bags I carried heavy, my mind swirling with the dust. Of course, I realized in a sudden burst of misery and relief, Kouje had distracted them from their purpose. They wouldn’t think to look in our bags. What servant would ever beat his master so? What loyal subject would ever strike his prince?
We were of no more interest to them. We were irrelevant to their duty.
But Kouje, I knew, would never forgive himself.
The guards by our horses stepped away at a gesture from the commander, and I tried to feel grateful, not muzzy with pain and the gentle wet dripping of blood into my sleeve. I thought of rocks, and mountains, and the forbidding, solid posture of the men who played heroes in the theatre and I held my place. I didn’t sway, or stumble. If I had done that, then surely everything would have been lost. As it stood, I was unsure and afraid of what was holding Kouje together.
I knew that it would be terrible when whatever he was clinging to crumbled at last.
“My blessings on your nephew,” said the commander, which meant we could go. His voice was less cordial than it had been before, as though he’d decided that Kouje was not a man he’d like to know after all.
The injustice of it rose thick in my throat like the dust, so that I had to swallow around my unhappiness. I held silent, and dropped my gaze so that I could not even see the commander’s boots.
“My thanks for your courtesy,” Kouje said, and handed back the commander’s willow branch.
If the gesture was a little too swift and abrupt, it could be taken as apology for the commander’s displeasure. The bow that came next could be taken for the same, but I knew that it was only so that Kouje could take shelter in a brief moment of hiding his face.
I took the horse’s reins once again, my movements perfunctory, as though I were a puppet putting on a show of humanity.
Kouje walked ahead of me. He did not look back even as we passed out of the courtyard and into Honganje prefecture.
CHAPTER TWELVE
KOUJE
It was quiet on the plains. To our left were the humble rice paddies of country farmers, and as the sun set it cast light across the murky water, so that it burned silver. To our right, in the far distance, were the Cobalt Mountains, over which the dragons flew during the war. Their peaks disappeared into the clouds, and if I tried to follow them, my eyes burned with the fading sunlight.
“I understand why you did it,” Mamoru had explained, many hours ago, after I’d helped him to mount the horse. My hand had rested upon his forearm, where that very same hand had drawn blood. I had nothing to wrap the wound with.
Those were the last words he’d spoken. I’d offered none at all.
When we stopped for the night, and there was no more promise of putting that moment yet farther behind us—then I could answer for what I’d done, confront it, stand like the fabled warrior protecting his lord on the bridge with my weapon at the ready.
That story had been my father’s favorite. It recounted the tale of the loyal retainer, the last barrier between his lord and their enemies, fighting off a garrison of men on his own while his lord prepared means for suicide high in the castle keep. They died together, my father said, and they were honor itself. But those men came from a time long before ours, a time when honor ran thicker than blood, and bound each man to another—a hierarchy, itself more violent than magic. It was a principle upon which our entire world was built and I had defamed it with one simple stroke, with a weapon as simple and as beautiful as a willow branch.
Put that in your play, Goro, I thought; but even that was too outlandish, and no audience would ever believe it. It had been, in short, the perfect ruse—so perfect that they had not bothered to check our bags, in which Mamoru’s silk robe lay coiled like a snake to destroy the two of us.
Mamoru knew why I had done it.
If he knew that much, then he knew what it meant for both of us that I had raised my hand against him. We did not speak the next day, nor the day after that, but rode on toward our goal as though we were strangers.