CHAPTERTHIRTY-FOUR
Kai
They left the capital under the cover of darkness. Nioh had a larger household, and when they arrived, in the pale light of the moon, they’d found the prince surrounded by his bodyguards and a wing of fifty men-at-arms. He’d already boarded up the house. “Good,” Yora said. “We’ll move tonight.”
They rode for hours. Afraid to speak, afraid the mere rustle of their clothes, the breath of horses, would get them caught. They rode past midnight, through mountain woods and winding tiger-paths, leaving the royal city in its sleep. They rode into the early hours, the time of ghosts, of witchcraft, of a colder kind of fear.
When confronting your enemy, Yora had taught her, let all else in the universe disappear. Whenyou strike, it must be with all your spirit behind it. Never hesitate. There’s a reason we say a sword without spirit is dead.
“The contest is inside you,” he’d said. “It is where you land on the line between life and death. You cannot go there if you are not prepared to fall – to either side. So: prepare yourself. In your heart. In your spirit. Prepare, so when it comes, you may fall, freely. When you’re prepared, you’ll see: whichever way you fall, there is no difference. In the end, we all die; today, or tomorrow, or a hundred years; in the end, it’s all the same. In the end, the flame will go out.”
Now the copse lay silent.
Hidden a hundred paces off the road, they went down an embankment,surrounded by skeletal trees. Moonlight cut through gaps in branches, little prisms of silver under a cloudless, frozen sky. Their party rested. Kai could taste the resiny sap as it mingled with the cold; the air itself hung heavy, wet, and clammy to the touch.
Yora threw himself from his horse, stamped his feet on the ground more with anger than with cold. He was worried, she knew. Their hopes for a winter storm had not materialized. Air sliced away from them, freezing but clear. Clouds lined the far northwest, where lake-effect from Awa Bay sent frigid winds to the south.
Ahead they found a wooded compound where Nioh once spent his summers, studying history in books called the mirrors-of-the-past, but no one had come to meet them. They would gather their supporters on the road, try to make it to Naruji. Here it grew quiet; Kai felt a shudder in her breath. They’d hoped the storm would be a bad one, sending traffic to a stop on the highways and through the Shujo Gate. Yora said that it would hinder their pursuers. But the snow, and the cover it would give, hadn’t come.
Kai swore as she dismounted, slipped, and fell onto the dirt. Her ribs were aching. The bathhouse had hurt her more than she’d thought; her back was sore and bruises on her knee made it hard to walk. The bandage on her arm felt stiff, the wound a dull throb.
“They won’t follow us into a storm,” Hayo had said. “They’ll come slowly, they’ll be burdened by their armor and horses, and by then we’ll be safe with the monks. The snow will suffocate them.”
Only it still hadn’t come.
I told them this would happen, she thought.Look at us.
Yora,everything he said came true, and what was his reward? Disgrace.The capital, the nobility, they didn’t want anyone to contradict them, their whole world was a kite propped up by the hot air of their lies and they would deny or murder anything that came to let air out. They’d cover the whole fucking world, and the final fall would be the end of everything.Might already be too late, she thought. But Yora had been right: show them how they’re wrong, they hang you for it. You lose your head.
The voices of corrupt and spoiled empire seemed to drift across the wind. Voices, faces of men who changed what being ‘noble’ meant.They wrecked the system.They corrupted what people used to believe.Now, the wind began to shift. The voices lingered. Her imagination cleared. Snow would come at last.
Hayo came over to her and nodded, saying to her,Rest. They would sleep in the barn. Then, with a small, reassuring pat on her shoulder: “Don’t lose hope.”
Kai glanced at the blood-guard that had sworn to protect their prince, and the few Gensei retainers who had come to Yora’s house before they fled. Kaji Getoh, the brawler who’d served her uncle for years, was organizing them into a perimeter. Soldiers stamped and grumbled as they got to work, framed by moonlight at the edge of the trees.
The mirror prince, Nioh, tripped over a rut. “Who’d believe this. Imperial guards, coming to kill one of their own.”
“You declared against the child-emperor Seitoku,” Hayo said. “Which means you’ve declared against the chancellor who controls him. Hurry!”
His retinue was ready. A small group would stay behind to hold their escape here at the temple. Nioh himself had shed his bright courtier’s clothes, dressing in the linen of a servant instead. “Better they don’t know who you are,” Yora said. Kai watched, in silence, and when she sat on the side of the porch, taking it all in, she found her hands were shaking, too.
An hour later, they were on the move. Her aunt hauled her to her feet again, and soon they were galloping into the hinterlands, riding for ages over increasingly frost-wreathed country roads, further and further from civilization, into the mountainous maze above the farms on small trails specked with trees. The clouds were growing worse, and the snow had started to fall in drifts; abruptly, Kai realized the moonlight had been banished for some time.
Now the storm came. Wet ice at first, then fog, then wind cut through it all. They passed broken hillsides to an old, decrepit farmhouse somewhere near Yamano. Two burly guards shouldered their prince through the door, and when Kai followed them, the strange woody scent of hundreds of years of drying herbs and birdshit in the cowl hit her with the force of a gale.
The soldiers hunkered down, quilts were unrolled, and Kai found herself beside a child, who was shivering in the cold. They told her he was the young prince, Nioh’s son, Noyori. “Here.” She offered him her coat.
“Tell me a story?” the small boy asked.
She paused, with a spike of awkwardness; she never knew how to talk to children. “Do you know the story of Sora’in, the shaman-empress?”
He smiled, and nodded, and said, “Tell me.”
So she did.
“In the time-long-past, she became soramitsu, sky-seen, ruler of the Eight Islands of the World of Floating Reeds…”
We’ll make it, she told herself, later, when the boy had gone to sleep. We can choose our fate. I choose to rebel. Against the fear they want us to have, against obedience – to what they want to make us do, or become.
