With a glare, he shoved Sen off. “Away with us!” His eyes left Sen’s own only to dart back to the jade-bead necklace once again. “I can tell when we’re not wanted.”
Then he strode past, waving as if dispelling some foul air.
“We will find that no’in, princes of the east. She has struck the followers of the Middle Path. She will be punished!”
“Off with you,” Hakaru called.
“We will see you, warrior sons,” the monk said in parting. “We’ll see soon enough.”
And they were gone. Riding back up the highland trail, back up into the blaze of sun’s light that was turning deeper red. Back through the no’in village and the larger township, toward Kitano on its hill.
“Those mongrels,” Hakaru began. “Damn them. Where’d that girl go?”
“Enough,” Nihira said. He turned to Hakaru and Sen. “Come. We should get home. It’s not for us to disturb a no’in’s life any further.”
It was only when they’d climbed the hill again that Sen saw how tightly Nihira gripped his reins. Only then did he see how angry his stewardmother’s heir truly was.
“Get what you deserve, you mud-snails,” Sen muttered.
But the air was changing. He didn’t know how to hold his feelings, and as his stewardbrothers waited on the trail, he wheeled about, watching the dust clouds drifting into summer sky. They were rising, choking him.
“I’ll – catch up with you,” he called, feeling something he couldn’t explain. “I want to ride a little first.”
“Sen, do nothing rash,” Nihira warned.
“They’ve already done something rash,” Sen said, and turned his horse into the woods.
In truth, Sen wanted to be alone. Wanted to pass the hills, the rivers and the paddy-fields. Wanted to kiss up against the edges of the woods and go in, and lose himself in the forest near the Godspath.What will they do,he’d asked his stewardmother once,the imperials, if they find out I’m alive?
I don’t know, Lady Iyo had said,andI have no wish to find out.
Be careful near them.
Sen thought of his father as he rode, of the night he died, the night he paid the price for his rebellion. Imagined his wounded heart, blood flowing when the arrows came. Imagined the retainer, whose name Sen didn’t know, who betrayed him. Who caught him alone with his daughter Kai and led the enemy Keishi clan to him, as wolves on a scent.
The sun went down in a blaze of honeyed air and shards of light lanced through the trees. He found himself in a thicket by the river, passing a turn in the mountain road where someone had made a little shrine to the spirit-god O-ine.
He thought of blood in the soil, frozen in winter and unfrozen, then frozen again, seventeen years of his family’s death seeped into earth that grew rice for imperial hands. He thought of the sky from their ancient homeland in the hills of Amayari-by-the-sea, which he’d never seen, and only knew from stories. He thought of the moon, the stars that gave his name. He thought of the smell of a bamboo cask; the smell he would never forget.
He thought of a small hand holding his own, and didn’t know why.
The past lives within us, his tutor, Old Yozora, always said,burning away, merrily, and as hot as it ever had in life. The dead are gone, but never leave.
So that is my inheritance, Sen thought. An empty room. The smell of bamboo, a child’s hand, one jade bead on a string, and a paper that tells the past.
Somewhere out there, I have family, he told himself.Somewhere, I have a sister. I have an uncle living still.
I will find a way to meet them.
Soon he emerged into a space in the middle of the woods, a rare flat hollow ringed with trees. There, a pond lay glinting as if in magic light. The sun wasgoing down; already it had faded past the edges of the wood, casting everything in shades of gold. A soft glow filled the air. Time seemed to vanish.
At the water’s edge there was a wooden dock, built large enough for a rowboat and nothing more. He tied Kaminari to a tree and turned toward the water, still as a mirror, silent, and serene.
There, as he had hoped, he found them – the two of them, the no’in woman and the first, dying serow that had fled, the size of a deer. Even now it was panting its final breaths. It had made it to the water’s edge, as if to leap in and swim wildly to the other shore, before it fell.
The no’in was shorter than him. She wore peasant clothes, rough hemp robe and pants, and Sen saw now that she had a string of prayer beads around her wrist. For a time, he didn’t want to move, didn’t want to breathe, for fear of breaking the reverie. She was crying softly, on her knees in the fine sand, and her hands were gently stroking the animal and its fur.
“You’re all right,” she said, gently, with such sadness in her voice. “You didn’t do anything wrong… you’ll be all right…”
