Good, Yaeko had thought.
“My little rose,” her mother always said. “Yaeko, you are a rose among the peonies… May you never have to use your thorns…”
But I will, she thought.Mother, you always wanted me to.
The last time she saw her mother, the old nun was a shell of the woman she had been, skin and bones and failing body that was tearing itself apart in an effort to survive.
The last time she saw her mother, the old nun had told her to remember her duty.
Yaeko had to wait in the hall outside her mother’s room for almost an hour before the doctors let her in. The monks were doing their best, but the disease in her mother’s chest was beyond their powers to heal.My mother, so pious,cared more about those holy books than she ever cared about me.
No, she thought.She’s not my mother anymore. She’s a dying nun who wants me to forgive her. She’s some woman I don’t know.
I owe her nothing.
The doors slid open. She was finally allowed inside. The woman lay, frail and papery beside a dying fire. The shutters were closed, casting the place into a cave of death already, fumes so thick with incense Yaeko could hardly see, and as she sat, the woman who was her mother tried to rise to meet her; pale, yellowed, with a shaved head and an ascetic look, bones jutting through her skin. She huffed and groaned with pain in trying just to breathe.
“Yaeko,” the woman said. “Yaeko.”
“Nun Shizen,” Yaeko said coolly, using her mother’s religious name. She hadn’t spoken her mother’s real name in years. “What do you…”
She faltered. Somehow a part of her still wanted to repair this, to recover an element of the love. Somehow, a part of her still wanted to say,Mama, help.
“How’re you feeling?”
“I’m dying,” the woman spat. “Don’t try to ease me up, I know it. Everybody knows but no one says it to my face.”
Yaeko bit her tongue. “As you say.”
At the Hermitage, her mother had visited only once, in summer, when Yae was fourteen. “You’re growing up among them,” her mother had said. “You have a special place in Seikiyo’s heart. His compassion, his soft heart, it will be his undoing. He promised to raise you, he placed you in his family’s schools. Use that. Grow up with them, be as a rose among the peonies… and when he has your trust, when the time is right, you will know what to do.”
I was fourteen, Yaeko thought.A child. You knew how to manipulate me even then.
Her mother, helped by the old monks, had made her sign a blood-pact before an image of their tutelary gods from Sentaiji, the island of shoals. A pact they wrote in ink and signed with blood, then burned; they drank the ashes in rice-wine to seal it before the gods.
Yaeko still remembered the bitter taste, the coating on her throat as they made her recite the words: “I will redeem the great shame of our family. I will do what I must, to end this reign, and end the corruption of the capital. I will stop Keishi oppression once and for all…”
Then her mother gave her a dagger that belonged to her father. Yaeko had the blade even now, on a small stand by her bedside. She looked at it now and then, polished the blade to remember where she’d come from.
“What will you become?” her mother asked, that day, when they burned the pact and swallowed ash-in-water before the gods. “My wild rose, what will you become?”
“Worthy of our family,” she’d said. “I’ll do my duty.”
But that meant nothing now. She’d been a child, coerced by the very people who were supposed to keep her safe. Instead, they sent her into the heart of their enemies and expected her to finish what they started. That was before Seikiyo showed her what a loving parent really was; his enemies called him a tyrant, but in truth, everything he did, he did for his family, to keep them safe.
The last time Yaeko had seen her mother, the dying woman begged her to remember the promise, begged her to remember what she’d said, the young child who had drunk the seal of ash and been sworn to her family’s vendetta to the grave. Who said,I’ll do my duty.
“Do it now,” her mother gasped.
Yaeko recoiled. “Never.”
“You must.”
Yaeko tore away.You want to know the truth?she wanted to scream into her mother’s face.I keep that knife,the one you gave me all those years ago, I keep it not to remember what you wanted me to do, but to remember who you were. What all of you were. Who would use a fourteen-year-old as a weapon for your lost cause. Who would have me end my life – for you – rather than begin one of my own. I keep it to remember what you were, and what I will never be.
“I won’t become like you,” she said, bitter with rage.
“I am your mother! This is yourfamily!”
