“Don’t blame your friend,” Lady Iyo said. “For the world she was born in.”
Sen had found his stewardmother on the veranda, her father’s sword in hand, its ceremonial wrappings lined with gold.
“That’s exactly something a lord would say,” he said. “Why does she hate them so much?”
“They come from the capital. The nobility know nothing of life out here. They look down on the rest of us while they drink their wine and write their pretty poems. My people used to say there was a disease growing, up there, in the capital. A disease of wealth. My family could never trust them.”
“That’s why they say you’re wild,” Sen said. “‘Raised by wolves.’”
Iyo gave a subtle smile. “Maybe I was.” She let that lighten the air for a moment, then sighed. “There’s a reason they call our lands ‘beyond-the-mountains’. On the northern coast the winters are long, and after so many years of war they feel they still don’t totally control us. They remember we’re not subject to the court far away.”
She gestured out over the land, wild, windswept. “I have both in me, Sen. Your family’s imperial blood, the blood that carved a peace between our world and the gods’, and the blood of Iteki, who sided with the gods, and lost.”
Iyo’s family had come from a long line of Iteki rulers, who lived in the northeast for centuries before the empire came. But inevitably, come the empire did, and soon the lands beyond the mountains became the frontier of annexation and conquest.Join us, the empire said. We of the civilized world. Join our sacred Ten’in under the sun.
Sen’s ancestors, two hundred years before, had been generals in those campaigns.
“Your hair’s getting gray,” he said, poking fun the way he used to, when he was a child.
“I’m not so young anymore. Weight still grows upon one’s shoulders. The muscles get weak.”
“Train more,” he said. Iyo laughed.
“I should.”
She indicated the blade in her hands. “My father’s sword. They say, such a great horseman and archer was he, he was never forced to draw it. The sword is clean.
“I know what you would ask,” she said, looking east, to the Kitano River. “You want what is yours. Your birthright. And that is your right. Take it.”
Sen accepted his stewardmother’s sword with trembling hands. Below them lay the city itself, the great hope of the east, and the seat of Iyo’s domain. To the west, winding hills, the Blue Woods; to the south, rice paddies, criss-crossed with smaller ridge-roads and outvillages. A pair of ducks lazed around the pond at Kitaiji temple. A songbird twittered in a tree.
“You smell that?” Iyo asked, after a moment. “The trees. They smell better this time of year. It’s the changing of the wind.” With a flurry, the ducks took off, sending an explosion of crystal water into the air. “Reminds me how old I have become.”
They watched in silence for a heartbeat. “You’re unhappy,” said Sen.
“Do you know why I am allowed to be lord of the eastern provinces?” Iyo asked, carefully. “Do you know why we have fortresses here, why I have lands at all? I’m here because my grandfather turned against them, and sided with the armies of the Ten’in, rather than be killed. We’re trapped in these memories of violence. We cannot forget that. We have stability now, but one day they will want me to lead their army through the east again, across the narrow straits to the islands of the north, and then what will we be? We must not forget the blood and the bones we stand upon – you as much as me. If we do, there will never be an end to it. If we do, whatever hopes we have for a better future will be lost. The truth is, it was my grandfather who decided he’d had enough. Decided it was better to serve than to die. So he served.”
She looked out over the valley. “My grandfather killed people for the emperors, and was rewarded for it. With land, a manor, a fortress… and an army, and a name. That is how we became the Northern Hara clan. Not by blood or marriage. By imperial decree. A contract. I have more Iteki blood in me than Hara. And yet, I have their name, as do my sons, and their sons and daughters will as well. Because we belong to them.”
Sen knew the stories. When his ancestor Rai Gekko’in was sent to subdue the barbarians, a terrible war began. It lasted ten years and changed the shape of the region for ever. The native Iteki were too mobilefor the emperor’s conscript army; raiding on their fast horses and disappearing into the Blue Woods, they cut off shipping lines through the inner sea. For years, Rai fought a losing battle, until finally she made a treaty with Lady Iyo’s family, an Iteki house open to finding alternatives to war. The new coalition attacked Iteki strongholds in Kurogane and Unasaka, diverting the water supply and setting the wooden fortresses ablaze. The remaining houses soon surrendered. Rai Gekko’in and her daughter, Makoto Ie’in, were hailed as heroes, Sen knew. Makoto was called the daughter of the god of war, given the investiture and revered as a deity in her own right as the decades turned.
“Our peace,” Iyo continued, “is born from the bloodshed of the past. This is how it always is. But now we have something that resembles stability. Now, we have something that resembles independence, so who’s to say it wasn’t good? There is good and evil both. But we must keep hold of it. We’re the only Iteki ever to have been allowed to rule our own lands: I won’t give that up. The capital has been begging at my gates. They want to promote me in the ranks of their court. Give me some symbolic title as a means of bribing my support. The more I reject them, the more they see me as a rebel, the more I remember I’ve harbored the son of their enemy all these years.
“The truth is,” she said, “they’ll call us to join the march and serve again. And if we don’t, the march will lead to our homes, and when they leave, they will leave nothing but ash.”
A light rain had begun to fall across the hillside, the grove of whistling pines. “I’m trying to finish Kitaiji before I die,” she said. “My father began construction when I was a child… I hope one day to see it done.”
Sen realized. “You’re afraid of them. The Keishi, the regents…”
“I’m afraid of what they’lldo. As is the retired-emperor. It’s why he’s in such a tenuous position. We massacred an entire countryside in the name of the emperors; the stories of your ancestor Makoto Ie’in and her mother are true, they killed my ancestors and the old lineages in these lands, yet my grandfather allied himself with the lady Makoto and forged a peace. My family, my father and my grandfather and me, we only exist because of them. We live on land that belonged to them. I have Iteki blood. That is why the Ten’in fear me.”
“The emperors don’t fear anything.”
“They’re human.”
“They’re descended from the gods…”
“And yet,” Iyo said, “all humans fear. There’s nothing wrong with that. One day, they’ll fear you, too. We’re not what they make of us, Sen.Remember that. No matter what they tell you. We’re not what they make us.”
