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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Be careful, big brother, she wanted to say then, be careful how hard you love what you know you can’t have. But that also was not her place.
“Why?” “So you islanders won’t leave, so you’ll stay here and keep fishing the coasts and farming the land to fuel our dying economy, so you’ll die protecting his lands, instead of moving into the overpopulated cities and getting disillusioned about the state of the Empire like everyone else.”
What’s wrong? She wanted to ask, but that wasn’t the sort of thing you asked a
man and a warrior, even if you were his mother.
For the first time in his life, he was perfectly, overwhelmingly whole. He smiled.
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.
I did it, he thought, and the blood spreading from his body seemed unimportant. Tou-sama, Kaa-chan, I did it! He couldn’t wait to tell them!
As his body grew warm and numb,
Mamoru wondered if this fonyaka had someone to remember him across the ocean—a father, a mother, someone who would be proud to hear that he had died on the Sword of Kaigen.
But he was as distant as he was still, and Misaki knew from years of experience that reaching out and calling to him wouldn’t make a difference. He was untouchable. She was alone, drowning in screams.
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.
Wholeness, she had learned, was not the absence of pain but the ability to hold it.
She hadn’t been surprised to realize that she still loved Robin. What was strange was that she could love him and love Takeru at the same time.
Love for what she had and what was gone. Love no matter the pain.
There had been other ghosts trapped here: the spirit of a ferocious teenage girl and the boy she loved. They were gone now too, passed into the realm of memory where they belonged, where they could rest.
