The Sword of Kaigen

by M.L. Wang

“What are you?” Takeru whispered. Something bigger than myself, she realized. “I’m Matsuda Misaki,” she said with pride and honesty she never attached to those words before. “I’m your wife.” And she attacked him. The speed of her youth seemed to surge into her limbs—but more than that. She was something more than Tsusano Misaki or Sirawu, the Shadow. She was fighting for something greater than one life, or five, or ten. Takeru’s will to live, Mamoru’s soul, her family’s future, the survival of Takayubi itself, all hung on her blade edge. That was something the Shadow, in all her blind love and ruthlessness, would never have understood.

Yet here was this woman who held everything inside a little body of flesh and blood without breaking. It was as though all that pain had compressed in her slight figure like the molecules of a Whispering Blade or thousand-fold steel beaten to a blade in the forge. She had taken every drop of hardship like a stroke of the hammer, turning it to strength, and she was stronger than Takeru. She was breaking him.

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.

And he saw them both for what they were: a woman who needed her husband, and a man who needed his wife.

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.

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