Tsuna, flung sideways in her saddle, veered about on the crazed animal before she could recover her balance. The arrow had grazed the edge of her helmet and buried itself in the metal at her temple. Kai caught a flash of her face, grimacing with anger, pain, and fear, as blood wept down across her eyes. She shouted. Somehow she raced back to her father, to the open courtyard, but as Kai watched with horror, a Keishi horseman struck out and grappled with her, whipping their horses about and trying to send her to the dirt. Tsuna veered away, horse staggering and stumbling as it tried to escape. Finally she fell from the saddle; her horse skittered off, neighing in terror. She hit the raw earth and lay still for a moment, then rolled over, groaning, and tried to rise. By then the soldiers were swarming around her. The blows came from all sides. A dozen wounds. A dozen deaths. She roared, seized the closest man and struck off his head with such desperate force that they both tumbled back to the ground.
Somehow Tsuna rose again, swayed there for a dazed, bloodcurdling moment, before the mounted soldiers were on her once more. She cut out with her sword. She fell.
At the main temple steps, Yora pulled himself up, a pincushion with arrows speared into his back and shoulders. He hacked at the men who were trying to kill his wounded daughter, shouting at her, get away, get away.
Bloodied, her breath short and coming in fast gasps, Kai found herself moving back to save them – to help them – do something, anything shecould – when Myorin’s hand closed around her wrist. “No,” Myorin said, dark and terrible. Just, “No.”
She pulled Kai away, and with a cry, Kai let her.
Yora, surrounded now, ducked beneath a spearpoint and cut another down. Tsuna lay in a widening pool of crimson below the temple steps. He called to her. He cried out. He fell to his knees; he cradled his daughter’s head, arrows jutting from his sides.
He rose. He hewed a man down; he gored him through the throat. He was stuck from behind and never noticed. He spun, his sword a flaming star. He cut a ring around her body, Tsuna, lying like in peace. Her hands were open. She was facing the sky. A cry of victory came from somewhere in the rooftops; Yora struck again, and Kai could hear his bellowing from here. Myorin gripped her wrist, urging her on from their hiding place. The horses were terrified; Kai twisted, turned, saw Yora charge again, a screaming mass of spearmen lunging, jabbing at him with their needle points. “We have to go. We have to help him—”
Myorin held her back. “It’s too late!”
“I’ll kill them!” Kai screamed. “I’ll kill them all!”
Myorin pulled her away, their horses side by side. Face set, feeling nothing. Not yet. Not yet.
“Yora!” Kai cried again.
“It’s too late.” Myorin, rough as coal, forced Kai violently on, and said nothing more.
Too late.
His last order had been to get to safety. To save themselves.
Now he stood near the body of his daughter, Tsuna, skin pale, almost white from lack of blood.
He was alone on the steps.
Keishi soldiers surrounded him.
A barrage of arrows rained down.
He tried to run.
The arrows fell.
He was hit. The leg. He buckled.
“No!” Kai cried again. “No.”
She heard a final shout in the insanity. Yora was standing before the temple, with one hand on the arrow-wound at his leg, the other on his sword, as Keishi charged up the steps around him.
“Go,” he’d said. “Live.”
And he turned. A great cry of terror and challenge and sacrifice.
The Keishi came upon him, ten, twenty on the steps.
Myorin grabbed her reins. But Kai had frozen. Arrows glanced about them, invisible barbs in the gray, but she was barely aware. Myorin wheeled around, trying to get them to move.
But Kai was still. She could only watch.
Watch, as Yora raised his sword, the famous Nagareboshi, the Falling Star. It glinted with steel so dark it seemed blue.
Watch, as he cut them down.
