“I should have ended things the day we lost the rebellion,”he said. His words sounded too calm, like the stories her mother would read her in bed when she was a child, words that didn’t matter because they belonged to someone else. “I have been living in shame and cowardice since then.”
“Then why did you come back?” Sen said, her voice thick with tears. “Why did you bother training me if you were always going to... to...” She trailed off, fighting back a wave of nausea.
“Because I needed your help, Sen.”
He reached for his blade, and Sen flinched back instinctively, but he did not draw his long sword. Instead, he drew a tanto, a double-edged dagger that he rarely used, that he always said was more barbaric than a longer katana, meant for stabbing rather than cutting.
It wasn’t the tanto but the look in her father’s eyes that gave it away—he had never before looked at Sen so earnestly, as if he was truly seeing her.
All the blood in Sen’s body pooled in her feet, her skin cold. “No,” she whispered, backing up against the door. And when her father didn’t correct her, didn’t seem confused by her response, she understood.
Tanto were also used for seppuku, when a samurai would disembowel himself so he could die with honor rather than at the hands of his enemies.
The ritual called for the assistance of a skilled kaishakunin. When the dishonored samurai stabbed himself and pulled the blade across his stomach, the kaishakunin was supposed to strike from behind and cause a partial decapitation, with only a thin band of flesh binding the head to the body. To fail and decapitate the samurai completely was a great disgrace.
This is what he’s been training me for ever since the failed rebellion, Sen realized, closing her eyes against the scalding tears that seared down her cheeks.Not to fight, but to complete this ritual for him.
“You didn’t need me for this,” Sen said through clenchedteeth. She felt like a starving wolf as she glared up at him, blood and snot and bared fangs. “You could have split your own belly on the battlefield and never come back.”
Her father shook his head. “The ritual is traditionally—”
“What do you care for tradition?” Sen said. “You write your own rules! You always have.Traditionsays you should have died with the other soldiers.”
“Is that what you want for me, Sen?” her father said. “For me to slowly bleed out in pain, alone?”
Sen stilled, and as her father’s words sank in, she realized at last why her father had actually come home.
He was scared to die.
Cutting his own abdomen would be a slow, agonizing death. Only a kaishakunin guaranteed a swift end.
She let out an incredulous laugh. For so long, she had thought that the creature who’d returned from the forest was a monster who had eaten her father’s soul and worn his skin like a glove. But he was only a man who could no longer pretend to be a hero.
“I won’t do it,” Sen said, clenching her fingers in the blood of her family. “I’ll never help you.”
Her father closed his eyes, then bent down, and to her horror, bowed to her. He pressed his forehead to the pool of blood, rippling Sen’s scarlet reflection.
“Please,” her father said, the first time he had ever said such a word to her. “I don’t want to die in chains. I want to die knowing that the last samurai of Satsuma lives on without the shame of her father.”
The last samurai of Satsuma?Sen thought, choking on a breath when she realized he meanther.
Sen knew he was only calling her a samurai now to get what he wanted, and she gritted her teeth against the sting of the lie.
“What good is it to live without shame if I’m alone?” Sen said.
“All of us are alone,” her father said. “We live and die alone.”
Sen shook her head. “Don’t ask this of me,” she said, her voice trembling.
“It is the last thing I will ever ask of you,” he said. “So think on it.”
The he turned the tanto on himself.
Sen reached out to stop him, but she wasn’t fast enough. She was never fast enough.
Her father plunged the blade into his abdomen and yanked it across, tearing through his robes and flesh. Blood and intestines gushed across the futon, a broken cry falling from his mouth. He fell forward onto one hand, then slid to the floor, panting at Sen’s feet. She covered her mouth because otherwise the scream building inside her would escape.
“Please,” her father gasped, clutching her feet with bloody hands.
