The Sword of Kaigen

by M.L. Wang

So many years, he had avoided touching this porcelain doll he had been given for fear of breaking her. He hadn’t wanted to see this beautiful, strange woman crumble the way his mother had. Somehow, he had broken her anyway, but she hadn’t broken quietly like porcelain. She had broken like black glass and ice—jagged and more dangerous than ever.

Never seen that side of Takeru

The irony was that Mamoru had been right—about the Empire, about the Kwangs, about the Ranganese—and Takeru had called him weak.

In the uncertainty of youth, Mamoru had been closer to true clarity than his father ever had been. Takeru had demanded that Mamoru stand and fight for his truth. Now that his wife was asking him to stand, all he could do was shatter, and shatter, and shatter.

As the tiny woman matched his steps, Takeru was forced to realize that he had spent fifteen years sleeping obliviously next to a combatant very nearly his equal in skill.

Unlike his ancestor, Takeru had only ever found the focus to form a Whispering Blade by retreating into the obscuring white of the mountain, where he was blind to his country, his wife, even his own emotions. What sort of a man closed his eyes to the world and called it clarity?

There was pain in her fighting, coursing alongside the strength, pitching and rising like storm waves with each stroke of her sword. She was in agony, and it was his fault. He had never meant to do this to her, but with each defensive step back, he only seemed to make it worse—and he couldn’t bear it. In her growl, he heard his father’s bitterness, his mother’s tears. Mamoru boiled from her eyes.

The break sent a jolt through Takeru’s soul. He was a little boy, curled up on his side, shaking with the aftershocks of his father’s fists, unable to understand where his mother had gone, why she had left, why his father hated him so much. Tou-sama had stomped on him twice, leaving a heel-sized bruise on his cheek and a lance of pain in his ribs.

For his whole life, Takeru had been certain that he was right to cast his pain off on the mountain, that it was the only way—because how could one possibly hold so much suffering in something as small as a human form?

That's so sad

Yet here was this woman who held everything inside a little body of flesh and blood without breaking.

In that moment of awe, Takeru realized how much he owed this woman, who had borne his children, who had fought, and fought, and fought for a family she had never asked for. She had given him her life and demanded nothing in return. Mamoru hadn’t inherited his strength from his father. It had come from her.

As he reeled, she threw a kick into his stomach. It had been decades since someone had struck him hard enough to knock him down, but in Misaki’s monstrously powerful state, her foot slammed the breath from his body and sent him tumbling through the snow.

Misaki was rushing toward him now, the final, most important part of his life bearing down on him. And he saw them both for what they were: a woman who needed her husband, and a man who needed his wife.

“I accept,” he said and for once, his voice was full—overflowing with gratitude, and strength, and the determined bite of winter.

Cool fingers ran over Misaki’s sword hand, over her sleeve to brush the hair back from her face. In the falling snow, Takeru stared at the woman he had married and saw her for the first time. “I accept.”

Takayubi legend said that a Matsuda had never walked away from a duel without first spilling his opponent’s blood on the ground. Takeru and Misaki broke that tradition that day. She caught the drops of blood before they could fall and placed a gentle hand over the cut on his neck. He didn’t push the hand away, even as her jiya tugged at his open wound, knitting the liquid into a scab.

“I think I should stay a while,” he said, “and say goodbye to my brother and son.” Misaki nodded. “Of course.” But she found that the thought of leaving Takeru alone on the mountainside upset her. He had spent too long alone in the snow, hadn’t he? Meditating the humanity out of himself, sinking deeper into a refuge that was now stained with his family’s blood. “Would it be all right if I stayed with you, Takeru-sama?” she asked softly. Takeru was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded. “Please.”

Finally

“That is my wife’s business,” Takeru said a little sharply. “As a lady of a noble house, she can bear a sword if she—”

Character development

“The details are unimportant for the time being,” Takeru said. “For now, I’m just relieved that my family is safe.” Misaki would have expected Setsuko to ask more questions, but the other woman had stopped, staring at Takeru. Evidently, she had noticed the change in him, the way his voice carried a modicum of emotion. Her expression of confusion turned to one of shock when Takeru stooped and picked up Nagasa. To Misaki’s memory, Takeru had never held one of his children. Nagasa himself looked disoriented at suddenly finding himself so far from the ground.

“Great Nagi, Misaki,” Setsuko whispered in Misaki’s ear, her eyes wide. “What did you do to that man?” “It’s hard to explain,” Misaki said with a smile.

Love, that's what she did

Everyone in this part of town has been oppressed or abandoned by the theonite powers the rest of the world depends on. But they don’t give up. Instead, they’ve made a life and a culture here for themselves. It’s not perfect, but it’s worth protecting, even if the ruling theonites, and the politicians, and the police have all decided otherwise.

As Misaki looked at her husband in the lantern light, everything started to make sense. Takeru had never witnessed a marriage without violence. He had been trying to keep them from that the only way he knew how. With silence. In a twisted way, it all made sense.

So much of her anger had spawned from Takeru treating her like a doll, but she hadn’t been much better. She had treated him like a human-shaped mass of ice without considering that there might be entirely human reasons that ice had formed.

When Misaki and Takeru lay down on their futon together, a wave of their cold extinguished the flame in the lantern, leaving only the gray-blue mix of moonlight and shadows. The darkness didn’t threaten nightmares now that Misaki was no longer alone in it. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world when Takeru moved to touch her—then he paused. “What is it?” she whispered. “You hate it when I touch you,” he said—not an accusation but a simple fact. “You’ve always hated it.” Misaki didn’t try to deny it. She didn’t know if she could make herself like his touch, but she leaned in and brushed her cheek against his fingers. Then she reached out and held him. Cold. But what did that matter? So was she. Nestling closer, she rested her head on his shoulder. He would never have that hot spark that set her desire to a boil, but when she closed her eyes, no nightmares came. In her husband’s embrace, wrapped in the sound of his steady breathing, she slept soundly for the first time in a month.

Wow

“He’s cuter than I am,” Misaki said. “Makes me seem sympathetic and unthreatening. Isn’t that right, little buddy?” She tapped Izumo on the nose.

“I’m not displeased that you spoke to the jaseli,” Takeru said. “I’m displeased that you acted alone.” “I said I was sorry. I’ll obey you next time.” “Obey me? Misaki, that’s not what I…” Takeru let out an agitated huff, and even in the dead of winter, his breath was so frozen that it misted and sank in the darkness. “You what?” Misaki prompted when the tension had stretched too thin between them. “I would like you to be honest with me and to trust me to protect you.” “I do trust you,” she said earnestly. “I’m sorry.” “That was a dangerous thing for you to do. What if you had been found out?”

Bro changed

“I know you wouldn’t understand this, being a civilian and not a true military man, but the Emperor cannot spare troops to distribute food and supplies when they are busy protecting his provinces from foreign invaders.” “Respectfully, General, the Emperor’s troops didn’t protect this province,” Takeru said. “We did.” It had probably been the wrong thing to say, but Misaki found herself struggling not to smile. She wondered if Takeru was aware that he had never been more attractive. It had never properly occurred to her before that moment, but perhaps the thing she found most attractive in men had never been power. It had never been danger. It was bravery. And her husband, facing these liars in a language that was not his own, was braver than any Matsuda facing an army on the battlefield.

see. It seems I have spoken out of turn then. I apologize.” Takeru’s monotone was so blandly sincere that the general seemed to be having trouble deciding if he was being mocked or not.

A dragon knew when he was looking at worms and snakes.

Misaki had spent so many years pining after sun and firelight. She hadn’t looked closely enough to see that Takeru had his own light about him. Subtle but clear. Something of the moonlit snow that seemed to live in his skin.

Because it was nighttime and no one was around to see, Misaki reached out and found her husband’s sword-calloused fingers. They had been married fifteen years. It was the first time they had ever held hands.

In that freezing cold kiss, Misaki found a subtlety she had never known in her husband. He was not a single slab of rigid ice. Beneath the frozen mountain, there was the swell of tides. Beneath the snow, there was the bubbling of the Kumono spring and the rivers it sent racing beneath the ice and deep underground. Beneath the shiver of pines, their roots reached like fingers into the soil to grasp at the spring-warmed core of the mountain.

The sword seemed like an impractical, purely ceremonial pursuit in peacetime. But with the revelation that Ranga could come knocking at their door any day and the Imperial army would do nothing to protect them, training with the greatest fighter on the Sword of Kaigen suddenly looked very appealing.

But this little creature, with the eyes of Yukino Hyori and the power of a fonyaka, was irrefutable. They might fear and hate her, but she was living testament to everything the Empire had tried to erase. As long she walked the Duna, no one could forget what had happened on the Sword of Kaigen.

The Empire may have refused to let the people of Takayubi mark the graves of the dead, but the mountain didn’t forget.

Her youngest son wasn’t quite two yet, and he looked at the grass with wide eyes, clearly unsure what to make of the bright green world suddenly towering all around him.

He was softer than his brothers somehow. Though born to a pair of killers—his mother, the underhanded ambush predator, and his father an unquestioned apex predator—he had a nervous air about him that was more characteristic of prey.

Unlike Hiroshi, however, Izumo gave the impression that his head was alive with a clamor of thoughts. No matter what was going on around him, he always seemed to find some small thing to fascinate him—the drip from the end of an icicle, the stitches holding his own sleeves together, the slow progress of an ant following its fellows’ scent trail up a blade of grass.

Artist

She had never seen anyone inspect their physical surroundings as closely as her fourth son—no one, except perhaps Koli Kuruma, the greatest inventor of his generation. She was beginning to suspect that Izumo had something none of his brothers had. She suspected that he might be a genius. And the more ridiculously he behaved, the more she seemed to love him.

What'd I tell you?

The silence that had pervaded the Matsuda estate had retreated in the past months, giving way to the sounds that filled the air this morning—laughter as Nagasa and Ayumi chased each other through the halls, the thwack of wooden blades as Takeru’s students warmed up in the dojo, the ringing hammers of numuwu working on the new addition to the front of the house.

Robin Thundyil knelt on a cushion at the low sitting room table opposite Takeru. They were having tea.

Strange indeed

If Robin sat down with a person, there was always a sense that they belonged to him and he belonged to them. As an orphan, he had learned to make family wherever he went.

a person’s tragedy doesn’t define them or cancel all the good in their life.

Wholeness, she had learned, was not the absence of pain but the ability to hold it.

“Damn it, Robin.” “What?” “It’s just that I… all these years, I had a few things that comforted me. I would look out there.” She nodded to the horizon visible through sitting room’s open door. “At the sun. And I would imagine that somewhere, you were happy. You made it work somehow. You found a girl who was nice enough to be gentle with your heart and tough enough to keep up with everything in it, and you had the family you always wanted.”

Setsuko flirting with Robin was one of the weirder things that Misaki had had to process in recent memory. Then again, Setsuko flirted with a lot of people, so Misaki decided she wouldn’t dwell on it.

Strange

Despite the fire hazard, Daniel turned to be a delight to have around. Most children spent at least a little time being wary and uncomfortable in a strange place full of foreigners, but it seemed that a life with Robin had accustomed Daniel to strange places and people.

In youth, Robin’s nyama had leapt and crackled against hers, painful but joyful at the same time. Somewhere on his path, Robin had encountered suffering he couldn’t turn to energy, something that had broken him. That something sat deep inside him, heavy, like molten metal, hotter than fire but lacking the jubilant brilliance of flame. The Robin Thundyil she had known was gone. Of course, Misaki had changed too. Her power, which used to dance along the surface of the world, shallow and free, now sank deep into Robin’s molten veins, matching its intensity.

The picture of Mamoru was recent, taken during what no one realized would be Kumono Academy’s last school picture day. He sat straight in his school uniform, trying far too hard to appear serious. To Misaki, it perfectly captured her son—a boy with enough talent to never have to try hard at anything, who had tried harder than everyone at everything, until the very end.

She knew in that moment that this was one more thing that would never go away. She would always love Robin, the same way she would always miss Mamoru. For everything that had changed, this hadn’t. It hurt. Gods in the Deep, it hurt, but it didn’t consume her. After so long, she had learned to carry it like a woman.

The familiar ache rose between them—the burning urge to rush into an embrace, contained in the knowledge that they never could. It strained there between them as their eyes met. They didn’t shake, or shout, or cry as they had when they were teenagers. They bore its weight like the man and the woman they had become.