“A good Qorin man?” Kenshiro said, reading my mother’s signs. “I don’t see any here. Come forward, Boorchu.” Then he broke into Hokkaran again. “Mother, please. She’s only five.”
What were they talking about? Why was Boorchu sweating so much, why had his friend run away, why was my brother trembling?
Boorchu dragged his feet. “Burqila,” he said, “I just want them to be strong. If you never let them hear what people think of them, they’ll weep at everything. You don’t want them to be spoiled, do you?”
My mother clapped her hands. One of the guards—a woman with short hair and a scar across her face, with more braids than loose hair—snapped to attention.
“Bring the felt,” Kenshiro translated.
And the guard ran to get it. In a minute, no more, she returned. She bound Boorchu’s hands together with rope and wrapped him in the felt blanket. He kept screaming. The sound, Shizuka! Though it was soon muffled, it reverberated in my ears, my chest. It was getting harder to breathe.
“Ken,” I said, “Ken, what’s happening?”
“You should turn away,” he replied. “You don’t have to watch this.”
But I couldn’t. The sight and sound fixed me in place. My eyes watered, not from sadness, but from fear; my brain rattled in my skull.
“Shefali,” he said, “look away.”
My mother drew her sword. She didn’t bother signing anymore. No, she walked up to the man in the felt binding and ran him through. Just like that. I remember how red spread out from the hilt of her sword like a flower blossoming. I remember the wet crunch of bones giving way, the slurp as she pulled her sword back.
Kenshiro ran his hands through my hair. “Shefali,” he said, “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have … I’m sorry.”
I wasn’t paying attention.
I couldn’t look away from the bundle of white-turning-red. I saw something coming out of it, glimmering in the air, swirling like smoke. As I watched, it scattered to the winds.
This was unspoken horror. This was water falling from the ground into the sky. This was a river of stone, this was a bird with fur, this was wet fire. I felt deep in my body that I was seeing something I was never meant to see.
I pointed out the flickering lights to Kenshiro with a trembling hand. “What’s that?”
He glanced over, then turned his attention back to me. He stroked my cheeks. “The sky, Shefali,” he said. “The Endless Sky, who sees all.”
But that wasn’t what I saw. I knew the sky. I was born with a patch of it on my lower back, and though the birthmark faded, the memory remained. Grandmother Sky never made me feel like this.
I felt like an arrow, trembling against a bowstring. Like the last drop of dew clinging to a leaf. Like a warhorn being sounded for the first time.
“Ken-ken,” I said, “do you see the sparkles?”
And, ah—the moment I spoke, I knew something within me had changed. I felt the strangest urge to look North, toward the Wall of Flowers. At the time, I’d heard only the barest stories about it. I knew that it was beautiful, and I knew that it was full of the Daughter’s magic.
How could I have known that the Wall was where blackbloods went to die?
How was I to know?
Kenshiro furrowed his brow. “You’re just stressed, Shefali,” he whispered. “You saw something you shouldn’t have. But you’ll be all right, I promise.”
I bit my lip, hard. Kenshiro couldn’t see it.
Maybe he was right. Kenshiro was right about a lot of things. He always knew where the sun was going to rise in the morning, and he knew the names for all the constellations.
But that didn’t change the awful feeling in my stomach, or the rumbling I now heard in the distance, or the whisper telling me “go north.” I looked around the camp for an oncoming horde, but I saw none. Yet there was the sound rolling between my ears; there was the clatter of a thousand horses.
It wasn’t there, I told myself, it wasn’t there, and I was safe with my mother and Kenshiro.
But for the rest of that day, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something awful had happened.
Kenshiro told me Tumenbayar stories to pass the time. Tumenbayar is something like your ancestor Minami Shiori—there are hundreds of stories about her. All of them are true, of course, especially the ones that contradict each other.
It was one week later that I received your first letter. When the messenger first brought it out of his bag, I knew it was yours by sight alone. You sent it sealed in a bright red envelope, emblazoned with golden ink. I snatched it out of his hands in a way that made Kenshiro apologize for my rudeness, and I pressed it to my nose so I could smell you.
You might find it strange that I was so excited for a letter from a girl who tried to kill me. The truth is, I never bore you any ill will for what you did. When you first saw me, you were struck with unspeakable rage.
But when I saw you, I …
Imagine you are a rider, Shizuka, a Qorin rider. You have been out in the forests to the north for some time, trying to find something to feed your clanmates. Two days you’ve been hunting. Hunger twists your stomach into knots. You can hardly will yourself to move. Behind you, you hear something in the trees. You turn, you fire, and you slow down enough to see your catch: two fat marmots, speared together by your arrow.
Seeing you was like seeing those marmots. I knew everything would be all right, so long as I had you near me.
So your letter understandably excited me, and getting to smell it thrilled me even more so. A person’s soul is in their scent. For the first time since Boorchu died, when I took a breath of your perfumed paper, I felt safe.
Until I tried to read the letter. Then I only felt frustrated. I stared at the characters and pretended I could read them. I traced them with one finger, and imagined what you might say to me.
Kenshiro caught me at it. “Is that—?”
He tried to take the letter from me. Only Grandmother Sky could’ve pried it away from my grubby little hands. After some coaxing, he convinced me to hold it out so he could read it.
His bushy brows rose halfway up his forehead. “Shefali,” he said, “is this from the Peacock Princess?”
I nodded.
He let out a whistle. “You’ve made an important friend! Can you read this?” When I shook my head, he sat down next to me. “Then it’s time for some tutoring. Follow along with my finger.”
To be honest, I couldn’t follow any of the writing at all. Your calligraphy was beautiful even then, but I could never make sense of it.
You can read Qorin letters, Shizuka. Imagine if every time you blinked, everything changed. Where the letters were. What they looked like. Imagine if they went from right side up to upside down and backwards. That is what happens to me when I read Hokkaran.
I made Kenshiro read it to me so many times that I remember it still.
Oshiro Shefali,