Rumor tells he has the full backing of the Lotus Guild. Once he secures position as clanlord, he will claim the Shogun’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.
Yukiko bent double, hands on her knees.
Black flowers bloomed in her eyes, unfurling in time with the strobing pain in her skull.
“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?”
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
“Stop it,” she breathed.
Kaori took hold of her shoulder, squeezed tight. “Yukiko, what is happening?”
Hearts beating in thin, feathered chests. Blood pumping beneath fur and skin. Smashing themselves against the walls, falling broken and bloodied toward a grave of fallen leaves. Eyes burning bright, teeth gnashing, the girl inside their head screaming and screaming and screaming and they had to make it stop because it hurt what does she want why won’t she stop make her stop
“Yukiko, stop it.”
Knuckles and pulses and a thousand, thousand sparks.
Her scream rang out in the darkness, her eyes wide and bloodshot, hair splayed in dark tendrils across her face. Silence fell like a hammer, broken only by the sound of small, still-warm bodies tumbling down into the darkness below. Bright spots of red spattered on the boards between her knees. She reached up to her nose, felt sticky warmth smeared down her lips. Pulse throbbing in her temples in time to the song of her heart, Buruu’s thoughts cupping her and holding tight, the Kenning’s heat receding like floodwaters out into a cold and empty black.
Kaori knelt beside her, blade still clutched in one trembling fist.
“Yukiko, are you all right?”
She dragged herself to her feet, smudged blood across her mouth with the back of one hand. Stumbling out the door, she wrapped her arms around Buruu’s neck. Sinking to her knees again, him beside her, wrapping her beneath his clockwork wings. Salty warmth on her lips, clogging her nose. Echoes bouncing inside her skull. The sparks of every animal out in the forest, out there in the dark, flaring brighter than she could ever remember.
She could feel everything.
“Gods, what’s happening to me?”
3
THE FIRST AND ONLY REASON
Yukiko’s dreams were of burning ironclads.
A golden throne and a boy with sea-green eyes.
Smiling at her.
Her sunlit hours were all motion. Visiting Kin in the infirmary. Speaking with the Kage council about the ironclad attack. Talks of Hiro’s wedding. Concern over the flurry of small, warm bodies that had dashed themselves to dying against her bedroom walls. Halfhearted assurances that all was well. Disbelieving stares.
The ache in her skull swelled by the day—the thoughts of the surrounding wildlife encroaching just a fraction further, a thousand splinters digging ever deeper. But every night, she made it stop, reaching for the sake bottle to dull it all. A blunt force trauma knocking her wonderfully senseless, burning mouthfuls submerging her beneath a merciful, velvet silence.
She would sit with the bottle in her hands, fighting the urge to hurl it into the wall. To watch it shatter into a thousand pieces. To ruin something beyond repair.
To unmake.
Buruu’s concern was a constant white noise inside her skull. But if he thought less of her as he watched her retching up the dregs every morning, she felt no trace of it inside his mind.
Hauling herself from her bed in the splintering light of the third day, the ache flared inside her head; an old friend waiting in the wings with open arms. Liquor dregs sloshed inside her empty innards, hangover fingers buried in her skull all the way to the knuckles. She sat at breakfast with the rest of the village, avoiding Daichi’s watchful stare, swallowing her puke like medicine. It was almost midday before she made it to the infirmary, asked Old Mari if Kin would be well enough to take a walk with her.
