“But youknow,” Rui said. “You see the future, you mustknow…”
“Have you learned nothing, child?” The Hososhi roared through the earth itself. “You see many paths. What may happen. What may not. The roads are there. Take one.”
With that, they vanished, and Rui felt another sharp stab of pain in her chest, a white-hot flash that cut below her heart and radiated outward like lightning until she screamed in agony and fell to the dirt, unable to stand.
She remained like that, by the sticks and the fallen leaves, trying to catch her breath. Afraid, yes, afraid of the demon in white, afraid of the killer they said she must become, afraid of the future the Hososhi saw but would not tell her. Because the god was right – she felt something coming, and when she closed her eyes, she could see it, too, a shadow in her mind, ever present, and coming closer. The god of four directions had seen it.
The woods fell silent; the normal chittering of birds and whispers of the wind had gone. Only the trees looked down, and the air itself lay still.
“What must I do?” she asked, to the emptiness.
“What is the worth of an earthly soul compared to that of gods?” the Hososhi thundered. “The demon walks this land. You… may have a role in stopping her.”
“I can’t kill a demon,” she said. “How can I kill a ghost… Why’re you doing this?”
“Because in all the myriad futures of the world, you may still have a role to play. I have seen it. But one path is not the only path, and I must make sure my mission is done.”
“You keep saying that… Whatisyour mission?”
A hissing sound. The Hososhi’s laughter. “I am at the gate between the worlds,” they said.
The voice disappeared more quickly this time. Rui sat back with her head against the base of a sakae tree. The wind returned, and the frozen joints of the trees began to creak. Her heart pounded in her chest, the ache spread with every beat, and she felt as though her blood itself was still aflame.
The dead sparrow remained where she had killed it, at her feet. She looked at it for a long time. There were no other creatures anywhere in sight. She heard nothing but the wind in the leaves.What have I done?she thought.What have I done?
That night, she fell into a fitful sleep. In her dream, she was bombarded by sensations. The feeling of hands like thin smoke tracing the contoursof her shoulders, ghosts guiding her to some destination known only to them.
In her dream, she saw a dark path in the woods over a low-lying field, empty rice paddies full of mud. Ice fell from the air. She saw a figure walking through the trees on a high hill overlooking the plain, a woman in white, who had no face, just a featureless mask, two black eyes, unblinking. Strange words were written across the mask and the woman’s skin, in the ancient seal-script of the diviners. She couldn’t read the words.
No, she shouted, soundlessly.No, get away.
I know you, the vision said.I know…
She tried to run, fell to the base of a ravine, where she found a tiny girl, no more than six years old, crying, in a ditch deeper than Rui was tall.
Is that me?she thought. I am looking at myself as a child.
Birds flew overhead, dotting out the stars. They were too fast, too sharp and too thin, like they were made of rice-paper. They rained down upon her, surrounding her, tiny strips of paper with the same magical seal-script that had summoned them: shikigami, small-spirits summoned by ancient magic, marks written on the paper seals.
Rui couldn’t move. She could do nothing but wait as the paper swirled in the air, small, sharp cuts slashing themselves around her, as the ghosts came near.
Then they were gone, flying back over the slope of the hill, toward the spectral dreamscape where the woman in white still waited, hand out as though calling them back to her.
“She’s coming.” The Hososhi spoke. “Coming for him.”
“For who?”
“For Sen.”
There was no choice. She left, in the middle of the night, taking one of Koroku’s mares and riding away from Jobo, and the town, and after the departing Gisan forces. Rode after her friend. She looked back as she left the outvillage and city of Kitano, the only home she’d ever known.
She remembered the look of pain and surprise on Idachi Honnen’s face the moment when she killed him; she remembered the look of outrage on his mother’s face when she’d gone to make amends.
Rui had gone back to their home once or twice, trying futilely to make something better, but always strayed, always wavered at their door. She’d seen them, here and there, in the weeks and months that followed, working and living by the guard tower where she killed their son. She watched them sadly, the Honnen parents, childless. But life went on. They workedtheir brewery. They had friends. They made an altar for him. She felt terrible for watching, wanted to apologize again.But what would I say? Please, I’m sorry, I beg you to forgive me?What was she really looking for? For them to smile at her, and say,It’s all right?How does forgiving someone change anything that has already passed?
“Can’t change the past,” she muttered now, thinking of them again, and went into the night.
She rode all night and most of the next day, traversing the Serpent’s Scales, a rocky highland full of bogs and high granite boulders southwest of Kitano. Near sundown, she found Tokuon’s outriders where the mountains gave way through a narrow pass to the flat, fertile lowlands that led to Oiriguchi below.
