“I did. But that’s not how. When I was young, I made a promise: my son died. My first son, Shigemune. After the rebellion. I vowed: no more. I promised: never again. I told you, each of you, when you were young, that everything I do is for you. To ensure your future. I will not give that up.”
He looked to the lamps then, and seemed nothing so much as an old man, lost in his past.
“My father,” he said, “was nothing at first, a middling rank, a junior guard. We had to scrape for everything we ever had, stand in the face of them, those aristocrats who sneered at us over their noses. And now, we arehere. The realm prospers because ofus. Because of Keishi ships, Keishi sailors; Keishi fleets are the reason we pass safely through the inner straits and to the continent. And still, those nobles look at us with scorn. No kijin will ever be an equal in their eyes… They fight us. They always fight us…”
Stop him, Yaeko thought.Stop him before this goes too far.
She did nothing.You’re the only one I trust, Seikiyo told her once. She forced herself to remain silent.I am not a person, she reminded herself.I am a kijin of the Keishi clan. I am a stone lion-dog that guards the palace. Seeing everything, saying nothing.
That is the only way to get through in this world.
That is the only way to survive.
“I thought that we could make a change,” Seikiyo said now. “But… death comes back. It always comes back.” He touched a candle with his finger. “No more.”
“Kai will call her bannermen,” Shosei stuttered. “She’ll raise the Gensei army.”
“You don’tknowthat!” Hagane stood. But Seikiyo raised a hand.
“The news?”
Yaeko found the envelope. A runner had come, breathless, in the morning. “A message from the Musha’in. The lord Gisan is assembling an army in the Kanden Plain…”
Seikiyo sighed. “Akiyo told me she was following Goshira. He sent his killers to the north. Send for her. Tell her to give me all the information she has. Watch their movements. Send her mountain-wolves. We must support our true emperor now; news will travel quickly, and the Gensei will not take it well. They – what remains of their line, in the Kanden – have always supported Goshira’s older son, Nioh. They will use him to contest the throne.”
A dark mood had come over him. He shook his head.He’s sad, she thought,so sad that it had to happen in this way.
“This chaos in the capital,” he said. “These pamphlets… They’re trying to sow discontent. Trying to make us look like fools.”
“I’ve seen the broadsheets,” Yaeko said.
“Well now it’s not just broadsheets. There are letters, spilling out of every window and inn and wine shop on the roads from here to Naruji. Pamphlets calling for the overthrow of this government, my own imprisonment, mocking us. ‘My name is the Prince of Victory,’ they say… ‘I will bring the tyrants down. The high will fall, the low will rise to take their place…’”
Seikiyo motioned to Hagane. “Go to Ashihara. Go to your husband. Tell him: he will make the proclamation in his son’s name; don’t let the regent do it. Ashihara gives the order. Authorizing us to hunt the remainder of these traitors.”
The young emperor had a kind heart, people said.Buthe’s barely twenty now.He has pimples on his face. His wife is a Keishi.
“Emperor Ashihara is tired, bored, and doesn’t like feeling useless,” Seikiyo said. “He performs his duties, but when you get to the other side of the screen, you’ll see the young man for who he is. Now that he’s stepping down, he’ll think he’ll be able to exert more will outside the burden of his office. Weuseit.”
Things moved quickly after that. Keishi swept into the capital. Troops from their lands in Isawa had been mobilized; they were already on the way. Shosei, now Seikiyo’s heir, armed the palace guard. Keishi retainers arrived from their many strongholds in the west.We come to protect the capital, they announced. None stood in their way.
Shosei called his brother Seichi to help the Musha’in hunt traitors in the provinces. They agreed to move within days. An impulsive man,Seichi lacked the nuance of his brother, but made up in strength and a willingness to kill. He stood as the antithesis of the imperial court, and its scholar-courtiers; Yaeko could only watch as the nobles fluttered and scowled about, and did nothing. They were bureaucrats. Seichi’s men had spears, and knives, and bows.
The coup began.
Sunlight. A draft in the Hall of the Morning, where Seikiyo had set up his camp. Yaeko shivered in the cold. They’d sent riders under the command of Akiyo Musha’in to begin finding the Gensei lords in the provinces: a tactic that the poet Yora, once advisor to her lord, had now arrived to critique.
Seikiyo had no time for him. “The barrier lands resist control. As they have always done. This… is a force of unification.”
“They will not like this,” Yora said.
“When have they everlikedus? Your nephew Tokuon has been building his army in those high mountains for years, don’t tell me you didn’t know. Are you in contact with him? This Gisan lord? The revolt must stop. The houses must submit, or be destroyed. We have no choice.”
“This won’t end well,” Yora said.
Seikiyo waved him off: “Akiyo knows her duty.”
He called the ministers before him, turned to Goshira’s former aide, a sliver of a woman named Chikae Ikariya. “I’m appointing you the new regent-mother to our young emperor. You have been a loyal advisor to the retired-emperor in the past. Will that be a problem?”
