The Empress of Hokkaro surrounds herself on all sides with splendor. The many-faced gods of Ikhtar, rendered in gold and ivory, guard the four corners of her room. Her gilded bed is larger than a peasant’s hovel; its sheets made from silk dyed in a hundred different colors. Paintings and woodcuts adorn her walls; Surian carpets prevent her sacred feet from ever touching the ground. Even the robes clinging to her small frame are woven from gilt cloth. A single thread would beggar an entire village.
Yes, she is surrounded by a hundred splendors.
But not a single comfort, save for the far-off voice of her lover. Nothing but ink and paper to soothe the ache of loneliness. Nothing but words and memories.
With one gold-taloned hand, O-Shizuka rings the small bell by her desk. Before she can take another breath, a servant slides the door open and touches her forehead to the ground.
“Imperial Majesty,” she says, “I am yours to command.”
“Bring me a bottle of rice wine,” says O-Shizuka. “Another.”
Is that hesitation on the servant’s part? For O-Shizuka swears the girl does not immediately skitter off to her task. Yes, there is a pause, minuscule in span. A beat. A hesitation.
A memory, perhaps, of the orders Lai Baozhai left with the staff. Of the dark times, before Baozhai stayed with her.
The girl knows better than to question the Daughter of Heaven, the Virgin Empress. With another bow, she is gone.
It is another ten minutes before the girl returns with a full bottle of wine. She slides open the door and sets it down, along with the Empress’s cups. Then she slides the door shut. It’s Seventh Bell now, and the Imperial Timekeeper is pacing the halls, reading from the Divine Mandates.
O-Shizuka sniffs. The room spins a bit. What use was there in such a tradition? Why remind everyone of gods who had clearly abandoned them? Two hundred years. Two hundred years since the Daughter-Made-Flesh last visited a temple. Having someone shout her family’s words at the top of their lungs would do nothing to bring her back.
That was what the commoners failed to understand. None of their prayers were being heard, none except the ones Shizuka herself tried to ignore in the middle of the night. No—that was not right. She did not ignore them. Much as she wanted to. She listened, and if she thought it might be something she could help with—
It sounds so foolish to say she willed something to happen, but Shizuka can find no other words for it. She shuts her eyes and sends … sends something of herself out into the world.
Does it help? She isn’t certain. All she ever hears are requests for crops to grow, or flowers to make it through the winter, or for a duel to go well. At times she does not hear the words, only feels the emotions tugging at the back of her mind like an upset child.
It is no wonder she drinks.
She tips another cup. Another. One more. It’s gotten to the point where it takes this many, and she is faintly proud of herself, faintly ashamed.
And the alcohol starts to drown the memory replaying, like painted opera, at the back of her mind.
“Itsuki!” O-Shizuru sputtered, black blood flecked on her deathbed. “Where is Itsuki?”
Itsuki was dead. O-Shizuka explained that to her ten, twenty, thirty times. O-Shizuru either could not hear her or did not want to, but O-Itsuki was dead, and no one had found his body.
To this very day, no one had ever found the body of the Poet Prince. His funeral services were a farce, at best, performed with scrolls of his work instead of his body. O-Shizuka attended—but as drunk as she is, she cannot remember the details.
She is too focused on what her mother looked like lying in a dirty, stained blanket on a dirty, stained Imperial bed. Her mother’s bone peeking out from the rotting, gray flesh where her arm used to be.
O-Shizuru, Queen of Crows, lying in agony on a soiled bed.
O-Shizuru, Shizuka’s hero and namesake. O-Shizuru, who was imprisoned in her youth by a Demon General for eight days and emerged with his head. O-Shizuru, who should’ve been Empress if the world were anything like it should be; O-Shizuru, who always brought her daughter a new story whenever she returned home; O-Shizuru, quick with boasts and bawdy jokes and blades; O-Shizuru, who loved O-Itsuki more than even he, master of poetry and song, could ever convey.
O-Shizuru.
Her mother.
Lying in agony on a soiled bed.
By the end of the sixth cup, O-Shizuka, the Empress, Light of the Empire, Eternal Flame, Serene Phoenix, has forgotten all this anew.
But she has not forgotten what it was like to end her mother’s life. She has not forgotten the terror, the despondency, the resignation, the realization that if she did nothing, her mother was going to rise as a blackblood within a day’s time.
And it is a strange thing, to realize you are utterly alone. To realize you are not the person you’ve pretended to be, you are not the infallible, unreachable god you keep saying you are. To realize you are nothing but a child on the verge of adulthood; to realize there will never again be anyone in your life you can trust as completely as you’ve trusted your parents.
She was thirteen, at the time. The sole heir to the Imperial throne. No siblings, and her only cousins too far removed to inherit; only a single friend, one whom she’d not seen in years, and an uncle who saw O-Shizuka as an ominous loose end.
An uncle who knew what he was doing when he sent a forty-nine-year-old woman—mother—wife—to fight two dozen risen blackbloods. You send seventy soldiers to deal with that many. Seventy, if you live recklessly and do not care how many come back to you. One hundred eight would be preferable.
But her uncle sent only O-Shizuru.
It filled O-Shizuka with unspeakable rage to think of him. To think of what he’d done. There were no blood trails spattered on his hands, never, but he had done this all the same.
Yes, Shizuka remembers hovering over the trembling lump of flesh that was once her mother.
If only her mother were still herself, if only her mother could think clearly. That’s the irony of it—if their positions were reversed, then the Queen of Crows wouldn’t have hesitated. O-Shizuru never left room for doubt. She would have demanded that Shizuka give her a clean death.
So why was it so hard, then?
If O-Shizuka was going to be a warrior, she was going to have to take lives. And yet, looking at her mother she saw more than the present, mangled form. She saw O-Shizuru and O-Itsuki having tea together in the mornings, stealing kisses when they thought their daughter wouldn’t notice. She saw O-Shizuru’s stern face, heard her voice shouting to put the sword down and get back to the zither.
O-Shizuka has not forgotten what it was like to lift her mother’s pillow. She has not forgotten how heavy it seemed, steeped with the weight of her childhood memories.
She has not forgotten her own grim determination: if she hadn’t done it, then Uemura would have had to, and she could not bear to let her mother be killed by an outsider.
O-Shizuka has not forgotten how wrong it felt to hold the Daybreak blade. How her hands shook, disrupting the balance. The rattle of drawn metal as she pressed it against her mother’s pallid neck.
It had to be her. This was the duty of a warrior. Of a future Empress. Of a loving daughter who would never have her mother’s blessing on her wedding day, who would never again clamber into her parents’ bed during a nightmare, who would never again make her mother proud.
O-Shizuka wept as she slit her mother’s throat. She wept and she crumbled and she threw her arms around the corpse despite the danger her mother’s blood posed. She stayed there for …
She cannot remember how long.
But she has not forgotten what happened afterwards. She has not forgotten her hatred, burning like a forge in her stomach, how she’d thought it could grow no larger—but it was merely the first blossom beneath a frost. Her uncle had done this. Her uncle had given the order. Her uncle, who then kept her locked in her chambers, except when he paraded her at court like a mare in search of a stud. And only in her own rooms was she permitted to wear mourning white.
O-Shizuka drains the last swallow from her cup.
When the time had come to seize her uncle’s throne, she did not kill him. Yoshimoto—the Toad, the Limp Emperor—lived on private lands far, far away from Fujino. Let the souls of his ruined family, his tattered Empire haunt him. Let him toil in the fields. Let him see, from a distance, what his niece makes of the nation he could not salvage.
That will be his punishment, she thinks. The day that she returns with Shefali at her side, happy and healthy and thriving despite all his efforts to the contrary.
A sight her parents will never get to see, for they left not even bones to bury.
So she throws the bottle of rice wine against the wall. It shatters, sending shards flying through the air. By some miracle, none hit the Empress, at least not until she lies on the ground and weeps.
When sleep takes her, she is too drunk to notice.
In the morning, she awakes to a pounding headache. Whatever mess she’s made has disappeared as if by magic. O-Shizuka winces. She has a dim recollection of falling on the floor, and no memory of getting in bed.
Yet here she is, tucked in and comfortable in her sleeping gown.
The servants must’ve done it. Dimly, she thinks again that she must pay them more.
O-Shizuka forces herself to sit up. The room goes topsy-turvy for a moment, and she grabs her nightstand to steady herself. Hair falls like inky brushstrokes against her sleeping gown. The first few rays of the morning pierce through her blinds. She shields her eyes and sighs.
The scowl drops off her face the moment she sees Shefali’s letter. She laughs, in fact. Shefali never had to deal with hangovers. Maybe it was that rancid milk she insisted on drinking. O-Shizuka can picture her now: sipping from a skin in the eastern side of the ger, wearing her brightly colored deel. She takes a deep gulp and chuckles in that quiet way. “Try some.”
And Shizuka did, every time. And she forgot, every time, how much she hated kumaq. Shefali looked so happy drinking it, so it must be good, right?
O-Shizuka reaches for the manuscript. For her old friend, for her joy. She opens the pages, and her headache melts away.