Kinslayer

the answer to a perception puzzle that, once seen, can never be missed. She remembered reaching out to Yoritomo’s mind in the Market Square, trying to hold on to him like a handful of sand. But now, effortlessly, she could feel every person in the village. A low-level hum stacked upon itself, one person at a time, until the entire world was shapeless noise. She bent double, blinking hard, Buruu rising to his feet and whining.

SISTER?

Daichi took another sip of tea, his voice a dry whisper.

“Are you well, Stormdancer?”

She smoothed the hair from her brow, the sensation of her fingertips like sledgehammers across her skin. She tried to close herself off, to force the noise and heat away, curling up inside herself and closing down the Kenning completely.

Gods, what’s wrong with me?

“Yukiko,” Daichi said. “Are you well?”

She took a deep breath, exhaled slow. The world had fallen quiet, and yet she could still feel it, just outside her skull. The tide of it rushing back out to sea before its next surge, a tsunami rising to blot out the sun. She in its shadow, standing an insect high.

“I have a headache, Daichi-sama.”

“Perhaps you should rest?” Kaori asked.

“How can I rest?” She blinked at the older woman, out of breath as if she’d been sprinting. “The Lotus Guild is trying to reforge Kazumitsu’s Dynasty and you’re talking about killing Kin? We should be talking about Hiro. The wedding. What are we doing to stop it?”

“The Kuro Street cell are already at work,” Kaori said. “We have an operative inside the palace walls. The ceremony is weeks away. Calm yourself.”

“I am calm!”

“Yukiko…” Daichi said.

SISTER.

“No, godsdammit!” she shouted. “The whole nation was ready to rise a few days ago, and now you’re sitting on your hands while it all slips—”

“Yukiko!”

Daichi shouted this time, graveled voice like a slap on her skin. She forced herself to be still, caught her breath, felt Buruu’s concern flooding her receptors. The world pulsing, the thoughts of everyone in the room building against her crumbling little dam as the whole earth beneath her swayed.

“What?” she hissed.

“Your ears are bleeding,” Daichi said.

She reached up to her head, felt the flood of thick warmth down the sides of her neck, spattering on the floor. Black suns imploded in her vision, tiny singularities folding in upon themselves and drawing her with them. Buruu was at the doorway, his thoughts a storm in her skull, the crunch and crumble of thunder interspersed with white strobes of crackling lightning. She fought for breath, for space, for a moment’s silence inside her head.

The tide came rolling in.

The walls trembling, the floor beneath her rolling. She sank to her knees, clutching her temples, heard the clatter of the tiny ornaments on Daichi’s shelves, chess pieces tumbling and falling. People on their feet, shouting, their thoughts impossible to keep at bay, flooding into her and out of her nostrils in scarlet floods. A teacup smashing on the boards. Daichi’s sword falling from the wall. Cries of alarm from the villagers outside as the trees literally trembled in their roots, and in her head a tangle, a briar, thorned and tearing, all of their thoughts, their hopes, their fear (gods, their fear), everything they were and could have been and wanted to be filling her up and pulling her down to the dark beneath her feet.

YUKIKO!

Buruu, help me!

WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

I can’t keep it out!

It rose up on black wings, like some forgotten beast beneath the bed in the days when blankets were armor and her father’s voice the only sword she needed to keep the dark at bay. But he was gone, gone to his pyre, gone to the great judge Enma-o. She could see him now; the ashes of offerings daubed on his face, cadaverous skin hanging loose from his bones, black blood still leaking from the hole in his throat. Her hands on the wound, trying to stop the flow, but it was too much, too deep, too late. Heat and thoughts and screams and floods, and as it rose up to swallow her, she felt Buruu in the black, groping toward her, burning in her mind.

HOLD ON TO ME.

Buruu!

HOLD ON TO ME, SISTER.

A tracery of blood vessels pulsing across the backs of her eyelids, strobing light beyond.

Reaching for him, her rock, her anchor, all that held her still in that gnashing swell.

His wings about her, ozone and feathers and warmth, soft as pillows.

And into the dark, she fell.

8 NO ONE

No matter the shape of the shoreline, or the color of the horizon, there are three breeds of drunk to be found beneath the rising and setting of the sun.

There’s the jovial kind who takes to the bottle when he has cause to celebrate, who has a few too many at festival feasts and revels in the rush of blood to his cheeks. He slurs his songs and argues with his friends about the gaijin war or the last arena match, grinning to the eyeteeth all the while. And though he might swim deep in the bottle, he doesn’t drown, and when he looks at the bottom he can still see his own reflection and smile.

Then there’s the kind who drinks like it’s his calling. Hunched silent over his glass, charging headlong toward stupor as fast as lips and throat can take him. He takes no joy in the journey, nor solace in company upon the road, but he keens for his destination with an intensity that leaves shadows under his eyes. Oblivion. A sleep where the dreams are so far submerged beneath Forgetting’s warm embrace that their voices are a vibration rather than a sound, like a mother’s lullaby in the blurred days before words had shape or meaning.

And then, there was No One’s father.

Seven shades mean, the kind who saw the bottle as a doorway to the black inside. A solvent to peel the paint from his mask, the luster of bone and blood beneath. A mumbled excuse for what had happened the last time, and the unspoken promise why it would happen the next.

The bottle’s lips pressed against his own like a mistress, a balm discovered in empty days after he returned from the war overseas. A tranquilizer to silence the cries of the gaijin that still haunted his dreams, numb the pain of the parts he was missing. And though he was a gambler too, hopeless and helpless, the bottle was his first and truest love.

But he loved her too, in his own stumbling, ugly way. He called their mother “bitch,” her brother “bastard.” But his daughter? His dearest? His flower? Even at his worst, he still called her by name.

Hana.

Her earliest memories of her mother were of tears spilling from swollen eyes, irises of gleaming blue. Of slumped shoulders, trembling hands and broken fingers. Of screamed abuse. Open palms and bloody lips and spitting teeth. Long days without a crumb to eat. Brief periods of plenty, of laden tables and tiny toys (dolls for her, soldiers for her brother) that he would give them with his broad, broken-toothed smile, and hock to the pawnman a few weeks later.