I can stand against it; I have my choice; I choose; I am alive.
When she woke, Noyori was tugging at her sleeve. The house lay silent. All within had drifted to a fitful sleep, and she stretched, trying to pull the ache out of her head, out of her eyes. Outside lay the thin, sick gray of morning, dim.
“I have to pee,” he said.
All was quiet. The moon shone down; a wet, mysterious kind of predawn light, blue fog giving way to hints of morning over snow. Mist coated itself across the lawn, heavier than air, and the sky glowed like ice. It made everything feel contained somehow, caught in a jar. Somewhere far away, the sun was beginning to rise.
Kai stood and shivered while the boy peed into the bushes. Noyori looked younger now, in his sleeping-clothes and bleary eyes, his pelvis stuck forward, shirt tucked beneath his chin.He’s just a child.
As she waited, she thought she heard something stir behind the fence. Perhaps the wind. Trees rustled.The cold is growing deeper now, she thought,deeper than ice; the kind you feel in your bones.
Then she started, struck by a sudden thought.Where are the guards?She looked back to the road – Nioh’s homeguard had set up watch there. They should be looking out. But she saw no one, and when she returned, blinking with unease, to the treeline, she saw the boy had vanished.
“Noyori?”
Quiet loomed around her. The boy was nowhere to be seen. Instead, she heard his voice, followed it to the edge of the trees. A small path had been carved there, lined with polished river-stones. They clicked underfoot as she walked.
Finally she heard him again, a thin voice, asking: “What is your name?” Kai clutched her cloak around her, about to call again when she heard another voice, high and even younger than the boy’s.
“I’m a princess…” The new voice said. It was light and thin, and unmistakably a girl’s. “Just like you’re a prince…”
With the chill and the deepening mist, the trees all around, the voices seemed to float, fleeting as a breeze. Kai stepped closer. The voices seemed to come out of the woods themselves.
“My father died too…”
“My father isn’t dead.”
“Oh, that’s right. Sometimes, I get confused… Sometimes. I want you to meet someone.”
There: movement in the palest light. Noyori was standing at the edge ofa gnarled oak, one hand out, as if in greeting. But he was alone. Wherever the second voice had come from, it was gone.
“Noyori. What’re you doing?”
He gave a start, blinking, and glanced about. “Where…”
Hesitant now, he saw the trail between the trees lay empty, and when she came to him, reaching for his hand, he felt cold, clammy as the dead. “We should get back.”
Dawn crept through the trees. They wound their way back to the cabin, and in the brightest edge of morning, Kai couldn’t help but feel that something else had gone amiss. The air seemed too thin, too quiet. The birds called; the water dripped. The gate was open.
Kai stopped. The two guards lay bloodied on the trailhead, run through by spears. Instantly she tensed. “Noyori, get behind me.” She pulled him back, just in time: arrows whistled out of the foliage, striking the dirt where they had been.
Kai gripped the boy’s hand, shouting now. “Uncle! Help!”
She needn’t have tried. When she got to the main road and the clearing before the little house, she realized they were too late. It was surrounded. Nioh, Yora, and the others were ringed by Keishi warriors on horseback and a dozen armored guards. Spears and longblades glinted in the morning light.
So this is how it ends.
Seichi the firebrand was canting about on his horse. “Kai Gekko’in,” he said, when he saw her, a wicked grin spreading across his face. “The lord chancellor has requested your presence. He says for you to come with us at once.”
Yora stepped forward. “That’s not going to happen.”
“Stand back,” Seichi said. “Away from the horses.”
Kai pulled the boy close. Seichi, the chancellor’s youngest and most bloodthirsty son, brought his horse toward her. “Gekko’in. You will come with us now.”
“Why?”
“You are to be admitted to his army, girl. I am under orders of our lord chancellor to bring you back to the palace.”
