Jay Kristoff: The Last Stormdancer

And the Lady Mai?

She walked beside Lord Riku, palms crossed over her belly, her face as rigid and cold as a mask. But every now and then, she would glance from the cobbles beneath her feet to her sister walking at the coffin’s left-hand side. To the once-perfect kohl painted around her sibling’s eyes, smudged now with sorrow.

And she would smile.

The boy hung from my claws, limp and bewildered as we circled ever higher. I held him beneath his arms, talons not yet piercing his flesh. He did not struggle as most other monkey-children I had seen did in his predicament. He did not plead in his jabber-tongue nor buck in my grip. He simply clutched the broken body of the dead sparrow in one hand, lashes crusted with frozen tears.

This makes no sense.

His voice in my mind again, warm as summer breeze.

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

I snorted, circling higher still, the Four Sisters laid out below us, snow-clad and beautiful.

WHAT YOU EXPECT, MONKEY-CHILD? BE STORMDANCER? BE HERO? LUCKY SKYMEET NOT TEAR YOU LIMB FROM LIMB.

I care nothing for heroes. I care for the sickness. It took my mother. My father.

A chill in my belly.

And I am supposed to stop it.

SUPPOSED?

It was foretold. It is my destiny.

FOOLISHNESS.

Though he could see only darkness, the boy’s gaze was affixed on the ground far below; the vista of mountain and earth, of stone and soil and green stretching all the way to the horizon. He opened his bloody palm, let the sparrow’s body fall, spinning and tumbling end over end until it became only a speck, and from there, nothing at all.

He spoke then. Monkey-words I did not understand. Perhaps a song. Perhaps a prayer.

We ascended.

THIS SICKNESS YOU SPEAK. HAS SPREAD FAR?

The boy’s eyes were downturned and vacant. His body shivering from altitude’s deathly kiss. He was light as air, feeble and soft. Numbed to his core. I shook him once to regain his attentions.

ANSWER, MONKEY-CHILD!

… It has spread far. It does not just kill people, as I said. All the great spirit beasts suffer and die from it. Phoenix and henge and kappa and dragon. Arashitora alone seem immune.

IT IS COUGHING? BLOODY BREATH AND DYING?

The boy nodded.

My kind call it blacklung … But how could you know the symptoms?

MY KIND NOT IMMUNE, MONKEY-CHILD. ARASHITORA SICKENING ALSO. MANY OF US. MY MOTHER, FATHER, BROTHER, ALL GONE. OUR EGGS GROWING THINNER. BREAKING IN WOMB OR BENEATH THEIR MOTHER’S WEIGHT.

Then … why would your Khan not help? Why did you kill my friend?

KHAN FEAR MONKEY-CHILDREN. FEAR MACHINES. HE OLD. NOT UNDERSTAND NEW WAYS. CHANGING WORLD.

But you do?

NO.

Thunder rolled in the skies about us, sending a thrill through my belly. The voice of Raijin, the Thunder God, father to all arashitora. Telling me not to be afraid.

BUT WANT TO.

You … you will help me, then?

I circled lower, descending through the freezing squalls, down to the broken crags at the Four Sisters’ edge. I dropped the monkey-child into a thick drift of snow, alighted beside him, sinking deep into sharp chill. My breath roiling in the air between us. My eyes upon his, sightless though they were, seeing more than the leader of my race ever would. I had lost my family to this sickening. And though the Khan might bid us simply leave Shima and its woes behind, though I had no words at the time for concepts like “forever” or “extinction,” I found myself unwilling, in that tiny, frozen moment, to lose my home along with my kin. Not without at least knowing why.

This seemed important.

This boy seemed important.

I HELP, MONKEY-CHILD.

And your friends? Your kin?

ARASHITORA NOT FIGHT MONKEY-CHILD BATTLES FOR YOU.

What if we were to convince my people to help also? Would you fight beside us?

CANNOT SAY. PERHAPS WE FIGHT. BUT ONCE KHAN SPEAKS, HIS WORD IS LAW. MUST RETURN BEFORE SKYMEET IS DONE. A DAY. TWO AT MOST. OR ELSE, WILL BE TOO LATE.

The boy smiled, grinned like a fool.

Grandmother was right …

KNOW NOT GRANDMOTHER.

She spoke a prophecy, a vision—

NOT CARE ABOUT VISION. NOT CARE ABOUT YOU. NOT FRIENDS, BOY. NOT THINK YOU STORMDANCER. NOT DO THIS FOR YOU. DO THIS FOR MY KIND. MY CUBS, YET UNBORN.

You have a bride? I did not know. Do you wish to tell her—

BRIDE? FOOLISH. SEE NOTHING.

I felt him, then. A frown upon his face, reaching out through the frost-clad space between us and slipping inside my mind. The strangest of sensations; sharing a room as vast as reckoning with another mind, wide as the dawning sky. Touching. Overlapping. A sense of him in me, and me in him. Unlike anything I had ever known. And after a moment, the frown smoothed from his brow, incredulity settling there instead, blind eyes searching mine as if he saw me true.

My gods. You’re … female …

TROUBLES YOU, MONKEY-CHILD?

Not troubling, no. It is just—

NEVER RIDDEN FEMALE BEFORE?

Amusement rippling in my mind. Spilling into his.

In truth, I have not, great one.

FIRSTS, THEN. FOR BOTH OF US. NOW, WHERE WE GO?

The Shōgun’s palace is in Kigen city. He is the leader of my people. Like your Khan.

I looked at the Four Sisters behind me, the Aerie of my race. The Skymeet therein, aloft and aloof and afraid. What would happen to me when I returned? What shape would my Khan’s displeasure take? My kind did not allow females to fly free. Risk themselves in battles. Such was our way. Had always been our way. But there was change coming. All with eyes to see knew it …

HOPE NOT, MONKEY-CHILD.

If we visit the Shōgun, I can tell him of this sickness. How it spreads through his subjects and all the beasts and birds of the sky—

HE NOT KNOW?

In my experience, those who live with their heads in the clouds seldom look at the ground beneath their feet.

WHY HE LISTEN?

Because we have destiny on our side, my friend.

The boy stood there in the snow, ice on his brows and the soft down at his cheeks. He seemed a tiny, lonely thing, then. Far from home and all he knew. Yet still that certainty loomed within him—the pillar of belief that all this was preordained. A faith unswerving. A conviction, perhaps, that would change the world …

I do not know your name …

MY KIND CALL ME KOH.

Does it have meaning?

KOH IS ARASHITORA WORD FOR CHANGING OF SEASONS.

I like that.

I CARE NOT.

May I ask something of you, Koh?

ASK.

May I touch your face?

My eyes narrowed, wings flaring, wisps of lightning crawling across my feathers. A growl rumbled in my chest, shivering the snow upon my fur, spilling to the ground in rolling white flurries.

… WHY?

The winter sparrow. The one your brethren … killed. She was more important to me than you can know. My gift is called the Kenning in my mother’s tongue. And through it, I can share not only a beast’s thoughts, but also their senses. Little Mikayo …

He paused to wipe at those milk-white eyes, and I felt a sadness touch my heart.

She was not only my friend. She was my eyes.

The sadness swelled, slowing my breath, clutching my chest. You may think us beasts, monkey-child. And beasts we are. Predators, proud and fierce and wild. The storms that rock your walls and shiver you beneath your straw roofs are but spring showers to us. Ours is not a world of mercy, of softness or kindness. The bodies of the weak fill the bellies of the strong.