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  Raiju and Chimon rushed around Shuri and snatched Yaki up. Each gripped an arm. Even as Shuri burned, a last crystal made its presence known: a healing crystal sprang to life with such strength and warmth that a soothing coolness ran through Yaki’s blistering throat before they had pulled her from its radius.

  Gama rushed to catch up. “Shouldn’t we finish her off?”

  “Just run!” Yaki looked over her shoulder to see the still-burning warrior rolling to smother the flames. Turning a corner, Yaki sighted a perfume shop with a man assaulting passersby with his wares. Veering off course, she snatched the sample from his hand.

  “HEY!” he called after her.

  Yaki ignored him, wrenched off the spritzer, and shattered the bottle in front of her and the trio. The scent of jasmine flooded the street. Nobody asked what she was doing; they were too busy running.

  Together, they skidded into the deserted alleyways, and they all slowed from a dead run to a jog and finally a brisk walk, slow enough for Raiju and Chimon to sheathe their bloody swords. Nobody said anything as Gama took the lead, clutching at his blood-soaked arm.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  To be called upon to become the next Steward is both a great honor and a great cost. To sit upon that unadorned throne is to have everything from before stripped away. The Stewards’ personalities and competence differ greatly but they all protect the state; it is the closest thing they have to family.

  Hon Nishamura, chief historian of the Steward’s archives

  The vague scent of cooked bacon and the tittering of various kami in his ears were all the Steward needed to know that Shuri’s confrontation with Yaki had gone badly. Shuri did not limp, but she wore her hair over her face, shoulders slumped.

  “Tch!” Lady Crane, his first concubine, sat to his left on a plush pillow. The twin blades, Sunset and Sunrise, lay on either side of her. “Got your cute little ass spanked and sent home by the Admiral’s pup like the child you are.”

  The Steward opened his mouth to rebuke his first love, but the woman to his right got there first. “Can’t you hide your thorns for once, dear Crane? The dearie is in such pain.” Madam Xi was so shriveled and old that she had more wrinkles than face. Her eyes were completely hidden by her drooping eyelids. Yet the lines around her mouth always seemed to indicate a smile hidden somewhere in there. She claimed to have been a concubine of a previous Steward but never remembered which one. Judging from the fact that the Steward had been ruling for thirty years now and Madam Xi had not died nor seemingly gotten any more ancient, he had to wonder how many Stewards she had survived. Anytime he had given the matter enough thought to actually investigate, something had distracted him. He made a mental note to try again soon.

  Shuri had not responded to either Lady Crane’s jab or Madam Xi’s grandmotherly intonations. The Steward cleared his throat. “Shuri, are you well enough to resume your duties?”

  “Yes, my lord. But my watch crystal has been damaged; I cannot see the air,” Shuri said in a clear monotone.

  “Ha! She smashed it first thing, I bet. You young ones always think the crystals will save you. Crystals are fickle things. The good don’t rely on such baubles.” Lady Crane sniffed imperiously.

  The Steward swallowed back both his own bile and a stern rebuke to Lady Crane. They had never been close; originally of House Noguchi, the family who had apparently sponsored his candidacy for Steward, she had been thrust on him early on. She had hinted that they knew each other well before he had become Steward. However, since the kami held his memories of that old and now very distant life in trust, he had not retained the key to Lady Crane’s heart. She had grown bitter and resentful at him for forgetting some promise. Although once he took on a few more concubines, she tended to take it out on them and not him. “Please leave us, dear ladies,” the Steward said.

  “I will remain outside the door while you kiss her boo-boos away.” Lady Crane snatched up her two swords and sheathed them in scabbards that hung from each hip. Shuri flinched out of her way. Madam Xi stood up from her own plush pillow with the aid of her silver cane.

  “Don’t mind her, dearie; she’ a rosebush who’s forgotten how to flower.” Madam Xi patted Shuri’s arm as she tottered past. The grand door to the throne room closed soundlessly behind her, and for the first time in several days, silence fell on the throne room like a welcome blanket. The Steward sat back in his chair and breathed it in. Lady Crane had been loyal for all these years, but she treated everyone around her like a blithering idiot. Including him.

  The Steward gestured his foot-long nails in front him. Shuri shuffled over the long distance to his throne and sat at the foot of it, facing outward. A canine whimper crept out of her.

  “What happened?” The Steward eased off his throne and slipped down to the step.

  “I made a tactical error and have paid for it. I have to leave your service for a time.” Her tone was formal and carefully controlled.

  A cold chill ran down his spine. The prospect of having only Lady Crane to protect him did not appeal. He only had three concubines at the moment; Lady Quill had been taken into the palace for many reasons but not her martial prowess. And he hadn’t really been thinking much about new concubines since Madria left. With a war brewing, assassination would be a real threat. Lady Crane and her swords had indeed gotten him out of several tight spots, but at nearly sixty years old, she had aged far past her prime. Shuri had been with him for nearly nine years now, a gift of Lady Night. Little more than sixteen at the time, she had defeated anyone set against her, including Lady Crane.

  Even when not using crystals, Shuri moved too fast for a normal human, and she handled the complicated balance of her six crystals without much effort. The Steward had known straight away what Lady Night had sent her.

  “Let me see,” the Steward said, his hand hovering over her shoulder. The number of times he’d touched her could be counted on those overly long nails. Only this close could he feel her taint, and even now, it remained like the soft bristles of a brush against his palm. Nothing like the vile unnaturalness of a Yozi or a true Enshadowed. With a wince, he pushed through her aura and gently grasped her shoulder.

  Shuri shuddered, and at first, the Steward thought she might shrug off his grip, but instead, she collapsed against his knees, sending a buzz of wrongness cascading through his skin as her aura collided with his. His body tried to flinch away but he managed to still the impulse to push her off him. Political instinct saved him more than any sense of affection. Shuri had been a loyal soldier for him for years, and loyalty must be rewarded. Shuri had been totally isolated from anyone but the other concubines and their children. Several years older than Madria’s daughters. He was all she had.

  “Let me see,” the Steward whispered again.

  Slowly, Shuri pulled one half of her hair out of her face. Biting his tongue, he managed to stifle the instinctive hiss of disgust into a sharp inhalation through his nose. “I had to use my healing crystal,” she said by way of explanation. The entire cast of her lower face had shifted, lips thinned, nose broadened; both were an inhuman shade of black. A faint dusting of fur crawled up the bridge of her nose and then faded back to smooth human skin between her eyes. Her nose had always been discolored, but now it shone with wetness and the shape of a canine. It was repulsive and impure. Had the huge throne been occupied by the Golden Emperor, the Steward himself would surely be flung from the balcony for simply touching her.

  Yet the Emperor had not sat in his throne for two thousand years. Many things had changed in his absence, and a fearsome woman who had come to him as a fearsome child deserved a bit of leeway. The houses schemed, and he stared down the barrel of a war they couldn’t win. The right thing, the traditional thing would be to call the priests and have Shuri hauled away. Instead, he found himself pulling the woman closer and whispering, “It’s all right. Wear a mask; let them make up a story about it.”

  “I’ll fetch her for you,” Shuri said. “I won’t f
ail again. I’ll sniff her out. Won’t matter if she breathes fire or not.”

  “She breathes fire now?” The Steward recalled the old priest’s report: “A demon is inside her.” A priest whose loyalty was more to his house than to him. And how had that happened? That he had to do favors to a house in order to get his priests to do something. And he’d been doing it for decades. His predecessors had been doing it before that. The military was still his, but the upper ranks were infested with the nobility, which Madria had helped him weed, but now as he thought about it, he’d been ruling the city as if he’d been painting a picture with his eyes closed.

  The time for grieving the love between them was long gone. But Madria was too dangerous of an element to leave whipping in the wind. She would have a price, but once paid, she’d stay bought. In the meantime, he would have to start painting with his eyes wide open. Starting with the woman leaning against him.

  He held out his hand, and a single sheet of paper fluttered to his fingers. The Steward narrowed his eyes, and creases began to form in the smooth cream surface. This was the other element that would always be loyal to him, a perplexing power that had been granted to all the Stewards since the passing of the Emperor. The animated ink served everyone in the Golden Hills, but paper was his and his alone. It was time to make use of it. The corners folded on themselves; another piece of paper joined it, then another as the sculpture took shape, a face with a long muzzle, a hound’s mask. Its eyes of narrowed into slits and the lip curled into an angry snarl.

  “Wear this for me.” He lined his voice with the edge of a command, and Shuri pulled away. Straightening up and drawing in a wet sniff, she took the mask. Her mouth pressed into a thin line but she said nothing.

  The Steward considered his next words carefully. “You failed, Shuri, and Lady Crane will be sure that everyone knows that.”

  “You never punish Lady Crane, no matter where she stabs her venom,” Shuri interjected. “Or Madria, while she lasted.”

  “I did punish Madria. But this is our joke.” The Steward rushed to finish. “While everyone will assume the mask is shame initially, they’ll soon fear it.” She leaned against him, marinating him in her bristly aura. And he heard Madria’s voice snaking up from his memories: What is the use of tradition if it anchors you to the ground? “The Golden Hills needs a loyal hound for the coming months. You are the greatest of all my concubines.” She nodded a little at the praise but still looked at the mask as if it might bite her.

  She put it on and stood before him. “I will wear this for you, my lord. But I remind you that you took me as your wife, not your as your hound.” The paper mouth moved at her words, over paper teeth. “I want my own children.”

  “And at the end of this war, you will have them,” he said, mentally adding, if I’m still Steward.

  She seemed to accept that with a nod, and he allowed himself a small sigh of relief.

  Still, it didn’t change the fact that Madria’s child, possessed by a fire-breathing demon, was in his city without permission. She needed to be found and removed before whatever chaos she was sowing came to fruition. The Grand Torii had stirred when she entered the city. The priests should have been able to track her without effort. Unless a kami of the city had taken her under its protection. The thought stopped him. Yaki…the pretty one, a shrine maiden before she came to the palace. Finally, he remembered a portrait that Madria had kept in her bedchambers of her daughter standing in a garden he had visited before.

  Drawing himself back up, he clasped his hands. “Shuri, for your first task. I need you to send a message to Miss Yaki. There is a garden across the street from Madria’s family home. There is an ancient willow tree there. Take priests to question her about the Madria family’s whereabouts. If she has sided with the Madria family over the needs of the Golden Hills, declare her a Yozi and burn her.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Before Lady Night brought the shadows to heel, murderous gangs called Fangs ruled. After two entire Fangs disappeared in the space of a single night, the rest quickly assented to her laws. Or at least the remainder of their members did so.

  The Wretch, Enshadowed poet

  Yaki woke with a shout. While her heart was pumping fire, it was her skin that burned. The smell of smoke assaulted her nose.

  “What’s wrong, child?” The doctor looked up from her desk to the cot on which Yaki had been sleeping. Gama, in the next cot over, stirred as well. They were in his aunt’s underground clinic, which Yaki now knew was one of an entire network. They served mostly Enshadowed but did not turn away those who did not trust the sun priests with their ailments. Chimon and Raiju were not in cots but had cleared a small corner of one of the doctor’s workbenches and had cards laid out between them. Rufus, the man with dog cancer, watched their game with interest.

  Yaki coughed through her bruised throat and winced. The smell of burnt willow bark did not disappear. “They’re burning her,” she croaked.

  Raiju and Chimon looked up. “Burning who?” they asked in unison.

  “Grandmother Willow, they’re burning the garden,” Yaki said, her voice steadier now. Reaching for her sword, she began to fasten it to her belt.

  “Is it something that will happen or something that is happening?” the doctor asked.

  Yaki blinked at her, but there was no doubt. “It’s now.” She shook Gama. “Come on, we gotta go.”

  He moaned tiredly and sat up, rubbing his arm where it had been stabbed a few hours before.

  The doctor gave them a tired look and stepped from behind the desk, blocking the path to the exit. “This is a kami that is protecting you?”

  “Yes, I took care of her shrine when I was younger.” Yaki watched the doctor warily.

  “There is nothing you can do, then; sit back down, girl,” the doctor urged.

  “No, I have to go!” Yaki said.

  “How fast can you run? It’s miles to your old family home. It will be done by the time you reach it. Unless you can summon a rainstorm from here, sit back down, Yaki of Madria.”

  Yaki gritted her teeth as an angry heat grew in her chest.

  “Not to mention the streets are crawling with the city watch by now. Street fights are not supposed to occur in the market district, ya know. They prefer that stuff stays by the docks or in the dueling circles,” Chimon said without looking up from his hand of cards.

  “What about an underground passage? The ones that the Enshadowed use?” Yaki could feel the heat on her skin creeping up her neck.

  “That’s not a shorter route,” Rufus said, meeting Yaki’s eyes. Yet he reached for his black cloak. “You’d be spending as much time walking away as you would be going forward that way.”

  “And it will be a trap.” The doctor took a step forward. “I’m sorry, dear, but the best thing you can do is pray to her now. Rufus, could you fetch her a basin of water?”

  “Already doing so.” Rufus shrugged into his cloak and disappeared into the passageway, leaving Yaki still stuck between the doctor and a solid-looking wall.

  Yaki stood there, rapier clasped in her hands. The memory of the flames played over her skin; she saw Grandmother Willow’s thin branches wither to ash in her mind. The doctor did not move, arms crossed and stern eyes boring into Yaki’s own. Over a mile run and then how many priests lay in wait? Yaki looked down at her blade. Her hands had pulled it an inch or so from the sheath. One blade. Gama watched her, his hand also on his sword. Two blades.

  Two blades against twenty priests while throwing away everything she’d been working toward. She shoved the blade back into the scabbard with a soft click that echoed around the silent room. “I’m sorry, Grandmother,” Yaki murmured to the air and let herself fall back onto the cot. I’m a pirate, not a hero, she reminded herself. You can’t fix a problem if you can’t shoot at it. Ishe had said that once, and the memory brought a tiny smile to her lips.

  “Good!” the doctor said in a tone that would make a dog very happy. “Honor her m
emory. Plant a seed in her name in a peaceful moment. Not now.”

  Yaki nodded as the doctor knelt in front of her.

  “Now, while Rufus is fetching you some water, let us talk about your friend inside here.” The doctor pressed a hand against Yaki’s sternum, and through the eyes of her mask, Yaki saw the woman wince. “You still run very hot.” She moved her hand out along Yaki’s chest, feeling along the outline of the heat. “How’s that feel now?”

  The physical sensation of the doctor’s palm dulled the sensation of flames on Yaki’s skin, chasing away the phantom pain. Instead, it pushed the heart’s steady rhythm into Yaki’s awareness. Thrum-thrum. Thrum-thrum. “Warm?”

  “You’re a little cooler than when the boys brought you here the first time. You were convinced this was going to kill you last time. Still think that?”

  Yaki remembered flame billowing out of her mouth to bathe Shuri’s body. Thought of the deliciousness of the gold rods in her bag, the round object that had been pulled inside Yaz’noth’s forge while she had been flayed open. The small cry that had filled the chamber, and the strange, squirming bit that the tendrils had sewn to the mechanical heart. She had done her level best not to think about it before. Focus on getting the quicksilver and not about how another mouthful of it would taste.