Chapter Twenty-Two Sen
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Sen
Time moves so quickly, Sen thought. It gets the better of us all.
Rui, pale and feverish, had been adamant that she was fine. “Just shaken,” she’d told them, only to collapse into his arms.
“Hurry,” Jobo said. “We must get her to the village.”
They saw the signal fires on the path; Jobo tensed, as if struck. “So it’s started already,” he muttered. “Hurry!”
I thought I would have time to learn, Sen thought. I thought there would be time to make a choice. But now?
Now there were no choices. Now there was only the ring of fire at the edge of sight, the tinge of smoke in the air, the remnants of that strange attack, the woods themselves that had seemed to turn against them, growing sour, and darker than any Sen had ever seen; now there was the fear in his teacher’s eyes, and the pale shuddering fever of a god’s curse in Rui’s veins.
They went to the outvillage, to old Chie’s hut, with her unsown garden, brittle in the cold, and as evening came over the edge of Kitaiji-on-the-hill, splitting air and scudding down with rain, a wind came with it; a commotion, a blur in the west. Old Goro moved his aching limbs to claw some remedies from an ancient chest and Chie brought the fire back to life.
Rui shook, sweating, grasping at the lily-seed darkness beyond the fields.
“What’s happening to her?”
Chie shook her head. “No one can know. If it was the gods…”
Outside, the bells were ringing. Something had happened at the fortress.
No time.
Sen had frozen at the sight of the god, the impenetrable wall of being that engulfed them. He’d drawn his sword. He thought it was a demon.
And now, Rui had saved him again.
He found himself muttering, “Rui, you’re not going anywhere. Jobo’s going to help you…” She shivered in his arms. “We have to do something.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Jobo, “but this may be beyond my ability to heal.”
Rui cried out. Sen held her hand. “It’s all right… We’re here, don’t worry, you’re safe.”
There was a commotion from the road.
He looked out. Safe? What world could be safe? Now that the war of his father had returned. Now that the refuge his mother gave him was under threat. Now that he’d met a warrior who said, Sen, I am your cousin, I am here to bring you home.
Was this not his home? Or had it ever been?
What safety was there in a world at war?
What safety was there, when the capital made their threats?
His stewardmother’s peace was unlikely to hold, not unless she acquiesced.
Not unless she increased her tribute. Unless she said, I am one of you, I assimilate, I am Iteki no more.
Unless she gave them what remained of her – of their – last freedom.
Safe?
The smoke was rising. Someone coming from the south. A thunder of hooves.
Time, he thought, as a crowd gathered, and the clouds of dust rose on the road. Time moves too quick. If you’re not careful, it slips away.
I thought I would have more.
Only now, it seemed, the gods had other plans. Jobo looked to the window. “Those are not your stewardmother’s men…”
He pulled Sen back. “Go, warn your stewardmother. Tell her it’s as I said. Kiie Taisha is coming. He needs our help. Tell them. Hurry!”
Sen paused. “Who’s Kiie Taisha?”
Sometimes the world won’t let you choose. Sometimes things happen all at once. Sometimes things fall from your hands, and once fallen, you cannot pick them up, can’t put them back together. He hadn’t finished training. He hadn’t had a chance to choose.
The riders were coming close.
“Go!” said Jobo. “Tell them!”
Too fucking fast. Sen mounted the mare Koroku had made ready and raced toward the city.
He whispered in the horse’s ear, wishing he knew her name, and together they thundered up the hill.
As the dirt clouded up in mounds, as the pound of a dozen warbreds drew on, like a cascade, he thought, It’s slipping away.
Something terrible has happened.
Ahead, Hakaru and two bannermen called Hori Yataro and Ise Tadanobu rode with the blood-guard, and, in the middle of their protective ring, a man he didn’t know on a stallion black as night.
In armor of pale gold, his old tutor, Yozora Hogen, rode beside them, slumped at the edge of consciousness. Every so often they had to lean and help him keep his place. Three or four arrows stuck out from his breastplate and his arm.
Sen’s voice was lost among the pounding of the hooves, but Hakaru peeled back as his guard rode through the gatehouse, bringing the wounded inside.
“What happened?”
“A skirmish in the woodland sea. Beneath the Scales. They sent messengers for help. Raiders, outside the Oiriguchi, but…”
“What is it?”
Hakaru’s face grew pale, in shock. His voice caught. “Yozora.”
“It’s me! Hoshiakari!” Sen shouted to the guards. “Take me to Ogami’in now!”
Too fucking fast.
One moment he’d been in a golden sunset, holding Rui’s hand, with the leaves of autumn and the chill of winter in the air.
One moment, far from everyone, it didn’t matter who was no’in, who had rank. It didn’t matter where they’d come from, only who they were.
One moment, and the air grew cold. The light changed; they met a god.
One moment, and the world came apart.
He was halfway to the hall when his stewardmother appeared, flanked by guards. “Two days ago,” she said, “our scouts found a messenger in the Scales. They were attacked crossing the border and were being chased. Where is Azamaro?”
“On the field with his hunters,” called Nihira. “I’ve sent a message, but they’ll have seen the fires already.”
Tokuon filled the courtyard with his men. Horseback, torches gleaming.
“Gensei, did you send for them?” Iyo asked. “These riders?”
“No,” Tokuon said. “But my heart tells me I already know what this message will say. Lord Kiie is my uncle. And yours, Hoshiakari. Time has come.”
Time, Sen thought. Taking everything away.
“We’ve had news,” Tokuon continued. “Keishi troops in the upper Kanden. There was a revolt in Tose… Now my uncle Kiie comes across the gates…” He turned to Iyo. “The Keishi have crossed your borders trying to stop him, lord. They have broken the treaty!”
He called his riders to him, shouting, “Those mountain-wolves will still be out there. They’ll use the dark to get away. Do we let them make an insult such as this?” A roar of anger, of support, and vengeance, rose to greet him. He gripped his reins; his eyes met Sen’s again.
“We ride!”
The rest happened quietly, and happened far too fast. They brought Sen to the guardhouse to see the wounded men. No time to go into the hall. Hardly time to call the doctors, or the priests.
His tutor, Yozora Hogen, lay pale and bloodless on a sheet.
He saw Sen, waved an arm, took him by his side and coughed before he could find the strength to speak.
“I have… always been your friend. Sen Hoshiakari,” Yozora said weakly.
“Though… I know you have not always liked me very much. I know… I have not done much to inspire… love. But I was loyal to your father. I promised him. I promised…”
“Rest easy, teacher,” Sen said.
“I was there,” he said. “I have done my best to protect you…”
And he said no more. That was it. So fast. One moment, the man who’d been Sen’s instructor from the age of three. One moment, one old man, his shaking palm in Sen’s own. Then nothing.
“The night sky is dead,” muttered Nihira.
Hakaru slumped against the wall. “We were attacked at the Scales. It was that Keishi monster, Akiyo. Her mountain-dogs are everywhere below the pass.”
Lady Iyo stood, silent as a ghost, with her back against the wall. She had heard. She had seen Yozora’s end.
A page, bright with fear, appeared at the door. “Ame’in. It’s the Lord Gisan… He’s back. He says, find you. He says there’s news.”
Sen followed Iyo to the hall. He tried to clear his mind, but too much had happened. He never even liked Yozora, and yet… his heart, his limbs, they felt so impossibly heavy.
“Ogami’in,” he began. “Yozora, he said…”
Iyo did not break stride. “I heard his words, Sen.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Yozora was not his true name. His name was Kyohara-no-Shigeki Reizan. A retainer of your uncle, the Poet. He was with him the day he… the day they saved you. He was the one who offered to take you in, when Yora found you and that no’in girl in the village…
The Keishi would have killed you where you lay. He brought you here.”
Sen stopped. “I never knew.”
“He didn’t want to tell you. I respected his wish.”
“Then I owe him my life,” Sen said. “I…”
The emotion threatened to take over, throw him down into some dark place and send him sinking away.
He struggled for the words. “No one ever told me…”
“They thought it was for the best,” Iyo said.
“Though I never understood exactly why. He never felt comfortable getting close to you. He looked at you, and he didn’t see a little boy.
He saw Katsusada Asa’in. He saw the tiger of the Gensei clan.
Too many of their generation… they think of war, and remember the friends they had, who are gone, and yet they who survived sit on piles of money now because of it.
What do you think that does to someone? How would you feel? ”
“Stewardmother,” Sen said, “do you think this attack was really them? The Keishi?”
“Anything’s possible. But something tells me, no. I think it was something else. This has a whiff of treachery, someone who does not want peace.”
“Who is that?”
Iyo turned to him. “I think it was the—”
The Kitaiji abbots interrupted them, running up with ash on their cloaks. “Lady!” they cried. “Lady Ogami’in!”
One breath, one moment, and the world falls away.
The great temple had been put to flame while they were dealing with the wounded. Great swathes of smoke, set intentionally, the abbots cried. They had formed a chain, put the fires out. But they needed the lord. They needed her orders.
“A stranger, seen on the castle walls,” cried the abbot, sweating profusely, his face still smudged with ash.