Girls of Storm and Shadow (Girls of Paper and Fire, #2)
Natasha Ngan
To James,
Two Jimmys made these books happen. You are one of them. Love, always.
Please be aware that this book contains scenes of violence and self-harm, and references to sexual abuse and trauma recovery.
CASTES
At night, the heavenly rulers dreamed of colors, and into the day those colors bled onto the earth, raining down onto the paper people and blessing them with the gifts of the gods. But in their fear, some of the paper people hid from the rain and so were left untouched. And some basked in the storm, and so were blessed above all others with the strength and wisdom of the heavens.
—The Ikharan Mae Scripts
Paper caste—Fully human, unadorned with any animal-demon features, and incapable of demon abilities such as flight.
Steel caste—Humans endowed with partial animal-demon qualities, both in physicality and abilities.
Moon caste—Fully demon, with whole animal-demon features such as horns, wings, or fur on a humanoid form, and complete demon capabilities.
—the Demon King’s postwar Treaty on the Castes
DEEP IN THE DARK HEART OF the royal palace, the King was hiding.
He’d been there for weeks, eschewing all visitors save for the shamans who worked on his injuries and his two closest confidants to nurse wounds both of the body and of the ego. He would never have admitted this was what he was doing, of course. And if anyone were to dare even suggest he was struggling, he’d swiftly have them executed. None of it was painful. None of it was too much for the great Demon King of Ikhara to handle.
Yet like most lies people tell themselves, it came apart in the shadow and quiet of the night. The King, however much he expressed otherwise, was shaken. His wounds had penetrated deeper than flesh and bone. They had burrowed, insidiously, down each vein and cell and pore, until he could feel the fear echoing alongside every beat of his heart. And this fear took a shape. A name.
Lei-zhi.
He refused to speak it out loud, but his body betrayed him. It whispered her name to him in the rhythm of his pulse. Showed him her face when he was asleep: blood-splattered porcelain skin; furled lips; wild eyes, those bright golden eyes honed with so much rage it pierced right to his soul, right down to places within him he thought he’d long since stamped out of life.
When it got too much—when her name and face would mock him so that he felt he couldn’t breathe and the walls of his rooms were closing in—the King called for a girl.
None of those girls, of course. Those girls he had yet to properly deal with.
Though he would.
But another girl. A pretty Steel caste lynx-form from the Night Houses with softly furred hips perhaps, or a young Paper slave fresh from a raid. He didn’t care. They would bring him a girl, and he would ruin her, just to prove he could. To feel once again that he was all-powerful. One human girl would not get the better of him—even if the constant sting and ache of his scars reminded him how close she had come.
Each day, royal shamans came to heal the injuries to the King’s throat and face. Naja had done well. The shamans had arrived just in time after the girl’s attack to save much of his vocal cords, though it hurt to speak and his voice was hoarser than before: rough, a guttural grunt. His right eye however was beyond repair. The socket had been a mess of severed nerves and pulpy flesh, too damaged even to fit a glass eye. In the weeks since the attack, it had grown a little less horrifying under the magic of the shamans. While it would be many months more until the rest of his face was back to normal, even shamans couldn’t bring back life from the dead, and his missing right eye would forever be a reminder of that night.
The King recalled one of his generals, also a bull-form, who’d once come to him about using the royal shamans to remove an ugly slash across half his face. “Battle scars are a badge of honor, General Yu,” he’d told the soldier. “They are marks of power. To rid oneself of them would be to show weakness. Wear your scars with pride.”
Wear your scars with pride.
What godsdamned crap. He always knew it, of course, but some part of him had believed in the sentiment once.
Not anymore. The King knew now exactly what scars were: reminders of your own failings. And so were those who dealt them.
The girl was still out there. But the King had faith. Naja had not failed him yet. She would find her, just as she promised she would, along with the traitor Ketai Hanno’s daughter, and she would bring both of them back to the palace for him.
Because this was something else the King had learned about scars—they were a brilliant furnace of hate. And if rage like this could give a weak human girl the power to attack him… well. They would see what it could do to a Demon King with a ferocious hunger for revenge.
ONE
FROM THE NIGHT WE ESCAPE THE palace, what was at first a light scattering of flakes grows into a snowstorm.
It takes less than twenty-four hours for the first layer to settle. Just over a day until it builds into a thick blanket of glittering white. One more day and the snow has covered everything, a carpet of muffling powder that stings your eyes in the daylight and casts strange shapes at night from the shadows. After two weeks, it’s as though we’ve lived in this frosted world forever.