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‘there are a million ways to tell the same story. Our job as jaseliwu is to find the one the listener needs to hear. Not necessarily the one that makes them the happiest or the one that gives them the most information, but the one they need to hear to do what they need to do.’
“Was the headmaster serious about challenging people to single combat? You guys really still do that?” “How else would we settle our differences?” “I don’t know. Talking?”
People whispered that the moonlit curls of mist on the lake were ghosts from the next world, striding their silvery way over the water’s surface. Mamoru had never feared them. The people who had lived and died here in times past were Matsudas and Yukinos. They were family.
Her father always said there were things you couldn’t train into a fighter—spirit, courage, the ability to be something bigger than oneself.
“Most strong things are rigid. If you are water, you can shift to fit any mold and freeze yourself strong. You can be strong in any shape. You can be anything.”
And what happened to a man who devoted his entire life and soul to a single pursuit only to fail entirely? Misaki supposed, after so many years of disappointment, he turned into a wrinkled husk of a human who could only find solace in tormenting those younger and better than himself.
“Why don’t you try taking responsibility for the things you can control instead of the things you can’t?”
You learn over time that the world isn’t broken. It’s just… got more pieces to it than you thought. They all fit together, just maybe not the way you pictured when you were young.”
“I’ve borne a powerful Matsuda heir. What else could I wish for?” “A smart one?” he suggested.
A jaseli once told me, listening never made any man dumber, but it’s made a lot of people smarter.”
The storms, Kaa-san said, were a reminder of their place in the world. “Ours is borrowed power,” she would say, “a gift and a blessing. The true power belongs to the gods.”
Normally, she couldn’t sense nyama at such a distance, but the snow acted like spinal fluid, shooting the agony up the rocky backbone of Takayubi. She felt it shudder, like a sob, in her veins before dropping into silence. Dozens of pulses. Gone. In a single beat of her own heart.
Had Mamoru been a dignified warrior, worthy of his name, he might have taken a moment to pray. He might have considered that this man was the last of the true Yukino swordsmen, that his passing ended a line that stretched all the way back to Takayubi’s founding ancestors. He might have found some words of respect to ease his teacher’s way into the Laaxara. Instead, he just shook, like a child, and said, “I’m sorry, Sensei,” his voice ragged and small. “I’m so sorry.” He reached out and touched his master’s hands—the hands that had taught him how to hold a sword. “Don’t go.”
Curling her fingers in as far in as they would go, Misaki ripped her hand free. His windpipe shredded in her fingers. Like that, she was a killer.
She had assumed, for some reason, that killing a person would be hard. But it wasn’t. When you were used to slicing tendons, of course cutting a man in half was easy. When you had trained to stab between major arteries, of course piercing a whole organ was easy. With a blade like Siradenyaa, killing was obviously going to be easier than not killing. She should have understood that, but she couldn’t explain the emptiness that suddenly overwhelmed her.
A mother wouldn’t have been able to cut a young woman’s head from her shoulders. A human being wouldn’t have been able to turn from their dismembered corpses without a single pang of guilt. Thank the Gods she was a monster.
“I know you koronu like to frame relationships between opposites in terms of conflict,” Kotetsu said, drawing a piece of glowing hot metal from the coals. “Fire against water, light against darkness, day against night, but one who hopes to create must understand that opposites exist to balance and complement one another.
An explosive personality in life, Matsuda Takashi had become an explosion in death, frozen branches and blades bursting from his body in all directions—crystal ice veined with blood. Unwary fonyakalu who had been too slow to jump clear were speared through limbs, chests, and abdomens by the force of his dying jiya. Some had been hoisted off their feet high into the air, creating a tree of corpses that glittered red against the sunset.
“You slimy Kaigenese sea slug,” the woman spat, resorting to racist insults, as so many fighters did in defeat. Not good ones either. “You cheated.” Indignant, Misaki scowled down at the fonyaka. “You try fighting fair after pushing out four babies,” she panted in Shirojima Dialect she knew the woman couldn’t understand.
The dragon killer ripped the blade free, and Mamoru watched his own insides spill from his body. Reality overcame him like river waters breaking through the last of winter’s ice. I’m dead, he realized with chilling clarity. I’m dead.
Suddenly, it wasn’t as though he was missing fingers. His fingers were the snow. They were the rivers, reaching all the way down the mountain to sink into the ocean and grasp the power of gods. He wasn’t bleeding out. He was the mountain. For the first time in his life, he was perfectly, overwhelmingly whole.
A decade later, a fifteen-year-old Hiroshi would become known as the youngest swordsman ever to master the Whispering Blade. What the world would never know, was that he was the second youngest.
Part of what had always made Hyori so beautiful was her simplicity. Those soft eyes were as clear as spring melt, concealing nothing. In love, in joy, in mirth, she was pure. Her pain was the same. Undiluted. And it was unbearable to look at.
“You should be proud, Yukino-san.” Takeru looked down at the wrecked woman. “He died with his sword in his hand.” Hyori screamed.
Wound up in his heat, she had to wonder what appeal this held for the white adyns with no jiya or taya. Where was the magic in something that didn’t seethe between extremes? Where was the excitement in a kiss that didn’t spark and steam and burn like this?
Coarser than Kaigenese hair, straighter than Yammanka curls—an anomaly, like everything about him. Her fighter who preserved life. Her theonite who kissed like an adyn. Her tajaka who drank the cold like it could sustain him.
“It was the day you were born, Misaki. Since I started building something better and more beautiful than a fighter’s glory, the idea of war has made me sick. The idea that my little girl might suffer or that my boys would be forced to go to war… That’s not something a loving parent wants to contemplate, even the most hardened warrior. Now that I’m an old man, far past my fighting prime, I consider it a great blessing that I have never had to unsheathe my sword in a real battle. I would not see you or your brothers in danger for all the glory in the world.”
“You did right by your family and your country, even though, I think none of us did right by you.
Misaki wished she had Setsuko’s strength. She had thought for so many years that what she had was strength—faking a smile through pain and anger—but this honest ability to smile from the heart was something beyond anything she had ever had.
A steady stream of corpses on stretchers came up the mountain all day. It was horrible to hear the cries of grief and denial from family members that greeted each new body, but Misaki found that it was more horrible still to watch a body appear over the ridge to silence. Some of these people had died along with everyone who might remember them. They lay alone on their ice slabs, with no one to mourn them.
“My son’s sword doesn’t have a name.” “Of course it does, Matsuda-dono,” Kotetsu said in his singularly gentle, rumbling voice. “It gave its maker and wielder to earn it. That is Mamoriken,” he nodded to the sword, “the Protector.”
This is where Ranga started, she realized. With a breath held too long, with a people who couldn’t bear to answer to men like this any longer.
And with my palms to the ground, I realized that I could disperse myself into the snow, spreading all across the mountain, even to the sea below and deeper, deeper, until the pain diffused through my new being, like a drop of blood into a pool. Maybe the pain and shame were too much for a small boy to hold, but the mountain… the mountain could bear it all.”
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.
What sort of a man closed his eyes to the world and called it clarity?
So, instead of giving himself to the snow, Takeru dug his hands into it hard. His fist tightened, and the snow rushed up to him. In an agonizing surge, it seemed to give back everything he had sent out into it over forty years: his brother’s bruises, his mother’s screams of impotent anger, his nineteen-year-old bride holding her face in her hands as she fought to stifle her sobs, his father holding a bamboo rod and cracking it down on him.
“It almost seems that human limitation resists our existence, that maybe… the Gods are the sort of parents who do not wish their descendants to exceed them.”
Misaki and Takeru’s fight hadn’t magically imbued them with love and understanding. It didn’t heal the pain of Mamoru’s absence. But it was something, like the beginnings of a scab. It was the first sign that things could get better.
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.
“I won’t raise another generation as blind as my own.”
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.
As Izumo blinked awake in her arms, Misaki turned inward, toward her home and her husband. Her little boy smiled up at her, and the future was no longer at the burning edge of the sea. It was here, in a softly beating heart and black eyes, bright with promise.
