Kinslayer (5 page)

You know what they say. Kitsune looks after his own.

Yukiko pressed against the mighty beast beneath her, felt the blood-red percussion of his pulse, the smooth motion of his flight. She ran her hands through the arashitora’s feathers, following the glass-smooth lines down his shoulders until her fingertips brushed the metal framing his crippled wings. The feathers clipped by a madman, barely a month in his grave.

At least now Kin is back and he can adjust your wings for you. This contraption looks ready to fall apart. How long until you molt?

YOU CHANGE THE SUBJECT AS ARTFULLY AS YOU LIE.

You’re becoming quite the master at avoiding questions, though.

The thunder tiger growled in the back of his throat.

I WILL HAVE NO NEW PLUMAGE FOR MONTHS. NOT UNTIL MY WINTER COAT GROWS IN.

Yukiko curled her fingers through sleek feathers, right where neck and shoulder met. His favorite spot.

And then what?

I DO NOT TAKE YOUR MEANING.

I mean what will you do after you can fly again under your own power?

WHAT DO YOU EXPECT ME TO DO?

I don’t know. Go home, maybe? Leave this place behind.

LEAVE YOU, IS YOUR MEANING.

… Yes.

AFTER ALL WE HAVE BEEN THROUGH?

This isn’t your fight. This isn’t your home. You could fly away right now and forget any of this ever happened.

YOU KNOW THAT IS A LIE.

Do I?

YOU KNOW ME. AS YOU KNOW YOURSELF.

I don’t know anything, Buruu.

THEN KNOW THIS. BETWEEN AND BENEATH AND BEYOND ANYTHING ELSE I MAY BE, I AM YOURS. I WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU. NEVER FORSAKE YOU. YOU MAY RELY UPON ME AS YOU RELY UPON SUN TO RISE AND MOON TO FALL. FOR YOU ARE THE HEART OF ME.

She rested her head on his neck, wrapped her arms around him and breathed. The burn scar on her shoulder was a distant, nagging ache. The last few weeks with Buruu had been like something from a dream—flying to the clan capitals and speaking to the people, watching the fire grow in their eyes as she spoke. In Kigen, the citizens had laid out hundreds of spirit stones in the place where her father died. In the Dragon capital of Kawa, their arrival had kicked off five days of rioting. In Yama city, home of her own clan, the Kitsune, they had been treated like heroes. The whole country felt ready to rise. To throw off the shackles of the old Imperium and forge something new.

And still, the memory remained. Grief turning to slow and smoldering rage. Her father’s death. His blood on her hands. Dying in her arms. She hadn’t attended his funeral pyre. Hadn’t watched the flames consume the swollen, bloated thing his body had become. Hadn’t visited his grave in the days since, to burn incense or pray or fall to her knees and weep.

She hadn’t shed a tear since the day he died.

She glanced over her shoulder at the boy pressed against her, his breath soft, eyelashes fluttering against smooth cheeks. One hand seeking his, the other pressed to Buruu’s feathers. Surrounded by those who cared for her. And still …

And still …

Part of me feels like I’m still trapped in Kigen, you know. I can see Yoritomo looking at me over the barrel of that iron-thrower. Hands stained with his own sister’s blood. It makes me want to scream. To reach inside his head and kill him all over again.

YORITOMO CAN HURT NO ONE NOW. HE IS DEAD. GONE.

He’s still all around us. In red skies and black rivers. In soldiers’ graves and blood lotus fields and dying soil. The Kazumitsu Dynasty is shattered, but even without a Shōgun, there’s still the Lotus Guild. They’re the cancer at this nation’s heart.

She shook her head, felt the warm swell of rage in her breast. Sudden and seething, curling her hands to fists. Remembering the heat of conflagration on her skin, the screams of dying Guildsmen as the sky rained ironclads. Because of them. Because of her.

And it felt
right
.

Daichi and the Kagé speak the truth. The Guild needs to be burned away.

AND YOU WILL BE THE SPARK? A HANDFUL OF WEEKS AGO, THE ACT OF TAKING A SINGLE LIFE WAS UNTHINKABLE FOR YOU. AND NOW—

A handful of weeks ago, my father was still alive.

THERE IS BLOOD DOWN THIS ROAD, SISTER. BLOOD LIKE A RIVER. AND THOUGH I SWIM IT GLADLY, I DO NOT WISH TO SEE YOU DROWN.

He bled out into my arms, Buruu. You don’t know what that’s like.

I KNOW THE SHAPE OF LOSS, YUKIKO. ALL TOO WELL.

Then you know what I have to do.

The thunder tiger sighed. His stare fixed on the ancient forest below, glazed and distant, staring into a future stained a deeper scarlet than the poisoned sky above.

WHAT
WE
HAVE TO DO.

We?

ALWAYS.

Buruu banked down into murmuring gloom.

ALWAYS.

*   *   *

Her bedroom trembled in the midnight hush, candles flickering on the walls like dawn through rippling autumn leaves. Yukiko watched the shadows play through the blur of her lashes, eyelids made of lead, the same blood-drenched pain that had plagued her for weeks pounding inside her skull. Fists to temples, breathing deep. Teeth clenched, focusing on the aching scar at her shoulder to stop her mind drifting back into the dark. The place where her father lay, cold and dead, the ashes of his funeral offerings caked on his face. The place where she was helpless. The little one. The frightened one.

She drew the back of her fist across her mouth.

Never again.

Buruu’s low growl dragged Yukiko from the throb inside her head, the ache in her body. She closed her eyes, tried to look through the Kenning to see what he was grumbling about. But as she reached inside his head, the world flared bright and loud, screeching and clawing—the thoughts of a hundred tiny lives out in the gloom flooding her skull. An owl soaring through the velvet dark (
seekkilleatseekkilleat
), a tiny furtive thing of fur and pounding heart hiding in long shadows (
stillstillbestill
), mockingbirds curled in their nests (
warmandsafesafeandwarm
), a lone monkey howling (
hungreeeeeeee
). So many. Too many. Never in her life so impossibly loud. Gasping, she closed off the Kenning, as if locking a disobedient child in an empty room in her mind. Breathing hard, she dragged her eyelids open, squinting out to the landing.

A figure stood in the shadows.

High cheekbones and steel-gray eyes. Dressed in dappled forest-green. An elegant, old-fashioned wakizashi sword at her waist, a scabbard embossed with golden cranes in flight. A long, black fringe cut to fall over one side of her face, almost concealing the jagged diagonal knife scar running from forehead to chin.

Another of Yoritomo’s legacies.

“Kaori.”

Daichi’s daughter lurked in the near darkness, wary eyes locked on the thunder tiger.

“He won’t hurt you,” Yukiko said. “Come in.”

Kaori hovered for a few uncertain moments, then slipped past Buruu as quickly as she could. The arashitora watched her, amber stare glittering. His metal-clad wings twitched, and he lay his head back down with a sigh and a hiss of pistons, tail sweeping in broad, lazy arcs.

The bedroom was ten feet square, unvarnished wood, wide windows looking out into a sea of night. The perfume of dried wisteria mingled with sweet candle smoke, doing their best to banish the pulsing ache at Yukiko’s temples. She lay back in her unmade bed with a sigh.

“The lookouts told me you had returned,” Kaori said.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come see you and Daichi-sama. I was tired.”

The woman looked her over with a critical eye, lips pressed tightly together. Her stare lingered on the empty saké bottle at the foot of the bed.

“You look awful. Are you unwell?”

“The Guild ships are dealt with.” Yukiko’s arm was slung over her face, words muffled in her sleeve. “They’re no threat to us anymore.”

“Your Guildsman is resting. He is torn. Bruised. But Old Mari says he will recover.”

“He’s not
my
Guildsman. He’s not a Guildsman anymore at all.”

“Indeed.”

“My thanks, anyway.” Her tone softened. “Your father honors me with his trust. I know what it means to have Kin here.”

“I sincerely doubt that, Stormdancer.”

“Don’t call me that.”

Uncomfortable silence fell between them, broken only by the whisper of dry leaves, the thunder-rumble breath of the arashitora outside. Yukiko kept her arm over her eyes, hoping to hear Kaori’s retreating footsteps. But the woman simply hovered, like dragonflies in the bamboo valley where Yukiko had spent her childhood. Poised. Motionless.

Finally, Yukiko dragged herself upright with an exasperated sigh. Pain flared at the base of her skull, claws curling up through her spinal cord.

“I’m tired, Kaori-san.”

“Thirsty too, no doubt.” Steel-gray eyes flickered to the empty saké bottle. “But we have news from our agents in Kigen city.”

She sensed the hesitation in Kaori’s scorn. The weight.

“Is Akihito all right?”

“Well enough. He cannot escape Kigen while rail and sky-ship traffic is locked down. But the local cell is looking after him.” Kaori walked to the window, avoided her reflection in the dark glass. “The city is in chaos. The Tiger bushimen can barely maintain the peace. We get new recruits every day. Talk of war is everywhere.”

“That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? The body thrashing without its head.”

“The Guild seek to grow it a new one.”

Yukiko blinked through the headache blur. “Meaning what?”

The woman sighed, clawing her fringe over her face, kohl-rimmed eyes downcast.

“I take little pleasure in telling you this…”

“Telling me what, Kaori?”

The woman looked at her palms, licked her lips. “Lord Hiro is alive.”

Yukiko felt the words as a blow to her stomach, a cold fist of dread knocking the wind from her lungs. She felt the room spin, the floor fall away into a beckoning nothing. And yet somehow, she managed to sway to her feet, to hold her center and pretend she didn’t feel like a stranger clawing at the insides of someone else’s skin.

She could see him in her memory, lying on sweat-stained sheets, the light of a choking moon playing on planes of smooth skin and taut muscle. His lips, soft as clouds and tasting of salt, pressed against hers in midnight’s hush. Peeled back from his teeth as she drove her blade into his chest, as Buruu’s beak sheared his right arm from his shoulder in a spray of hot crimson.

How could it be? He was dead. They killed him.

I killed him
.

“Gods,” she whispered. “My gods…”

“I am sorry,” Kaori said, still staring into the dark. “We hear but whispers. We only have one operative left who can move freely within the palace grounds. But we know Hiro is one of three seeking the title of Daimyo. Rumor tells he has the full backing of the Lotus Guild. Once he secures position as clanlord, he will claim the Shōgun’s throne.”

“But that’s madness.” Yukiko tried to swallow, her mouth dry as desert dust. “Why would any of the other clanlords support him?”

“Their oaths of fealty bind them to the Kazumitsu Dynasty.”

“But Hiro is not of Kazumitsu’s blood. The dynasty died with Yoritomo.”

“There is one of Kazumitsu’s line who still lives.”

Yukiko frowned, trying to clear her thoughts. To focus. Buruu was on his feet, growling, his heat echoing through the corridors of her mind. She could feel the nightbirds beyond the window glass. Monkeys flitting across the trees. Tiny lives and tiny heartbeats—hundreds of them, bright and burning in the Kenning. So hard to think. To shut them out. To breathe.

“I don’t…”

“Aisha lives.”

A flash of memory in her mind’s eye. Yoritomo in Kigen arena. His eyes dancing with hate. Wiping his hand across the bleeding gouges on his cheek.

“No, my sister refused to betray you. And still she dared to beg me for mercy.”

Yukiko bent double, hands on her knees.

“She found none.”

Black flowers bloomed in her eyes, unfurling in time with the strobing pain in her skull.

YUKIKO?

“Hiro will cement his claim by joining the dynastic bloodline through its last surviving daughter.” Kaori spoke as if her words were a eulogy. “He and Aisha are to be wed.”

The dark fell still. Sudden and silent as death. No nightsong. No wind. A wet thump rang out in the room and Kaori flinched, squinting through the bedroom window to the black beyond. A small splash of blood was smeared on the glass. Another thump, against the far wall. Another.

And another.

She turned toward the girl, saw her doubled over in pain.

“Yukiko?”

YUKIKO!

A sparrow smashed itself against the window, colliding headfirst and dashing its skull open against the glass. Another bird followed, another, as dozens upon dozens of tiny bodies slammed into the bedroom walls, the ceiling, the glass. Kaori drew her wakizashi, blade gleaming in the candlelight, turning in circles, her face thin with fear as the pounding of flesh against wood became thunderous. A rain of soft, breathing bodies and brittle bones.

“Maker’s breath, what is this devilry?”

Yukiko was on her knees, hands pressed to her temples, forehead to the floor. Eyes shut tight, features twisted, teeth bared. She could hear them all—a thousand heartbeats out in the dark, a thousand lives, a thousand fires, hotter than the sun. Their voices in her skull, nausea rising black and greasy in the pit of her stomach, overlaid with the taste of his lips, the bitter words he had spoken right before she killed him, she killed him, gods, I
killed
him.

“Good-bye, Hiro…”

SISTER.