The Tiger's Daughter Read online

  But the moment you laid eyes on me, something within you snapped. I cannot know what it was—I have no way of seeing into your thoughts—but I can only imagine the intensity of it.

  All I know is that the first thing I can remember seeing, the first sight to embed itself like an arrow in the trunk of my mind, is your face contorted with rage.

  And when I say rage, you must understand the sort of anger I am discussing. Normal children get upset when they lose a toy or when their parents leave the room. They weep, they beat their little fists against the ground, they scream.

  But it was not so with you. Your lips were drawn back like a cat’s, your teeth flashing in the light. Your whole face was taut with fury. Your scream was wordless and dark, sharp as a knife.

  You moved so fast, they could not stop you. A rush of red, yes—the color of your robes. Flickering golden ornaments in your hair. Dragons, or phoenixes, it matters not. Snarling, you wrapped your hands around my throat. Spittle dripped onto my forehead. When you shook me, my head knocked against the floor.

  I struggled, but I could not throw you off. You’d latched on. Whatever hate drove you made you ten times as vicious as any child has a right to be. In desperation I tried rolling away from you.

  On the third roll, we knocked into a brazier. Burning oil spilled out and seared your shoulder. Only that immense pain was enough to distract you. By the time your mother pulled you off me, I had bruises along my throat, and you had a scar on your shoulder.

  O-Shizuru apologized, or maybe O-Itsuki. I think it must have been both of them. Your mother chided you for what you’d done, while your father swore to Alshara that you’d never done anything like this before.

  Before that day, before you tried to kill me, no one ever said no to you.

  You did not come to stay with us that summer.

  Soon, Shizuru scheduled your first appointment with your music tutor. The problem, in her mind, was that you were too much like her. If only you fell in love with poetry, like your father; or music or calligraphy; cooking or engineering or the medical arts; even acting! Anything.

  Anything but warfare.

  And as for my mother’s reaction? As far as my mother was concerned, O-Shizuru’s only sin in life was not learning how to speak Qorin after all their years as friends. That attitude extended to you, as well, though you had not earned it. O-Shizuru and Burqila Alshara spent eight days being tortured together, and years after that rescuing one another. When the Emperor insisted that O-Shizuru tour the Empire with an honor guard at her back, your mother scoffed in his face.

  “Dearest Brother-in-Law,” she said, “I’ll run around the border like a show horse, if that’s what you want me to do, but I’m not taking the whole stable with me. Burqila and I lived, so Burqila and I will travel, and let the Mother carry to sleep any idiot who says otherwise. Your honored self included.”

  Legend has it that O-Shizuru did not wait for an answer, or even bow on the way out of the palace. She left for the stables, saddled her horse, and rode out to Oshiro as soon as she could. Thus began our mothers’ long journey through the Empire, with your father doing his best to try to keep up.

  So—no, there was nothing your mother could do wrong. And when you stand in so great a shadow as O-Shizuru’s, well—my mother was bound to overlook your failings.

  But my mother did insist on one thing—taking a clipping of your hair, and braiding it into mine. She gave your mother a clipping of my hair and instruction, for the same reason. Old Qorin tradition, you see—part of your soul stays in your hair when the wind blows through it. By braiding ours together, she hoped to end our bickering.

  I can’t say that she was right or wrong—only that as a child, I liked touching your hair. It’s so much thicker than mine, Shizuka, and so much glossier. I wish I still had that lock of hair—I treasure all my remnants of you, but to have your hair in a place so far from home …

  Let me tell you another story, the ending of which you know, but let us take our time arriving there. May you hear this in my voice, and not the careful accent of a gossiping courtier. May you hear the story itself, and not the rumors the rest may have whispered to you.

  * * *

  WHEN I WAS FIVE, my mother took my brother and me back to the steppes. We spent too long in the palace at Oshiro, she said; our minds sprouted roots. She did not actually say that out loud, of course—my brother spoke for her. In those days, he was the one who read her signing. My mother uses a form of signing employed by deaf Qorin, passed down from one to another through the years. Kenshiro did not spend much time traveling with the clan, due to my father’s objections, but my brother has always been too studious for his own good. If he could only see our mother once every eight years, then he wanted to be able to impress her.

  Thus, he taught himself to sign.

  Was my mother impressed? This is a difficult question. As commendable as it was that my brother went to such lengths, he was Not Qorin. He could never be, when he wore a face so like my father’s, when he wore his Hokkaran name with such pride.

  But he was my brother, and I loved him dearly, and when he told me this was going to be the best year of our lives, I believed him.

  On our first night on the whistling Silver Steppes, I almost froze to death. The temperature there drops faster than—well, you’ve been there, Shizuka, you know. It’s customary for mothers to rub their children down with urine just to keep them warm. No one sleeps alone; ten to fifteen of us all huddle together beneath our white felt gers. Even then the nights are frozen. Until I was eight and returned to Hokkaro, I slept in my brother’s bedroll, and huddled against him to keep the cold away.

  On one such night, he spoke to me of our names.

  “Shefali,” he said, “when you are out here, you are not Oshiro-sun. You know that, right?”

  I stared at him. I was five. That is what five-year-olds do. He mussed my hair as he spoke again.

  “Well, you know now,” he said. “Our mother’s the Kharsa, sort of. That means she’s like the Emperor, but for Qorin people.”

  “No throne,” I said.

  “She doesn’t need one,” said Kenshiro. “She has her mare and the respect of her people.”

  Ah. Your uncle was a ruler, and so was my mother. They must be the same.

  I did not know much about your family back then. Oh, everyone knew your uncle was the Son of Heaven, and his will in all things was absolute. And everyone knew your mother and my mother, together, killed one of the four Demon Generals and lived to tell the tale.

  But I didn’t much care about any of that. It didn’t affect me as much as you did, as much as the memory of you did. For you were never far from my mother’s mind, and she was always quick to say that the two of us must be like two pine needles.

  Yes, she said “pine needles”—the woman who lived for plains and open sky. I always thought it strange, and when I learned it was a line of your father’s poetry, I thought it stranger.

  But still, I grew to think of you as …

  Not the way I thought of Kenshiro. He was my brother. He taught me things, and spoke to me, and helped me hunt. But you?

  I did not know how to express it, but when I touched the clipping of your hair braided into mine, I knew we were going to be together again. That we were always going to be together. As Moon chases Sun, so would I chase you.

  But during my first journey around the steppes, I learned how different our two nations were.

  Kenshiro was teaching me how to shoot. The day before this, Grandmother Sky blessed us with rain, and I hadn’t thought to pack my bow away in its case. The second I tried to draw it back, it came apart in my hands; the string sliced me across the cheek and ear.

  As I was a child, I broke out crying. Kenshiro did his best to calm me.

  Two men who were watching us cackled.

  “Look at that filthy mongrel!” called the taller one. He was thin and bowlegged, and he wore a warm wool hat with drooping earflaps. When he spo
ke, I caught sight of his teeth. What few he had left were brown. His deel was green and decorated with circles. Two braids hung in front of his right earflap, with bright beads at the end. “I tell you, it is because she was born indoors. Burqila is a fool for keeping her.”

  My brother was eleven then. For a Qorin boy, he was short. For a Hokkaran, he was tall and gangly, all elbows and knees. He stood in front of me, and I thought he was big as a tree.

  “She was born outside,” he said. “Everyone knows that, Boorchu. And if she wasn’t, it wouldn’t make her any less Qorin.”

  “And why should I listen to a boy with roots for feet?” said Boorchu. “If she had a real teacher—”

  “Her bow was wet,” he said. “Of course it broke. It could’ve happened to you, too.”

  “No, boy,” said the tall man. “I know better. Because I was born on the steppes, and I grew beneath the sky, without a roof to suffocate me. You and your sister are pale-faced rice-eaters, and that is the plain truth.”

  The shorter one—who was squat and had only one braid—only snorted. I don’t know why. “Rice-eater” is not a piercing insult. “Ricetongue” is far worse. And on top of that, they called both Kenshiro and me pale-faced, when only Kenshiro is pale. I’m dark as a bay. Anyone can see that.

  “Boorchu,” said the shorter one then, grabbing his friend’s arm. “Boorchu, you should—”

  “I’m not going to stop,” said the tall one. “Burqila never should’ve married that inkdrinker. A good Qorin man, that is what she needs. One who’ll give her strong sons and stubborn daughters, who don’t snap their strings like fat little—”

  All at once Boorchu grew quiet. Shock dawned on him, and soon he was the pale-faced one.

  Someone touched my head. When I turned, my mother had emerged from the ger. A silent snarl curled her lips. She snapped to get Kenshiro’s attention, and then her fingers spoke for her, flying into shapes I could not read.

  “My mother says you are to repeat what you just said,” Kenshiro translated. His voice shook. He squeezed me a bit tighter, and when he next spoke, he did so in Hokkaran. “Mother, if you’re going to hurt him—”

  She cut him off with more gestures. Her horsewhip hung from her belt, opposite her sword; to a child, both were frightening.

  Kenshiro made a soft, sad sound.

  Boorchu stammered. “I said that, I said, er, that your daughter…”

  “A good Qorin man?” Kenshiro said, reading my mother’s signs. “I don’t see any here. Come forward, Boorchu.” Then he broke into Hokkaran again. “Mother, please. She’s only five.”

  What were they talking about? Why was Boorchu sweating so much, why had his friend run away, why was my brother trembling?

  Boorchu dragged his feet. “Burqila,” he said, “I just want them to be strong. If you never let them hear what people think of them, they’ll weep at everything. You don’t want them to be spoiled, do you?”

  My mother clapped her hands. One of the guards—a woman with short hair and a scar across her face, with more braids than loose hair—snapped to attention.

  “Bring the felt,” Kenshiro translated.

  And the guard ran to get it. In a minute, no more, she returned. She bound Boorchu’s hands together with rope and wrapped him in the felt blanket. He kept screaming. The sound, Shizuka! Though it was soon muffled, it reverberated in my ears, my chest. It was getting harder to breathe.

  “Ken,” I said, “Ken, what’s happening?”

  “You should turn away,” he replied. “You don’t have to watch this.”

  But I couldn’t. The sight and sound fixed me in place. My eyes watered, not from sadness, but from fear; my brain rattled in my skull.

  “Shefali,” he said, “look away.”

  My mother drew her sword. She didn’t bother signing anymore. No, she walked up to the man in the felt binding and ran him through. Just like that. I remember how red spread out from the hilt of her sword like a flower blossoming. I remember the wet crunch of bones giving way, the slurp as she pulled her sword back.

  Kenshiro ran his hands through my hair. “Shefali,” he said, “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have … I’m sorry.”

  I wasn’t paying attention.

  I couldn’t look away from the bundle of white-turning-red. I saw something coming out of it, glimmering in the air, swirling like smoke. As I watched, it scattered to the winds.

  This was unspoken horror. This was water falling from the ground into the sky. This was a river of stone, this was a bird with fur, this was wet fire. I felt deep in my body that I was seeing something I was never meant to see.

  I pointed out the flickering lights to Kenshiro with a trembling hand. “What’s that?”

  He glanced over, then turned his attention back to me. He stroked my cheeks. “The sky, Shefali,” he said. “The Endless Sky, who sees all.”

  But that wasn’t what I saw. I knew the sky. I was born with a patch of it on my lower back, and though the birthmark faded, the memory remained. Grandmother Sky never made me feel like this.

  I felt like an arrow, trembling against a bowstring. Like the last drop of dew clinging to a leaf. Like a warhorn being sounded for the first time.

  “Ken-ken,” I said, “do you see the sparkles?”

  And, ah—the moment I spoke, I knew something within me had changed. I felt the strangest urge to look North, toward the Wall of Flowers. At the time, I’d heard only the barest stories about it. I knew that it was beautiful, and I knew that it was full of the Daughter’s magic.

  How could I have known that the Wall was where blackbloods went to die?

  How was I to know?

  Kenshiro furrowed his brow. “You’re just stressed, Shefali,” he whispered. “You saw something you shouldn’t have. But you’ll be all right, I promise.”

  I bit my lip, hard. Kenshiro couldn’t see it.

  Maybe he was right. Kenshiro was right about a lot of things. He always knew where the sun was going to rise in the morning, and he knew the names for all the constellations.

  But that didn’t change the awful feeling in my stomach, or the rumbling I now heard in the distance, or the whisper telling me “go north.” I looked around the camp for an oncoming horde, but I saw none. Yet there was the sound rolling between my ears; there was the clatter of a thousand horses.

  It wasn’t there, I told myself, it wasn’t there, and I was safe with my mother and Kenshiro.

  But for the rest of that day, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something awful had happened.

  Kenshiro told me Tumenbayar stories to pass the time. Tumenbayar is something like your ancestor Minami Shiori—there are hundreds of stories about her. All of them are true, of course, especially the ones that contradict each other.

  It was one week later that I received your first letter. When the messenger first brought it out of his bag, I knew it was yours by sight alone. You sent it sealed in a bright red envelope, emblazoned with golden ink. I snatched it out of his hands in a way that made Kenshiro apologize for my rudeness, and I pressed it to my nose so I could smell you.

  You might find it strange that I was so excited for a letter from a girl who tried to kill me. The truth is, I never bore you any ill will for what you did. When you first saw me, you were struck with unspeakable rage.

  But when I saw you, I …

  Imagine you are a rider, Shizuka, a Qorin rider. You have been out in the forests to the north for some time, trying to find something to feed your clanmates. Two days you’ve been hunting. Hunger twists your stomach into knots. You can hardly will yourself to move. Behind you, you hear something in the trees. You turn, you fire, and you slow down enough to see your catch: two fat marmots, speared together by your arrow.

  Seeing you was like seeing those marmots. I knew everything would be all right, so long as I had you near me.

  So your letter understandably excited me, and getting to smell it thrilled me even more so. A person’s soul is in their scent. For the
first time since Boorchu died, when I took a breath of your perfumed paper, I felt safe.

  Until I tried to read the letter. Then I only felt frustrated. I stared at the characters and pretended I could read them. I traced them with one finger, and imagined what you might say to me.

  Kenshiro caught me at it. “Is that—?”

  He tried to take the letter from me. Only Grandmother Sky could’ve pried it away from my grubby little hands. After some coaxing, he convinced me to hold it out so he could read it.

  His bushy brows rose halfway up his forehead. “Shefali,” he said, “is this from the Peacock Princess?”

  I nodded.

  He let out a whistle. “You’ve made an important friend! Can you read this?” When I shook my head, he sat down next to me. “Then it’s time for some tutoring. Follow along with my finger.”

  To be honest, I couldn’t follow any of the writing at all. Your calligraphy was beautiful even then, but I could never make sense of it.

  You can read Qorin letters, Shizuka. Imagine if every time you blinked, everything changed. Where the letters were. What they looked like. Imagine if they went from right side up to upside down and backwards. That is what happens to me when I read Hokkaran.

  I made Kenshiro read it to me so many times that I remember it still.

  Oshiro Shefali,

  My parents are making me write this because they think I need to apologize to you. I think that’s silly. You know that I am sorry, so why do I have to tell you again? But my mother wants us to be friends, so I have to write to you.

  Big lumpy Qorin horses don’t interest me, and neither does archery. I don’t know what we can talk about. Do you like flowers? I don’t know if they have flowers on the Silver Steppes. Peonies and chrysanthemums are my favorites. Most of the time I can guess what everyone else’s favorite is, but whenever I try to think of yours, I can’t do it. If you don’t like chrysanthemums at least, then you’re wrong, and I’ll have to show you all of mine when I see you next.