“How do we know this isn’t you!”
“For what reason?” Tokuon grew tense. “We came to treat with you, we came to ask forhelp!”
They were still arguing when Sen left. Their anger, their words, he wanted none of it. His entire body tingled, a thousand needle-points in every vein. When he closed his eyes, he saw it again: his stewardmother, pierced with two arrows, bleeding out upon wet ground.
He stayed beside her that night. He would stay until the end.
Where are Rui and Jobo?Sen wanted to find them, to see how his friend was doing. He needed his teacher’s advice. But there was no time. Iyo turned and sweated under the blankets. Sen changed her dressings every hour, and when the dawn came, he found himself in a state of nothingness, too tired to move, or talk, or eat, and too worried to sleep. He felt both everything and nothing at all.
In the morning, he squinted up to find the light too bright and the smell of sweat and old blood clinging to his hands. Iyo had brought herself to a seated position, while the Gensei and Kitanohara generals argued at her feet. Tokuon’s seer, Hassho Tayu, stirred herbs in the corner.
“We must do something!” said Kanesuke Daijin, Tokuon’s milk-brother. “Lord, tell him!”
“What message have you received?” Iyo asked. Her face was pale, and every breath looked like it brought her pain.
She won’t last long, he’d heard the Gensei guardsmen mutter in the night. He shouted at them, wanted to strike them for saying such a thing, but the deepest part of his heart told him they might be right.
Iyo, who had been more a mother to him than anyone, who was famous throughout the land for her iron will and steady hand, could no longer do so much as sit without the help of her sons. It broke Sen’s heart to see her this way.
We shouldn’t have to see such weakness, some part of him wanted to say,we shouldn’t have to put up with this, this is wrong…
He remembered what Jobo had said about the two sides of the spirit; he could feel them now, the angry soul inside him that wanted to lash out in revenge, and the other soul, the gentle one, that wanted nothing to do with weapons and warfare ever again, not when this was what it brought.
Daijin shouted: “Prissy fools! Strike back at them!”
Nihira, prudent, argued it would destabilize their country.
“So you will do nothing?”
Sen rose, suddenly furious—
“Quiet.”
Iyo silenced the room with the word. “We will not go to war.”
“Mother,” Hakaru began.
“I’m not a corpse yet. Listen to me. What have I taught? Our land, our peace is more important than their squabbles.”
“They attacked us!” Hakaru shouted.
Tokuon stepped in: “Lord…”
“Do not go to war,” Iyo whispered, blood on her lips. She grasped Sen’s hand with cold fingers, trembling with the effort to hold his hand in her own, to stay awake.
“Sen,” she said. “Listen to me.”
“This is my responsibility,” Sen said, voice wavering. “This would not have happened if I hadn’t… if I hadn’t fought those monks… hadn’t made them come… but now they start awar…”
“We will not get involved,” she repeated.
“They did this to us!” He could no longer keep his calm. “They have…”
“Son,” she said, a thickness in her voice he hadn’t heard before. “The Kitanohara cannot become involved.”
He held his fists at his sides, struggling to rein in his emotions. A feeling of realization settled over him. “But… I am not a Kitanohara, mother, I am a Gensei… As is the lord Tokuon, who asks for our help… I can go with him…”
He saw the look of pain and sadness pass over her pale face, but he couldn’t stop. Not now.
