He found Kai in the cloakroom, head in her hands, still shaken from her attack in the bathhouse. Hayo was busy packing the horses. The servants were already sent away. “They could have killed me,” Kai said. “If they’d wanted… I’d be dead…”
He went before her. “But you’re not.”
“I should’ve known something was wrong… I was waiting, I… thought it was you…”
“I only found your note that morning.” He sighed. “You’ll be ready next time.”
“They could have killed me,” Kai said again. “I was too slow—”
“You stood your ground.” He found himself staring at the fear in her eyes. “You got one of them for what they did.”
She shook her head. “I – didn’t want to. I didn’t know what else… He had a sword…”
“He would have killed you, then.”
“I don’t know.” Her hands were shaking. “I don’t know.”
“Kai,” he said gently. “Listen. What you’re going through is a natural response. Your body is going to take time to catch up with itself. Just let it come. Let it come.”
Breath shuddered from her chest. Her hands, her shoulders, then her whole body began to quake. “How do you do this? How do you go through this and keep yourself together?”
“Many don’t,” he said. “Let’s get you a blanket.”
Soon she’d been placed by the fire with a soft quilt over her shoulders. “I can’t do this,” she said at last, warming her hands, watching the fire dance and flick about. “I’m not a fighter… How will I lead the house when I can’t even pick up a sword?”
“But you did pick up a sword,” he said.
“It’s – it’s too much weight.”
Yora sat back. “Your father was the first male leader of the Gensei clan in generations, after our sister died without an heir. Why do you think we’re the only ones to uphold the old ways now?”
“Why?”
“It gets them what they want. You can’t build a system to control people if you don’t have ways to put them into roles. That’s what they’ve always done – what we’ve helped them do. They’ve done it to the no’in for generations, claimed divine reason for it. Now they want to do it to everyone else.
“They want to make it so that if you’re not a man, you’re not in charge. Or from the right family, you’re not in charge. Of power, of money, of laws, of your own life. None of it. You’re not highborn, you never will be, if you’re not nobility, you have no say in court. They put people into boxes so they can cut things up. Put people into categories so they can say what should be done. That way, they create a history, and use it for their own veneration; doesn’t matter if it’s true. That way, they turn the people in those boxes intothings; and soon they’re not people at all. Not to them.
“We’re all complicit, Kai. The Northern Hara, Ogami’in and her family… Her grandfather did everything he could to claw himself awayfrom his own people because he was convinced assimilation was better than being killed. Many disagreed, but they’re not here anymore, so who’s to say. We took part in that. And we’re taking part in this, here, now. We have that curse; that’s what your father’s war was all about.”
“That’s why we have to win,” Kai said.
“You know what I fear most? My fear, my greatest fear, is what will happen when wedo.”
“We can change things.”
“Change?Three young men and an emperor, we tried tochangethings in the war. We inherited our power and our wealth, and we thought it was up to us to decide how best to ‘change’. What happened afterthat?”
He left it in the air. She’d know what he meant: just a few years after they helped Goshira take the throne from the demon-emperor, the three warriors – Seikiyo, Yora, and Asa’in – had split apart. Her father died trying to take power from the men he’d once defended, and their family was now fractured in result.
“Your father was never meant to lead the clan. He never wanted to lead the clan. But when our sister fell ill, he had no choice. Everything landed on his shoulders.” He grew quiet now. “My fear,” he said, “is that we will win this war, and find out who we really are.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you gain power on the merit of defeating a tyrant, who will you be when you take the tyrant’s place? You want to be a better ruler: good. But you’ll still be sitting in the exact same chair. That’s what I fear.”
She looked like she wanted to say something, but didn’t. The house had emptied. Everything was packed.
“In the end,” he said, “you realize it’s blinded you the entire time. Until you find yourself, up there, surrounded by it. And it’s only then, when it’s too late to turn back, when it’s too late to change what you have done, only then do you really start to understand why they say, ‘You can’t be king of the mountain without standing on a pile of bones.’”
