Time, Sen thought.Taking everything away.
“We’ve had news,” Tokuon continued. “Keishi troops in the upper Kanden. There was a revolt in Tose… Now my uncle Kiie comes across the gates…” He turned to Iyo. “The Keishi have crossed your borders trying to stop him, lord.They have broken the treaty!”
He called his riders to him, shouting, “Those mountain-wolves will still be out there. They’ll use the dark to get away. Do we let them make an insult such as this?” A roar of anger, of support, and vengeance, rose to greet him. He gripped his reins; his eyes met Sen’s again.
“We ride!”
The rest happened quietly, and happened far too fast. They brought Sen to the guardhouse to see the wounded men. No time to go into the hall. Hardly time to call the doctors, or the priests.
His tutor, Yozora Hogen, lay pale and bloodless on a sheet.
He saw Sen, waved an arm, took him by his side and coughed before he could find the strength to speak. “I have… always been your friend. Sen Hoshiakari,” Yozora said weakly. “Though… I know you have not always liked me very much. I know… I have not done much to inspire… love. But I was loyal to your father. I promised him. I promised…”
“Rest easy, teacher,” Sen said.
“I was there,” he said. “I have done my best to protect you…”
And he said no more. That was it.So fast.One moment, the man who’d been Sen’s instructor from the age of three. One moment, one old man, his shaking palm in Sen’s own. Then nothing.
“The night sky is dead,” muttered Nihira.
Hakaru slumped against the wall. “We were attacked at the Scales. It was that Keishi monster, Akiyo. Her mountain-dogs are everywhere below the pass.”
Lady Iyo stood, silent as a ghost, with her back against the wall. She had heard. She had seen Yozora’s end.
A page, bright with fear, appeared at the door. “Ame’in. It’s the Lord Gisan… He’s back. He says,find you.He says there’s news.”
Sen followed Iyo to the hall. He tried to clear his mind, but too much had happened. He never even liked Yozora, and yet… his heart, his limbs, they felt so impossibly heavy.
“Ogami’in,” he began. “Yozora, he said…”
Iyo did not break stride. “I heard his words, Sen.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Yozora was not his true name. His name was Kyohara-no-Shigeki Reizan. A retainer of your uncle, the Poet. He was with him the day he… the day they saved you. He was the one who offered to take you in, when Yora found you and that no’in girl in the village… The Keishi would have killed you where you lay. He brought you here.”
Sen stopped. “I never knew.”
“He didn’t want to tell you. I respected his wish.”
“Then I owe him my life,” Sen said. “I…”
The emotion threatened to take over, throw him down into some dark place and send him sinking away.
He struggled for the words. “No one ever told me…”
“They thought it was for the best,” Iyo said. “Though I never understood exactly why. He never felt comfortable getting close to you. He looked at you, and he didn’t see a little boy. He saw Katsusada Asa’in. He saw the tiger of the Gensei clan. Too many of their generation… they think of war, and remember the friends they had, who are gone, and yet they who survived sit on piles of money now because of it. What do you think that does to someone? How would you feel?”
“Stewardmother,” Sen said, “do you think this attack was really them? The Keishi?”
“Anything’s possible. But something tells me, no. I think it was something else. This has a whiff of treachery, someone who does not want peace.”
“Who is that?”
Iyo turned to him. “I think it was the—”
The Kitaiji abbots interrupted them, running up with ash on their cloaks. “Lady!” they cried. “Lady Ogami’in!”
