Chapter Five Sen
Sen woke before dawn.
There was something sacred about the smell of the damp earth under the moonlight, the first whispers of light threatening
to pierce through the black sky. Samurai could only ever wake to darkness.
She changed her robes, brushed her hair, then sat beneath the quickly paling stars with a roll of paper, a brush, and an ink
palette. Her father considered painting an acceptable form of meditation, so every morning, Sen translated her dreams into
brushstrokes, ripping them from her mind and splattering them across clean paper with harsh lines. Maybe if she drew the images
from her dreams, they would live on paper and no longer torment her by nightfall.
Ever since she’d come to this house, her dreams had changed.
Most nights, she dreamed of a black sea that drowned her even though she had no body, no lungs, no mouth.
It roared more loudly than any beast, its salt scraping across her soul, its darkness stealing all her light.
But on some nights, the seas parted and a pale woman sat on the white sand.
Her lips moved as if forming words, but Sen could never hear them over the ocean’s roar.
A great sadness weighed down her features, but when Sen drew closer, the ocean stole her away.
Sen set her brush down once she’d rendered her dream in black ink, then closed her eyes and finished her meditation in stillness.
She could sense the entire landscape around her, as if painted in strokes of gold behind her closed eyelids. The shivering
of the trees in the wind, the footprints carved into the earth, the sound of morning air winding through the rocks and branches
and flowers. She felt the wind inside her as she breathed, for she was as much a part of the earth as any tree, her roots
running even deeper into the world’s heart.
That was how she noticed the silence.
For the first morning since she’d escaped to the house behind the sword ferns, the forest said nothing at all. She heard no
hum of insects, or distant caw of birds, or footsteps of foxes and squirrels scurrying through the fallen branches.
The animals knew something she didn’t.
Maybe there would be an earthquake or a typhoon. Maybe there was something in the forest more terrifying than soldiers, or
her father.
Whatever it was, she would find it.
She sharpened her sword on the whetstone beside her bed and headed out into the forest.
She could not feel the pulse of the earth through the soles of her feet as she usually did. It was as if the soft soil had
hardened into oak, unyielding beneath her. She stepped silently around the sword ferns and deeper into the forest, which was
just beginning to glare orange from the first blood of sunrise.
Soon, she reached the river. It was a bleeding artery through the center of the forest, which Sen had pried open wider by cutting down the nearby bamboo saplings.
She’d tested the sharpness of her blade on the young trees, littering the forest with fallen branches.
She walked through a graveyard of tree stumps, all of them perfectly smooth from the keenness of her cuts.
Her father had told her that bamboo was as hard as human bone, that if she could cut through bamboo with one strike, she could sever a human head just as easily.
Sen stood perfectly still among the branches, as if she too were a young sapling, and listened. But the forest wouldn’t speak
to her that day. She could hear little else but her own breathing and the wind whispering through the trees. There were no
monsters in the woods—at least, not right now.
She sighed and sheathed her sword, then knelt down at the river to wash up before the sun fully rose. Her reflection glared
back at her in the rushing water, wrinkling a dark spot that marred her chin.
Sen tried to wipe it away with her thumb, but it only grew larger. A stain the color of red wine crept across her face, running
scarlet down her chin, bubbling past her teeth. She raised her sleeve to scour it, but the darkness devoured her jaw, leaving
her with only half a face.
Sen reeled away from the water. She scrubbed at her face with her sleeves, dyeing her robes deep red. But as the salt reached
her tongue, she hesitated, savoring the taste on her lips.
She was so hungry.
Her family barely had any food, and Sen spent her days practicing her sword work in the forest with nothing in her stomach.
At times she felt like she was puppeting a corpse around rather than preparing for battle.
Sen pressed her sleeve to her throat, and this time, it came away clean. She turned back to the river, but her reflection
was pale and unstained, the same as always.
She splashed water on her face, letting its frigid bite wake her up.
It wasn’t the first time her mind had wandered and wouldn’t be the last. Ghosts had followed her ever since the first rebellion.
Sen’s uncle had been among the first to approach the soldiers. When Sen was younger, he used to cut wheat stalks around her
and let them rain down like golden snow, tickling her face.
An imperial guard had shot him in the head with a rifle.
Sen learned that day what weapons from the West were capable of. One moment, her uncle had bright eyes that gleamed with concentration,
a sharp nose and tense lips and hard jaw that she had known all her life. The next moment, his face was a deep crater of blood
and bone fragments. His eyes burst like lychee berries, and everything that had been him was blasted away into a mess of brain pulp and blood.
Sen’s mother had pulled her away from the window then, but not before Sen tasted the salt of his blood, how it burned like
hot oil. Guns were so loud ; she could still hear them even now, ripping her dreams in two.
Everyone in the military academy—all two thousand of her peers and uncles and cousins—had gone to face the imperial army in
the winter. Her friend Yukichi, who had a crooked tooth and hair that stuck up and had never once questioned if a girl could
be a samurai. Her cousin Tsurumatsu, the fastest fighter, who danced around her blade like he was made of wind. Her youngest
uncle, who said that Sen would grow up to be stronger than her father one day. They had all marched to Kumamoto Castle in
the snow, and by the time it thawed, all of them had died there.
All of them but her father.
Sen took a steadying breath and gripped the handle of her sword. She closed her eyes, and just as vividly as she had pictured
the forest, she saw the dark eyes of the imperial guards, sparkling beneath their helmets.
She stepped forward, pulled back the sheath with her right hand, and struck down with her blade.
The sound of her cut whistled through the air, as it only could when a sword struck perfectly straight. The bamboo sapling split in half, the top section sliding to the ground. Sen sheathed her blade and examined the edge of her cut.
Clean, straight, with no hesitation. It had to be, because samurai only struck once.
She readied her stance, then whirled around and struck again, slicing through another bamboo shoot, imagining it was the throat
of one of the soldiers who had massacred her family. Left hand is power; right hand is control . Her father’s words echoed in her mind as she flowed through the forest, the clearing yawning wider as she tore it apart
from the inside.
She stopped not because she wanted to, but because if she cut down too much in one day, there would be no forest left to shield
her family. They had nowhere else to go.
She panted as the heat drained out of her, kneeling in the grass. When she caught her breath, she looked back toward the house
swathed in sword ferns, where she’d seen the man in her window.
A foreigner with bright haunted eyes and dark curly hair, his face painted gray with shadows.
Sen had rushed back to her room as soon as she saw him, katana unsheathed and primed to strike, but he was gone. It didn’t
matter what room she tore through—there was no one there but her family and the servants.
It must have been a bad omen. The foreigners who first came to Japan had brought the guns that ended the rebellion, and now
the image of a foreigner had appeared inside her house. Surely it was a sign that they were coming to take her house, her
land, her life. Her father didn’t believe in omens, but would he believe if he’d seen the sharp, clear lines of the foreigner’s
face?
A blade pressed to her throat.
Sen tightened her grip on her sword, but it was too late. The blade dug deeper, carving a thin line of blood just above her collarbone.
Behind her, Sen’s father sighed.
“If it were anyone but me, you would be dead,” he said. “If I weren’t feeling as kind today, you would also be dead. You deserve
death for your inattention.”
“I deserve death,” Sen echoed, her pulse hammering in her throat. Maybe today would be the day her father actually killed
her. Her mouth dried up, but she couldn’t swallow, or the motion would press his blade into her skin.
At last, he withdrew his sword. Sen heard the sound of him sheathing it behind her, and wasted no time folding into a bow
before him.
“Forgive me,” she said. “I was distracted.”
Her father grabbed her by the ponytail, yanking her to her feet. She stayed limp as he tugged at a loose lock of hair in his
left hand. He released her ponytail, then drew his short katana and sliced off the stray lock of hair, casting it to the forest
floor.
“If you are slain with an unseemly appearance...” Her father paused, waiting for her to finish the thought.
“You will show your lack of resolve,” she said.
Her father shoved her to the ground. Branches crackled beneath her palms, cold mud sinking into her robes.
“Never appear unclean before your enemy,” her father said, sheathing his short katana. “Inside, the skin of a dog. Outside,
the hide of a tiger.”
He was quoting the Hagakure , the book that he turned to when the emperor and his fellow samurai had failed him, the words that might as well have been