“Even with the support of our other temples, we’ll have perhaps athousand fighters,” the wizened abbot said. The prayer hall loomed around them. “The Keishi will raise ten times our number.”
Several monks murmured in agreement. Some wanted to flee south, to the old city of Naruji. There, many had answered Nioh’s call to arms. Some wanted to chance it on the field.
Yet Akiyo waited east of the river. Others argued:They will catch us from behind.
“Then we’ll have to be faster than them,” said Yora. “And if they do, we’ll stand our ground until Tokuon can get to us.”
The abbot asked: “Will he come?”
Yora nodded. “He’s on the east road, gathering the armies outside Kiseda. He’s wanted this for years. He’ll come.”
Nioh sighed; he had no good hope for the coming days. “We’ll have to find a way to survive until he does.”
“Getoh will find them,” Yora said. “He’ll deliver our message. They’ll come.”
On the second morning, word came from the capital: the Keishi demanded surrender of the rebel prince and his followers. Refusal would be met with death. “Kill aprince,” Nioh fumed. “Kill a member of the imperial family – that is whathewants to do.” His son, Noyori, pale and trying not to tremble, watched from a nook by the wall.
Keishi forces demanded that the Onji temples cast out the fleeing prince, but the river monks were no friends of Ryaku’in – nor the Keishi – and refused. The messenger fled under a barrage of arrows.
Nioh sent his fastest riders to the temples of Naruji, the Window Retreat and the Temple of Equilibrium, asking for help. They had long been loyal to the mirror prince and his father, and, like the Mountain, had armed fighters of their own.
The messenger did not return. Day turned to night. Kai’s fear – and the strange pressure in her chest – rose to aching. She had a vivid image of the moment Hayo fell, pierced by arrows. The smell of blood mixed with snow. She turned to the bushes and retched.
Betrayer. Outcast. Exile.That’s what I will always be, in their eyes. The spawn of a traitor, never to be trusted. Never to be given what is mine.
Now, she thought, the flutes and lyres have gone quiet. Now the festivals will go unplanned. Spring will come, and with it, flowers, the bloom of fleeting life, but none will be there to see them. Instead of music, you’ll hear the thrumming of horses on hard dirt. Instead of painting, you’ll see the vibrancy of blood. The bells would ring not for the coming of another year, but in mourning, for the dead.
The Temple of the Three Wells and the Temple of the Far Earth lay on either side of the bridge at the mouth of the Onji River, less than a day from where it met the Great Awa Sea. The Three Wells sat on the west side, closer to the capital; the Far Earth on the east, with its wide buildings, prayer halls, gardens, and dormitories.
Once the fighting started, Yora planned to withdraw across the bridge and make a stand at the Far Earth, with its walled enclosure and its golden hall, surrounded by an artificial lake like a moat. He planned to hold the river as long as possible to give the prince time to escape, fleeing through the village, and from there, to a foothill road that led east, toward the river tributaries.
The bridge made a natural bottleneck; that was their only advantage.
“We pull the planks,” he said. “Strip the middle, so none can pass. It’s the only way we’ll hold out long enough for Tokuon to come.
“From now on, we stay in groups. Nioh and his bannermen. Getoh’s household, who joined us at the prince’s estate, and the river monks will divide themselves into units. No one walks alone.”
She found Yora later, in the temple courtyard, chopping wood for the barricades in bound, pleated pants and a simple dye-checked shirt like a farmer. Sitting beside him, breath misting in the chill, she listened to thechock, chocksound of the axe, that seemed to bring him focus. Wind brought fog in from the banks as he worked.
“You asked me, once,” he said after a moment, “what really happened with your father and Seikiyo. You asked what changed things, what we did.”
“You never answered.”
Yora paused the methodical thump of his axe. “How old were you then? Nine? Ten?”
“I was ten,” she said.
“She was not even your age, then.”
“Who?”
“The princess.”
He moved carefully, wiping the blade clean. “When your father led the attack on the demon-emperor Sutoh, when they burned the White River House and Goshira took the throne… he didn’t know. Nobody could have known.” He held the axe before him, angling it to see the light flare like a tiny sun along the edge.
“The demon-emperor had fled,” he said, “but the house wasn’t empty. His child, and her caretakers, were still there. When the River Houseburned, Sutoh’s daughter was trapped with her servants, in the flames. No one knew she was there. But she was.”
He gazed up at the afternoon sky, icy and cold. “Your father killed the demon-emperor’s daughter when he burned their house. And for that, he thought he’d been cursed. Maybe the curse came true. He told me, once, he thought that was why Sutoh went mad. The death of his daughter… He told me it was why the demon-emperor cursed this land…”
