“The Stormdancer.”
“Stormdancer?”
The girl looked at him as if he were a simpleton.
“The girl who tamed the thunder tiger? Brought it back from the Iishi single-handed? You must have heard of her. She’s all over the Kage broadcasts. Someone’s even written a kabuki play about her; I saw it outside a brothel in Ibitsu Street last week, before the bushi’ started cracking skulls.”
“Oh, I’ve heard of her,” Akihito nodded. “I’m still just getting used to the name, to be honest. I always called her Yukiko.”
Hana’s eye narrowed. “You know her?”
Akihito considered the girl staring at him. Defiance. Suspicion. She was so wretchedly thin; fingers almost skeletal, pale skin covered in grime. He focused on that single dark eye, almost too large in her emaciated face. He wanted to trust her, but couldn’t quite fathom why. Was it because she was somehow familiar? Female? Young? How old could she be, anyway? Seventeen? Eighteen?
Almost the same age as …
“I hunted with her father, Kitsune Masaru.”
“The Black Fox of Shima?” Hana’s voice was awed, and she leaned forward, braids forgotten. “People lay spirit tablets for him near the Burning Stones!”
The big man held up the wood he’d been carving. “Who do you think started putting them there?”
“My gods, you
“Meet it?” Akihito’s chest puffed out a little. “I helped catch the bloody thing.”
“Oh my
“I helped catch it. On the sky-ship
“What’s she like?” Hana’s eye was bright, her imagination afire. “The Stormdancer?”
“A clever girl.” Akihito nodded. “Strong. Hellsborn stubborn. But sugar-sweet. Truth be told, she’s a lot like you, Hana-chan.” He glanced up at the windowsill where the tomcat had been perched a few minutes before, scratched the whiskers on his chin.
“She’s an awful lot like you.”
11
DESOLATION’S EDGE
Yukiko had forgotten how beautiful the world could be.
Towering mountains beneath them, ancient and unchangeable. Making her feel like a brief and tiny thing; a spark escaping the rush of a twilight fire, speeding into the sky even as it burned away to nothing. Trees arrayed in gowns of bloody scarlet and shining gold, of bright rust and fading rose, like dancers awaiting the moment autumn’s music would falter. And then they would shed their finery in a flurry, sleep naked in winter’s arms, and wait for spring to wake them with warm and gentle kisses in all their softest places.
Yukiko rested her head against Buruu’s neck and watched it all grow smaller and smaller. She’d closed herself off from the Kenning, just she and the wind in her hair, the world diminishing beyond lenses of polarized glass.
Yofun lay strapped across her spine with a length of braided cord. She’d found the katana clapped and scraped against the tanto at the small of her back, threatening to ruin the lacquer on both. Deciding the knife and sword made an argumentative pair, she’d stuffed her tanto into the bottom of one of Buruu’s satchels, melancholy thoughts of her father with it.
The sake had worn off, the memory of Kin’s cold farewell a hollow ache inside her. She reached out to Buruu, eyebrows knitted together, opening herself up just a hair’s breadth. A burst of heat, blinding, pulses in the forest below flaring bright—lives she’d never have been able to feel at this distance just a month ago.
She clenched her teeth, tried to make the Kenning contract, like an iris as the sun crests the horizon. Trying to build a wall of herself, brick by brick. A bulwark of will to hold the fire at bay, something stronger than the insubstantial numbness granted by a gutful of liquor. Images of her childhood. Memories and moments—anything that would tether her, anchor her, shield her from the inferno waiting beyond. Her breath came shorter, headache cinching tight.
His voice was tiny, as if he stood on a distant mountaintop and called across a valley of burning red.
She hissed in pain, wincing, slumping forward across his shoulders. Her grip faltered as his thoughts crashed inside her skull, smashing her wall to splinters, her whole body aching. Buruu whined, holding his wings steady so as not to throw her from his back. Blood dripped from her nose, bright and gleaming, smeared through his feathers and upon her cheek.
She felt him pull himself back, whispering across the link binding them together.
She wiped the blood from her nose, a slick of crimson on her knuckles. She sniffed hard and spat, salty, bright red.
The thunder tiger nodded.
They ascended, clouds rolling back across a bloody gray sky. The sun was a harsh glint on the edges of her goggles, sharp enough to cut her eyes from her head. The forest pulse receded as they rose above it all, the island shrinking beneath them as the air grew thin and brittle, blood-red ocean stretching all the way to the horizon.
Looking far behind them, miles upon miles to the south, she could see the Iishi Mountains melting into low foothills. And beyond them? Blood lotus. Everywhere. The blooms had been plucked as summer died, red fields stripped to undergarments of miserable green. The weed with a hundred uses, or so the Guild claimed. Proof the gods existed. But squinting across endless fields rippling in the toxic wind, Yukiko only saw proof of her people’s greed.
Deadlands. Great, smoking tracts of earth, stripped of life by the poison in the lotus roots—an infection spreading across Shima’s flesh. From this altitude, they could see how bad it had become, how far the soil-death had spread. Countless miles of ashen earth, rent with fissures as if the island was bursting; some sepsis forcing its way up through a broken crust. Dark mist drifted snot-thick over the deadlands, never straying far from the desolation’s edge.
Yukiko found herself wondering if Kin was right. If there was anything they could do to save the land. Some way to undo all the damage they’d wrought …
Buruu lurked behind her eyes, a gentle, cotton-pawed prowl. Feline grace, even in his thoughts, trying his best not to awaken the pain he could feel coiled and ready. She nodded to the southern fields, blurred by smog and distance.
