They were your friends, he thought. How had it come to this?
In the fieldridge town that night, there stood Hara Akugenta before him, the Tiger of Omori; and Genma Sanbatsu of the Shelterwood, Onoe Kizan, the Blackcloak, and brothers Tokeishi Nobuhira and Nagahira. But they were wearing their helms and iron masks, and with the darkness and the smoke trails roiling all about them, he could not tell the men apart.
The flames had died. There was no sound, save the pounding of his heart in his ears, the sudden shifting of a snowdrift in the wind. He felt the sword in his hand and feared the blood on it that would come. The five men spread before him. They were men of the capital, men he had dined with and trained with for fifteen years, men he laughed and rode with in his youth. Now they were men who had attacked his family. Now, they were men he would kill.
The first came at him with a longsword gleaming in his hands. Another sword flashed sharply in the moonlight. The clouds had gone. The smoke remained in the air and he could taste it, taste it as he tasted the blood when the first man struck and smashed an elbow in his face when he parried the blow.
“Why are you doing this?” he’d cried. “What are you doing?”
The men didn’t speak, didn’t answer. They came at him together, five men with swords, and even as the second struck, Yora called,Stop!again. Even as he cut down, once, twice, and the first two of the men were dead.
Even as the third came up behind him. Yora cut backwards, stringing his own sword into the man’s waist and turning so they both fell hard into the mud. Even as the fourth stepped back, younger, suddenly, utterly afraid. It was Genma, he realized. Just a boy. But the blood was in him now. Yora knew he couldn’t stop.
He found himself in another place, a different place, deeper and more silent, where his body moved far quicker than his mind. He cut down against the backside of the young one’s swing, sending him off balancewith his sword pushed like lightning into the earth. Then he was on him, one soft breath and his own blade opened the side of the man’s neck. Hara Akugenta, the last of them, had charged, but slowly, hampered by Genma’s fall, and now Yora met him, spinning upward, spinning close enough to catch the last of the man’s blade inside his own, just as he had caught the other’s, and when Akugenta came back, shoving with his sword, Yora let him, and he used the momentum to pull around onto the opposite, unbalanced side – the side that was now open, where the man’s neck and heart were now exposed.
Then it was done.
In his mind’s eye, Yora still felt the heat and cold, still smelled the soot, the iron stench in the air; in his mind, he saw the burned ruins of the town again. But now there was a silence.
“There was no one there,” he said at last, turning to Seikiyo once again. “The town was burned to ash.”
He’d crossed then through the ruins of the village, dead and dying all around him. At the crossroads up above, his retainer, Kyohara-no-Shigeki Reizan, had come and was calling his name.Yora. Yora.
“But you found her,” Seikiyo said.
“… I did.”
His brother’s wife, Sumiko, of the Kyohara line, dead of a spear wound through her heart.
But that was not all that Yora found, in that night of flames, that night of howling wind. He heard a sound, coming from the cellar. And there, amid the chaos of the house, amid the bodies of his family’s servants and retainers who had tried to shield his brother’s wife, tried to help and get her out, he saw them. Two children, hiding in an empty storeroom for roots and grain.
They were tiny: a boy and girl, holding hands, no more than three or four years old. Shaking in fright, they had remained, miraculously, alive, while their families were murdered in the other room.
He’d leaped forward, calling his nephew’s name. “Sen,” he whispered. “It’s me, it’s Yora,it’s your uncle.”
Only then did the boy begin to cry. Huge eyes welling with tears, Sumiko’s son clung to the other child, a lowborn girl maybe a year older than he.The child of the house, thought Yora.The servants had a daughter…
She had a small jade bead around her neck, just as Sen did, just as every Gensei child was given at their birth. But she was just a no’in. It must have been a gift from the clan, from the mother who now lay dead…
“Gods help them,” Yora said, and took them in his arms, and raced into the dark.
He never told a soul what he had seen that night. To close his eyes was to, again, see flame. He never spoke of when his brother died.
“Is there a chance the boy survived?” Seikiyo asked him now. “From what you saw…”
“I did not find a body,” Yora said. The same line, the same words he’d told them, years ago…
“That is not what I have asked you.” Seikiyo was watching him.
Yora took his time. The boy would be nearly twenty now, and the no’in girl too. If the Keishi were to find them –eitherof them…
But no. He could not bear to think of it. Of course there had been rumors that the boy survived. But if the Keishi were to get their hands on him, if they were to bring him, or the no’in girl, back to the court, and find out what he’d done… The consequences would throw the nation into war. It would be the ruin of them all. He answered as carefully as he could.
“I advise you not to listen to these rumors, lord,” he said. “Without proof…”
“So, the boy is dead?”
Silent, Yora gave a nod.
