inside my mind. The strangest of sensations; sharing a room as vast as reckoning with another mind, wide as the dawning sky. Touching. Overlapping. A sense of him in me, and me in him. Unlike anything I had ever known. And after a moment, the frown smoothed from his brow, incredulity settling there instead, blind eyes searching mine as if he saw me true.
Amusement rippling in my mind. Spilling into his.
I looked at the Four Sisters behind me, the Aerie of my race. The Skymeet therein, aloft and aloof and afraid. What would happen to me when I returned? What shape would my Khan’s displeasure take? My kind did not allow females to fly free. Risk themselves in battles. Such was our way. Had always been our way. But there was change coming. All with eyes to see knew it …
The boy stood there in the snow, ice on his brows and the soft down at his cheeks. He seemed a tiny, lonely thing, then. Far from home and all he knew. Yet still that certainty loomed within him—the pillar of belief that all this was preordained. A faith unswerving. A conviction, perhaps, that would change the world …
My eyes narrowed, wings flaring, wisps of lightning crawling across my feathers. A growl rumbled in my chest, shivering the snow upon my fur, spilling to the ground in rolling white flurries.
He paused to wipe at those milk-white eyes, and I felt a sadness touch my heart.
The sadness swelled, slowing my breath, clutching my chest. You may think us beasts, monkey-child. And beasts we are. Predators, proud and fierce and wild. The storms that rock your walls and shiver you beneath your straw roofs are but spring showers to us. Ours is not a world of mercy, of softness or kindness. The bodies of the weak fill the bellies of the strong.
But we know kinship. We know pack. We know the warmth of another’s body against our own when the winter bites deep and the cold winds moan. And in the days after my family fell to the sickening, I had learned what it was to be alone.
Truly alone.
The boy stepped forward, head tilted, reaching out with trembling hands toward my heat and sound. I could feel his heart beating through the thin walls of his chest. I knew it pumped with fear, despite his talk of prophecy and destiny and other such foolishness. Standing naked before the beast he was, sightless and small. But as he touched my cheek, I saw the fear in him melt, slowly, by inches. His hands exploring my face. Down my beak, black as moonless midnight, fading through to gray at a tip that could puncture steel. As his fingertips brushed my closed eyelids, I tensed and growled, and he withdrew not for fear of me, but out of concern. I could feel his presence in my mind, even as I felt his hands return to my brow, my temples, my throat, his thoughts as gentle as his touch. I had not known such sensation. Nothing so careful or … kind? No room in my world for a moment such as this. And in it, I felt the wound left by my kin’s passing begin to ache …
I pulled away, snorting, claws tearing at the frost. The boy’s eyes were open, and tears were frozen upon his cheeks, and his smile was bright as the sun.
A growl deep within my chest, ruffling my feathers and shaking the snow from my wings. The boy wiped salted ice from his cheek, the mask of determination slipping back into place.
The boy walked forward, prodding the snow with his lacquered cane, feeling about my wings for the briefest of moments before he scrabbled atop me, light and only a little graceless. It was a strange sensation, the weight of him up there. I had not flown with anyone on my back before. My muscles tensed, wings flinching as he found his balance, my tail lashing side to side. His arms closed about my neck and I almost balked, blood rushing beneath my skin. But ever I could feel him in my mind, just as frightened as I, trembling just as deep, all his certainty eroded at the heat radiating from my fur, the taste of ozone in back of his tongue, the crackle of infant lightning across the breadth of my feathers.
Clumsy as first-time lovers we were. And though nothing of love lay between us, I could not recall a time I had felt as close to another as I felt to him in that moment.
My voice in his mind, killing the uncomfortable silence between us.
My wings spread, twenty feet, flickering with pale blue-white. His skin prickling with adrenaline, echoing in his thoughts. His arms about my neck, squeezing tight.
A swift breath before the plunge.
Then flight.
Lord Tatsuya stood in his command tent, bathed in the bloody light of burning chi-lamps, staring at the map before him. He was decked in traditional samurai armor—an elaborately embossed suit of black iron, commissioned for him on his eighteenth naming day by his dear-departed Lord and father. Katana and wakizashi at his waist, a braid of long dark hair slung over one shoulder. Dawn waited two hours distant, but the battle ahead was already playing out in his mind, clear as a portrait hung upon the palace walls. The ring of steel. The smell of blood.
