The second thought came unbidden:
I hope to the gods that I do.
Iyo’s broken sword lay in its scabbard at his waist. He removed the helm he’d donned for the ceremony, stepped through the silken screens.
Before him waited his family.
Kai, sitting near Tokuon and his diviner amid the quiet bustle of large men moving to and fro, opening maps; the shift of armor; the shuffle of their steps. She gazed at Sen. He gave a nod.
The clansmen raised a flag behind them.
Theirflag. The gentian flowers, the fan of leaves.
Our father would be proud.
He stepped forward, bowed on his knees. Rose just long enough to look into his sister’s eyes, searching for that person he had met in the medical tent, but whatever it had been, it had vanished. In its place, all that remained was theheir. Kai had changed, or the world changed around her, it made no difference. She was a woman at war.
Eight years older than him, Kai looked like she’d emerged from myth: imperious, impenetrable. When the page announced him, Sen bowed again, hands on the dirt, and the ceremony began.
“Welcome, Sen Hoshiakari,” the Shiden, Kanesuke, said. “Will you receive the service of your lord?”
“I will.”
With his helmet under one arm and his sword grasped at his waist, Sen stepped into the clearing and kneeled before his sister in the red-and-white. One knee on the ground, one palm touching earth.
“Whom do you serve?” the Shiden asked.
“Amayari-no-Kami Gensei-no-Toryo Satsuki Kaihime Gekko’in,” Sen said in full formality. “Heir to Katsusada Asa’in, successor to Yora Shijin as head of the Amayari-Gensei, and all its houses.”
He lowered his head. The air hung still. The ground pressed cold and wet under his hand. He felt the damp seeping through the armor and the bloused trousers at his knee. Above them, somewhere, a bird called.
Tokuon stood at Kai’s right hand. The ancient Hassho Tayu muttered prayers and spread salt into the air, and it was done.
Kai stood. Her red-and-white robes billowed lightly in the breeze; the birds fell silent. No sound, save the distant hissing of the trees. Sen caught a glimpse of a giant pine, dark green and spindly, swaying in the lonely wind. The sky beyond it, gray, and cold as steel.
As was she.
“Rise,” Kai said. “Rise, brother. Come beside me. We will have time to get to know each other. But for now, you have my thanks. We will need each other. This war is just beginning, the outcome is far from certain, but we have the blood of the old Gensei in our veins, we have the god of war on our side, and their daughter, who is our patron. We have the east, brothers and sisters in the valleys who have long suffered under the weight of Keishi rule, and now the whole of the land, every country within it, knows how they’ve overstepped their bounds.
“This is a new world,” she announced. “Free from the bureaucracy and the idleness of the court. Free from the corruption of the royal city. The emperor has been reduced to a puppet. We fight to free him! Hisgrandfather, the retired-emperor, has been put under house arrest. He needs our help. The capital needs our help. All the countries of the Kanden, and the highlands to the west, and the islands to the north above the inner sea. They need our help.
“This war,” Kai said to her assembled clan, “is not about conquest or dominion. It is about freeing our lands from the system that has grown fat off our labor and pushed us to the shadows. We will do what our father could not, but his dream will live within us. We will save our empire. And we will bring peace.”
“Peace!” the warriors shouted. “Peace!” They raised their swords and bellowed the word with such violence it sounded to Sen like a cruel blow.
“Peace!”
Sen drew his own broken sword, remembering his stewardmother’s words.You know who you really are, Sen, she’d told him once.You know who you are. Don’t lose it.
I won’t, he thought.I won’t.
The warriors shouted to the sky, loud enough to echo through the plains like thunder, shouting to the dead and the damned that would meet them.
Peace! Peace! Peace!
This.
This land. This earth. This is the sky-seen world of the emperor, these shattered islands in the sea. They defend us from the storms, the Ten’in, for they are descended from the great god Hirume, descended from Sora’in, who slew the serpent and banished all the gods. Descended from the land itself.
