#ronin writes

As he walks down the hall to meet the others by the entrance, he catches sight of Takechi-sensei in the garden. Sensei's back is turned, he's in conversation with another man, but Izo would know the silhouette anywhere. He wishes sensei would turn around and wish him good luck or offer words of apology for the other night, but he knows it's pointless to hope.

It's only been two days since he was injured during Honma Seiichiro's assassination, but now he's leaving the inn again, this time with three others, to murder a man named Ugo Shigekuni, who's said to be hiding in a home on Kawaramachi street.

"The fuck is he going to do with his arm in a sling?" Murata Chuzaburo's voice carries across the yard as Izo approaches, but it's clear he meant for Izo to hear him.

Something has fixed itself upon Terada Kagenori: a rattle in the dark, small bare feet crossing the floor, a cold that stands in the room like a person. He is certain it is a vengeful spirit, but for the life of him, he cannot name what wrong he's done.

--- Content warnings: emotional hurt, angst, dissociation, grief/mourning, loss, death ---

Chapter 24 Chichiue

---

Content warnings: trauma, flashbacks, anxiety, emotional distress

---

He moved back to his father’s house a few days later. It was the natural thing: a son came home to his father’s hall, not his grandfather’s, and the room at the end of the hall where Hyogonosuke had grown up was aired and made ready, the room he had slept in as a boy, three doors down from the one where his father started every morning before the sun came up.

His grandfather let him go without ceremony, only resting a hand on his shoulder at the parting and looking at him for a moment with that reading look, satisfied now, and Hyogonosuke understood what whatever his grandfather had needed to see in those first days, he had seen and was content to hand him on.

His mother was waiting. She had held back during those first days, which was his grandfather's doing again, Hyogonosuke thought, the careful management of how much could come at him at once, but in her own house she could not hold back another moment, and she had him barely through the door before she had her hands on him.

She was a village woman still beneath the years of being a swordsman's wife, broad and quick and undefeated, and she took one look at her son and set about him the way she had once set about her husband's leg, with a brisk maternal horror that had no patience for ceremony at all.

"Look at the state of you. Look at your hair, it's like a horse's tail in the rain. And thin! You're barely there, there's nothing on you, I can see the bones of your wrists! What were they feeding you, were they feeding you at all, sit, sit down, no, by the fire, you're frozen, your hands are frozen—" She had him by the wrist, by the shoulder, turning him to the light, her hands going to his face, to the scar, tilting his head to see the powder-burns, clucking, her thumb at his cheekbone — "and this, oh, my boy, your face, your handsome face—"

Hyogonosuke pulled back.

He did it before he had decided to, a sharp turn of the head out from under her hand, a lift of his own hand that moved hers away from his face without ever touching her. Not the flinch, not the recoil from danger, but something else, something almost forgotten: the simple irritable recoil of a grown man being handled, a son too old to have his hair tutted over and his wrists measured and his face turned to the light like a boy who has come in filthy from playing the fields.

He pulled back, and gave her a look, and the look said, plainly, as plainly as anything he had managed in months without a voice: I am not a child, leave my hair alone.

His mother stopped. She looked at him, at the turned head and the put-away hand and the flash in his eye, the first ordinary human flash anyone had seen in him since he came down the lane, and something crossed her face that was not hurt. It was almost satisfaction. As though in the pulling-back she had found a thing she had been more afraid of not finding than of any scar: that he was still in there, the boy who hated having his hair fussed. She had been braced, perhaps, for someone with no push left. And here was a push.

She put her hands on her hips. "Well," she said. "Listen to you." Which was a joke, because he had not said anything, and she made it anyway, lightly, the way you could make such a joke only if you loved a person all the way down and were not afraid of his silence. It was the first time anyone had played with the silence instead of stepping around it, and it landed in Hyogonosuke like a small warm stone. "Too grand to let your old mother tidy you. Fine. Fine. Sit by the fire at least, you contrary thing, before you freeze, and let me feed you, since I can see nobody else has bothered in two years."

She fed him. She did not get to fuss his hair, that evening, and made a great show of being wounded about it, and fussed about everything else instead, the fire, the food, the bedding, the thickness of his bedclothes against the cold, and Hyogonosuke sat in the middle of it, in his mother's undefeated noise, and let it be the thing it was, which was a room in which his catastrophe did not get to change the rules. It ached. It was unbearably close to being small again, to being the boy he had been before any of it. And it was the first hour since the field that he had felt, around the edges, something that was not grief and not fear, but only the ordinary warmth of being a person his mother loved too much to handle gently.

His mother did not reach him the way the others had reached him. She did not need to. She was not where the deep thing in him lived. She was where the boy lived, and she tended the boy, and let the men of the house tend the rest.

---

The deep thing came at night, as it always came.

He had been back in his father’s house for a few days, sleeping in his boyhood room, before it happened. The days had been good, as good as the days could be now: he was warm, he was fed, the leg that had ached with the previous weeks’ travel eased with rest, his mother fussed and he pushed back and she fussed regardless.

He saw his father every morning and every evening. They sat together mostly in silence, which had not been unusual before Hyogonosuke lost his speech, keeping each other easy company, and on the third morning, his father took him out to the yard in the cold. Frost silvered the packed earth and the bare branches of the plum tree stood black against the pale winter sky. They stood for a while and Hyogonosuke thought that was all they would do, until his father crossed to the rack on the engawa and took down two bokuto. The sight of him tightened something low in Hyogonosuke’s chest.

His father handed him one. The wood settled into his hand with a familiarity that was almost painful. His father waited, asking nothing. And at last, Hyogonosuke brought up his second hand and closed both hands around the grip.

Toshikatsu stepped back and raised his own.

The first form came without needing to be remembered. The body knew it. Left foot. Right foot. The settling of the hips. The rise of the sword. The cut. The scar along his leg pulled and complained as they had at the temple, but neither stopped the movement.

His father watched. Again. The second form. Again. The third. No corrections. No instruction. Only his father's eyes following the work of his body the way a carpenter follows the grain in a board, taking the measure of what remained.

The next morning, they did it again, and the morning after. Hyogonosuke getting up with his father before the dawn and practicing his forms in the garden, which was the routine his father had kept since before Hyogonosuke started learning any of his family’s sword style.

The sixth morning, Hyogonosuke’s father handed him a fukuro-shinai instead of the bokuto and stepped opposite him. Hyogonosuke bowed, accepting that they were moving from the simple forms to the thing the forms drilled. His father returned the bow and closed the distance, slowly at first. A cut, a parry, a step, another cut. The old language of the school, spoken in wood and movement instead of words. And then, for a moment, when his father stepped forward, something in Hyogonosuke flinched with the memory of the field. His father saw it and the tempo changed at once. The pressure eased. The distance opened. And nothing was said as they ended the exchange and lowered their swords, breath standing white in the morning air.

Toshikatsu looked at him for a long moment and nodded, the same kind of nod he’d given Hyogonosuke when he was a boy and had finally managed some difficult move after failing at it for weeks. The nod that said, good, that’s it for now.

---

But the field did not care that Hyogonosuke was sparring with his father or that he was warm and fed and home. It came anyway, on the ninth day, up out of the middle of his sleep with all of its old country intact.

He was in it. He was up the lane and the slopes were full of guns and the bright light of the moon, and Suke was … Suke was there, in the field, where he had no reason to be, with the blood at his mouth, the fragment, the edge of the thing he never let himself look at the middle of, and it was happening, all of it was happening at once the way it did, and the sword answered without his asking, and the boy, the woman, his own man, the faces of the village laid over the dead, and he could not stop it and he could not get out of it and he could not, could not —

And out of the bottom of it, out of the deepest place the body kept, where it had kept the one thing it would give up only when there was nothing left and no choosing in it, came the word.

"Chichiue—"

He heard it. Half surfaced, thrashing up out of the field into the dark of his boyhood room, he heard his own voice say it, cracked and strange and unused, a child's word, the word a small boy cries in the dark when the dream has him, the deepest reach the body had — father — and it was out of him before he knew it was coming, the way the breath had never once come when he reached for it, coming now because the body needed it and the need went under all the broken machinery and pulled the word straight up out of the place words came from.

He did not understand, in the first instant, that it was the first word. He only knew the field was letting him go and he was in the dark and he had made a sound that was a word, his voice, shaped, a word.

And the footsteps were already answering.

Step-drag-step-drag, fast, faster than he had ever heard it, down the boards in the dark. His father, three rooms down, who so slept light as all old soldiers sleep, who had heard, through the wall, in the dead of the night, his son's word come up out of a nightmare as a cry for him. The door slid back. His father came across the room, no slowness now, and was down on the floor at the edge of the bedding before Hyogonosuke had fully surfaced, his hands finding his son in the dark.

Hyogonosuke did not flinch.

He noticed it the way you notice a thing from very far off, even as the field's grip was still loosening on him and his heart was still going and the dark was still full of it: the hands came onto him out of the dark, his father's hands, and the body did not recoil. For the first time since the field, hands came at him in the dark and the body knew them before it could be afraid of them, knew them as the hands it had just called for, and let them.

"I'm here." His father's voice in the dark, low, close. "I'm here. I have you. It's the dream, only the dream, you're home, I have you."

Hyogonosuke lay in his father's hands in the dark of his boyhood room with the field draining out of him and the word still hanging in the air where he had said it, the first word, father, and he could not say it again. He reached for it. He tried, in the dark, to make it come a second time, to say I'm sorry or I’m alright or chichiue once more on purpose, now that he knew it was in there, and the breath went into the shape of it and came out the other side as breath, the way it always did, because it did not come when he reached for it. It only came when the deepest part of him needed it past all reaching.

But it had come once. The door he had thought had no handle on his side had opened, once, for a single word, in the dark, toward his father, and his father had heard it, and crossed the house on his bad leg, and was here, his hands on his son, not letting go.

His father did not ask him to say anything else. He seemed to understand the way his own father understood things, the way the whole of this family understood things in the end without being told, that the word had been everything, that there was nothing to add to it and nothing to make it do twice. He only stayed, down on the floor with his bad leg folded wrong beneath him, his hand on his son's chest where the heart was still going, and waited it out, the way the kind ones waited everything out, until the heart slowed and the dark went ordinary and the night, at last, let them both be.

Outside, over the valley, the waning moon was setting, white and enormous, behind the western slope. Neither of them saw it. The room was dark, and the word had been said, and the father was there, and the son, for the first time since the field, slept the rest of the night through.

---

Previous Chapter | Index

---

You may be surprised to find that this story is full of little truths.

Yagyu Hyogonosuke was a real person who lived from 1579 to 1650. He served Kato Kiyomasa, leaving for the 500 koku posting in 1603 against his grandfather’s wishes. During his service, he was sent to suppress a peasant revolt, replacing Ito Mitsukane, who had failed to do so. He crushed the uprising and resigned from service almost immediately afterward to wander as a ronin for some time.

In 1615, he eventually accepted a position as a sword instructor to Tokugawa Yoshinao in Owari, at a stipend of 500 koku – the same amount he had been paid by Kato Kiyomasa more than a decade earlier. Hyogonosuke himself requested that he should be excused from any official duties besides those of a sword instructor and that he not be given a higher rank or stipend. He founded the Owari Yagyu branch, married, had children, and retired to a temple in 1648.

Hyogonosuke’s fear of moonlit nights threads through literature, sometimes attributed to his experiences in the peasant revolt, and is generally used against him in comments made by members of the Edo Yagyu branch (his uncle Munenori’s family).

Chapter 23 Father

---

Content warnings: trauma, emotional distress, grief

---

His father wasn’t in the valley, Hyogonosuke learned that first night when his grandfather told him so over the evening meal Hyogonosuke couldn’t finish. Toshikatsu had gone three days east to the house of a senior student who kept a training hall of his own there and had been bringing him out twice each year to correct the school’s forms in person. He would be there another three or four days yet, though word had been sent by a fast horse, which would likely reach Toshikatsu while he was already on his way back.

“So your father is coming,” Sekishusai said. “He does not yet know what he is coming to, and we will let him travel first and tell him the rest when he is here.”

Hyogonosuke heard, underneath the plain words, the thing his grandfather was not saying: that the telling would be done carefully, that it would not be left to a rider’s message or to the shock of his doorway. That his father would be prepared. He was grateful for it and ashamed of the gratitude that he should need to be handed to his own father gently, like a thing that might break in the passing.

But there was another thing under the plain words, too, and it took him until he was alone in the dark of the small east room, clean, and fed, and lying on clean bedding under his grandfather’s roof, to find it. His father had gone east to teach. The journey took three days over the passes, and it was the edge of winter, and his father still made it, up and over the same mountains Hyogonosuke had just come down, to stand in another man’s hall and correct the angle of a cut because the school needed it and there was no one else whose eye would do. The bullet to his back had not ended his father’s usefulness. It had not made him a thing the family carried. He had spent the years since teaching himself to live in it and then simply gone on, up the passes twice a year by horse, doing the work. He was doing the work now, at this very moment, while his son had walked four hundred ri convinced that a damaged man was a finished one.

Hyogonosuke lay in the clean dark and turned that over, and it would not stop turning. He had built his vision of the future on the absolute certainty that his body would not be forgiven for not being able to do what it could not. Yet his father was three days east disproving it without knowing there was anything to disprove. The wall that had stood so solid all through the winter, the image of being kept as a debt rather than a kindness, the place at the edge of the family's table, the margins of the dojo where students did not bow to him, that wall did not fall that night, but a crack ran up it that he could not unsee, and behind the crack was his father, traveling the passes even with his bad leg, kept by no one, teaching the Shinkage-ryu at the dojo of a man three days to the east who could afford the expense to invite him.

The days waiting on his father’s return were quiet ones and they were, Hyogonosuke understood much later, a gift his grandfather arranged as deliberately as the carefully telling. He was let alone to be a body that needed mending. He bathed, and the heat went into the cold that had sat deep in his bones since the pass, or perhaps even since long before the pass, since Kumamoto. He slept and it was sleep on clean bedding, behind a wall and under a roof, and even when the sleep was not good, which was most nights, the gray morning came through the screen the way it had at the temple, soft and gentle. He ate what was put in front of him and the kitchen, on his grandfather's order, kept putting it there in amounts he could never finish.

Genzo tended him without fuss, with the rough gladness of an old servant who had a young master back to tend. The young one who had tried to send him away from the gate could not meet his eye and went out of his way to do him small, silent services, a thing Hyogonosuke wished he could tell him to stop because there was nothing to make up for since the young man had only done his work and hadn’t known any better.

In the evenings he sat with his grandfather. They didn’t talk, mostly, because Hyogonosuke could not, and because his grandfather had never been a man of many words. They sat in the large room as the light went, or beside the brazier when the cold came down, and Sekishusai did the small things an old man does in the evenings, read his books, write at his low desk, and let his grandson be in the room.

Once, Hyogonosuke went through his traveling bundle with his grandfather. Sekishusai didn’t ask anything, just looked, his old hands turning over the netsuke hare and the river stone when Hyogonosuke handed them to him. He saw the list of the forty’s names and Hyogonosuke offered it to him to read, but Sekishusai set it down with care and said he understood what it was without being told.

On the third evening, Sekishusai brought a wooden sword to the room with him and placed it in Hyogonosuke’s hands, just set it across his palms and watched his grandson’s hands close on it, and eventually took it back and said nothing, but something in the old man eased, as though he had checked a thing he needed to check and found it sleeping, rather than lost.

Hyogonosuke understood on those evenings that his grandfather was reading him. Not the way the barriers had read him, for danger, nor the way the village had read him, for placing, but reading him the way Joen had read him under the eaves: as the particular man he was, the man he had become, taking the measure of what had come home so as to know what could be built from it. And he understood, dimly, without daring to hold it up and look at it directly, that his grandfather was not finding a ruin. The old man's face over those evenings did not have the grief of a thing lost in it. It had something more like the patience of a thing recognized, and waited for, and finally in hand.

On the sixth day, in the early dark, his father came home.

Hyogonosuke did not see the homecoming itself. He was in the small east room when he heard it, the sounds of arrival at the front of the house carrying down the boards, the gate, voices, Genzo's voice, the particular uneven tread of his father’s footsteps coming into the entry that he would have known among a thousand footsteps, the sound of his whole childhood mornings, and his heart went up into his throat and stayed there.

There were low voices. And then he heard his grandfather's voice, level and quiet, and his father answering, and then his father not answering, and he understood that out there in the entry, in the cold, before his father had so much as taken off his traveling cloak, his grandfather was telling him. He could not hear the words and, in a way, he was glad he could not. But he could hear the shape of it: his grandfather's voice going on, low and steady, unhurried, the voice of a man laying a thing down carefully piece by piece so that the man receiving it would not be cut on the edges; and his father's voice coming in less and less, a word, a question, and then not even that, and then a silence that stretched.

Hyogonosuke sat in the small room and watched the door and imagined his father standing in the entry with the cold coming off his clothes, hearing that his son had come home, and then hearing the rest of it: he cannot speak, the scar, the leg, the powder-burns, he flinches from hands, came home alone, came home like this, and having nowhere to put any of it, the way Hyogonosuke himself had had nowhere to put it.

His father had been carrying something else up the passes home after hearing that his son had returned. Hyogonosuke knew it the way he knew the tread. Nearly two years of silence had passed between them: the lord's single letter and then nothing after. A son who had been honored in the field and then vanished off the face of the world and sent not one word home. His father had been coming home angry. A father's anger, the kind that is made entirely of fear and has nowhere to go but at the one who caused it: where have you been, why did you not write, do you know what you did to your mother, to your grandfather, do you know what it is to wait two years for a letter that does not come. He had been carrying that up the mountain and through the passes after the messenger had reached him, and now his grandfather was taking it out of his hands in the cold of the entry, piece by piece, replacing the picture of the silent, ungrateful son with the picture of the son who had actually come home, so that when his father came down the boards the anger would have nothing left to land on.

The silence in the entry went on a long time.

Then the footsteps came. Step-drag-step-drag, down the boards, slower than Hyogonosuke had ever heard it, as though his father were walking toward something he was not sure he could bear to reach.

Hyogonosuke got himself up off the floor, the leg protesting, because he could not meet his father sitting, and he stood in the middle of the small room facing the door with his shoulders drawn in and his hands not knowing what to do or where to go, so they knitted into each other at his waist, fidgeting, palms clammy, and the tread stopped outside, and the door slid back without even a pause allowing Hyogonosuke to gather himself any more.

His father stood in the doorway.

He had not taken off his traveling clothes. There was the cold of the road still on him and the dust of it, and his face above it was the face of a man who had been told a thing in an entryway and had walked the length of his own house not believing it, because no one believes these things until the body is in front of them. He had come down the boards still half made of the anger, Hyogonosuke saw it, the set of a man who had rehearsed hard words over three days of mountains, and then his eyes found his son standing in the middle of the room, and the words did not come.

Hyogonosuke watched his father look at him. Watched the eyes go to the scar, the long pale line of it. Watched them go to the grey stipple of the powder-burns scattered around the eye. Watched them drop to the way Hyogonosuke stood, the weight kept off the leg, the old downward wound written in his stance; his father, of all men, reading a leg, knowing exactly what he was reading, the one man in the valley who knew from the inside what it was to stand that way.

And he watched his father understand that his son flinched, because Hyogonosuke could not help it, even now, even here; his father took one step into the room, the half-step of a man who means to cross to his child, and Hyogonosuke's body did the thing it did, the small recoil, the flinch, before he could stop it, and his father saw it. Saw his son flinch from him.

And at this, the last of the anger went out of him. Hyogonosuke watched it go. There was nothing left for it to be; the son who had not written for two years was standing in front of him scarred and flinching from his own father's step, and he could not be angry at that, there was no anger in the world that could hold its shape in front of that.

His father's face, which had come down the hall still armored, came apart the way the old woman's had, the way the grandfather's had, the way every face that truly looked at him came apart in the end.

His father did not cross the rest of the room quickly. He had learned, in his own quarter-century, how a damaged body is best approached; or perhaps he only knew his son now, in this one glance, well enough to know. He came the rest of the way slowly, letting himself be seen coming, the way the kind ones had all learned without being taught, and he did not seize his son. He stopped close, and he raised one hand - Hyogonosuke held himself, held against the flinch - and laid it against the side of his son's scarred face, over the long pale line, the way he would have cupped the face of his son when he was a small child.

"Look at you," his father said. Very low and not at all the words he had carried up and down the mountain. "Look what they did to you."

It was not a question, and it did not ask Hyogonosuke for anything, for no word, no account, no apology. It only stood there between them, look what they did to you, a father saying the one true thing, and Hyogonosuke, who had braced for where have you been and do you know what you did, found that this was the thing he could not stand against, the simple grief of it, the my son in it. His face crumpled. His father's hand stayed against it. And his father drew him in, slowly, his arms going around his son, and held him, holding his boy in the small room in the early dark, and Hyogonosuke put his face down into his father's shoulder and made the wordless sound again, the third time in that span of days, and his father held him and made a low sound of his own into his son's hair.

---

Chapter 22 Grandfather

---

The room hadn’t changed.

It was the large room facing the side garden where his grandfather had made his case across three mornings two years ago, where the old man had said I have lost enough family and looked out at the practice yard with the thing in his face that his grandson couldn’t place.

The same room.

The light that fell into it through the closed screens was the gold of a late winter afternoon now as the sun continued its path.

Genzo brought him to the threshold and stopped there, and Hyogonosuke went in alone and lowered himself to sit, the leg folding under him with its pull, in more or less the exact place he had sat the last time. He was painfully aware that he did not sit the way he had sat two years ago, square and easy and certain, taking up his full space in his grandfather’s home by right. He now sat folded inward, his shoulders rounded, the long journey having gone all the way into the bone of him, making himself small in the middle of the plain, bright room.

The mansion was not a grand place, itt was never meant to be. It had been built plain and functional on the reduced land that remained the Yagyu after the wars, and yet it was swept and ordered, and smelled of clean tatami and wood smoke and home, and he sat in the middle of the room in his road-filthy clothes with the mud of the passes on him and the cold still deep in his bones, even after the hours spent sitting at the old woman’s irori. He had never in his life felt so plainly that he did not belong in a place.

He drew his shoulders in a little further, as though, if he only made himself small enough, he might be able to shrink back out of the room, out of the moment, out of being seen at all. He waited, with his heart racing, for his grandfather to come.

He heard the young servant go past the room once, quick steps on the boards, toward the inner house, carrying Genzo’s messages in front of him, making the circuit he had been appointed to make, the baths, the kitchens, the room, the master, in that order. And then, after some time, he heard his grandfather: the slow tread of an old man on the boards of the hall, slower than two years ago, a small hesitation in it now, but still unmistakably him. He was unhurried, the tread of a man who, Hyogonosuke surmised, had been warned about what he was walking toward and needed to be ready to meet it.

Hyogonosuke kept his eyes down. He could not look toward the door.

Sekishusai entered and stopped just inside the room, the door shutting behind him.

Hyogonosuke heard it and did not look up. He looked at the floor in front of his own knees and waited for his grandfather’s voice, for the thing he had built in the dark of every night on the road: the thing he had imagined his grandfather’s face doing: not anger, anger would have been simple, but rather than look of a man proven right about the one thing he had prayed to be wrong about. Recognition and grief and the bone-deep weariness of being unsurprised. The look the household had worn when Kyusaburo had died in Korea.

The silence went on.

No question came. No who is this? No speak! No name demanded of him. His grandfather asked him for nothing and said nothing, which the old machine that had shown him many versions of this very scenario could not account for.

Hyogonosuke made himself look up.

His grandfather was standing inside the door, looking at him. He had aged in the past two years. He was thinner, the bones of his face nearer the surface, the last of his hair gone wholly white. The hesitation in his steps visible now in the way he held himself. But his back was straight, the way it had been straight at seventy-three, by an act of will that outlived everything else, and the eyes in the aged face were still his grandfather’s eyes, fixed on Hyogonosuke, taking him in. Taking stock: the scar, the powder-burns, the thinness, the silence he had already been warned about. The whole of what had come back up the lane, taking him in without flinching from it, the way the old man had never flinched from anything.

His grandfather’s face did a thing Hyogonosuke could not place. He had built the imagined face so many times that he could not now fit the real one to it. The real one was doing something the imagined one had not done, something complicated that moved across the old features and that would not resolve into what he had braced for. He could not read it. And because he could not, the machine in his mind decided that it was judgment, that he must answer with an apology.

He bowed. He put his hands to the floor, one at a time, and bent over them and put his face between them, all the way down, holding nothing back. The bow of a man laying his failure in front of the one he had failed.

He held it. The floor was cool under his forehead, and he could hear his blood thrum in his ears. He waited for the voice above him, for whatever his grandfather would say to the wreck that had come home.

He heard, instead, eventually, the slow sound of an old man lowering himself to the floor: the steps coming closer and then the careful folding-down of a body that no longer folded easily, close in front of him. And his grandfather’s hands came down onto his shoulders.

Hyogonosuke flinched. The body did it before anything could stop it, the old recoil from hands that came at him, his whole frame jerking, and the hands did not go away, and they did not grip, they only stayed, light and old and certain on his shoulders, waiting out the flinch the way the kind ones had all learned to wait it out, and when the flinch had passed through him and he had not been let go, his grandfather drew him up off the floor, not roughly, not all the way, just up out of the bow, and gathered him in.

The old arms came around him. His grandfather pulled him in against him and held him, the way he had not held him since Hyogonosuke was a very small boy, before he was old enough to be a swordsman's grandson and put away such things; held him hard, the straight back curving at last around him, one old hand coming up to the back of his head, to the high-tied hair with its thin, dry ends, holding it there, the way you hold the head of something you have been afraid you would not get to hold again.

And Hyogonosuke, who had braced for the voice and the judgment, felt against the side of his own head his grandfather's face, and felt that it was wet, and felt the old chest move once, hard, and then again, with something that was not speech and would not become speech, that had no words in it and needed none.

His grandfather was not proving anything right. He was not unsurprised. He had stood at the head of the lane for two years in the cold looking up the pass, evening after evening, through two winters, and the thing in his face that Hyogonosuke had never been able to place, the thing from the morning by the practice yard and the thing now, was the same thing, and it had never once been judgment. It had been this. It had been a man who had already lost one grandson to a far shore he never came back from, holding the other, the one who had, against everything the old man had feared and against everything he had let himself believe in the worst of the dark, come back down the lane alive.

Hyogonosuke broke for the second time that day. He turned his face into his grandfather's shoulder, into the smell of him that he had forgotten he knew and knew instantly, and his own arms came up at last, slowly, with the same reluctance the hand had come off the obi for the cloth at the temple, as though they had forgotten how and were relearning it under him, and he took hold of his grandfather's kimono in both fists and held on, and his grandfather held him, and neither of them let go.

---

Chapter 21 Gate

---

Content warnings: trauma, emotional distress, grief

---

It was past the middle of the afternoon before she could get him to go.

She had fed him a small bowl of millet and pickles, and then, after he had managed to get that down, a second one. She watched him eat with flat, practical satisfaction and no remarks, and let him sit by her fire through the short winter’s day while she went about her regular work, talking to him and asking nothing, until the worst of the morning had settled in him and the shaking was gone. The light had begun to turn golden and slant toward the western slope by then.

Then she had stood, rising slowly with her hands on her knees. “It’s time,” she had said. “I’ll walk with you. I haven’t had a proper walk in a while and my knees will go stiff with the cold if I sit all day long. The chickens will mind themselves.”

He didn’t want to go. She could see it in him and did not argue with it. She simply put away Tasuke’s folded kimono in the chest in her room that held the things that mattered most to her, banked the little fire in the irori, and put on her sandals.

She held the gate for him and, somehow, he found himself through it and in the lane under the golden light with her beside him, before the not-wanting had found anything it could take hold of.

They walked up through the village together. The village knew her where it had not known him this morning. People lifted their hands to her from their doorways, for the old woman from the eastern edge of the village, out for a walk before the cold came down in the evening, with one of the dojo’s many ronin keeping her company up the lane, and nobody looked twice. The mansion’s roofs grew larger against the slope as they went.

A little way further, where the lane began to rise toward the gate and his step began to drag with more than his sore leg, she took his hand. “Here, let me have your arm up this bit,” she said, folding her thin, old hand around his as though it were the most ordinary request in the world, not slowing, not making a thing of it. “These old knees of mine don’t care for a slope, and the footing’s bad along here, see, all rutted where the carts come down. There. A body’s glad of a steady arm at my age.”

She kept on, easy, about the ruts and the cart-tracks, and how they never would mend the lane until someone turned an ankle, talking the whole way up so that there was nothing in the air but her talking and the two of them walking. But her hand was steady and his was not, and they both knew which of them was holding the other up, and so she gave him the talk and the reason, so that he did not have to know it out loud. It was the same way she had taken his hand when he was small and the walk home from the far fields had been too long for a child’s legs, folding him into her chatter and walking him home inside of it.

At the mansion gate she let go.

She stepped back from him, put herself in order, and bowed to him low and proper, the bow of an old village woman to the grandson of her lord, putting them both back into the shapes the world had given them in front of a gate like this one. When she straightened, her face was certain.

“Go on in,” she said. “He’s home. I’ll wait here till you’re through the gate so you can’t think better of it.” And then, lower, without ceremony, “You’re a good boy. You always were. You go on. See your grandfather.”

He bowed to her and held it and she let him. Then he turned and went in through the gate of his grandfather’s house. Behind him, once he had passed through, he heard nothing but knew without looking that she had remained standing in the lane until he was through, the way she said she would.

---

A young servant Hyogonosuke did not know, who must have been hired in the two years he had been gone, met him in the entrance court, and this man did not do the careful reading and judging the village had done. He saw a scarred, road-filthy ronin come up limping to the Yagyu house at the end of the day, near the evening meal, with no announcement, and he planted himself in the way.

“What’s your business?” The young man’s voice had the edge of someone guarding a great house against exactly this sort of arrival, though there was nothing his broom could have done against a sword-carrying intruder had Hyogonosuke been such a thing. “Coming up to the gate at this hour! The master is not receiving. If you’ve come to challenge the dojo, you come in the morning and you come properly, through the steward, not hiking up the lane at suppertime. Have you no manners at all?” He looked Hyogonosuke up and down: the swords, the dirt, the silence. “Well, do you have a tongue?”

Hyogonosuke stood in the court, his own family’s entrance, feeling the helplessness coming up in him. It was the domain barrier all over again. You shame your house. He could not speak his own name. Instead, he reached into his kimono and brought out the one thing that could speak for him, the little carved hare that his grandfather had given him as a boy and held it out in his open palm.

The young servant looked at it and made nothing of it. To him, it was simply a whittled rabbit in a beggar ronin’s hand. His face hardened another degree and he was about to scold Hyogonosuke for being ridiculous and run him out of the mansion, but another man had come out into the court behind him at the sound of the voices, and this one Hyogonosuke knew: Genzo, who had served his grandfather since before Hyogonosuke was born, grey now and stooped. He’d come to see what the young one was making such a noise about and saw the hare on the stranger’s open palm and went still. Then he looked up, hard, at the stranger’s face, at the scar and the stippling from the powder burn, and the eyes, searching the way the village had not known to search in the morning.

Hyogonosuke watched Genzo find it. He watched the face go from doubt to a terrible, uncertain hope, the old eyes going over the scar and the powder burn and coming back to meet his, searching for the boy he had known. And finding him.

“Young master,” Genzo said, and his voice was not entirely steady. The younger servant turned and stared at him. “Young master, it’s – it’s you.” Genzo started again. “You’re --” He could not finish it. He needed, the way a man needs air, for the young master to say it back to him, to say his name, or to say Genzo, or to say anything at all in the voice the old man had known since it was a child’s voice in this yard, so that it would be true and not simply a thing an old man hoped. He waited for it, his face open, waiting for it to be answered.

Hyogonosuke wanted to. More than he had wanted the words at any gate or barrier or on the whole road home. He wanted to say Genzo, but nothing came. And Genzo’s face was waiting, full of hope and confusion, not understanding why the young master, if this truly was the young master and not some cruel apparition, would not say something. So Hyogonosuke lifted his hand to his own throat, laid his fingers against the place where his voice should be coming from, and shook his head, slowly, the small broken shake that was not refusal but emptiness. It isn’t here. It won’t come. There is nothing. I’m sorry. And he kept his eyes on the old man’s, asking him to understand the thing he couldn’t say.

Genzo went still. He looked at the hand at the young master’s throat and the shake of the head and understood. Hyogonosuke watched it reach him, watched the last of the confusion go out of the old face and then watched something worse settle instead.

They had all known the young master was hurt all those months ago. The lord’s letter of merit had said as much: that he had been injured and released from service with awards of money and swords. But none of them had known this, that the young master would return to his family’s home having to try to make himself understood mute, with gestures.

The old man’s composure, which had held through the recognition, came apart now, all at once, his mouth pulling down and his eyes spilling over, and he bowed, very low and very long, perhaps to hide what his face was doing , and when he came up again he had taken hold of himself because someone had to.

“All right,” Genzo said, low and unsteady, gently, the way you speak to spare someone. “All right. You don’t – you needn’t. I have you. You’re home.” He did not make the young master try again. He turned, instead, to the younger servant who had gone white, and gave him low, quick orders: a bath heated, the brazier readied in the small east room, and word to the kitchen, and then, lower, a word in the young servant’s ear that sent him hurrying ahead into the house: go to the master, go now, tell him the young master is home. The young man went, throwing one backward look at the man he had just tried to bar from the gate.

Genzo turned back to Hyogonosuke. “Your grandfather is in the house,” he said. “Let me bring you to him.” And because he did not know how to say any of the rest of what wanted saying, he simply led in the way Joen had led, with his body rather than his words, down the familiar boards of the engawa toward the large room overlooking the side garden where it had all begun.

---

Chapter 20 Tasuke

---

Content warnings: grief, trauma, survivor's guilt, emotional breakdown, discussion of death and loss

---

The first face Hyogonosuke saw that morning was the old man who made and mended baskets in the house beside the bridge. He was at it already in the cold of the morning, sitting on his little bench beside the doorway of the house, a half-made basket between his knees and the split bamboo laid out beside him, exactly as he had sat there in the mornings of Hyogonosuke’s childhood. He was older and grayer now, with less hair and bushier eyebrows, but otherwise the same man, the same hands doing the same work in front of the same house.

And Hyogonosuke’s body knew the face before his mind had finished arriving at it, only the knowing went wrong, the way it had gone wrong in the moonlight in reverse. On the road, the dead had worn the faces of the living: the man who mended baskets, the daikon-seller, his own little brother, the moon handing him their faces and laying them over the people he had killed in the field. Now the living man sat in his doorway, his hands moving at his trade, and the corpse the moon had made of him came up behind Hyogonosuke’s eyes and stood there over the living man, so that, for a moment, he saw them both, the basket-mender and the slack face in the millet, and his step faltered and his breath went short, and he had to look at the ground to keep walking.

The basket-mender glanced up from his bench and looked at him, at a road-worn man with a scarred face and a limp, swords at his side, coming down off the shrine path at dawn with a traveling bundle on his back. The man’s face did the small, careful thing every face on the road had done, the half-heartbeat of reading him, and then it filed him away as a ronin, one of the many who come through the valley to train or challenge at the dojo, arriving early off the mountain, and the man dipped his head in the small, neutral courtesy a villager gave a passing ronin he did not know, and went back to his basket.

He did not know me. Hyogonosuke walked past the bridge with the double-image still fading behind his eyes and the man’s not-knowing settling into his chest. All night he had braced against being known. He had not known to brace against this, that he had changed so far past the young man who had ridden out of the valley two years ago that the people who had watched him grow up looked straight at him and saw a stranger. He was thinner than when he had left. The weather of two years had darkened his skin and damaged his hair. The long, pale line down the cheek and the grey stipple of powder burns around his cheek. And, he realized, he no longer walked the way he had walked, with his chin up and his shoulders square, the unhurried strut of a young swordsman who wanted the world to look at him. He came down the road now with his head down and his shoulders drawn in, the walk the road had taught him, the walk of a man who wanted not to be looked at. The Hyogonosuke who had left would have hated this walk. He would not have recognized himself in this man, either.

He passed more of them. The woman drawing water at the well in the small square looked up and looked back down. Two men loading a handcart gave him a passing nod and went on with their loading. A knot of children ran across the lane in front of him after a small tan dog and did not so much as slow. None of them knew him. He was a ronin off the mountain; the valley was full of them, the dojo drew them from every province, and the village had learned not long ago not to take special notice of one more stranger walking toward Sekishusai’s gate.

It should have been a relief that he was not recognized, and some part of it was. But it was also its own grief, walking down the lane of his own village unknown, and the two things sat in him together as he went.

He had thought, on the road, of the faces here as a thing to be braved, a gauntlet of both recognition and judgment he would have to walk through to reach his family. And the village simply declined to play its part. It looked at him and let him pass, the way the herb-seller had let him pass, the way Joen had allowed him to be a shape until he was ready to be a man. The valley was doing the same for him, without knowing it, the one kindness he most needed and could least have asked for.

He did not go to the mansion. He meant to, in some version of the night’s plans, but he found, in the daylight, with the village not-knowing him on every side, that there was somewhere he needed to go first.

He went to find Tasuke’s mother.

---

The house stood on the eastern edge of the village where the lanes yielded into the first of the fields: a modest place behind a low fence of woven brushwood, gone gray with the years, a simple gate set in it. Chickens worked the bare yard inside, a vegetable patch was turned for winter along the southern wall. Smoke stood above the roof, long and straight, the thin thread of a warm irori inside.

It was the house Tasuke’s elder sister had married into, where his mother had gone to live after her own husband passed, and Hyogonosuke had been here as a boy more times than he could count. The yard had been one of the places the valley children ran loose, with its low fence and the chickens worth chasing, and Tasuke’s mother had minded the lot of them in the loose way of such women, samurai and farmer’s child alike, wiping their faces and breaking up squabbles and chasing them out of the vegetable rows and off the plum tree, so that her hands had known Hyogonosuke since he could barely tell her his own name.

He stood with his hand on the gate and could not move. It was the same place his body always went now: the short breath, the racing heart, the fine shake coming up through him. But it was worse here because on the other side of this not-crossing was the woman he needed to give the kimono to that he had carried for four hundred ri, and now that he was at the gate, the carrying suddenly seemed like it had been the easier part. He stood with his hand on the gate and the mechanism told him, in its flat way, to go back up the lane and never come back down again.

“Young master.”

He jumped. Not the gun-flinch, the whole-body recoil that lived in him now at the hunters’ guns, but the ordinary startle of a man who had thought himself alone and found someone suddenly close by. She had been down on her heels a little way to his right, low along the inside of the fence, pulling the dead growth away from the roots of the things that had flowered into the autumn, and he had walked to the gate without noticing her at all.

She rose now, a hand to the small of her back, a simple patched apron over her striped kimono, hands dark with the cold earth. She was in her sixties, the age folded into her face, her hair gone iron-grey and pulled back plain. She was a countrywoman who still kept the yard and the chickens and the vegetable patch, and she came up off her heels with the grunt of a woman whose knees were not what they were, but who got up off the ground everyday regardless.

She looked at him over the low fence. Looked up, as she was a head shorter than he was. And she did not do the thing the basket-mender had done, the thing every face on the road had done, that half-heartbeat of reading him and filing him away. She looked at the scarred, road-worn man at her gate and knew him for who he was, and her face went still, and then it opened, all at once.

"Well," she said. "There you are."

He could not answer her. His mouth opened around the place where a word should have been, a polite greeting, and the breath went into the shape of it and came out the other side as just breath, the way it always did now, and his face must have done something, because hers softened and she wiped her hands on the apron and came toward the gate.

"You're cold all the way through, look at you. Came down off the mountain, did you, sleeping up at the old fox shrine like a child playing at being lost." She said it without surprise, as though he had done it last week and would again next week, and she lifted the latch herself, since he had not, and held the gate. "Come in out of it, there's a fire and there's hot water. There's no one here but me to mind whether you do or don't, so you may as well."

There was no choice left in it: the old woman was holding her gate open for him in the morning cold and there was nothing his body could do but go through it. The chickens scattered from his feet and re-gathered after he passed through on their way across the yard. She watched him walk, the limp, the way he came through the gate, and said nothing.

"They're all gone up the north valley, the whole pack of them, the girl and her man and the little one, off to see his people," she said, latching the gate behind him. The girl was her granddaughter, Tasuke’s niece, her eldest daughter’s child. The little one was the girl’s boy, the old woman’s great-grandson, the newest of the long line of children to run loose in this yard, his father was in service to the Yagyu.

"His grandmother's getting on and wanted the boy where she could look at him. Four now, he is, four and a holy terror, into the chickens, into the shed, into everything that'll have him." She said it the way she said everything, as though he had been by often enough to know whom she meant. "So, it's only me until they're back. You'll have tea. Don't tell me you won't. Sit."

She had him sit beside the irori, the sunken hearth in the middle of the big central room, and he lowered himself with care, easing down so the bad leg could fold under him in seiza, and it did, but the scar pulled as it settled, the downward line of the kama cut running tight from high on the outside of the thigh to low at the inner knee, and he could not find the way to sit that did not pull at it. He shifted his weight. He shifted it back. And he sat as still as the ache would let him and could not find his comfort and could not make himself feel easy in the warm room.

The kettle hung over the fire on its blackened chain where it hung most of the day in a house like this, and she had only to swing it over to herself and pour. She settled across from him on the same side of the hearth, and poured, talking the whole while – the cold this year had come early, the way her knees told her the weather now better than any almanac, the boy and the chickens.

She broke off her talk to ask him, in the ordinary way, turning to him, an ordinary question, had he walked the whole way, then, or hired himself a horse over the steep passes?

And she watched him try to answer her. She watched his mouth open on it, watched the breath go in and shape itself toward a word but come out only as breath, no word, nothing. Watched his face do the thing it did when the word would not come, the frustrated small working of a man reaching into the place words came from and finding it shut.

Her talk stopped.

For a moment, she looked at him, taking it in – that the young master whose face she’d wiped, whom she’d fed at this very hearth, whom she’d chased out of her vegetable patch, who could not now answer a question about his travels. Something moved across her face very briefly before it was put away. She had known him before he talked in full sentences, a lifetime ago. And here he was come home, unable to tell her whether he had walked or ridden. Then she picked her talk back up. She did it deliberately, he saw, pitched now so that the conversation asked for nothing back, left him no gaps to fall into, running on easy and unbroken about the boy and the chickens and the early cold, filling the air for two, the way she filled it for the four-year-old, so that he could sit in the warmth of it and not have to fail at answering. She had read the whole of it in one stopped breath and folded it into her care without mention. 

He watched her hands do the ordinary work of making tea, the same hands, older, that had wiped his face when he was little and had scraped his knees in the yard. The warmth of the room came up around him and he could not feel easy in it.

He had placed the bundle beside him on the mat and while she talked and the steam came off the cooling cups, his hands went to the knot of it, because if he did not do it now, while the doing was in him, he did not think he could do it at all.

She set the cup down on the hearth-frame within his reach, near his knee, and he could not pick it up. She let her talk run down and watched him work open the knot and did not interrupt. The cloth came open. He moved aside the spare tabi, the little hare of carved wood his grandfather had gifted him as a boy, the smooth gray stone from the river below One-Sword Rock, the folded paper with the forty’s names. And there, at the very bottom, folded as he had folded it so many times along the road and in Kumamoto before that, was Tasuke’s spare kimono, the worn cotton, the repair under the left arm where the sleeve met the body, the thing he had carried out of the empty house in the castle town because it was the one thing he could not leave behind.

His hands lifted it out. And the body, which had done this on a hundred nights by a hundred fires on the road and at the temple, began without choosing to do so, to bring the folded cloth up toward his face, to find in it the last trace of the man, the cotton and wood smoke and the almost-gone smell of Suke at the collar, the most of him that was left anywhere in the world.

He caught himself, his hands stopping halfway up. Because this was not his to do here. He had carried it this far to give it to her. It was hers. He had nearly pressed his face into her son’s kimono in front of her like a thing he was keeping for himself.

He brought it down and held it out to her across his two hands, to give it, and as he did, he looked up and he caught her face.

She had been watching the kimono come out of the bundle and she had understood. He could see it in her face. Perhaps she had understood from the moment she rose from her weeds and saw him at her gate without Tasuke beside him. Perhaps she had carried the understanding already for a year, the way the whole valley had carried it, the word gone round from the great house that the young lord had been honored and injured and let go, and then the long silence after, with no son following the word home. But there was understanding and there was her son’s worn kimono coming out of the bundle in her own house, being held out to her across two shaking hands, and her face, looking at it, came apart, quietly, the way a face comes apart when it has been holding a thing a long time and is, at last, allowed to set it down with closure.

And that was what broke him. Her face.

The thing he had not let himself touch since the field, the thing he pushed away in the daylight the way he pushed away his memory of the cousin and the impossible fragments that couldn’t possibly be memory, the thing he had known all along in the place where the body keeps what they mind will not: that Suke was dead, that he had been there, in the field, that the two fragments his mind had kept were the edges of a thing he could not look at whole. It all came up at once with nowhere left to go. His face had gone wet without his feeling it begin. His breath broke in his chest. He was still holding the kimono out to her and his hands were shaking, and before he understood what was happening, he had curled forward over his own knees with the cloth gathered against him, his head going down, and the sound that came out of him was the only sound the body would give him, the wordless tearing thing it had given him in the field and on the lane, given now to this.

He wept over his knees in the old woman’s house and could not stop and could not shape it into anything. Not into her son’s name. Not into I am sorry. Not into, It was quick, he didn’t suffer, there was nothing to be done. There were no words in him for any of it and there had not been for a long time. There was only the sound, and the shaking, and the kimono held against him.

She let him.

She did not reach for him, or gather him up, or hush him. She stayed and let the grief have him because she had buried a husband and was old enough now to have learned what the young doctors and the monks sometimes needed to be taught, which was that there are things a body has to do in its own time, and the kindest thing a person can do is to be there and wait it out, and not make it any harder by needing it to be smaller or quieter or more contained.

And so she waited.

When the worst of it had gone through him, when the sound had worn down to ragged breath and the shaking had begun to ease, she moved. She shifted herself closer on her knees, slowly, with a hand going to his arm first so that he felt her there before she did anything, she reached for the kimono and worked it gently from his arms, out of the grip his hands had taken on it, and she held it for a moment against her own chest, her son’s kimono, and then folded it into her lap and smoothed it with her hand.

Then she took out the tenugui from her sleeve and wiped his face. He flinched at the first touch, the body doing what it did still when hands came at him, and she stopped and waited and then brought the cloth back slowly enough for him to see it, and this time he let her. She wiped the wet from his face the way she had done when he was a boy, the same plain, rough kindness that had never once in his life stood on the ceremony of whose grandson he was. She did not say anything for a while. She just wiped his face, and when that was done, she took one of his hands into both of hers, his broken-and-mended fingers sitting in her old ones, and let him breathe.

They sat like that for a while, the fire crackling beside them, and the chickens clucking in the yard, and the cold morning light coming grey through the doorway.

“There,” she said at last, low, gentle. “You brought him home.” She looked down at the kimono in her lap and not at him, which was its own kindness. “That was a long way to carry a thing. You brought him home. That’s the thing that wanted doing and you did it.” She patted his hand. “It’s done now. It’s done.”

He sat with his hand in hers and let her hold it.

Eventually, she went on talking the way she talked, low and easy, about nothing much at all. That he’d want a bath and a proper sleep, that he was thin as a rail and someone ought to feed him, that the cold would be hard this year, she could feel it in the mornings in her hands. He let it go over him. And then, in the same voice, in among the rest of it so that it took a moment before he understood she had said anything different, she said, “Your grandfather’s up there waiting on you, you know. Has been a good while.”

He looked up.

“Two years, near enough. He comes out to the head of the lane, where it turns down off the pass, and he stands there in the evening and looks up it. In the cold, too, mind, in the worst of winter, wrapped up like an old crow. My girl’s seen him, and I’ve seen him, more times than I could count for you. Just stands there looking up at the pass.” She said it lightly, busily, as though it were one more piece of valley gossip. But she had covered his hand again while she said it, the weight of it sitting across his knuckles. “An old man doesn’t stand in the cold for two winters to give someone a scolding when they come home. Whatever it is you’ve got yourself frightened of –“ she looked at the fire and let him keep his face, “- I shouldn’t carry up the hill with me, if I were you. It’s heavier than what’s waiting.”

---