Chapter Thirty-Four Sen
Sen pressed her blade to her brother’s throat, drawing a thin line of blood just below his jugular.
Next came the part where she was supposed to raise her sword over her head and kill him with a single strike. He was unarmed,
so a quick cut would slice through his spine instantly. For an armored warrior, if there were no weak points, the best way
was straight through the eye, don’t stop until your sword comes out the back of their skull. Neither move was physically that
hard to pull off, especially on a child’s body, like Seijiro’s. It was only the mental barrier that made most people stop
too soon.
“Okay, okay, you win!” Seijiro said, holding up his hands, his sword falling to the dirt. “Let me up.”
But Sen only leaned closer, her shadow falling over him like an impending storm. Her blade pricked his skin and a bright bead
of blood trickled down his throat. “If you want to get up, force me to retreat,” she said.
Their baby brother, Kotaro, was watching from the porch, sucking his thumb. Sen couldn’t see their father, but he was always
around, watching. Waiting for her to make a mistake.
“I said I want to stop,” Seijiro said, his face red, his eyes glinting like he wasn’t actually sure Sen wouldn’t murder him in the yard in front of the baby. Good , Sen thought. You should be afraid.
Something shifted in the woods. Clumsier than a raccoon or fox, heavier than a bird or mouse. Sen turned toward the sound,
just barely glimpsing the swaying leaves deep within the forest.
Seijiro hooked his ankle around hers and knocked her off her feet.
She fell onto her back, all the air rushing out of her lungs, her sword falling from her hands.
“Ha!” Seijiro said. “Am I done now?”
Sen rolled onto her hands and knees, peering into the woods, but whatever she had sensed there was gone.
“Fine,” she said, brushing off her clothes. Seijiro picked up the baby and hurried into the house before Sen could change
her mind. She sheathed her sword and turned around.
My lady.
The words crept across the back of Sen’s neck. She whirled around, blade drawn, but she stood alone in the forest. Her hands
trembled, but she sheathed her blade again, taking a steadying breath. No one had called her my lady in ages—not since her father fired her maid.
She planted one foot on the porch to step up, and that was when the world split in two.
A bright pain seized her, like a sudden flash of sunlight in her eyes, but it seared not through her vision but her entire
body. Sen had been stabbed before, so she was no stranger to pain, but this was far worse.
She fell to her knees, one hand on the lip of the porch, the other in the dirt.
Her bones throbbed in a steady beat, as if the garden was alive, its panicked pulse echoing through her.
She grabbed a tangled fistful of weeds, but they shivered be neath her hands, shifting colors, disappearing and reappearing, first dandelions, then grass, then dirt, then ash.
Then, all at once, it stopped.
The sudden relief left a numbness ringing through her. She rose to her feet, stumbling against the porch as she drew her sword.
She had been vulnerable for too long, her back turned to the forest.
“Sen.”
She whirled around, her blade ready, but her father hadn’t even drawn his sword. His eyes looked strangely gray, staring not
at Sen but at the house behind the sword ferns.
“I need you to go collect firewood,” he said.
It was an odd request—Sen knew they had plenty of firewood, for it was still scorching hot outside and they only used it for
cooking, not to heat the house. But her father had asked it of her, so she would do it.
“Yes, Chichiue,” she said, sheathing her blade and heading to the shed for an axe.
For the next hour, Sen cut down as much as she could carry. When she’d packed all the wood in the shed and her hands were
blistered and sore, she washed up at the river and headed back to the house.
She stopped at the edge of the clearing.
It was too silent. Normally, one of her brothers was always shouting and running around, heavy footsteps thumping from one
end of the house to the other, followed by her mother’s voice calling after them.
Have the imperial soldiers come? Sen thought, terror clamping cold around her heart. She rushed to the front porch and threw the door open.
She tripped in the darkness of the front hallway, her hands splashing down into something hot.
It was so dark that at first she thought an inkwell had overturned, but there was far too much of it, and it was far too warm.
She scrambled to her feet and pressed back against the wall, where she saw the body of a servant face down on the floor, blood slowly pouring from a wound at her throat.
Sen clapped a hand over her mouth, trying to stop the scream clawing its way up her throat.
The soldiers have already come , Sen thought. I’m too late.
She threw open the door to the kitchen, hoping to find her brothers cowering inside a cabinet or under a table, but it was
empty. One by one, she tore through the rooms of the cursed house, finding more and more dead servants, but none of her family.
At last, she reached her own room, but hesitated just before throwing open the door.
There was a stain.
The echo of blood spatter seeping through the opposite side of the door, bright sparks of it like a small constellation. Sen
could visualize the strike that would spray blood like this, for her father had taught it to her.
Still, she could hear breathing on the other side, which meant she wasn’t too late.
She threw open the door.
The room was dim, the shadow of sword ferns blocking the sunlight from the one small window. Even so, the green tatami mats
seemed too dark, and the room smelled sharp with blood.
Sen’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, and she let out a breath of relief.
Her mother and brothers were sleeping in her futon, her father sitting upright in the corner, his sword in his lap. He protected them , Sen thought.
“Chichiue,” she said, stepping forward. Her father wasn’t the type to accept affection, but she wanted nothing more than to
embrace him now.
The tatami mats rippled beneath her. What she had thought was a floor cast in shadows was actually a pool of blood, stretching to every corner of the room like a sheet of black glass.
Sen looked questioningly to her father. She could hear his breathing, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze.
“What happened?” Sen said, her whole body suddenly cold. “Did the soldiers...” But the words wilted in her mouth, the question
dying before she could ask it. If the soldiers had come for her father, they wouldn’t have left until he was dead.
The soldiers hadn’t come here.
“ What happened? ” Sen said again, dropping to her knees in front of her futon. Blood splashed onto her robes, so warm against her knees. She
shook Kotaro, but he was limp and remained stubbornly asleep. She pulled back the blanket and picked him up, but his head
rolled back, exposing the clean line sliced across his throat, the blood that seeped down the front of his shirt, painting
his chest. His lips were blue, and even when Sen crushed him to her chest, she could feel no heartbeat, no breath, no sound.
She clutched him tight against her, looking in a panic between her father and the still forms of Seijiro and her mother beneath
the blanket. She didn’t want to touch them, didn’t want to see.
Her heartbeat felt so loud, hammering in her ears as she turned to her father, hands trembling around Kotaro’s body.
“You...” she whispered, the unfinished accusation hanging in the air.
Her father wouldn’t meet her gaze, and that was all the confirmation she needed.
Disgraced samurai would sometimes end their entire family lines rather than let a family stripped of honor live on. Her father
had faced the greatest shame of all when he returned alone from the rebellion, a failure and a coward. Sen had thought his
plan for redemption was what sustained him, but she’d been very wrong.
“I thought we were going to fight,” Sen said.
Her voice trembled, and the thought sounded so childish now that she’d said it out loud.
How could the two of them have ever found enough samurai children to train for an uprising?
How could they have ever hoped to stand against the soldiers?
But her father had told her it was possible, and she had followed his words to the end of the earth.
“It is kinder than what the soldiers would have done to them,” her father said at last.
Sen let out a sharp laugh. Her father frowned at the sound, but Sen couldn’t stop the hysterical laughter from bubbling up
until she thought she would be sick. She set Kotaro down in bed beside her mother.
“Kinder?” Sen echoed, her voice trembling. “ This was kindness to you? ”
On any other day, he would have yelled at her for her tone, but now his face was cold as stone.
She’d imagined it so many times—standing back-to-back with her father in battle, slicing down the imperial soldiers with perfect
strokes of her katana, just as he’d taught her. They would baptize the house with the blood of the imperial army. They would
show them that the samurai would never die. And when it was over, her father would look to her with pride, that barely perceptible
nod he gave her only when she had pleased him.
That dream was sand pouring through her fingers.
“You didn’t think I could do it,” Sen whispered as the realization washed over her. She fell forward onto her hands, folding
into the bloody tatami mats.
Her father rose to his feet, and even now, Sen cowered as his shadow fell over her. The pale glimmer of the tears in her father’s
eyes was the only brightness in the room, the only place the shadows hadn’t eaten.