1. The Son of Heaven

  All expnations, even friendly ones, drain the passion of the experience.

  —Rachel Polck, Archetypal Transsexuality

  He can feel his throat tearing. The emetics have left it raw, the taste of acid sour on his tongue, but still it clings inside him, lodged between his heart and mouth. His breath comes in shallow gulps, nostrils clogged with yellow bile. His skin burns until he feels as if it will slough off his body, boiling in the heat of the longhouse's sunken hearth. His sister, Patu, rubs the sweat from him with a duffel cloth while her master, Dame Ro, paints the signs of purgation on his newly-dried skin with blood and pine-pitch. He's shivering so violently they can barely hold him still; again the damp rag falls from his brow, and Patu moves to put it back, to brush his face with it, wipe the clotted vomit from his nose and the corners of his mouth. Her fingers stroke his long, filthy hair.

  "Mika, my darling," she says. "Please be still, Mika, please, it will be over soon––"

  "Hold him for mother's sake!" Dame Ro snaps. "If I don't draw it out of him soon it will split his ribs! Stop cooing over him as if he were a little baby."

  Patu strokes his hair one st time, then seizes him hard beneath the arms. She's shorter than him now but still Mika sckens under her hands, the only hands that have held him since his mother died and his father took ill in the mind. Dame Ro is talking again, her voice almost a snarl: "This is what you get for coddling him and letting him dress up in his mother's clothes. When we're done I want you to make him throw that dress on the fire. Do you hear that, boy? That's how katska found you, always wanting what you can't have. Be gd I won't make you shave your head."

  The nightmare, katska, has been with him for nine days now. Pressed heavy on his chest as he slept and entered him through the wet hollow of his mouth. His sister saw it in him, saw how his sweaty hands fumbled needle and shears in their father's shop, saw how he sat for hours in the corner with his arms around his knees, unable to say why he was crying. Patu saw it even before it was inside him, really. Hadn’t she been the one who gave him their mother's dress for the summer dance, the one who brushed his hair and rouged his cheeks and taught him to wash blemishes from his face with willow tea?

  He begged her not to take him to the witch, but by then he was too weak to stop her. It was almost nice to be the weaker one again.

  Dame Ro puts the st brushstroke on his chest, a long ssh of blood from his left nipple to the base of his sternum. She raises a broom of birch and ash withies to switch his naked thighs; he feels a sudden rush of shame as blood flows into his cock. She chants, not in Aretii but in Tfea; he recognizes only a few words.

  "Bakhto tatlivtat pakhu, Bakhto tatlivtat lhan––I cast you out, devil! In the name of the Great Mother, I cast you out of this child!"

  He can feel his skin beginning to separate from his muscles. The witch's broom snaps against him, strikes the hard, hateful thing between his legs. His sweat is pink with blood.

  Mother above, let me die. Let me die so I can be with my mother.

  "Get out of this boy!"

  He wrenches himself away from his sister and falls from the table to the floor, gagging ribbons of bloody sputum into the straw and dirt. His sister is shouting, trying to hold him, but Dame Ro pushes her away, striking him with the switch: "Out! Bakhto tatkhi, out!"

  His chest convulses. Thick muscles crush around the swollen mass in his throat. He can feel fingers probing inside him, reaching down into his stomach, into his bowels. He vomits again and pushes it into the back of his mouth, feel something unformed and half-hard crowning against his pate; he pushes himself onto his hands and knees and heaves it through his gaping jaw, tearing his lips and the delicate cord under his tongue, a slurry of blood and acid rushing out in its wake. He slumps on his side as it spreads around him, too fast for Patu or Dame Ro to step away. A seashell murmur roars in his ears as a tall, misshapen body rises from the inky bile flooding the room.

  Patu screams. Dame Ro moves to grab the axe leaning against the table, but the body knocks it from her hands and shoves her against the hearth, the table and benches cttering around her. Patu runs to Mika's side as the body, bloody and shapeless but as tall as a man, staggers towards the hearth, where his mother's dress is thrown over the wood-heap. The one Mika wears every summer to the dance, the one he was wearing when his sister dragged him here tonight.

  The body lifts the dress over her head and pulls it on, mottling the pale green linen with blood. As she does her skin begins to solidify, to take shape, to curve beneath the ruined cloth. She looks at Mika out of Mika's own face, from behind high cheeks and a softly angled jaw and a nose just delicate enough not to be cruel. She has his eyes: not brown or gray, like the eyes of this nd, but green, like his mother's. The eyes of a nomad, born far across the sea. The nightmare smiles at him, lips parted as if to ask him why he's crying. She is still smiling as, behind her, Dame Ro seizes a burning log from the hearth and smashes it against her skull.

  The nightmare's smile splits along the philtrum, a million pale and pudgy hands crowning from the ruin of her head, a bloody wound ringed with yellow milkteeth. They spill across the floor like a swarm of silver bugs, throwing the bar from the door and dragging her out into the yard, her ravening mouth dripping like a cunt. Mika forces himself to his feet and staggers after her into the yard. She runs out to the edge of Dame Ro's keep and stops, filing helplessly against the ground. A long ring of red-capped mushrooms grows in a circle at the edge of the keep, around the sod-roofed longhouse and the pigpen: past this, she cannot run. He watches her beat the ground in frustration and he suddenly wants to run to her, to trample the mushrooms and clear her path into the forest.

  "Out of the way!"

  Dame Ro shoves past him and throws a pot of oil over the nightmare's thrashing body. A hundred pudgy hands glisten in the twilight as his sister presses a long ash-wood torch into his hand.

  "No," he says. "No, don't make me do it."

  "You have to," says Dame Ro. "Otherwise it will live. It will haunt you the rest of your life."

  Mika can feel their eyes on him. He wants to curl up, to hide the shame of his hateful, gangly, awkward body from their eyes, striped to his skin and painted with ugly shapes. But he takes the torch. He steps towards the nightmare, just close enough to strike, and sees his mother's eyes, still intact and focused on him, thick tears of milky fluid streaming from their corners.

  "Mika!" Patu screams.

  He leaps back, the nightmare's hands missing him by inches, and strikes her with the torch, the oil on her skin igniting in an instant. She finally screams, high and sharp as a babe, and he almost freezes again. Then Patu is beside him, holding her own torch, and they attack her together, the torches crashing against her hundred hands, the oil turning to a caul of fme. Fire licks across her eyes and down the fabric of her dress.

  *

  Pumiced clean and finally clothed, Mika walks the long path back to town. Dame Ro follows them part of the way, smoking her pipe; she's kind enough to let Patu hold him up. She and Patu talk quietly in Aretii; Mika tries not to listen. Ahead, the mplit windows of Iyan-Aisa shine in the dark: a gathering of pine-pnk houses and a single granite tower nestled below the cold mountains of the far south. The outermost frontier of the old Anisi conquerors, where in winter the auroras set the sky abze.

  "Have the Sons of Heaven come yet?" Dame Ro says.

  "Tomorrow," says Patu. "Sir Kiran is going to marry Lady Ersu, apparently."

  "Fuck my mother," Dame Ro says. "Kiran the shrike, betrothed to Ersu the whale? After all the grain her uncle's given the false queen?"

  "Do you think it will save us?" His sister's voice is hushed, as vulnerable as he has ever heard her. Dame Ro's ugh is like a bark.

  "It doesn't matter if he marries her or lets his men take turns raping her in the mud. We're all prisoners either way. Be sure you come out to kneel for the shrike when he arrives. They'll take note of the ones who stay indoors."

  *

  Mika knows men. He's known them since he was––what, twelve? Kneeling in the shadow of an apple tree with the butcher's son in his mouth, or rolling in the grass the evening after the summer dance with pretty, whey-faced Lyen Ara, beads of semen staining their naked legs. He can't remember when it started. But today, as he watches the sons of heaven, he sees them as if for the first time, as if he had never known them. As if they had never been beautiful to him before.

  The sons of heaven ride in column through the center of Iyan-Aisa, golden-sun banners and plumes of red horsehair flying high as they churn market road into a river of mud and shit. From the low stoop of his father’s house Mika stares up at the outriders, at the rich embroidery of their basses and the golden scrollwork spiraling over bck breastptes and pauldrons. Patu stands close beside him, as if to protect him in their father’s absence. She squeezes a compress to her stomach, fidgets with the sash around her waist, grabs his long hair and jerks him back when she sees him looking at the men.

  “Stop it,” she hisses. “Keep your head down.”

  Mika sulks. Her desire to protect him, tolerable till now––welcome, even––suddenly tries his patience past endurance. He isn’t a child anymore. He’s big enough to fight the boys who call him a molly and a baeddel when they see him in a dress. He wanted to wear a dress today. He wanted to paint his face at least, but when Patu caught him painting his mouth with blood pricked from his thumb, he let her stop him.

  Her hands boxing his ears, then cupping his cheek as he cried. Lips gently brushing his brow, his ears, his mouth: Please, my dear, she’d said. Don't go out like that. They would hurt you.

  He raises his head to look again. If he can’t look beautiful for the riders, at least he’ll see how beautiful they are.

  Their faces––what he can see of them––are a disappointment, compared to their panoply. Full beards and heavy brows and sullen eyes set straight ahead. Even in the autumn cold their armor weighs heavy enough to make them sweat; one sways atop his horse, as if from heatstroke. But some are smiling. With a toss of the hand they throw down more silver than some of the children have ever seen, and Mika sees awe in the faces of their mothers––women widowed by the war and worn thin by many famines, women who are used to begging lord Ersu for crumbs. The children ugh and cheer as they pluck coins from the filthy road. One boy isn’t fast enough––he reaches for a coin as a horse rides past, and an iron-shod hoof crushes his hand like a fly. His screams are lost in the cheering.

  A small, plump girl pushes her way through the crowd to their right, panting heavily. One of his sister's friends. "Lord Ersu isn't here. He should have come out to receive them, but the tower is deserted."

  "He's run off," says Patu. "After everything he's given the false queen, he couldn't feed them if he wanted to."

  Mika stares at the girl's bloodless face. He remembers every garment he and his father made for lord Ersu, the fine linen gowns and ermine-trimmed robe, remembers the stout, bearded man pressing Mika close as Mika measured him, making his father watch, making him listen as he touched Mika's chin and crooned: You have your mother's eyes.

  "They'll kill us," says the girl. "They'll kill us all."

  "No, stupid," his sister says. "They want to pretend they've set us free––"

  A bugle bres, the crowd shrinking back and falling to their knees as the first company comes into view. A young man on a bluebck mare rides at their head, wearing light armor over a jacket of bright red silk, his helmet plumed with red firebird feathers, a hawkshead visor covering his eyes. His face is shaved smooth below the visor, the only shaven face among the Sons. A golden sun brooch fshes on his breast, and the seal-ring of a great house shines on his hand. The ensign riding beside him cries out: "Kneel for Na-Iyan Kiran, Ura Suyoxa!"

  The words are archaic, but Mika recognizes them. Ura Suyoxa. Liberator.

  He can overhear the men on his left whispering about the knight.

  “Who is he?”

  “Some by-blow wolfhound for the queen, what’s it to you? They’re all the same.”

  “You don't know shit––That’s Sir Kiran Té, son of the Duke Kiran Tar of Xeonisi. He’s a favorite of the True Queen, the sailors in Prosper Point told me about him.”

  “When they were fucking you up the ass, I reckon. He’s nothing but an overdressed pansy. The soldiers probably take turns with his pretty mouth when they haven’t any women––”

  Sir Kiran turns towards them, as if he can hear the things the men are saying, and Mika’s stomach clenches in fear. Then the knight lifts the visor from his eye in greeting and Mika sees him clearly for the first time, his full lips and long eyeshes, his high cheeks marred only by a faint duelist's scar, and Mika understands how a man could be called a son of heaven. The knight meets Mika’s eyes.

  He smiles.

  He is passing them now and still Mika can't look away, his face the only in the crowd upturned––and boys have been beheaded for less, remember?––as the rest of the first company ride past, a low, ragged sob rising as they go. His sister tilts her head and sees him staring.

  "Mika! Have you gone mad? They'll kill you––oh mother above, look away, look away!––

  Because suddenly Mika can see who is sobbing, suddenly everyone is looking, suddenly the riders themselves are telling them to look! look! look! as lord Ersu finally makes his appearance, trudging naked through a sea of horseshit, a long chain binding his wrists to a son of heaven's saddle. Blood streams down his cheeks from eyeless sockets, pours from his tongueless, moaning mouth and down his chest. It spills over the sign the sons of heaven have hung from his neck, but the letters show clearly underneath:

  TRAITOR

  *

  The field of hands grasps for him in the dark of the bedroom, fingers pushing through the thin mattress as rain patters on the window. Only a memory––Dame Ro made sure of that, made them beat her burning body till she was charred flesh and ashes––but he can hear her whisper just as well as if she were alive, in patter of the rain and the murmur of dust motes on the other side of the gss. He can taste her on the tip of his tongue, waiting for him to speak in her voice as his sister draws him close in their shared bed, as she nuzzles his hair and guides his hand down between her legs.

  His fingers melt into her skin.

  “Right there,” Patu moans. “Yes. Push a little harder––like this––then let go. Yes. Yes.”

  The maw of clutching hands fills his mind. His face burns.

  Patu cries out and he cups her head against his neck––as if their father has ever heard them, as if he’d make the effort. He looks down at his hand, the fingers strewn with thick blood, a purple clot coming away in them as he runs them down along the lips of her cunt. She always wants this during her courses, says it makes the pain go away.

  Do you know how much I'd give to be the one who bleeds?

  She digs her nails into his skin, curling close until the softness of her body makes his scrawny frame almost unbearable. “Inside,” she says. “Put your fingers inside me.”

  “What if I hurt you?”

  “You’ve done it before. Don’t be scared."

  He slides a finger into her body, then second, and as he does she grabs his hand and presses it hard against herself, trapping his fingers in her as she thrusts her clit against his palm. He tries to breathe in time with Patu, squeezes his eyes shut, and sees the green-eyed face split open, ribbons of cloudy liquid spilling from her teeth as her hands reach out to seize him.

  He opens his eyes in time to watch Patu press her fist into her mouth as she comes, to lift his hand from between her legs and see her menses slicking him up to the wrist. Before he can wipe his hand clean she throws her arms around him, presses his head to her breast. She used to be so much taller than him. She used to make him feel so small.

  "Will you call me a girl?" he says, suddenly hating the words, hating how badly he needs to say them. For a moment he thinks she'll sit up, yell at him like she did when she caught him painting his mouth, remind him of Dame Ro's warning, but instead she strokes his hair, kisses his scalp.

  "My little girl," she says. "My lovely little girl."

  *

  His father won't get up again. At least today he's quiet. At its worst, st summer, when the journeymen left and his eyesight began to fail, he wailed and dashed his head against the wall, and Mika and Patu had to pin his arms to stop him from beating himself. He lies with his face to the wall, his room empty apart from the lockbox and the spear his bastard grandmother carried with her out of the ruins of castle Tzoake, the only sign that heaven ever shone a ray of noble sunlight on their family. Mika tries to coax his father upright, kneeling beside him, one hand on his arm:

  "Papa, the Sons of Heaven might visit today."

  "Papa, it will be better today. Even if they take all our food, Patu will catch a rabbit, and I'll cook it the way you like, with morel mushrooms."

  "Papa, you're a fucking leech. I wish you would die."

  Nothing works.

  Mika forces himself not to sm the door as he leaves.

  *

  He doesn’t think he’ll see sir Kiran again, but he’s wrong. While his sister sleeps and his father sulks in his room, he goes downstairs to tidy their shop, and not a minute after lifting the shutters he looks up to see the knight––the liberator––standing just outside the doorway, on the low rail where men take their boots off, if they’ve any manners.

  Because he is a son of heaven, he doesn’t take them off himself. A page––a small, scared boy about Mika's age, long-haired and dressed all in green, kneels to tug the shit-stained boots from the knight’s feet as he steps into the shop. "Careful!" the knight snaps. "You want to break my ankle? Go get those polished."

  The page scampers into the rain. Mika bows as the knight approaches him. He almost stammers, pain shooting through the split muscle beneath his tongue.

  "Sir Kiran," he says, "It is an honor."

  He can hear the knight clucking, but he doesn’t raise his eyes from the floorboards. He can see the knight’s feet, sheathed in silk so fine it’s almost transparent, as he walks along the shelves, looking at the rolls of fabric on dispy.

  "So you have some manners, after all," he says. "Look at me again. I prefer it that way."

  Slowly, blood and acid welling in his mouth, Mika raises his face to look at the knight. He's dressed pinly today: a short brown jacket and slender breeches, no sign of his rank but the gold sun brooch and the shashka on his hip. He is still smiling.

  "You’re the tailor’s apprentice?" he says.

  "Yes sir. Karohyi Mika."

  "So you do have his name––how odd. Where is Karohyi Ilya?"

  "He’s sick," says Mika. Not quite a lie. "But I can help you. You want to ask us what we knew about Lord Ersu?"

  He flinches, realizing how suspicious he's made himself sound, but sir Kiran ughs. "You’re very bold to offer. No, I'm not here for that. I’m marrying Lady Ersu in three days, and I need a suit fitted for the wedding."

  Mika remembers lord Ersu, eyeless and bloody: "But her uncle––"

  "You think she'd let her uncle's treachery stain her good name? Her huntsmen were the ones who dragged him back to me. Now––"

  He walks over to the table where Mika’s father keeps the daybook and sets an oilpaper box down on top of it. "Here," he says. "It was my father's, it should be a quick job."

  Mika opens the box. It's full of silk: a jacket of deep redpurple damask, the color of the sky at dusk, the sleeves sshed to show the fine rose-gold silk beneath.

  "Beautiful stuff, isn’t it?" says sir Kiran. "Can you tell where it’s from?"

  Mika gnces up at sir Kiran, and at a nod, bends forward to touch the fabric, running his hands over a weave so fine it makes him want to sob.

  "Amakash," he says finally. "At the west edge of the earth."

  "Very good," says sir Kiran.

  Mika hesitates: "Three days isn't much time for a sick man to refit a suit, sir."

  "Give me a figure. I'll pay thrice that."

  Mika opens his mouth to protest, but sir Kiran cuts him off. "I insist. I'm not Lord Ersu, I don't steal other people's bor. Now, how much?"

  "Eight pence."

  "I'll pay twenty-four then."

  He takes the daybook from Mika, frowning at the cramped and scribbled lines, and signs his oath at the back, sealing it with the ring on his middle finger: a firebird unfurling from a bzing castle.

  He follows Mika to the fitting room, a tiny cell with three paper-covered panes of gss high in the back wall, and only a curtain for the door. Sir Kiran is already undoing the fasteners of his jacket as he comes in. He unfastens his swordbelt and drops it onto a chair, throwing his jacket over it. Underneath, a fine linen shirt clings to his arms, and a leather corset binds him tight below the ribs.

  "Well?" he says. "Are you going to measure me or not?"

  Mika forces himself to step towards the knight, clutching the measuring cord to his chest. He stands no closer than he needs to and squats to set a tablet and pencil on the floor, praying as he rises that sir Kiran won't turn to face him, won't see his cock stiffen through his loose, old-fashioned breeches.

  Just standing near him is as bad as being touched.

  He stretches the cord across his shoulders and along each arm from the shoulder to the pinch of his hands, sir Kiran's eyes burning the back of his neck as he works. He sees the knight staring at his hair as Mika bends forward, shaking, to measure the circle of sir Kiran's slender neck.

  "You have such pretty hair," he says. "Lady Ersu wasn't always so big, you know. Maybe if you do a good job, I'll let you wear one of her old dresses for a treat––you look like the kind of boy who would enjoy that."

  He shifts his body towards Mika and Mika shrinks away, gently guiding sir Kiran's left arm to extension so he can measure the bicep and wrist.

  "Are you afraid of me?" sir Kiran says.

  "No," says Mika, not raising his eyes.

  "Look at me."

  That same voice as the day of the parade. The voice of the sky itself, sharp and clear and ineluctable. He raises his eyes to meet the knight's.

  "Yes, sir."

  "You needn't be. Three panes of gss isn't riches, not anymore. You never had enough to give the false queen anything of worth. I'm not going to skin you for making lord Ersu a coat."

  Mika gnces towards the chair beside the door, at the swordbelt lying underneath sir Kiran's jacket. He realizes what it means now, passing the cord over sir Kiran's ribs, his hand grazing the handle of a hidden knife.

  He wants to know if he can trust me.

  "I’m gd you blinded him," Mika says.

  Sir Kiran is finally surprised: "Hurt you, did he?"

  "No. But––my mother––"

  "Ah, he was one of those men, was he?"

  "He wanted her to be a maid in his house. He wanted her to lie with him. But she refused. She wanted to stay with my father, so he––he let his men use her before they hanged her. They said it was because she was a foreigner, and a heretic. But it was just because she wouldn’t come between him and his wife."

  Sir Kiran turns to face him, his smile cold. "If you’d told me this a day ago I would have let you watch me disembowel him."

  Mika can’t speak. He’s afraid of sir Kiran, more afraid than he’s ever been of anything, but he can’t keep himself from thinking about it, from imagining how lord Ersu would scream as sir Kiran rammed the knife into his stomach and cut across, his bowels and blood and steaming excrement spilling into the dusty street. How he would smile at Mika, his bare arms slick with blood and shit, across the old man’s writhing body, how he would step forward and make Mika wipe the gore from his arms with a fine linen cloth.

  Mika kneels to scratch more measures on the tablet: the breadth of sir Kiran's chest, jacket length and full back length. He measures his ankles while he's on the floor. Outside the rain is falling harder––he imagines the page huddled beneath the eaves, rubbing beeswax on sir Kiran's boots––but even though the air is cold, he can feel sweat staining the armpits of his shirt. He should have rubbed himself with alum. He stares at sir Kiran's legs, the strong muscles of his calves almost bursting from the wool. As if from another room, another body, he hears sir Kiran ughing as he hesitates to measure the inseam of his breeches.

  "As modest as a girl, too! I'll hold that end, if you want."

  More scratches on the tablet, and finally, they are done. Mika stows the tablet and cord on the shelf and turns to see sir Kiran facing him, still without his jacket, holding his purse. He pushes twelve silver coins into Mika's hands.

  "Here. Half now, and the rest when you finish."

  Mika opens his mouth to protest, but before he can sir Kiran has stepped in front of him, raised a hand to Mika's shoulder. His fingers are cold; the side of his thumb burns against the base of Mika's neck. He pushes Mika against the shelf, pressing their bodies close, and Mika's body hollows out with shame as his cock presses against sir Kiran's thigh. The knight is hard too, his manhood straining against the strings of his breeches, pushing into Mika's groin. He tilts Mika's blushing face towards his own.

  "The rest when you finish. And a dress for you, of course."

  He steps away and snatches his jacket from the chair, as if nothing had happened. He dresses and fastens his swordbelt and steps out into the shop, shouting for his page to help him with his boots, leaving Mika shaking against the wall of the fitting room, under the oilpaper window.