She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

Author:Shelley Parker-Chan [Parker-Chan, Shelley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250621801
Google: GtUPEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1250621801
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 2021-07-19T23:00:00+00:00

* * *

The gers shone silver in the moonlight. The smoke from their apexes wended upwards like celestial rivers. Ouyang made his way through camp to where the Prince of Henan’s mounts were tied on long tethers to an overhead line stretched between two tall anchor poles. A single figure stood midway along the line with the large shadows of horses clustered near him.

Esen didn’t look around as Ouyang came up. He was stroking the nose of his favorite horse, a tall chestnut that looked black in the moonlight. The horse pricked his ears in recognition, not quite in Ouyang’s direction. Not at Ouyang himself, he thought uneasily, but at whatever it was that trailed unseen behind him. His own mare was tethered a few horses down the line. When she noticed Ouyang she dragged her tether along the line, bunching up all the intervening tethers into a tangle the grooms would be cursing him for in the morning, and nudged him with her nose.

Esen’s shoulders were tight with misery. It was easy to tell what kind of encounter he and Lord Wang had just had with Chaghan. As he looked at Esen’s noble profile, for a moment all Ouyang wanted to do was ease his unhappiness. Ouyang felt his own pain at seeing Esen hurting, and tried to imagine it multiplied by a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand. He couldn’t. He thought: I’m still drunk.

He said, “Your father and Lord Wang. How was it?”

Esen sighed. His brashness had gone out of him. It made Ouyang think of that moment when you went to a fire in the morning, and instead of embers found only cold gray stones. It filled him with sorrow. “So you know. Of course you do. Does everyone?”

“Not know, but suspect it. Would they be wrong?”

Esen turned away. Looking at Ouyang’s mare, he said, “What did you name her?”

“I haven’t.” Ouyang rubbed the mare’s nose. “Would it make a difference to how well she serves me?”

Esen laughed sadly. “You don’t find that too cold?”

“Do you name your sword? Men get too attached to their horses. We’re at war; they’re going to die sooner rather than later.”

“I see you think so highly of my gift,” Esen said wryly.

Despite his preoccupations, Ouyang smiled. “She’s been a fine gift. I think more highly of the giver.”

“It’s normal for people to get attached to horses. To other people.” Esen sighed again. “Not you. You always push everyone away. What do you find in it, the loneliness? I couldn’t bear it.” The warm scent of animals rose up around them. After a long moment, Esen said, “Father would have killed him, had I not been there.”

Ouyang knew it was true, just as he knew there was no possible world in which Esen could have let it happen. The thought pierced him with a feeling that mingled sweetness, longing, and pain.

“I didn’t believe it,” Esen said. “Before. I thought—I thought maybe they just had their differences. I thought they could be reconciled.”

That was the pureness that Ouyang wanted to protect forever.

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