Jobo said, “The Hososhi sees everything, but our futures are not a river flowing in time, rushing directly to one destination. They are like pages in a book, among a vast uncountable library of books. Your futures are there: you may choose one. Or not. You may end up in a different book altogether. The pages are of an infinity of paths that we may take. Hososhi sees all, so yes, they saw the future of what you would do. They also saw the countless other futures, in which you did not. In which you had not survived as a child. In which you had gone left, instead of right. They are all real. They are all equal. You only happen to be living in this one.”
“What good is seeing the future if you don’t know it’ll come?”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Have you learned anything I’ve tried to teach?”
“If I could see the future, I would want to be able to predict what would happen.” Her head was pounding. “So I could stop it.”
“Who are we to know the minds of the gods? How do you know theywantto stop it?”
“Why would they not want to stop it?”
“Who are we to know. I’ll bring you some herbs tonight, help clear your head. In the meantime, you must rest.”
“I’m not tired,” she began.
“Rest.” When she lay back on the blanket, her eyes had already started to close.
Where do we go from here?
Above, the mountains cast shadows over everything, a thick, black blanket that muted the colors of the valley, made the trees so much darker in the dark. Bitterly cold. She shivered, looking out over the field and the narrow valley between the peaks, and found her teacher sitting with his back to the fires, staring at the clouded sky.
“They want me to kill her,” Rui said. “The demon…”
“Any who strike such a demon will bear the injury themselves,” Jobo muttered. “As you have seen. It is impossible.”
Rui said, “You know who she is.”
He wiped his eyes. “Whatever she is, whatever is left of her spirit… it’s twisted under the weight of evil. That’s what onryo are. Spirits, notat rest. Whoever she is, she would not want to keep living in this way, serving as a medium for the demon. We must help her. We must set her free.”
He held the spear before him. “This is a sacred object. It was made with the power of the ancients in days long past. This is how you kill a monster.”
“Teacher,” she asked. “How do we know it’ll work?”
He was a stone. “We don’t.”
Jobo stayed up long into the night, murmuring his prayers over the sacred weapon, polishing and sharpening the edge, the dark pattern on the blade like ocean waves.
Alone, Rui watched the stars and shifting clouds and thought of her god – her curse – again. She wondered how fate had led her here.I had such anger in me, she thought. She could still feel it, bubbling away. It makes you hate so much, she thought. Hate. Hate what you want, what you don’t have. What you used to have, and do no more.
It’s who you are, the god had seemed to say.
Once the fury gets you, she thought, there’s no choice. The fury gets you; you can’t turn back, you can only turn into one of them. A creature of rage. Your heart changes. The black blood, like tar, covers you, all of you, consumes you and makes you kill until it’s eaten you away.
She’d had another vision in the moments before her fever broke. She saw the three wells. She saw Sen, and another, shadowy figure with the Gensei crest on her robes. They stood together on a bridge, facing fire on one side, and on the other, the haunting demon, the woman in white.
The wells. Rui jerked awake, on the cold earth outside her tent, near a dead fire and the full red blaze of sunset, and she knew.
She slipped away from the tents at sundown, not knowing where she would go, or how. Her mind would not stay still. Around her, silence. Evening had fallen. What little light remained was painted gold and streaked with watery blue, turning darker as the gold burned out. There were voices at the edges of the world. She heard them in the sound of the wind, and the darkness.
Night fell quietly over the uplands above the Kanden plains, and she’d not gone fifty paces beyond the last outwatcher’s pit when the trees shivered, the wind grew loud, and long shadows cast themselves about, wicked and bewildering as spirits. She hurried to the edge of the highroad, but was stopped when small drifts of snow began to fall, light as clouds. Shewas filled with a rush of indecision. She was on the edge, as if a waterfall had opened up before her, the current at her back, and she looked down but couldn’t see where it would go.
A shadow passed.What was that?She turned, moving to the line of trees.
Nothing. Ghosts in the evening, the small-spirits come again. Tricks, uncertainties, that the god was playing in her mind. There. She heard it now. Something solid, real; a horse, a rider, in the trees.
He came not on the road but through the brambles, on a high mount black as night, and through the trees but a breath away, hooded, cloaked against the cold of the mountainside, two blades at his hip. A kijin.
She shouted in alarm, drawing her sword: “Halt!”
