Sen’s fingers clenched reflexively around the kaiken case. Even now, as her mother sobbed, her father’s compliment warmed her.He thinks my strikes are clean, Sen thought, traitorously.
“Onesan, don’t!” Seijiro said, his face wet with snot and tears.
Her father picked up a bowl and hurled it at Seijiro’s head. He ducked just in time, and the bowl shattered against the wall, splashing gray porridge everywhere. It crawled down the wall, leaving a dark stain. Kotaro started crying, reaching out for his mother.
“Sen will obey me, because she is the only one of you who understands what it means to be a samurai,” her father said. Then he turned to her, his eyes shadowed. “Isn’t that right, Sen?”
Sen swallowed, feeling as if she was standing on the precipice of a great canyon. The darkness in her father’s eyes called to her like the mouth of an abyss, a cold breeze winding around her ankles and urging her to step forward and fall.
Before the rebellion, her father never would have harmed her mother—he knew she was a samurai only by marriage and not by birth, and expected nothing of her but to give him heirs. He reserved his anger for his children, who he thought he could mold into warriors.
But before the rebellion, he never would have trusted Sen with something like this. He’d always treated Sen as a child to be disciplined, not as his sword arm. But now she was an extension of him, a keen blade that would not fail.
Her mother had never cared for her anyway. But her father still might.
Sen unsheathed the kaiken.
“How many fingers?” she said. The words felt like ice as they left her mouth. She could hear nothing but her own heartbeat.
Her father grinned. The edges of his smile were sharp as the afternoon sun, and Sen basked in their warmth.I will not fail you, she thought.
“What do you think, Sen?” he asked. “Three? One for each child she wants so badly to feed?”
Her mother whimpered, but the sound was very far away from Sen, who could only stare up at her father. She memorized the shape of his smile, unsure when she would ever see it again. The rest of the world fell away, and she was on a dark island in this one precious moment when her father’s anger was directed at someone else, when Sen was perfect for him.
“Two,” Sen said, “or she won’t be able to hold the baby. It would make more work for the servants.”
“True,” her father said, nodding in approval. “Go on, then, Sen. Show your brothers how a samurai strikes.”
Sen glanced at Seijiro, but he hadn’t risen from the floor after their father threw the bowl. He was still curled up with his face on the ground, sobbing. Kotaro had gone limp in their father’s arms, crying and gnawing on his robes. At last, Sen turned to her mother.
Her mother flinched at Sen’s gaze, like Sen was a burning star too bright to look at. It was the same way she looked at Sen’s father.
Sen smiled.
As her father loomed behind her, she gripped the kaiken in one hand.
“Don’t move, or you’ll lose more than two,” Sen said. Then she raised the dagger over her head and struck down.
After dinner, Sen polished her father’s kaiken while the servants wiped up the blood. The room smelled of salt, and the table had a dark tinge that wouldn’t wash away. The blood had splashedmuch farther than Sen had expected, all over Sen’s shirt, the back of Kotaro’s head, even the wall by the kitchen door. Sen had watched the blood track down—a dark, narrow line, as if red wine had splashed and then dripped down, or perhaps a thin finger had smeared it like a tally mark.
Sen’s mother had hidden away in a spare room with her brothers, but there was no need. Sen had pleased her father, and his anger had evaporated.Don’t you see that I kept you safe?Sen wanted to scream.I did this for you, becauseno one butme can be what Father needs.
The whole house was hiding from her, but Sen felt full of sunlight. She sat on the porch and waited for her father to return from the forest once more so she could present him with his clean kaiken. Let the others fear her as they feared her father.
“My lady.”
Sen jolted and spun around. Youna was standing in the doorway with a rag and a bowl of water. She knelt beside Sen and took her hand, then began to clean her fingers, which were still stained with her mother’s blood. She paid careful attention to the creases in each knuckle, each nail, each torn cuticle. Sen’s own mother had never washed her so carefully.
“Why aren’t you hiding with the rest of them?” Sen said when Youna finished cleaning her left hand.
“Do you wish me to hide, my lady?” Youna said, rubbing her warm washcloth up Sen’s wrist.
“I don’t care what you do,” Sen said stiffly, “or what any ofthemdo.”
Youna paused in her washing, meeting Sen’s gaze for a fleeting moment, then turned her hand over and washed her palm. She finished cleaning her hands, then folded up the cloth. “You should go inside, my lady,” she said. “The mosquitos will come out soon.”
“I await my father’s return,” Sen said.
