Toshi walked among the fallen foxes, prodding them with his toe. Some, like Pearl-Ear and her brother, stirred and groaned as if they were about to wake up. None of them did, however, and soon Toshi was back where he started, no closer to a solution but much closer to O-Kagachi. The only good thing he took from his survey was his jitte, which he found tucked in Sharp-Ear’s belt.
Furious and frustrated, he slumped heavily to the ground. He sat cross-legged and idly began gouging out small furrows in the dirt with his jitte. Here, at the end, he couldn’t even think of a useful symbol to draw. Hidetsugu had once told him it would end like this: Toshi alone, forsaken, and fresh out of tricks as retribution closed in on him. Toshi hadn’t given the prediction much credence, and when he did he was certain he’d be much, much older when it came true.
I tried, Toshi thought. The final irony was that he truly had been trying to do the right thing. To release the Taken One, to honor the wishes of Night’s Reach … he truly had been trying to help others in addition to himself.
O-Kagachi roared again. Toshi tossed his jitte into the air so that the tip stuck in the ground. This, Toshi thought. This is what I get for moral and spiritual diligence.
CHAPTER 23
Michiko felt herself disappear into the world, becoming a part of everything while remaining separate and distinct from it. It was intoxicating but also smothering and constraining. She felt like a fish in a bowl that was exactly as big as she was: the entire world was hers to explore, but her world started and ended with her own body.
See, sister, how I have lived. Kyodai’s voice rang in Michiko’s head though the princess could not see her. Before I was taken to your world, I was woven throughout the fabric of both realms like the threads in your clothing. The old serpent embodies everything in the kakuriyo and the utsushiyo. Many of the kami you know seceded from O-Kagachi after they’d been given an identity by the denizens of your world. Your prayers can give the spirits purpose, and that purpose gave them power, identity.
Michiko’s vision darkened. When it cleared, she found herself suspended in a huge, cloudlike void of darkness and unstable shapes. She saw a vast expanse of flickering energy and drifting dust … by now a very familiar scene to her. Twice before, powerful spirits had shown her the spirit world, its unfathomable ebb and flow churning in a complex rhythm she would never apprehend.
But the kakuriyo seemed somehow different with Kyodai as her guide. Her sister’s presence comforted Michiko, making the strange space more real, more alive, and less overwhelming.
Here, Kyodai said, there was no “I.” There was no Kyodai to separate from the fabric of O-Kagachi. All things in both worlds are part of the old serpent, but none more so than me. For I was forcibly removed from his essence not by the prayers of many but by the arrogance of one. I was never meant to be distinct, never intended to be an individual. Then, I had no motion of my own and no will. I had not even the thoughts required to recognize these essential aspects of existence. I was subordinate, wholly contained.
“I am so sorry, my sister. That sounds like a hellish existence.”
It was not hellish or divine. It simply was. I did not know anything other than what was, so I could not love or hate it. How could I long for the touch of your hand when I did not know you existed? When I did not know I had a hand to touch?
The void shuddered and began to spin. Michiko had seen this vortex form before-the visual effect of Konda’s crime.
And then he came. Kyodai’s voice grew low and malevolent.
The scene before Michiko shifted, taking her from the mysteries of the kakuriyo to a small stone chamber in her father’s tower. Konda was there with General Takeno and the daimyo’s advisors from Oboro and Minamo. They stood around a flaming brazier that cast eerie blue light across the room. Above the brazier hung a stone disk with a fetal serpent etched across its face.
He stole me from my home, ripped me away from everything I knew and was. He gave me individuality without freedom, that I might recognize my sorry state but remain unable to change it. Here is where the hellishness begins, my sister. Hadyour father let me be, I would never have known regret, anger, or loneliness. Had he brought me here as a true kami, one to be worshiped with respect and admiration, I would have been another willing participant in the great dramas of the physical plane. I would have showered him with as many blessings as he could conceive, as many as I could bestow. For I would have been alive.
But he did neither of these things. He cast me in stone and left me aware. He made me powerful but denied me choice and action. He created me as an individual entity but used me as a means to his ends.
Michiko found herself constrained again, frozen and immobile. She was looking through a distorting window at her father’s face. Awash in blue light, Konda’s mad grin and wild eyes were the most frightening things she had ever seen.
This is the face of my enemy. The face of your father. This is what I saw for the twenty long years of my physical existence. I will never allow myself to be imprisoned like this again. Do you understand me, sister?
“I do, Kyodai. He is a great man, but great men do not always make good fathers.”
The view from inside the stone disk shimmered. When it cleared, Michiko was once more looking out into the void of the spirit world. Slowly, Kyodai faded into view alongside the princess.
“What of your father?” Michiko asked. “We are agreed Daimyo Konda wishes to imprison you again, to use you for the glory of his nation. We will not let that happen.
“But what of O-Kagachi? What will the old serpent do when he finds you?”
Kyodai looked away, her jaw working nervously in an unconscious imitation of Michiko’s own nervous habit. I fear the worst.
“Then, like me, you fear he will do more than imprison you,” Michiko said. “He will devour you. He will consume and digest your personality until it is once more a mere extension of his. He will take you back into himself to restore the injury done to this realm regardless of your wishes. Regardless of the multitude of injuries he will inflict in the process.”
Kyodai’s voice was soft, almost melancholy. I called out for him when I was afraid. But I am also afraid of him. There is none of this, she motioned back and forth between Michiko’s mouth and her own. No language, none of the sharing of ideas or ourselves. He is everything and therefore needs nothing. His guardianship is all that matters, the imposition of boundaries between the realms of physical and spiritual. Only that drives him. I see now how terrible he is.
Michiko looked past Kyodai and took in the whole of the kakuriyo. From her vantage point she could see the very edges of the spirit realm, the limits of it scope, the very shape of it. Though its depths were still immeasurable she felt she could reach out and take it in her hands like some rare and exotic treasure. Was this how her father felt? Did he also see the true shape of the spirit world and dream of holding it, protecting it, shaping it to his design?
Kyodai was truly her sister, she thought. Their lives shared so many parallels. Yet they were also strangers, unknown and perhaps unknowable to each other. Kyodai had taken a body of flesh and Michiko had seen the cosmos as an ephemeral spirit, but this was not true understanding. They were only visitors in each other’s worlds, observers of each other’s lives. Michiko could never grasp the perfect nightmare of gaining an identity only to spend twenty years discovering it was that of a helpless, motionless prisoner. Kyodai would never see how Konda’s indifference to Michiko was as cruel and painful as his devotion to the stone disk, and how his actions had forever altered the course of her own life. They were two sides of the same mirror, linked, identical, but forever distinct and separate.