By the time I looked back, Shizuru was on top again. Any hope I had to see her triumph was soon dashed. Burqila rocked forward, scooped up Shizuru’s arm, and twisted. In that moment I learned that broken arms sound very much like broken twigs.
She screamed, cursed, rolled off of Burqila. I was at her side in an instant, holding her hand, doing whatever I could to ease the pain. Sweat left a thin sheen on her body; her lips were dry and chapped. Next to us, Burqila Alshara knelt and wrote on her slate. I glanced up to see what she had to say for herself.
You should have submitted, old woman, before I had to break your arm.
I scowled. The worst thing was—she was right. Shizuru must have realized on her own. She, too, glanced over at the slate—and then she lay back down, laughing.
“Yeah,” she said, “you might be right about that.”
Behind us I heard the marching of Imperial boots. Barked orders to disperse followed not long after. The guards were coming—and yet Burqila Alshara did not run. As Keichi did his best to cobble together a splint for his sister’s arm, Burqila Alshara scrounged up a plank of wood to help him.
I frowned. What was she getting at?
“Itsuki,” said Shizuru. I turned my attention to her instead of the warlord helping us. “Next time I try to fight a Qorin, you talk me out of it.”
I winced. “I tried,” I said, “but you were an arrow in flight.”
She laughed at that, too. In the haze of her injuries she gestured to Alshara, of all people. “Listen to him!” she said. “Arrow in flight. My poet!”
Burqila did not have time to react. The guards, by then, were on us. Without so much as asking what had happened, they seized Burqila. Apologies to Shizuru fell from their mouths like leaves from autumn trees.
Shizuru squinted. “Where are you taking her?”
What sort of question was that?
“To prison,” said one of the guards.
Shizuru lurched up, yelping as she inadvertently put weight on her now-broken arm. “Wait, wait,” she said. “I started this fight. You take her, you’ve got to take me, too, and I’ve got a feeling you don’t want to take me in.”
I could not believe what I was hearing. She was lobbying for Burqila’s freedom? Burqila Alshara, the warlord? Even the woman herself raised a skeptic brow.
The guard looked to me for confirmation. I cleared my throat.
“With all due respect,” I said, “it’s true. Minami-zul started the fight. However…”
I faltered, for I could not bring myself to use my power in so corrupt a manner. The guard must have caught on to the situation from my awkward silence.
“Well, there’s been a lot of property damage here, your Imperial Highness,” she said. “Someone ought to pay for it.”
“Of course,” I said. I could already see the list of damages forming, and it would be longer than I was tall. “Rest assured, it will be taken care of.”
“You heard him,” said Shizuru. “Let her go! She won a fight, damn it, isn’t that why we’re all here? To win fights?”
Her voice was a little slurred from all the head injuries, but I got the feeling she’d make the same argument lucid. That was the most worrisome part of all.
The guards released Burqila. That fearsome warrior stood a horselength away from us, unsure of how to hold herself or what to say.
After a long silence, the captain bowed to us and departed. In so doing she snapped the tension of the moment like twine, and the rest of us were free to resume breathing.
“Hey, Burqila,” said the concussed woman in my arms. “Teach me how to do that arm-breaking thing when you get a chance, yes?”
After all that fighting—that was what Shizuru wanted to say to her?
A smile broke out across Burqila’s face like sunlight through storm clouds. She nodded.
And as we sat in the wreckage of the White Leaf, White Smoke teahouse, I thought to myself that it was a good thing I did not ask for Shizuru’s hand that day.
For one thing, that hand was mostly useless at the moment.
And for another, with an introduction like that, there was no way Burqila Alshara was going to end up anything but Minami Shizuru’s greatest friend.
*
A SCANT TWO days after this incident, I asked Minami Shizuru to marry me in the Imperial Gardens, beneath my favorite dogwood tree. To my delight, she agreed.
*
I WAS TO be proven wrong on the first account. Shizuru fought a great many of her most famous duels with her broken arm in a sling—after we got her to a surgeon. The woman outright refused going to a healer. As she put it, she didn’t want to be responsible for my wasting several thousand ryo and ten years of someone’s life over a broken arm. I should have expected nothing less from a woman who laughed in the face of death.
But—I was right on the second account. After that confrontation, Burqila and Shizuru’s respect for one another only continued to grow. Soon, whenever we traveled, it was the three-and-one of us—Keichi, Shizuru, Burqila, and myself. Sometimes the two of them ran off together on some madcap adventure they’d later refuse to explain between tearstained bouts of laughter.
Burqila made good on her promise to teach Shizuru Qorin wrestling, and Shizuru repaid her with lessons in bare-handed fishing. Or tried to, anyway. It turned out Burqila had never been more than knee-deep in any water at all. The fact that fearsome Burqila could not swim brought Shizuru endless joy; it took two weeks of practice before Burqila could so much as doggie paddle.
Sitting on the banks of the Jade River, watching the Wall-breaker herself flounder in the water, Shizuru leaned on my shoulder with a grin.
And it was hard not to smile along with her—with them.
What a puzzling thing to behold, this newfound friendship. This woman who’d waged war on us took Shizuru out riding and drinking. She let us try to draw her bow and laughed at us when Shizuru could hold it back for no more than a second.
I admit, it did not feel quite right to me, to be so trusting of a woman who’d tried to kill us. And yet there was no end to Shizuru’s enthusiasm for her.
That is my favorite thing in the world about Minami Shizuru—my favorite even among a host of favorites. I will never, I think, fully understand my Queen of Crows. Our cores are too different. She is iron and I am woven silk. We are strong in our own ways, but where I am soft she is rough. Or perhaps she is the silk, for she is far more flexible than I, who hold on to my grudges.
It is that difference that I yearn for. She is a puzzle I cannot figure out; she is a story with endless delightful little twists. Just when I think I’ve discovered all there is to know about her, she reveals something new.
It was only after our daughter’s birth, for instance, that Shizuru admitted she was a fan of my poetry before we met.
I asked her, incredulous, what she thought when she read my long-ago war poem.
She tapped me on the nose.
“You’re pretty, and your words are too,” she said, “but nothing you’ve ever written about me has been quite right.”
How many poems have I written about her? In some small way she lives in everything I’ve written since we’ve met—for she is always on my mind.
I suppose I will have to keep writing until I get it right.
Praise for The Tiger’s Daughter