The Lotus War - Kinslayer Part 3

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-fas.h.i.+oned wakizas.h.i.+ 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 aras.h.i.+tora 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 sake bottle at the foot of the bed.

"You look awful. Are you unwell?"

"The Guild s.h.i.+ps are dealt with." Yukiko's arm was slung over her face, words m.u.f.fled 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 aras.h.i.+tora 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 sake 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-s.h.i.+p traffic is locked down. But the local cell is looking after him." Kaori walked to the window, avoided her reflection in the dark gla.s.s. "The city is in chaos. The Tiger bus.h.i.+men 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 thras.h.i.+ng 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.

"G.o.ds," she whispered. "My G.o.ds..."

"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 t.i.tle of Daimyo. Rumor tells he has the full backing of the Lotus Guild. Once he secures position as clanlord, he will claim the Shgun'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 gla.s.s. 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 gla.s.s. 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 das.h.i.+ng its skull open against the gla.s.s. Another bird followed, another, as dozens upon dozens of tiny bodies slammed into the bedroom walls, the ceiling, the gla.s.s. Kaori drew her wakizas.h.i.+, 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, G.o.ds, I killed him.

"Good-bye, Hiro..."

SISTER.

Buruu. Make them stop.

THEM? IT IS YOU. THIS IS YOU.

Me?

YOU ARE SCREAMING. STOP SCREAMING.

"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. Smas.h.i.+ng themselves against the walls, falling broken and bloodied toward a grave of fallen leaves. Eyes burning bright, teeth gnas.h.i.+ng, 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 make her stop.

"Yukiko, stop it."

SISTER, STOP IT.

Knuckles and pulses and a thousand, thousand sparks.

"Stop it!"

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.

"Good-bye, Hiro..."

She could feel everything.

"G.o.ds, 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 a.s.surances 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.