But it never made it there. Sen’s father struck it down before it left the clearing, not across the throat but through the middle. Stringy noodles of hare guts spilled across the dirt, and both its front and back paws twitched, its red eyes darting around in terror, the top half crawling away from the bottom. Sen’s stomach clenched, but she steeled her expression because showing her father that it scared her would only make the training last longer. He’d done it on purpose, to make the hare suffer because of her. Her father did not miss.
Every time she failed to kill a hare, her father cut it in two and forced her to touch the clean cut he’d made. Her fingers trembled over the base of the animal’s throat, the open hole of the windpipe clenched beneath her fingers like it was trying to tell her something.
Samurai do not feardeath,they are indifferent to it. That was what theHagakuresaid, what her father was trying to teach her. True samurai lived as if they were already dead. When she was too young to hold a katana, he’d brought dead foxes into her room and made her sleep beside them until their eyes filled with maggots. He wouldn’t remove them until she stopped crying.
But it wasn’t enough to be calm when standing beside death. Sen had to take life without hesitation.
As the hare squirmed in her grip, Sen could feel her father’s burning glare above her but couldn’t bring herself to move.
Thankfully, Kono Sensei appeared in the grove.
Her father turned, and Sen used the excuse to release the hare, who darted back into the forest.
Warn your friends, Sen thought.Run far away.
Kono Sensei taught sparring to the other children at the military academy. Sen had feared him at first because he’d paired Sen with the strongest boys in the class, but she had quickly learned that he was doing her a favor. Sen was faster and stronger than all of them because her father trained her even after the academy sent them home for dinner. While other children slept, Sen practiced her sword forms.
Her father had come to watch her spar a week ago and determined that the school was a waste of time. He demanded that Kono Sensei pair Sen with the older boys who used real swords instead of wooden ones. Kono Sensei had refused, so Sen’s father had taken her home to finish her training himself, swearing to send her back only when they would let her have “a real fight.”
Kono Sensei entered the clearing and looked across the bloodstained dirt, the scattered remains of hares, then at last, at Sen. His gaze softened, as if she was more pitiful than the still-twitching hare corpses.
“Itaro-dono,” Kono Sensei said with a sigh. “You know that these techniques—”
“I have heard your opinion and I don’t care for it,” Sen’s father said. His blade glinted as he turned, and though he would never threaten a teacher directly, everyone at the academy knew better than to upset him. “I will teach my children the way they were meant to be taught.”
Kono Sensei shook his head. “She should go back to sparring with the others, not be out here slicing the hares to extinction.”
“You teach your class to dance, not to fight.”
“They are still young,” Kono Sensei said.
Sen’s father turned his back to the teacher, eyes scanning the forest for more hares. The conversation was over.
Sen tasted tears at the back of her throat but swallowed them before her father could notice. The only thing worse than failing her father was failing in front of Kono Sensei, who had once believed in her.
“I can’t put her with the older class,” Kono Sensei said, bowing his head. He was older than Sen’s father, but he would diminish himself for Sen. “But what about that new boy in the middle class? Fujita Torazo?”
Sen tensed. Fujita Torazo had come last week from the north, and he was a head taller than anyone in Sen’s class. Sen had caught him cutting down birds’ nests from trees and stomping on the eggs. He’d sliced off another boy’s fingers “by accident” and no one in his class had wanted to spar with him since. He would have loved to slay hares with Sen’s father.
Kono Sensei hadn’t seen Torazo shove the other boys to the ground and eat their lunches so they would be too weak to fight, or the way he’d leered at Sen, who was one of the only girls at the school. Kono Sensei only saw a child.
“I’ll allow it,” Sen’s father said, his back still turned. “Bring him here, and I’ll see if he’s a worthy opponent.”
Kono Sensei smiled at Sen, as if he’d saved her rather than doomed her, and ran off into the forest. Sen cleaned up the dead hares without being asked, stacking them up on the porch for her mother to skin for soup later. It would be too much, and it would go to waste, but they didn’t have to worry about going hungry back then.
Sen waited in the bloodied dirt, her palms sweaty as she sensed the trees shifting in the distance, Kono Sensei returning.
Torazo appeared first, grinning when he saw Sen waiting among all the blood and hare intestines. This was all a game to him, because he did not have a father like Sen’s. He didn’t understand what it would cost her to lose.
Kono Sensei passed them wooden blades because childrenweren’t supposed to kill, but Sen was not a child; she was a warrior. Sen knew her father only allowed it because he did not know this boy, because he wanted to see how he fought.
Sen knew she couldn’t beat him.
Torazo was older and taller and stronger. Sen was no more than a mouse scurrying away from the swelling shadow of a hawk as it descended in a field. She would fall, she would be cut to pieces, she would—
Torazo struck down with his sword, the blow nearly knocking her off her feet from the force. Her feet slid through the mud, but she righted herself quickly and ducked under his next blow, striking his knees. He was bigger than her, but she was faster.
Or so she’d thought.
