Chapter Twenty-Two Sen #2
They fought to put the fire out, he said, but when they did, they found sabotage; the younger acolytes reported seeing someone – a shadow – with a mask before the fires were lit.
“More and more,” Iyo swore. “The Keishi are no killers in the night. Not like this. They were never like this…”
She increased her pace, crossing the wide courtyard by the stables. “Sen,” she called, “come quickly.”
“Lord,” Sen said, concerned. “Who do you think it was?”
“I think—”
He was still five paces off when he heard.
A wind. A cry.
A whistle through the leaves.
Two arrows sliced through the darkness, hit Iyo in the chest and shoulder.
“Iyo!” Sen screamed.
She fell.
The guards were shouting, pointing at two veiled, shadowed figures who’d been perched, invisibly, atop the wall. Torches went up, chasing after them, but, as Sen lay in shock with his stewardmother in his arms, they scaled the walls like cats and vanished.
“Go after them!” he shouted.
Iyo tried to stand. So fast, Sen thought. You lose one thing and another. My mother. My father. My life. And now…
Breath choked his lungs. The fear came stronger than before.
“Help!” he cried out, panicking. “Somebody help me!”
In a moment, the alarm bells were ringing, struck by sentinels at the gates. The entire compound came to life, and Iyo Ogami’in lay bleeding in his arms.
“Sen,” she rasped. “Son…”
“I’m here,” he said, “I’m here, Ogami’in.”
“Not your fault,” Iyo said. “Don’t let this…”
“What is it?”
“I have tried…”
The rest of her words were too faint to hear.
A shout drew Sen’s attention to the entrance of the courtyard. Nihira and the homeguard had returned. Nihira nearly fell to his knees when he saw what had happened, racing to his mother and his adopted brother.
“It was an arrow,” Sen said, uselessly. His mind wasn’t working. Nihira could see the arrows in his mother’s chest.
“We need to get her inside,” Nihira said.
“Assassins from the capital,” Tokuon hissed. Torches cast long shadows about the walls of their urgent council; Tokuon and his inner circle were armed to the teeth and Hakaru had accused them of betrayal.
“How do we know this isn’t you!”
“For what reason?” Tokuon grew tense. “We came to treat with you, we came to ask for help!”
They were still arguing when Sen left. Their anger, their words, he wanted none of it. His entire body tingled, a thousand needle-points in every vein. When he closed his eyes, he saw it again: his stewardmother, pierced with two arrows, bleeding out upon wet ground.
He stayed beside her that night. He would stay until the end.
Where are Rui and Jobo? Sen wanted to find them, to see how his friend was doing.
He needed his teacher’s advice. But there was no time.
Iyo turned and sweated under the blankets.
Sen changed her dressings every hour, and when the dawn came, he found himself in a state of nothingness, too tired to move, or talk, or eat, and too worried to sleep.
He felt both everything and nothing at all.
In the morning, he squinted up to find the light too bright and the smell of sweat and old blood clinging to his hands. Iyo had brought herself to a seated position, while the Gensei and Kitanohara generals argued at her feet. Tokuon’s seer, Hassho Tayu, stirred herbs in the corner.
“We must do something!” said Kanesuke Daijin, Tokuon’s milk-brother. “Lord, tell him!”
“What message have you received?” Iyo asked. Her face was pale, and every breath looked like it brought her pain.
She won’t last long, he’d heard the Gensei guardsmen mutter in the night. He shouted at them, wanted to strike them for saying such a thing, but the deepest part of his heart told him they might be right.
Iyo, who had been more a mother to him than anyone, who was famous throughout the land for her iron will and steady hand, could no longer do so much as sit without the help of her sons. It broke Sen’s heart to see her this way.
We shouldn’t have to see such weakness, some part of him wanted to say, we shouldn’t have to put up with this, this is wrong…
He remembered what Jobo had said about the two sides of the spirit; he could feel them now, the angry soul inside him that wanted to lash out in revenge, and the other soul, the gentle one, that wanted nothing to do with weapons and warfare ever again, not when this was what it brought.
Daijin shouted: “Prissy fools! Strike back at them!”
Nihira, prudent, argued it would destabilize their country.
“So you will do nothing?”
Sen rose, suddenly furious—
“Quiet.”
Iyo silenced the room with the word. “We will not go to war.”
“Mother,” Hakaru began.
“I’m not a corpse yet. Listen to me. What have I taught? Our land, our peace is more important than their squabbles.”
“They attacked us!” Hakaru shouted.
Tokuon stepped in: “Lord…”
“Do not go to war,” Iyo whispered, blood on her lips. She grasped Sen’s hand with cold fingers, trembling with the effort to hold his hand in her own, to stay awake.
“Sen,” she said. “Listen to me.”
“This is my responsibility,” Sen said, voice wavering. “This would not have happened if I hadn’t… if I hadn’t fought those monks… hadn’t made them come… but now they start a war…”
“We will not get involved,” she repeated.
“They did this to us!” He could no longer keep his calm. “They have…”
“Son,” she said, a thickness in her voice he hadn’t heard before. “The Kitanohara cannot become involved.”
He held his fists at his sides, struggling to rein in his emotions. A feeling of realization settled over him. “But… I am not a Kitanohara, mother, I am a Gensei… As is the lord Tokuon, who asks for our help… I can go with him…”
He saw the look of pain and sadness pass over her pale face, but he couldn’t stop. Not now.
“I’ll go. I’ll fulfill our duty. I’ll get them back for this.”
She closed her eyes, as if pressed by a deep grief, a weight in her heart that had suddenly grown.
“I cannot order you to stay,” she said, quietly, “but I would ask it of you.”
“We are his family,” Tokuon said. “The boy is right.”
“I’m not a boy!” Sen cried, louder now. “I’m the second heir to our clan. Son of Katsusada Asa’in of Amayari. I have to go.” He turned to his stewardmother again.
“I don’t have a choice.”
When the doctors and the priests had ushered them away, they gathered in another of his mother’s meeting-rooms. Nihira let out a shout of anger, releasing the emotions he had refused to show in his mother’s presence, and smashed his fist against the wall.
Hakaru was a stone, sitting on the floor with his legs drawn in, staring at nothing; he subtly shook his head, as if he couldn’t comprehend what had happened.
Tokuon made to speak, but Nihira slapped his hand aside. “Out! All of you! Out! Family only.”
Tokuon looked like he would strike the younger man, then nodded. “We’ll be outside, lord.”
It hit Sen all at once. Whether or not Iyo survived, Nihira had to take his mother’s place. He was shifting, grim, his cheeks still wet with tears, but Sen could see it in him now, the strange feeling of loss and responsibility that Nihira had always felt.
He was the Ogami’in now.
That night, Sen went back to the little hut at the end of the outvillage to see how Rui was doing.
One moment, and the next, he thought, and the world was changed for ever.
One moment, he was in Lady Iyo’s halls, watching as a war unfolded before him. The next, he was in the no’in town, sitting by Rui’s side. One moment, the sun sets, the skies light up in flame; the next, night comes; gods come; your cousin brings hawk-feathered death with him and says, It’s time.
Rui had woken, still pale, breathing with weak breaths, but doing better. She looked so fragile. She looked exhausted, like she hadn’t slept for a week.
Lose focus, and one moment turns into for ever.
“How’re you feeling?” he’d asked.
“I feel… like there’s a thorn in my head.” She tried to sit up. “I feel like someone’s holding my heart in their hands, and they’re speaking to me, but when I can’t hear them they give a squeeze.”
What do you want? they’d shouted, at the god.
What was the answer? I see evil coming.
“Sen…” Rui tried for a brave face and failed. “It’s fine. I’m all right…”
She was lying, he knew. Whatever the god had done, in that hollow in the trees, it had made her very ill.
He sat. Suddenly, tears came, before he had a chance to stop them.
“Iyo’s hurt.”
Rui grew quiet. “I heard.”
“It’s…” Sen found himself speaking, and not sure what he was trying to say. All he knew was that, if anything, he wanted to be held. He felt shaky all over. His fingers trembled. “They don’t know if she’s going to make it. I…” His voice cracked. “I’m sorry…”
“You’re talking to the girl who just got struck by a god. You don’t have anything to be sorry about. That’s what you told me, remember?”
Something shifted in him, like a waterfall, like a dam at the brink of collapse. “The army will march.”
“I know.” She gave a weak, pained smile, which made him hurt even more. “Here.” She reached for her jade bead, on its string. “Keep it. It… it’s your family’s anyway… You’ll need it more than I do.”
“I can’t take this from you,” he said. “It’s yours.”
“Just for now,” Rui said. “You can give it back when we reach the capital.”
“Rui…”
“I can’t let you go do something stupid,” she mumbled. “Someone’s gotta… watch over you…”
He gave it back. “They won’t let you,” he said.
She looked away, fell back against the cot, the blanket, and he realized how faint she was. He touched her cheek. “You’re burning up.”
“I’m… fine…”
Her eyes told him that she was anything but. Her jade bead gleamed, deep stone-green traced with gold. It seemed to shimmer in the candlelight.
“I’ll come with you,” she murmured faintly. “You know I can fight.”
“You just need to get better,” he said. “Just rest.”
He wasn’t sure if she heard him. She muttered silently, turning about in her sickbed. He helped her under the covers.
“I have to.” She spoke suddenly, for a moment crystal clear. “No one else will help you there… With them…”
Sen wanted to ask what she meant, but Rui had already drifted to sleep.
He hesitated, at the door, to find that she had rolled to the side, back to him, and pulled the blanket over her shoulder, so that he could no longer see her face.
Jobo was waiting for him outside. “So, how’re you doing?”
“They’re moving out.” Sen couldn’t find a way to answer the question head-on. “They’re gathering. Everyone. The Gensei. I’m going with them.”
“You know,” Jobo said, carefully, “blood is just blood… It doesn’t set your path in stone. Doesn’t define you.”
“They’re my family…” Sen stopped, unsure what to say. “We were attacked. That is set in stone… we have to do something.”
“And you’ve decided what you will do?”
“Teacher…” A needle lanced through his heart. “Will… Rui be all right?”
“There is strong magic in the west,” Jobo said.
“It’s been coming for quite some time. Something’s happening in the capital.
A thousand years the spirits have been banished from the human world, but the power of the emperors has weakened.
The deal they made with the gods is falling apart.
Spirits are being splintered from their homes, and lost at the borders, bleeding into this world in numbers that haven’t been since the Sunlit Empress…
And now our friend Rui has been struck by a god. ”
He turned. “Do not go with them to the capital.”
“They need me.”
“What about your friend? She needs you. We must journey to the west. Find what sorcery is going on there.”
“Then come with me.”
“I dare not. That way is the way to war. A demon has come into our world. It walks across the countryside and I fear it has come for you.”
“Why?”
“I cannot see. But it is linked to you, Sen, in some way that is still obscured. It makes me worry. If you go, you will be in danger.”
“Then I’m in danger here,” Sen said.
Jobo scratched his stubble. “This is true. Any choice we make may prove to be a mistake, but we must act. I must go to Mount Takano, search for answers there.”
When he looked at Sen, it was a look that said, I’ve failed. “Be careful, Sen. Your family is there. War is there. It will draw you in. They will try to make you one of them.”
“I am one of them. I must obey my family.”
“That is what they told you.”
“The Keishi killed my father,” Sen said, grasping. “My mother… and now Iyo… This is our chance to make things right.”
Jobo shook his head. “This war will spare no one, Sen. Not even you. ‘Make things right’, those are Tokuon’s words. What do you think I’ve been training you for? To throw it all away? This evil that has struck comes from the west. There may be a better path, but I fear…”
“You fear what?”
One moment, the sun had cast bright rays across a meadow. One moment, Rui turned to him, said, Let’s run away.
One moment, and he’d stopped himself from saying, Yes.
Then he blinked. The world changed. The clouds came in, and that future was gone, replaced by a new one like a tide. It was pouring over him, over all of them, thick with mud, opaque, and whatever life was on the other side, he couldn’t see.
“If the evil that is causing this,” Jobo said at last, “if it has taken root among your family or the imperial court, it will use you too.”
Sen hesitated, but he’d already made his choice. “I won’t let it.”
His teacher sighed.
“I’m not like them,” Sen said.
“No,” Jobo said, “you’re not. Not yet.”