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Tain Shir meets her cousin, the future Duchess of Vultjag, two days after she was born.
Papa emerges from the building that hosts the seat of Duchy Vultjag with a wide, proud smile. From where she’s sitting with Auntie Yawa, Shir can feel his delight. “Ko’s still inside,” he tells Yawa. “Arguing with her brother. This little one’s mother needed some rest.”
“So she gave the child to you?” Yawa snorts. “Is she mentally deficient?”
“Oh, shut up.”
Shir stands up, raising her arms above her head to crack her shoulders the way the revolution’s riders had taught her to after a long hard night on the road. She rises up on her toes to peer at the baby in her father’s arms. “It’s tiny.”
“She, Shir,” Yawa corrects.
“Her name is Hu,” Papa says. “Tain Hu, after her father’s family.”
Shir looks at the little girl. She’s so small, with a perfect button nose and unblemished skin the same shade as Shir’s own.
“Do you want to hold her?” Papa asks.
Shir, who is perhaps the clumsiest ten-year-old she had ever encountered — though, granted, she didn’t know many children her age — balks. “What if I hurt her?”
Papa motions to the stump upon which Shir had just been sitting. “You won’t. Auntie will show you how to hold her.”
Shir allows Auntie Yawa to arrange her arms just so, and when Papa places the baby in her arms, she holds her breath as long as she can. Just in case.
“When you were that small,” Auntie Yawa murmurs from where she sits beside Shir, “I swear you tried to bite me every time I held you.”
“She gets that from her father,” Papa calls from across the clearing.
“Hush!” Auntie whisper-hisses.
Shir ignores them and looks down at the bundle in her arms. Paper-thin eyelids flutter open to reveal luminescent gold eyes. Tain eyes. Shir feels a bolt of jealousy. She wishes those were hers too.
“Hello, little one,” Shir whispers, because being envious of a baby is stupid and because the sudden urge to ensure Auntie Yawa didn’t take the baby from her had seized her. “I’m your cousin Shir.”
Hu’s little fist waves in the air, tiny fingers opening and closing. Shir offers one of her own, and Hu grabs it with surprising strength for one so small. Yawa chuckles. “She likes you.”
Shir looks down. Hu’s eyes are keen, narrowed a bit, and sharp like a hawk. Hu means something to do with nature, right? Shir smiles a bit.
“Auntie?” Shir asks, because Yawa reads a lot, when she can. “What does Hu’s name mean?”
Auntie Yawa thinks for a moment. “Some say it means ‘tiger’,” she says. “I’m not sure what her parents took it to mean. In the old days, priests named children with a meaning for their future. But that tradition has long since passed out of the north, I think.”
Shir doesn’t miss the mournful note in her aunt’s voice, though she doesn’t understand it. “What does my name mean?” she asks instead.
“Shir means ‘song’,” Papa says, coming to sit at his sister’s feet. “Your mother picked it out for you.”
Hu’s little fingers spasm around Shir’s hand. There’s a little furrow in the baby’s brow, like she’s already learned to frown. Shir pulls her finger gently from Hu’s hand to smooth it out.
Hu lets out a shriek. Shir, startled, looks at Yawa. When Hu grabs at her hand again, Yawa laughs. “She really likes you, Shi.”
Shir smiles. Hu’s warm little fingers twitch. Her mouth parts in a yawn and her eyes flutter shut.
Shir doesn’t let go of her until the first light of dawn comes.
I looked at all the trees and didn't know what to do.
A box made out of leaves.
What else was in the woods? A heart, closing. Nevertheless.
Shir fights with her father the night before he becomes Duke Lachta.
She stands outside their family’s tent, now mostly packed and scrubbed clean of anything that was once theirs, and stares at him in the dancing firelight of a thousand victorious revolutionaries.
“You sold our victory to them.” She doesn’t shout or scream. She says it calmly, the words that have been resting on the tip of her tongue from the moment Olake signed the Treaty of Federation. The ships with red sails had danced on the harbor wind, as if in celebration. “We did all this for freedom from royalists, and you went and made it all worse.”
Olake scrubs a hand over his face. “Shir, you’re too young to understand-”
“Understand what?!” she shouts. “You made a choice-”
“I made a compromise,” Olake argues back, “one that would allow us to live in peace and ensure there was no more death or suffering for our people!”
Shir scoffs. “You sound like Yawa.”
“My sister makes a good point every now and then.”
Shir scrapes her hair behind her shoulders, wincing when her fingers tangle in the snarls. “'Everyone is free to make their own choices',” she says, bitter mocking rancid on her tongue. “You’re the one who told me that. So why make this one for the whole of Aurdwynn? What makes you so sure you know best?”
Olake sighs. “Shir, when you’re older – listen!” he says when Shir scoffs. “When you’re older, you will understand the world does not exist in black and white. Sometimes a compromise is necessary. That’s how everyone can have enough of what they want to be happy.”
“You sold us to the Masquerade! The moment you sign that treaty, Aurdwynn will never be free again! How can you not see that!”
“Maybe there is merit to the way they live,” Olake snaps. “Did you ever consider that, Shir? That maybe their trade and their sanitation are worth compromising a few parcels of land and some of our ancient ideals?”
Something ugly curdles in Shir’s gut. She spits at her father’s feet and stalks into the woods, where she climbs a tree and sleeps there until Ko comes to call her down.
“You have to get dressed,” is all she says. “The dukes and duchesses are here for the treaty signing.”
Shir goes to get dressed. She wears a plain white shirt, brown vambraces, and earrings stolen from Yawa’s pockets last year. She looks like herself, like a girl from a revolution, like someone who is still a person instead of a tool under a masked machine.
Shir holds little Hu in her arms and watches Aurdwynn’s future be signed away. When Hu scratches at the red paint dashed across her nose and cheeks, Shir gently pulls her hand away.
“That is the symbol of your people,” she tells Hu softly, under the murmur of the crowd. “That is how people know you are of Vultjag. Don’t let anyone take that away from you.”
Hu looks up at her, clever gold eyes glittering. “But aren’t they taking home away from us now?”
Shir doesn’t have an answer. When her father catches her eye across the room, she looks away.
Unmoored, she thinks, is how she feels right now. Like a boat without a harbor. Like a leaf ever falling through the forest. Has everything been a lie? Were her father’s lessons contingent on some falsehood?
Hu struggles in Shir’s arms until Shir puts her down. The treaty is signed. Applause rings out. Hu takes Shir’s hand.
“Don’t be angry, Shi,” Hu says innocently. “Maybe this won’t be so bad. At least we’re still together.”
Everyone needs a place. It shouldn't be inside of someone else.
I kept my mind on the moon. Cold moon, long nights moon.
When Shir wakes from a nightmare about the Night of Reckoning, she reaches for the letters underneath her pillow before she does anything else.
The smell of blood on her hands is still fresh in her mind, as is the sounds of clashing blades and fists, the cries of rebellion and revolution. All that once thrilled her now turns her stomach. The violence was wrong. They were reducing themselves to their baser instincts. How uncouth.
She calms herself with the letter. It came yesterday from her Itinerant. Unlike most of them, which serve as musings on Incrastic law in Aurdwynn and the natures of truth and justice, this one is an invitation.
I understand your desire for a good and just way to live. It makes sense, given all you’ve seen and experienced during the rebellions in Aurdwynn. If you saw fit to learn from this young idealist, I would be proud to take you under my wing when I visit Taranoke and begin opening trade with their market at Iriad. I’m sure you’re familiar.
Shir had not been familiar. Once the dawn had broken, she had stuffed the letter into her pocket, and had visited the small store of books and papers her father often frequented, and she had asked the shopkeeper’s daughter for a map.
Her name was Kiya, and she was wide-eyed and eager, innocent and sweet, and everything Tain Shir was not. At sixteen, Shir had not managed to master even one of the “feminine wiles” that Auntie Yawa was always harping on her to grasp. She still kept her hair barely short enough to braid, still spent more time in the woods than in her father’s home, and still preferred the solace of the sky and clouds to the thundering waves of the harbor of Treatymont, no matter how much progress happened on those shores.
Kiya never seemed to mind Shir’s clumsiness. She was always kind to Shir, and to Hu when Shir came in carrying her little cousin on her hip. Yesterday, Kiya had furnished her with a map and a teasing comment about how she didn’t think the daughter of Lachta needed one.
“Ai! What’s that supposed to mean?” Shir had asked, bristling at the insinuation that she wasn’t fit to see the world.
Kiya’s ears had colored prettily. “You spend so much time in the woods,” she had said softly. “I thought that meant you understood the world better than most of us. You know its rhythms and strengths, and how to survive. I’m jealous.”
She had smiled nervously, and Shir had seen the way her thick, light, long hair curled against her neck, and something warm slithered from her chest to rest in her gut.
“Sorry,” Shir had murmured, taking the map, daring to let her pinky brush Kiya’s. “I meant no disrespect. I was hasty in being upset.”
Kiya had waved her off, and given her the map without taking any paper money. “I don’t want that stuff anyway,” she had said, and the warm thing in Shir’s gut turned to ice.
Shir had made it almost to the threshold when Kiya called, “Your cousin isn’t with you?”
Despite herself, Shir had turned. “No. Not today. Her parents are sending her here again, though. For her safety.”
Kiya had come closer, suddenly, light-footed and sure. There had been a flush dancing over her cheeks, pretty and irreverent in its innocence. “Don’t let her take up all of your time,” she had teased, and Shir, for a moment, had indulged a fantasy that was anything but pure.
She chastised herself the whole way home, and was grateful Itinerant didn’t know what she had done. He would never have taken her with him to this far-off island if he had known what she had been secretly thinking about the girl in the shop.
Those thoughts were never allowed to fully form. Shir wouldn’t let them. She shakes her head against them, climbs out of bed, and sets herself to the map instead, marking the route from Treatymont to Taranoke.
The map, as it turns out, is too wide for her desk. So it’s back to the bed, where she kneels cross-legged like a child and inspects the labeled trade routes and winds.
This is where I could go, she thinks to herself, tracing the dotted lines around the Ashen Sea. Somewhere, there is a world where people know the right and just way to live .
Her door bangs open. “Shi!” Hu doesn’t wait for an answer before going to Shir’s desk and dragging the stool over so she can climb up and kneel on it to see the top of Shir’s bed. “What’s that?”
“A map,” Shir says. And, a bit wryly, “hello Hu.”
Hu twists her head to see the paper, which is upside-down in her perspective. Something dark and red drips on the map, near the Vultjag-Stahki border.
Shir laughs. “Come here.” She picks Hu up and gives her a small hug. “Sit with me. Don’t hurt your neck.”
Then she realizes. “Ai!” she says for the second time today. The exclamation feels more familiar than the Aphalone she has trained herself to use. “Hu! Why is your nose bleeding?”
Hu touches it and winces. “I fell from a tree. It’s nothing, Shi. Just hurts a bit.”
Shir swears, in Aphalone this time, knowing Auntie would tsk if she heard, but that Hu won’t understand. “You likely broke it! Come on, forget the map, we need to find Auntie Yawa.”
Auntie Yawa, predictably, was loath to leave her office of secrets and machinations, but emerged once Shir insisted something was wrong with little Hu. To the child’s credit, she submitted bravely to her nose being reset, though Shir did offer her the edge of her tunic to wipe tears away before Yawa could see.
“How did you manage to do this?” Yawa wonders aloud, taping the bridge of Hu’s high Vultjag nose. “Can’t you keep yourself out of trouble?”
Hu gives Auntie Yawa a rakish grin, one Shir knows she stole from her own face. “I was just trying to climb a tree to see what Shir sees.”
“Hey! I’m not that tall!”
“You’re tall for someone your age, and not built right for a woman,” Yawa says, ever the eugenicist, and once again, Shir feels shame. Would Itinerant find her wanting?
And then she stops. Why would I care? Am I seriously thinking about...about becoming my father? Giving in to them, when not even a year ago I was screaming at Olake in the woods about signing the treaty?
Maybe he had been right. Maybe she had been too young to understand, too uneducated. That’s what Itinerant had respectfully suggested: that Shir just didn’t know better, was too sheltered and small-minded to see the scope of the world.
If Yawa knew, or if Olake did, they would allege she had some kind of attraction to the man. In her heart, Shir knows that to be false. She wants Itinerant’s approval as she once sought her own father’s. But he had compromised, and so she had let him go. That was all there is.
Shir was not compromising anything, for she was not a coward. She tells herself this to soothe the foreign ache in her chest as she gives Hu a comforting hug and kiss atop her head before kneeling in the hall to inspect her bandage.
“Does it hurt?” she asks.
Hu shrugs gamely. “Not much. If I’m ever going to keep up with the Vultjagata, I’ll have worse.”
Such brave words from a child. Shir tousles her hair. “Want to go to the woods?”
Hu’s golden eyes sparkle. “Do you have another lesson?”
“No,” Shir says, “I thought we’d pick some berries. Olake will be home tonight. Auntie says so.”
While Shir holds no respect or affection for the man who sold his family for his home, Hu adores the man, so this prospect cheers her considerably. They ride into the woods on Shir’s horse, and leave him to graze in their well-loved clearing.
“Where’s Auntie Ko?” Hu asks, picking through a low-hanging branch. “Why hasn’t she come home? When you’re married, don’t you stay together?”
Shir feels nothing at the mention of her traitor-mother, who had fled the Masquerade in favor of fomenting another rebellion. When Ko had first gone, she had cried herself to sleep nightly. But that was before she realized...well, a lot of things.
The letter in her pocket burns against her thigh. Shir busies herself with biting into a berry from the bush Hu was ravaging, just to make sure it wasn’t poisoned. When her lips didn’t numb and her tongue didn’t bleed, she picks another.
“Auntie Yawa doesn’t like her,” Hu says. “Maybe that’s why she doesn’t stay.”
Shir laughs. “Auntie Yawa doesn’t like anyone.”
“Well. When I marry,” Hu says haughtily, stepping on a branch until it snaps under her boot heel, “I’m going to marry someone better than Auntie Yawa and your mother. And you’d better love her too, because I won’t choose.”
Shir doesn’t have the heart to tell her that Hu will never get to love a woman. Now is not the time nor place, anyway. Their woods were not grown for heartbreak.
“Oh?” she asks instead, letting a teasing lilt infiltrate her tone. “And why is that?”
“Because I love you, you idiot.” Hu rolls her eyes. Shir makes a note to strangle whoever taught a six-year-old to do that. “And I don’t want you to hate someone I love.”
“If you pick them, little one, I will love them.” Shir kneels to lace her boot again – damn it, she needs new laces – and when she looks up, Hu is looking solemnly down at her.
“Why don’t you love anyone but me?” she asks softly. “Aren’t you lonely without anyone else to love?”
Shir thinks about the letter in her pocket and the reply she left half-drafted on her table. She thinks about Incrasticism and Falcrest, mothers who have mothers and fathers, and fathers with two of the same. She thinks of the ache in her gut that festers every time she sees her father look at her mother like she matters, and the rage that boils when she and Yawa conspire over their loneliness.
“That kind of love isn’t for me,” Shir tells Hu softly. If you saw fit to learn from this young idealist, I would be proud to take you under my wing. Shir shakes her head against the echo of what she thought Itinerant’s voice might sound like. Falcresti men. All the same. “I love you and I love my country. That’s enough.” That’s why I might leave you.
She thinks of her father, who feels so guilty over what he let himself become that he can’t stay in Treatymont for too long, and frowns. What makes me better than him?
Maybe Itinerant could explain it. He might even have a scientific explanation for the Xate madness that Shir fears inheriting, which Auntie Yawa alleges to be hereditary on her brother’s side.
Hu frowns. “Shir, aren’t you listening? I love my country too.”
“I know you do. And it’s for that reason that you must also be careful about who else you love.”
Shir stands. Hu slips a hand into Shir’s. “I know. That’s why I love you. You’ll always protect Aurdwynn. And I know you’ll always come to save me.”
They stay out until well past dark, until Shir hears the sound of the horns signaling Duke Lachta’s return to Treatymont. Hu, tired from questions and dreams and excitement, had fallen asleep in Shir’s arms.
Shir stands and, for a moment, looks around her. Looks at the forest where she spends hours teaching Hu about the meaning of compromise and surrender. Hears the laughter that rings over the leaves and bushes and grass.
She looks at the trees and wonders if she could ever leave her home.
A small part of her wishes to be young again, to crouch in the cool northern streams with her father, to hear him call her little blackberry and ask him what she should do. But when he chose to compromise his ideals, he compromised his child. And when he couldn’t explain why, Shir knew there was never any going back.
Hu shifts in Shir’s embrace. Something in Shir shudders. When Hu did return home, she would be welcomed as she was into this world - with love and open arms. She was a lucky child.
Could I leave her? She knows the answer. To ensure a better world for Hu, one where she could always be loved? Yes. She could do anything.
She will never be loved by a woman if you do , whispers a voice in her head that sounds like Tain Ko’s. They call women like her unhygienic. Tribadists. For them, the knife.
Shir shakes her head, hard. Tribadism was a woman’s disease. Hu was a girl, with plenty of time to change her mind. To grow up right.
It doesn’t work that way , singsongs the voice in her head that sounds like her own. She thinks of Kiya. Of the girls who take notice of her when she walks the streets of Treatymont or climbs the hills outside the city.
Hu shifts in Shir’s arms again and blinks up at her. “What is it?” she asks blearily. “Is it time to go home?”
Shir sets Hu down. Hu’s hand wraps around hers again. “Yes.” Shir’s heart beats against her chest so hard she fears she might be shaking from it. “Come on. Let’s go home.”
That night, while Hu sleeps in her bed, Shir writes three letters.
The first is to Itinerant. She tells him she would like to learn from him, as there are no Incrastic schools in Treatymont, and asks where she should find passage to begin her tutelage.
The second is to her aunt. A short message, one she will leave behind: I have gone to seek out the nature of justice. Somewhere in this world there must be a good true way to live.
The third is never finished.
Hu, I hope one day you’ll understand why I had to leave you
I’ll come home with the answers we both crave
When we’re older, we can fight for our home together, and maybe then I’ll have a good answer for why those in power compromise so much
Shir never could remember what happened to that third letter. She thinks of it a month later, when she boards a ship bound for Taranoke. No one had come to say goodbye. She hadn’t told anyone where she was going.
That’s alright, she thinks, tasting the thrill of adventure in her mouth. Someone would be waiting for her when she made it to her new home.
From the landscape: a sense of scale.
From the dead: a sense of scale.
The last time Shir ever lays eyes on Tain Hu is the night after Tain Ko dies.
“Why did you do it?” Hu’s voice rings from the treeline like a bright crack of Stakhieczi lightning. There is no sorrow nor remorse. Only cold questioning.
She sounds, Shir thinks bitterly, like Auntie Yawa.
She threatened me, Shir almost says. Or, I had to. She left me no choice.
But she had raised Hu better than that. Better to tell the truth than insult her with a lie. And those who let a choice become an excuse were cowards.
So why did she feel like she was one of them?
“Olake would say you had no choice,” Hu says. She does not move from the trees. “But if anyone ever tells you that they have no choice, they are afraid. You taught me that. And you were not afraid, were you, Shi?”
“No.” Shir’s men and women have let the fire burn low. She sees it through the thin, new trees to her left. To her right, the plains stretch on. “I wasn’t.”
“Then why?” Hu’s voice rises, thin and high. “Why kill your mother? Why take away Vultjag’s regent? Why-”
“She was never going to be your regent, Hu.” Shir cannot look at her. There’s something in her way; some kind of ache in her heart, some kind of pain that radiates out from the bitter, rotten, Xate-mad core of her. “She was never going to come home.”
“You killed her for me.” Hu’s voice is brittle now. Shir remembers Catch me, Shi! and When I marry… and wants to growl like a cornered animal. “I didn’t ask you for that. All I asked – all I wanted – was for you to come home.”
Shir stands. Hu looks at her, eerie gold eyes sparkling in the dim light from Shir’s feeble fire. Vultjag eyes. Tain eyes. It hurts to look at her.
In this moment, Shir rejects what she has created within herself. The Masquerade’s seeds are left to wither in the firelight as she steps close enough to clasp Hu’s forearms in her scarred hands. “I’m sorry, little one,” she whispers, the Iolynic rough in her mouth. “You have no idea how sorry I am.”
Hu’s eyes sparkle. “I love you, Shi.” She clasps Shir’s arms. Then she draws away. “And you can always come home. But you are not mine anymore. You are not Aurdwynn’s. I know you think you have to find a good, true way to live, but there is no set way to exist, any more than there is one true way to catch an animal in a trap, or lead a duchy. And when you learn this, I hope you come home.”
Hu’s face is cast in shadow when she steps away. “This is freedom,” she whispers. The memory catches on all of Tain Shir’s rough edges and leaves blood in their wake. “A knife in your hand. And you may do with it as you please.”
And then she is gone. Shir trembles in the darkness until the sun rises.
When the light comes, she sets herself free. She unburdens herself of Aurdwynn and Taranoke, of dukes and lineages, of the forest and the trees and the screaming wind of Vultjag winters, and the summer sun of Treatymont’s coast.
She cannot, however, turn her back on the city. Not yet. She and her killers ride back to Treatymont, a long two days and nights, and she stalks toward the Jurispotence’s office with the polestar mark over her face like a brand.
“Shir.” Yawa’s voice is cold. She looks so small standing there in her robes of office, her chin jutting stubbornly forward.
“Durance.” I know what you are. “Auntie.”
Yawa does not look shocked. She looks resigned. “Oh, Shi, what did you let them do to you?”
Fuck off, she wants to say, but that would not be becoming of a Masquerade agent. She merely sits on the uncomfortable low-backed chair with her legs spread wide, and waits.
“The rebellion,” Shir says, when it becomes clear Yawa won’t speak. “The Fool’s Rebellion. You ended it.”
“Of course I did.”
“And Vultjag?”
“I expect Hu will rule alone. Until she marries.”
Shir laughs in the back of her throat. The pawns and players come easily to mind. “Unuxekome will offer. Or Oathsfire.”
“Hu will decline.” Yawa says it like the thought tires her. “She’s…”
The words pass between them, unspoken. Shir turns her face away.
Little one, some small voice inside her whispers, if you love someone, I hope I would love them too.
A memory shocks her like a prod to cattle: the little girl at Iriad Market on Taranoke. The girl with dark eyes, the color of coffee, and messy hair, who had stolen her coin and who Shir had called “little one” on reflex. The girl who was now her patron’s favored one.
“I wish you had not become this,” Yawa says, as if to pour salt on the wound of Shir’s memory.
Shir scoffs, and pushes the face of little Baru Cormorant from her mind. “You never cared what I would become. That much has been certain for years.”
Yawa flinches as if slapped. “Are you quite finished here?” she asks, voice hard and brittle. “Or do you and your killers have more still to do?”
Shir does not reply to that last sentence. It’s meant to feel like a slap. It feels like a confirmation: she is despised here, and so she has done her work well. Same as Auntie Yawa; Shir knows what the woman is doing. Admires it, even. Revolution by breaking the backs of those meant to be uplifted. They should be grateful for that protection.
“We will set sail at dawn. I will ensure the Empire of Masks learns of your success.”
Yawa sighs. “Shir. Take off that mask.”
Shir does not know what compels her to do so, but she does. Yawa takes her in. “Oh, Shi,” she breathes, “this isn’t what Olake wanted.”
Shir scoffs. “You don’t get to tell me what my father wanted for me. I serve a better master now.”
It’s the same words she uttered to Ko. Unlike Ko, Yawa does not move. “I wish you and I saw this differently,” is all she says. “I wish it more than almost anything else.”
Shir sails the next day, and presses all thoughts of Aurdwynn from her mind, imagining them blowing away on the trade winds that bear her quickly toward Oriati Mbo.
There is more work to be done before she is allowed to rest in her new and just world.
I turned my back on the story. A sense of superiority.
Everything casts a shadow.
Shir learns her cousin is dead because she dreams.
This is an old superstition, and when she wakes, it is with disbelief. The priests of her youth held that loved ones knew when theirs had gone because they would visit in dreams, and that felt comforting to a girl of twelve but foolish to a woman of thirty-eight.
But in the dream, her little cousin stands beside her, head still coming up to Shir’s shoulder, though the size and scale of the massive sword she wields is new.
“Nice sword,” says Shir-in-the-dream.
“Thanks.” Hu’s nose is even more crooked. She’s broken it again, Shir thinks, and has to smile. “I’m dead, so it doesn’t really do much for me now. The women liked it, at least.”
She looks at Shir, those gold eyes flashing — Tain eyes, aristocrat eyes, family eyes — and smiles. “I’d say don’t cry for me, but you don’t cry, do you? Doesn’t matter now, I guess.” Her voice crackles like lightning. “I missed you, Shi. Why didn’t you come home? Did you not hear about my rebellion?”
“The Masquerade would have followed me the moment I set foot on Aurdwynni soil. I wouldn’t harm your hard work like that.”
Hu sighs. Her long hair tickles Shir’s arm when she leans her head against Shir’s shoulder like old times. Like they’re children again. “I wish you could have seen it. I kicked the shit out of old man Cattleson. Twice.” Shir can feel her smiling. “And I met someone. A clever woman who can’t stand the winter and who I really should have known better than to love. A woman twisted to ugliness the way you were. I wanted to save her. I could have saved her.”
Something wet and cold slithers down Shir’s arm. Water. When she looks down, Hu’s hair is wet. Her skin is turning pale and peeling. “Little one?” Shir asks, a helpless reflex. “What’s happening?”
“Like I said,” she laughs, and sea water spills from her mouth. “I’m dead. You know what the Mask does to traitors.”
She steps away into the darkness of Shir’s dream. “One day, I’d like to hear your story. When you hear mine, know this: I was never once afraid. You taught me that.”
Shir wakes up, chest heaving. The salt on her cheeks does not come from the sea.
And though she rejects all she had been, all that the girl in the woods with a letter in her pocket represents, some ancient thing is calling her forward, borne on the winds of Tain Hu’s name.
Or, maybe, it’s her hereditary madness calling her to count the cost. If you believe in that sort of thing, which – as Shir is growing to understand – she might.
She charts a course. For the first time in too many years, she looks toward the north.
Her course takes her through the rainforest and out the other side, to a small port city with nothing but bustling commerce and an absence of Falcresti influence. A kindly old man and his young son stop her on the docks, and ask her if she’s alright and if she needs a place to go.
“Do you know what’s happening in the world?” she asks instead, trying to get a grasp on the local tongue. “In Aurdwynn?”
The old man looks surprised. “Well, yes. A merchant told me yesterday there’s been a rebellion. One of their young duchesses put together an impressive show of strength, if you can believe the rumors. They say the Empire of Masks has been challenged to war against the Fairer Hand, some woman from Taranoke.” He laughs a bit. “But that news is already over a week old. Who knows what’s happened since? You know what they say. Someone is always changing something.”
It’s been a long time since anyone has spoken to her for this long. “Thank you,” Shir says.
Aboard a stolen ship, Shir looks out over the horizon. Ships like these brought her letters. Ships like these taught her what the world thinks of love and justice and honor.
Hu , she thinks, you told me I could come home once.
And she stops. There’s nothing more to say.
Your body told me in a dream that it’s never been afraid of anything.