That was how she noticed the silence.
For the first morning since she’d escaped to the house behind the sword ferns, the forest said nothing at all. She heard no hum of insects, or distant caw of birds, or footsteps of foxes and squirrels scurrying through the fallen branches.
The animals knew something she didn’t.
Maybe there would be an earthquake or a typhoon. Maybe there was something in the forest more terrifying than soldiers, or her father.
Whatever it was, she would find it.
She sharpened her sword on the whetstone beside her bed and headed out into the forest.
She could not feel the pulse of the earth through the soles of her feet as she usually did. It was as if the soft soil had hardened into oak, unyielding beneath her. She stepped silently around the sword ferns and deeper into the forest, which was just beginning to glare orange from the first blood of sunrise.
Soon, she reached the river. It was a bleeding artery through the center of the forest, which Sen had pried open wider by cutting down the nearby bamboo saplings. She’d tested the sharpness of her blade on the young trees, littering the forest with fallen branches. She walked through a graveyard of tree stumps,all of them perfectly smooth from the keenness of her cuts. Her father had told her that bamboo was as hard as human bone, that if she could cut through bamboo with one strike, she could sever a human head just as easily.
Sen stood perfectly still among the branches, as if she too were a young sapling, and listened. But the forest wouldn’t speak to her that day. She could hear little else but her own breathing and the wind whispering through the trees. There were no monsters in the woods—at least, not right now.
She sighed and sheathed her sword, then knelt down at the river to wash up before the sun fully rose. Her reflection glared back at her in the rushing water, wrinkling a dark spot that marred her chin.
Sen tried to wipe it away with her thumb, but it only grew larger. A stain the color of red wine crept across her face, running scarlet down her chin, bubbling past her teeth. She raised her sleeve to scour it, but the darkness devoured her jaw, leaving her with only half a face.
Sen reeled away from the water. She scrubbed at her face with her sleeves, dyeing her robes deep red. But as the salt reached her tongue, she hesitated, savoring the taste on her lips.
She was so hungry.
Her family barely had any food, and Sen spent her days practicing her sword work in the forest with nothing in her stomach. At times she felt like she was puppeting a corpse around rather than preparing for battle.
Sen pressed her sleeve to her throat, and this time, it came away clean. She turned back to the river, but her reflection was pale and unstained, the same as always.
She splashed water on her face, letting its frigid bite wake her up.
It wasn’t the first time her mind had wandered and wouldn’t be the last. Ghosts had followed her ever since the first rebellion.
Sen’s uncle had been among the first to approach the soldiers. When Sen was younger, he used to cut wheat stalks around her and let them rain down like golden snow, tickling her face.
An imperial guard had shot him in the head with a rifle.
Sen learned that day what weapons from the West were capable of. One moment, her uncle had bright eyes that gleamed with concentration, a sharp nose and tense lips and hard jaw that she had known all her life. The next moment, his face was a deep crater of blood and bone fragments. His eyes burst like lychee berries, and everything that had beenhimwas blasted away into a mess of brain pulp and blood.
Sen’s mother had pulled her away from the window then, but not before Sen tasted the salt of his blood, how it burned like hot oil. Guns were soloud; she could still hear them even now, ripping her dreams in two.
Everyone in the military academy—all two thousand of her peers and uncles and cousins—had gone to face the imperial army in the winter. Her friend Yukichi, who had a crooked tooth and hair that stuck up and had never once questioned if a girl could be a samurai. Her cousin Tsurumatsu, the fastest fighter, who danced around her blade like he was made of wind. Her youngest uncle, who said that Sen would grow up to be stronger than her father one day. They had all marched to Kumamoto Castle in the snow, and by the time it thawed, all of them had died there.
All of them but her father.
Sen took a steadying breath and gripped the handle of her sword. She closed her eyes, and just as vividly as she had pictured the forest, she saw the dark eyes of the imperial guards, sparkling beneath their helmets.
She stepped forward, pulled back the sheath with her right hand, and struck down with her blade.
The sound of her cut whistled through the air, as it only couldwhen a sword struck perfectly straight. The bamboo sapling split in half, the top section sliding to the ground. Sen sheathed her blade and examined the edge of her cut.
Clean, straight, with no hesitation. It had to be, because samurai only struck once.
She readied her stance, then whirled around and struck again, slicing through another bamboo shoot, imagining it was the throat of one of the soldiers who had massacred her family.Left hand is power; right hand is control. Her father’s words echoed in her mind as she flowed through the forest, the clearing yawning wider as she tore it apart from the inside.
She stopped not because she wanted to, but because if she cut down too much in one day, there would be no forest left to shield her family. They had nowhere else to go.
She panted as the heat drained out of her, kneeling in the grass. When she caught her breath, she looked back toward the house swathed in sword ferns, where she’d seen the man in her window.
