“My lady—”
“Please,” Sen said, taking her katana from the shelf. There were spies in her yard and spirits in her room, and Sen felt as if the world was closing in on her.
Sen threw open the door to the yard and ran barefoot into the clearing with her sword in hand. She needed to get away from her house, because the rage she felt would destroy everyone it touched.
She knew, as soon as she reached the forest, that there was no one there. No bullfrogs, no magpies, not even a single gnat. Definitely not a spy. If anyone had been there, they had left. Was she always doomed to strike too late? To be skilled in practice but useless when it mattered?
She trudged back to the house and swapped her sword for an axe, then headed to the cedar grove. If she could not feed her family, or protect them, she would at least keep them warm when winter came.
Until the sun broke across the horizon, Sen hacked at the cedars. The forest fell to splinters beneath her bare feet, the world bright with the sound of her crisp cuts, her ragged breaths. Her arms ached as she heaved the axe into the tree trunks and wrenched it out again, but she liked the way the pain sang through her, made her feel as if she’d swum from murky waters into clear blue sea.
She carried the wood back to the house and piled it by the western gate, then set to work breaking it down on the cutting stump. She did not feel the blisters on her hands, or the splinters in her bare feet, or the scrapes on her arms from broken branches.
Seijiro slammed open the porch door, rubbing his eyes.
“You’re too loud,” he said. “Why are you stomping around?”
Sen said nothing, striking the next piece of wood harder than necessary.
“Why are you chopping wood so early?” Seijiro said.
Sen gritted her teeth and kept chopping, channeling all the heat in her bones into the axe instead of her brother. She was caring for him, and he should have been grateful. She would protect him from hunger, from darkness, from death.
For a brief moment, she saw herself slicing Seijiro in half like a log, spilling his organs across the yard.
“Go away,” she said.
Seijiro scoffed. “You’re a demon,” he said, turning and slamming the door.
Maybe I am, Sen thought grimly.But I am not the demon you should be afraid of.
When Sen was seven, her father put her in a box and left her to die.
It was a wooden crate that a servant had used to carry sacks of rice to the house. Sen was just small enough to fit inside if she hugged her shins and pressed her face against her knees. Her father had led her outside at night, placed her in the box, and told her to make herself small.
She thought it was a game, at first.
She’d climbed inside, imagined she was one of the tiny snails that oozed across the river rocks, hugged her legs tight and held her breath and tried to be so small her father couldn’t see her at all, because that would make him happy.
Then her father nailed the box shut. The hammer jolted the wood, so loud, so close to Sen’s ears. He placed her in a hole in the earth and piled wet dirt on top of her until she could no longer see the sky. The box was poorly built, so the slats didn’t line up perfectly and dirt spilled through the seams, worms and beetles wriggling across Sen’s bare toes.
You will know what it’s like to be dead, her father said.
Sen had never thought she was scared of the dark, but she had only ever known darkness as starry skies and dim bedrooms with her mother sleeping beside her. This dark was all-consuming, a lead weight pressed down all around her, the sound of growing roots and scurrying bugs and the ache in her neck that bloomed into a sharp pain.
Chichiuewon’t let me die, she thought.It’s a game, and he’ll come back for me.
But time had a strange way of unfurling in the dark.
It stretched long and thin like dough, the strands snapping as they grew too worn. Sen spent years in the dark doing nothing but breathing. Her stomach cramped with hunger, and her mouth went dry, and as another year passed, she began to realize that her father would not come back. He had always wanted sons—he’d said as much to her mother. Maybe he’d just gotten rid of Sen so he could start his family over again. He no longer needed her, just like he hadn’t needed Kura.
The worms wriggled over her toes and the beetles crawled into her ears, but Sen couldn’t move a single inch to pull them out. The box grew smaller and smaller, crunching down on her bones from the weight of earth, and Sen imagined she was a rotting corpse melting back into the ground.
And then, in the dark, came a thin voice.
Sato?it whispered.
Sugar.
