughout all the roaring, all the thunder and howling wind, the little winter sparrow on the monkey-child’s shoulder remained calm as millpond water. Quiet confidence mirroring the boy on which it perched. Eyes flitting over the thunder tigers around the Khan’s throne, drifting ever back toward mine.

—HELP YOU?—

The Khan did not speak, yet his words were a tempest in our minds. Somehow, through the boy, we all of us could hear him as if he roared with lungs and beak and tongue.

—WHY WE HELP YOU, MONKEY-CHILD?—

The boy stepped forward, covered his fist and bowed low. I stood close, muscles taut, ready to drench the snow with him should he show some sign of deceit. But the only weapons he wielded were words. Simple words. True words.

I have walked far, oh great Khan. I have spoken with the phoenix of the Hogosha mountains, whose wings are flame. I spoke with tanuki and henge and kappa and the great dragons of the sea. They speak of a sickness. A poisoning. Younglings born deformed, or worse, still and dead. A sadness that bids the dragons swim north, the phoenix curl up and die. And none can explain it.

At this, my hackles rose. The sickness we knew. The sting of its loss I had felt full well …

—BUT YOU CAN EXPLAIN, MONKEY-CHILD?—

The boy smiled. Slow and sad.

I do not know for certain. But I believe the smoke rising from our cities, tasting black and clinging thick to every lungful—I believe this is the sickening’s cause. I believe the blood lotus we humans plant in our soil will be the death of this island. If we do not stop it.

—WE?—

I hope so, yes.

The Khan spread his wings, soared down off his throne, landed in the snow before this strange little monkey-child. I could hear his old bones creaking. See the film of age covering his eyes. One day soon, one of the bucks would challenge him for the stone seat. Change was coming. All of us could feel it. My mother had named me for it before she …

Before …

—WHO MAKE THIS SMOKE? THIS SICKNESS?—

They are called the Lotus Guild, great Khan. They are masters of the machine. And the strength and wealth those machines give them buys much power. There are many of my kind who side with them. Many who do not care about the sickness this smoke causes.

—THEN WHY WE CARE?—

Because this island is your home.

—PERHAPS NOT LONG, MONKEY-CHILD. WE GATHER HERE TODAY TO SPEAK ON IT. ROAR AND GROWL AND CHEW ON IT.—

Speak on what, great Khan?

—WE KNOW SICKNESS. HAVE SEEN IT WORK, BLACK AND VILE. WE DECIDE HERE WHETHER ARASHITORA LEAVE THIS PLACE FOREVER.—

A vibration in the boy’s thoughts. An uncertainty, shaking his center, as an earthquake trembles the mightiest pillar.

… You are going to leave Shima?

—NOT YOUR BUSINESS, BOY. NOT YOUR PLACE TO QUESTION. WERE YOU NOT YŌKAI-KIN, ALREADY YOU BE FLYING.—

The sparrow looked over each of us in turn. The boy’s head followed the bird’s gaze, as if he watched us also.

There must be some among you who see as I do?

The Khan growled, low and deep and deadly.

—SEE NOTHING. YOU BLIND.—

Alone in the snow. Beneath the stares of dozens of thunder tigers, any of whom could have torn him to pieces. A thousand miles from Kitsune lands, with his tattered boots and his tattered hope. And still, the boy stood tall.

Am I?

—MONKEY-CHILDREN MAKE SICKNESS. EXPECT ARASHITORA TO MEND? AND OF ALL, THEY SEND YOU? WEAK AND BLIND AND MEWLING?—

Nobody sent me, great one, save perhaps the gods themselves.

—HEAR THEM, DO YOU?—

They have spoken to me. My grandmother has the gift of Truth. Of Sight. She said I would save the lands of Shima. End this sickness. Riding with thunder tigers at my back.

—THEN SHE AS BLIND AS YOU.—

You do not understand—

—DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CARING AND UNDERSTANDING, MONKEY-CHILD.—

A slow blink. A frown darkening that blind and vacant stare. It seemed to me the monkey-child’s mask fell away, his serenity and quiet assurance shattering upon the ice, and beneath was the face of a confused and frightened boychild, lost in a world he thought he knew.

But … you must help.

—NO PLACE FOR MUSTS HERE, SAVE MINE.—

The sparrow peered at the great Khan, trembling in the freezing chill. The boy stepped forward, the pack about him rising, growling long and deep in warning.

Please, great one. This was foretold. A child of my—

—TAKE FORETELLINGS WHEN YOU LEAVE, MONKEY-CHILD. NO PLACE FOR THEM HERE, EITHER.—

But I—

The Khan’s roar was a slap to the boy’s face. Blasting the fringe back from those sightless eyes, drenching his pallid cheeks with spittle. The Khan’s breath boiled in the freezing air, reverb shaking our bones. And at his outburst, the sparrow nestled at the boy’s shoulder finally broke, springing loose and fluttering away in a rolling tumble of feather and shrill squawking. Right into the path of another young buck by the name of Rahh. A friend of mine. As close to a brother as I would know.

Rahh’s beak closed, quick as lightning.

Snap.

And the little white sparrow squawked no more.

No! Mikayo!

The boy turned, fell to his knees, pawed about in the snow until he found the sparrow’s broken corpse. Bright red smeared in pearlescent white. Clutching the little bundle to his chest, he made nonsense noises with his mouth, tears glittering in his eyes.

… You did not need to do that.

Rahh leaned close to the blind boy, amber stare boring a hole through the monkey-child’s skull, hackles raised in jagged threat down his spine.

* GET OFF OUR MOUNTAIN, MONKEY-CHILD. *

She was my friend …

* FLY WITH US THEN. *

Rahh raised his claws, intent on seizing the boy and ripping him skyward. Rumbling growls amidst the roll of thunder above. And as the talons of my brother who was not my brother descended, I called to him in our own tongue, my voice enough to stay his hand.

“Wait.”

Rahh fell still. Glanced at me with eyes the shade of sunflowers and murder.

“He laid his stick on my back.”

I stepped forward, talons sinking deep into the snow.

“Let me teach him.”

Rahh looked to the Khan looming at our backs, blinking in question. This was not my place to speak. Let alone to demand. But the old beast must have assented (as he often did in those days), for the brother who was not my brother inclined his head, backed away from the boy with his bloody palmful of broken sparrow.

“Teach him well,” he said.

And seizing the monkey-child by his shoulders, spreading my wings wide, I sprang into the sky.

Lady Ami knelt in a vast antechamber of the House of Passing, her sister Mai beside her. The roof arched forty feet above her head, long silken amulets of perfect white running ceiling to floor. The room was lit with a thousand fragrant candles, also the color of death; white as newborn snow. Two dozen maidservants gathered about her, heads pressed to floorboards, hands clasped in prayer.

The sisters were motionless as statues. Faces painted bone-pale, thick kohl about their lashes. Hair bound in coils and braids, twelve-layered robes of mourning-black dragging them earthward. They were beauties among your kind, or so I am told. Perfect as the first flowers of spring. Born of the same womb, one year apart, mirrored reflections of each other in dark, still water.

Brides of the Shōgun’s sons—sisters wed to brothers, which I suppose makes a kind of sense, in so far as anything you monkey-children do makes sense. And hanging heavy in the air between Ami and her sibling, along with the perfume of burning candles and the hymns of beggar monks praying for the dead Shōgun’s soul, lay the knowledge that all that stood between either of them and the title of First Lady of Shima was the death of the other’s husband.

Lady Mai spoke first. Utterly motionless, save her lips.

“Your Lord Tatsuya looked unwell this morning, dear sister.”

Lady Ami was still as stone. Unblinking. Almost unbreathing. “My husband is well, dear sister. Considering circumstances. Though I must say, your Lord Riku looks a picture of health.”

“He does, does he not?”

Ami nodded slightly. “One would think the Bear would appear a touch paler, considering the forces my noble husband has gathered to his side.”

“Lord Tatsuya has proven himself most effective in the application of bribery and threats, to be certain. A pity he was not courageous enough to simply end the matter by duel and spare us all the horrors of civil war.”

“Horrific for some,” Ami nodded. “Considering our forces outnumber yours almost two to one. And yet Lord Riku barely musters a sweat. Most admirable.”

Lady Mai’s smile was pretty as sunset. “Perhaps my Lord and husband knows it is not simply numbers that win battles, dear sister. That skill counts for more by half.”

“One would think,” Ami smiled in return, “such knowledge would make him sweat all the more.”

A hollow chuckle, drifting off into a deathly hiss. “Always so clever, little sister.”

“And still you ever ask to dance.”

“A pity the same cannot be said of the Bull?” Mai glanced sideways at her sibling.

Muscle clenched at Lady Ami’s jaw. She blinked once. Twice.

“No riposte?” Mai whispered. “Does it cut you so deep that Tatsuya-sama spends so little time in your bedchamber? I would have thought you accustomed to the idea by now.”

“You dare…” Ami breathed.

“Tell me, if your Lord and husband does murder mine and do away with me besides, will the arrangement our parents made remain intact, do you think? Or will the Bull supplant you with the one he truly loves? Whomever that might be this week?”

Ami licked once at trembling lips. Palms pressed flat to her thighs. She glanced at the maidservants behind her, breath strangled in her lungs. Tatsuya’s latest favorite, a tiny slip of a thing named Chiyoko was watching the back of her head, turning her eyes to the floor as the Lady met her gaze.

Lady Mai finally glanced at her sister, dark lips curled in a smile.

“By the by,” she said brightly. “You will be an aunt soon.”

The doors to the Chamber of Passing opened wide, the volume of the mourning hymns rising. Beyond the threshold, their husbands awaited. Lord Tatsuya and Lord Riku, Bull and Bear, swathed in heavy armor of ink-black, surrounded by a legion of samurai and beggar monks. Beyond them, carried by a multitude of hunched servants, the old Shōgun’s body awaited on his funeral bier.

Lady Mai smiled at her husband, rose with practiced grace and drifted to his side. Lord Riku was somber as occasion would dictate, yet still leaned down to kiss her brow, place a comforting hand upon her midriff. Lady Ami watched the pair—mirror to her and Tatsuya, and yet nothing alike at all.

Her husband glanced at her, still kneeling on the floor. Still reeling from the blow. Hand pressed to her empty belly. Blinking faster than the tears could muster.

“Ami-chan,” Tatsuya said with faint annoyance. “Come.”

Lady Ami breathed deep. Stood slow. Walked to her husband’s side. If she noted the Bull’s stare lingering on Chiyoko and the other maidservants behind her, she gave no sign.

The procession trudged from the House of Passing, down a vast flight of stone stairs and into the Kigen streets. The people were a throng, a crush, lining the Palace Way. Each citizen dressed in black, head bowed, burning sticks of incense held in clasped hands. Those few with the courage to look at the royal entourage as they passed noted each of the Shōgun’s sons were as stone, hands on their katana hilts, eyes downturned. The Lady Ami was pale as death itself, thin lips pressed into a bloodless line. And though it was improper to show emotion at an event such as this, the young woman wiped once at her eyes, as if brushing away errant tears.

And the Lady Mai?

She walked beside Lord Riku, palms crossed over her belly, her face as rigid and cold as a mask. But every now and then, she would glance from the cobbles beneath her feet to her sister walking at the coffin’s left-hand side. To the once-perfect kohl painted around her sibling’s eyes, smudged now with sorrow.

And she would smile.

The boy hung from my claws, limp and bewildered as we circled ever higher. I held him beneath his arms, talons not yet piercing his flesh. He did not struggle as most other monkey-children I had seen did in his predicament. He did not plead in his jabber-tongue nor buck in my grip. He simply clutched the broken body of the dead sparrow in one hand, lashes crusted with frozen tears.

This makes no sense.

His voice in my mind again, warm as summer breeze.

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

I snorted, circling higher still, the Four Sisters laid out below us, snow-clad and beautiful.

WHAT YOU EXPECT, MONKEY-CHILD? BE STORMDANCER? BE HERO? LUCKY SKYMEET NOT TEAR YOU LIMB FROM LIMB.

I care nothing for heroes. I care for the sickness. It took my mother. My father.

A chill in my belly.

And I am supposed to stop it.

SUPPOSED?

It was foretold. It is my destiny.

FOOLISHNESS.

Though he could see only darkness, the boy’s gaze was affixed on the ground far below; the vista of mountain and earth, of stone and soil and green stretching all the way to the horizon. He opened his bloody palm, let the sparrow’s body fall, spinning and tumbling end over end until it became only a speck, and from there, nothing at all.

He spoke then. Monkey-words I did not understand. Perhaps a song. Perhaps a prayer.

We ascended.

THIS SICKNESS YOU SPEAK. HAS SPREAD FAR?

The boy’s eyes were downturned and vacant. His body shivering from altitude’s deathly kiss. He was light as air, feeble and soft. Numbed to his core. I shook him once to regain his attentions.

ANSWER, MONKEY-CHILD!

… It has spread far. It does not just kill people, as I said. All the great spirit beasts suffer and die from it. Phoenix and henge and kappa and dragon. Arashitora alone seem immune.

IT IS COUGHING? BLOODY BREATH AND DYING?

The boy nodded.

My kind call it blacklung … But how could you know the symptoms?

MY KIND NOT IMMUNE, MONKEY-CHILD. ARASHITORA SICKENING ALSO. MANY OF US. MY MOTHER, FATHER, BROTHER, ALL GONE. OUR EGGS GROWING THINNER. BREAKING IN WOMB OR BENEATH THEIR MOTHER’S WEIGHT.

Then … why would your Khan not help? Why did you kill my friend?

KHAN FEAR MONKEY-CHILDREN. FEAR MACHINES. HE OLD. NOT UNDERSTAND NEW WAYS. CHANGING WORLD.

But you do?

NO.

Thunder rolled in the skies about us, sending a thrill through my belly. The voice of Raijin, the Thunder God, father to all arashitora. Telling me not to be afraid.

BUT WANT TO.

You … you will help me, then?

I circled lower, descending through the freezing squalls, down to the broken crags at the Four Sisters’ edge. I dropped the monkey-child into a thick drift of snow, alighted beside him, sinking deep into sharp chill. My breath roiling in the air between us. My eyes upon his, sightless though they were, seeing more than the leader of my race ever would. I had lost my family to this sickening. And though the Khan might bid us simply leave Shima and its woes behind, though I had no words at the time for concepts like “forever” or “extinction,” I found myself unwilling, in that tiny, frozen moment, to lose my home along with my kin. Not without at least knowing why.

This seemed important.

This boy seemed important.

I HELP, MONKEY-CHILD.

And your friends? Your kin?

ARASHITORA NOT FIGHT MONKEY-CHILD BATTLES FOR YOU.

What if we were to convince my people to help also? Would you fight beside us?

CANNOT SAY. PERHAPS WE FIGHT. BUT ONCE KHAN SPEAKS, HIS WORD IS LAW. MUST RETURN BEFORE SKYMEET IS DONE. A DAY. TWO AT MOST. OR ELSE, WILL BE TOO LATE.

The boy smiled, grinned like a fool.

Grandmother was right …

KNOW NOT GRANDMOTHER.

She spoke a prophecy, a vision—

NOT CARE ABOUT VISION. NOT CARE ABOUT YOU. NOT FRIENDS, BOY. NOT THINK YOU STORMDANCER. NOT DO THIS FOR YOU. DO THIS FOR MY KIND. MY CUBS, YET UNBORN.

You have a bride? I did not know. Do you wish to tell her—

BRIDE? FOOLISH. SEE NOTHING.

I felt him, then. A frown upon his face, reaching out through the frost-clad space between us and slipping inside my mind. The strangest of sensations; sharing a room as vast as reckoning with another mind, wide as the dawning sky. Touching. Overlapping. A sense of him in me, and me in him. Unlike anything I had ever known. And after a moment, the frown smoothed from his brow, incredulity settling there instead, blind eyes searching mine as if he saw me true.

My gods. You’re … female …

TROUBLES YOU, MONKEY-CHILD?

Not troubling, no. It is just—

NEVER RIDDEN FEMALE BEFORE?

Amusement rippling in my mind. Spilling into his.

In truth, I have not, great one.

FIRSTS, THEN. FOR BOTH OF US. NOW, WHERE WE GO?

The Shōgun’s palace is in Kigen city. He is the leader of my people. Like your Khan.

I looked at the Four Sisters behind me, the Aerie of my race. The Skymeet therein, aloft and aloof and afraid. What would happen to me when I returned? What shape would my Khan’s displeasure take? My kind did not allow females to fly free. Risk themselves in battles. Such was our way. Had always been our way. But there was change coming. All with eyes to see knew it …

HOPE NOT, MONKEY-CHILD.

If we visit the Shōgun, I can tell him of this sickness. How it spreads through his subjects and all the beasts and birds of the sky—

HE NOT KNOW?

In my experience, those who live with their heads in the clouds seldom look at the ground beneath their feet.

WHY HE LISTEN?

Because we have destiny on our side, my friend.

The boy stood there in the snow, ice on his brows and the soft down at his cheeks. He seemed a tiny, lonely thing, then. Far from home and all he knew. Yet still that certainty loomed within him—the pillar of belief that all this was preordained. A faith unswerving. A conviction, perhaps, that would change the world …

I do not know your name …

MY KIND CALL ME KOH.

Does it have meaning?

KOH IS ARASHITORA WORD FOR CHANGING OF SEASONS.

I like that.

I CARE NOT.

May I ask something of you, Koh?

ASK.

May I touch your face?

My eyes narrowed, wings flaring, wisps of lightning crawling across my feathers. A growl rumbled in my chest, shivering the snow upon my fur, spilling to the ground in rolling white flurries.

… WHY?

The winter sparrow. The one your brethren … killed. She was more important to me than you can know. My gift is called the Kenning in my mother’s tongue. And through it, I can share not only a beast’s thoughts, but also their senses. Little Mikayo …

He paused to wipe at those milk-white eyes, and I felt a sadness touch my heart.

She was not only my friend. She was my eyes.

The sadness swelled, slowing my breath, clutching my chest. You may think us beasts, monkey-child. And beasts we are. Predators, proud and fierce and wild. The storms that rock your walls and shiver you beneath your straw roofs are but spring showers to us. Ours is not a world of mercy, of softness or kindness. The bodies of the weak fill the bellies of the strong.

But we know kinship. We know pack. We know the warmth of another’s body against our own when the winter bites deep and the cold winds moan. And in the days after my family fell to the sickening, I had learned what it was to be alone.

Truly alone.

YOU MAY TOUCH.

The boy stepped forward, head tilted, reaching out with trembling hands toward my heat and sound. I could feel his heart beating through the thin walls of his chest. I knew it pumped with fear, despite his talk of prophecy and destiny and other such foolishness. Standing naked before the beast he was, sightless and small. But as he touched my cheek, I saw the fear in him melt, slowly, by inches. His hands exploring my face. Down my beak, black as moonless midnight, fading through to gray at a tip that could puncture steel. As his fingertips brushed my closed eyelids, I tensed and growled, and he withdrew not for fear of me, but out of concern. I could feel his presence in my mind, even as I felt his hands return to my brow, my temples, my throat, his thoughts as gentle as his touch. I had not known such sensation. Nothing so careful or … kind? No room in my world for a moment such as this. And in it, I felt the wound left by my kin’s passing begin to ache …

ENOUGH.

I pulled away, snorting, claws tearing at the frost. The boy’s eyes were open, and tears were frozen upon his cheeks, and his smile was bright as the sun.

You are … beautiful, Koh.

BEAUTIFUL TO MONKEYS? THINK THIS FLATTERY?

Not flattery. Just truth.

A growl deep within my chest, ruffling my feathers and shaking the snow from my wings. The boy wiped salted ice from his cheek, the mask of determination slipping back into place.

Kigen city is southeast of here. Perhaps a day as the thunder tiger flies.

THEN CLIMB ABOARD. NO TIME TO WASTE. NEED NOT WARN TO NOT LOOK DOWN.

The boy walked forward, prodding the snow with his lacquered cane, feeling about my wings for the briefest of moments before he scrabbled atop me, light and only a little graceless. It was a strange sensation, the weight of him up there. I had not flown with anyone on my back before. My muscles tensed, wings flinching as he found his balance, my tail lashing side to side. His arms closed about my neck and I almost balked, blood rushing beneath my skin. But ever I could feel him in my mind, just as frightened as I, trembling just as deep, all his certainty eroded at the heat radiating from my fur, the taste of ozone in back of his tongue, the crackle of infant lightning across the breadth of my feathers.

Clumsy as first-time lovers we were. And though nothing of love lay between us, I could not recall a time I had felt as close to another as I felt to him in that moment.

YOU ARE WELL?

My voice in his mind, killing the uncomfortable silence between us.

I am well.

THEN HOLD ONTO ME, MONKEY-CHILD.

My wings spread, twenty feet, flickering with pale blue-white. His skin prickling with adrenaline, echoing in his thoughts. His arms about my neck, squeezing tight.

A swift breath before the plunge.

HOLD TIGHT.

Then flight.

Lord Tatsuya stood in his command tent, bathed in the bloody light of burning chi-lamps, staring at the map before him. He was decked in traditional samurai armor—an elaborately embossed suit of black iron, commissioned for him on his eighteenth naming day by his dear-departed Lord and father. Katana and wakizashi at his waist, a braid of long dark hair slung over one shoulder. Dawn waited two hours distant, but the battle ahead was already playing out in his mind, clear as a portrait hung upon the palace walls. The ring of steel. The smell of blood.

Soon.

Four days had passed since his father’s funeral, and already, the war had begun. After a bloody skirmish in the Broken Hills, his brother’s forces had retreated north, refusing to engage Tatsuya’s armies in the open field. Riku’s men were now almost boxed in on the slopes of the Junsei river valley. To the west lay the Four Sisters Mountains. To the north and east, the rushing flow of the Junsei herself. Though Riku had the high ground, there was also nowhere for him to run if the battle went badly (which, Maker and simple mathematics willing, it most certainly would), save for a single bridge spanning the Junsei, perhaps a mile east of their encampment. The Bear seemed caught between the hunter and the trap.

“What will you do, brother-mine?” Tatsuya wondered aloud.

One the four generals gathered about the table—a grizzled old wardog called Ukyo—tapped his finger on the map.

“If he has wisdom, he will remain on the high ground and make us pay dearly before we reach him. We may have numerical advantage, but numbers cannot wield blades.”

“My brother is no strategist on open ground,” the Bull said. “He will break for his keep in Blackstone province. Turtle there and make overtures to the other clanlords for aid.”

“There is no path north through the Four Sisters. And if he orders retreat across the Junsei, his forces will be bottlenecked on that bridge. Most will be slaughtered before they can cross.”

“As I said,” Tatsuya murmured. “No strategist. Riku has a head for duels and drunken diplomacy, not open warfare. He should have killed me when he had the chance.”

One of Tatsuya’s samurai stalked into the tent, armor clanking with an off-key tune, gleaming in the flickering light. He stopped before the council table, covered his fist and bowed low, the red tassel on his helm near touching the earth at his feet.

“Forgiveness, Lord Tatsuya. An emissary to see you.”

A raised eyebrow. “The Bear sends overture?”

“Not from Lord Riku, great Lord. The emissary is of the Lotus Guild.”

The generals about Tatsuya murmured, scowls running deep. Tatsuya himself stroked his chin, his face that of man confronted with an angry viper in his wedding bed.

He had been wondering when the Lotus Guildsmen would decide to place their bets. Tatsuya’s father had warned him often about their strange brotherhood, their arcane arts. Fueled by the wondrous chi—in turn derived from the blood lotus flowers from which the brethren drew their name—the machines the Guild created were wonders, to be sure. Harvester machines to bolster the productivity of breadbasket provinces. Generators providing power for everyday life. Railways and crude lighter-than-air ships the Lotusmen promised would revolutionize travel in Shima. Maker’s breath, even Tatsuya’s own supply lines were made up of motor-rickshaw convoys provided by the chi-mongers. But the wealth they were accumulating, the power such wealth brought them … any ruler of Shima would be right to dread getting into bed with them for fear of being suffocated as he slept.

Tatsuya turned to his lead general.

“Ukyo-san, ensure the men are ready to march. My brother may seek escape across the Junsei under cover of darkness. If he does so, he must pay in blood.”

“Hai!” The old general bowed, led his commanders from the tent.

Tatsuya turned to the samurai guard. “Send the Guildsman in.”

A low bow. The song of oiled armor, heavy tread. The samurai exited the tent, reappeared a few moments later with three other guards, a fourth figure corralled between them.

The Lotusman was clad in a suit of heavy brown leather, riveted with thick brass plates. It wore a sealed helm, some kind of breathing contraption made of snaking metal tubes strapped over its nose and mouth. A device of counting beads and transistors and wires was affixed to its chest, clicking and chirping and shuddering. Goggles of blood-red glass covered its eyes, bulbous and facetted. Tatsuya imagined it the gutter-born offspring of woman and wasp, clad in its brass and leather suit to hide its hideousness.

“Lord Tatsuya, Bull of the Tiger clan, son of Sataro, exalted Shōgun of Shima. We are honored you grant us audience.”

The thing’s voice was an insectoid hum, tinged with gravel and metal. It bowed low, almost simpering, lamplight glittering in its empty, bloodred eyes. Tatsuya wondered what kind of man could be found beneath that false skin. If a man could be found at all.

“And what name do I have the honor of addressing you by, Guildsman?”

“Call me Maru, great Lord.”

“Then I bid you speak swift, Maru-san. I mean no discourtesy, but I have a war to win this day.”

The Lotusman glanced at the map table, the carved figures arrayed atop it. As it breathed, bellows on its back rose with machine precision, hiss-whoosh, hiss-whoosh, a sharp, antiseptic smell slowly pervading the tent.

“You are well placed to win the battle, great Lord,” said the Guildsman. “But the war? We think not.”

“I was unaware the Lotus Guild boasted masters of military strategy, Maru-san?”

“Escape for your brother lies across the Junsei. Should he flee, the battle will be yours, but he will live to fight another day. To raise rebellion. Muster more troops. Recruit other clanlords to aid in his cause. In short, to be a thorn in your side.”

“You tell me nothing I do not know,” Tatsuya said. “Come, do me the honor of speaking plainly. What is it you wish of me?”

“I speak not of what the Guild wishes. I speak of what it offers.”

The Bull sighed. “Offer, then.”

“For some time now, our ironworks in the Midlands have been dedicating their resources to perfecting the art of war. We of the Lotus Guild wish to make ourselves valuable to the Shōgunate. To the man who sits on the Four Thrones. We offer you this token of our goodwill.”

The Lotusman touched the device upon its chest, slipping the counting beads back and forth in some unfathomable, intricate pattern. Another brass-clad figure soon entered the room, kneeling before Guildsman Maru and proffering a long metal box on upturned palms.

The box was unadorned, set with two plain brass clasps. Maru flipped the catches under the watchful stare of Tatsuya’s guards. More than one of the men let their hands drift closer to their sword hilts, tensing visibly as the Guildsman drew a sheathed katana from the box. The weapon looked strange—bulkier than a regular sword, its heavy hilt encumbered by some kind of motor …

“With your permission, great Lord?” the Lotusman asked.

Tatsuya folded his arms, distrust running deep as the molten blood of the earth. Yet finally, he grunted assent, nodded once. The Guildsman drew the katana from its scabbard, and Tatsuya saw the blade was adorned with hundreds of metal teeth, razor sharp and gleaming in the amber light. The blades were interlocked, like the spurs of the tree-shredders used to clearfell forests for lotus planting.

“What in the Maker’s name is that?” Tatsuya asked.

“We call it a chainkatana, great Lord.” The Guildsman pressed a button on the hilt, and the weapon sputtered to life, spat a blue-black plume of exhaust into the air. The Guildsman depressed what appeared to be a throttle, and the razored teeth on the blade began spinning and spitting a rasping tune. As if to demonstrate, the Guildsman swung the weapon at the box still proffered on his comrade’s palms, shearing the metal in two, filling the air with a blinding spray of sparks. The two halves clattered to the floor, the edges looking as though they had been savaged by dragon teeth.

“Maker’s breath…” Tatsuya breathed.

“I am glad it pleases you, great Lord,” the Guildsman rasped. “This is the first of many weapons we can bring to bear in your name. Soon we will have a fleet of warships that can sail the skies, rain death upon your enemies. Armor for your samurai, augmenting the wearer’s strength and making him impervious to most conventional weaponry. An army backed by the Lotus Guild will be unstoppable.”

With a bow, the Guildsman held out the strange weapon on upturned palms. Tatsuya took the proffered blade, swung it in one hand, testing the weight, gunning the throttle and listening to the blades sing a tune of murder.

Murder and victory.

Tatsuya looked up from the chainkatana, peered deep into the Guildsman’s bloodred lenses as if straining to see the real eyes beyond.

“And you will give these weapons to me?”

“The Lotus Guild offers much, Lord Tatsuya. We can outfit your troops with arms such as these. Sky-ships from our yards—only a handful at first, but understand more are being built as we speak. And lastly, we can offer you your brother’s head.”

Tatsuya’s eyes narrowed.

“Now you have my attention, Guildsman.”

“As you say.” Amusement buzzed in the Lotusman’s voice. “We have a crew of sappers at work beneath the water as we speak. The bridge over the river Junsei is being rigged with chi-bombs from our Midlands munitions works. The blast will be violent enough to collapse the structure, ancient stone though it may be, cutting off your brother’s escape route. You can win this war today. Literally, this very morning. With our help.”

“You would hand me my throne upon a brass platter?”

“In exchange for … considerations, great Lord.”

Tatsuya smiled, the Tiger blood in his veins running hot. “So we come to the rub at last. What do you ask in return for these marvels, Guildsman?”

“Trifling things, great Lord.” The Guildsman waved his hand. “We wish to decentralize our chi production. Perhaps some land in each clan capital upon which to build a refinery. Some hand in the administration of farms growing blood lotus. Perhaps a licensing system, controlled by the Guild to ensure quality and yield. Most importantly, we would seek to root out an impurity amongst Shima’s people. A deformity, if you will.”

Tatsuya’s eyebrow raised in silent question.

“Those who speak to the minds of beasts,” Maru offered. “Yōkai-kin, they are named. Our scriptures speak against them. We would seek permission to … cleanse the land of their taint.”

“And in exchange for these trifles, you offer my brother’s head?”

The smile in the Guildsman’s voice was obvious now. “We would, my Lord.”

“My twin brother.” Tatsuya took one step closer to the Lotusman. “A man with whom I shared a womb. The son of a Shōgun. A descendant of great Kazumitsu himself.”

A pause, filled with the empty hiss-woosh of the Guildsman’s bellows.

“My Lord?”

“Think you, the blood of the Kazumitsu is to be bought with trifles?”

hiss-woosh

“Think you, I would enlist the aid of mechanics and artisans—not a single soldier or samurai amongst you—to help win me a war I am already winning?”

“Great Lord, I—”

Tatsuya gunned the chainkatana’s throttle.

hiss-woosh

He could swear he heard the Lotusman gulp.

“Lord Tatsuya, I counsel—”

The Bull raised the weapon, blades hovering an inch or two from the Guildsman’s throat. He revved the engine again, watching the lanternlight gleam on growling teeth, noting with grudging admiration that the Lotusman did not flinch.

“Be at ease, Guildsman,” said Tatsuya. “I am not the sort who murders an emissary, no matter how grave the disrespect I or my family are shown. Count yourself fortunate you did not offer this same deal to my brother. The Bear does not share my fondness for clemency.”

hiss-woosh

“You do not offer me a triumph, chi-monger. I have already won this war. And you do not offer me my brother’s head, for he is already dead. What you offer is a swifter victory. The avoidance of a siege. And that is worth some consideration, surely, for I have no stomach to starve my own twin to death inside the walls of Blackstone Keep.” Tatsuya met the Guildsman’s eyes. “But I will not give all you ask.”

Condemned prisoners choose their last meals with less care than the Lotusman used to choose his next words.

“That you give us anything at all is truly pleasing, great Lord…”

“This talk of a licensing system. Quality assurance. In this I see wisdom. But you will not build your refineries in my cities. Keep your tarworks and smokestacks out in the wilds where I need not inhale the stench. Nor will I help you ‘cleanse’ any of my citizens for a harmless accident of birth. And I will require approval on any further military projects your Artificers engage in, before the work begins. It is illegal for a commoner to carry a blade longer than a knife in these lands. I cannot fathom how your masters consider it acceptable to be building warships and motorized swords without the Shōgun’s permission.”

“I will … need to report these requests to my superiors.”

Tatsuya’s eyes narrowed. “Requests?”

“Commands, great Lord.”

“We have time. The Bear has nowhere to run—once your sappers blow the Junsei bridge, of course. I will consider this demolition ample apology for your threats against a son of the Kazumitsu line. Memories of your temerity will sink into the Junsei with the broken stone.”

“I will give the order to blow the charges as soon as they are in place, great Lord.”

“Good.” As much warmth lay in the Bull’s smile as in a drift of snow. “I look forward to hearing your superior’s response.”

“… Hai.”

The Lotusman bowed low, backing away with his comrade. Out of the tent and out of Tatsuya’s sight, leaving the young Lord in possession of the growling sword. The Bull’s gaze followed their departure, drifting finally down to the weapon idling quietly in his palm. His murmur was soft as bloodstained silk.

“Lowborn gardeners. Thinking to stake a claim in the rulership of this nation?”

He gunned the chainkatana throttle, tongue tingling with the kiss of blue-black smoke.

“Not while I draw breath.”

The monkey-child scab lay below us, sundered by the flow of three sluggish brown rivers. A seething sprawl, little nests of stone and clay and glass, stacked upon each other with no order or reason. A stench drifted up from its nethers, a blue-black haze reminding me of the stinking mouthfuls of black and blood my family coughed as they died, mixed with rot and rust and spice and excrement. I shied away, instinct bidding me turn and fly, fly away from this rats’ nest and the sea of pink and mewling flesh rolling within it.

What is wrong, friend Koh?

NOT YOUR FRIEND, MONKEY-CHILD. WISE TO REMEMBER THIS.

If you will not be mine, I am still yours. That your thoughts are troubled troubles me.

SCAB BELOW US. YOU LIVE LIKE THIS. CRAWLING OVER ONE ANOTHER LIKE MAGGOTS ON CORPSES.

We call them cities.

NOT CARE WHAT YOU CALL.

Do you see the palace? It will be a grand building. Beautiful.

ALL LOOK SAME TO ME. HOLE IN GROUND. MONKEY-CHILDREN EVERYWHERE. NOISE AND STINK AND ROT AND DEATH. THIS PLACE WRETCHED.

Though it shamed me, I felt fear swell at the sight of all those monkey-children, innumerable and hungry. The same fear my Khan must have known—the fear of a predator in the face of an army of ants. No matter how big the tiger, how sharp the bear’s claws, a million mouths can eat the largest of meals.

Friend Koh—

NOT FRIEND!

Great Koh, I will know the palace when I see it.

CANNOT SEE, FOOLISH BOY. BLIND. WEAK. MEWLING. WRE—

I can see if you let me. I can see through your eyes.

I growled, long and low, gliding in wide, aimless circles above that filth-choked pit. The thought of the boy peering out from behind my eyes was an unwelcome one. A frightful one. All this new to me. I had never left the Four Sisters before and now, here I was, some mad, blind boychild astride my back, buoyed by some insane notion of prophecy. A city full of lice below me, probably the same source of sickness that killed my kin. And I was about to dive down into it?

You will not even know I am there, Koh.

THEN WHY NOT JUST TAKE? WHY YOU ASK?

The boy pressed his hands to my feathers, stroked as gentle as a cub’s first breath.

Friends ask.

I growled again. Ashamed of my fear. Ashamed I had flown all this way and balked at the last. And so I breathed deep, heart all a-thunder against my ribs. Nodding assent.

DO IT, THEN. DO AND BE DONE.

I felt nothing, just as he promised; no sensation of intrusion or invasion. But I heard the boy gasp, felt his breath come quicker, a warm spice of joy and thrill in his thoughts spilling out into my own. I realized this would have been the first he had seen of the world from the air. The first moment he had witnessed all there was laid out below him, stretched from the end of one horizon to the other. The vastness of it all, the tiny lives and tiny moments caught beneath the burning sun, all washing away between the permanence of sky and earth.

All.

It is … beautiful.

SO YOU SAY ABOUT EVERYTHING, BOY.

To one who lives in the dark, even the tiniest spark is a blessing.

He ran his hands down my neck, a blinding smile in his thoughts.

Thank you for this, great Koh.

PALACE. YOU SEE?

I see it. The building surrounded by gardens. There on the eastern slopes.

HOLD ON THEN. TIME AGAINST US. SKYMEET SPEAKING, EVEN NOW. MUST BE SWIFT.

I dipped my wings, dropping as a stone, feeling the boy’s fear and exhilaration, fingers sunk to the knuckles in the feathers at my neck, a cry boiling inside his belly and finally spilling up over his teeth. A whoop of joy, snatched from his mouth by the rushing wind, lingering long enough to spill over into me. I cannot explain it. Perhaps it was the link of thought between us. Perhaps I had forgotten the simple joy of the skies. But somehow, if only for a moment, his joy became mine.

We swooped into the thing the boy named palace—a towering nest of stone stained by the blue-black pall lingering in the streets. Gardens with a vague and sickly air, a brook babbling somewhere amidst the graying green. Monkey-samurai with metal skins and shiny sticks rushing from the surrounding walls, from within the structure itself, aiming their pointed steel twigs in our direction. I roared once in warning as we came in to land, gravel crunching beneath my talons. Wings spread, hackles raised in threat, tail lashing as a whip before frightened livestock. And I felt the boy in my mind again, calm as summer dawn, filling me with the same.

Fear nothing, great Koh. I will speak. They will listen.

The boy slipped off my back, spoke with loud and clear voice. I could not understand the shaping of his words. Twisting and snarled in my ears; the language of bleating goats and filth-clad hogs. He spoke long, back and forth with the little samurai, voices rising and falling. It seemed the boy grew distressed for a time, thoughts filled with pleading, but finally some understanding filled the place where the jabber-words had rung. And the boy fell still, watching through my eyes as a handful of the men in their flimsy tin suits slipped back inside the nest, leaving us beneath the watchful stare of perhaps two dozen more.

WHAT HAPPEN?

The Shōgun is dead. He died four days ago.

NO NEW MONKEY-KHAN?

His sons do battle as we speak for the right to sit on the throne. Civil war is raging to the north, my friend. Brother against brother.

STRONGEST RULE. THRONES BOUGHT WITH BLOOD. OLD KHAN MUST DIE FOR NEW KHAN TO RISE. FOR US AND YOU.

One son seems to be favorite. His name is Tatsuya, though folk call him the Bull. He chases his brother north, but has left his wife here to speak in his stead. That he controls the Imperial Palace speaks well for his chances of ruling the country.

AND SHE SPEAK YOU?

I think—

The doors to the monkey-child nest groaned wide, revealing a cadre of samurai in tabards the color of blood, armor the hue of midnight, hard, narrowed eyes. Long sticks of folded steel, bows and quivers brimming to burst with arrows. Marching four by four by four. And behind them walked a monkey-child female, smaller and sleeker, long hair blacker than the warrior’s armor bound in needlessly complicated knots and braids.

She looked soft. Weak. Adorned and decorated, paint upon her face. I noted all the male monkey-children wore iron, carried steel, and yet the only weapon she bore was a fan fashioned of gold. And yet, in Jun’s chest, still I felt the twist of a blade, as surely as she had thrust one between his ribs. A sudden catch in his breath, a surge of butterflies in his stomach murmuring to mine. A sense of recollection, dusty with the weight of years. As he looked upon the monkey-child woman through my eyes, sharp as eagles, hungry as tigers, I think at last he remembered what true beauty was.

He had seen it before.

The woman stood atop stone stairs leading up into the nest, robes embroidered with prowling tigers. There was something akin to those jungle cats in her bearing; the way she looked us over, we two. Not astonished and bewildered as all the men about her, slack-jawed in their metal suits. No, she was predatory. Calculating. Perhaps even hungry.

They spoke then. The boy and the woman. Words I did not understand. At one point, Jun laughed, bowed so low he nearly fell forward on his face. I could not fathom why. But the female spoke with a voice of strength, hiding a blood-red smile behind the fan of gold. And finally, she stepped aside, and gestured to her nest of stone and clay.

She invites me inside. To speak further.

TRUST HER?

She seems impressed by you. I do not believe she would risk harm against me. And remember, friend Koh, we have prophecy on our side.

I NOT GO INTO NEST WITH NO SKY ABOVE. NOT ARASHITORA WAY.

Will you wait for me, then?

I WAIT. SICKNESS MUST END. NO MORE ARASHITORA DIE. YOU TELL HER.

I will. Fear not.

FEAR? FOOLISH BOY. GO. MAKE YOUR NOISE. SPEAK YOUR SPEAKINGS. THEN RETURN WITH TELLING OF WHO I MUST KILL.

Perhaps we need not kill anyone?

I snorted, snarled; a noise as close to laughter as my kind know. Looking him over, wondering if he saw himself as I did—small and pale and eyeless. Knowing all about his future, and yet knowing nothing at all.

NOW WHO FEARS, BOY?

The Junsei bridge rumbled as a fat man with a bellyful of bad clams. Trembling in its boots, the water about it rippling with bone-deep vibrations. And with no more warning, the stone supports blew apart like fireworks on a feast day, flame surging magnesium bright in the predawn still. Stone and mortar and dust spraying hundreds of feet skyward, illuminated by the brief flame screaming its birthsong below. Yawning, moaning, sighing, the arches collapsed, one by one by one, crashing into the mud-brown flow with a sodden roar.

Tatsuya watched from a small hill beside his command tent, turned his spyglass to his brother’s encampment on the hill. A flurry of motion, distant cries, a thousand fingers pointing to the column of smoke marking the beginning of their ends.

The young Bull turned to his first general. “Ukyo-san, send emissary to my brother. Tell Lord Riku I offer full amnesty to any of his troops who now surrender. Tell him I will guarantee his wife’s safety, and that of his unborn child should he now lay down arms.”

The old general nodded. “He will refuse, of course, great Lord.”

“Of course. But I will not have history say I was merciless in victory.”

The general smiled and bowed. “You will make an admirable Shōgun, great Lord.”

“Time will tell.”

Tatsuya saw Maru the Guildsman approaching over uneven ground, his brass-and-leather suit hissing and whirring, bloody eyes aglow. The Guildsman stopped before the Bull, bowed low, hand over fist.

“Great Lord, my superiors find your conditions most agreeable, and humbly thank you for your gracious considerations. We will aid your noble endeavors in exchange for quality controls and licensing over blood lotus production in Shima. We have drawn up a document,” here the Lotusman proffered a scroll case marked with the Guild’s lotus bloom sigil, “outlining the finer points of the arrangement.”

“Leave it with my scribes,” Tatsuya said. “I will mark it once your side of the bargain is fulfilled. On this you have my word. I presume the vow of a son of Kazumitsu is acceptable in place of some scribblings upon a page?”

“… Hai, great Lord,” Maru rasped.

“Good. Now where are these wonders you promised me?”

The Lotusman pointed west, his voice a graveled rasp.

“They approach, great Lord.”

Tatsuya squinted into the brightening sky, burned by the glow of the rising sun. He could see blunt silhouettes approaching—what looked like tall ships floating on the clouds. In place of sails, the ships had large inflatable balloons, propellers at their flanks, the song of their engines like the hum of distant insects. He had seen inflatable craft before, of course—the Guild had been experimenting with lighter-than-air ships for decades. But this was the first he’d ever seen a ship so obviously outfitted for war. The snouts of what looked like black-powder cannon jutting from their flanks. Armor plating. Faster than any airship he’d laid eyes on.

He found himself counting his good fortune that the Guild had been so easily cowed.

“Chainkatana and wakizashi,” said Maru. “Suits of armor augmented by chi-powered motors. Enough to arm every one of your samurai, and cut your brother’s forces down like grass.”

“See them distributed amongst my elite,” Tatsuya said. “General Ukyo will assist you. We attack within the hour.”

“As you command.” Maru bowed. “Shōgun.”

“We have no time, Lady Ami. No time left at all.”

Jun knelt in what felt like a vast space, cool breeze echoing in distant recesses. The whisper of silken amulets moving in the wind. The distant murmur of servants’ footsteps. He could smell the tea placed before him, hear the soft breathing of the woman kneeling opposite. Head turned, eyes downcast, mind still clouded with the recollection of her face.

Like a portrait from the days when he still had sight; the work of the masters he had studied before the sun took his eyes away. She was smoke and coal. Alabaster and red silk. Lips the color of heartsblood. Irises so black it seemed night itself pooled behind her lashes. The image he had seen through Koh’s eyes, eagle-sharp and tinged with predatory hunger … he feared he would never be rid of it. The music of her voice. The shape of her face.

All this he remembered.

And yet now, without the thunder tiger, without his little sparrow, he dwelled in darkness. His other senses sharpened, yet no compensation for the loss of his eyes. Clouded by the urgency coiled tight in his belly, pulsing with every beat of his heart, despite the surety that all this was happening exactly as it was meant to. He could feel other presences in the room: a maidservant introduced as Chiyoko, now pouring the tea, guards lining the walls, armor clanking, breathing soft. The quiet creak of the rafters above his head.

Lady Ami’s voice was low, smoky, his skin prickling at every note.

“Your name is Jun?” she asked.

“So my mother named me, great Lady. Before the sickness took her.”

“From what clan do you hail?”

He licked his lips. Forced himself to be patient. Courteous. Calm.

“I am Fox clan, Lady,” he replied. “Born and raised.”

“Another Kitsune.” Jun heard a smile creep into the Lady’s voice, muffled by the fan she no doubt covered it with. “I am pleased to enjoy the company of a clansman once again. It has been many years since I saw my homeland.”

“In this, we are equals, Lady Ami-san.”

“Then you were not born blind, Jun-san?”

Images of a vast garden. Laughing children. A girl who smiled at him as—

Jun shook his head to banish the memories.

“No, Lady. I began losing my sight when I was ten. It took two years to depart. My grandmother blamed the pollution in the sky. The haze that makes Lady Sun burn brighter and hotter. I am told many folk wear goggles now in the north, to protect them from my fate.”

“That is very sad.”

“Happier than some. The sickness grows worse with each passing year. It claims lives, not just eyes. My mother and father both fell to it. The people of my village call it blacklung. And it strikes not only humans. The phoenix sicken and die. The mujina and tanuki of the forests, the kappa of the river and lakes, even the thunder tigers—all of them are falling prey.”

“We hear rumor of this sickness you speak of, Jun-san,” said Lady Ami. “I remember folk of my father’s court falling to it when I was younger. But we had no notion it had grown to such a threat. My father-in-law’s illness, the matter of succession … the Shōgun’s court has been consumed by it in recent times.”

“I fear the Lotus Guild is to blame for…”

His voice drifted off as a familiar shape in his mind … no, two … coalesced out of the mists at the edge of his senses and stalked forward into the light. All purring and soft velvet, tread like a faint breeze on the polished boards. He reached out with the Kenning, their thoughts calling to his, recognizing them as cats, male and female, slinking to their mistress’s side and watching him with curious eyes. He touched their minds, bid them greeting, feeling their delight as the Lady Ami ran her fingernails through their fur, their sensual shivers flowing into him.

“These are your cats, Lady? What are their names?”

A long pause, the press of three stares upon his empty eyes.

“Whisper and Silk,” the Lady finally replied.

“Very pretty.”

“You have excellent ears, Jun-san. Can you hear what color undergarments I wear?”

A playful tone in the Lady’s voice, soft laughter as his cheeks flushed at the imposition of thoroughly unbecoming thoughts. He shivered again as she stroked the tomcat’s spine. Despite his upbringing, he felt a novice. Provincial and ignorant in the face of this Lady’s parlor games.

She has changed so much …

“I hear the thoughts of beasts, Lady. The cats in your lap. The thunder tiger outside.”

“… You are yōkai-kin?”

“Hai.”

“I have never met one of your ilk before. I though perhaps you were legend.”

“So it might one day be said of phoenix or henge and tanuki. So might it be said of all the spirit beasts of this land, if the Lotus Guild and their sickness are not stopped.”

The Lady cleared her throat, attention refocused, the cats in her lap forgotten.

“The Guild grows in power daily,” she said. “They buy ministers and magistrates with the iron coin their mechanical marvels bring them. They could be dangerous enemies. You have proof of their involvement in this sickness, Jun-san?”

“I do not, Lady. I am … that is to say, I was a simple artist. But my grandmother is a wise woman, and she is convinced the Guild is to blame. Her village stands at the edge of a murmuring forest, by the banks of a chuckling stream. But the water flows from a Guild factory upriver, and the thicker their smoke grows, the sicker people become. The tanuki I spoke to in the Iishi forests said similar. The phoenix also. And why else do the Guildsmen wear masks? Those suits? Why do they not breathe the same air we do unless they know it is toxic?”

“You were an artist?”

Jun frowned, confused as to why that, of all he had said, might catch the Lady’s attention.

“Hai,” he finally nodded. “My father was a hunter. But when my sight began failing and it became clear I would never follow in his footsteps, my mother thought to teach me of the arts. Poetry. Painting. Until the sun took my eyes completely, at least, and the sickness them besides.”

“Your tale grows sadder still, Jun-san. It has the seeming of a great ballad. A song for the ages. A painter struck blind by the Sun Goddess. A poet, never to write again. All you need is some unrequited love and perhaps a tragic death…”

“Please, Lady,” Jun said. “You make jest at my expense. But the spirit beasts are dying in droves. The thunder tigers are planning to leave Shima. We have only days until they decide whether or not to abandon us to our fate. And the prophecy spoke of their importance.”

Jun could hear the skepticism in the Lady’s voice. “Prophecy?”

“My grandmother has the Sight, great Lady. She foretold a child of her bloodline—a child Kitsune-born—would save these islands from certain destruction.”

“And you … believe yourself this child, Jun-san?”

“I have no living kin, save her and my grandfather. If anyone is to fulfill the prophecy, it must be me. But we have only days. So I beg forgiveness if I seem ill at ease sitting here drinking this lovely tea.”

“You ride one of the beasts already, Jun-san. Why do you need the Shōgun’s help at all?”

“In Grandmother’s prophecy, the child would ride with an army of thunder tigers at his back. But the arashitora will not help if we do not help ourselves. If they are to stand against the Guild, the Shōgun must stand beside them. The arashitora will not fight our battles for us.”

“There is no Shōgun to stand against the chi-mongers, Jun-san.”

“Will your husband be victorious against his brother, great Lady? Claim the Four Thrones of Shima as his own?”

“Nothing in this life is certain, Jun-san. Least of all the battle between Bear and Bull.”

“My grandmother taught me differently, Lady Ami. She taught me to believe I would save this place from itself. And I intend to do just that.”

“Excuse me, Lady,” the maidservant said. “I must fetch more tea.”

Jun heard the girl rise, retreat with short, clipped steps across the floorboards. He felt the cats purr in his head, their chests thrumming, the Lady Ami stroking each in turn, watching him in silence. He felt his blindness keenly, longing for the little sparrow on his shoulder. He could look through the cats’ eyes to be certain, but then he would see only himself. Not her face. Not her eyes, no doubt locked on his, those ruby lips pressed thin in thought as she watched and he remembered—

“I agreed to speak to you out of respect for the beast you rode, young master Jun. My father raised my sister and I on tales of the Stormdancers. But this talk of prophecy and destiny … it will carry no weight with my husband, should he prove victor against his brother. And Lord Riku will care less for it still. Regardless, it is doubtful the war will be decided within days, and days are all you have before the arashitora leave.”

Jun heard the serving girl reach the doors.

Close them softly.

Slide a bolt into place.

He frowned, head tilted. Rising slowly to his feet.

“I ask forgiveness if this displeases,” Lady Ami continued. “But if the only proof—”

Jun grasped his walking stick in both hands. With a click and a flourish, he drew his fists apart, revealing the three feet of gleaming folded steel hidden inside the haft.

“Master Jun—” the Lady warned, a tremor in her voice.

Jun leaped across the tea service, sending the pot and cups crashing to the floor. Lady Ami rose to her feet and shrank back in sudden fright, clutching the small tantō blade hidden in the drum bow at her waist. The guards about the room cried out in alarm at the sight of Jun’s hidden blade, raising their tasseled spears and charging toward the blind boy, intent on protecting their mistress.

As such, they missed the assassins crawling in the rafters above.

A shuddering pop! pop! pop! pop! rang out overhead, the air filled with dozens upon dozens of gleaming shuriken stars. The guards fell, bloody and screaming, the whistling blades shearing through skin and leather, puncturing iron breastplates. Lady Ami cursed as Jun pushed her back against a pillar, swiping at the air with his thin sword. Sparks flew, blinding bursts of light, the boy moving as a field of long grass in a rolling winter wind. His blade struck the shuriken from the air, one, two, three, head tilted, eyes closed, brow furrowed, pain twisting his features as one of the stars struck his arm, another grazed his cheek. Blood flowing now, bright and red, and still he moved amidst the hail, sweeping his blade as if a conductor’s baton, and the gleaming death sprayed toward him, his orchestra.

A series of hollow clicks and the room fell silent, save for the Lady’s shuddering breath, the moans of dying guards. And from the ceiling, long, thin-limbed shapes unfurled—men, clad in shadows, strange weapons with flat barrels in their hands. Loose black cloth swathing their forms, a strip of flesh showing through their cowls, eyes covered in goggles of dark red glass.

They sheathed their hollow weapons at their waists, drew long katana from their backs, the blades studded with spinning, growling teeth. Jun frowned, the engines’ growls filling his ears, clouding the assassins’ footsteps as they crept closer. He felt the Lady Ami at his back, heard her draw her own blade, ragged breath, steel in her voice.

“There are eight of them,” she whispered.

“I know.” A slow nod. “Can you use that tantō you carry?”

“I am no master like you, Jun-san,” Ami breathed. “Should we live through this, I would hear the telling of how a blind painter became a sword-saint…”

“Stay behind me, then. I will protect you with my life.”

Soft footsteps as the figures gathered about them. The Lady’s voice, softer still.

“My thanks, Jun-san.”

“No thanks necessary,” the boy smiled. “I am in no danger.”

“There is a fine line between confidence and arrogance, young master.”

“Not arrogance, Lady. I simply cannot die today.”

He flashed her a winning grin.

“I have not saved the world yet.”

The assassins closed, growling swords raised high in their hands. Were this some pantomime or puppet show on the streets of your scabs, monkey-child, the assailants would have come one at a time, neat and orderly, to be impaled in proper fashion upon the young and dashing hero’s blade to the hymn of the cheering crowd. And it is true that, for some astonishing reason, the first two murderers did approach in a rather conventional array, one slightly behind the other, perhaps lulled into false confidence by the milk-white orbs behind the boy’s lashes.

Jun side-stepped a scything, downward blow, the same hummingbird speed he had used to shame me before my kin serving him now in an arena just as deadly. He leaned in close, below another sweeping strike, and with a bright note of razored steel and the sharp clipped intake of his assailant’s breath, he pushed his blade in and out of the assassin’s chest, one, twice, spinning on the spot and planting his boot square in his foe’s belly.

The bleeding, punctured lump of carrion flew back into his comrades, scattering them long enough for Jun to swipe his blade across the second assassin’s throat. Bright arterial spray painted the boy’s face crimson, the Lady Ami gritting her teeth to stifle her gasp of horror. And then all became chaos, no form or order to it, just six snarling blades filling the air. Jun pushing Lady Ami back, ducking below one strike, leaping up onto the pillar and springing away to dodge the next four. Hurling his scabbard into one assassin’s face, divesting another of his hamstrings. The sting of burning exhaust in his nostrils, choking his lungs. The chainkatana growl utterly stifling his sense of hearing, leaving him secretly thanking the gods for the two cats who even now lingered at the room’s periphery, bubbling with vague concern over the fate of their mistress.

It was through their eyes he saw.

But it was to my mind he called.

I had become bored, and more than a little disgruntled, I will confess. Sitting beneath the thin shade of a struggling sugi tree and snarling whenever one of the terrified serving staff looked my way. I had been seriously considering taking to the skies to escape the gut-churning stink when I heard the boy’s cry of alarm in my mind, raising the hackles on my back, the threat he felt somehow spilling over into me and setting my skin to bristling.

Friend Koh! Help us!

I cannot explain the sensation. Your tongue is crude and shapeless, monkey-child, and your words have brittle meaning. I can only say that, though I knew the voice to be his, somehow I felt the threat to be mine. That I stood there, in the room with him, the vague weight of his blade in my hands. Perhaps it was the time he had spent in my eyes? Perhaps the soft kinship we shared, both orphans, both outcasts, both alone? I could not say then, and now, it fills me to sadness to dwell in those thoughts. So instead of the why, I will speak of the what.

The doors of the monkey-nest burst apart like glass beneath my weight, and I pounded down the corridors, shredding the floorboards to splinters as I came. There was no sky over my head, no sun or moon on my back, and the wrongness of this place struck me to my heart. Stone and clay and twigs, vast boxes filled with stink and pretty, pointless trinkets. But on I ran, great loping strides, wings crackling with fresh lightning. Through another set of doors, smashing a wall to dust and ruin, closing in on his thoughts like moth approaches candleflame. Through another wall and at last to him—the little blind boy and the painted monkey-girl, their backs to a pillar of stone, surrounded on all sides by men in thin and gleaming black, slivers of growling steel in their hands.

I roared, bellowed, thundered, pounding the boards with my feet and the air with my wings. A great sonic boom birthed at my feathertips, splitting the floor asunder, blasting three of the assassins to mush and guts as they turned to face me. And herein lies the strangest thing—the sensation in which your words most dismally fail. For as we fought, the boy and I, as I stepped up beside him and cleaved the black-clad men to ribbons, just as he furnished them with a bevy of new and weeping holes, I lost all sense of myself. Not to say I was stricken with some red rage blinding me to the battle’s flow, no. Simply to say I somehow lost track of where I concluded and where we commenced. I could feel him in my mind. Behind my eyes. Flowing with me and through me. And as we moved, I thought perhaps I knew why the old tales called those who rode the backs of my kin Stormdancers. For that, it seemed, was the closest word you have to describe what we did in the midst of that song of screams and blades and blood.

Dancing.

And when we were done, standing with burning lungs and trembling fists, him behind my eyes as I looked him over, pale and bloodied and breathless, that oneness faded. That sensation of being lost in another, of being more … it evaporated like early morning mist with the rising of the sun. And it surprised me, how much I longed to feel it again.

Thank you, friend Koh.

YOU BLEED. YOU HURT?

A scratch or two. No matter.

MONKEY-KHAN’S MATE?

“You are well, Lady?” the boy asked.

“I…” Lady Ami looked herself over, eyes wide. “I believe so…”

“Who are these men?” The boy gestured to the assassins.

“I know not.” The Lady stooped, picking up one of their growling swords. “I have never seen a blade such as this. But my husband must be informed immediately…”

“I can take a message to him when I—”

“And have me wait here patiently to be attacked again? I think not, master Jun.” She glanced at the locked door the serving girl had left by, the iron bolt trapping them inside. “It seems those closest to me have been bought and sold, and Lord Riku is not content to fight this battle on the field alone.” Here she looked at the slaughtered men about her, dead in puddles of cooling blood. “If my own bodyguard can be slaughtered to a man by these assailants, who will protect me when next they strike?”

“What do you suggest, Lady Ami?” Jun frowned. “I cannot remain here to protect you.”

The woman looked me over, from the tuft of my tail to the tip of my beak. Her hands were shaking from the fright, face paling at the stink of blood and excrement daubed in the air. And yet there was iron in her voice. Steel in her gaze.

“As I said, my father raised me on tales of the Stormdancers, young master Jun.”

Her smile, the curve of a newly sharpened blade.

“And there looks to be room on your friend’s back for two…”

The sun was a burning eye in the heavens, and the Bull’s armies were arrayed for the kill. Orderly rows of bushimen in iron breastplates, long naginata spears clutched in gauntleted hands. A legion of horse-borne archers on the flanks, short hankyū bows upon their backs, quivers of arrows at their waists. And in the vanguard, the warriors to lead the charge. Fully one hundred samurai, long tabards and tassels of bloody Tiger red. Guild-crafted suits of hissing, clanking, whirring iron, spitting chi fumes into the air. Growling chainkatana and wakizashi in their fists, the hum of a hundred motors murdering the prebattle hush. Their eyes narrowed—against the fumes or the glare or the rush of the oncoming slaughter, who could say?

Lord Tatsuya sat astride a white stallion at the rear of his forces, blue-black air rattling about the poor beast’s lungs. A tall banner pole rose from his back, set with the sigil of the Tiger clan and the scrolling kanji of the Kazumitsu line. He had declined the Guildsmen’s offer of a suit of chi-powered armor, preferring instead to wear the traditional ō-yoroi his father had commissioned for him. It seemed fitting; to claim the rule of the Shōgunate in gear that had been gifted him by the former Shōgun himself. Lips curling with contempt, he glanced up at the sky-ships hovering overhead, their propellers a muted drone, great bladders creaking with the press of the hydrogen inside. The Guild loitered above the battlefield like carrion birds, poised to swoop down and feast on his brother’s fresh-killed corpse.

The Bull turned his gaze from the Guild vessels, took one deep, rasping breath in the suffocating air. And raising his hand, as a puppeteer on the marionette’s strings, he gave the order for the slaughter to begin.

A cry rang down his lines, the samurai vanguard surging up the hill with great, leaping strides. Already, the sight of Tatsuya’s fiercest would have been enough to make an ordinary soldier quail. He could not imagine what the men on Riku’s front lines thought as they saw those metal-clad engines of death charging up the hill toward them. Iron masks shaped in the likeness of oni demons. Arrows falling among them like spring showers, turned aside by the Guild suits or simply shattered on the embossed iron. A roar building amongst the charging samurai, underscored by the growling snarl of their chainblades raised high. Farther up the hill beneath the wooden rain they charged, close enough now to see the terror on their enemies’ faces.

Tatsuya noted Riku had pulled back his own samurai from the front lines, meeting the charge with a legion of peasant soldiers; a bristling thicket of long spears outthrust against the oncoming tide. It was a sensible enough stratagem—to see what havoc these new technological terrors could wreak among his chaff before he committed his best forces to the fray. Their commander’s wisdom, however, proved little solace for Riku’s spearmen. Tatsuya’s samurai began the grisly task of hacking them to pieces, leather and thin iron plates melting like snow under those awful, growling swords, the spears no more use against the Guild suits than toothpicks against an iron cliff.

Tatsuya raised his hand to his signalman, preparing to send in his infantry as soon as Riku’s archers were neutralized. It would only be moments before his vanguard smashed the lines—then his bushimen could proceed uphill without being riddled with arrow fire. He could hear screams and agonized wails now rising above the rumble of gunning motors and snarling swords. The Guild engines wreaking slaughter among the—

Wait …

A hush falling over the carnage up the hill, the bass and bottom end falling away from the bloody symphony. Tatsuya frowned, squinting in the burning glare, clawing goggles of polarized glass down over his eyes to dim the burning light. He could see figures falling—armored figures—chainblades tumbling from nerveless fingers amidst cries of rage and despair.

General Ukyo stood tall in his stirrups, hand up against the sun.

“What the hells is happening?”

“Listen,” Tatsuya said.

Ukyo titled his head to the song of murder on the wind. His face paled as he looked to the Bull.

“The armor,” Tatsuya whispered, glancing at the Guild ships floating overhead. “The motors have fallen still…”

Black shapes fell from the silhouettes overhead, pushed over the railings by brass-clad hands—barrels lit with burning fuses. The first landed amidst his archers, a second landing a split-second afterward, Tatsuya’s voice rising up in a roar as a deafening blast ripped through his men. A burst of scalding air hit the Bull’s face, momentarily dazzling, the thunderous whump of a dozen more explosions tearing through his lines like summer fires through waves of dead grass. Dread realization seized him by the throat, cold fear unfurling in his belly.

“We are betrayed!” he cried.

Another explosion, another, the bombardment ripping up his lines and leaving wailing, bleeding pulps of meat and bone in its wake. Soldiers, warriors, brave men all, reduced to blubbering children. Clutching their missing pieces with bloody hands or rolling about in warm, wet puddles of themselves. Screaming horses. Thundering, flaming hooves. Fires blazing, burning, choking smoke, yet more terror tumbling from the sky-ships overhead and bursting upon his shell-shocked troops.

“Great Lord, beware!” Ukyo cried.

The old general lunged forward and slapped Tatsuya’s horse, just as a bone-shattering explosion erupted behind the pair. Ukyo was blasted to pieces, the shockwave hurling Tatsuya to the ground, the bannerpole at his back almost snapping, his colors dragged through the dirt. Another explosion nearby, shrapnel flying, the Bull crying out as blood-soaked clods of earth rained down around him. The sounds of slaughter on the hill, the wails of samurai in lifeless iron suits being chopped to pieces by Riku’s own elite. Tatsuya felt his gorge rising, staggering to his feet, watching his few remaining archers incinerated by another blinding burst of flame.

“Retreat!” he roared at the top of his lungs, the word bitter and black upon his tongue. “Maker’s breath, we are betrayed! Retreat! Retreat!”

The Bull ran to his horse, wide-eyed and bloodied. Though terrified, the stallion was war-trained, holding its nerve long enough for its master to scramble atop its back, kick hard in the stirrups. But where could they go? Somewhere to shelter from the bombardment. High ground, more easily defended. Roofs of stone above their head.

He looked west. West toward those four snow-clad peaks rising from tumbledown hills.

“Ride!” Tatsuya roared. “Make for the Sisters! Ride, damn you!”

Men all about him, scrabbling for horses or simply breaking on foot. Weapons thrown aside, breastplates hurled to the ground—anything and everything they could do to move swifter, escape the barrage from those accursed ships overhead. The bombardment had paused; thick, billowing plumes of smoke shrouding the field in choking black. But Riku’s forces would quickly be finished with the slaughter on the hill, soon to be set like hounds upon his trail. So swiftly, the hunter had become the hunted.

Tatsuya squinted up the rise, fancied he caught a glimpse of a tall man wading amidst the slaughter, a banner bearing the Kazumitsu sigil on his back. The same armor Tatsuya wore, black embossed iron, now slick with blood—a gift from their father on the day they became men. And now Riku had whored himself to the chi-mongers.

What had he promised them? What had Riku sold of himself to buy this bloody victory?

“Godsdamn you for a fool, brother,” Tatsuya murmured.

And kicking at his stallion’s flanks, the Bull turned and fled.

Clouds dipped in sunset, sky the color of a belly wound, just as difficult to look at. The stains of the sickness seeping into the very air around us, turning all to red. Below us, farmlands. Fields for miles. From the blur of one horizon to the next, pressed up against that wounded sky. Between the wheat and corn and rice, I saw long rippling swathes of lotus blossoms. Snaking through the weeping land like rivers of blood. Deeper and wider by the year.

Jun and Ami sat astride my shoulders, the Lady pressed against the boy’s back. Her hands about his waist sent a thrill humming in his veins, adrenaline souring his tongue, and through the sliver of himself the boy had lodged behind my eyes, spilling now into me. I felt as he felt, though perhaps only a shade of it; conscious of the curves of her body snug against his spine, her soft breath on the back of his neck sending frissions of current along his skin.

Youthful memories filled his mind; palace grounds and bright laughter and long ribbons of midnight hair. He was near drunk on her closeness, and yet, the knowledge that the Lady was another man’s wife—a man who would probably be Shōgun by week’s end, no less—lingered first and foremost in his mind. That though she seemed to relish the reactions her proximity caused him, she was a woman, another’s woman, and he himself still only a boy. Unused to courtly games, the weapons used therein. He felt oafish. Clumsy. Foolish.

“Your friend flies swift, Stormdancer Jun,” said Lady Ami.

Though it was more monkey-jabber spilling from her lips, I realized when she spoke, I could perceive something of the Lady’s words through Jun’s ears. Disconcerting. Fascinating also, to feel your clumsy speech take form and shape in my head. And so, while I admit I was still afraid of this boy skulking behind my eyes, the changes his presence wrought in me, I let him linger, listening to her words and his heart and the static charge growing between them.

Crackling.

“Swifter than I imagined,” Jun said. “If we fly through the night, we will reach your Lord and husband’s armies before dawn.”

“They will be impossible to see in the dark. Unless they have already engaged Lord Riku’s forces. They will light no fires by which to be spotted.”

“Koh has excellent eyes.”

She shifted her arms about his waist. Sighed deep. Jun shivered as her breath tickled his earlobe, his blood rushing south, licking at bone-dry lips.

“I fear I may fall asleep,” Ami said. “Perhaps you should sit behind me, Stormdancer. Your arms about me. Better to catch me if I should fall?”

Jun glanced down at the growing problem below his waistline, horrified at the thought of the potential First Lady of Shima inadvertently pressing up against it. I could feel his face flushing a deeper scarlet than the sky, amusement rippling in my mind despite myself.

SHE NOT TIRED. SHE HUNGRY.

Gods above, what is wrong with her?

GRATEFUL YOU SAVE LIFE.

She’s a married woman!

VERY GRATEFUL, THEN.

“Perhaps it would be best if we landed and took some rest, Lady Ami,” Jun said. “It has been a long day, and tomorrow I fear will be longer still.”

“You wish me to bed down in some farmer’s squat?”

“Actually, I’d think it best if we avoided other people. The questions they would no doubt ask. Those we came across might be loyal to your brother-in-law, or possessed of wiles enough to know how much a prize like you might be worth.”

“We have a thunder tiger with us, Jun-san. What kind of fool would challenge us?”

“The same kind who allows an organization like the Guild to prosper?” He shrugged. “Greed does strange things to people, my Lady. And I have no desire to kill more folk today than I already have.”

“So. Shall we sleep in the mud, then?”

“… Down there, perhaps?” Jun pointed below us, to a tall silo I had spotted, rising from a field of scarlet blooms. “That seems comfortable enough to shelter in for a few hours.”

“Oh, indeed, it looks positively stately…”

We circled lower in the deepening dusk, my gaze drifting to the Four Sisters in the northwest. I wondered how hot the blood was running at the Skymeet. If all had been said and done. What we would do if the Khan’s decision had been made by the time we returned. The thought of stopping made me ill at ease, yet the boy needed rest—exhausted from his trek, his battle, the weight pressed on him. A few hours, I supposed, would not hurt. Just because he slept, did not mean I must.

We glided across the field, my wings flattening great swathes through the fronds, a sea of disembodied petals rolling and spinning in our wake. As we slowed to land, they fell about us like rain, red as blood, red as the sun kissing the edge of the world, sinking now gently to her rest. The woman unwrapped her arms from the boy’s waist, slipped down to the earth, her hand lingering upon my fur as she did so. Wonder in her eyes. Her face that of one who walks in a dream.

“Your friend is beauti— Maker’s breath, you’re bleeding!”

Jun slipped down from my shoulders with a wince, hand pressed to the shuriken wound at his shoulder, the sluggish flow of blood seeping down the front of his tunic. The gash at his cheek was crusted over, blood darkening to black in the failing light. Concern in the Lady’s eyes, genuine enough it seemed, her hands hovering as if only now she were afraid to touch him.

“It is only a scratch, Lady Ami, truly,” Jun said. “I am fine.”

Face pale. Noble facade cracking in the face of the blood, the muck, the filth around her. And yet, that same steel in her voice.

“I should tend to it.”

“Gracious Lady, I—”

“You saved my life, Jun-san,” the Lady said. “I owe you a debt. Honor demands no less.”

I GO.

Jun blinked, looking back and forth between the Lady and me.

Wait, what? You go where?

CAN FLY TO FOUR SISTERS FROM HERE. RETURN BY MORNING.

You will leave me alone with Lady Ami?

SAFE ENOUGH HERE.

The boy looked to the woman before him, already unfastening the obi about his waist and gingerly pulling the sticky cloth away from his wounded shoulder.

It is not danger without I fear …

MUST SEE HOW SKYMEET FARES. SPEAK KHAN, IF NEEDS BE.

But will your kin listen? You being female and all?

MY FRIEND. BROTHER WHO NOT BROTHER. RAHH HIS NAME. HE SPEAK FOR ME IF MALES NOT LISTEN.

But you will come back, friend Koh?

I looked the boy up and down. Felt the fear lingering in his mind. Without me, he would be blind again. Without me, he would be alone …

I RETURN. BY DAWN LIGHT. FEAR NOT.

Sparing a glance for the woman, I turned and bounded into the sky. The disembodied blooms a storm beneath me, whipped into scarlet showers by the rush of my wings. Circling higher, watching the woman and the boy below, together in that field of swaying, rolling red. In the deepening gloom, it seemed for a moment they stood on an island, surrounded by an ocean of blood. Tide rising higher with every breath. Soon to engulf them both.

I shook my head to rid it of such foolishness, turning my eyes to the silhouette of the Four Sisters against the blackening sky. Wings thrashing, flying hard as I dared, I cut through wind and cloud toward the place of my birth.

Hours of solitude. Thoughts of my parents, my brother, the black mess they hacked upon the stone in the days before they died. The same stink spilling from the growling swords of those assassins sent for the Lady Ami. I had not a mind for machinations or the politics of monkey-children, but it seemed to me if the ones who made the sky sick also wished the Lady dead, she or her mate must be a danger. And the enemy of my enemy must be my friend?

Not all monkey-children could be the same. Not all of them as blind or ignorant as others. A revelation slowly dawning, that perhaps we had misjudged them. Blamed all for the idiocy of a few. But could I convince my kind of the truth? Would my Khan listen to a word of it? Or would his fear of the unknown, the burden of his loss, rule him as always?

Well past the deep of night, I soared over the frozen peaks and valleys of my home. The chill like a welcome kiss against my cheeks, the thrill of returning almost surprising. How I loved this place; the rolling ice, the groaning wind, the fangs of black granite piercing the sky. How I feared the thought of leaving it behind, and hated the ones threatening to take it away.

Descending to the Aerie, circling above until I spotted him; curled in the crook of a stone cradle, wings pressed tight to his flanks. The brother who was not my brother. Closer to me than kin. The one I would choose when the first flushing pressed upon me with all its insistent heat. We do not know love as you, monkey-child. But that is not to say we do not know love.

“Rahh.”

I alighted beside him, a few others stirring at my approach and grumbling as they curled their heads beneath their wings and drifted back to sleep. Yet, Rahh slumbered on. Oblivious. The Thunder God Raijin could throw lightning at the stone right beside his head, and he might sleep on through it. I growled his name, low and soft as velvet.

“Rahh.”

I nudged him with my forehead, rousing him to waking. He blinked as if thinking he woke dreaming. His chest was broad, muscle and bone and shimmering feathers. His eyes sharper than his talons, lifting that proud, sleek head amidst soft fallings of lonely snowflakes. His voice was gravel and plain song, deep as thunder.

“Koh? Where been? Khan afeared for you.”

“Fear not. I ride with the blind one. The monkey-child.”

A low growl.

“Ride?”

“Not speak here. Come. Fly with me.”

We took to the wing, the wind beneath us, our oldest friend holding us both aloft. Not close enough to touch. Close enough to wish he did. Wondering where this thought came from, when no thoughts like it existed before.

Changing.

I was …

“So,” Rahh growled. “Speak.”

“Blind monkey-child sees true. Sickness caused by children of men. But not all. They war within themselves. I am close to truth of it.”

“Not female’s place to seek truth, Koh. Your place to brood. Breed. Raise strong cubs.”

“No time for such foolishness. How goes Skymeet?”

“Foolishness? Our way is foolish now?”

“Foolish to sit in judgment when not know all. Skymeet. How long until Khan decides if we stay or go?”

“Today. Elders have done with speaking. He decide today.”

I snarled, eyes narrowed in the gloom, a thin red haze smeared over the sky and blurring the face of Father Moon. We had only a day. A day to find and convince this monkey-child Khan to stand against this so-called Guild. But they had tried to slay his mate—surely that alone would be enough to sway him?

I glanced at Rahh, watching him watching me, agitation in the beat of his wings, the hackles bristling at the base of his neck. The words I spoke did not soothe him.

“We seek to raise the monkey-armies against the sickeners. And when we have them beside us, you must speak it to the Skymeet. They not listen me. But if monkey-children fight, arashitora can do no less.”

A growl, low and deadly.

“Koh, no. Must return to Aerie. Khan wrath grow fierce if he learns what you do.”

“Leave to me, to fret on my grandfather. You must hold the Skymeet until I return.”

“Koh, this—”

“Trust me.”

“Koh—”

“Rahh. Trust me.”

Since we were cubs, we had been close. Born within a moon of one another. We had first taken to the wing on the very same day. When my kin had died, other thunder tigers had feared me, shunned me, thinking perhaps I carried a sickness that in turn could be given to them. But Rahh had helped me drag the bodies from their nests, gift them to the sky. It was I who first taught him to roll in the clouds, he who taught me where the best dartfish might be found in the mountain streams. And still he wavered. Fear of my grandfather. Fear of the Khan. I could see in his eyes; it pressed him hard. And yet.

And yet …

“I trust you, Koh.”

Listen to me now, monkey-child. Listen and hear me well. You have soft skin. Cherry-red lips and neat white teeth. Thunder tigers have beaks of black bone with strength enough to puncture steel. We cannot smile as you. We cannot laugh.

But that is not to say we cannot know joy.

“I return today. Wait for me, Rahh.”

A nod.

“Be swift, Koh.”

“Swift as the wind.”

The tips of our wings touched, the crackling of static current between our feathers, small and impossibly bright. My heart swelling. A purr in my chest.

And into the darkness, I dove.

“So tell me of yourself, Stormdancer.”

The Lady Ami knelt before young Jun, eyes narrowed in the dim light. They had built a small fire in the shelter of the lotus silo. An old metal bucket sat beside the flames, water within stained crimson. Ami dipped her silken rag again, torn from the edge of her own gown, returned to cleaning the wound at Jun’s shoulder. She seemed discomfited by her surroundings, the dirt and dust and cobwebs thick, but her breeding held her displeasure in check, like a mask held before an open, screaming mouth.

Jun sat still, sightless eyes fixed on the far wall. His world was darkness, all-encompassing, and yet his senses boiled with her. The smell of her perfume; jasmine and hyacinth blossoms, a hint of honey and fresh sweat. The softness of her hands upon his skin, the gentleness of her touch, the press of soft breath upon his face as she leaned close and mopped at his cheek. There was no pain in his world. Only her. The closeness of her. The herness of her; all smoky voice and intoxicating fragrance, leaving no room inside his head for the feeble achings of his wounds.

“What is it you wish to know, Lady?”

“Let us begin with how a blind painter comes to wield a blade with more skill than most masters.”

“In painting and swordplay, there is no end of parallels. Form and flow and surrender of control. To cease to feel and become one with the implement—blade or brush, it matters not.”

“But you had a teacher, surely.”

“My father studied under the sword-saint Kitsune Yoshinobu. He trained me also, before my sight began to fail.”

“Kitsune Yoshinobu? The Laughing Fox?” A frown in the Lady’s voice. “But he served in my father’s halls. In the court of the Kitsune Daimyo.”

“As did my father, Lady. For a time. Before my mother bid us move north for the sake of my sight. My father was a demon hunter, like his father before him. As I would have been. A sworn swordsman of your father’s house.”

“But, wait … that would mean…”

A smile on his lips. “You remember at last, Lady.”

“Gods, you were the huntmaster’s son!” the Lady breathed. “I remember you! That little light-fingered hellion who would steal my sister’s clothes while she bathed…”

“As I recall correctly, Lady, it was your idea to steal her clothes.” Jun inclined his head. “You simply roped me in to help you. And to catch all hells when things went sour.”

“Oh, gods,” Ami laughed. “I remember now! We would hunt imaginary beasts through my father’s gardens. And you would hide in the wisteria and frighten the maidservants. Gods, you were just a slip of a thing. You couldn’t have been more than eight or nine when you left?”

“Ten, Lady. As I said.”

“Maker’s breath, but you have changed Jun-san,” she sighed. “I would never have recognized you. Long years have treated you kind.”

Jun smiled, sightless gaze fixed on the flames. “No more than you, Lady.”

“And here you are, years later. Handsome as a fistful of devils. A master swordsman. A Stormdancer, no less. Blind as midnight, and still rescuing noble ladies from murderous assassins. Quite a change from the little boy I charged to do my evil bidding.”

Smoke in her voice. Wistful.

Hungry?

Jun cleared his throat. “I was not truly blind during the attack, Lady. I could see through the eyes of your cats. Even then, if not for Koh, if I were not intended to save this world, I would have fallen.”

“I am less certain. Prophecy or no, I sense the remarkable in you, young Stormdancer.”

Jun fell silent, heat rising in his cheeks.

“And yet he blushes!” Ami laughed, pausing in her ministrations. “Oh, you are a sweet one. Did the girls of your village not pay you such compliments as you grew up?”

Jun fought the flush in his cheeks to no avail, feeling again like a clumsy, provincial child. “In truth, the girls paid me little heed, Lady.”

“Then they were foolish.”

“A blind man does not a good husband make.”

“Not all trysts end in vows of forever. Some exist for their own sake.”

Jun felt her move closer, hand falling still at his cheek.

“… Surely there was someone?”

Jun stood quickly, stepping back, a nervous smile twisting upon his face. Hands outstretched before him as if to ward her away. What did she want? What was she doing? No matter what lay in their pasts, she was a married woman. The wife of a would-be Shōgun.

This was madness.

“There was no one, my Lady. If you will forgive me, I’d not speak of it further.”

“No one at all?” A smile in her voice. “The beautiful Stormdancer, yet unplucked?”

“Lady—”

He heard her rise, felt her fingers touch his, drawing away as if scalded. Blind there in the dark, he stepped back farther, snagging his heel on their pile of firewood. The Lady was swift, catching his hands, holding tight, preventing his fall. Fingers wrapped in his now, pulling him in, feeling her burning gaze searching his face.

“Surely you know you are beautiful, Jun?” she said. “Strong and fierce and proud and young. Surely you know how you must look, to someone like me?”

“I fear you see a trinket, Lady. A plaything, perhaps. One to be used and discarded.”

“Used? You think I do not see the want in you, too?”

“Your husband…” he floundered. “Your vows…”

“My husband has not touched me in three years, Jun-san.” Bitterness crept into her voice. The anger grown in the wake of a long-dead sorrow. “And in the two years before that, there was never anything of love in it. Our marriage was arranged by our parents. You are older now than I was when they made me a bride. And as for my Lord Tatsuya’s vows … well, he breaks those nightly with my ladies. Under my very nose.”

“Lady, you do not think clearly. You see a childhood friend and think it more than what it is. Simple shock. Relief after a day of trauma. You are beautiful, surely. But I do not know you.”

“You do not need to know me to love me, Stormdancer.” Jun felt the gentle touch of her fingertips across his cheek. “I do not ask for forever.”

He felt her close, lips brushing against his with every word. He could feel warmth radiating from her body. Her fingertips trailing static electricity across his skin. Down his throat. Along his chest. His breath trembling, quick as hummingbirds as she pressed her body against him, melting all that was left of his will.

“Only tonight,” she breathed.

She stepped away from him, back toward the fire, soft footsteps and the sound of her gown falling layer by layer to the ground. Her voice calling to him in the dark, the oldest, deepest tune, barely audible over the bloodrush of his pulse in his ears.

“Come here, Stormdancer.”

“I cannot see you, Lady…”

“You have hands, do you not? Let them find your way.”

I returned as the Lady Sun cleared the horizon, turning all to blood and fire. The blooms in the fields below unfurling, slow and soft, turning their heads toward the light and opening wide. Jun was waiting for me outside the silo, standing there in the brightening light with his face upturned toward me. I felt his touch in my mind, the strange sensation of returning home, though in truth I had just left the place of my birth.

You returned, friend Koh.

SAID I WOULD.

Still, it gladdens me. How did your travels fare?

SKYMEET DECIDE TODAY. MUST BE SWIFT.

I will rouse the Lady. We will fly north, quick as you may.

SAW MONKEY-CHILDREN ON MY RETURN. SOLDIERS CAMPED NEAR FOUR SISTERS. MANY. RIDING FROM SOUTH. OTHERS FROM NORTHEAST. TWO ARMIES GATHERING. READY TO CLASH.

The Lady Ami emerged from the silo, hair mussed by sleep, the faint remnants of paint upon her face. She looked at the boy, smiling, her eyes shining. The boy saw her stare through mine, smiling broader still, the tremblings of new affection in his thoughts.

“Good morning to you, Lady Ami,” he said, bowing.

“And to you, Stormdancer Jun,” she replied. “The mighty Koh has returned, I see.”

“She spied two armies on her flight back here, Lady. Gathering at the feet of the Four Sisters. It seems your husband and his brother clash there today.”

The smile faded from her face, the color beside it. Whatever peace their brief respite had bought now evaporated in the light of the waking day.

“Then let us waste no time. The fate of our nation is decided this day.”

Jun climbed aboard my back, offered his hand to Ami. Her smile returned—only a brief glimmer, yet enough to set the boy’s heart racing. As their fingers touched, I felt electricity arcing across his skin, the press of warm and sweet summer winds. The Lady climbed onto my shoulders, sitting in front of the boy now, I noted with interest, his arms about her waist.

No time to wonder. No time to ponder.

Fly, friend Koh.

And fly we did.

Lord Tatsuya stood atop a rugged foothill, surveying the forces arrayed against him. His brother’s armies were arranged in orderly phalanxes, Tiger banners blowing in the breeze, tabards dipped in the same bloody hues; seeming for all the world like a lotus field in bloom. It briefly occurred to the Bull that either he or his brother should have changed their colors so their armies might tell each other apart. Some few of Riku’s men had painted their banners with the sigil of the Bear alongside the Tiger clan, but as it stood, almost every one of the rank-and-file troopers on either side was arrayed in the traditional clan scarlet, roaring Tigers emblazoned on their chests.

Tatsuya’s reserves had arrived from the south, bolstering his numbers, but from the look, Riku still outnumbered him two to one. The high ground would normally offer advantage, but those accursed Guild sky-ships hovering in smoke-stained skies above Riku’s army all but neutralized their gains. The Bear’s attack would almost certainly commence with another aerial bombardment, so Tatsuya had his men sheltering in the caves around him. Yet sooner or later, they would have to venture out to meet Riku’s charge or be hemmed inside the caves.

“And then those bastard ships will blast us to pieces…” Tatsuya muttered.

The Bull looked at the majestic mountains rising up behind him, snow-clad and beautiful. A spring storm was gathering at their summits; cruel Raijin no doubt watching the proceedings from above, the Thunder God delighting in the thought of the slaughter to come. The hills about him were old and strong, roots running deep, the surrounding fields rippling with the chill press of mountain winds. Cool in his lungs. Gentle kisses on his eyelids.

A good place to die, Tatsuya thought.

A cry went up from his men, fingers pointed skyward. Tatsuya looked up and saw the silhouette of an arashitora circling above; wingspan of twenty feet, silvered and graceful. Raijin had sent one of his children to give his blessing on the battle to come, it seemed. The Bull raised his hand, palm upturned, asking fortune from the beast and its father—fortune he might live long enough to meet his brother in single—

Wait …

Soldiers emerged from the caves, murmurs of wonder and astonishment sweeping through their number. Tatsuya blinked, jaw slackening as the beast circled lower, and he finally caught sight of the figures on the arashitora’s back.

Impossible …

“Lady Ami!” came the cry amongst the men.

Tatsuya hurried down his hill, shale and pebbles skittering about his feet, watching the arashitora sweep in to land. Dust and pollen stung his eyes, thunder cracking overhead as the beast touched down, wings pounding, talons spread and gleaming. He saw a boy seated behind his wife, hands upon her waist. As the thunder tiger touched down, the lad leaped off the beast’s back, covered his fist and bowed low to Tatsuya. He looked a scrawny peasant-child; dirty black cloth and ragged shoes, a thin cane of polished pinewood in his hands, milk-white eyes. But Tatsuya spared him only a moment’s glace, instead focused on the wife he had left in Kigen city. Her hair flowing free, wind-tossed and knotted. Her face bereft of paint, her dress torn. Anger flared in his chest along with the disbelief, a frown darkening his brow.

“Ami-chan, what in the Maker’s name goes on here?”

Ami climbed down off the thunder tiger’s back, bowed from the knees.

“I am pleased to see you also, my husband.”

“Hang the pleasantries, woman. What are you doing here? Who is this scrap of a boy who dares lay hands upon you? I should have his head!”

I glared at the Tiger Lord, his words spilling through Jun’s head into mine. A growl seethed in my chest, wings spread in challenge. I did not care who he was, what title he claimed among his kind—it was not his place to threaten Jun.

“The Stormdancer’s name is Kitsune Jun,” Lady Ami said. “And though I beg your forgiveness at saying so, beloved husband, he may be deserving of somewhat more courtesy considering he saved the life of your bride yesterday morn.”

“Saved your life?” The Bull blinked. “What madness is this? This boy is clearly blind!”

“My maidservant betrayed me. Assassins struck the palace in your absence. Almost a dozen, armed with weapons I had never seen. Shuriken spitters and growling swords. They slaughtered my guards. Blind or no, Jun-san’s blade struck true and swift. If he were not—”

“Growling swords?” Tatsuya breathed. “Like the chainblades used to clearfell forests?”

“The same,” Ami nodded. “They would have killed me, if not for the Stormdancer’s intervention.”

“Honorless Guild dogs,” he whispered, fingers curling to fists. “They will pay for this treachery in blood, I vow it.”

The Bull turned away, rage flooding his face, teeth gritted and bared. It took a few moments for the Tiger Lord to compose himself, breathing deep, eyes closed. After a long, suffocating silence, he turned to Jun, covered his fist and bowed low.

“Humble apologies, Stormdancer Jun,” he said. “I beg forgiveness for hasty words. It is not often I see another man place his hands upon my wife. Yet, for saving her life, I and all this country owes you a debt. For burying the Guild’s assassins, thwarting their treachery, I grant you tribute. Ask anything and it will be yours.”

“Noble Lord.” Jun spoke with hesitant voice, eyes drifting to the Lady Ami. “It was my pleasure and duty to assist the Lady in her trials. And I ask only what you have already vowed. The Lotus Guild is responsible for a spreading sickness. Afflicting not only the people of Shima, but the beasts of the land and sky, also.” Here he gestured to me. “My friend, the great and fearsome Koh has lost her own kin to this illness. That you declare the Guild your enemy, that you agree to purge them from Shima once this war with your brother is done, is all I ask.”

“I have so vowed. For them to betray me on the field is bad enough. For them to strike at my hearth and home is insult that cannot be forgiven.”

A smile brightened Jun’s face, spilling over into me. I could see the thoughts in his head—his grandmother’s prophecy now one step closer to fulfillment. Providence had brought him the Tiger Lord and his armies. But the Skymeet spoke, even as we stood there. Every second bringing us closer to the moment the Khan would render his judgment.

“Then you must excuse me, Lord Tatsuya,” Jun said. “But my friend Koh and I have business in the skies above our heads.”

“Will you not stay and do battle alongside us, Stormdancer?” Tatsuya said. “The Guild has ships that sear the skies with fire, blast my men to pieces. You and your thunder tiger could do much to even the scales when the Bear moves against me.”

Jun was already astride my back, my wings spread and crackling.

“I can do better than a single arashitora, great Lord. Give me an hour, and I will give you an army.”

Jun bowed deep to the Lady Ami, palm covering fist. And before the Bull could give his reply, we took to the air, my muscles humming, tearing through the frostbitten skies and circling up the mountainside. The earth fell away beneath our feet, exhilaration filling the boy’s belly, filling my own, his teeth gritted in my skull, my fingers digging into his feathers. That oneness again, adrenaline and hope dragging us together—we two who were so different, and yet so much the same. His grin infectious, making me wish for a brief and gleaming moment I had lips with which to smile.

Do you believe now, friend Koh? Do you see how close we are?

MILES AWAY BY MY RECKONING, MONKEY-CHILD. MY KHAN NOT BE SO EASILY SWAYED AS YOURS.

The gods themselves ride with us this day, friend Koh. Nothing can stop us now.

Up the face of the first sister, black crags and jagged teeth, snow thrashing and curling and twisting beneath my wings. Chill bearing down, pressing him tight to my back, my warmth, his arms about my neck. This little boy, who only a few days ago walked unbidden into my life, and now, had changed it forever. And did I believe, you ask? Believe as he did? In gods and destinies and things undone already sewn in the tapestry of fate?

I confess I did not.

But also, that I wanted to.

A fierce cry spilling from the scouts in the skies above. The eyes of the Skymeet upturned as we pierced mist and cloud, lightning cracking above our heads. I roared, Rahh answered, the Khan bellowing louder still as I skidded in to land, snow swirling about me, young Jun leaping from my back and bowing low, feeling about the Skymeet for any threat. Steam rising from my flanks, shaking head to tail to rid myself of the snow and ice crusted upon fur and feather, dipping my head in respect before my Khan.

“Grandfather,” I said.

“What this?” The Khan growled in response. “Where been, young Koh? Why returned now, with boy who should have flown to his death days past?”

“Have flown far, great Khan. Seeking truth of sickness. Seeking monkey-children who would fight it. Found them. Just below us. Enemies of our enemies. This Guild and their poison machines. They fight alongside—”

A roar, cutting off my words, chilling me to silence, the Khan’s eyes alight with rage.

“Defy our ways, granddaughter. Defy your Khan.”

“I sought only truth—”

“Not female’s place to seek truth. Nor fly free. Such is our way.”

“Then is BROKEN way,” I snarled. “Blind way. Old and foolish way. And old and foolish Khan who bids us cleave to it.”

Outrage amongst the elders. Snarls amongst the bucks. But in the eyes of the other females lurking about the Skymeet’s edges, I saw a gleaming. A pride.

“You DARE,” my grandfather snarled. “Too much I gave, when your kin die. Too much love. Too much softness. There, I foolish. THERE, I blind.”

“This place our home. Monkey-children fight for it. Why not—”

“ENOUGH.”

The great Khan stepped forward, hackles raised, his growl rumbling louder than the thunder above our heads. Lightning flickering in his eyes, along the curling tips of his mighty wings. A snarl spilling from the depths of him, making me quail despite myself.

“Khan spoken. Skymeet ended. We leave Shima this day. It over. Khan’s word is law.”

I felt the words as a blow to my chest, souring my belly, sinking down into my paws. It had been spoken. The Khan’s words could not be rescinded. The Skymeet would not disobey him. And old though he was, afraid of this new world and the terrors therein, still he was respected. Twenty years, our leader. Two decades beneath his wisdom. He was beloved. He was feared. There would be none brave enough to stand against him.

I looked to Jun, standing there in the snow, fear in his eyes. He knew it was not his place to speak. That his words here would only provoke further rage. And yet the need boiled inside him. The belief. Faith in the words of some old monkey-crone, probably moon-touched or speaking to him out of pity. Still, I did not believe. And yet, all she had foreseen was within our reach. With the arashitora onside, the Tiger Lord below could win his war. Purge the Guild. End the sickness. If only one were brave enough to cast the Khan down from his throne.

“Then I challenge it,” I growled. “I challenge Khan’s law. And I challenge Khan.”

My grandfather snorted, amusement bubbling among the Skymeet.

“Foolish child. Only males challenge. Female not be Khan.”

“Kill me then, Grandfather. Throw my scraps down with the remains of my kin. Your daughter. Your grandson. Leave behind when you flee, tail tucked between your legs.”

A roar, tail lashing, hackles bristling down his spine. All thought fleeing at my challenge, his pride and his rage swelling past his love for me, his last remaining kin. And as he tensed to charge, a buck stepped from the crowd of onlookers and roared at the top of his lungs.

“I challenge.”

My friend. My brother, not my brother.

Rahh.

He glanced at me. All that lay between us. That might lie before us. And he turned to the Khan and spoke again.

“I challenge.”

Two white shapes. Falling like meteors in the skies above our heads. Blood like rain amidst the thunderclaps. Lightning at the edges of their wings. Crackling across hulking clouds as they collided, screaming and roaring and tearing.

Heart in my throat. Pulse running quicker. Fear for him, my friend, my brother not my brother. A feeling for him, running deeper than I had known. Where did it come from? The monkey-child now inside my mind? His softness spilling into me? Had I always known this, and only now acknowledged it, when he might be taken away? The flood of it, the confusion of it, all a-tumble in my mind. Jun beside me, hand upon my shoulder, bringing more comfort than I could have believed but a day or two ago.

A strange thing, monkey-child. Your clumsy words failing me again. I felt I had awakened from a dream. I felt the proximity of gods. The hands of fate. So many intersections here, on the ground below, in the skies above. So many possibilities stretched before us. Only one outcome certain.

Death.

Rahh roared, kicking loose of my grandfather’s embrace, a spray of blood trailing from the old Khan’s claws. Rahh was quicker, stronger, younger. Yet the old Khan had wisdom on his side. Patience and cunning. Rahh’s was the charge, the strike, the bellow. But the Khan’s was the feint, the riposte, the deathly silence. Gravity and momentum, muscle and bone, majestic gleaming arcs of trajectory across the roiling black, collision and escape, and blood, blood, blood.

I prayed. Yes, we pray, monkey-child. To the father, Raijin. The God of Lightning and Thunder. To bring Rahh back to me. To show us a sign. That we were meant to remain, to fight for this place, once our home, now taken away by the sickly hands of metal and greed. I did not know if he heard. Or if he did, if he listened. If the outcome of this battle, as all battles, was preordained. If there was such a thing as fate. A part of me wished to believe so—in destiny and such. For if such existed, Rahh would not fail. Could not fall.

And yet, the part of me that had awakened in those last few days, roaming free, flying with the boy on my back—that part of me hoped beyond hoping that there was no hand at play here. That we were all free to do as we wished. That, if Rahh won, he won because he willed it more, not because some god upon some cloud intended it so.

The pair collided again, roars and shrieks, orphaned feathers falling from the sky. I squinted as the lightning flashed, Jun’s fingers clutching my feathers. The old Khan had his talons dug into Rahh’s chest, kicking with his back legs, claws like sabers. The pair plummeting from the sky. And yet, locked tight in that embrace, the Khan had left himself exposed. Rahh proved himself the stronger, arresting their fall with thunderous beats of his mighty wings, flipping the Kahn over onto his back. Rahh caught the Khan’s hind legs with his own, struck once, twice with his beak, tearing the tendons at the join of wing and shoulder, the Khan roaring in agony. And as they fell closer and closer to the jagged rocks below, Rahh clawed loose of the Khan’s grip, bloody spray and tattered fur, leaving the old beast to fall.

I watched my grandfather’s end. Many turned away, but I forced myself to see. The end of an era. The death of an age. Trying to flap with broken wings, deny gravity’s grim embrace, refusing to cry out, admit defeat, shriek his fear. Crashing into the rocks, jagged and unforgiving, crushing and tearing and pulping to nothing, the grand old beast reduced to blood and feathers and fur. Thunder split the skies, echoing the roars of triumph below, the answer above. Rahh circling above us, bloodied but unbroken, bellowing his victory for the Thunder God to hear. Jun beside me, fist raised high, grinning and cheering, hugging me, telling me he told me so. That all this had been said and done. That all this was as it should be.

Rahh came in to land, the Skymeet gathered about him, singing his name.

The first new Khan of Shima in twenty years.

What would his first command be?

Tatsuya cursed beneath his breath, retreating to the caves, his soldiers and his bride beside him. Riku’s forces were marching up the hill, row by orderly row. No heedless charge for the Bear’s men, no. Not with those Guild vessels overhead. They tromped over the broken ground, up the steep incline in the shadow of the sky-ships, knowing full well if Tatsuya charged out to meet him, the Guild’s bombardment would blow them to bloody pulp. A grim advance, hemming the Bull’s forces in against walls of stone. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.

“Form up on me!” Tatsuya bellowed.

“Form up!” The cry echoing down the line. “To the Bull! For the Imperium!”

Tatsuya turned to Ami, drawing his katana.

“Go back to the caves, Ami-chan. You will be safe there. If Riku breaks through, throw yourself upon his mercy. You are his sister-in-law. He will not harm you.”

“No kiss farewell, husband-mine?” Ami said. “No last tearful embrace?”

Tatsuya glanced at the soldiers gathering about him. The blades drawn. The flags unfurled.

“It would be unseemly. Go wait in the cave, Ami-chan. I will return presently.”

Ami licked her lips. Bit her tongue. Bowed.

“As my Lord commands.”

Riku’s forces closing in. Tatsuya’s gaze fixed on his brother, spotted now amidst the swell of bright steel and black iron and rolling, rippling red. The same banner at his back. The same armor on his skin. So much alike, they were. To think it had come to this …

“Make your peace with the Maker, my brothers!” Tatsuya called, raising his sword high. “And take these bastards with you to the hells!”

“Banzai!” his men roared. “Banzai!”

“Charge!”

A great shout rolling down the line, the thousandfold trample of running feet. A thunder, tumultuous, the katana raised high in Tatsuya’s hand as he stormed down the incline, the crush and press of bodies all about him, cold dread in his belly as the Guild vessels accelerated and Riku’s army came to a full halt. The shadows of the advancing sky-ships fell over the Bull, his muscles tensing as he waited for the bombardment to begin.

A blast fell amongst his men, then another, blinding, deafening, tearing through his soldiers as if they were paper dolls. Men blown to cinders and pieces, the blast as loud as thunder, rattling the teeth in his skull. But as quickly as it began, the explosions stilled, the ringing silence in the aftermath setting Tatsuya’s teeth on edge. What was happening? Those ships should be ripping them to shreds …

More thunder overhead, rolling across the skies above the drone of propellers, the cries of terror. And Tatsuya looked up at the screams above, the cries of wonder from the men about him, and saw the sky was filled with thunder tigers.

Awe and amazement. Openmouthed shock. Dozens of the beasts filling the air above him, falling on the Guild ships with claws sharp as swords, hard as steel. The flank-mounted cannons opening fire, not with black powder, but with a burst of silvered death, shuriken shredding the skies and the arashitora unlucky enough to be in their sights. Beasts fell tumbling and torn, blood pattering on his helm and spaulders as four bodies crashed among his lines in quick succession, roars of pain and bellows of despair. But by then, Tatsuya’s charge had cleared the shadow of the sky-ships, thundering down into Riku’s lines, smashing through the rows of spearmen with momentum and gravity behind them. The screams of the wounded, the cries uncurling behind vicious deathblows, the ring of steel on steel.

Tatsuya cut some poor spearman from neck to privates, took another’s throat out, ear to ear. Cleaving and hacking through the chaos, intent only on his brother, on that banner waving above the mob, on the voice shouting above the discord. Smashing a blow aside, divesting his attacker of his hands, then his life. Knocked down to his knees by the press and crush around him, helped up by some loyal soul who died for his trouble, cut to bubbling pieces by an enemy’s growling chainkatana. Riku’s elite were amongst them now—the samurai who had cut his own to shreds, wearing the very armor of the men they’d slaughtered. No fuel shortage for Riku’s troops though, no. No failing of the growling steel in their hands. And fury took Tatsuya—fury at his betrayal, at his own stupidity for trusting those serpents, at his brother for taking their hand. He became a dervish, death itself, roaring, breath burning in his lungs, spittle flying from his teeth, gore caked thick upon his blade, his hands, his face. Chaos all about him, the copper perfume of blood entwined with the sharp stink of shit, screams and roars layered upon the off-key notes of armor and katana and tetsubo and naginata. Thunder tigers amidst the samurai now, bellowing, shrieking, falling on the only soldiers they knew were foes—the ones clad in the Guild’s hissing suits, carrying the Guild’s growling steel. Tearing them limb from limb, all the power of the chi-mongers laid to ruin in the face of Raijin’s children, their fury terrifying to behold.

A rain of arrows fell, Riku ordering his archers to fire into his own troops and Tatsuya’s beside. Men falling about him like flies, clutching broomstick-thick shafts protruding from throats or chests or eye sockets. Blood everywhere. On his face. In his mouth. Slicked over the stones at his feet. Stepping over broken ground and soft, broken bodies, a slush of intestines and mud. But finally Tatsuya saw him—his brother, surrounded by his men. The face he saw every time he looked into the mirror. Death all about him, inside him, the lives of innocent and loyal men—men of both sides—spilled onto this hungry ground in the name of an empty chair. His brother’s words on the day of his father’s death ringing in Tatsuya’s ears. A truth so far denying it filled him to sickening.

“Better it be just you and I, brother. Just the two of us, without the nation beside us.”

Tatsuya would have lost. He knew it then. He knew it now. His brother was ever the better swordsman.

But still, he should have listened …

“Riku!” he roared. “Riku!”

His brother turned to face him, eyes wide and red-rimmed. The echo of crashing sky-ships somewhere behind him. The roar of thunder tigers all about him. The Stormdancer’s voice, high above it all, his blade whistling in the air. And Tatsuya raised his katana and bellowed, charging across the broken stone, eyes narrowed to knife-cuts, intent on only one goal.

Murder.

Black and bloody murder.

A hailstorm of arrows about us. Jun swiping them from the air with his tiny sliver of polished steel. A shaft protruding from his shoulder, pain flowing into me. A deep gouge at my throat, just a few inches to the left of my death, my agony seeded inside him. And still we moved like a blade through water, cutting a swathe through the men and their growling swords, the stink of sickness spilling from their crumpling suits. The wingless slugs had already been ripped from the skies by my brethren. Our Khan circling above, still torn and bleeding from my grandfather’s claws, yet unwilling to let us fight without him. My thoughts drifting to him along with my eyes, my heart swelling at the sight of him. So fierce. So brave. So—

Friend Koh! Keep your eyes on the battle! I cannot see without you!

An arrow sank into Jun’s leg and he cried out, the pain ripping my gaze from my Khan overhead and back to the chaos about me. I bounded into the air, sailed over the mob and landed amidst the little men with their bent sticks, filling the skies with volleys of death. And into them, we tore like a cyclone, like the thunder and lightning crashing overhead. They fled screaming, cast aside their little bows and tumbled away, a swathe cleared through them by another of my kin, falling on them as they fled. Riku’s armies were defeated, crushed beyond recovery, his Guild allies slaughtered. But if his brother fell in the battle …

Tatsuya! Where is Lord Tatsuya?

I searched for the monkey-child Khan amidst the chaos, the blood, the din. Sweeping aside one tin man with my talons, the wretch rolling away in a steaming coil of his own innards. A blast from my wings clearing a dozen spearmen as if they were green saplings, uprooted in a howling gale. And there, atop an outcropping of blood-drenched stone, we saw him. Them. The two Tiger brothers, locked together in grim struggle, the fate of their nation hanging in the balance. Katana in their hands, blades locked, sparks flying as they danced. Both of them masters, smooth as river stones, spattered in scarlet, clad in more besides.

WHO IS WHO? I CANNOT TELL.

Jun shook his head, teeth gritted.

Nor I. They are brothers from the same womb. The same hour. But fear not, friend Koh. Tatsuya cannot fall. The prophecy is true, do you see? A child of Foxes. An army of thunder tigers at his back. Today we save the nation. You and I!

BATTLE NOT OVER YET, MONKEY-CHILD.

We watched the pair clash, the carnage about us stilling to a hush. The two armies—the pitiful remnants of Riku’s forces, Tatsuya’s grim-faced butchers, even the blood-drenched members of my own pack—falling still, as there on that bloody ground, in the shadow of the sisters four, twin brothers fought for the fate of the nation. They were an even match to my eyes; neither really the other’s better. Both chests heaving. Both drenched in sweat and blood. Hands trembling on the hilts of their blades. But sooner or later, one had to fail. Sooner or later, if nothing else, fate would decide for us all.

Did I believe that now?

Had I become as he?

It was the simplest thing. Not even an error, really. But as one brother shifted his weight, stepping up onto a small outcropping to seek height’s advantage, the stone beneath him crumbled. Set him stumbling. Just an inch or two. Just a second’s span. But in that moment—a lifetime long it seemed—his twin struck, landed a splintering blow on his brother’s forearm, cleaving iron and cutting deep into the flesh and bone beneath. The wounded brother gasped in pain, stumbled back, bringing his sword up to guard in his one good hand.

I could see it in his face—cursing pitiless luck. That of all times for that stone to fail, in all the storms and floods and years, it had chosen now to split. But had it chosen? Had not all those storms and floods and years brought it to here? This moment? Had it not been meant to happen? Had that not been its fate?

The wounded brother warded off a handful more blows, katana trembling in his off-hand with every ringing blow. But at last, his twin smashed the steel aside, cut deep into his sibling’s thigh, dropping him to one knee. The wounded one held up his hand then, terror in his eyes, and though his lips did not move his eyes spoke all

wait

wait

WAIT

Yet the blow fell, splitting his throat from ear to clavicle, a gout of dark crimson, a choking, gurgling cough. The sword fell again, puncturing the iron breastplate, into his brother’s heart. And tearing loose his sword, the victor staggered back, near-retching, face drenched in salty red. Ragged breath spilling from cracked lips as he gazed at the absolute stillness about him; a thousand eyes fixed now upon him, the ruins of armies crumpled in the dust, the blood of brothers on all their hands.

“Good-bye, Riku,” he gasped.

Jun stood before Rahh, bloodied and bruised in the hush of the aftermath. Joy gleamed in those sightless eyes. Spilled from his thoughts into the gathering of thunder tigers around us.

You have done us a service we can never repay, great Khan. We are forever in your debt.

Rahh’s voice was thunder, echoing inside Jun’s head, inside mine.

* THANK KOH, MONKEY-CHILD, NOT I. *

The boy turned to me, a smile upon his face. He reached out and touched my throat, smoothed the bloodied feathers.

I suppose this is good-bye, great Koh.

NOT GOOD-BYE, MONKEY-CHILD. GUILD LINGERS. WILL NEED OUR HELP TO PURGE THEM TRUE.

Too many of your kind have fallen this day. We can ask no more of you.

THIS IS WHAT FRIENDS DO, IS IT NOT? THEY ASK.

… Friends?

I nodded.

FRIENDS.

A slow purr rumbled in Rahh’s chest.

* WHEN HAVE NEED, CALL ON US AGAIN, LITTLE JUN. WHILE I KHAN, SHIMA OUR HOME. WHILE I KHAN, WE REMAIN. WE FIGHT. *

Jun put his arms around my neck and embraced me, cheek pressed to my feathers, tears in his eyes. I wrapped him in my wings, this little monkey-child, whose thoughts in my head were now as welcome as my own. What would I be without him? Could I go back to what I was?

I looked at Rahh, his eyes shining, strong and proud and fierce.

And decided I could try.

Behind us, the Lady Ami emerged from her cave, blinking in the wounded daylight, hand held aloft to the burning sun. She drifted down the hill, surrounded by rolling smoke, a wall of swords and spears. Her eyes met little Jun’s across the thicket of steel and fur and feathers, and she smiled despite the carnage about her, the horror she so clearly wore in the face of this dreadful slaughter.

He smiled back, the ache in him spilling into me.

Foolish boy, I thought.

And there in the crowd of battered soldiers, his face crusted and daubed in the blood of his kin, stood her husband. Tatsuya, the mighty Bull of Shima, drenched to the elbows in victory, his face an ashen mask. The Lady picked her way through the bodies, holding the hem of her ruined gown. She stood before her husband, covering her fist and bowing low before him, her eyes downturned to the bloody ground.

“Shōgun,” she said.

All about her, the monkey-child soldiers did the same. Tatsuya’s bloodied victors. The broken remainder of Riku’s once-mighty legion. Bowing in unison, little Jun along with them, that same word spoken from a thousand lips.

“Shōgun.”

The Tiger Lord looked to the Lady Ami, his face grim. And as Jun’s poor heart wrenched inside his chest, Tatsuya put his arm around his bride, leaned close, and placed a bloody kiss upon her brow.

Look now in your moldy history books, monkey-child. Look now in your dusty scrolls. Read now of the glorious Kazumitsu Dynasty, and see how much those bleach-white pages speak of the Battle at Four Sisters. Do you see mention of Lotus Guild ships present there? Stormdancers? No?

Do you wonder why?

A month after the battle, a thin normality had descended on Shōgun Tatsuya’s court. His ascent onto the throne had been a gloried affair; a golden tiger mask upon his face, golden katana and wakizashi at his waist, a robe of bloody red trailing long behind him, and his wife beside it. As much pomp and ceremony as possible was mustered for the celebrations, considering the funeral arrangement that would coincide with the festivities. And in the hush thereafter, Tatsuya set about the quiet and bloody business of ensuring his dominion.

As promised, the Shōgun showed clemency to Riku’s wife. The Lady Mai was permitted to dwell within a quiet corner of the Imperial Palace, her belly swelling with her dead husband’s child. First Lady Ami herself set about affairs befitting her station: the running of the Shōgun’s household, the entertaining of visiting dignitaries from the Phoenix, Dragon and Fox clans. She spent what little time she could with a pale, blind boy who lingered like a shadow at the court’s edge; ever uncertain of his place there. The boy in turn kept the company of her cats, looking out from behind those slitted eyes of green glass and seeing a world he recognized not at all.

Since Tatsuya’s ascension, Ami had seen the Shōgun only fleetingly, and from a distance. Ever surrounded by ministers and courtiers. Ever kept at cold arm’s length. Still, she struggled on. As best she could. As best she knew how. It was nearly five weeks after the Battle at Four Sisters when she heard it—the news that drained the blood from her face, set her storming through the palace halls in search of her seldom-seen husband.

After almost two hours and a dozen minders’ attempts to stave her off, she found him in meeting with his council of ministers and four representatives of the Lotus Guild. The men arrayed about a long table, crowded with tea services and sumptuous dishes, laughing and smiling, ruddy cheeks gleaming. The Guildsmen seated opposite, their glasses and plates empty, bloodred goggles fixing Lady Ami with dead-eyed stares as the herald begged forgiveness for the intrusion and announced her name to the assembly.

The bottom half of the Shōgun’s face was covered by a golden breather fashioned like a tiger’s maw—apparently intended to keep the worsening fumes at bay. A kimono red as heartsblood was draped about his shoulders, embroidered with gold tigers. A golden breastplate and matching swords completed the imperious portrait.

He raised one eyebrow, met Ami’s burning glare.

“Honorable wife? What is the meaning of this?”

“I beg forgiveness, most gracious Lord.” Ami kept the rage from her voice, her face impassive as a statue’s. “But I must speak with you on a matter most urgent.”

Ami held up a crumpled sheet of rice paper in one white-knuckled fist—an edict marked with the Imperial Seal. The assembled ministers looked to their Lord in unison. The Shōgun’s brow darkened, his voice hollow and metallic behind the mask.

“Do you not see me here in council—”

“As I say, great Lord,” Ami interrupted. “A matter most urgent.”

The Shōgun looked among his ministers, the Guildsmen. “You will excuse us, please.”

Murmured acquiescence, the hiss and whine of pistons and the whisper of silken robes as the assemblage stood as one, bowed to their Lord, their Lady, and marched slowly from the room. Ami’s eyes were fixed on Tatsuya, the beginning of tears gathering in her lashes. Rage burning inside her, refusing to let them fall. The Shōgun’s voice was tinged with impatience.

“You had best have fine reason for interrupting—”

“I do not care about your bloody council, Tatsuya!” Ami crumpled the paper in her fist and hurled it at her husband’s chest. “Bad enough you leave our marriage bed empty, and my belly besides. But now you shame me like this?”

Tatsuya glanced at the paper in his lap, back at his wife. “Shame you?”

“You plan to adopt Mai’s child?” Ami hissed. “Make it your heir?”

“Hai.” Tatsuya nodded. “If it is a boy. Until I have an heir of my own.”

“And how in the name of the gods do you suppose that will happen, Tatsuya?”

“I am wondering the same, beloved,” the Shōgun replied. “I hear rumor about the court you are barren. Unable to provide me with sons.”

“You have not touched me in three years!”

“Strange,” he mused. “I heard no mention of that amidst the whispers.”

“What did I do to you?” Ami demanded. “Ever you have spurned me, but never have you sought to so openly disgrace me. And now I find you in council with the Lotus Guild? You vowed vengeance against them! Have you forgotten they tried to murder me? Your own wife?”

“The Guild leaders who ordered such dishonorable aggression have been brought to justice. Their heads delivered to me personally. And my vengeance? Already I bring them under my heel. I have commanded their chi-production be brought under Shōgunate control. Their refineries will be constructed in each clan capital now, where they can be monitored by my officials. No longer will they practice their arts out in the wilderness beyond my sight or knowledge. It is time they learned to whom they owe allegiance.”

“You bring their refineries into our cities?” Ami was incredulous. “Have you taken leave of your senses?”

Tatsuya stood slowly, hand on his sword. His scowl growing black as storm clouds above the tiger mask. “Mind your tongue, honorable wife. You speak to your Shōgun now.”

“What of the sickness? The blacklung? The arashitora fought beside you because they thought you meant to expel the Guild! Unravel it! You gave Jun your word!”

“I recall making no promises to the beast-speaker.”

“Beast-speaker?” Ami blinked. “He is a Stormdancer, Tatsuya! Perhaps the last of them!”

“Indeed? Then where is his thunder tiger?”

Ami fell silent, incredulity and rage choking her to stillness.

“The Guild has some intriguing interpretations of holy scripture regarding the nature of those who speak with animals.” Tatsuya crossed the wooden floor, heavy boots ringing upon the boards. Towering over his wife now, staring down at her with cold, black eyes. “The Book of Ten Thousand Days is quite clear upon the topic, when read in a certain light.”

“… A certain light?”

“Hai,” Tatsuya nodded. “The book also speaks clearly on the matter of wives. The nature of deference. Obedience. I suggest you peruse it, before next you consider it prudent to burst in upon one of my council sessions like some moon-touched peasant-child…”

“What has become of you, Tatsuya? Always you and I had our differences, but now…” Ami shook her head. “It seems I know you not at all…”

The Shōgun stared from behind his breather, golden tiger fangs bared and gleaming.

“Did you ever?”

She found him in the garden, his thin pine walking stick in hand. He stood in the shade of a twisted maple, leaves turning gray in the stink and slow exhaust haze. Every day, it seemed to be growing just a fraction worse. A few Guild ships now rumbling in the skies above Kigen, smudging the clouds with thick plumes of blue-black smoke. The haze of motor-rickshaw thickening in the streets, beggars coughing in the alleyways, the taste of lotus leaking slowly into the water. The food. The air. Everything.

“Jun-san.”

He turned toward the sound of her voice, and she saw he had tears in his eyes.

“Jun-san, what is wrong?”

“I heard them crying.” He pointed to the gardens beyond the palace verandah. “I came to see. On days such as this, I wish I were truly blind.”

Ami saw a clutch of servants gathered around a tall stack of bamboo cages. The little prisons were filled with sparrows, all hues of the rainbow, screeching their distress. The servants reaching through the bars, one by one, plucking the birds out and setting to with wickedly sharp snips; clipping the sparrow’s wings as they struggled and screeched.

“The ones who could fly away already did.” Jun’s voice was that of a man with a hollowed-out chest. “But the servants told me the Lady Mai enjoys their song. The Shōgun had hunters in the north catch them, bring them here.” He looked around the graying gardens as if he could truly see. “To die. Singing.”

Jun frowned, pressed his hand to his brow.

“I can hear them. All of them. The sparrows. The seagulls. The cats and dogs and rats. It is getting worse. I cannot stand it. It was not supposed to be this way. I was supposed to save the world…”

“Come inside, Jun-san.” Ami put her arm about his waist, led him up to the verandah. “Come with me.”

They walked together, Jun’s stick tapping upon the boards. Servants bowing in deference to the Lady, but not the boy. Lingering stares. Puzzled, even. They had not been told of the Battle at Four Sisters. The minstrels did not sing of the Stormdancer Jun who came to their Shōgun’s aid. And they wondered who he was; this confidante of the First Lady. This boy she spent so much time with, when instead she should be furnishing their Lord with sons.

They found an empty room in the training halls—a dojo filled with wooden dummies, wooden swords, wooden armor. A hollow facade, just as their lives had become.

“We should not be alone,” Jun said. “It is unwise.”

She ran her hand across his cheek, gentle as first snows. Watching him shiver.

“I miss you,” she breathed.

Stepping closer, her body pressed against his, bleeding with want.

“I know myself a fool for saying so. But I cannot forget.”

Jun reached up with trembling hands, running soft fingertips over her face as if to see her. She sighed, eyelids fluttering closed, his touch making her thighs ache. Her breath coming faster, his fingers across her lashes, brushing her lips, the smooth curve of her throat. Lunging forward, her mouth seeking his, her arms about him as he crushed her to him, the press of his lips making her shiver. Gods, she wanted him.

Need you.

Breathe you.

“We are both fools, then,” he sighed.

Running her fingers through his hair, drifting apart with reluctance, her eyes fixed on his sightless stare. All about her was lies, but this, here in her arms. He was real. When all else was shadows and spiders.

“There is something wrong with Tatsuya,” Ami whispered. “He plots with the Guild rather than punishing them. He speaks of you…” She shook her head. “I fear you are in danger here, Jun. You should go. Back to Koh. Away from this palace. The serpents within.”

“I sense the truth of it. There are eyes ever upon me here. I feel them crawling on my skin, though I have no eyes to see them.”

“Not even Whisper and Silk?” Ami smiled. “Those cats seem to spend more time in your company than mine. I have not seen the ungrateful little devils in days…”

“I have not seen them, either,” Jun frowned. “Now that you make mention…”

Ami pulled back from his embrace, dread unspooling in her belly. “You do not suppose—”

Jun put his finger to her lips, head tilted. Expression paling. Breath catching in his lungs.

“… There are soldiers coming,” he said. “Many.”

“You must go, Jun,” Ami said. “Go now. Quickly.”

“Who says they come for me?”

“Tatsuya would not harm me. He would not dare. But the way he spoke of you … you must go, Jun, now!”

A smile on his lips. Melting her heart.

“I cannot die today, remember?”

He grasped his cane, drew forth his gleaming blade.

“It seems I have not saved the world yet…”

The doors slammed open, a dozen samurai in iron armor stomping into the room, studded war clubs in their hands. Their faces covered by iron masks, crafted into the likes of oni demons straight from the Yomi hells; all twisted snarls and upturned tusks. Behind them, four Guildsmen in their suits of leather and brass, strange devices clutched in their hands; hollow tubes making a faint sloshing sound, cylindrical hoppers feeding into long, smooth barrels.

“Kitsune Jun,” said the samurai captain. “By order of Shōgun Tatsuya, you are to surrender your arms and come with us. You are under arrest.”

“For what crime?” Lady Ami demanded.

“Impurity,” hissed a Guildsman.

Ami ignored the Lotusman, a challenging stare fixed on the lead samurai. “Kitsune Jun saved your Shōgun’s life, Captain. Tatsuya would not even be alive, let alone sitting the Four Thrones if not for him. This is the courtesy we show now in the Shōgun’s palace?”

“I follow my orders, First Lady,” the samurai replied. “I humbly suggest you take issue up with your Lord and husband.”

“This is madness. This is—”

“Enough,” rasped the Lotusman. “Take the abomination into custody.”

The samurai reached out to seize Jun’s arm. The boy backed away, three steps, raising his blade into guard position. His eyes were closed, head titled slightly, a gentle smile curling his lips. His voice soft as new-forged steel.

“I warn you, honorable soldiers, all,” he said. “If you stand against me, you stand against the gods themselves. It was spoken by my—”

A flurry of hisses from the raised barrels clutched in the Guildsmen’s hands. Ami cried out, Jun shoving her aside as whistling projectiles filled the space between them; tiny needles set with syringes, filled with gleaming black liquid. Jun moved, his sword a blur, rolling and swaying, slicing one, two, three from the air. The samurai lunged, war clubs raised, closing about the boy as he swayed in the hail of fire. Jun struck, swift as quicksilver, slicing through the join at one man’s elbow, stepping behind another as the Lotusmen fired again, the samurai’s back sparking under the needle flak.

“Stop this,” Ami roared. “I am the First Lady of this Shōgunate, and I command you to stop this!”

Jun struck again, pushing his blade through the eye socket of one samurai’s mask, the soldier screaming and falling to his knees. Jun vaulted up off the man’s shoulders, flipping himself overhead, landing amidst the Lotusmen. His blade a whistling, crimson blur, weaving in the air to the tune of murder, blood spraying in haphazard patterns across the dojo walls. One Lotusman collapsed screaming, two more forever silenced. But as the fourth fell back before Jun’s onslaught, he let loose a last volley from his weapon, one of the tiny needles striking the boy in his shoulder, burying itself to the hilt.

Ami cried out, drew the tantō hidden in the small of her back. She stabbed the Lotusman in the throat, a gush of crimson warmth flooding over her hands, painted upon her lips. Bubbling nausea in her belly as the Guildsman fell, clutching the spray at his neck. The floor slippery beneath her feet. The first man she had ever killed. Gods …

Jun turned back to the samurai, the figures surrounding him now. His chest heaving, frown forming between his brows, shaking his head as if to clear it. Blade dripping gore. Plucking the empty needle from his shoulder. Swaying on his feet now. Ami crying out as the samurai lunged.

He fended them off for a moment or two more, opening up another at his throat. Yet his footsteps were unsteady. Head drooping. Shoulders slumping. Sword hanging limp in his grip. Ami cried out, stepping into the fray only to be seized by iron hands, flung into a corner. She hit the wall hard, breath knocked loose, blood on her tongue. A club stuck Jun’s sword arm, breaking it clean, the boy crying out as he fell to his knees. His sword clattering to the dojo floor as another blow crashed across his shoulders, splayed him flat upon the boards. Clenched fists rising and falling, Ami trying to catch breath enough to scream. Jun falling still, beaten senseless, head lolling on his neck as they slapped manacles about his wrists. Hauling him from the room now, supported between two hulking iron figures, his bare feet trailing through pools of cooling blood. Leaving her there, clutching her breast. Staring at his sword, gleaming in the crimson puddle, now as useless as his certainty. His prophecy. His destiny.

Weeping. Cursing. Hair in ragged curtains over her eyes. And dragging herself across the floor, through the blood, she clutched the blade, the hollow scabbard, hauling herself to her feet.

Husband.

She had to find Tatsuya …

Three figures in a shadowed hallway, lit by the scarlet light of flickering lanterns.

The first, a son of the great Kazumitsu Dynasty, son of Sataro-no-miya, victor of the Battle of Four Sisters. Absolute Lord of all he surveyed. Shōgun of the Shima Imperium. Unquestioned. Unchallenged. Untouchable.

The second, a widowed bride. Her belly swollen with her beloved’s child. Still dressed in the mourning black, barely a month since her husband’s passing.

Standing together, heads bowed, speaking softly.

A third figure, hidden in the shadows. Quiet as whispers. Still as stone. A bloody sword clutched in her white-knuckle grip.

She watched them. The pair. Speaking in hushed tones. Dread and disbelief in her belly. Recalling his face in the battle’s aftermath, drenched in blood. The gentle kiss he had placed on her brow—the first touch from him she had felt in years.

That should have been enough.

She was certain now. But she had to see.

The pair of them. Soft voices. A wicked, curling smile.

A hand, placed on a swollen belly.

Lips, upturned to a gentle kiss.

The Shōgun removing his golden tiger mask, the face beneath one she recognized at last. Almost identical to his brother’s. A near perfect symmetry. But still, she should have known …

Not a bull upon the throne.

A bear in a bull’s skin.

Curse me for a fool.

And just as certain, the thought that pulled her back from the brink.

The truth that loosened her grip on the blade’s hilt, and all desire here to remain.

No one will believe me …

I was not there that day.

I did not see him dragged through the streets before a wondering crowd. The figures in leather and brass on either side of him. Eyes of bloody-red glass. The four stones, newly erected in the Market Square. The mob gathered around it, as if some new sport. The blind boy there chained, eyes open and seeing nothing at all.

I did not hear the figures in their white tabards, reading of “impurity” from ancient and twisted scripture. Proclaiming a new order, a new law, set with the Shōgun’s seal. I did not hear their lies. The feeble justifications for atrocity you monkey-children so love to weave. I did not hear the sound of the flames flaring at their wrists. The tinder beneath him crackling.

His screams.

I did not smell the blackening meat, the burning hair, the charring bones.

I did not touch the cooling remains when all was said and mercifully done.

I did not taste the ashes on my tongue.

I was not there.

I did not see, nor hear, not smell, nor touch, nor taste. Not any of it.

So how do I know, you ask?

Foolish monkey-child.

Death told me.

Ninety-nine years after the birth of the Kazumitsu Dynasty, at the beginning of a boiling summer, I watched a twenty-two-year-old woman limp to the highest summit of the Four Sisters Mountains.

Not the most spectacular of finales, I will grant you. Not one to bring audiences to their feet, rippling with vibrant applause. Not the way a story about heroes should finish. And you need not be availed of facts about how high the peaks, or how hard the trek or how the skies around those magnificent mountains were prone to rain samurai.

All this, you already know.

She was dressed in heavy black cloth and furs. Eyes hidden from the burning sun behind goggles of dark glass. A heavy cowl pulled up over her newly shorn hair.

But still I recognized her.

Seated at my Khan’s right flank, I was. Raising my head at the warning cries of our scouts, Rahh’s tail whipping in agitation. Curled there in his warmth, the embers of my first flushing still glowing faint. And beside me, he, the one I had chosen when it pressed upon me with all its insistent heat.

We do not know love as you, monkey-child.

But that is not to say we do not know love.

A summer storm was gathered above our heads, cooling showers to wash away the smoke curling ever upward from the monkey-scabs below. Thunder pressed down on us like our father’s smiles. Butterflies in our bellies. The taste of home.

And now the Lady Ami, here in my Khan’s court. No sign of Jun beside her. Confusion in my thoughts. Cool dread in my heart. What had happened, that she was here alone?

“Koh?”

Rahh looked at me, at the Lady, growl seething in his chest.

“Be still my Khan,” I said. “I will seek the truth of it.”

Down onto the snow I bounded, to stand before the Shōgun’s bride. She did not make your jabber speakings with her monkey-tongue. She did not try to tell me what had happened. But from within the folds of her travel-stained robes, she drew a thin cane of polished pine. Dried blood upon the blade. Dried blood upon the hilt.

His blood.

“Koh?”

The Lady reached inside the obi wrapped at her belt. Drew forth a small sack of dark cloth. Loosening the binds at its throat and upending it there before my widening eyes. Sandy gray spilling forth, out into the wind, snatched and scattered by the howling gale, dusted upon our faces, hers and mine. Ashes, I realized.

His ashes.

No.

The beginnings of it, a growl. Deep in my belly. Boiling and burning, monkey-child, like the brightest flame. White-hot and incendiary. Demanding release. Rumbling up through my chest, churning and seething, tearing from my throat with all the strength I could muster. A roar to shake the very stones, reverberating across the mountainside. A roar to begin avalanches, to send boulders of ice crumbling free and crashing into the canyons below, all Four Sisters trembling with the fury of it. And I raised my talons, set to seize and tear and shake like a doll of rags and bones and bloody—

“They killed Jun.”

I turned to Rahh, my eyes ablaze.

“THEY KILLED HIM.”

Rahh stood tall, hackles raised, talons crushing the stone at his feet to dust. A snarl, wings flared wide.

“Then they die. All die. Jun your friend. Your brother. We avenge. We fight.”

Rahh roared, a long, grating call, echoing amongst the peaks. A call to battle. To war. For every buck to take to the wing, to spill blood and strike fear into the hearts of—

“No,” I said.

Rahh cocked his head.

“No?”

My growl shook the very stones around me.

“They blind. All. Blind, Rahh. Monkey-Khan promise to end sickness. Sky grows redder by day. Sun burning brighter. Smoke thicker. They lie to us. They use. Think us beasts. Think us fools. And if we stay here? If we fight when their own Khan will not? Then fools we are.”

“I gave word,” Rahh growled. “Khan’s word is law.”

“Not stay here. Not fight.”

“You not asked to fight. Males fight. Females breed. Such is our way.”

“Foolish way!” I snarled.

“This again? Not speak so, no! I your Khan. You obey. Khan’s word is law!”

The bucks gathering about us now, flying in from the corners of the Four Sisters. The skies above us filled with the thunder of their wings. I recalled flying with Jun on my back. Those brief and precious days of freedom. Anything and everything possible between us. We were supposed to save the world, he and I. We were supposed to change everything. That was our destiny.

And I looked then, at the ashes scattered in the snow. Smudged upon the face of this tiny monkey-child before me, just as wounded and lost as I. And I hated her. Her and all her wretched race. Their greed and their blindness and their pride. Their faith and their dreams and their foolish hope. All of it. They deserved to burn. To suffer. To die choking in the funeral shroud of their own weaving.

Jun was dead. The prophecy a lie. There was no saving this place.

Why in the name of all would I doom myself and my own to linger here?

“I challenge,” I snarled.

Rahh blinked. Eyes narrowed.

“What you say?”

“I CHALLENGE!”

“Foolish. Females not challenge. Females not fight. Females not—”

I did not wait for him to finish. Did not wait for him to list yet another thing I could not should not would not do. Instead I roared, hackles flaring, wings spread, and charged into him with all my might. We collided like thunderheads, the crack of bone, the hiss of breath, a splash of blood. Lightning cracking at the edges of our feathers as we flew off the mountainside, a tumbling, snarling flurry. He tried to break away, roaring at me to stop, to hold, to think.

But I could not think. I could not feel. I could not breathe.

All I tasted was blood.

All I saw was red.

And all I knew was rage.

And here at last, we find our place, little monkey-child. Here, where we first stepped out upon the stage.

I plummeted from the sky, wind clawing at my eyes. Warm and scarlet painted thick upon my tongue. Wings pressed tight to my flanks, lighting crackling along my feathertips. Roaring, bellowing like the storm itself, impossible brightness cracking the skies, black clouds closing at my back. My talons locked with his. My friend. My foe. Our plumage dipped in crimson and fluttering in our wake as we flailed and bit and kicked. Descending.

Mountains loomed below us. Jagged peaks rising from the rolling mist of rain and ashen smoke, snow-clad teeth set to tear us to pieces. But still we struggled. Chained together by my rage, my hatred, unwilling to let him go. At the last, he broke away, kicking loose in a shower of blood. I spread my wings, felt the wind cup my feathers, distant pain from the wounds he had torn in me stealing my breath. He was ever my match. Even when we were cubs, the stripes at our haunches still muddy gray. Not my blood. But yet my brother.

And now, my enemy.

We leveled out, circled each other through the rain. He called to me, voice as loud as the storm, my blood in his mouth.

“Stop this, Koh. Stop this madness.”

I growled reply between the thunder claps.

“Only three ways this will end.”

“I am Khan here,” he roared. “Khan’s word is law.”

“Then kill me.”

“Never.”

“Then die.”

I tore across the sky toward him, tempest at my back. All around us was chaos, the voices of our packmates raised, eyes watching the drama unfold. We collided like comets, like falling, burning stars. I dug my talons into his flesh, knuckle deep. He tore at my shoulder, blood brighter than the poisoned sun, and we became snarls and shrieks and roars, all a-tumble across the sky. Lightning rocked the clouds, gleaming in his eyes as we plummeted toward teeth of stone. His beak closing about my throat. Mine about his.

My friend. My enemy. My Khan.

“Stop this!” he growled.

“Not stay here. Not fight. Not lose you or myself or the ones growing within me.”

A silence, then. Long as years.

“… What?”

“Will not let us die here.”

“You lifebearer?”

“Your cubs, Rahh. Yours and mine.”

The stones rising to meet us. Open grinning mouths. Teeth of black rock, smiling as wide as the sky.

“Wish to fight for the right to see them born still?” I asked.

His eyes on mine.

“Die mewling inside cracked shell too thin to hold them?”

My eyes on his.

“Monkey-children not worth that.”

“But I vowed,” he said. “Khan’s word is law.”

Seconds from impact.

“Then be not Khan,” I said. “And my word be law.”

He spread his wings, snarling, momentum and gravity tearing at his joints. Pulling us back, away from death’s velocity and rolling, just as I had taught him when we young, flipping himself beneath me as we collided with the mountainside. The crunch of year-deep drifts of snow, the splintering crack of ice and stone beneath. The impact knocking all from our lungs, pressing me to him, blood and feathers and fur. And there on his back he lay, wings spread in the deep frost about us, throat exposed. At my mercy.

The pack gathered about us, soaring down from the Aerie above, astonished cries and fearful roars. The Khan, bested by a female? Never in our history had such a thing come to pass. What could it mean? What could it portend?

Understand, monkey-child; the title of Khan is never given. Always taken. Bought with murder. And for me to claim his title, I should have claimed Rahh’s life. He knew it to be so. My rule would be bought with his death. Such was our way.

But mine would be a new way.

“Enough death. Not for this. Not kill you, Rahh. Too few of us left. Too much lost already.”

My roar echoed on the stone around me, in the sky above me, my grandfather’s ghost hanging in the air beside me.

“Arashitora do not kill arashitora! No more. Khan’s word is law!”

Rahh dragged himself to his feet, bloodied and bruised, shaking the snow from his fur. Ragged breath boiling the air between us. Thunder echoing in rolling clouds as the others gathered on the stones about us, wide eyed, hackles raised as Rahh lowered head in deference.

“Khan’s word is law.”

I looked about my kin. Rage burning in my chest. Flame in my eyes.

“Not stay here. Fight no more. Why we help them, when they not help themselves? When they destroy all beautiful and pure?”

Rahh’s voice was low, and keen-edged.

“Certain this about them? Not about him?”

I growled long and low. The truth striking closer to my heart than he could know.

“This about us.”

I looked to my belly, to the lives I could already feel swelling inside there. To the two futures laid before them—one beneath this sweltering bloody sky in a land run through with poison and gleaming brass. The other, I did not know where. North perhaps, where the dragons fled. A different land. A different future. One at least where they might have a chance to breathe.

Rahh pressed his cheek to mine. Nodded slow.

“Us.”

We took her back to the land of her birth. The land of the Kitsune clan. The Lady Ami upon my shoulders, the last monkey-child ever to sit there. The island that had been our home laid out below, bloodred and turning slowly to rot. My eyes were ever on the land beneath. The smog creeping into the soft valleys. The beginnings of a decay; a blackening that even then was beginning to take seed, and in years to come, would grow so much worse.

But the Lady Ami’s eyes were on the horizon. The edge of the sky. What might be. What could still be. One hand pressed to the curve of her belly.

We found it where he said we would—at the edge of a murmuring forest, by the banks of a chuckling stream. A tiny house, a thatched roof, a crooked door. Beast skins hung on racks outside the walls. An old woman and an older man, both browned and wizened by the sun. The woman bent with years, almost blind. The man tall and wiry, still possessed of a hunter’s spirit, sweeping up his spear and watching me with wide and terrified eyes as I came in to land.

Lady Ami slipped off my shoulders, sank slowly to the ground. Though we could not speak, still she knew this was an ending. Tears in her eyes. Empty hands upturned toward me. Dragging what she could of a smile along bloodless, trembling lips.

But the taste of ashes lingered on my tongue. The taste of death you monkey-children had carved for yourselves with the petals of bloodred flowers. So I took to the wing. My mate and all my pack beside me. Turning away from your prophecies and destinies, your greed and your blindness, turning our eyes instead to the fateless horizon. A place we could make our own. A future, our own to decide.

And we did not look back.

Arashitora live long years, monkey-child. And my years were good ones. Bright ones. Spent in a place where the storm endlessly raged. Where our father Raijin beat upon his drums with all the fury of the heavens. Rahh and I knew joy. Our cubs growing fierce and proud and strong away from your choking sky. Our kind spared the extinction awaiting us if we had lingered beneath that ceiling of bloody red. And when he left me, when he lay down his head and slept forevermore, I was there beside him, my wings around him, my stripes slowly turning gray.

Those twilight years were tinged, yes, I admit, with a hint of regret. That I was not there to save Jun as he died. That his prophecy, his destiny—that a child of his grandmother’s line would one day save the world with an army of thunder tigers behind him—had proven false. It was a grand dream. A bright dream. But not, I thought, a true dream.

Because I did not know, monkey-child, you see? I did not know.

I did not know of the sweet collision between Jun and Ami that night amidst the lotus blooms. I did not know the seed of it grew in the Lady’s womb, nor that it would fruit into a fine and healthy son. I did not know he would be raised a hunter by his great-grandfather, nor that his grandson would inherit not only his craft, but also Jun’s gift.

A gift he would pass on to his only daughter.

But I know her name, monkey-child.

Just as you do.

I know it as I lay here, watching the endless storm rage above a night-black sea. I know it as the wind howls me a lullaby, old as the stars, singing to my weary bones of a time when I flew free and wild and strong, a boy as light as twig and tinder upon my shoulders, the whoop of his joy spilling into me as we plummeted together from the clouds.

I know it as I know my children, their children, swooping and wheeling in the skies above my head.

I know it as I know myself.

I know it as I close my eyes.

I know Jun was not the last Stormdancer.

And how do I know?

Foolish monkey-child.

Death told me.