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Sui grunted as she straightened her back, digging her shoulder up into Taxue’s belly. The Zheng’s hind legs dragged awkwardly on the sand, trembling as the paws knuckled, the sudden weight on Sui pushing the knee she’d braced into the dirt. Sui braced her palms up under the Zheng’s hind legs, feeling for the distended sac of her bladder, swollen larger than Sui’s head overnight. Muscles bulged over arms used to drawing heavy longbows as she compressed it. For a heartbeat, nothing happened. The Zheng raised its five tufted tails, a thin stream of pungent urine spraying out onto absorbent sand.

No fishy smell today. Sui breathed out in relief as she maintained the pressure, waiting until the bladder lost its tightness and shrank into the size of a fist. Sui grabbed the damp cloth from a hook by the Zheng’s stall and wiped Taxue down. As Sui carefully shifted Taxue away from the wet patch and onto its hind legs, the Zheng twisted stiffly, her tufted ears twitching over its white leonine face as she gently licked Sui’s face with a raspy tongue.

“Almost done,” Sui told her. After an induced urination, Taxue sometimes defecated as well. Today’s was wet, but passed without strain. Taxue curled up over her bedding, dropping back into sleep by the time Sui returned from cleaning up. As she bent to check the Zheng’s claws, a shuffled step behind Sui told her that the day’s unwelcome company had arrived.

“Who knew that the Sword Saint was so sentimental?” The intruder folded her arms over the long bar that fenced in Taxue’s stall.

“Don’t raise your voice, cousin,” Sui said as she squeezed a callused paw pad, wiping down the claw that emerged. “Taxue might be old and ill, but she is a Zheng, not a house cat.”

“She might as well be a house cat,” Yun said with a sneer. “Doing nothing all day but sleep. I told you from the day you came back from the border that you should have taken mercy on it and—” Yun yelped as a stalk of hay, unnaturally stiffened into a needle by qi, shot past and embedded itself in the pillar behind her. Sui lowered her hand as Taxue huffed, stirring uneasily at her master’s flash of temper.

“You forget who I am,” Sui said, gently inspecting the next claw.

Strangely, Yun didn’t flee. Annoying as the girl was, she’d been the only one who hadn’t started bowing and scraping when Sui had returned to the family home hauling Taxue in a cart behind her. Military merits, built with blood, had long erased Sui’s disgraceful birth as an illegitimate daughter of a maid and had elevated her mother past being a lowly concubine into one of her father’s main wives. Not that Sui had said much to either her father or her mother, relatives for whom she never had any interest or hope.

“Hard to forget, when your name is all the rest of us tend to hear,” Yun said. The bitterness in her voice made Sui glance over. “The Patriarch marries all of us off based on the weight of your name. If you retire early and become forgotten, that will change.”

“So?” Sui looked back at Taxue’s claws. “I never earned my merits for my family’s sake.”

“That’s why you shouldn’t be here.” Yun lowered her voice. “Not with a weakness this obvious.”

Sui set down Taxue’s paw and turned. Yun glared up at her, defiant. Sui reassessed her cousin’s age—she’d thought her at least of marriageable age when they’d first met, with all the women of the house dressed up and coiffed in contrast to Sui, clad in her armour and the dust of the road. Shed of fine clothes and makeup, Yun looked like a child.

“Would you abandon a friend who saved your life when the friend grows old and ill?” Sui asked. She tickled through Taxue’s mane, brushing it back to its usual snowy sheen.

“I’d at least try not to nurse the friend in a den of snakes,” Yun shot back.

Sui chuckled, studying Yun more closely. The skinny girl with a long face had familiar eyes. “You’re . . . Third Uncle’s daughter?”

“Granddaughter. My father started young.”

“Third Uncle did as well. You might do well to rein in your tongue, if you live on his graces.” Sui’s uncles were as mercenary as her father, their habits worse now that the family’s mercantile fortunes had risen with her stock.

“Didn’t you have anywhere else you could go?”

“I did,” Sui said, amused. “This was the least worst option.”

“. . . You have no friends? That’s sad.”

“That mouth of yours must get you in trouble all the time. Yet something is interesting about your fearlessness. I wouldn’t expect it of a family like this.”

“Coming from you?”

“I learned mine.” It had been desperation that had driven Sui from her home at the beginning, not courage. “Yes, I could have called in favours from the E-Mei sect, Shaolin Temple, or any of the Great Clans who owe me. But the lairs of the powerful are all complicated in one way or another.”

“You’re testing us,” Yun guessed.

“You give this place too much credit.”

Yun set her jaw. “How’s this, then. The Patriarch wants to marry you off. I overheard it myself.”

Sui’s lip curled. “I’m curious how he thinks he might succeed.”

“The third prince wants you as his princess. He’ll offer you one of the Imperial Hospital’s Divine Panaceas as the bride price.”

“A princess would be confined to a backyard, never to take a step out of it in her lifetime. That would destroy any little worth I might have to the Imperial family. It can’t be that simple,” Sui said.

“You seem more puzzled than disgusted.” Yun paused. “You’re not interested at all?”

Sui tipped up Yun’s chin with a sword-roughened finger. “You’re being oddly helpful. Little niece, what do you want from me?”

“A chance to leave this place and spit on it as I do.”

Sui shook her head. She returned to Taxue’s side, stroking her mane. “You have no talent for martial arts. Marrying well is your best option in this ugly world.”

“What if I don’t want to?” Yun clenched her hands over the pole.

“Life has a way of turning you powerless.”

• • • •

The mother Zheng growled. Holding up her hands in surrender, Sui backed off with a smile. Alin giggled as they made it out of the stables, flushed with excitement. “They’re so cute! Already as big as a human infant.”

“It’d take a year for them to be large enough to ride,” Sui said. Her body ached as she sat against the maple tree in the large paddock. Autumn touched the border in red and gold, its beauty startling against forbidding peaks and gashed ravines. The horizon boiled constantly with purplish miasma, visible as a thin streak from where Sui sat, behind high parapets. The demonic realm lay beyond, kept in check.

Alin sat beside her. “I think you fractured my ribs.”

“Didn’t break them.”

“Did you have to hit me so hard? The final match was symbolic. Win or lose, we’d both have qualified to become Zheng riders.”

“As if you didn’t hit me back just as hard,” Sui said. She flashed a grin. “Besides, if we didn’t fight at our best, all the boys we displaced to get here might get messy thoughts.”

“Hah! Like you ever cared about that.” Alin glanced at the stables. “Strange. I thought I’d gotten away from caring for kids when I ran away from home and ended up here.”

“Zheng aren’t kids.”

“They’re not pets, either. You’ve seen how effective they are in the war.”

“You’d be signing a master-servant contract on your Zheng. It can’t hurt you,” Sui said.

“That’s not what I meant. For the next twenty years or more, we’ll be feeding them, grooming them, and mucking them out. If they were horses, that’d be the job of stable hands.”

“It’s the least we can do.” Wild Zheng were mysterious creatures, rumoured to live for centuries. Whether it was the master-servant contract, domesticity, or worse, living as a beast of war had turned the mythical beasts mortal.

“You’re oddly sentimental today. Don’t tell me—you’re a secret plush lover?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. We’re in a war, and the Zheng are tools.” Sui tapped her fingertips on the hilt of her sword.

• • • •

Resting Taxue’s muzzle over her lap, Sui pushed up her lip, chuckling as the Zheng huffed playfully. The carnal breath that washed over Sui had worsened over time as age began rotting the Zheng’s teeth. Sui tugged up Taxue’s lip to show graying gums and yellowed teeth. She dipped the brush into the basin of water and brushed, ignoring Taxue as the Zheng grumbled.

“Good girl.” Sui kissed the top of Taxue’s wet nose once she was done. As she cleared the tools away, Yun staggered in with the pail of meaty paste, warmed up enough over the coals to stimulate Taxue’s failing appetite. Pouring it into a large basin, Yun scraped out the last of it with a ladle and backed off as Taxue bent over her food.

“She’s hungry today,” Yun said.

“It comes and goes.” On bad days, Taxue wouldn’t even react when Sui brushed her teeth, giving her only a tired stare when made to pee.

“Would the panacea help?”

“No curing age.” Sui stroked Taxue’s mane lovingly as the Zheng ate.

“Oh. So it wasn’t you?”

“Wasn’t me what?”

“Bandits apparently attacked the Third Prince’s convoy. Seems he’s injured, and the panacea’s missing.”

Sui blinked slowly. “Interesting.”

“About how convenient it is?”

“No.” Sui flicked Yun’s forehead. “That you thought I’d be so crass. If I did want to rob a prince, no one would suspect that it was me. For a start, there’d be no more third prince in this world.”

Yun looked around anxiously. “Shh!”

“While now he’s likely to level demands on me and the family based on what he’s ‘suffered.’ I’m unsure what Father’s plan is. Perhaps all the soft rice he’s eaten from leeching off his daughter’s name has turned him soft in the head in turn.”

Yun frowned. “The panacea can’t cure ageing. The prince and the Patriarch presumably know that, yet they arranged this anyway, even though they’d offend you. So, why?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Sui tapped her fingertips on the hilt of her blade, a habit she’d taken to since she’d first learned to wield a sword. She’d broken two blades since, and worn down her third. “Schemes matter little in the face of absolute strength.”

• • • •

Heiyun lifted his bloodied muzzle and kept a watchful gaze as Sui approached on Taxue’s back. Alin didn’t straighten up, a hand pressed against a tree as she vomited into the bush. The air stank of charnel. Beside them, the creek boiled black with the blood of people and demons alike.

Sui didn’t speak. Taxue’s paws squelched on the grass, her fur matted down with so much gore that the only white patches that remained were on the back of her neck. Blood didn’t show up on Heiyun’s black fur, but it did make his mane stick out at stiff angles. Assessing that Sui wasn’t a threat, Heiyun made a low throaty sound and nudged his master gently.

Alin flinched away. “Shit! Don’t touch me!” She skidded back a step and overbalanced onto her ass, armour clanking. Heiyun flattened his ears and lowered his head apologetically.

“He’s worried about you,” Sui said.

“He would be.” Alin rubbed her palms over her eyes. “His master’s a goddamned mess.”

“It’s war. It’s what we trained for.”

Alin shuddered. She got unsteadily to her feet, her face wet. She rubbed her eyes again, smearing dirt liberally over her forehead. “Half of our detachment is wounded or dead.”

“I know.” Sui had checked the triage area first before leaving the camp to look for Alin.

“You know . . . you know!” Alin let out a hysterical laugh. “Why are you so calm!”

“Because nothing will change.” Sui pointed at the bloody fields that lay beyond the river. “The war’s lasted centuries. It won’t end today, tomorrow, a hundred years in the future, when we’re both bones in the ground. At this point, it’ll never end. It’s meaningless to get angry.”

“You’re heartless,” Alin snapped. She strode over to Heiyun and pulled herself into the saddle, urging her Zheng to leap the river.

Taxue huffed, shaking out her mane as Sui absently patted her head. “Head upstream. You need a bath,” Sui said.

• • • •

Teeth scraped against Sui’s bracers as she shoved the last pill down Taxue’s throat. The daily ritual complete, Taxue shuffled toward the patch of sun in the paddock. A hind leg gave out, and the Zheng dragged herself determinedly on her belly over the sand until she reached the patch. She lay down gingerly, folding her head over her paws. Sui pushed Taxue’s stiff hind legs under her and massaged her hindquarters. Her fingers sank through fur to the wasted flesh beneath, running over jutting bone.

Yun peeked through the door. “The patriarch wants to see you,” she said.

“Let him wait.” Sui dug the heels of her palms into stiff muscles, rolling them.

“The third prince is here. They’re discussing your future, in case you didn’t care.”

“They let you overhear the news, so that you might rush here to anger me with it,” Sui said, stroking further up Taxue’s back as the Zheng rumbled contentedly. “Why give them that kind of pleasure? If Father dares to marry me off against my will, I dare to leave this family against his. The border will take me back—with or without a family name. We’ll see who suffers more in the end.”

Yun exhaled. She squatted on the threshold of the courtyard with a groan. “I envy you so much.”

“You shouldn’t. The life we’ve lived for the past few years cannot be more different.” As Yun groaned again, Sui said, “Don’t worry. I’m not the only person who wouldn’t want this marriage to go through. The other princes wouldn’t want the third princess to be someone too troublesome.”

Sui massaged Taxue to sleep by the time the third servant came to urge her attendance. She brushed herself off and strolled to the central courtyard with Yun on her heels. Seated in the audience hall under rosewood and gilded pillars were her father and a stranger in a purple robe, adorned with a four-clawed dragon. Sui eyed her father critically. Age had eroded the rest of his resemblance to her, turning his face craggy, his eyes cruel. She smiled. This would make things easier.

“Kneel, you unfilial girl,” the Patriarch commanded. “You’re in the presence of the third prince!”

“I don’t see a prince here, only a troublemaker,” Sui said.

The third prince reddened. Behind him, his guards set their hands on their swords. “You dare.”

“Surely only a troublemaker would think it prudent to annoy the Sword Saint with something as crude as a forced marriage,” Sui said, walking over to the closest pillar. “Surely only the ignorant would think something like filial piety and social graces matter to someone who spent the last twenty years of their lives knee-deep in demons.” She braced her fist and punched the pillar, piercing through it in a strike that shook the dust from the beams above her. Looking the prince in the eye, Sui said, “Are you a prince or a troublemaker?”

A guard stepped forward. Sui raised a palm. “Draw that sword and you all die.”

“Sui!” her father gasped. “This would put our whole clan to death!”

“Perhaps you should have considered that when you dared to plot against me,” Sui said, withdrawing her fist from the pillar. “It’s never good to be greedy.”

Her father flushed. “You’re past your prime. Soon you’ll grow too old for the battlefield, and as a woman you’d be unlikely to be promoted. The imperial court has never bestowed a rank on you, even with your achievements. I’m trying to prepare for your retirement.”

“Don’t pretend that you’re doing this for my sake.” Sui looked back at the prince. “Well? Will we all die here today, or will a troublemaker leave?”

The prince fled. Her father cursed at her but left under her steady stare. As the hall grew deserted, Yun said, “Again I’m envious.”

“Don’t be.” Sui handed her a folded letter from her sleeves. “If you survive the coming weeks, go to the border. With this, you’d be welcome there.”

Yun all but snatched the letter away, then smiled awkwardly to cover her haste. “I thought you said I had no talent for martial arts.”

“That’s not all you need to survive on the border. As you no doubt already understand, clever child.”

Yun started to speak, but chose silence. She bowed slightly as a warrior would to a compatriot, hands clasped before her. Sui offered no advice, and Yun asked for none. She would be fine.

• • • •

Alin woke, coughing in wrenching gasps as she choked on the blood in her lungs. Sui grasped her hand tightly, kneeling by the cot. “Don’t speak. Save your strength.”

“Liar,” Alin whispered, managing a bloody grin. “I’m on my last legs and we both know it.”

“The E-Mei sect has a Divine Panacea. I’ll ride out and get it—wait for me.”

“And you’d what, rob a sect for it? Those things might not work anyway. If they did, surely all these powerful sects would live forever. Besides, life and death are predestined,” Alin said. She paused. “Or that’s what I’ve heard from the monks. Personally . . . I think it’s all lies.”

“Maybe.”

“You should leave. Apply to retire. You’re not getting any younger. Besides, what even is the point?” Alin made a bitter, raspy laugh. “Do you know why Zheng riders don’t get promoted?”

“We don’t usually live all that long.” Zheng riders were the vanguard of the cavalry.

“Wrong. It’s because the difference between a spiritual beast and a demonic one is arbitrary. What we think of as ‘spiritual beasts’ are merely mythical creatures limited by a master-servant contract. ‘Demonic’ is their true nature. They heal faster, live longer. Hungry all the time, which is why they keep attacking the border.”

Sui stared at her friend’s face. “What happened to Heiyun?”

“He was dying,” Alin whispered, closing her eyes, “so I released him from his contract.”

“Alin! Won’t that kill him outright from the backlash of the spell?”

“Not if you do it properly.” Alin beckoned Sui closer, whispering into her ear. Sui jerked back. She took a closer look at Alin’s wounds, which ran as great gashes over her chest and belly. Wounds that looked inflicted by a giant cat.

“Why?” Sui asked.

“I’m tired.” Alin turned her face away. “Someday, you’ll understand.”

• • • •

Taxue slept longer, ate less. Sui ran a palm over the knobbly arch of Taxue’s spine, now pressing into her fur. She brushed Taxue down, teasing out tangled mats. A week ago, Sui moved them to a remote property at the foot of a mountain, a tea farm that the family owned. She’d given the staff the day off.

“I don’t know what you’re planning on doing,” Yun said, “but I hope it’s not what I’m thinking.”

“I’m not that far gone,” Sui said. The comb caught on a thick mat, and she bent for scissors.

“As long as I won’t be leaving for the border with news of your death or something.” Yun peered closer.

“I don’t die that easily.” Sui flicked Yun’s forehead. “Go home. The city’s curfew will start in an hour.”

Yun hesitated. The child had decent instincts—perhaps that was how she’d survived this long with her mouth. “Will I see you again?”

Sui flicked her a second time. “Don’t curse me, you little brat.” Yun stuck her tongue out at Sui and left, with a couple of reluctant gazes back over her shoulder.

Alone, Taxue wearily raised her head, looking at Sui with her cloudy eyes. She huffed as Sui pried open her jaws, pressing her arm lightly over Taxue’s tongue. Taxue grumbled, trying to twist free, but Sui held her firm until she stopped struggling. “Don’t protest,” Sui told her. “This is what we both deserve.”

Taxue blinked slowly as her jaws tightened. Sui kissed the top of Taxue’s wet nose and tickled under her chin with her spare hand, waiting for the bite.