Chapter Fifty Rui #2
Beside them rode the Lord Tokuon, stern as ever, and a giant of a man with an axe on his flag. Other warriors in the group, the circle-of-dragonscales crest of the Zusho clan fluttering from a banner. They would march to Amayari, the family’s ancestral land.
He’s with his people now.
Rui stopped, surrounded by the clamor of the crowd. She’d never felt so alone. She shouted, “Sen! Over here!” but the tumult grew too great, and Rui was but one voice in a sea. Sen looked back for only a moment.
“Hoshiakari!” someone called. “You’ll be left behind! Come on!” Finally, Sen turned his horse and left. Maybe he hadn’t seen her at all.
Rui fell back, letting the crowd pass over like a tide, and made her way to a plum tree by the side of the road.
There weren’t as many people here; the air blew, chill, and day-old snow lay heavy on the fields.
Everything was moving now, the columns heading out.
Myorin and Atsu were somewhere with the rest of the Jibashiri. They were calling for her.
Surrounded by the army and the war erupting all around them, Rui thought of the night that they were found, clutching each other’s hands.
She felt the snow on her cheeks and the bite of the wind flowing westward down the valley, her skin tingling with every sensation.
Breath misted before her. Sharp, icy sheets of daylight lanced through clouds. You’re no one, they had said.
But I am someone. I’m here.
The world takes so many things, Sen had told her once, it’s easy to forget what it gives.
Rui wanted to find that girl now, that child who’d hidden in an empty barrel, and show her what it gives.
Wanted to tell her: This is your life. Your life.
Yours. You do not end in tragedy, Rui. You find a way.
There are things that go too far, there are things you can never come back from, but you can keep going.
You can say: to hell with it, I won’t give up.
I’m still here. And you can find someone, you can find people whom you love, and who love you, who will always love you.
Somewhere out there, the sun was rising.
But for a moment, the sky grew dark, and Rui felt a shimmer of trepidation once again.
She looked up, seeing what no one else could see, the shattering of the boundary between the worlds.
Everything was changing. The funnel-wind of the storm and the fires and the air had mixed together, but beyond them, something opened.
I am held, she thought. I am a chrysalis, I am going deeper, falling into something hot and cold and improbable as love. A flurry. Crystal haze.
They’re with me now, she thought. My family.
My village, old Goro and Koroku, Otsu and Jobo and the monks, and Sen.
They will always be with me. We’re on the road now.
We’re gonna make it. And she thought, Well, that’s all right.
She felt herself receding, pulling back.
The gods were with her still; perhaps they always would be.
She felt something in herself float off, into the wide, white arc of snow on the hillside, and the trees and the storm-colored horizon beyond.
She could hear voices now. There were people all around her, an army moving out. Among them, she was alone.
Atsu came running, and when she saw her smile, Rui felt she could find a new family without giving up the old.
Maybe that was all right, too. She stood in the pale brown of the sunlight as it rose somewhere behind those clouds, behind the dead sky and the world.
And in the distance, she tried to see Sen as he was that day, when he walked with a spring in his step, and lay in the grass, and said, There’s nothing wrong with who you are.
Now Sen was riding away. He had his cousins and his retainers all around him, bannermen at his side.
But to Rui’s eyes, among the cohort of the clan, Sen looked lonely.
Around his neck, he wore his jewel; Rui touched the one around her own.
There were flowers in his hands. A breeze sliced past. His horse jittered, and the petals flew off in a scatter beneath the wind.
I’ll always know you’re out there, Sen had told her once. It felt so long ago. I know you’ll be there. Now, Rui heard his voice again. Find me, Rui. Whatever happens, come back and find me.
The horses were receding now. The first ranks started on the road.
Rui lingered on the little hill by the plum tree, with its small buds already starting to open, spots of color among the frost. She watched the soldiers curse and joke as they packed their belongings into canvas sacks, porters hurrying around.
Tents had been struck, cooking fires doused, and over the entire encampment she could hear the sound of the army slowly lumbering to life.
The earth seemed quieter; the snow was melting.
There were birds in the air, and when she turned to the road, where Atsu was waving from the tents, she saw a flower budding from the frozen earth.
“I’m coming back,” she said at last, whispering the words to herself, or her friend, or the gods. “I’ll come back to you. I promise.”