Jay Kristoff - Kinslayer

In a minute, maybe less, the Phoenix would be directly over the refinery.

One barrel would be all it took.

“Captain,” Hiro said. “Set course for the Palace . Ramming speed.”

“… Hai!”

Hiro cursed, licked ashes from his lips. Be this his last breath, he’d take those honorless dogs down to walk with him in the hells. The iron fist at his side clenched, involuntary, thoughts turning to the vengeance he’d now be forever denied. The murder he’d dreamed of, her face upturned to his, terror in her eyes as he closed iron fingers around that pretty throat and squeezed the very life from her body.

And then thunder tore the skies.

The reverb rolling down his spine, familiar as a lover’s fingertips, goosebumps rippling across his skin. Running to the railing. Ashes cracking on his cheeks as he narrowed his eyes, squinted into the fire-clad pall filled with sparks and smoke and screams of the dying.

Looking for them.

Looking for her .

And like a dream, there she was.

“Yukiko…”

Buruu’s roar cut the sky, talons tearing through the inflatable of a swift Phoenix corvette, sending it tumbling to the earth. Yukiko was pressed low to his back, katana drawn, hair streaming behind her in a cinder wind. The air was filled with shuriken fire, burning sky-ships, Tiger and Guild and Phoenix, all hammering at each other with every ’thrower they had. The city below was ablaze, folk fleeing in screaming droves, the night almost as bright as the day. Chaos. Absolute bloody chaos.

LOVELY WEDDING.

Buruu’s thoughts echoed in the Kenning, underscored with the reverb of psychic trauma in the city below and fatigue from their frantic eight-day flight here. Yukiko’s eyes were full of sand, head heavy as lead, bruised face and pounding skull. Every muscle aching. Every breath burning. Buruu and Kaiah had both given almost everything to get here, but at least they’d made it in time to see. The sight filled her with horror and joy, the fury and bedlam of it all. She had no idea where they’d even begun, but somehow Kin and Daichi and Kaori had done it. Set the wolves upon each other. Torn the wedding night to tatters and Hiro’s dreams of dominion to ruins. She could taste smoke through her grin.

Reaching out through the Kenning’s heat, she felt for the thunder of Kaiah’s psyche, pulled the female arashitora’s thoughts into herself, wincing at the volume. Beneath a pulsing rush of pain against her wall, blood on her lips, she could feel both thunder tigers inside her mind, her thoughts a conduit between each, her skull echoing with the pair’s bloodlust and awe.

I don’t know what the hells is going on here. But unless I’m mad, those Phoenix ships are attacking the city.

—LEAVE MONKEY-CHILDREN TO THEIR SLAUGHTER?—

Buruu growled in response.

THERE ARE INNOCENTS IN THE CITY BELOW.

Buruu is right, we can’t just—

A burst of ’thrower fire gleamed through the smoke toward them, Buruu and Kaiah splitting apart and weaving through the shards. The Tiger and Guild vessels had spotted them, opening up with their batteries alongside the Phoenix ships. Whatever enmity had sprung up between the two clans, it seemed to vaporize in the presence of Yoritomo’s assassin and two full-grown thunder tigers. But glancing at the deck of the monstrous Fushicho flagship, Yukiko could see her crews loading barrage-barrels into firing tubes, priming ignition charges. Picturing the bombardment of the Iishi forest in her mind’s eye, looking at the course they were on, Yukiko felt a cold dread in her gut beside the two burning sparks of life she could now feel with every part of—

They’re going to attack the refinery chi reserves! Kaiah, you keep the smaller ships off our tails long enough for us to deal with the big one!

A low growl was her only response, and Buruu was swooping and rolling through the withering hail of shuriken spewing from the flagship’s flanks. The Tiger and Guild vessels were still pouring on the fire too, a stray burst cutting one pursuing corvette to shreds. Yukiko slipped into the heat behind Buruu’s eyes, felt the thunder of his pulse inside her own chest, clinging to him with all her strength as they wove through the silver rain. She felt herself falling inside him, that familiar totality stretching out to envelope her, infant lightning playing at the tips of her fingers as he opened her mouth and roared. And there in the fire-torn black, the air around her filled with whistling death, his heat beneath her skin and her thoughts within his mind, they felt the warmth of them, the four of them, and found a oneness no other could ever know.

Crashing through a corvette’s inflatable, canvas torn to ribbons, the screeching of propeller blades across the sky. Falling and flying and spinning and swooping, her beak open as he roared and clapped their wings together, blue-white flaring across the severed beauty of their feathers and Raijin Song, Raijin Song, stretching out and taking hold of the night’s hem, tearing it to tatters and the ships filling it alongside, a shock wave from the heart of them smashing the tiny flying things as if they were wrought of glass. Through the spinning fragments, toward the hulking shape of the death writ large over Kigen skies, the Phoenix and their palace of pleasures, now sowing death in great flaming handfuls through the streets below. Kaiah’s roar thrilling them, electricity rippling along her hackles, bellowing in response, the cry for war, the call for blood, blood, blood like rain as they tore another wingless fly from the air.

But to sink in it?

To drown?

Down through the hail, a strike to his shoulder, blood on her feathers, shrieking in rage. Swooping under the belly of the colossal ship, a brief moment of stillness in the shadow below, gravity clutching them cold and trembling as they dragged themselves up the other side, momentum and mass and beautiful, thunderous will ripping them up past the astonished faces of the Phoenix crews, the open howling mouths of two men with painted eyes and beautiful, perfect faces, resplendent in sunflower silk fine enough to die in. Riding a beast of metal and wood and canvas—the dream of monkeys crawled down from the trees, looking to the skies since the day they were born and filled with yearning. To feel the clouds kiss their faces and the wind in their hair and the weak slip of gravity as it fell away like a tiny, mewling thing. A question. Always.

Why not, my friend?

Why not fly?

And they screamed it—the two (four) who were one (one), there at the last, talons outstretched and rending deep, compartment after compartment, the skin of the false-flyer peeled open like ripe fruit and spilling the squeal of escaping hydrogen out in the flooded night. Screamed their throat raw. Screamed for all the world to hear and feel and know. The answer why not, my friend, why not fly.

Because the skies are ours.

Because the sky is mine .

And the fire bloomed in their talons, reflected in their eyes, gleaming amber and bottomless black, trembling in their grip. The tiny handheld flare, just a spark unworthy of the name of flame. How easy would it be to hurl it toward the vapor, like a lover heartsick from a day of solitude, back into its beloved’s arms? And in that marriage, that love, that lust, conflagration would bloom, a shattering as wide and bright as a god’s eye, searing and blistering and mushroom-shaped. An unmaking filled with the scream of Phoenix lords, princelings undone by flame’s bright kiss, their Palace blown to splinters and shards of iron, raining down on fair Kigen like the cruelest storm. Ashes to scatter on the screaming wind, falling like fine snow, swirling amidst the smoke and char and soot and dusting the gutters with all they had been and ever would be.