“But I do care,” Sen said. “I do.”
“I just want…” Rui began. Then nothing came.
Sen waited. “What is it?”
“All they want is war,” Rui said. “I know they’re your family, but you have to see that. It’s not your place. Don’t you think it’s better to try to stop the killing? Not all this… retribution. All this death.”
“That’s what my family wanted to do,” Sen said. “The Keishi didn’t let us. They took everything instead. And it’s just going to keep getting worse.”
“Then when does it end?”
She rose and walked off, toward the small road that led back up the mountain, to the Blue Woods and Kannagara. The sun was falling. Sen clearly wanted to follow but something held him back.
“Rui.” A dozen words seemed to come into Sen’s mind and leave him just as fast. “You know I have mixed thoughts about them. About…”
“I know.”
“They want me to go with them.”
Rui’s voice betrayed her, nearly soundless when she spoke. “I know.”
“You’re my best friend.”
“I always figured you’d go back to them,” she said at last. “Your family. I just didn’t think it would be so soon… I hoped it wouldn’t be so soon…” Something fluttered in her chest; a warm, rising feeling, the sense of fullness when someone offered something and expected nothing in return.
A spike of emotion jolted in her; she didn’t know what it was. “Do you… do you remember anything about that night? When our parents died? Because, I don’t remember anything… I try… It’s like I’m empty.”
She wanted to know what it was like. She had nothing of her own, mere fragments, vague and ephemeral, so dim as to be disbelieved, thin as air, and just as fleeting. It was impossible to know if they were real memories at all, or just the remnants of something that had turned into imagination. She could see a round, kind face, a softness of skin, of being held in her mother’s arms. The shape and color of a room. A tall, dark-eyed man who was her father, who never spoke, who only stared.
Sen said, “We were too young.”
She placed her medicine box into his hands. “Sometimes I ask O-ine what my life is supposed to be. They never answer. If none of this had happened, I’d probably be in the village where I was born. And you’d be in the palace. You’d have everything you want…”
Sen paused at that. Perhaps he hadn’t thought of things that way. Perhaps he’d thought she didn’t feel the same. Perhaps he’d hoped, and dismissed; for what was so easy to cast off as hope? As that which would never be? And yet, it never left you.
He said, “I’m sorry, about before.”
“I can’t…” She stopped.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know,” Rui said.
“Why can’t you tell me?”
Because I don’t know what I think. Because you’re everything I wanted to be, you have everything I couldn’t have. Because I thought you could be my family, too.
As always, she said nothing, and hated herself for it.
She said, “You’re all I’ve got. I’m not even allowed in the castle gates. That world, where you come from… I’ll never see it. Never be… nothing but an outcast.”
Sen took her hand. “None of that. This world takes so much from us. It’s easy to forget what it gives. But there’s nothing wrong with who you are.” He sat back, bumping his knuckles idly against Rui’s knee.
“It’s easier for you,” she said.
With that, he tackled Rui to the ground. They rolled down the hill, laughing and fighting, until they landed on a soft patch of grass at the bottom, and lay there together, winded, with grass stains on their knees.
“Hear that?” Sen listened to the sound of the wind in the branches. “The gods are happy we’re here.”
