“Kitsune Jun,” said the samurai captain. “By order of Shōgun Tatsuya, you are to surrender your arms and come with us. You are under arrest.”
“For what crime?” Lady Ami demanded.
“Impurity,” hissed a Guildsman.
Ami ignored the Lotusman, a challenging stare fixed on the lead samurai. “Kitsune Jun saved your Shōgun’s life, Captain. Tatsuya would not even be alive, let alone sitting the Four Thrones if not for him. This is the courtesy we show now in the Shōgun’s palace?”
“I follow my orders, First Lady,” the samurai replied. “I humbly suggest you take issue up with your Lord and husband.”
“This is madness. This is—”
“Enough,” rasped the Lotusman. “Take the abomination into custody.”
The samurai reached out to seize Jun’s arm. The boy backed away, three steps, raising his blade into guard position. His eyes were closed, head titled slightly, a gentle smile curling his lips. His voice soft as new-forged steel.
“I warn you, honorable soldiers, all,” he said. “If you stand against me, you stand against the gods themselves. It was spoken by my—”
A flurry of hisses from the raised barrels clutched in the Guildsmen’s hands. Ami cried out, Jun shoving her aside as whistling projectiles filled the space between them; tiny needles set with syringes, filled with gleaming black liquid. Jun moved, his sword a blur, rolling and swaying, slicing one, two, three from the air. The samurai lunged, war clubs raised, closing about the boy as he swayed in the hail of fire. Jun struck, swift as quicksilver, slicing through the join at one man’s elbow, stepping behind another as the Lotusmen fired again, the samurai’s back sparking under the needle flak.
“Stop this,” Ami roared. “I am the First Lady of this Shōgunate, and I command you to stop this!”
Jun struck again, pushing his blade through the eye socket of one samurai’s mask, the soldier screaming and falling to his knees. Jun vaulted up off the man’s shoulders, flipping himself overhead, landing amidst the Lotusmen. His blade a whistling, crimson blur, weaving in the air to the tune of murder, blood spraying in haphazard patterns across the dojo walls. One Lotusman collapsed screaming, two more forever silenced. But as the fourth fell back before Jun’s onslaught, he let loose a last volley from his weapon, one of the tiny needles striking the boy in his shoulder, burying itself to the hilt.
Ami cried out, drew the tantō hidden in the small of her back. She stabbed the Lotusman in the throat, a gush of crimson warmth flooding over her hands, painted upon her lips. Bubbling nausea in her belly as the Guildsman fell, clutching the spray at his neck. The floor slippery beneath her feet. The first man she had ever killed. Gods …
Jun turned back to the samurai, the figures surrounding him now. His chest heaving, frown forming between his brows, shaking his head as if to clear it. Blade dripping gore. Plucking the empty needle from his shoulder. Swaying on his feet now. Ami crying out as the samurai lunged.
He fended them off for a moment or two more, opening up another at his throat. Yet his footsteps were unsteady. Head drooping. Shoulders slumping. Sword hanging limp in his grip. Ami cried out, stepping into the fray only to be seized by iron hands, flung into a corner. She hit the wall hard, breath knocked loose, blood on her tongue. A club stuck Jun’s sword arm, breaking it clean, the boy crying out as he fell to his knees. His sword clattering to the dojo floor as another blow crashed across his shoulders, splayed him flat upon the boards. Clenched fists rising and falling, Ami trying to catch breath enough to scream. Jun falling still, beaten senseless, head lolling on his neck as they slapped manacles about his wrists. Hauling him from the room now, supported between two hulking iron figures, his bare feet trailing through pools of cooling blood. Leaving her there, clutching her breast. Staring at his sword, gleaming in the crimson puddle, now as useless as his certainty. His prophecy. His destiny.
Weeping. Cursing. Hair in ragged curtains over her eyes. And dragging herself across the floor, through the blood, she clutched the blade, the hollow scabbard, hauling herself to her feet.
Husband.
She had to find Tatsuya …
Three figures in a shadowed hallway, lit by the scarlet light of flickering lanterns.
The first, a son of the great Kazumitsu Dynasty, son of Sataro-no-miya, victor of the Battle of Four Sisters. Absolute Lord of all he surveyed. Shōgun of the Shima Imperium. Unquestioned. Unchallenged. Untouchable.
The second, a widowed bride. Her belly swollen with her beloved’s child. Still dressed in the mourning black, barely a month since her husband’s passing.
Standing together, heads bowed, speaking softly.
A third figure, hidden in the shadows. Quiet as whispers. Still as stone. A bloody sword clutched in her white-knuckle grip.
She watched them. The pair. Speaking in hushed tones. Dread and disbelief in her belly. Recalling his face in the battle’s aftermath, drenched in blood. The gentle kiss he had placed on her brow—the first touch from him she had felt in years.
That should have been enough.
She was certain now. But she had to see.
The pair of them. Soft voices. A wicked, curling smile.
A hand, placed on a swollen belly.
Lips, upturned to a gentle kiss.
The Shōgun removing his golden tiger mask, the face beneath one she recognized at last. Almost identical to his brother’s. A near perfect symmetry. But still, she should have known …
Not a bull upon the throne.
A bear in a bull’s skin.
Curse me for a fool.
And just as certain, the thought that pulled her back from the brink.
The truth that loosened her grip on the blade’s hilt, and all desire here to remain.
No one will believe me …
I was not there that day.
I did not see him dragged through the streets before a wondering crowd. The figures in leather and brass on either side of him. Eyes of bloody-red glass. The four stones, newly erected in the Market Square. The mob gathered around it, as if some new sport. The blind boy there chained, eyes open and seeing nothing at all.
I did not hear the figures in their white tabards, reading of “impurity” from ancient and twisted scripture. Proclaiming a new order, a new law, set with the Shōgun’s seal. I did not hear their lies. The feeble justifications for atrocity you monkey-children so love to weave. I did not hear the sound of the flames flaring at their wrists. The tinder beneath him crackling.
His screams.
I did not smell the blackening meat, the burning hair, the charring bones.
I did not touch the cooling remains when all was said and mercifully done.
I did not taste the ashes on my tongue.
I was not there.
I did not see, nor hear, not smell, nor touch, nor taste. Not any of it.
So how do I know, you ask?
Foolish monkey-child.
Death told me.
Ninety-nine years after the birth of the Kazumitsu Dynasty, at the beginning of a boiling summer, I watched a twenty-two-year-old woman limp to the highest summit of the Four Sisters Mountains.
Not the most spectacular of finales, I will grant you. Not one to bring audiences to their feet, rippling with vibrant applause. Not the way a story about heroes should finish. And you need not be availed of facts about how high the peaks, or how hard the trek or how the skies around those magnificent mountains were prone to rain samurai.
All this, you already know.
She was dressed in heavy black cloth and furs. Eyes hidden from the burning sun behind goggles of dark glass. A heavy cowl pulled up over her newly shorn hair.