The Winds of Tepr

The hall holds its breath. Steel ripples like a pond of knives; lacquered screens drink the lamplight and show nothing back. Backs are bowed, helms lowered. The new Emperor—barefoot, robe stippled with drying red—stands on the first riser as if it were a battlefield he has already measured.

His gaze moves, a blade choosing meat. It slides past Shen Huo's iron geometry, past the war-priest quiet of lances, past Yile kneeling so low his forehead learns grain. It stops.

"You," he says, not loud, and the hall hears it anyway. "The girl behind Yile. Rise."

Meicao's head comes up like a hunted thing risking daylight. The chain at her wrist gives a single tired clink. She stands. Beside her, another shadow rises a fraction: Meibei, mask tilted just enough to see; her hand still folded around the lance's haft as if it were a pen writing on air. From a screen to the left steps Kexing, plain as a proverb, empty-handed and inconveniently present.

"Names," the Emperor says, as if placing stones on a board.

Meicao swallows. When she speaks, her voice keeps low to avoid breaking. "Meicao," she says. "Of Behani. Warrior-monk of the Crescent Moon School."

A heartbeat. Meibei's mask turns a degree toward the throne. Her bow is ink drawn thin. "Meibei," she says, the name distinct, the rest withheld. "Of Behani. Warrior-monk of the Full Moon School. Her sister." Her voice is a reed in winter: flexible, unbroken, sharpened by cold.

"Kexing," Kexing says. Nothing else.

Yanming—boy no longer—regards them as a potter regards three lumps of clay that pretend to be finished. He does not sit. "Meicao," he says, tasting it. "You flew steel at my throat for a man who asks to die at my feet." His eyes flick to Yile, then back, the smallest arc. "Tell me which leash owns you."

Meicao's chin lifts, not insolent—anchored. "His," she answers, and the word is not shout, not plea. It is a nail driven with care. "My master."

Yile flinches; the movement is almost nothing, a tremor in silk. His mouth opens with a reflex he thought broken, but the heel of the Emperor's look presses him shut. Meibei shifts in place, weight moving from blade to bone. The mask hides her eyes; the way her shoulders close says what the porcelain is paid to conceal.

Kexing scratches her wrist once, thoughtful. "Clarity," she murmurs, as if pleased with a kitchen knife that admits it is only good for onions.

"Your master," Yanming repeats. The syllables flatten. He steps down from the riser: one step, and he is level with men for whom he is no longer level. The silk of his robe whispers; the blood on its hem makes the stones remember. He stops three paces from Meicao and studies the chain coiled at her wrist, the callus stripes at the base of her fingers, the stance that reveals training and hunger both. "Stronger than your Emperor?"

Meicao does not move. "Yes."

Meibei breathes, once, too sharply. In the shadow behind her jaw, something tightens and does not relax.

"Good," Yanming says, and somehow it is not. He looks past Meicao to the mask. "Meibei."

She inclines her head. "Majesty."

"You say you have never betrayed him," he says, and it is not a question.

Kexing's mouth twitches. "Meibei values honor above all else. She has never betrayed anyone."

"Silence," Shen Huo warns.

The Emperor's gaze does not leave Meibei. "I will have proof," he says. "Not papers. Not oaths. The new order is coins we mint in blood so they do not spend false." He turns a palm up, lazy as a cat that knows the next movement will end an audience. "Your sister names him master. She chooses him over me."

Meibei's fingers tighten on the lance. The mask shows a polite blankness.

"Prove your loyalty," Yanming says, very gentle, the way a boy speaks to a dog he is about to set on a boar. "Kill her."

...

They come in under a sky hammered thin by wind, hooves thudding like a giant's slow heartbeat. Naci rides first, her braids flowing in the wind; behind her Borak sways in the saddle as if he grew there, and Sen bounces with dangerous glee amid a wagon that clinks and clucks and occasionally hisses. The camp smells of old smoke, trampled thyme, hot iron. Children race the horses and peel away when they see Khanai pacing at Horohan's knee, the white tiger's whiskers sharp as frost.

Horohan steps from shadow. The eagles make their thin, imperious music from Temej's posts. Under the felt eaves, women lift their eyes from stitching; men pause with spearheads half-brightened. The steppe inhales.

Naci swings down without haste. For a breath, the space between them is a history only they read. Then she unstraps a cedar crate bound with blue silk cord and sets it in Horohan's hands as if delivering judgment.

"Again?" Horohan murmurs, humor pressed flat beneath the word. Her fingers loosen the cord.

Inside: snow caught and taught to hold its shape. Porcelain fine as breath and painted with a patient winter—fern-frost, tiny cranes, a hawthorn branch stippled with red dots so modest they might be remembered rather than seen. The cups are thin enough to forgive, the pot plump as a contented cloud, the tray a glacier's memory.

Horohan's face does not change; everything else around her notices the temperature rise. "You ruin me," she says lightly.

Naci's smile knives quick and is gone. "This set promised to obey you. The last one was a rebel."

"The last one died a martyr on Kuan's elbow," Horohan says, accepting the weight with both hands.

"That elbow was innocent!" Kuan protests, materializing as always where blame is sweetest. His hair bells give a telltale ring. "The tea assaulted me first."

"It was your story about the magistrate and the goose," Temej says without looking at him. "The cup fled the narrative."

"It fled your face," Kuan counters. "A reasonable choice for fragile pottery."

Borak's laugh is a wedge splitting the solemnity. He hauls Temej into an embrace that creaks leather. "Little brother," he says. "Did the sky miss me? Did your birds compose laments?"

"The birds slept," Temej replies into Borak's shoulder. He disengages with a stoic shove. "We had peace. It was precious and unrepeatable."

"Lies," Kuan says, clapping Borak's other shoulder, conspirator already. "We suffered. We had to listen to Temej's philosophy about boiled meat. Save us, bear. Tell him spices exist."

Borak throws an arm around Kuan's narrow neck in an amiable choke. "He knows. He hoards them like secrets."

"Secrets spoil in his hands," Kuan says, wriggling free. "Give them to me. I will plant them like rumors."

Kelik arrives with a wooden spoon like a scepter, her braid gray as dawn, her gaze the kind that survived flood and famine and found both wanting. "My sons," she says, and the spoon taps each sternum in a benediction disguised as inspection. "One returns fatter. The other still thinks hunger is a virtue." She eyes Borak. "Did the city feed you or salt you?"

"Both," Borak answers, kissing her brow. "I brought you oranges. And a comb from Pezijil bone-workers."

Kelik snorts but the corners of her eyes soften as Naci passes her a bundle of indigo. "A shawl," Naci offers. "The payment for renting one of your sons again."

"Not bad," Kelik says, pressing the cloth to her cheek. "Thank you, Naci."

Gani comes, wiping her hands on an apron that will not be clean again. There is a line at the corner of her mouth that hadn't settled there last moon; a cough taps at her chest and pretends to be nothing. Tseren follows, proud shoulders weighted with a tiredness he is too stubborn to admit. His smile is a stitched thing but it holds.

"My fierce daughter," Gani says, folding Naci in with both arms, refusing rank and season and watchful eyes. "Did you remember the spices I asked you?"

"I remembered a city of them." Naci draws out a tin that sighs cardamom when opened, a jar of black vinegar glittering like a small night, cakes wrapped in wax paper that smell of almond and festival. For Tseren, she produces a collapsible spyglass.

"So he can see trouble coming and pretend he knew all along," Gani says, pleased despite herself.

Tseren's laugh rasps to a halt. He coughs into a cloth, the sound wet, thorned. When he lowers the cloth, he has already turned it inward. Naci's gaze flinches a finger's width. Gani, without looking, sets a bowl of hot water near his hand.

"Mother," Horohan says, turning as Lizem's step enters the ring, the older woman's bracelets speaking before she does. Lizem's hair is a black river braided with copper fishhooks; her smile is a slice of sunrise with teeth in it.

"Northern queen," Lizem greets Naci, and the honorific is an old joke between equals, not a bow.

"Winter mother," Naci returns, and sets in Lizem's arms lengths of south-sea silk the color of thunderheads, packets of saffron sting, buttons carved like little lions that bite the cloak closed. "Also, a ridiculous hat," she adds, showing a cap festooned with dyed heron plumes and a notion of fashionable madness.

Lizem puts it on at once, the plumes trembling like joyous grass. "If I die, bury me in this," she announces. "So the ancestors know we still have taste."

"Die later," Horohan says dryly. "Tea first."

Sen meanwhile tumbles from her cart in a black snow of soot and feathers, chased by a copper pipe and three angry hens. The pipe collides with Kuan's shin; the hens aim for his soul.

"Progress!" Sen declares, wrenching a sack of crushed bone to safety. "Science travels home triumphant! Where is Saya? Where is my sister? I require a brain to speak to before I embarrass myself explaining resonance to Temej."

"I am relieved in advance," Temej says.

Saya is already there, cutting through the crowd as the tide parts for a known rock. Her hair is plaited with harbor twine; her hands smell of rope and brine even this far from sea. Beside her walks her husband Turkan—broad as a door lintel and gentle as a prayer whispered for a child; grief sits on his shoulders like a sleeping wolf. When he sees Sen, some of that weight lifts.

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"Sister," Saya says. They collide with a clatter of bangles and tools. Sen's hands pat Saya's arms as if checking a ladder—sound, steady, not rotten.

"You married an ox," Sen blurts, delighted, appraising Turkan's forearms as if they were a new alloy. "An intelligent ox! Look at those wrists! We can carry pipes on him!"

Turkan's laugh is a low thunder. "I am furniture," he agrees. "Put things on me. I will not move unless it is funny."

"Turkan is better than furniture," Saya corrects mildly. "Furniture cannot lift a skiff with one hand when a child sleeps in it."

"He did that?" Sen is already filing the datum for later worship. "Marry me," she tells him absently.

"You're late," Saya says, and the joke curls small in the space where other words might break. "Father would have scolded you."

Sen's mouth opens, then closes. The light she carries gutters once and then steadies. "How," she asks as if the air might bite, "was the pyre?"

Turkan's gaze slides away to a corner of sky that the steppe keeps for bleakness. "Hot," he says simply. "Too hot."

Saya's voice thins and strengthens, a wire under tension. "It was quick," she lies for Sen's sake, then flinches at her own mouth. Honesty refuses to be bound. "He drowned before the fire. In himself. His lungs… the phlegm—" She swallows. "It had the color of iron left out in rain. The sores around his mouth opened like little mouths of their own. We washed him with juniper and vinegar and sang so he would remember the road. When the flames took him, the smoke smelled sweet at first, like sugar burning, then like fat. I hated my nose for learning the sequence."

Sen leans her forehead to Saya's, breath trembling. "You learned the rites of the steppes well. You worked really hard, sister. I wish I were as smart as you."

"Don't be ridiculous," Saya murmurs. "We both know you are the smartest."

Kuan, who never leaves grief alone with itself too long, slides into the circle with a bow that mocks and honors in equal measure. "Master Turkan," he says gravely, "permit me to express the camp's deepest condolences and inquire whether you will be donating your biceps to the war effort."

"I was planning to," Turkan says, straight-faced, flexing like a saint exhibiting relics. "One to each front."

"Generous," Kuan approves with a laugh.

Tea blooms like a lifted veil. Horohan handles the new set with a priestess's precision; steam curls through painted frost and writes impermanent characters on the air.

"Tell me," Lizem says, cradling winter in her palms. "What does the city say when we are not listening?"

"That its gutters are conversations and its rooftops are lies," Naci answers. "That people who are not supposed to need to eat still do. That gunfire is a flavor children are learning to name."

"Flavor," Kelik says disdainfully. "We had flavors. Clay. Smoke. Goat. We lived."

"Living will require new teeth," Horohan says, pouring again.

"Biting is inefficient," Sen says, resurfacing from clutching Saya's hands. "Tearing is efficient. Shockwave is elegant."

Gani's cough arrives like a thief with the wrong shoes: obvious, clumsy, leaving red fingerprints on the cloth when she forgets to hide it. The chatter narrows. Naci's head turns a degree. Horohan does not move. Tseren pretends they are discussing sheep.

"The fever is a jealous wife," Kelik pronounces, banging her spoon on fate. "It wants everyone. It will not have us all."

"Not if we outrun it," Borak says. "We will move camp."

"And bring it with us like an honored guest," Temej replies. "It has already packed."

From the edge of the circle, Pomogr clears his throat with the gravity of an ax in a stump. The skin under his eyes is new-paper thin, the color of old bruises. He has not dressed his grief in anything but dust. "We came back from a place where the air kills at order," he says to Naci, to Horohan, to anyone who wants the truth without sauce. "I would trade for a fever that only asks first."

The porcelain—miracle of fragility—clicks soft on its own tray as if in sympathy. Horohan's glance sharpens, then relents. "We'll talk," she says. "After we settle the living."

"Settle them fast," Pomogr says. "The future knocks with a hammer."

The tiger yawns; the eagles rotate the world with a slow pivot of golden eyes. The wind sifts through hair, banners, the fur on the back of grief. For a few breaths, the camp remembers how to be a village. Children swarm the cart to steal sweetness with the professionalism of ants. Kuan pretends to be scandalized by their theft and pockets two cakes. Temej pretends not to notice and keeps one back for his favorite bird.

Horohan sets a cup into Naci's palm at last. Their fingers touch, flint to steel. "You will put the world in a furnace," she says, quiet as a knife being oiled.

"I will," Naci answers, and sips winter.

Gani fumbles her cloth and Tseren catches it. Their eyes meet in a narrow, private bridge over a red smear. Naci sees the bridge and looks away only long enough to look harder.

"Kuan," she says without raising her voice, already turning the camp on its hinge. "Find me ten boys and girls with good lungs and we'll, make them into runners."

"Don't worry, my Khan," Kuan smirks, "Lanau is already working on it."

...

Dawn pries at the felt seam of the ger with a gold fingernail. Horohan wakes to the sound of buckles and finds the bed already colder where Naci should be. The Khan stands half-armored in the blue breath of morning, and for a heartbeat Horohan thinks a shrine has grown legs.

The armor is preposterous and magnificent. A cuirass hammered into a prowling tiger, its brass flanks chased with cloud-scrolls and tiny, laughing demons; along the spine, a ridge of chased scales where a dragon once dreamed itself into metal. The pauldrons flare like temple eaves. The skirt is lamellae overlapped in fishbone curves, gilt winking through lacquer black as a moonless waterhole. Gloves end in articulated claws that look designed to pinch fate by the ear. And the helmet—oh gods—the helmet is a dragon's skull cast in iron and plated where light would notice, its maw a visor, fangs folded down to bite over her cheeks, horns swept back like a storm deciding direction.

Naci turns, a child caught in the pantry of glory, and grins with the shameless pride of a raider who has stolen the sun and found it fits.

"You are ungodly," Horohan murmurs, soft and impious, sitting up on an elbow.

"I am official," Naci corrects, striking a stance so theatrical it should require a drummer. "Behold! You have had the inexpressible honor to sleep with the Dragon–Tiger General of the Yanming Emperor."

She says it too loudly for the small room. Somewhere beyond, a tethered horse stamps as if seconding the joke. Horohan cannot help it; laughter moves in her like wind across new snow. She rises, catches the snarling helm in both hands, and settles it on Naci's head as if crowning a misbehaving deity.

"It is ridiculous," Horohan says, the words warmed by adoration. "It will frighten children and attract geese."

"Geese are honorable foes," Naci says, voice muffled by dragon-teeth. "They know no fear."

"Like my wife," Horohan says, and kisses the cold iron between the eye ridges in benediction and conspiracy. "Go on. Parade, monster."

She follows.

The morning steps aside for them. The camp exhales smoke and porridge-steam; everything smells of boiled bone and wet leather and ground thyme crushed under hooves. When Naci emerges blinking fire from a dragon's face, the first reaction is a kind of reverent silence—as if the steppe has decided to humor a particularly confident storm. Then, almost immediately, the children swarm.

They come like locusts in a festival—bare feet slapping dust, braids flying, noses running, eyes answering only to wonder. "A Dragon!" a girl shrieks, and thumps the tiger on Naci's belly with the heel of her hand. "It's hollow!"

"Is it real?" asks another, already pinching a scale to test for pain. A small boy wedges himself between greave and boot to check whether the sabatons have toes inside them.

Someone begins to chant: "Roar! Roar! Roar!"

Naci obliges. She throws her arms wide, the plates singing faintly, and lets out a roar so theatrical birds argue about it. The littlest ones squeal and hide in their own shadows, peeking out to see if the terror is still sweet.

Lanau arrives at speed, antlers tilting, a string of amulets trying to flee her haste. She stops, takes in dragon, tiger, and forty feral apprentices dancing around both, then presses her palms together and looks as if deciding between laughter and a ritual smiting.

"Spirits above," she mutters. "It moves."

Naci dips the dragon's muzzle toward her. "Lanau the Child-Tamer," she intones. "Behold: a miracle. All your little demons, in one place."

Lanau pinches the bridge of her nose. "If that suit keeps them here for a quarter hour," she says, "I will compose a hymn to your glory." She claps sharply. "Line up! The Dragon will count your teeth! Those with fewer than twenty-four will be offered to the tiger."

A chorus of delighted, appalled gasps. "I'm missing two!" brags a boy.

"Then you get a head start," another hisses.

Around the edges of the spectacle, adults stand at ease the way wolves stand at ease—ready to sprint into seriousness if needed. They smother smiles because Horohan is behind Naci, walking with a predator's patient tread, eyes like coins hammered thin. Anyone tempted to make a joke sees her and shuts his mouth. Khanai pads at Horohan's heel, the white tiger's tail writing question marks in the dust.

"Walk with me," Naci says, low, as they carve a slow path through their own people. "Tell me what the wind did while I was combing the Emperor's tea for arsenic."

Horohan gives the bones of it. "We met with Puripal and your brother. We thought the Needle's Ear could be gnawed from within. Ta did it—graceful as a pickpocket. Then the grey ones came. A new kind of Moukopl cavalry armed with muskets. They probably hid it from you, didn't they?"

"They did," Naci says, which is not comfort but a knot under the feet. "Good job, baby Emperor. But that means we can stop pretending too."

Across the fire-pits, a runner takes breath to shout; Naci outshouts him.

"Warriors! To the lines!"

Her voice is a blade striking a bell. The camp jumps as if the ground twitched. In moments, men and women resolve themselves into ranks the way iron filings find a magnet. Borak is already bellowing intervals and flattening sloppiness with his palm. Pomogr limps to the front like a complaint that learned to carry a spear. Temej whistles two notes and the eagles stop being decorative.

Sen arrives at a dead run with Saya and Turkan behind like two legs under a table supporting far too much. Crates thud open; inside, the empire's new theology: long, ugly, heavy sticks married to iron and intention. Powder-horns dangle like trapped moons. Bandoliers stitched with wooden cartridges clack like prayer beads for a devout butcher. The smell is black salt and old eggs.

"First eighty!" Naci calls, raising a clawed hand. "Step."

They do—colts and hawks, cheeks still smooth or only grazed by a first careless blade. They smell of leather, sweat, and the beginning of legend. Scars are rare and recent; training welts, sun-lines, a split knuckle drying to brown. Eyes bright, backs straight, eagerness crackling like frost under hooves. Kuan and Lanau sift them with a priest's gravity and a trickster's cruelty, bells tattling when Kuan lies, antlers tilting when Lanau decides; in powder-stain and oath-breath they anoint the vibrant youth of Tepr as its new warriors.

Borak takes the front—past thirty by a stubborn handful of winters—but command fits him like a familiar pelt, and no one argues with the avalanche you want to follow.

"Matchlocks," Sen crows, incapable of not teaching while the house is burning. "Not as quick as the southern devil-flints, but the devil sulks here. Touch-hole is here. Pan here. Keep powder dry or it sulks too. Do not fall. If you fall, throw it away. Trust me."

She slaps a musket into a woman's arms. "This one is named Sour Auntie," she says. "It complains and then kills your enemies." To a lanky boy: "This one is called Law. It is boring and reliable until it is not."

"Targets," Naci snaps, and Temej has them: a line of raw sheep suspended from a pole—meat pink and shining, ribs like white harp-keys, a sack of wet offal tied where a neck would be.

"Front rank, kneel," Naci says. "Rear rank, lean. Prime. Level." She doesn't need to say fire. They feel it in their shoulders.

"On my count," Naci adds loudly, and the children go utterly, perfectly still. "Three. Two. One."

The volley is not thunder, it is a brutal, staggered hammer-blow of noise that punches the air and leaves ears ringing. A thick, acrid cloud of white smoke blasts from the muzzles and clings to everything in a choking haze. The sheep carcasses jerk and dance on their ropes as if struck by invisible fists. One torso erupts, ribs splintering into pale shards that fly like daggers. A stray ball smashes into a support post, tearing out a chunk of wood that explodes into a shower of sharp splinters. A warm spray of blood, saltwater, and pulverized offal drenches the front rank. The silence that follows is heavy and stunned, broken only by the drip of gore. The air reeks of spent black powder and fresh slaughter.

"Look," Naci says, and pulls one carcass toward them. A boy turns away to spit. A girl, focusing not to vomit.

"Weapons," Naci says, and the visor-shadows make her voice furnace-flat, "are an ethic. This is a promise you make: to tear what opposes you beyond the stitching of mothers. I do not hand this power to cowards. I hand it to the Banners."

She turns, dragon face sweeping the ranks. "You eighty are the first. The Banners of the steppe. Not colors on a pole. People who can read wind and fear. You will practice until your fingers know the pan by moonlight. You will learn to move without thinking and to think when everyone else moves. You will not wait for permission if the shot is right. You will answer to me."

A murmur shifts under the words. A chieftain in the third row stiffens like a thorn working its way to the skin. Naci finds him with the dragon's empty eyes.

"Autonomy," she says. "Not an indulgence. A duty. Banners will govern where they winter. Gather tax like rain—fair, then gone. Try disputes. Hang thieves. Feed widows. Drill every morning until the soup boils without you. You are my handwriting on the land."

The old men hear what she is taking. The young hear what she is giving.

Lanau wipes gore from a boy's cheek with a square of linen that used to be pretty. Her mouth is a line. Her eyes approve and mourn. "We will have to invent new rites," she says to no one. "The old prayers know nothing of burning air."

Horohan stands beside Naci, scanning the ranks with a gaze that weighs men and measures weather. "Seop," she says, low, riding the name the way one rides a mean horse. "You intend it early. Before their harbor rats breed ships."

"Before Linh sings them a hymn," Naci says. "Emperor Yanming has a southern fever. He will be grateful if his north cools itself. We bring him a bay full of broken oars and a ledger balanced in his favor. He returns the favor with silence when I change the way Tepr listens to itself."

Someone cheers because he is young. Someone else because she is old enough to enjoy courage when it is loud.

Naci lowers the dragon to look at the only person whose eyes she ever needs to meet. The iron muzzle almost touches Horohan's cheek. The morning is full of smoke and old bread and new decisions.

"I have," she says, and the words are the quietest thing she has said all day, "an offer for Puripal he can't refuse."