The god was right. To save one life was to save the lives of all the world. There were lives she still could save. She didn’t know how. She didn’t know what would happen. But she could choose, she could try. She would. She had to.
Children once laughed, and danced about her, wanting stories. I’m only young, she’d say. I’ve told all the ones I know.
We’ll have to make our own.
Late winter, melting snow and muck. Two lonely birds carved an arc through raw granite-colored sky, and she walked among a group of civilians, in the fields outside Kiseda. Ahead, the army was moving out.
“Rui!”
She turned to find Atsu skipping through the crowd toward her. “Praise the Awakened,” Atsu gasped. “You’re still alive. I can’t believe it.”
Rui fought the tightness in her throat. “Atsu… Me neither…”
She’d spent three days with the farmer and her husband, three days of healing and trying to forget. The god came back to her, in dreams. A tangle of wood and gnarled roots:Bird-child, they said.You did well.
She’d saved the spear. Removed the mounting, extracted the long blade from its hilt. The tang, almost the length of the blade, was undamaged. She wrapped it in smooth silk, stored it in a long cloth pouch across her back.
She’d followed the road south, then east, along the foothills, toward Kiseda, and the Tose road.
Now she met Atsu, her light embrace. “I’m glad you made it too.”
Atsu took her hand, led her back toward the camp. “Myorin will be overjoyed. She never wanted to believe that you were…”
“Where is she?”
“With the Hoshiakari. He’s in the command now,” said Atsu. “The red guard…”
Rui slowed. On the other side of the highway, Gensei generals were riding forth.
And there he was.
“Look.”
Tall and terrible on their warhorses, they rode. Armor of every color, the most beautiful bows. A woman rode at Sen’s side, regal and pure, head high near the Gensei crest, a crescent fan of bamboo leaves under a gentian flower. Rui had met that woman, the night before the battle. Kai Gekko’in, Sen’s sister. Rui had thought she seemed so sad.
But she looked a different person now. Brave, impenetrable.
She looked like royalty.
Sen, in red armor, had white flowers in his hands.
Beside them rode the Lord Tokuon, stern as ever, and a giant of a man with an axe on his flag. Other warriors in the group, the circle-of-dragonscales crest of the Zusho clan fluttering from a banner. They would march to Amayari, the family’s ancestral land.
He’s with his people now.
Rui stopped, surrounded by the clamor of the crowd. She’d never felt so alone. She shouted, “Sen! Over here!” but the tumult grew too great, and Rui was but one voice in a sea. Sen looked back for only a moment.
“Hoshiakari!” someone called. “You’ll be left behind! Come on!” Finally, Sen turned his horse and left. Maybe he hadn’t seen her at all.
Rui fell back, letting the crowd pass over like a tide, and made her way to a plum tree by the side of the road. There weren’t as many people here; the air blew, chill, and day-old snow lay heavy on the fields. Everything was moving now, the columns heading out. Myorin and Atsu were somewhere with the rest of the Jibashiri. They were calling for her.
Surrounded by the army and the war erupting all around them, Rui thought of the night that they were found, clutching each other’s hands. She felt the snow on her cheeks and the bite of the wind flowing westward down the valley, her skin tingling with every sensation. Breath misted before her. Sharp, icy sheets of daylight lanced through clouds.You’re no one, they had said.
But I am someone. I’m here.
The world takes so many things, Sen had told her once,it’s easy to forget what it gives.Rui wanted to find that girl now, that child who’d hidden in an empty barrel, and show her what it gives. Wanted to tell her:This is your life. Your life. Yours.You do not end in tragedy, Rui. You find a way. There are things that go too far, there are things you can never come back from, but you can keep going. You can say: to hell with it, I won’t give up. I’m still here. And you can find someone, you can find people whom you love, and who love you, who will always love you.
Somewhere out there, the sun was rising. But for a moment, the sky grew dark, and Rui felt a shimmer of trepidation once again. She looked up, seeing what no one else could see, the shattering of the boundary between the worlds. Everything was changing. The funnel-wind of the storm and the fires and the air had mixed together, but beyond them, something opened.I am held, she thought.I am a chrysalis, I am going deeper, falling into something hot and cold and improbable as love.A flurry. Crystal haze.
