Chapter Seven Sen
Samurai only strike once.
Sen’s father would kill her if he knew she’d missed.
She had known at once that she hadn’t met her target, for there was almost no resistance against her blade. Sen knew how it
felt to drive her katana through a body, and she knew she hadn’t done it. Blood had coated her blade, but not nearly enough
of it. She’d examined the way it dripped down the keen edge of her katana, wondered how the blood of evil spirits could look
and smell so much like the blood of humans. Maybe a sword wouldn’t have killed a ghost anyway, but it might have scared him
away from bothering her family.
It would be harder to attack him now, for he would be wary of her. She had failed, but there was no one to punish her for
it, for she couldn’t tell her father.
Someone knocked on her door.
Sen whirled around to face the hallway, where candlelight illuminated a woman’s figure.
“My lady?” Youna called. “May I come in?”
“Just a minute!” Sen said. She turned back to the closet door, where light still burned. What if the spirit hurt Youna? Sen could defend herself, but the servants didn’t even have weapons.
Sen jumped to her feet and leaned against the side of her dresser, shoving it in front of the closet door. It hooked into
the wooden frame at the edge of the door, stopping it from opening. The door was small, and the dresser was large, so it blocked
out the light from the other room, like it wasn’t there at all. Sen listened for a moment to make sure the spirit on the other
side would stay quiet, then rose to her feet.
“Come in,” Sen called.
Youna opened the door with one hand, carrying Kotaro on her hip. Youna often cared for him at night so Sen’s mother could
sleep.
“Is he all right?” Sen said, hurrying across the room.
“He’s fine, but he was asking for you,” Youna said.
Sure enough, Kotaro reached out his chubby arms for Sen. She took him from Youna and he lay limp across her chest. Sen never
got to hold him during the day; every chance there was, her mother seemed to snatch him from her arms. Sen stroked his hair,
which was starting to curl at the base of his neck. His face was damp, as if he’d been crying, yet Sen hadn’t heard a sound.
The idea of him crying silently—as if too weak to conjure his voice—was so much worse.
“Youna, can you grab some honey from the kitchen?” Sen said, sitting down with Kotaro on her futon.
Youna nodded and hurried to the kitchen, then reappeared a few moments later with the honey jar and passed it to Sen with
both hands.
Sometimes, when Kotaro was too hungry to sleep, Sen found that giving him some honey would sate him enough that he could drift
off. She spooned some honey onto her fingertips and held it to Kotaro’s lips. He suckled at them eagerly, gripping her wrist
to hold it in place.
Youna watched them with a soft smile. “He calls you Hachi, you know,” she said. “For hachimitsu.”
Honey , Sen thought, going still. She fed Kotaro honey so often that he thought it was her name. She looked down at Kotaro and remembered
when Kura had fit in her arms this way.
Kotaro had eaten all the honey from her fingers and was dozing off on her shoulder. Sen wanted to keep him in her bed, but
she didn’t know if the spirit would come back, and she didn’t want her mother to wake and find Kotaro was gone—that would
make her angry. Sen stood and carefully passed him back to Youna.
Then, over Youna’s shoulder, a light flashed in the forest. Sen moved around Youna and stood at the window, her eyes narrowed
as she surveyed the tree line.
It was as if a star had twinkled between the branches. Or perhaps a candle had flickered and gone out... or a spyglass
had caught the edge of the moon.
“What is it?” Youna whispered, standing a careful distance back.
“I thought I saw something,” Sen said, gripping the windowsill. “My father said he thought there was a spy. Maybe—”
“It’s more likely the bullfrogs by the stream. Their eyes reflect light,” Youna said. “Let it from your mind, my lady.”
Sen shook her head. “I’m going to the forest,” she said. “Put Kotaro back to bed, please.”
“My lady—”
“ Please ,” Sen said, taking her katana from the shelf. There were spies in her yard and spirits in her room, and Sen felt as if the
world was closing in on her.
Sen threw open the door to the yard and ran barefoot into the clearing with her sword in hand. She needed to get away from
her house, because the rage she felt would destroy everyone it touched.
She knew, as soon as she reached the forest, that there was no one there. No bullfrogs, no magpies, not even a single gnat. Definitely not a spy. If anyone had been there, they had left. Was she always doomed to strike too late? To be skilled in practice but useless when it mattered?
She trudged back to the house and swapped her sword for an axe, then headed to the cedar grove. If she could not feed her
family, or protect them, she would at least keep them warm when winter came.
Until the sun broke across the horizon, Sen hacked at the cedars. The forest fell to splinters beneath her bare feet, the
world bright with the sound of her crisp cuts, her ragged breaths. Her arms ached as she heaved the axe into the tree trunks
and wrenched it out again, but she liked the way the pain sang through her, made her feel as if she’d swum from murky waters
into clear blue sea.
She carried the wood back to the house and piled it by the western gate, then set to work breaking it down on the cutting
stump. She did not feel the blisters on her hands, or the splinters in her bare feet, or the scrapes on her arms from broken
branches.
Seijiro slammed open the porch door, rubbing his eyes.
“You’re too loud,” he said. “Why are you stomping around?”
Sen said nothing, striking the next piece of wood harder than necessary.
“Why are you chopping wood so early?” Seijiro said.
Sen gritted her teeth and kept chopping, channeling all the heat in her bones into the axe instead of her brother. She was
caring for him, and he should have been grateful. She would protect him from hunger, from darkness, from death.
For a brief moment, she saw herself slicing Seijiro in half like a log, spilling his organs across the yard.
“Go away,” she said.
Seijiro scoffed. “You’re a demon,” he said, turning and slamming the door.
Maybe I am , Sen thought grimly. But I am not the demon you should be afraid of .
When Sen was seven, her father put her in a box and left her to die.
It was a wooden crate that a servant had used to carry sacks of rice to the house. Sen was just small enough to fit inside
if she hugged her shins and pressed her face against her knees. Her father had led her outside at night, placed her in the
box, and told her to make herself small.
She thought it was a game, at first.
She’d climbed inside, imagined she was one of the tiny snails that oozed across the river rocks, hugged her legs tight and
held her breath and tried to be so small her father couldn’t see her at all, because that would make him happy.
Then her father nailed the box shut. The hammer jolted the wood, so loud, so close to Sen’s ears. He placed her in a hole
in the earth and piled wet dirt on top of her until she could no longer see the sky. The box was poorly built, so the slats
didn’t line up perfectly and dirt spilled through the seams, worms and beetles wriggling across Sen’s bare toes.
You will know what it’s like to be dead , her father said.
Sen had never thought she was scared of the dark, but she had only ever known darkness as starry skies and dim bedrooms with
her mother sleeping beside her. This dark was all-consuming, a lead weight pressed down all around her, the sound of growing
roots and scurrying bugs and the ache in her neck that bloomed into a sharp pain.
Chichiue won’t let me die , she thought. It’s a game, and he’ll come back for me .
But time had a strange way of unfurling in the dark.
It stretched long and thin like dough, the strands snapping as they grew too worn. Sen spent years in the dark doing nothing
but breathing. Her stomach cramped with hunger, and her mouth went dry, and as another year passed, she began to realize that
her father would not come back. He had always wanted sons—he’d said as much to her mother. Maybe he’d just gotten rid of Sen
so he could start his family over again. He no longer needed her, just like he hadn’t needed Kura.
The worms wriggled over her toes and the beetles crawled into her ears, but Sen couldn’t move a single inch to pull them out.
The box grew smaller and smaller, crunching down on her bones from the weight of earth, and Sen imagined she was a rotting
corpse melting back into the ground.
And then, in the dark, came a thin voice.
Satō? it whispered.
Sugar.
Sen remembered sugarcane in Kura’s tiny hands, her wet smile with fibers caught in her teeth.
A small white hand parted the curtain of darkness and reached out for Sen. Sen couldn’t make out Kura’s face, but she could
feel Kura’s stringy hair as it spilled across Sen’s bare legs, Kura’s jagged nails on her calves, Kura’s cold hand on Sen’s
arm.
“Kura,” Sen whispered into the darkness. “Chichiue has left me to die.”
The hand tightened on her arm. Why would he do that?
“Because I’m worthless,” Sen said, coughing as she breathed in wet dirt. “Because I’m weak.”
The hand pinched down, fingers biting into Sen’s arm. He does this because you’re strong , Kura said. He does this to show you what you will become if you give in to your weakness .
Then Kura set her hands on Sen’s knees and leaned closer, brushing the darkness aside like a silk curtain.