Chapter Forty-Eight Yaeko
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Yaeko
We are servants, the old ones always said. We fight, we use violence, we sin, so that others may be left in peace. A sword will never find salvation; an arrow finds only its target. But now?
Now, Yaeko followed the Keishi generals into the hall, still wearing her armor and the river water and the blood.
Now her teacher was dead. Now she had been promoted to a higher level than she ever dreamed. First Commander of the Army of the Right, directly below Seichi, the chancellor’s son.
To get there, all she’d had to do was kill.
“Not a word.” Seichi stopped long enough to peer down on her with his height and greater bulk before striding toward the far end where the council, and his father, had convened. He looked at her once more, and he went ahead, and the coldness came back.
Yaeko was with Seichi when Yora died. As his homeguard, she remained beside him, soaked to the bone and dripping through her armor, as the battle ensued. She was there when they saw Kai escape. When Yora, alone, stood before them on the steps of the great hall.
When Seichi killed him.
“This is the lord poet?” he’d gasped, canting about, fighting the overwhelm of what he’d done, mad with adrenaline and fear. “This is all he was? An old man!”
He’s going to be sick, Yaeko had thought. Yora was his teacher, too. Seichi staggered backwards, disgusted by the blade in his hand.
Then he rallied, and in a frenzy, Seichi took the sword, the Falling Star, and sawed off Yora’s head. Then strode to the edge of the pond and moved to toss it in.
“Lord, don’t,” Yaeko began, but it was too late. With a shout Seichi threw the head, a spatter of blood fanning behind, but his aim was off, and the head landed, rolling on the shore, and left a brown smear on the sand that had stuck to it.
Yaeko found herself crying silently as the Saikyo army marched back to make its report. Shosei left a garrison at the destroyed temple; his brother Seichi intended to burn the whole thing down.
“But let us see what father thinks,” he’d said. They left Yaeko there, with the guard, to finish cleaning up.
Now she had come back through the palace gates.
She found Shosei and Seichi sitting beside their father in the chancellor’s hall.
Two prisoners, bound and kneeling, lay at their feet.
The first Yaeko recognized as a young woman named Chiyome – Prince Nioh’s first-consort, and mother of his child.
She had been captured at Deer Valley. The second was Satsuki-no-Ayame Hayo, Yora’s wife.
Bandages circled her torso, her face drained of color but for the thin red rim of agony that lined her eyes.
For a moment, Yaeko couldn’t move.
With his high voice, Shosei addressed the consort, Chiyome, first. “You’ve been granted a clemency,” he announced.
“We will allow you to take up the priesthood and live in exile in the northern islands. Or perhaps the Mountain of Rains. At Ametoge, if you would prefer. Present yourself to the monks up there. You may become a nun. We hold no malice against you, but you conspired against the chancellor, and risked his life, and the lives of his family. If you ever come back, the chancellor will be forced to lose his remaining compassion. Do you understand?”
Chiyome couldn’t speak. She was trembling, but she still did not cry. Her face blank with hatred. She could only nod.
“Send her away.” Shosei’s smile fell, like the dropping of a mask.
His compassion had run its course. Chiyome cried out as they pulled her from the floor.
Hayo tried to say something – a word of comfort, of strength – but whatever it was, it was lost amid the other woman’s shouts.
The guards dragged Chiyome away, and the doors closed; Hayo alone remained, stiff and in pain from the Keishi arrows that had struck her.
“Ayame Hayo,” Shosei said. “We have called you here to let you know two things. First, we have decided not to kill you.”
Hayo wouldn’t look at him. Her eyes were to the floor.
Seikiyo, above them on his center seat, watched carefully, but said nothing. Why doesn’t he speak? Yaeko wondered.
“The second thing.” Shosei nodded to an attendant by the door. A square box came forward. “The rebel prince is dead. As is the Poet.”
They opened the box, placed it on the floor.
Hayo flinched with a spasm of emotion, then suppressed it. She didn’t utter a word.
Yaeko fought the urge to vomit. To fight, to shout at these men who brought such savagery into the palace.
She was about to step in, to intervene somehow, when she caught sight of the other woman’s face.
It was a subtle thing, yet far-reaching. Hayo looked at Seikiyo, his sons. Then, without speaking, she turned away.
“You will stay here,” Shosei continued. “We will allow you to take up the priesthood if you choose.”
“Oh, you give me choices,” Hayo whispered, bitterly. “Now you give me choices.”
Seichi made as if to strike her, but his brother held him back.
“Yaeko,” Shosei said. “Get her a carriage. Bring her out. That’s all.”
Her guard came forward to carry Hayo through the doors. Yaeko wanted to say something, for Hayo had always been kind to her, but when she turned, she saw the rage in the other woman’s eyes.
Hayo spit in her face. “You know what you’ve done.”
When she left, Yaeko heard the aristocrats still arguing over the best way to burn down the temples of Naruji that had promised to help the rebel prince: old men shouting shrilly, pointing fingers at one another from under starched and heavy coats.
All the while, Seikiyo, the lone warrior among them, remained silent, forced to keep his calm.
She was at the main entrance when the guards announced that Chiten Goshira had entered the palace.
He came in, flanked by his shrouded Tessoku.
Yaeko bent to the floor with the others until the Chiten had passed, but when she rose, she found him arguing with Keishi guardsmen at the chancellor’s doors.
Goshira, his people announced, wanted to be admitted.
But the guards didn’t move. Their orders were to bar everyone until the councilors were done.
“Very well,” Goshira said at last. “I will return, then, to my residence. You can tell your chancellor where to find me.” He made to leave, stopping only when he’d reached her place again.
“Yaeko,” he said, looking down.
She bowed. “Yes, Chiten?”
“I hear you’ve finally been promoted. They’ve let you start to wipe the stain clean; you must be happy.” He offered a thin smile. “Finally where you were always meant to be. You have my congratulations.”
“Thank you, Chiten,” she stammered.
“One last thing. Give this to your lord, if you please. Seikiyo has won a great victory today, over his enemies… But he would be wise to remember, more enemies exist.”
He drew a silk-wrapped paper from his robes. “A gift. Given to me. Now I give it to your master, as a token of respect.”
The purple silk touched her hands. An envelope inside.
“Remember,” he said, “a gift from a friend.” Then he turned, surrounded by his shrouded guard, and strode away.
The envelope wasn’t sealed. Within, a single piece of paper rested in the folds, elegant and white. When she drew it out, she saw it was a poem. Not just any poem; it was the one that Kai had written, so many months before. In the evening light, cicadas fall silent…
Yaeko knew, then, what the Chiten meant. It was a threat.
He’s telling us he isn’t done.
He’s saying: I still have power. I pull the strings.
It’s a challenge. He’s saying, I did this.
But how would Seikiyo react?
She turned to call to him again, but he had already left.
The young attendant they’d given her murmured an approach, asking where his lady would like to take her rest. She pulled her helmet from under her arm and threw it at him.
“Get away from me!” Then softened, as the young boy shrank back, and tried to calm.
“I need to see the chancellor. Immediately.”
The boy ran off, leaving her alone in the hall.
The hanging scroll of Yora’s famous battle against the nightbird still hung loosely by the entrance.
As if on cue, two attendants arrived, and cut it from its hanging.
The portrait of the Gensei warrior fell to the ground in a heap; they bundled it away, and when they left, the wall stood empty. The hall grew quiet.
This is how it starts, she thought. This is what’s happened to the search for peace. She strode away, retrieving her helmet from the floor, and wondered, If you saw me now, Yora, if you were with me, what would you have me do?
She found her lord in the infirmary, bright light pouring through the windows.
Seikiyo was visiting the wounded, trailing from one ward to the next, his hands clasped, gray-specked stubble on his head.
It was a difficult sight. The maimed and dying were on cots throughout the hall, and Yaeko remained in waiting as he passed the beds.
Passed the wounded. Some of them recognized him, and turned, reaching, shouting, crying in pain.
On a cot apart from the others, Yaeko saw the form of her former schoolmate, the Gensei general, Yora’s daughter, Tsuna.
A flood of memory hit her then, memory of a different time, at the Hermitage and after. Yaeko had loved her, once. Now she clung to life but weakly; her breath fought as it could. Her body struggled. Her bloody sheets were stained, and damp, and still.
It was not yet clear if Tsuna would survive.
A sound; Seikiyo was leaving.
Yaeko walked on.
That night, she met Seikiyo at the altar in his residence, where he kneeled in prayer for those lost.
Praying for his friend the Poet, maybe, too.
He had a ceramic jar in his hands, stopped with cork, and as she watched, he opened the jar and a small beetle emerged. Holding it a moment, he allowed it to crawl onto the back of his hand.