The soldiers have already come, Sen thought.I’m too late.
She threw open the door to the kitchen, hoping to find her brothers cowering inside a cabinet or under a table, but it was empty. One by one, she tore through the rooms of the cursed house, finding more and more dead servants, but none of her family.
At last, she reached her own room, but hesitated just before throwing open the door.
There was a stain.
The echo of blood spatter seeping through the opposite side of the door, bright sparks of it like a small constellation. Sen could visualize the strike that would spray blood like this, for her father had taught it to her.
Still, she could hear breathing on the other side, which meant she wasn’t too late.
She threw open the door.
The room was dim, the shadow of sword ferns blocking the sunlight from the one small window. Even so, the green tatami mats seemed too dark, and the room smelled sharp with blood.
Sen’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, and she let out a breath of relief.
Her mother and brothers were sleeping in her futon, her father sitting upright in the corner, his sword in his lap.He protected them, Sen thought.
“Chichiue,” she said, stepping forward. Her father wasn’t the type to accept affection, but she wanted nothing more than to embrace him now.
The tatami mats rippled beneath her. What she had thought was a floor cast in shadows was actually a pool of blood, stretching to every corner of the room like a sheet of black glass.
Sen looked questioningly to her father. She could hear his breathing, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze.
“What happened?” Sen said, her whole body suddenly cold. “Did the soldiers...” But the words wilted in her mouth, the question dying before she could ask it. If the soldiers had come for her father, they wouldn’t have left until he was dead.
The soldiers hadn’t come here.
“What happened?” Sen said again, dropping to her knees in front of her futon. Blood splashed onto her robes, so warm against her knees. She shook Kotaro, but he was limp and remained stubbornly asleep. She pulled back the blanket and picked him up, but his head rolled back, exposing the clean line sliced across his throat, the blood that seeped down the front of his shirt, painting his chest. His lips were blue, and even when Sen crushed him to her chest, she could feel no heartbeat, no breath, no sound.
She clutched him tight against her, looking in a panic between her father and the still forms of Seijiro and her mother beneath the blanket. She didn’t want to touch them, didn’t want to see.
Her heartbeat felt so loud, hammering in her ears as she turned to her father, hands trembling around Kotaro’s body.
“You...” she whispered, the unfinished accusation hanging in the air.
Her father wouldn’t meet her gaze, and that was all the confirmation she needed.
Disgraced samurai would sometimes end their entire family lines rather than let a family stripped of honor live on. Her father had faced the greatest shame of all when he returned alone from the rebellion, a failure and a coward. Sen had thought his plan for redemption was what sustained him, but she’d been very wrong.
“I thought we were going to fight,” Sen said. Her voice trembled, and the thought sounded so childish now that she’d said it out loud. How could the two of them have ever found enough samurai children to train for an uprising? How could they have ever hoped to stand against the soldiers? But her father had told her it was possible, and she had followed his words to the end of the earth.
“It is kinder than what the soldiers would have done to them,” her father said at last.
Sen let out a sharp laugh. Her father frowned at the sound, but Sen couldn’t stop the hysterical laughter from bubbling up until she thought she would be sick. She set Kotaro down in bed beside her mother.
“Kinder?” Sen echoed, her voice trembling. “This was kindness to you?”
On any other day, he would have yelled at her for her tone, but now his face was cold as stone.
She’d imagined it so many times—standing back-to-back with her father in battle, slicing down the imperial soldiers with perfect strokes of her katana, just as he’d taught her. They would baptize the house with the blood of the imperial army. They would show them that the samurai would never die. And when it was over, her father would look to her with pride, that barely perceptible nod he gave her only when she had pleased him.
That dream was sand pouring through her fingers.
“You didn’t think I could do it,” Sen whispered as the realization washed over her. She fell forward onto her hands, folding into the bloody tatami mats.
Her father rose to his feet, and even now, Sen cowered as his shadow fell over her. The pale glimmer of the tears in her father’s eyes was the only brightness in the room, the only place the shadows hadn’t eaten.
