The first thing you should know about me is that I lose.
I lose every morning in the dirt behind Master Daigo’s barn, with a wooden sword in my fist and the sun in my eyes, against boys who are thirteen years old and already faster than I will ever be.
Today it is Ryo.
He is a sparrow of a boy, all elbows and one crooked front tooth, and there is no fear in him at all.
He does not blink when I come at him.
I swing high.
He steps inside it.
The wood cracks against my ribs once, twice, a third time before my body understands it has been hit.
I fold.
The dirt of Ashigawa tastes the way it always tastes, of ash and old blood and the rot of the millet fields, and I lie in it and look at the gray sky and listen to the other children laugh.
“Again,” says Master Daigo.
He never says it kindly.
He has two fingers missing from his left hand and one dead eye the color of spoiled milk, and he says everything the way a man pulls a nail out of a board.
He was a defense guard once, before the King’s captains taught him what the work really was and he walked away from it in the night.
That was thirty years ago.
He still sleeps with his back to a wall.
I get up.
My ribs grind.
I pick the wooden sword out of the dirt.
“Your father held a blade like it was part of his arm,” Daigo says.
“You hold it like a dead fish you’re ashamed to be carrying.”
“I know.”
“Then stop carrying it like one.”
Ryo grins at me.
He is not being cruel.
Children are not cruel about this.
They are only honest, and honesty is worse.
He is thirteen and he has already decided what I am, the way the whole village decided it years ago: the son of Shogen, who is nothing like Shogen.
I am nineteen years old.
I have never won a single bout.
We go again.
I lose again.
This time Ryo cracks my knuckles and the wooden sword spins out of my hand and lands in the pigs’ trough, and the laughter is louder, and Daigo turns his good eye away from me, which is the worst thing he does.
I do not cry.
I stopped doing that at fourteen.
What I do instead is count.
Bruises, mostly.
Left ribs, three.
Right hand, two knuckles split.
A welt on my thigh already going purple, the shape of a fat finger.
By nightfall they will be gone.
They always are.
My bruises never last the way other people’s do, and it is the only thing about me that has ever frightened me, so I do not think about it.
Ashigawa sits at the bottom of a valley where the sun arrives late and leaves early.
Forty-one huts, one well, one shrine to a god nobody has prayed to since the last famine.
The rice paddies climb the hillsides in narrow gray steps, and most of what grows in them belongs to the court in the capital, three weeks’ ride to the east, where people with royal blood live behind white walls and eat what we grow.
We eat millet.
When the millet fails, we eat what the millet was growing next to.
I walk home along the paddy dikes with my split hand tucked under my arm.
Farmers straighten up as I pass, then bend again.
No one says a word to me.
No one has to.
I know what they are thinking, because I have been thinking it since I was old enough to understand the songs.
Shogen killed a hundred royal guards in one hour, with one sword.
Shogen wore the demon like armor, and the guards who saw his face wet themselves and died anyway.
Shogen made the King himself come down out of the white walls to fight.
And then, in the songs, comes the part the children do not sing, the part the old women lower their voices for.
The King came to a small house at the edge of this very valley and asked my father to draw his sword.
And my father did, because he was a man who had never once refused a fight.
And the King had a demon of his own.
I was born while my father was still dying.
That is what Hanae told me.
I came out of my mother screaming into a house that already smelled of burning, and my mother looked at me once and her heart stopped.
Just stopped, Hanae said, like a stream that hits a wall.
Too much sorrow for one small body.
So there I was.
A baby in a bloody house, between a dead father and a dead mother, in a village that had lost its only hope in the same hour.
Somebody had to take me.
Hanae did.
She was already old then, a widow with no children, and she wrapped me in her own shawl and carried me home through the rain.
I have been the village’s embarrassment ever since.
Our hut is the last one before the tree line.
Hanae has lived in it for fifty years, and it leans like she does, a little to the left, as if the wind has been arguing with both of them all that time.
There is smoke coming from the roof-hole when I get there.
Rice gruel, thin as river water.
She is stirring it with a stick.
“You lost,” she says, without turning around.
“How do you always know?”
“You walk like a wet dog when you lose.” She looks over her shoulder then, and her eyes, which are the color of tea gone cold, go straight to my hand.
She says nothing about it.
She only picks up a rag, dips it in the water bucket, and pats the empty place beside her on the floor.
I sit.
She cleans the cuts.
Her fingers are like dried roots and they are gentler than anyone else’s has ever been.
“Ryo is thirteen,” I say.
“He is thirteen and he already—”
“Ryo has been holding a sword since he could stand.
You started at eleven, because I was afraid of what you would become if I let you.” She tightens the rag around my knuckles.
“That is my fault.
Not yours.”
“You were afraid?”
“Of the thing in your blood.” She says it flatly, the way you would say the thing in the well.
“I have watched you sleep for nineteen years, Shigen.
I have watched things move under your skin.
I know what you carry.
And I know your father never learned to hold it, so I did not want you to learn to hold a sword until you could hold yourself.”
I have heard this before.
Not all of it, but the shape.
The demon.
The spirit that came into my father at his birth, and into me at mine, passed down like a cracked bowl.
Hanae believes it is real.
So does Daigo, though he would never say so out loud.
Half the village believes it.
They look at me and they wait for the horns.
The horns have never come.
That is the joke of me.
I am the son of the demon-samurai, and I cannot beat a child.
“Maybe it went the other way,” I say.
“Maybe it looked at me and left.”
Hanae’s hands stop.
For a moment she does not say anything at all.
Then she pats my arm, two dry taps, and stands up to fetch the gruel.
“Eat,” she says.
That is not an answer, and we both know it.
That night I dream the dream again.
It has been the same dream since I was small.
I stand in a wide room with a floor made of black water, and something is standing on the other side of it.
I never see the whole shape.
Only the mask.
A white skull, cracked across the brow, with two horns curving up out of the bone, and behind the empty eyes something shining wetly, like a mouth.
It does not speak.
It only waits.
Tonight, though, for the first time, it lifts one hand toward me.
Long fingers.
Black nails.
It beckons, and I feel something in my chest lean toward it like a plant toward a window.
I wake up gasping, with the taste of copper on my tongue.
My nose is bleeding.
My bruises are gone.
I lie in the dark and listen to Hanae snore, and I do not sleep again.
The guards come on the fourth day of the new moon.
I am in the yard behind the barn, losing to Ryo again, when the first horn sounds.
It is a long flat note from the ridge road, not the kind you hear at harvest or festival.
Every head in the village comes up at once.
Ryo drops his sword.
Daigo goes very still.
“Inside,” he says, quietly.
“All the children.
Now.”
“Master, what is—”
“Now.”
He has never raised his voice at me before.
I obey, and I hate that I obey, and I stand in the doorway of the barn watching the road with the rest of the village, all of us lined up like scarecrows.
They ride down in a column of ten.
Black horses, black lacquered armor with white cord binding the plates, and on every breastplate the same crest in white paint: a crane with its wings spread wide, as though it were being pinned.
Each man carries a long sword at his hip and a short one at his back.
Some carry a chain wound around the forearm.
Two of them carry nothing I can see at all, and those are the ones I look at longest, because they ride with a quiet I recognize.
It is the quiet of a person who does not need to be seen to be dangerous.
Shinobi, then.
The King’s own.
The lead rider dismounts in front of the well.
He is younger than I expected, thirty at most, with a narrow face and a scar across his upper lip that has pulled his mouth into a permanent half-smile.
He unrolls a strip of white silk and does not bother to read it.
He knows it by heart.
“By order of the King and the blood of the royal house,” he says, in a voice that carries without effort, “the village of Ashigawa has been found in arrears.”
Nobody moves.
“You owe the court eleven sacks of rice.
You have delivered six.
The King is a generous man.” The half-smile widens.
“He will accept the difference in people.”
I hear Hanae behind me.
She has come out of the hut, and she is standing in the doorway with one hand on the frame, and her breath is very slow.
“The old and the weak,” the captain continues.
“Those over sixty.
Those crippled.
Those who cannot work the fields.
We will take our count from among them.
Line up, please.”
I do not understand it at first.
Not the words.
The math of it.
I have heard about the culls from traders and rumor, in the same way you hear about the weather in another province.
It is one thing to have a story.
It is another to watch a man in black lacquer point at a dozen frightened faces and start counting under his breath.
“Master Daigo,” the captain says, and his half-smile turns almost fond.
“Yes.
I was told about you.
You may keep your fingers, old man.
They are already gone.”
Daigo does not answer.
He stands with his one hand resting on the hilt of a sword I have never seen him draw, and his good eye is on the captain like a nail.
The captain walks down the line.
He stops in front of an old man, Tsugu, who mends our nets, who is deaf and mostly blind.
He nods.
Two guards take Tsugu by the arms.
He does not understand.
He is smiling at them, confused, polite.
They put him on his knees in the dirt by the well.
The captain draws his sword in one clean motion, the blade making a sound like silk tearing, and takes off the old man’s head.
It rolls.
It stops against the stone lip of the well, and the eyes are still open, still confused, still looking for a friend.
The screaming starts then.
A woman falls to her knees.
Somebody runs and is knocked down by a rider and stomped, once, twice, into silence.
Ryo’s mother clamps a hand over his mouth.
And I stand in the barn doorway with my mouth open and my sword in my hand, my useless wooden sword, and I cannot make my legs move, because for the first time in my life I understand exactly what my father was fighting.
Not a war.
This.
A man in a clean coat choosing which old people should stop existing so a debt could be balanced.
The captain wipes his blade on a cloth and steps to the next in line.
It is Hanae.
I do not remember crossing the yard.
I remember the noise I made, which was not a word.
I remember that the wooden sword was no longer in my hand, and that I had somehow gotten hold of the nearest guard’s wrist, a big man with a beard braided in three ropes, and that I was pulling at it with both hands as though I could bend it backwards.
He looks down at me with real surprise.
Then he laughs.
“This one has spirit.”
“Let her go,” I say.
He hits me in the mouth with his fist.
It is not a hard hit, by his standards.
It lifts me off my feet anyway.
I land on my back and something inside my jaw slides sideways, and there is blood in my mouth and dirt in it too.
I roll onto my hands and knees.
I try to get up.
He puts a boot between my shoulder blades and pushes me flat.
“Stay,” he says, cheerfully, as if to a dog.
“Watch.”
I turn my head.
The dirt scrapes my cheek.
From there I can see Hanae’s feet, bare and cracked and small, and the hem of her patched gray robe, and the captain’s black boots stepping up in front of them.
“Old woman,” the captain says.
“Your name?”
“Hanae.”
“You raised the boy?”
A pause.
I try to shout that it is not true, that it is nothing to do with me, that he should take me instead.
What comes out is a wet cough.
“Yes,” says Hanae.
Her voice is steady.
I have never heard it so steady.
“I raised him.”
“Then you failed,” the captain says, not unkindly.
“The whole valley knows it.
The son of the great Shogen, and he could not stand up to a guard’s slap.
The King will be pleased to hear it.” He lifts his sword.
“Is there anything you would like to say to him?”
Hanae turns her head.
She looks at me.
I am flat on my face in the dirt, with a boot on my spine and my mouth full of blood.
And she smiles.
It is a small, dry, terrible smile, and I know it, because it is the same one she wore on the morning I turned eleven and picked up my first wooden sword.
“Eat,” she says.
The blade comes down.
I will not describe what came after.
I will say only that the boot left my back, and that I did not get up right away, and that the yard went very quiet in the way a house goes quiet after a death.
I will say that the captain wiped his sword a second time.
That two more names were counted, and two more heads fell, and that the guards took the last of them, a child’s grandfather, and tied him to a saddle and rode out of the valley with the rice and the crane banners flapping and never once looked back.
I will say that I lay there until the sun went down.
Nobody came to lift me.
I do not blame them.
Some of them were burying their own.
When I finally sit up, the world has turned the color of ash.
My jaw is not broken.
My ribs are not broken.
The blood on my chin has already dried and begun to flake, and when I press the split in my lip with my thumb, I find it has already closed.
I stare at my thumb.
By nightfall they will be gone.
I have always known.
I have never let myself ask why.
Daigo finds me in the hut.
I have dragged Hanae inside.
It took a long time.
She weighs almost nothing.
I have laid her on her sleeping mat and closed her eyes and covered the place where the captain’s blade went with her own shawl, the same shawl she carried me home in, and I am sitting beside her in the dark with my hands open on my knees, doing nothing.
Daigo stands in the door.
“You didn’t stop them,” I say.
My voice is very flat.
“You had a sword.
You never drew it.
You just stood there.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because there were ten of them.
And two were shinobi.
And if I had drawn, every child in Ashigawa would be lying in that yard beside her.” He comes in, slowly, and lowers himself onto the floor across from me.
The old joints crack.
“That is the truth.
I am not proud of it.
But it is the truth.”
I want to hate him.
I find I cannot.
He looks too old.
“They’re going to come back,” I say.
“In the spring.
In the autumn.
Every time the rice is short.” He pulls something from inside his robe.
A long shape wrapped in oiled cloth, black with age.
“Hanae asked me to give you this.
If it ever came to this.”
I do not take it.
“She dug it up herself,” Daigo says.
“Nineteen years ago.
From under the floor of the house where you were born.
She has kept it beneath this hut ever since.” He sets it across my knees.
“It is your father’s.”
The weight of it goes through me like cold water.
I unwrap the cloth slowly.
Beneath is a scabbard of black lacquer, worn to the bare wood along the spine, and a hilt wound in dark cord gone brittle with age.
There is a single mark cut into the pommel.
A small circle with a line through it, like an eye that has been struck out.
“Draw it,” Daigo says.
“I can’t use it.
I can’t use anything.
You saw me.
Every day for eight years—”
“Draw it.”
I close my hand around the hilt.
It is cold.
Not cold like iron in winter.
Cold like the inside of a grave.
It goes up my arm in a slow pulse, and the hairs rise on my neck, and behind my eyes there is a pressure, gentle at first, like someone tapping on a door from the wrong side.
I draw the blade.
It comes out of the scabbard without a sound.
It is a long, plain, unornamented length of steel, dark as a river at night, with a single line of tempering along the edge like a breath fogged on glass.
The moment it leaves the wood, the whole hut seems to hold its breath.
And then something answers.
There you are, says a voice.
It is not a voice in my ears.
It is a voice in my teeth, in the bones of my skull.
Low and pleased and patient, so patient, the patience of a thing that has waited a very long time and can wait a little longer.
My vision goes red at the edges.
There is a pain in my forehead, two hot points on either side of the brow, as though something is pushing up from beneath the bone.
My nose is bleeding again.
I taste copper.
My hand on the hilt is shaking, and the veins along my forearm have gone black, dark as ink, spreading up toward the elbow in slow branching lines.
“Shigen.” Daigo’s voice, far away.
“Shigen.
Sheathe it.”
Let me help you, says the voice.
You wanted to save her.
I could have saved her.
I could have saved all of them.
Let me.
I want to.
Heaven help me, I want to.
I want it more than I have ever wanted anything.
I want the horns and the mask and the strength of fifty men.
I want to walk into the captain’s camp tonight and open every throat in it.
But I know something too, in the small cold part of me that has spent nineteen years losing.
I know what happened to my father.
He let it in every time.
Every time it took a little more of him, until there was nothing left but a mask and a blade and a name that frightened children.
That is why he lost to the King.
That is why a demon killed a man who could have won.
If I say yes now, I will never say anything else.
I shove the sword back into its scabbard with both hands.
The voice cuts off like a snapped string.
The red drains out of my eyes.
The black lines in my arm sink slowly back under the skin, and I fall forward onto my hands, gasping, and I retch a mouthful of blood and bile onto Hanae’s clean floor.
Daigo has not moved.
His good eye is wide.
“Twenty years I have been waiting to see that,” he says quietly.
“I did not think I would live to.”
I wipe my mouth on my sleeve.
I do not look up.
“It doesn’t work like they say,” I tell him.
“It’s not strength I can just use.
It wants something.”
“Yes.”
“It wants me.”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll have to be stronger than it.” My voice is hoarse.
“Before I use it.
I have to learn to hold a blade with my own hands first.
I have to be good enough that I don’t need it.
Otherwise it will—”
“Yes,” Daigo says.
“That is exactly right.” He is looking at me strangely, the way you look at a house you thought had burned down and find still standing.
“That is what your father never understood.”
Silence.
Outside the wind has come up, and somewhere down the valley a woman is still keening.
“Teach me,” I say.
“You know I can’t teach you what you need.
I taught you what I had.
It is not enough.” He rubs his dead eye with the heel of his hand.
“But there are men who can.
In the north, in the mountains.
Old masters, the ones who left the guard.
The ones who hate the crane as much as you do.
If you go, if you survive, if you learn—”
“Then I go north.”
“And then?”
I look down at the sword in my lap.
I think of Tsugu’s head against the well.
I think of the captain’s half-smile.
I think of the white walls three weeks’ ride to the east, where people eat what we grow, and of the King who put his hand on my father and pushed a sword through him and then walked away as if he had swatted a fly.
I think of Hanae.
Eat, she said.
Her last word.
Not a curse.
Not a prayer.
An order, from a woman who wanted me alive more than she wanted me brave.
“And then I go east,” I say.
“And I kill every one of them.
Every guard.
Every captain.
Every man or woman who ever put on that crane.” I close my hand around the scabbard.
“And when I reach the white walls, I take the King’s head off his shoulders the same way that man took Hanae’s.”
Daigo does not argue.
He does not tell me I am a fool, or a child, or the worst swordsman in the valley.
He only nods slowly, the way a man nods when he is watching a very old tree begin, at long last, to fall.
“Bury her first,” he says.
“Then go.”
We bury her at dawn.
Under the pine at the edge of the paddies, in the shallow ground where the frost has not yet gone deep.
I dig the grave myself.
The whole village watches, and nobody helps, and nobody looks away either.
When I am done Ryo is standing at the edge with his crooked tooth and his splinter-thin arms, holding a wooden sword against his chest.
“Are you really going to do it?” he says.
“Kill them all?”
“I’m going to try.”
“You’ll lose.”
He says it the way he says everything, plainly, without malice.
It is only a fact, offered like a stone in the hand.
“I’ve been losing for nineteen years,” I tell him.
“I’m getting good at it.”
I take the wooden sword from his fist, gently, and drop it into the grave beside Hanae.
It seems right somehow.
Then I fill in the earth with my hands, and I strap my father’s blade across my back with a length of Hanae’s shawl, and I walk out of Ashigawa without looking behind me.
The road north is frozen mud and thin white grass.
The sun is coming up over the eastern ridge, and it is red as a fresh cut, and I do not know how long I will live, or how far I will get, or what I will be when I get there.
Behind my eyes, something is smiling.
Good, it says, very softly.
Good.
I am in no hurry.
I keep walking.
End of Chapter One