“I am one of them. I must obey my family.”
“That is whattheytold you.”
“The Keishi killed my father,” Sen said, grasping. “My mother… and now Iyo… This is our chance to make things right.”
Jobo shook his head. “This war will spare no one, Sen. Not even you. ‘Make things right’, those are Tokuon’s words. What do you think I’ve been training you for? To throw it all away? This evil that has struck comes from the west. There may be a better path, but I fear…”
“You fear what?”
One moment, the sun had cast bright rays across a meadow. One moment, Rui turned to him, said,Let’s run away.
One moment, and he’d stopped himself from saying,Yes.
Then he blinked. The world changed. The clouds came in, and that future was gone, replaced by a new one like a tide. It was pouring over him, over all of them, thick with mud, opaque, and whatever life was on the other side, he couldn’t see.
“If the evil that is causing this,” Jobo said at last, “if it has taken root among your family or the imperial court, it will use you too.”
Sen hesitated, but he’d already made his choice. “I won’t let it.”
His teacher sighed.
“I’m not like them,” Sen said.
“No,” Jobo said, “you’re not. Not yet.”
CHAPTERTWENTY-THREE
Rui
Trust the gods, they’d said. And she’d tried, she really had. But it was hard to see what good might come, what the purpose of it was, when such a nightmare seemed to have been burned into her spirit. A god like a splinter between the souls of life and death. It cut a shard in her, leaving her feeling neither whole nor injured, but half awake, half here and half not-here, as though the god or their effects had already begun to pull her from this realm and into their own.
What am I going to do?
“There’s a cloud over my life,” she said to Jobo when he returned. “It’s been there since I was born, since they found me and Sen in the house, and took us away so we wouldn’t be killed. Nothing ever goes well…” Her eyes brimmed with tears. “I should’ve never tried, I should’ve just been happy in that attic over the stables, and none of this would have ever happened…”
“You cannot say what may or may not have happened,” Jobo told her. “Regardless, it did happen. You cannot change it.” He’d been strangely quiet, and she remembered his haunted face when he’d tried to listen for the gods.Something’s coming.
“The only thing to do is live your life,” he said. “One step before the next. It’s the only way.”
“The way to what?” she asked. “I pray and pray, and I never get any answers.”
“When you pray,” Jobo said, “true faith is not about expectingsomething in return. It’s about belief. And your respect for the numinous forces of the worlds, the gods and the things we cannot see.”
“My heart hurts.”
“And I am sorry.” She realized he was angry, barely holding it all in. “The god Hososhi came to you for a reason,” he said. “But we cannot expect for them to tell us what it is. We must make peace with that.”
“Easy for you to say. I have to live with it.”
“That,” Jobo said, “is the meaning of faith.”
Cursed,she thought.I was cursed before I did any of this. I was cursed before that day with the guard, the sword I stole, the metal in my hand. I was cursed before I was born.
A wave of pain flashed through her. She grimaced; her heart pounded. She tried to rise. She stumbled. With lightning reflexes, Jobo caught her fall, pressing a hand against her forehead and feeling her pulse. “This illness is your body reacting to the god,” he said, “the splinter in your heart. And it is growing.”
She went to the window to smell the rain. Finally, she found her cloak; the rough hemp felt good against her skin, solid and real, unlike these feelings of anger and loneliness mixed together. “I need to go outside,” she said. “I need to breathe.”
She walked for an hour, wandering the woods of the Godspath, staying away from the trail that led up to Kannagara but not wanting to return to the village just yet. She pushed through the undergrowth, got lost in the shadow of the sugi trees. She didn’t know where she was going. She found herself staring at the familiar curve in the trail, and went to her shrine at the edge of the Godspath, where O-ine always waited, to listen to the subtle sounds of the woods and its spirits as they came out to watch her, this strange girl with the red-brown hair who didn’t fit in anywhere.
