She loosed another signal arrow. “Concentrate on the bridgehead. There’s a gap at the gate!”
The fog sluiced off. Snow fell across the eastern field, white and blinding. Yaeko knew there would be no warmth. Not today.
“If these clouds don’t leave, all the archers in Saikyo wouldn’t help,” Shosei called.
Come on, Seichi, she thought.Do what you’re good at. Charge them. Mow them down.The drums continued. Then Seichi’s reply arrow screamed a song and hit the far shore with a jarring cutoff.
“Loose!” she cried. “Let fly! They’re on the bridge!”
Seichi’s spearmen had begun their charge.
She released a shaft, pulled back, straining to see the action on the bridge. Her runner appeared beside her, a bundle of arrows in his hand. She turned, letting him reset her quiver – and stopped.
She heard screams.
“What!” Shosei pulled back, over-gripping his reins. “Yaeko!”
She saw it. Chaos on the bridge. Cries of fear. Men falling from great gaping holes in the center of the deck. She realized the planks had been struck, and as they charged across, Seichi’s men were plunging through gaps and loosened planks that collapsed the moment they stepped on them. They couldn’t have known. They couldn’t have seen from the shore, not until too late. Already Seichi’s first wave of horsemen had fallen into the river, and the Onji swallowed them. Horses screamed.
The rest were caught in a deadlock on the bridge. Unable to go forward from the missing planks, yet pressed in from the footmen coming from behind. Nowhere to go until the rearmost spears were pulled back, physically, by the men still on the bank.
And still the monks’ black feathers flew. A hundred men caught in the bottleneck. A hundred men who could do nothing but crouch and hope the arrows found another head.
Damn it, Yora, she thought.This was you.
“Lord!”
“Shosei!” The lord’s brother came back, breathless from his fight on the bridge, shouting what they already knew.It’s a death trap.
“We know!” Shosei shouted. “Get them back, Seichi!”
Yaeko brought her horse past him, pulling to the shore to see dozens of Keishi soldiers trapped on the narrow bridge, prevented from moving by the missing planks and walled in by the mass of soldiers from behind. The rain of Gensei arrows grew even worse and they could do nothing to protect themselves; the bridge stretched wide enough for five or six tostand abreast, but now there were too many people caught in the trap. They were being slaughtered. She heard the cries from here.
“Come about!” she called. “We’ll find another way to cross!”
Shosei stirred. “We should go around. Cross at Kawaoka.”
“We don’t have time,” Seichi shouted. “That’s half a day away, it’s too far!”
“The water’s passable,” she said.
Seichi scowled. “I told you, it’s too deep!”
Do something. Act.Even now, she heard her teacher’s voice in her ears. Pushing her, urging her to be decisive. He’d taught her well.Never hesitate. Strike with all your might.
Now he waited, somewhere on the shore. Her mentor. Her enemy. He had chosen his side. He’d betrayed her trust as much as he had betrayed the realm.
You’re the one who caused this, she thought,not me.Not me.
Yet Seichi’s question came again:Will you face him?
We never should have done this, she thought. Yora floated in her mind. She could hear his voice even now, his gentle guidance, his stern reproach. When he trained her, when the firebrand Seichi was young: a cub of a boy, shouting, singing, tumbling about. She’d always been the darker one, the one to grow up with the cloud of shame. He, Seichi, knew only how to rise. And now the little cub had grown into a cunning, dangerous man.
I’ve changed too, she thought.I’ve shed the curse of my family. I know what the burden of duty is, Seichi. And now you want me to kill him. Our teacher. Yora. He taught us how to fight, how to kill. How to stay alive.
And now?Hell, what is wrong with us?
Yaeko blinked away her tears.We all make choices.She saw it, clear as light.It’s wrong.Seichi’s soldiers were watching her. They were waiting to see what she would do.
