No.They want justice because you killed a man. You did it. You can’t escape that.
You can’t escape.
She slipped, twisting her ankle, cursed again. She could see the young guard’s face as the spear went in him. She could see how the fear, and the pain, had come. How he fell and his blood spilled on the dirt and polished wood, and it was because of her. A spirit cut off, because of her. Because of what she’d done.
She wiped tears from her eyes.
I thought I was making something of my life, she thought. That was what she wanted. But it all went wrong. It always went wrong.
I didn’t have a choice.
Dappled moonlight came through the trees. It was colder now, her clothes were nearly frozen. She shivered so badly she could barely walk. Her ankle was on fire, each step an agony.
“Not gonna get far on a broken foot,” she mumbled. But she took another step. And another. And the night wore on.
In the icy dark, she thought of how Sen held out a hand, how she’d refused it, how he’d looked at her with something in his eyes she couldn’t read. Their fight came back, sure as the echo on the water. The little dock, the deepening woods, ice above and below; the light of the moon.
She ran for a time, with no direction. She ran with nothing but the terror at her back. She fell again. Collapsed, gasping at the pain in her foot, and knew: there was no way out. She needed to get out of the freezing, sodden clothes.
She made her way to old Goro’s hut at the end of the village, by the barren hill. She wasn’t sure what she would do. Wake him? Ask for help? But when she found the yard, she saw a heavy cotton overcoat on his clothesline, a pair of pleated pants.
She moved on instinct. Pulled them from the line, saw a paper had been folded underneath the coat.
On it, someone had drawn the image of a bird.
He left these for me.
It was too much. She broke down, sobbing as she ran. Near the stream, she changed from her old clothes and hurled them down the hill into frozen dirt by the water. There the creek made a fork, and she took the higher path. The clothes might keep the hunters off her scent, but it wouldn’t be for long.
At the end, she found a small hollow cave in the side of the great mountain, and hid there, huddled in her stolen clothes. She couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened.
I’ll be cursed to hell. The gods will see what I’ve done…
“The souls keep track of your doings in life,” Koroku told her once, “and bring them to the gods for judgment.”
“The gods don’t judge,” Rui said.
Koroku chuckled. “Don’t they?”
Now, shivering in the darkened cave, only half protected from the snow, she couldn’t help but wonder:What if he was right?
Every spirit has two souls, the old monks said. The wild soul and the peaceful. And the heart of the mind that gives them balance. Will they tear us apart? Will they unite, in one spirit under heaven?
At the cave entrance, the north star shone dimly through a shattered, icy sky. The world fell still. She had no answers. And when she cried out, that night, freezing in torment, the gods were silent. No answers came. Perhaps they never would.This is what they made me, she told herself.I didn’t mean to do anything wrong…
The boy’s face floated before her. The boy she killed. The small, wet sound from his mouth; the spear sliding through his gut.
He came to her in the freezing night, when she tried to sleep.
He came to her in the morning, in the blood of the small bird she killed for food. “Forgive me,” she whispered. After she ate, she vomited it up again.
Who am I, she wondered, when the world says I’m one thing, but I feel I’m something else? Who will I become, if what the world makes of me is not what I want to be?
It’s too late, she realized.I did it. I killed that boy. I didn’t mean to, but I did. And that will never go away.
This is who I am.These tears, these marks on my spirit. This injured leg. I can’t change the past. But I can change what I do now, I can still be good in the future, can’t I?
What if they won’t let me?
