#roninwrites

Chapter 4 Smoke

Content warnings: graphic violence, combat, emotional distress, mental breakdown, injuries, death

The order came the evening before from the local field commander, in an abandoned farmhouse that smelled of cold ash, the cheap fish oil used in farmers’ lamps, and the damp of a building standing empty for weeks.

The brief was given quickly by a man with a great deal else to arrange: Hygonosuke’s unit would go up the eastern road at first light, through the wooded slopes, and push the rebels off the high ground above the millet fields while the main force came in from the west and broke them. Hyogonosuke's forty would then hold the far side and take any of the rebels who were trying to run.

He understood his unit’s part and found it a good one.

Nobody told him his forty men were the distraction, the noise the rebels would be looking at while the soldiers who were coming to kill them came from the other side.

Hyogonosuke carried the orders back to his own fire the way a man carries good news, and sat down with Daisaburo to think it through.

Daisaburo was his lead ashigaru, a tall, broad-shouldered man who had been fighting since he was fifteen and knew more than Hyogonosuke about nearly everything that mattered in the field, though he never said much about it. He listened, deep in thought, with a dried grass stem shifting between his teeth, a small fidget he had developed at some point. His eyes were on the dark in the direction of the fields and the hill, and when Hyogonosuke said they would go up on foot he nodded, because he had been thinking it already. The hill was steep and wooded, with dense undergrowth. A man on a horse there would not get far.

They went over the plan twice: the order of the men, the pace, what to do if the rebels gave ground, and Daisaburo said little, agreed with most, and let the small part he did not agree with pass, because it was not worth the breath to mention it when the commander had already made his decision.

Hyogonosuke found Tasuke afterward and told him to stay back in camp, taking care of his horse, and keeping the fire going for their return, which would likely come late in the day when the temperature had already dropped and when a stoked fire would be most welcome. Tasuke complained good-naturedly about being left behind to tend the fire like an old woman, and Hyogonosuke assured him an old woman who kept a good fire would be the most welcome thing in the valley, more welcome after battle than all the tea houses of the capital. Tasuke conceded the point and went to gather more firewood.

In the morning, Hyogonosuke put on his armor. It was a plain suit with dark blue lacing, simple and unadorned, well-made but new, without the age or ornament armor took on over the years. He had had it made in Kumamoto, choosing the kind of pattern his grandfather would have selected for himself, simple and meant for use, not appearances, like the rebuilt mansion in the valley, like the way Hyogonosuke had been taught to hold a sword.

He did not put on a helmet. He had thought about it and he’d thought about the woods, the underbrush, and the way his kabuto narrowed what he could hear and see, and then he had decided against it, instead opting for a hachigane, an armored headband, which was what most of his men wore. So dressed he was nearly one of them, a plain man in plain armor among a unit of plain men, which was not a thing he thought about, but which would not have troubled him either way.

He marched out with his forty strung behind him in the thin autumn light. The valley was beautiful. The millet on the slopes had mostly been cut by this time of year, but the fields still smelled of it, dry and faintly sweet, and on the hillsides the maples had turned, their reds and yellows brilliant against the pale morning sky.

A pair of cranes lifted from a harvested rice paddy as the column passed, hanging white over the blue before vanishing behind the ridge.

"The cranes will come back," Hyogonosuke said, to say something.

"Mn," Daisaburo agreed, still watching the ridge.

The open ground ran out where the fields met the foot of the slope, and the road became a lane that climbed up into the trees between two wooded rises. It was already narrow, wide enough only for two men abreast and not three, and as it climbed it grew steep, so that the forty bunched on it, the men behind closing on the men in front where the ground slowed them, packing tight on the one strip of open ground between the brush.

Hyogonosuke felt something was wrong before he could have articulated the feeling and thought for a split second that he had spent much time studying swordsmanship and not much, by comparison, studying the military arts. Beside him, Daisaburo's grass stem had gone still in his teeth. They both knew, in the same moment, that men should not be stacked up like this on steep ground with cover to either side, and both of them knew it too late. There was no order to give that would unmake it. The column was already on the lane, the lane was already climbing, and you cannot pour forty men backward down a hill in good order on a word.

The attack came before they reached the high ground.

The first volley fired down out of the brush above them, and three men dropped before the sound had finished rolling across the hillside. The ashigaru to Hyogonosuke’s left took a shot through the gap between the do of his armor and the shoulder. He did not so much fall as simply stop, upright one instant, sitting in the road the next, legs awkawardly underneath him, hands pressed flat to his chest in the reflexive gesture of a man trying to keep inside him what no longer wished to stay there.

His name is Matsuda. He has two sons in Higo. These were facts Hyogonosuke had carried for nine months without once giving them much thought, and now they arrived all at once with specific weight.

The man beside Matsuda took a shot through the lower jaw, which came away from the rest of his face, tearing the flesh and sending the bone into lane, and he neither sat nor fell but stood, producing a sound unlike anything Hyogonosuke had heard a human mouth make, high and wet and unbroken, until the second volley came and put him down. The sound stopped on its own.

Move, something said, very far back in Hyogonosuke’s mind. Move, or you will sit down in the road and die where Matsuda is sitting.

He drew his sword and shouted the advance up the hill.

The men in front pressed back into the men behind as the next volley tore through them, and an elbow caught Hyogonosuke across the face hard enough to make his vision go white. A dead man fell against him with that particular slack and heaviness of something that had, until seconds ago, been a person. The weight brought him down, falling sideways, his knee striking the road, his shoulder catching something that drove the air out of him. He got a hand under the body to push it off and it would not move the way a thing should. It was only weight, dense and unhelpful, the arms swinging loose, and he had to brace and shove twice before it rolled.

Somewhere in that shoving against the dead weight, the day came loose from him.

He could not afterward have said when it happened, only that the world drew off to a small distance and stayed there. Everything in the gun smoke and the shadowy dark of the woods became unreal, far and slightly slow, the movement reaching him in pieces rather than a flow, as though he were blinking a beat too long and losing the middle of every movement, so that men came at him already halfway through their coming, jumping from one shape to another without crossing the space between.

His body went on without him. The sword knew the work. The part of him that should have chosen each cut stood behind his eyes and watched the cuts be made, watching and doing having come apart, and after that he was not entirely there.

He had made himself, across twenty years of training his muscle memory, into a very good sword, and a sword does not deliberate. It goes through what is in front of its edge and asks nothing.

The people stopped being people and became shapes. A shape with a spear held low, male, older than him. A smaller shape that swung something, cut across where its neck would be. He did not look at the faces, or rather, he didn't see the faces. Even his own men, when they came near him in the murk, reached him only as fragments that did not add to anything; a shape with a blade of grass at its teeth, working a long weapon in wide arcs off to his right, there one minute, and then, when the wide whistling of it stopped, not there the next. A shape going down with a lacquered comb spilling from the front of his clothing. None of it had names. The names were waiting for him further down the day, and he did not know it.

His injuries accumulated as he moved forward through the fight without his noting any of them. A bamboo spear-point scraped along his forearm; he did not feel it. A small blade laid a line across the back of his hand. A branch, or something like it, tore his cheek. None of them deep, none of them mattering on their own, but all of them adding up, a tax taken in small coins, so that he bled from a dozen places without knowing it as he went on.

Then the old man came at him from the left, low and fast, a long-handled kama held in both hands, the heavy rice sickle lashed to a pole; a farm tool, but a man who has swung one through thirty seasons of harvest has arms like braided rope and no waste in him at all. He came in under Hyogonosuke's guard, and the curved blade went into the outside of the thigh and pulled, raking down through the meat of it in a long deep stroke, and this one Hyogonosuke felt: a hot wide line that gaped when he moved and let the blood come fast and dark down his leg, the muscle of the thigh showing pale at the edges of it before the blood filled the wound and ran over. The sword answered the old man without Hyogonosuke's asking it to, and he went down among the leaves with the kama handle still in his hands, and disappeared in the blur. But the leg was wrong now, Hyogonosuke could feel it but not consciously understand why. It would still carry him, on the day's terror if nothing else, but it had gone uncertain, and every step was a step taken on something that might fold.

The fog had risen off the wet valley floor and come down off the high ground at midday, swallowing the gun-smoke, much thicker than the smoke had been, and the air had gone cold and close with it, the first word of weather. Then the sky opened and the rain came down hard and straight, bitterly cold, hissing in the leaves, and within minutes the ground was slick mud underfoot and the brush poured water and the world closed down further still.

Hyogonosuke’s hair came loose and plastered itself across his face. The blood from a dozen small wounds thinned and ran pink, soaking down through the lacing of the do into the clothing beneath, so that he was wet to the skin with rain and blood, and the leg's long wound ran freely in the wet and would not clot.

He moved through the downpour and fog as through hanging curtains, one and the next and the next, the leg failing a little under him on the slick ground, and sometimes the curtain held a person, and sometimes the person held a weapon, and the sword answered and the curtain closed again.

The woman came from his right. He had a half-instant of seeing her: not old, a farmer's work kimono hitched up and her hair bound back, a matchlock gun braced low against her hip, and then she fired, and he threw himself left, but the bad leg betrayed him in the throwing. The bullet did not pass him. It caught him along the side of the face, a hot iron laid from the corner of his eye back across to the ear, the burn of the muzzle arriving with it, the powder so close it drove into the skin of his cheek. Then he was down, and the right side of the world had changed. The eye filled and streamed and would not clear, stinging, the lid fighting to shut and stay shut, the whole right of his sight gone to water and blur. A high ringing started deep in that ear, the ear itself gone strange and far, sounds reaching it as though he was at the bottom of a well. The right half of him had dropped away into water and noise.

She did not give him the ground. She came at him with the matchlock swung up like a club, brought it down across his shoulder and then the side of his head, and he went flat. His sword was gone from his hand, lost in the mud and the dark where he could not see for the streaming eye and the rain. Then she was on him with a short blade and he had nothing. He caught her wrists and they fought for it on the ground, her weight on him, the blade coming down by inches, held off by inches. She was strong in the particular inexhaustible way of someone who has stopped caring whether she will die. He was bleeding and half-blind and exhausted. He heard himself make a sound meant to be a word, low, almost a plea, torn and broken in his hoarse throat but shaped by home, by the speech of the valley above Nara: "Stop."

It did not stop her. In the struggle the blade turned, he never knew by whose strength, his or hers, or the two together, and went into her. The fight left her by degrees and then all at once, and she settled onto him heavy and still. He had to push her off the way he had pushed the dead man off, against the same unhelpful weight, and got up onto his knees in the mud, gasping, scrabbling with his broken-fingered right hand for the sword he had lost.

The boy came while he was still down. He came out of the brush small and fast, the sword he held too big for him, gripped in both hands wrong, the way a person holds a sword when he has never been shown how to do it correctly. Hyogonosuke, on his knees in the mud with one eye streaming and his broken hand painfully closing on the grip of his own found sword at last, knew only that the shape was small and did not know how to hold a blade. It was not a fight. It was the brutal short arithmetic of a trained man on the ground and an untrained child rushing him, and the arithmetic worked itself out the way it had to; the small shape went down. Only when it was down and still did the smallness of it finally reach him, the wrongness of how small, how light it had been against the sword. He knelt over the dead boy, breathing in great gasps he could not get the bottom of, then pushed himself up on the failing leg and stumbled forward away from it, because his legs would carry him forward and not back, out through a last curtain of fog into a thinning of the trees, a slight clearing, the ground opening a little to the sky.

The clouds broke, tearing open overhead, the rain falling off to nothing, and the moon came through full and sudden, drenching the world below in silver light and stark shadows that, for a minute, left him stunned in the brightness, as if the world had suddenly come into focus for the first time.

He turned, trying to get his bearings after hours of dark, wet, and fog, and the first thing the moon showed him was the face of the boy he had just killed, turned up out of the leaves a few feet behind where he had stumbled clear.

The face was his little brother's face. It could not be. His brother was four hundred ri away, whole and asleep in the valley, but Hyogonosuke's mind, breaking, handed him the first face it had available, and the face it had for a dead young boy was his brother's. Hyogonosuke made a sound and went backward from it, the sword falling out of his hand into the mud, his heels skidding, scrambling away on the ground from the small, upturned face the moon would not stop showing him.

He went downhill.

He did not decide to; his body turned from the clearing and the face and went down, away from the high ground, and he did not look back up the slope to where the worst of the late fighting had been, where the dead lay in the dark under the trees where he would never have to see them. He went down, and the moon came with him, riding clear in the sky the rain had emptied, laying its cold complete light over everything, and as he went it showed him the remnants of the day.

The woman was next. She lay a little down the slope on her back, her hair come loose, the short blade still in her chest, and the moon gave her the face of the woman who sold daikon and pickles at the market below the castle at Nara. She had the same square set to the jaw, so that he had killed the daikon-seller, who had surely never in her life held a blade meant for anything besides cutting vegetables.

Then the others, in whatever order the descent gave them.

The old man with the kama still in his hands, his thigh-stroke paid back to him in kind, his belly opened where the sword had gone in, and the yellow of the fat showing at the lips of the wound. The moon gave his deep-lined face to the man whose house stood by the bridge in Yagyu village, who mended his baskets in the doorway and waved to the children going past, so that Hyogonosuke went by him knowing he had killed the man by the bridge and knowing at the same time it was not the man by the bridge, but unable to hold the two apart.

And one of his own. A shape with a young face. Hyogonosuke knew this one, the knowing arriving all at once with the name and everything attached to it: this was a man of his forty, who had come at him in the fog as confused and blind as everyone else, and it had been Hyogonosuke's own sword that had answered the shape and put him down. The man had given him a persimmon once, in the practice yard in Kumamoto, held out in both hands with an embarrassed grin the way young men offer things to their commanders, because Hyogonosuke had let slip that he liked persimmons. He had been perhaps twenty. The persimmon had been very good.

Hyogonosuke stood over what he had done to him and could not breathe.

The sound came back, in a manner, and could hear them now in the tree line, some nearer some further, over the ringing and the bottom-of-the-well deadness of his right ear. Some of the forty were not yet finished. A voice somewhere up the slope screamed, high and steady, with no words. Another, lower, said something, over and over, that might have been a name or a prayer. Another only made a sound. They were dying up there in the dark the moon did not reach, where he could not have found them through the brush and the fog if he had tried, and he did not try.

He went down away from them, away from the sound, away from the faces, stumbling now on the ruined leg, half-fleeing, the faces flooding up at him out of the moonlit ground faster than he could pass them. Behind him the voices thinned, one going quiet and then another, the screaming dropping out and then the praying, until by the time the trees gave way and he came out onto the open, sloped, bare, millet field at the edge of the forest, there was no sound behind him. The last of the forty had finished while he walked.

He was in the field now, the open ground his men had crossed that morning in the frost with the cranes going up before them, and the field had its dead too, the ones who had dropped on the approach, lying out in the stubble in the moonlight in whatever shapes their deaths had left them. He came in among them, and that was where the weight came down on him.

He understood it dimly as his armor — the weight of the do, the sode, the soaked clothing — but it had become the weight of the whole day pressing him toward the ground, and worse than the weight was what came with it: the certainty that there were hands on him. The dead man from the lane. The woman he had pushed off himself. The shapes that had come at him in the grey curtains and sheeting rain. All of them had hold of him at once, gripping his arms, his shoulders, his legs, bearing him down, and he could not draw breath under them. He tried to tell them to let go. He tried to scream it, to turn and roar at them to get off, leave him be, and what came out of his throat was only sound, hoarse and shapeless, no words in it at all, and his good hand went tearing at the cords of his armor.

He got them loose and dragged the do off over his head and flung it into the mud and pulled at the rest, the sode, the ties, his broken fingers useless, the other hand clumsy with panic, and got most of it off him, and still the hands did not let go. The weight was gone; the grip was not. He could feel them on him exactly where the armor had been, holding him, drawing him down into the field, and there was no fighting it, because it was no longer on the outside of him.

The hoarse sound he was making broke apart and became sobbing, and he went down into the cold wet ground sobbing, with no words for any of it and no one left to hear them if there had been.

He drew his knees to his chest, wrapped both arms around them, pressed his forehead against them, and shut his eyes.

Be small. Be still. Be a stone in the bank, a clod of turned earth, anything that is not a man who has to be here.

He gave himself to the cold ground and let it have him, because the hands were drawing him into it anyway, and it was easier to go than to be pulled.

Something is wrong with me, he understood, from very far off, something past the bleeding leg and the streaming eye and the cold. The thigh had gone deep, he half-knew, a bad wound under the crust forming on it now, and only the day's terror had kept him upright and moving on it. He had not slept in two nights. He had not eaten since the sweet potatoes. His mind would not hold a thought; he reached for one and it slid out of his grip like a wet stone and left him holding nothing, and he could not keep hold even of his own alarm, that too slid away, and he let it, because there was nothing left in him to hold it.

The cold came down with the clear sky. By the deepest part of the night a thin frost had begun to form on the beaten millet, on the dead, on the bare back of his neck, and the wet in his clothes stiffened.

The moon crossed the whole sky.

Hyogonosuke was still folded there when it set, still there when the east began to go grey: the sword somewhere on the hill behind him, the thigh stiff in its crust, two fingers of his right hand bent wrong, the side of his face a black dried track from the eye-corner to the clotted ear, the powder driven dark into the skin of his cheek, the eye still weeping, the ringing a constant tide. He was cold all the way through, so cold his body had stopped shivering some hours before, which he knew, distantly, to be a bad sign, and could do nothing about.

It was beginning to drizzle again, soft on the frost, when Kato's soldiers came.

---

Chapter 3 Coals

The trouble in the outlying districts had been gathering for some time: a tax raised three years running, two poor harvests in consecutive years, and the particular resentment that collects, quietly and with enormous patience, in people who had survived thirty years of civil war only to come out the far side still poor, still hungry, and considerably less frightened of armored men than their grandparents had been.

The recent wars had scattered a great many things unevenly across the country, firearms among them. Peasants who had once stood in lines at their lords’ command to form the first precarious line of a battle now understood well what guns were for, how to set a position, and how to use the lay of the land, because all of it had been done to them for a generation and they had been paying close attention.

By the time Kiyomasa sent reinforcements, the administrator charged with putting the revolt down, Ito Mitsukane, had been at it for six weeks and lost forty of his men, in addition to however many wounded. Two of his commanders were also dead. And the revolt was spreading from its original village the way fire spreads through dry grass, finding new fuel in neighboring districts that had been nursing grievances of their own, waiting only for proof that resistance was possible, which Ito had provided in abundance.

The army Kato sent to succeed where Ito had failed was not very large, but it was a good deal larger than anything Ito had been able to muster, and its men moved into the valley with the unhurried confidence of soldiers who had been told the hard part was over.

It was not. 

Hyogonosuke understood this only later, and in pieces; at the time, what he saw was a country that had been fought over and a campaign that had stalled, which he took to be two different things rather than the same thing wearing two faces.

The first villages they passed through were empty in the particular way of places that have been emptied rather than abandoned. Huts burnt to the blackened ribs of their frames. A well with a dead body fouling the water, so that the column drew water from the stream instead. The fields had gone to the weeds in the weeks since anyone worked them, the millet that should have been harvested standing brown, bowing overripe under its weight. 

Hyogonosuke rode through it and felt the aftermath of violence he did not witness: a kind of solemn appetite, the conviction that the real event had happened just out of frame and that he had barely arrived in time for the next.

They made their camp on the site of one of Ito's, and the ground told a story Hyogonosuke was not yet able to fully read. There was a great deal of damaged gear lying about: armor with its lacing cut, a helmet punched through by a bullet, the splintered shafts of spears stacked for firewood because they were not good for anything else now. More of it than there should have been. Equipment like that came off men, and the men it had come off were not in the camp.

His own missions in the first two weeks amounted to nothing much. 

He took his forty up one ridge and down another to look at ground that held no one. He was sent to confirm a ford that was in fact a ford, and to scout a hamlet that was no longer standing. He carried messages. Once, he lay a whole afternoon in cover above a trail on word that the rebels used it frequently and watched only a single old woman walk along with a basket of daikon; he was thanked for the thoroughness of his report in a tone suggesting thoroughness was not what anyone wanted from him.

He was impatient, and honest enough to know it, though not yet honest enough to mistrust himself. He had come almost the length of the country to make his name, and the war kept declining to begin. It frustrated him.

The men under him did not seem to share the feeling. They were farmers, most of them; men who had taken up the spear because it paid better than the field and not because they had any quarrel with the people on the far ridge, who were also farmers. Some of them had been to battle before, when they were much younger men. They cleaned their gear, ate when there was food, and slept when the day allowed it, with the bottomless practical calm of men who had learned that a soldier's life was mostly waiting and that the waiting was the good part.

It was on one of those slow evenings that a man named Genta came back to the fire grinning, with the front of his kimono bundled up into a sling and both hands cradling it, and he tipped a little heap of sweet potatoes out onto the ground by the coals. He’d found them in a farmhouse two fields over, half of it burned and the other half standing, underneath a board pried up in the floor with a straw-lined hollow beneath it.

"Buried under the floor of the back room," he said, pleased with himself, settling down to brush the dirt off them. "Right where I'd have put my own, if I had to run and meant to come back for them." He said it the way a man notes that another man keeps his tools the same way he does and went on cleaning the potatoes. 

Hyogonosuke had grown up in a valley full of farmers, raised closer to the soil than the grandson of a lord was meant to be because by his father's time there had been only the village and the valley left with the family. The smell of the potatoes, the dirt still clinging to them, and the particular homely fact of a winter store dug up from the cold ground took hold of something he had not thought about in years. Back home, the farmers had pressed sweet potatoes on him in the autumn, warm out of the ashes, when he was still small enough to be walked back to the mansion by whomever found him still out at dusk; they had called him over to their fires with a wave and a roughness that knew exactly who he was and didn’t stand on ceremony. 

"Leave me a couple of those," he said. "I'll do them myself."

Genta looked up, and one of the younger men beside him laughed before he caught himself, and said, half an apology, "The master knows how? Surely there are servants for that at home."

"There are," Hyogonosuke agreed, taking a place at the coals to rake a hollow into them with the side of a stick, the way it was done. "It doesn't mean I forgot how to do it myself."

Tasuke, who had carried the master's most important possessions the length of the country and aired his armor for him that very morning, said nothing, because he had been there for the boyhood the others were only now glimpsing, and knew where making sweet potatoes had been learned, though there was no need to say so. He only moved up to make his own room at the fire, and the matter passed. 

They buried the potatoes in the coals and ate them when the skins had gone black and split, passing them hand to hand, hissing at the heat.

For a while the war was nowhere near.

Genta turned out to have a gift for dice and no luck at all to go with it. A heavyset man called Rokuro could not hold even the thin camp sake, growing sentimental on a single cup of it, and showed everyone, twice, the lacquered wooden comb he was bringing home to his wife. 

Hyogonosuke sat among them with a black-skinned potato cooling in his hands and was as happy as he had been since leaving home: full and warm, easy among men he had come to like in the proprietary way a young commander likes the first men ever placed in his keeping.

He carried that ease with him when he got up to walk the edge of the camp before sleeping, his belly warm and his mind loose. So he was not braced for anything when he passed a second fire, a small one, where two of Ito's people sat, ones too lightly hurt to send back home and not hurt enough to be useless, who kept to themselves and watched the new arrivals with an expression Hyogonosuke had taken for the resentment of men being relieved of their duties.

They were talking low, in the flat way of men who have learned that speaking at all is a risk, and the warmth in him was the very thing that kept him from hearing it for what it was.

"—up the same road, is what I heard. Same as before."

"Then they're fools."

"They've got the numbers."

"So did we, the first time." A pause, the scrape of a bowl. "Numbers don't help you on that road. They march you up it nice and tight, and then—" The man stopped. He had either felt Hyogonosuke nearby or simply remembered that the walls of a camp are made of nothing. When he spoke again it was about the cold, and the other agreed that it was beginning to get quite cold, especially at night now that they were moving into late fall, and Hyogonosuke walked on, the half a sentence sitting unregarded in his mind. He had gotten to know his forty over the better part of a year, in the dojo, in the town, on the road, and he liked them. He trusted them and knew they were worth trusting. He did not understand that he could trust them with his very life and lead them out of theirs in the same motion, and that the second thing had nothing to do with the first.

---

Chapter 2 Kumamoto

The road to Higo took the better part of three weeks, and Hyogonosuke traveled it the way his grandfather had traveled in his own youth: on horseback, with a single servant, the things a man needed, and nothing he didn't.

The servant's name was Tasuke, though Hyogonosuke had called him Suke since before he could remember, having mangled the name as a small boy and never quite let go of the shortened version once he could manage the whole of it. Tasuke had come to the family as a teenager, when Hyogonosuke was still small enough to ride on his shoulders, and had been part of the household so long that the shortened name had become a kind of private fact between them, used when the two of them were alone and set aside by an unspoken courtesy when they were not. He complained about his knees at every river crossing and not once otherwise.

Hyogonosuke made the journey easily. He was twenty-four and in the full strength of a young man who had never been given reason to doubt his body, broad through the shoulders from a lifetime with the sword. In the dojo at home he had been the one the others measured themselves against, an heir of the Yagyu line and the most gifted blade the valley had produced in a generation, and he carried that standing the way the healthy carry their health: not as a thing prized, but as an assumption, the floor beneath everything else.

The connection that opened Kato's gate to Hyogonosuke was an old one and, like most such connections, more a matter of geography than affection. Kato Kiyomasa had been born in Owari, as had the Yagyu before the family settled in Yamato, and the bond between men who could name the same province as their home was a real thing in an age when a man might serve his whole life beside others whose speech he could barely follow. 

Sekishusai's letter to Kato had said that the bearer was his grandson, that he had been trained in the Shinkage-ryu from childhood, and that he was competent and licensed to instruct. What it did not say, and did not need to, was that the Yagyu patriarch was sending one of his own out into the world under the roof of a man from home and trusted him to remember it.

There was a second thing the letter also did not say, because Sekishusai had judged it better left for the world to raise or not raise on its own: that Hyogonosuke's elder brother Kyusaburo had gone to Korea seven years before and had not come back because he had died at Ulsan, in the winter siege, under the same banner Hyogonosuke was now riding toward. 

What the family had been told about Kyusaburo's death was the fact and almost nothing else: that he was dead, that it had happened at Ulsan, that it had been winter. What the wider world knew, and what the family could not help absorbing in the years that followed, was what Ulsan had been: an army that had gone into the cold provisioned for a campaign, not a siege, sealed inside an unfinished fortress, the country around it stripped bare, the men inside starving and freezing by the thousands, drinking from worse than paddy fields and rotted wells, and eating the paste off the walls before the end. Somewhere among that misery Kyusaburo had died at twenty-one. 

Hyogonosuke had been eighteen when word reached the valley, old enough to remember his brother and young enough that what he kept of him now was not his face but the silence that had followed the news through the house.

Hyogonosuke never met Kato Kiyomasa personally, nor had he expected to.

His appointment had been handled by a senior bureaucrat in Kato's employ, a compact and efficient man named Okabe, who had processed the formalities of taking on new retainers for so long that the business had shed any ceremony it may once have possessed. He read the letter, asked Hyogonosuke a short series of questions whose answers he did not write down, and named a stipend and a duty in the same breath: five hundred koku, instruction in the sword, and command of forty ashigaru, who needed someone to command them and might as well have a man who could teach them swordsmanship while he was at it.

Hyogonosuke was settled into a small residence with a small, fenced yard in the lower samurai quarters that ringed the castle, on the same day he met Okabe, which was the day after his arrival. 

The house sat at the outer edge of the quarter, where the proper streets began to give way to the workshops and tenements of the men who supplied them, which told him with perfect clarity exactly where a new retainer with no battle record stood in the order.

It did not trouble him much. It was a place to begin, and Tasuke took it over within the day, finding where things were bought and at what price, setting the small household in order, airing the master's armor and seeing to his things, so that Hyogonosuke was left free to do the thing he had come to do, which was to be seen.

Hyogonosuke caught a glimpse of the lord himself a few weeks later in the great dojo inside the castle, when Kato and a few senior retainers came to watch morning practice. 

Hyogonosuke, who was training among the rest, knew the lord had arrived at the entrance by the way the quality of attention shifted in the room, rather than by any announcement. But like the others he did not break off: the correct response, apparently, was to train harder and cleaner for the lord to watch, and so Hyogonosuke finished his practice. Only afterward did the men line up formally, and Kato stepped into the dojo and walked the length of them.

The lord was a large man, broad in the shoulders, and he wore a beard in an age when most men of rank went clean-shaven or close to it; a thick, deliberate beard that belonged to an older kind of warrior, grown in field camps rather than kept for court. He was not the figure Hyogonosuke had expected: not a daimyo in fine silks who had spent his life sending other men to do his fighting, but a seasoned commander who had gone to Korea and back twice and looked it, weathered and unhurried, with the hard, level eyes of a man for whom violence had long ago stopped being a question of nerve. 

His gaze moved down the row of retainers without lingering, until it reached Hyogonosuke, his newest, and held there.

It held a moment longer than it had on any other man, and something moved behind the lord's face while it did: not quite a question, but the look of a man who has caught a few notes of a tune he can't place and isn't certain he wants to. Four seconds, perhaps, with nothing said. Then the man following at his shoulder leaned in and spoke a few words, low, and Hyogonosuke caught only the shape of his family name in them — Yagyu — and saw the lord's expression settle, the half-recognition resolving into something quieter and more closed. Whatever had surfaced, Kato did not pursue it aloud. He let it go back down. Then the eyes moved on, and the lord said something to the man at his shoulder that Hyogonosuke could not hear, and the inspection was over.

I've been noticed, Hyogonosuke told himself. The rest is only a matter of time.

---

Chapter 1 Home

Yagyu Sekishusai made his case over the course of three separate mornings, which was notable because the patriarch was not in the habit of making any point more than once. He'd lived long enough to decide that anything worth saying was worth saying clearly enough the first time. That he came back the second morning, and then the third, was its own kind of argument, and Hyogonosuke understood this, even as he sat with his hands folded in his lap trying not to fidget, hearing his grandfather say the same words again, only in a different configuration.

They sat in the large room overlooking the side garden, in a house that did not match the name it carried. The Yagyu mansion had been rebuilt after the wars on a smaller scale than the one that came before, plain, simple, raised again on land that was now only a fraction of what the family once held. Sekishusai had been lord of a domain in his day, with holdings, retainers and the obligations that came with both, until the fortunes of war and a single ill-judged allegiance had stripped most of it away and left him an old sword instructor presiding over only a valley and a village.

He had spent the years since trying to knit something back together out of what remained, to recover some thread of the family's former standing, but the longer he worked at it the more it became apparent that what he wanted was simpler and more stubborn than status: he wanted his people near him, he wanted the valley kept whole and untouched by future fighting, and he wanted to lose no one else.

"I've lost enough family," Sekishusai said on the third morning, which was the most direct he'd been in any conversation in Hyogonosuke's memory.

The old man looked out over the square, which had been turned into a practice yard sometime before Hyogonosuke's birth, used for Sekishusai's family and occasionally his most senior students. His back was straight even at seventy-three, and there was something in his face even his grandson couldn't easily place

"Your father's leg was paralyzed in battle when he was younger than you are now. Your brother gave his life in Korea. When your uncle Munenori went to Edo, I asked him whether he understood what it cost me to let him go. He said yes. But he was twenty-three and understood nothing. And I don't think you understand either."

Hyogonosuke didn't claim to.

But the names his grandfather set down so plainly opened into things less plain.

His father's room sat at the end of the hall of the family home, close enough to his own that Hyogonosuke had grown up hearing the uneven rhythm of his steps through the house each morning with the first light, on his way to practice the sword: the step-drag-step-drag of a man shot in the lower spine at twenty and left to spend the next quarter century teaching himself to live in a body that no longer worked the way it once had.

His father had never complained about the leg. In all of Hyogonosuke's childhood it was mentioned perhaps twice. 

The first was when Hyogo was very young and had asked outright, in the unabashed manner of a small boy, what’s wrong with your leg, and his father had told him as though recounting something that had happened to another man. 

He had been twenty, and he and a distant cousin a few years older had been appointed to head the rear guard, a posting meant to keep two young men out of the worst of the fighting while giving them a command, and they’d not been able to bear it. There was a way around the back of the enemy position, his cousin had known the ground, and it had seemed a clever thing: a narrow, raised lane between the rice paddies, slopes rising wooded on either side. They had taken their men up it in the late afternoon and found the slopes full of gunners ready for them. His cousin had been thrown into the water with a round in his shoulder and lived. Toshikatsu had taken a bullet in the lower spine while dragging him out on the retreat and lived also, after a fashion. 

He told the story simply, the way a man tells a thing he has finished being angry about, and what Hyogo took away from it at that age was not the lesson but the picture: the green slopes, the bright paddies, his father young and whole walking up a road. It didn’t frighten him because it was a story that happened long ago, and the proof that it was over was sitting in front of him with his damaged leg, alive.

The second time was years later, and Hyogo didn’t realize then that it was the same telling, because his father had taken the story out of it. 

Hyogonosuke was seventeen and had come home from the dojo with broken ribs, having gone looking, in the way of boys who are good at a thing, for the place where being good at it stopped being enough. His father sat beside him while the doctor worked and said, quietly as he did most things, that the body had a way of remembering everything it was ever put through.

Worth knowing, he added, before you go looking for what it can withstand. 

Hyogo took this simply for the kind of thing fathers said to caution their reckless sons and let it go. He did not hear the rice paddies in it, nor did he hear that his father had once gone looking too, and was telling him, for the second time in his life and the last, what he had found.

His brother was the other name, and it closed a memory rather than opening it. 

Kyusaburo had been twenty-one when he went to Korea, and Hyogonosuke had been eighteen when word came that he would not return, brought on a cold spring morning by a retainer who'd taken the notice from a courier.

What Hyogonosuke remembered was not grief, exactly, but the silence that followed the notice through the house: a kind of exhausted recognition in the faces of his family, as though they had always known this was possible and had sincerely hoped otherwise. His grandfather had gone into his room and shut the door and had not come out until the following morning, his face composed, saying nothing.

Sekishusai had grieved Kyusaburo before his death, Hyogonosuke understood now. He had begun grieving early, anticipating the loss rather than waiting for the fact of it.

And he is doing it again. With me. Out loud, across three mornings.

The knowledge settled in his chest like a swallowed stone.

But he was twenty-four, and his grandfather's sword school in the Yagyu valley was not the world. He knew this the way he knew the shape of every room in his father's house, every path in the village, every floorboard of the Yagyu dojo. 

He had trained there since before he could understand the difference between playing and training, had learned every form his grandfather knew and several his father had adapted, and he was good. Better than good. He was, if he was being uncharitable to the rest of Sekishusai's students, the most gifted the old man had ever taught; more gifted than his uncle Munenori, who was sharp and disciplined but lacked the instincts Hyogonosuke shared with his grandfather.

A man has to take that somewhere, Hyogonosuke thought. There is nothing wrong with grandfather's school, but it is not where a man finds out what he is made of.

The fourth day brought no morning summons. Instead Sekishusai sent for him in the evening, and they sat together in the large room while the old man looked at him for a long while before he spoke.

"The sword in the dojo and the sword on the battlefield are the same sword. What changes is the man holding it, and whether he has spent enough hours contemplating himself honestly enough to know what he will find when the field opens him up." He paused. "Most have not. In my experience, most men meet their own character for the first time in battle and are surprised by it. The surprise is rarely a pleasant one."

Hyogonosuke sat with this and said nothing.

"I will write you a letter of introduction," his grandfather said. "Listen to whoever commands you. You have never been very good at listening to people who command you."

Hyogonosuke bowed.

He left the following morning, before the night's frost had melted.

---

...

Suigetsu (Samon’s Story) Loosely inspired by Yagyuu Hijouken Samon (manga) / Also on AO3 CW: graphic violence, abusive family, physical & psychological abuse

Chapter 1

It was already well into the hour of the rat and the bright full moon hung large and white in an inky sky, casting deep shadows across the formal garden of the secluded samurai mansion in the valley below. Gathering storm clouds raced across the blackness, pushed by the strong winds that had been gusting since late in the afternoon; winds that tore at the ancient maple at the center of the garden, scattering its crimson late-fall leaves like embers sparking from a fire.

Samon sat cross-legged in the center of the porch facing the garden, far enough from the edge that the overhanging roof shielded him from the thick raindrops that had begun falling just then, the only person still awake at this late hour.

He was dressed in a white kimono and light blue hakama as if readying himself for seppuku, and the brightness of his clothing contrasted with the dark wood of the veranda like a reflection of the moon above. He was watching the trees swaying in the distance, trying (and failing miserably) to calm his unfocused mind.

Early the previous morning, a messenger had arrived with a wrinkled letter sent by an acquaintance in Edo, a servant girl working in his clan’s upper mansion, who had once embarrassed herself by confessing her love to him when he was still a boy.

The letter, difficult to read because of her unpracticed handwriting, had been unsettling: she wrote that Munenori, Samon’s father, had been beside himself with rage after finding out about the stipend His Excellency the Shogun had granted Samon, and that he had dispatched Jubei, Samon’s eldest brother, to the Yagyu valley to “set things straight."

She didn’t know what this meant, said a scrawled addition at the end, but thought that he deserved a warning, considering his father’s and his brother’s tempers.

Samon appreciated her thoughtfulness in sending the letter, but the message had given him cause to anxiously pace around the mansion and its grounds ever since, trying to collect his thoughts and preparing for the worst. He almost wished he’d never received the letter at all, that he had been left in blissful ignorance until Jubei arrived at his doorstep.

He understood, at least on some basic level, why his father was angry: Tokugawa Iemitsu, who had inherited the post of Shogun following the death of his father, was in a precarious position because many of the daimyo opposed his succession and instead favored his younger brother, Tadanaga, whom they considered more suitable. Anything those men could use as fodder to strengthen their case, like the relationship Iemitsu and Samon had failed to keep secret, threatened not only the shogun, but by extension the Yagyu, Samon's family.

It was because of these politics Munenori had sent his son away months ago under the guise of illness, and why Samon was now little more than a prisoner in the old family home in Iga, two weeks’ travel from Edo.

Samon often wondered whether the politics surrounding their situation had occurred to Iemitsu. Certainly, he must have given it some thought before trying to return his lover to Edo with the stroke of a brush, by making him a daimyo in his own right and therefore subjecting him to the Edo posting, which required all daimyo to live in the city every other year; ironically, a measure originally devised to prevent rebellion against the shogunate.

But perhaps Iemitsu hadn’t considered it at all, had worried only about the two of them being kept apart for reasons he didn’t fully understand or care about.

Samon would have liked to think Iemitsu wouldn’t be so shortsighted, but he also knew just how impulsive he could be: once, when Iemitsu was still a teen, he’d stabbed his older lover to death just for looking at another man, though Samon had not seen that side of him as the young future Shogun matured.

He realized, of course, that worrying about Iemitsu’s intent or consideration made no difference now: what was done was done, and the only path left was the one moving forward, regardless of where it might lead. Logically, this made it entirely pointless to worry about the What Ifs of the situation.

However, Samon did worry about his father’s plans for “setting things straight,” as the girl had put it in her letter. He found it difficult to imagine any scenario that didn’t end in his own death, and he’d paced around his rooms and up and down the veranda for hours, apprehensively pondering whether a simple thing like blood ties would stand in the way of his father’s ambitions and desire for power.

Would this even enter his father’s mind, considering Samon was merely his third son, and additionally only the child of a mistress?

Eventually, and perhaps overdramatically, Samon had resigned himself to the idea that he would likely be killed once Jubei reached the Yagyu valley, and he’d dressed accordingly to await his brother’s arrival, which he supposed wouldn’t be too long after the courier’s.

By the time he sat down on the porch that night – and honestly, he couldn’t have slept even if he tried, just like he hadn’t slept the previous night – his thoughts were all over the place still, but somewhere at the back of his mind, he’d at least made peace with the idea of death. After all, if this was the price to pay to keep Iemitsu safe in his position as Shogun, wasn’t it worth such an insignificant life as his own?

How strange, he thought, that both my father and I share the common goal of keeping Iemitsu safe.

…

The initial thick, slow raindrops had turned into sheeting rain by the time Jubei arrived, dressed in black and dark green traveling clothes, climbing over the back wall into the garden like a common thief, rather than a visiting relative. It was a familiar entrance for Jubei, who had come and gone by means of this secret back route as a boy more times than Samon could count.

But this was no childhood escapade. Jubei already had his long sword unsheathed as he stood on the tiled roof of the wall, one foot planted firmly on either side of the center ridge while he surveyed the scene before him, like a large bird of prey perched on a tree branch, looking for a juicy mouse scurrying along the forest floor.

Seeing that his younger brother was waiting for him, he jumped down and walked casually along the stone path winding between landscape features, entirely unbothered by the rain dripping from his face and soaking into his clothes.

A small, satisfied smile curled the corners of his lips upward with contentment because his brother was expecting him, but his eyes were cold and disdainful, just as they had commonly looked at Samon in the past.

“I always hoped we’d get a chance to duel,” Jubei said when he was close enough for Samon to hear him over the rain pattering against the tiled porch roof. “I’m told some people think you’re the stronger swordsman, but we’ve never had a chance to measure our skills against each other in the fencing hall, let alone with real blades.”

This was so like Jubei: the obsession to be the stronger swordsman, the strongest swordsman, had not let up since Samon had replaced him as Iemitsu’s fencing instructor five years prior, and it stood to reason that he had only gained more real-life sword experience in his missions and wanderings since.

Samon had already played out in his mind numerous scenarios of how he might draw and strike with his sword tonight, and in each of them had found himself lacking in the face of his brother’s skill.

Jubei was many things: he was hateful and short-tempered, inconsiderate and self-important, ambitious and ruthless. But still, Samon could not deny the fact that Jubei was also an expert swordsman possessed of a strength and speed that was like a demon’s.

And Samon was scared. Terrified, really.

So, this was it, then.

Samon took a shaky breath and uncrossed his legs to rise, uncomfortably aware of the sweat slicking his palms as he reached for the sword that lay beside him, waiting to be drawn.

He found it unmovable, because someone, some shadowy figure suddenly standing behind him, had planted a foot against the sheath, pinning it in place against the floorboards. As distracted as Samon had been with anxiety, and with his focus solely on his elder brother, he’d never heard this second man approach, never even felt his presence. It served only to remind him in this split second of sheer panic of how inexperienced he still was, despite his years of training.

The thought flashed through his mind that his father would have been disappointed.

Samon tried to draw his blade from this awkward position, but next thing he knew, a coarse rope was slung around his neck. Instinctively, he brought up his hands to protect himself from being strangled, but before he could grab the rope, the man behind him kicked him between the shoulders, causing him to slam face first into the dark wood of the porch.

In the seconds it took Samon to taste the metallic bitterness of his own blood in his mouth and try to push himself upward, the man had knotted the rope at the nape of his neck, looped the two loose ends around his elbows to pin his arms against his sides, and bound his hands tightly in the small of his back. No matter how Samon struggled, he already knew there was no point: he was completely defenseless in front of Jubei.

“Why are you doing this?” he gasped, the rope pressing against his throat as he still pointlessly struggled to get to his feet. The man behind him pulled him backward and Samon came to sit awkwardly as Jubei approached.

“Ah, don’t give me that angry look,” Jubei sneered, sheathing his sword. “Is this any way to greet your big brother?”

“Why would you go to such lengths?” Samon said, trying to keep his voice calm and steady but hearing it waver all the same. He was both seething with anger that his own brother would resort to using one of their clan’s shinobi to trap him like this, and utterly terrified at what Jubei had planned, now that a fair duel seemed out of the question. “I know you don’t believe I’m better with the sword, or that you need to resort to dirty tricks to kill me.”

Jubei shrugged. “I’m not allowed to kill you, so what need is there for a duel?”

Samon couldn’t hide his confusion as he studied his brother’s face for anything that might give away a hint of what would happen next. Of all the scenarios he had considered over the past two days (and there had been many), he hadn’t considered a single one that did not involve his own death, unless he’d somehow be able to best Jubei in a duel.

After all, what easier way was there to solve his father’s dilemma: If the youngest son presented a danger to both the Shogun and the Yagyu, then disposing of the youngest son would fix the issue, since merely sending him away had not. And although understanding the reasoning gave him little comfort, it was at least a thought process Samon could follow and he’d prepared, in his own way, for this worst-case scenario.

But this, whatever this was, loomed dark and foreboding in its uncertainty.

“If you aren’t here to kill me,” Samon asked tentatively, “then why are you here?”

The rain had started to let up by now and Jubei smoothed back some of the soggy strands of hair clinging to his face as he stepped onto the porch, leaving muddy footprints in his wake.

Looking around the yard as if he were studying its features, the large rocks and manicured shrubs, he explained: “Father sent me to ensure you’re no threat to our family due to your …” A sarcastic chuckle interrupted his sentence. “…intimate friendship with our Shogun. But, for reasons that are a mystery to me, he doesn’t want you dead. He wants to keep you around.” A shrug. “Your mother is his favorite mistress, after all, so perhaps he’s feeling some kind of attachment. Perhaps she begged him for your life. Who the fuck knows.”

He turned to face Samon. “At any rate, he doesn’t want you dead. But he does want me to ensure that you won’t be seeing our Shogun again and that the stipend and title, with which he tried to return you to Edo so desperately, are rendered irrelevant.”

Although Jubei’s tone was light and dismissive, Samon could detect the undertone of anger, which he supposed originated in his brother’s disappointment at having to miss out on a long hoped-for duel, and he worried this might spell disaster because Jubei had a terrible temper – always had, even when they were both still children – which showed itself in a sadistic side. Jubei truly was their father’s son in that regard.

“So, here I am.” The elder brother continued, spreading his arms wide to indicate the mansion and gardens around them, irritation plain on his face. “An errand boy sent to do father’s bidding, sneaking around the Yagyu valley like a thief. And why? Because my little brother can’t be entrusted with simply doing his job as fencing instructor. No, you just had to spread your cheeks for the Shogun like a cheap whore, caring nothing about rank or position. You truly are an embarrassment.”

He leaned in close, breath warm against Samon’s face, and, with a smirk that exposed his pointy canine teeth, he produced a small dagger from within his belt.

“It’s not death, sorry, but I promise it will hurt a lot.”

As if on cue, the man behind Samon grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him flat onto his back, tied arms trapped awkwardly beneath his body so that the boney parts of his wrists and elbows ground painfully into the unforgiving wood of the floorboards.

For a moment, their eyes met and Samon recognized the shinobi as Genjiro’s son, Taro, whom he had known since childhood. He felt betrayed that someone he’d once counted as a friend would do this to him, and at the same time realized what a ridiculous sentiment this was, considering Taro was in service to Munenori, just as his father Genjiro had been before him, and any friendship that might have existed between the two boys as children did not extent to their respective positions in adulthood.

Taro placed his hands on either side of Samon’s face to hold his head steady, and Jubei lowered himself over his brother, knees to either side of his ribcage, and leaned forward to look closely at his face.

Samon lay still and quiet, knowing there was no point in struggling now and having resigned himself despondently to whatever was going to happen next.

He couldn’t think of any other course of action to take; his whole life had been one of doing as he was told, no matter if the orders came from his father, his elder brother, or the Shogun. If His Excellency asked for a duel, Samon would let him win. If his father wanted to use him as a pawn in some political scheme, he would hold his breath and wait for it to be over, regardless of the sacrifices he had to make.

Once, he'd told Iemitsu that he didn’t fear death because he was dead already, though that had been a bit of a lie. He feared death. He just knew that his life had never belonged to himself in the first place.

Jubei studied his younger brother’s face, droplets of water dripping down from his hair and rolling off Samon’s cheeks as he leaned in close.

“Get a good look, little brother,” he said, his pale brown eyes searching Samon’s, which looked at him through long lashes. “I’ll be the last person you’ll ever see.”

He touched the side of his brother’s face gently, calloused fingers against smooth, pale skin, then brought his hand up to force open Samon’s right eye. With a flash of steel caught briefly by the moon’s brightness, he flipped the small knife, holding it as one might hold a writing brush.

Samon took a sharp breath in, reflexively trying to wrench his head from Taro’s grip to no avail.

Jubei paused, clearly savoring his younger brother’s expression of terror, of the pupils widening at the sight of the sharp blade, and then he brought the knife down to carefully, surgically, lift the eye from its socket and cut its attachments, all in one swift motion not entirely unlike shucking an oyster.

Samon bit down on his lip to keep from screaming as he felt the warmth of his own blood spill from his eye socket, but his body stiffened and he couldn’t keep his breath from quickening, coming in harsh gasps no matter how hard he tried to control himself to deny Jubei the satisfaction of hearing him cry out. He felt betrayed by his own body when he realized he couldn’t even keep himself from spilling tears.

Jubei noticed, of course. He switched the knife to his left hand and cupped Samon’s cheek with his right, wearing an expression of satisfaction that made Samon feel utterly nauseous.

“How sweet,” Jubei said, his voice soft. “Actual tears.” He used his thumb to wipe them, then licked it as if savoring the salty taste.

“Do you suppose a person can still cry if they don’t have any eyes,” he wondered aloud, not expecting an answer, as he switched the knife back to his right and turned it on his brother once more.

His sarcastic smile was the last thing Samon saw before his world went dark and blood spilled across the other half of his face. He clenched his teeth so hard he was afraid they would break from the strain, but anything was better than giving Jubei the joy of hearing him scream. Even so, he couldn’t suppress a whimper in his agony, and his body, which he’d tried so hard to control even through the pain, was shaking now, shivering as if with cold, and he could do nothing to stop it.

Jubei sat back on his heels, wiping his hands and the small blade on his black tattsuke bakama before reaching into his sleeve and producing a small square piece of silk, which he spread across his palm, carefully placing the two eyeballs on it.

He studied the now lifeless dark brown irises, pupils gaping black in their centers, and seemed amused by the bits of optical nerve still attached to the back, which flopped limply like dead fish as he turned the globes between his fingers.

He stood up and stepped away, engrossed in playing with his trophies. Distractedly, he ordered Taro to wipe up the bloody mess lest it should stain the floorboards of the family home.

Taro helped Samon sit up and began gently wiping his face with a tenugui, whispering quietly so that Jubei would not overhear: “Please bear with it just a little longer, wakasama. I have prepared something for the pain and will give it to you as soon as your brother leaves.”

After a few minutes, Jubei wrapped the eyes with the cloth and tucked them into a pouch for safekeeping. Then he turned and said, almost as if to himself, “Our dear Shogun has always been so attracted to your dark eyes and those pretty lashes.” Every word was dripping with disdain. “I don’t suppose he would find you as attractive now, were he to lay eyes on you.”

You think him so shallow, Samon thought, but he couldn’t help wondering how Iemitsu would react if he saw him like this. After all, he had so often praised Samon for his appearance, just as Jubei said. He tried to shake the thought from his mind.

“Ah, but don’t worry, little brother,” said Jubei, watching him carefully. “You needn't be concerned that he’ll see you again. After all, these lovely little eyeballs I’ll be taking back to Edo…” He jiggled the pouch in his hand, even though his brother obviously couldn’t see it. “… these will serve as proof that you’ve lost your mind being separated from your lover for such a long time. He’ll want nothing to do with a madman who’s gauged out his own eyes, I suppose.”

So, that was the story father was planning to fabricate.

It was brilliant, in a way. Keeping Samon sequestered in the Yagyu valley had not done the trick. Instead, it had served only to embarrass Munenori, making him the subject of gossip around Edo castle once his son had been awarded that ridiculous stipend.

This, on the other hand, would solve the problem: once rumors that Samon had taken leave of his senses and disfigured himself to such an extent would begin circulating around the city, as assuredly they would with Jubei’s help, Munenori could rest safe in the knowledge that the Shogun would at last heed his advisors’ words and sever all ties with his former lover.

Surely, it would be a bit of an embarrassment to the Yagyu, but since Samon was only a third son and the child of a mistress, the outrage would certainly be brief. And the masses would love it: a story of a former lover driven to despair by their separation. It was the kind of gossip that kept the city going.

“Of course,” Jubei said, turning back from the end of the porch. “Our poor shogun will have to find himself a new wakashu on whom to dote his affections now. Though I doubt that will be much of a problem. The city is literally teeming with capable young samurai and since His Excellency certainly doesn’t hold his lovers to particularly high standards, as we’ve seen with you, perhaps he will find himself a whole harem of pretty, young, disposable boys to suit his fancies now. Don’t you think, brother? He might fill his whole Ooku with young men.”

“You’ve no right to mock Uesama,” Samon said through gritted teeth. “You’ve done what you came here to do. What reason is there for you to stand here and mock him.”

Jubei chuckled. “Oh, but it’s so much fun seeing you all riled up. I suppose the sex must have been quite something for you to become so utterly attached. It’s very sweet.”

He crossed back to Samon in a few swift steps, grabbed his brother by the chin, and slammed him backwards into the floorboards so hard Samon saw stars and, for a minute, thought he was going to pass out.

Jubei pulled him back into a sitting position by the front of his clothing, his younger brother too dazed from the sudden assault to resist. “But here you are still thinking you can talk back to me. You just don’t learn, do you? Your job – your only job – is to shut the fuck up and do as you’re fucking told.”

He grasped Samon’s chin and forced his rough fingers, callused from a lifetime of sword training, into his brother’s mouth, forcing it open.

“Don’t even think about biting me,” he warned as he pinched his tongue between two fingers and pulled it forward. “You’ll want to hold nice and still so I can make a straight cut. If you fight me … well, I might just rip it out instead. Your choice.”

He unsheathed his little knife again and sliced through his brother’s tongue, severing it just forward of its base. Then he pushed Samon back down, gave him a kick for good measure, and cast the severed tongue into the yard.

“We’ll have no more talking back now, will we?” he asked calmly, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened at all.

Turning to Taro, he added, “I think I’ll find a servant to heat the bath for me. Get this cleaned up. Once dawn breaks, have someone fetch the doctor. And don’t even think about untying him.”

“Yes, master Jubei.” Taro shifted nervously, watching Jubei disappear around the corner toward the main part of the house, then looked down at Samon who lay on his side in a puddle of his own blood, his body shaking from pain and blood loss.

“I am so sorry,” Taro said quietly. “Please don’t bear me a grudge, wakasama. These things are out of my control.”

Of course, they are. Just as they are out of my control as well.

Samon pulled his legs up, curling into himself, and pressed his head against the smooth wood of the floorboards. If there was only something he could do to make the pain stop. The coppery taste and smell of his own blood were so overwhelming in his nose and mouth they made him retch and he just wanted this to be over.

He lifted his head and slammed it into the floorboards.

He would never have been truly happy sequestered away in the Yagyu Valley, but only a handful of days ago, before the message of his appointment and stipend had reached him, he’d believed that he could at least be content to carve out a small life of his own here.

He’d considered opening a school to teach commoners’ children to read and write, just as his uncle Toshikatsu, his father’s eldest brother, had done after he was injured in battle and no longer able to fulfill his obligations to his lord. Perhaps he might even have taken up teaching the sword in the family dojo or build a fencing hall of his own and teach anyone interested in learning.

But now, even the hope for a simple life had been taken from him.

He slammed his head into the floorboards a second time. And again. Perhaps he could at least succeed in ending his life on this night. Not to spite Jubei, though he had no doubt that his father would see it that way, but to end the misery he was enduring.

But when he tried to hit his head into the floor again, Taro pulled him upright and wrapped his arms around his body, stopping him from continuing.

“Wakasama, please, calm yourself.”

Almost reflexively, Samon smashed his head backward into Taro’s face, hearing the crunch of his skull against the other’s nose. It was to Taro’s great credit that he didn’t curse out loud, but he brought one of his hands up and held Samon’s head back, restraining him from doing anything else.

“Please, wakasama,” he said again. “Calm down so I can see to your wounds. Your life should not end tonight. Don’t give them that satisfaction.”

Samon supposed “them” meant his brother and father, but he cared little whether they were or were not satisfied. He was tired of being a pawn in their political games, tired of being powerless against the forces that controlled his life. But he knew there was nothing he could do and he was tired, so very tired, of continuing down this path that was being laid out for him.

He felt Taro’s fingers on his mouth, a sudden cool touch against lips slippery with blood, and a small round object was placed in his mouth, the finger gently pushing it to the back of what remained of his tongue.

“Please swallow this,” Taro said. “It will take away the pain.”

.

Yahei was returning from an errand for the retired abbot when he saw a well-dressed samurai leave Shogen's cottage, followed by a manservant wearing the Uesugi family crest, and he realized at once that this was Shiro's uncle, Saigo Kenzaburo, who held an important post (Yahei couldn't remember what, exactly) in the Uesugi's upper mansion.

Yahei stepped off the foot path, bowing to Shiro's uncle when the man came close enough to pass, and Saigo stopped dead, casting his eyes down on the boy.

For a few awkward seconds neither of them spoke; then the old man cleared his throat.

"You're that boy, the one my nephew calls Yahei, are you not?" he demanded, the words spoken with so much disdain they were more of an accusation than a question.

"I hope you're happy with yourself," he pressed on, giving Yahei no chance to speak. "If you hadn't talked my nephew into that nonsense in Osaka, perhaps I could have placed him as a retainer, but as things are..."

He cleared his throat again, as if needing to swallow an unpleasant taste. "I hope the two of you are proud of yourselves for shaming this family."

He paused, perhaps waiting to see if Yahei would say anything in his defense.

"I should cut you down where you stand," Saigo hissed after Yahei didn't respond, making a movement to draw his sword, but then he stopped himself, his hand relaxing against the silk wrap of the hilt. "You're not even worth it."

He walked away, the servant following in his wake.

Yahei was too stunned to raise his head, hands shaking against the wrapped parcel he was carrying.

What... what did this mean?

He slowly straightened, looking after the old man and his servant in confusion, panic rising from the pit of his stomach.

Did this mean Shiro's uncle had no intention of taking in his nephew after they'd come all this way? After he'd promised he would?

Yahei forced himself to walk to the cottage, legs feeling like lead weights with every step as he made his way inside.

He placed the parcel beside the irori almost mechanically, but then he wavered in front of the room he and Shiro shared, dithering uncertainly, his hand unwilling to reach out and open the doors.

Eventually, he quietly slid the door open, almost afraid to look into the room. It was dark inside, a dusk-gray illuminated only by the light falling over Yahei's shoulder.

Shiro was sitting beside his futon, legs pulled into his chest.

The light caught an object near the door: the glint of a polished gold koban, and as Yahei's eyes adjusted to the gloom, he realized coins were scattered across the floor.

"Take them," Shiro's voice sounded hollow, the corners of his mouth twitching up into a smile that held no joy at all. "That's all I'm worth to my family."

He buried his face in his arms, forcing the words out through gritted teeth.

"My uncle..." He took a breath to keep his voice from cracking, somewhere between anger and despair.

"My uncle sat here and ordered me to take the bandages off my face. Then... he grabbed me by the chin, looking me up and down, as if he were appraising a new horse for his stable. And he..." His voice was shaking now. "He made this face, this... this... expression... of utter disgust..."

He curled into himself, sobbing.

Munetoshi couldn't help but chuckle to himself when he happened to find his boys - his eldest, Toshikatsu, and his youngest, Chiyogoro* - curled up together in Toshikatsu's room, sliding doors opened just wide enough to allow the gentle golden glow of the late afternoon sun inside, a book discarded beside the futon.

Munetoshi chuckled because he knew exactly what happened: Chiyogoro had brought his favorite story to beg his big brother to read to him, but he'd quickly fallen asleep (as he usually did). And with his little brother warm and comfortable beside him, it probably hadn't taken long for Toshikatsu to close his eyes and drift off as well.

The boys looked so content, Munetoshi couldn't bring himself to wake them, even though it was nearly time for dinner and Chiyogoro still had a scolding coming for putting the entire household into complete uproar by disappearing for most of the afternoon. They'd been looking for him for hours... outside the mansion because he'd last been seen by the front gates. And, of course, Chiyogoro had been told dozens of times not to bother his big brother while he was recovering from his injury.

Munetoshi stroked his chin thoughtfully, wondering if perhaps this kind of bothering was exactly what Toshikatsu needed. The boy's sleeping face looked more relaxed and happy than he'd seen him in weeks.

---

He doesn't remember the nightmares that jolt him from sleep each night, startling him awake bathed in a cold sweat that plasters his hair to his neck and soaks his clothes.

But he doesn't need to remember because every time he wakes, the only image in his mind is his eldest brother's face wearing that sardonic little smile, and the light catching the edge of the small white blade so close to his own face.

He always wakes panicked in the darkness, terrified Jubei could be in the room with him now.

Sometimes he finds the strength to lay still and carefully slow his breathing, listening to the sounds around him for clues to the time: birds chirping in the garden if the sun has already come up, the quiet crackle of the candlewick if it's still early in the night, Ken'ichi's breathing on the other side of the screen if it's past the hour of the rat.

Other nights, he feels so panicked he can't remain still. He has to touch something as a tactile reminder that he's awake: the texture of the tatami underneath his fingertips, the smooth floorboards of the porch under his toes.

This night is different.