by Zoe Marriott
“He sounds like a … difficult man,” I said, with as much neutrality as I could muster.
“And yet he was everything that they said a man should be. Strong. Proud. Fierce. He allowed no weakness – no womanly weakness, he would have said – to prevent him from doing what he pleased. I don’t mean to say that he was some kind of demon. He was just a man, a certain kind of man, the kind who believes he is … entitled. And he raised me to be the same kind.”
“But you were an ordinary human then? You were not…”
“A beast?” He drew in a shaky breath. “I will let you be the judge of that. I want to say … I want to say that I fell in love. That is how I thought of it then, although I would never have uttered the words aloud. I want to say that I fell in love – but it is a lie. I knew nothing of love. So the truth is that I wanted. I met a girl and she was lovely, and calm, and sweet, and serene and graceful. Everything that I believed a woman should be.”
I shifted a little uncomfortably beside him at this recitation of virtues I did not possess, and he took it for impatience and hurried on.
“Her name was Minamoto Oyuki. I decided that she would be mine. I deserved her, didn’t I? The perfect son, the perfect reflection of my father, deserved the perfect woman. Of course, she already had a betrothed and she and I had met only once, and I knew exactly nothing about her. Nothing that meant anything. Not what she wanted, or what would make her happy. I didn’t care. It didn’t occur to me that I should care, do you – do you understand? To consider the thoughts or feelings or wants of anyone else would be a weakness. I don’t think I even realized that other people had feelings. Certainly not women. She might as well have been a painted paper doll to me, for all that I knew, or wanted to know, of who she was inside.”
I began to get a very uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. Though I had been raised in a small, close-knit village, I was still a girl – and all girls knew, or quickly learned, that when a man felt he was entitled to a woman, bad, bad things were very likely to happen to the woman.
“What did you do?” I whispered, and the words came out small and fearful.
“I had my father get her for me. Simple as that. Her old fiancé was cast aside, and plans for our wedding were put in progress.”
“Just like that?”
“Yes! Just like that!” he burst out. “I … I was a vile, self-centred toad of a boy, as narrow-minded and small-hearted as … as … Dear Moon … I can hardly bear to think now of the way I spoke and acted. She came to me. She came to me, Hana-san, and tried to explain to me what I had done. She had been engaged to Ren-san since they were children. They had played together, grown up together. They loved one another. She told me he was the only one who saw her – saw her, not just the beautiful face she was cursed with. If she was made to marry me, she would be miserable, and our marriage would never be a happy one. Surely I did not want that?”
He moved restlessly, hanging his head low. “I listened to her and heard nothing. All that happened was that my pride was stung. What was Ren-san compared to me? The middle son of a modest family was to be chosen over me, the great son of the great house? No, never. I sent her away, more determined than ever to … to own her, because she had challenged me and no one, no one could be allowed to do that to my father’s son.”
“Itsuki, you didn’t go through with it? You didn’t force her to—?”
“No. It didn’t come to that.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t even been aware I was holding. It was bad, bad enough as it was, but that would have been worse. “Then you changed your mind?”
“Oyuki changed it for me. She made a break for freedom, her and Ren-san. They ran away into the forest on this mountain and hid in a tiny village, intending to make a new life. A life where they would be free, and together.”
A little village on the mountain? Our village?
It had to be. That must be how we had been drawn into this. But… “So they escaped, and made a new life. Isn’t that good?”
He dragged his hands through his damp white hair, and did not answer.
“Itsuki?”
“The wealth and connections that my father had offered Oyuki’s family were too tempting for them to simply whistle away. And the prospect of incurring my house’s wrath was terrible, for my father – and I – were known far and wide for our unforgiving tempers. Oyuki’s father and brothers hoped that if they acted very quickly and decisively, they could bring Oyuki home, cover up everything that had happened, and go on with the wedding without any scandal. They told my father and me that Oyuki was ill with a fever, and would be weeks recovering. Then they hired hunters, mercenaries with tracking dogs, and set them on Oyuki’s trail. And they found them. They found them.”
He shivered. “I … I was told, shown, later… She showed me, through her eyes, what had happened. They broke into the little house where Oyuki and Ren-san slept, in the night, and they tried to take her. But Oyuki and Ren-san fought like wolves. The commotion brought the whole village out. Oyuki and Ren-san called on their new people, the villagers, to help them. The mercenaries panicked. There was only a handful of them to several hundred villagers, and somehow they had to subdue Oyuki, but they had their orders. They weren’t to harm Oyuki – not so much as a bruise on her pretty, valuable skin. So how to make her stop fighting? How to frighten the villagers into letting them take her away?”
I closed my eyes. “Ren-san.”
“In that Moon-forsaken place, in the snow, they slit his throat, and told the villagers that anyone who tried to help him or Oyuki would be next. Oyuki … she screamed at the villagers to staunch his bleeding, or free her from the hunters so that she could go to him … but the mercenaries’ plan had worked, and the village folk were too afraid. Ren-san bled to death while Oyuki watched, and then the hunters dragged her away, and no one did a thing to stop it. Afterwards, the villagers buried Ren-san’s body in the forest. Without even a stone to mark the place.”
I was trembling, shaken with horror by the images that his story evoked, and the thought of what Oyuki must have felt. For a moment I was so filled with disgust that I could have hated Itsuki again, hated him on behalf of that valiant loving girl I had never met, whom his arrogance had broken.
But he had not been there in that snowy village square that night. He had not watched the knife fall, or heard Oyuki’s anguished screams and ignored them. No. That had been my people, hadn’t it? Mine.
We were not the innocent victims I had been led to believe. My lost great-grandfather – whom we were taught to revere, and mourn, and pray for – must have been there, watching, that very night. Standing by while the tragedy unfolded and refusing to act out of fear. I knew what would have run through his head, through all of their heads – yes, I knew it well.
Why should we risk our lives for them?
They brought this ill-fortune, this trouble with them.
I am not willing to die for their sakes.
None of us are.
Cowardice disguised as common sense. And when Oyuki had been dragged away and they had had time to look around them, to realize what they had allowed to happen − what had they done then? Thrown Ren’s body among the trees to rot as if he were trash, not a person they had known, a person they had betrayed. As if denying his existence would allow them to deny what they had done.
“After all that, when they finally brought Oyuki back to the city, it was too late,” Itsuki said. “Word had got out, gossip had spread, and my father’s rage had broken over her family’s house. I was far too busy nursing my own wounded feelings to consider what would happen to Oyuki. If I thought about it at all, I suppose I imagined that her father and brothers would beat her or starve her as punishment, and that it would serve her right. I told her brother that his family would have been better off if she was never born. We – I – didn’t know, then, what had happened to Ren-san. I didn’t stop to think how far they would go to appease us … what they might do to her.”
He held his head in his hands again, apparently lost in thought. I wanted to prod at him, but I did not. I was beginning to see. He called her Yuki-Onna. Yuki-Onna, angry spirit of snow and ice, that froze unwary travellers to death…
At last I murmured, “It was winter. You said in the village there was snow.”
“The whole city was white with ice. There was a storm that night that turned the rivers into stone, that tore out shutters and collapsed houses under the weight of the fallen snow. And in the morning the message came from Oyuki’s family. I think they expected me to be pleased. They had thrown her out at the dead of night with nothing but the clothes on her back. But it wouldn’t have mattered if they had given her a purse of gold and a horse by then, not to her. She had given up. They found her still on the front steps of the house, as if she had just lain down there to sleep in the frost.”
Silence hummed between us for a few uncomfortable minutes. Then I stirred, for this next part was what most concerned us now.
“She rose again. Became Yuki-Onna,” I said.
“The next night, when the Moon was dark, she came for me. She showed me, made me live through, all that my actions had caused. I saw her and Ren-san, and what they had been to each other, and how it had ended. And then, as I wept for mercy, she cursed me.” He spread his hands out. “Since then, all has been as you see now.”
“You tried to get out of the maze? Tried to get away?”
“In those first years, I tried everything. In the beginning I was still filled with resentment and pride, and I fanned those emotions because otherwise … what was left for me? But they burned out soon enough, despite my efforts. After despair had taken their place, and burned away in its turn, all that remained was the truth: that I deserved to be punished. Unthinkingly – no – uncaringly, I destroyed Oyuki’s life, Ren-san’s life. I killed them both.”
Fifteen
I bit my lip, and after a hesitation that felt longer than it was, I reached out and placed the flat of my hand on his back. His muscles clenched up, and he quivered under the touch, but otherwise stayed still as a stone, as if waiting for a blow to fall.
“Itsuki. That … you…” I clicked my tongue in exasperation at myself and began again. “Itsuki. That isn’t true. You didn’t kill anyone.”
He turned on me instantly – fiercely. “How can you of all people say that? Everything – every evil thing – that you have endured, that your people endured, is because of me. The curse on the forest – you lost your grandmother and brother to it! The beast nearly killed you! At the root of everything is me. Just as you said. It is all because of what I did.”
I blinked at him and then looked away from his awful face – what a fine irony that was, and how Oyuki must have enjoyed burdening him with his own fatal beauty. I focused on his big, bent hands as they curled and uncurled with tension, just as mine were wont to do.
“You did behave terribly to Oyuki. You treated her like a thing, an object with no worth but what could be bought and sold. You were cruel, and arrogant, and blind. I cannot forgive you for that. No one can but her. She is the one who suffered for it. There is no blessing or … or absolution that I can offer. The responsibility for what you did is yours, and you must bear it.”
“I know. I know,” he whispered, head bowed again, wretched.
“But by the same principle, you can only take responsibility for your own actions, Itsuki. What you did. You did not send the hunters after Oyuki, you did not wield the knife that murdered her beloved. Nor did you cast her onto the street to die, or ask that it be done. You did not put the curse upon yourself or upon this forest. Other people did those things, and the blame for them does not lie with you.”
He shook his head wearily. “You don’t understand—”
I silenced him with a sharp gesture. “You’re the one who doesn’t understand. I’m not being kind. I’m not trying to make you feel better. Don’t you see? You lessen your own responsibility if you try to shoulder the burden of other people’s actions too. Then it becomes about – oh, about self-indulgence, lashing yourself with guilt and wallowing in it – and that doesn’t help anyone, most certainly not the people you have hurt. The way to atone is to truly admit and face up to what you did, and seek to make up for your actions however much and in whatever way you can.” I paused, and saw that he was staring at me, apparently so struck by what I had said that he had forgotten, for once, to shield his face. Encouraged, I went on. “If there is any hope of forgiveness or redemption for any of us, we must repent for the evil we have done. And that is enough, Itsuki. Dear Moon, it is more than enough.”
As the last words left my mouth, I stilled. That was right, wasn’t it? It was. I had spoken the truth. I knew the truth of it, felt it down to the bones of me.
But if that was right…
A strangled noise – part sob, part laugh, part something else entirely – broke out of my chest. It was the truth, and that meant… What happened to Kyo was not my fault.
My brother’s voice that I heard in my head, that taunted me and sneered … it had never been him, not truly. Of course not. Of course not. Kyo would never have said those things – he had loved me, my brother, and if he had been here still, he would only have sought to protect me. Not to punish me for the fate that had befallen him.
I had tormented myself. All these years, shouldering that burden of too heavy responsibility, of guilt and self-hate. Trying to make up to my parents for what I felt I had stolen from them. Trying to be both a daughter and a son, and the perfect child, so that they did not look at me and long for an empty void that followed me at my shoulder. Trying to repay a debt that never, never could be repaid.
I had spent so many years trying to gain forgiveness from my father for a crime I did not commit. Surely, I had known, surely I must have always known … he was wrong to treat me as he did. But how could I accept that the father I worshipped could be so unfair? I loved him, and needed so much to be loved by him, to cling to something as I grieved the staggering loss of my beloved best friend and brother. I had got it all so tangled up. I thought if Father blamed me, then I must be to blame. If everyone else rushed to absolve me, then it was only pity and kindness.
In a twisted kind of way, I could almost understand why he had done it. If I had disappeared from the river by magical means, vanished into the forest on the wings of the curse, it would have been a familiar and inescapable tragedy. It would have been the monster’s doing, as so many other losses we had faced. But Kyo’s disappearance was different. He was only out there among the trees because my father had sent him away in his fear or his temper, or both. Because my father had ignored one of the most inviolable rules of our home: never go out at the dark of the Moon.
No good man could live with having sent his son straight into a monster’s jaws. No decent father could live with the responsibility for his child’s death. My father was a good man, and he had been a decent father to us both, loved us and protected us. He would have given his life in exchange for either of ours, I knew that. But he had made a mistake.
It had been wrong of him to send Kyo into danger that night.
I could only take responsibility for my own actions. And what had I done? I had tried to tell Kyo that I was moving up river away from him. In fact, I had shouted it at him in pique as I splashed away! I had not heard him later when he called to me. If I had, I would have answered. I could not have known what would happen. I hadn’t done anything wrong. It wasn’t my fault.
What happened to Kyo was not my fault.
With that realization, the acceptance of it, I felt my despair, my grief and guilt, the aching, empty hollow which had been rooted in my own heart, growing day by day for four years, begin to shrink, and contract, and close up. I would always love my brother, and I would always miss him. There would always be a scar in his shape on my soul. But the wound he had left within me was healed. At last.
I was free.
I did not hear Itsuki move, bu
t the next thing I was aware of was his gentle, twisted fingers wrapping around my wrists, coaxing my face out of my hands.
“Don’t … Hana, please, please, don’t…” he begged, just as when he had begged me not to struggle and hurt myself in my delirium.
I steeled myself to look up into his striped, alien face – and stared, astonished. His expression had transformed again, changed from that ugly rictus of anger into … something else. He had altered in some fundamental way, strange, and yet so familiar, though I was unable to name it. He was crying. The repellent beauty of his features was still there, still terrible to gaze upon, but I could look into those cat’s eyes now without flinching. I could see the sadness and compassion and caring in them, and somehow it made them human.
“Don’t cry,” he murmured again, and he sounded broken, faltering and hurt.
Itsuki was no longer that calmly remote, endlessly patient voice, so unmoveable that it had seemed perfectly fitting for me to name him “tree”. He was no longer the man who kept his back to me and wept so silently that I could only feel, never hear or see, his tears.
“It’s all right,” I reassured softly. “I won’t cry any more, Itsuki. It’s all right now.”
He wrapped his arms around me and clung so tightly that it hurt. He was shuddering. While I had been falling apart in my own little world, so had he, in his. I had got through to him.
We needed to break, I thought. We needed to break so we could both finally begin to heal anew.
It took a while for the strange, self-contained storm of our emotions to exhaust itself and blow out. When it did, we both drew back, and shook ourselves, and squinted and sighed, a little self-conscious and awkward in our own skins and with each other.
Itsuki wrung out his cloak and drew it back on with the hood pulled far forwards, although he left the rest of his disguise discarded in a soggy pile on the grass. I wiped my eyes and face on my under-robe and re-braided my hair, although it didn’t really need it.