“You can’t go! Stormdancer!”
“I can’t stay,” Yukiko said. “Not like this. The Guild rebels see the wrong in this world we’ve built, and they’ve chosen to fight to make it right. How they fight is none of our business. We’ve no right to expose them, or put their lives at risk. We’re no different from them. We’re no better. As soon as we start thinking we are, we’re just another Shōgunate, waiting to happen.
“But you can come. Any of you. All of you.” She turned to the sky-ship captain, standing beneath his impossible straw hat. “Blackbird-san, will you carry them on the Kurea? Anyone who wishes to leave and come with me to Yama?”
“You saved my life. My crew and my ship.” The captain nodded. “If you ask, it is yours.”
As Akihito stepped forward, Buruu and Kaiah turned on him with a snarl. Wings flared, tails stretched behind them like whips. The big man stopped dead, his voice low.
“Yukiko, you can’t do this…”
“It’s done, Akihito. All that remains is for you to pick a side.”
The girl climbed onto Buruu’s back, looked amongst the villagers, the cloudwalkers, this tiny knot of rebellion now unraveling faster than any could have foreseen. A fortress made of clay, crumbling to the tune of falling rain.
“All of you,” she said.
Thunder bellowed overhead.
“Choose.”
2
CAPITULATION
Fair Kigen had lost her First Daughter.
The city was dressed in funeral black, boardwalk littered with the skeletons of gutted sky-ships. Spot fires still smoldered in Downside, filling the already choking air with smoke. Her people wore soot-stained clothes and bewildered expressions. Soldiers walked her cobbles, heads hung in shame. A mother wandered black riverbanks, her eyes as empty as the charred wicker stroller she pushed before her.
When the Stormdancer had landed in Market Square and urged Kigen’s people to open their eyes and raise their fists, it had sounded an easy thing. A wonderful and powerful thing. And in a way, it was all that. But it was also an ugly thing. A brutal, callous, bloody thing.
Shima’s people were learning what it meant to stand rather than kneel. Freedom is never given in tyranny’s shadow—it is only taken. The Kagé rebels had done so, just as they promised. They’d burned Kigen city. They’d ruined Tora Hiro’s chance of renewing the dynasty that had ruled Shima for nine generations. And they’d murdered the Lady Aisha.
Her pyre was attended by almost every man, woman and child remaining in the city. Their fair Lady. The last remnant of a proud lineage, the final link to long-passed days of glory. As Shōgun, her brother Yoritomo had been respected, obeyed, feared. But Aisha, with her wisdom and beauty and flawless grace—she had simply been loved.
And now she was dead.
Her betrothed had watched her body burn, his armor painted death-white, face smeared with ashes as if he too were to be consigned to the pyre. He hadn’t shamed himself with tears. But the Daimyo of the Tiger clan had spoken to the assembled populace when the fire died, and in his eyes, they saw an emptiness speaking of all they’d lost.
“That which has been taken can never be reclaimed,” he’d said. “Kazumitsu’s last daughter is ended, and with her, all our hopes for tomorrow. But she will not stand alone before the great Enma-ō. The Stormdancer, the Kagé dogs who burned this city, those who made mourners of us all—they will join my betrothed in death. I will lay her down on a bed of their ashes. And when I die, they will greet me in the Hells.”
Some had cheered. Some had wept. Most had simply stared. This was the hour when words meant nothing. When talk of revolution and justice was washed away, and all that remained was the reality of a gutted home, a bloodstained thoroughfare, an empty stroller. This was fresh-faced troops marching onto Guild sky-ships. This was mothers and wives kissing sons and husbands they may never see again.
This was the pain before birth. The storm before spring.
This was what they asked for.
This was what they wanted.
This was war.
*
Fifteen days.
Hiro stood with hands clasped behind him, green eyes staring at a gigantic map of the Seven Isles on the floor beneath him. Long black hair tied in a topknot, a pointed goatee on a handsome jaw, white ashes smeared all over his face. The iron prosthetic where his right arm should have been spat chi smoke into the soot-stained air, staining the rice-paper walls.
Six Iron Samurai stood with him, faces also smeared with ceremonial ashes. Each stood seven feet tall in their death-white armor, masks crafted like oni demons; tusks and horns and grinning fangs. Their eyes were those of dead men.