Chapter Nine Sen #2
“Nothing, yet,” the spirit said. He leaned back slightly and Sen felt like she could breathe again. “But I have tools I can
use to read about the past. If you give me your name, I can learn about you.”
If you give me your name , Sen thought, dread pooling in her stomach. Even her baby brother knew better than to give his name to a spirit.
“Our past is not the same,” Sen said, clenching her jaw. “We do not live in the same world.”
The spirit glanced pointedly over her shoulder at the room that mirrored his. As his gaze passed over her shelves and books
and pillows, she felt like he was staring into her soul.
“Allow me to prove it to you, then,” he said. Then he stood up and walked into the darkness of his room.
Sen could have closed the door then, but she didn’t, and she was sure the spirit knew she wouldn’t. He had turned his back
to her, like he didn’t fear her at all.
He returned with a small black object in one hand, a thin rectangle with a glass surface.
“Let me tell you one thing about the future,” he said, angling the object toward himself and pressing on it with a thin finger,
“and then I will shut the door. You will never see me again, if that’s what you want. But when it comes true, and you want
to talk to me, I’ll be waiting on the other side of this door.”
“You’ll leave me alone if I listen?” Sen said.
“Yes,” the spirit said. “I swear.”
Slowly, Sen dropped her hand from the door. Pale light glowed from the surface of the black object, illuminating the spirit’s
face.
“Is it October twentieth for you as well?” he said as he kept poking at the box.
He glanced up when Sen didn’t respond, and must have read the answer in her face, because he nodded as if he understood.
“Tomorrow, there is going to be a fire in Chiran,” he said. “The mayor will die.”
Sen frowned, glancing out her window, where the sword ferns were still wet with raindrops. “It rained a few hours ago,” she
said, though the words were weak, as if she herself didn’t believe them. “There will be no fire.”
“Remember those words tomorrow,” the spirit said, “and when you smell smoke, think of me.”
Then he rose to his feet, bowed, and shut the door.
His shadow faded, and Sen hurried to push her dresser in front of the door, hating the idea of the spirit returning when she
was asleep.
Sen set her sword back on its shelf, her fingers numb. If the spirit kept his word, then she’d driven it from the house, and
she no longer had to worry. She lay down on her futon and stared at the ceiling, the ghost’s promise echoing through her mind.
Tomorrow, there is going to be a fire in Chiran. The mayor will die .
It was impossible to have a large fire with the wooden houses so wet, so Sen wasn’t worried. But still, the memory of the
spirit’s face appeared whenever she closed her eyes, his hollow green eyes glowing in the darkness of her mind.
There was one more thing she could try—one more test. For it was one thing to seek “proof” on the spirit’s terms, but another
to put him through her own test, one he had no idea about.
Sen knelt on the floor and lifted the loose floorboard near her futon, setting it to the side. Then she pulled an old sword
guard from one of her drawers, wrapped it in a scrap of fabric, and placed it beneath the floor. She slotted the floorboard
back into place, hiding her secret in the cold, dark earth.
“Kill it,” Sen’s father said.
Always it , never him or her .
The hare in Sen’s grip had red eyes, scratchy tufts of brown fur, and big ears that swiveled back and forth. It kicked its
hind legs at her forearms, trying to squirm away, but she held it firm behind the neck.
Sen was nine and had only just been trusted with a full-sized katana. This was one of her first lessons. It was a dry summer, but the soil around them was wet and spongy with blood from all the hares Sen’s father had slain, the knees of her hakama stained red.
She wanted to do what her father asked, but her hands shook whenever she locked eyes with the hare.
She’d set the first hare on the ground and deliberately drawn her sword too slowly, letting the hare dart back toward the
forest.
But it never made it there. Sen’s father struck it down before it left the clearing, not across the throat but through the
middle. Stringy noodles of hare guts spilled across the dirt, and both its front and back paws twitched, its red eyes darting
around in terror, the top half crawling away from the bottom. Sen’s stomach clenched, but she steeled her expression because
showing her father that it scared her would only make the training last longer. He’d done it on purpose, to make the hare
suffer because of her. Her father did not miss.
Every time she failed to kill a hare, her father cut it in two and forced her to touch the clean cut he’d made. Her fingers
trembled over the base of the animal’s throat, the open hole of the windpipe clenched beneath her fingers like it was trying
to tell her something.
Samurai do not fear death, they are indifferent to it . That was what the Hagakure said, what her father was trying to teach her. True samurai lived as if they were already dead. When she was too young to
hold a katana, he’d brought dead foxes into her room and made her sleep beside them until their eyes filled with maggots.
He wouldn’t remove them until she stopped crying.
But it wasn’t enough to be calm when standing beside death. Sen had to take life without hesitation.
As the hare squirmed in her grip, Sen could feel her father’s burning glare above her but couldn’t bring herself to move.
Thankfully, Kono Sensei appeared in the grove.
Her father turned, and Sen used the excuse to release the hare, who darted back into the forest.
Warn your friends , Sen thought. Run far away .
Kono Sensei taught sparring to the other children at the military academy. Sen had feared him at first because he’d paired
Sen with the strongest boys in the class, but she had quickly learned that he was doing her a favor. Sen was faster and stronger
than all of them because her father trained her even after the academy sent them home for dinner. While other children slept,
Sen practiced her sword forms.
Her father had come to watch her spar a week ago and determined that the school was a waste of time. He demanded that Kono
Sensei pair Sen with the older boys who used real swords instead of wooden ones. Kono Sensei had refused, so Sen’s father
had taken her home to finish her training himself, swearing to send her back only when they would let her have “a real fight.”
Kono Sensei entered the clearing and looked across the bloodstained dirt, the scattered remains of hares, then at last, at
Sen. His gaze softened, as if she was more pitiful than the still-twitching hare corpses.
“Itaro-dono,” Kono Sensei said with a sigh. “You know that these techniques—”
“I have heard your opinion and I don’t care for it,” Sen’s father said. His blade glinted as he turned, and though he would
never threaten a teacher directly, everyone at the academy knew better than to upset him. “I will teach my children the way
they were meant to be taught.”
Kono Sensei shook his head. “She should go back to sparring with the others, not be out here slicing the hares to extinction.”
“You teach your class to dance, not to fight.”
“They are still young,” Kono Sensei said.
Sen’s father turned his back to the teacher, eyes scanning the forest for more hares. The conversation was over.
Sen tasted tears at the back of her throat but swallowed them before her father could notice. The only thing worse than failing her father was failing in front of Kono Sensei, who had once believed in her.
“I can’t put her with the older class,” Kono Sensei said, bowing his head. He was older than Sen’s father, but he would diminish
himself for Sen. “But what about that new boy in the middle class? Fujita Torazo?”
Sen tensed. Fujita Torazo had come last week from the north, and he was a head taller than anyone in Sen’s class. Sen had
caught him cutting down birds’ nests from trees and stomping on the eggs. He’d sliced off another boy’s fingers “by accident”
and no one in his class had wanted to spar with him since. He would have loved to slay hares with Sen’s father.
Kono Sensei hadn’t seen Torazo shove the other boys to the ground and eat their lunches so they would be too weak to fight,
or the way he’d leered at Sen, who was one of the only girls at the school. Kono Sensei only saw a child.
“I’ll allow it,” Sen’s father said, his back still turned. “Bring him here, and I’ll see if he’s a worthy opponent.”
Kono Sensei smiled at Sen, as if he’d saved her rather than doomed her, and ran off into the forest. Sen cleaned up the dead
hares without being asked, stacking them up on the porch for her mother to skin for soup later. It would be too much, and
it would go to waste, but they didn’t have to worry about going hungry back then.
Sen waited in the bloodied dirt, her palms sweaty as she sensed the trees shifting in the distance, Kono Sensei returning.
Torazo appeared first, grinning when he saw Sen waiting among all the blood and hare intestines. This was all a game to him,
because he did not have a father like Sen’s. He didn’t understand what it would cost her to lose.
Kono Sensei passed them wooden blades because children weren’t supposed to kill, but Sen was not a child; she was a warrior. Sen knew her father only allowed it because he did not know this boy, because he wanted to see how he fought.
Sen knew she couldn’t beat him.
Torazo was older and taller and stronger. Sen was no more than a mouse scurrying away from the swelling shadow of a hawk as
it descended in a field. She would fall, she would be cut to pieces, she would—
Torazo struck down with his sword, the blow nearly knocking her off her feet from the force. Her feet slid through the mud,