Frail Human Heart

by Zoe Marriott

  My arm twitched. Izanagi’s cooling hand went flying out of my fingers into the hole in the centre of the bridge. I clenched my fist, staring at it in outrage. “How…? I am the sword-bearer.”

  You are a sadistic psycho and I won’t let you destroy the world for kicks.

  My whole body lurched, shuddering. “Stop! What are you doing?”

  I’m taking my body back.

  “No! No, this is my body mine, mine…”

  Who are you, then?

  “I am the sword-bearer!”

  No, not your function. Your name. Who are you? Go on – answer me! You can’t, can you? You don’t exist. You’re not a person. You’re just a shadow of me that the sword is using to control my body, and I. Won’t. Have. It.

  My fingers and toes curled and, against my will, my head slowly turned from left to right. “Stop this! Stop – stop – stop!”

  Suddenly I could hear it: the sword’s alien voice chiming inside my head. The sword’s voice? This was my voice – I was the sword-bearer… Wasn’t I?

  You are more than just the bearer of any sword, no matter how powerful. You are more than the servant of this blade. More than its puppet.

  Images – feelings – began to surge up inside me, like waves washing over a stony cliff in great sprays of colour and warmth and life. The feeling of being hugged, a hand gently patting my back. A masculine whiskery scent and a deep voice saying the words Midget Gem.

  My mother. My father. Your parents.

  “I don’t need parents!”

  You do. And you need laughter, and friends.

  Silly, uncontrollable giggling that came from a place of trust and happiness, a feeling that was somehow streaked with pink and purple in my memories. A sense of safety and responsibility and the image of a mug of tea offered to me. A flashing, fey smile, the swish of a coppery tail and the dry smell of ozone.

  Jack. Rachel. Hikaru.

  “Who are they? They are nothing to me! Meaningless insects!”

  They’re everything to you. Everything to me. You did all this for them. You did it for him.

  Dark hair drifting around smoky, endless eyes. A shy, cocky smile. The scent of bonfires and pine trees. A voice that murmured Mio-dono…

  “Shinobu?” I whispered.

  Oh, God. Shinobu.

  My gaze flew away from Izanagi’s cloudy presence to the other side of the bridge, where the boy I loved lay … dying? Dead already? I couldn’t tell. He was so still.

  Tears spilled down my cheeks.

  Shut up! Don’t listen! You are me and I am you! We are the night itself – we are the darkness hidden! We are the Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven! The sword’s energy shrieked, the green blade fizzing with sparks, vibrating with rage in my hand.

  We are all-powerful!

  We are immortal!

  We can destroy anything we want!

  I sucked in a deep, shuddering breath and felt control flow back into my own limbs in a tide of tingling pins and needles as I ripped the creeping tentacles of the sword’s intelligence from my mind, my soul, my heart.

  “My name is Mio Yamato,” I told it grimly as my fingers clenched and loosened on the smooth stone grip of the sword. “I am not powerful. I am not immortal. And I don’t want to destroy anything. I just want this to be over.”

  I looked up at the shining gold and black vapours of Izanagi hovering above me, drew back my arm – No no no! the blade screeched – and flung the Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven overhand like a spear with every bit of strength I had. The green blade screamed through the air, trailing white flames behind it.

  It plunged home in the centre of Izanagi’s noncorporeal form.

  Black and gold lightning and pale fire fought around and within the dark cloud. Slowly, the human body of the god took shape. He hung in the air, lips gaping in a soundless scream, as he clutched the hilt of the jade sword that protruded from his chest. Dark liquid bubbled up around it, dripping over his one remaining hand.

  His eyes. I could see his eyes, and they weren’t white any more. They were brown. They were … human.

  He dropped like a stone, falling past me, through the hole in the bridge and down into the swirling red river below. The sword’s final high-pitched scream of fury made my ears buzz. Then the red waters closed over Izanagi and swallowed him whole. Izanami’s voice broke out in a choked, triumphant cry of joy.

  There was a sound like a star collapsing in on itself, an indescribably vast, hollow BOOM. The water dimpled: sucked downward so fast that for an instant I saw the muddy bed, littered with rusting metal and trash. Then the water surged up like a fist.

  The shock wave blew me straight off my feet. I felt the toxic radiation travel through me, claws of ice scraping out the marrow of my bones. Before I even hit the bridge again – my head bouncing against the path hard enough to make me see stars – I knew that I was dying.

  I curled into a ball as the terrible forces raged around me, whistling and vibrating through the air like a steam cooker left on the heat for too long. The bridge heaved under me, letting out a series of deafening crunches and cracks. The waters rose, a great wave of blood washing over the bridge. With a groan, the whole structure rocked forward, then back.

  And then, so suddenly that it was like a slap to the face … everything fell still.

  I forced my eyes open.

  I was lying on my back, one arm and the bottom half of my leg dangling down into the hole. Above me, the red lightning cage was gone. High, high above that, the sick crimson colour was draining away from the moon, leaving it silvery and clean again. The dense purple clouds were drifting away, shredding in some distant wind that I couldn’t feel.

  My poor struggling heart stuttered, defeated at last, failing. It should have hurt – it should have hurt like hell, the way it had last time – but it didn’t. My grunting, choked breaths were a far-off, faintly annoying sound, nothing more. I’d already had so much pain. It was enough now. I was ready to go.

  I was ready to go with him.

  With a great effort, I rolled my heavy skull sideways. There. There he was, on the other side of the abyss. Shinobu. Lying so still, face turned up to the sky. His hands had fallen away from his chest. One curled just over the edge of the hole in the bridge, as mine did. It was as if we’d been reaching out to each other without even knowing it. Had he already gone? I supposed it didn’t really matter. Whichever one of us was first would wait for the other to catch up.

  My heart had finally gone quiet. My vision was narrowing: a black tunnel with a tiny pinprick of light at its centre. The dark blocked my view of Shinobu, but I knew where I would find him. I smiled as I mumbled, “Where you go…”

  I will follow. Always.

  I let my eyes close.

  EPILOGUE

  BITTERSWEET SIXTEEN

  A faint, continuous beeping noise sounded to my left. It kept on, and on, slowly picking up speed. I could feel my eyebrows wrinkling in annoyance – which sent an ache echoing through my skull.

  Wait.

  Wait a second.

  I’m breathing.

  I peeled gluey, leaden eyelids open. Blue wall. Blue curtains. A hospital room. On one side, my dad, in an uncomfortable looking plastic chair, slumped over on the blanket by my feet with his head pillowed on his arms. On the other side, my mum, in a slightly less evil-looking armchair with her head resting against the wall by the window. Both asleep.

  Fingers of syrup-coloured light crept under the curtains, touching my mum’s hair, the floor, the wall. Daylight. It was morning. It was … the morning of my sixteenth birthday.

  I was sixteen years old.

  I was alive.

  Why?

  “What happened?” My voice was a rasping croak that made me wince.

  “The very question I have been asking myself,” said a cheerful voice.

  I jerked violently, inadvertently tugging on the IV drip taped to my arm, and winced again. My whole body protested again
st these movements, and it took a long while for me to persuade my watering eyes to focus.

  Someone stood in the doorway. He had not been there an instant before. He was … jolly-looking. Early twenties, maybe, but already sloping gently into middle age. Chubby face, dimples, longish dark hair, and a neat beard. Like Santa in his uni years, maybe, if Santa was from Japan. Cute.

  Then I met his eyes. Starry, infinite depths gazed back at me. I looked down and saw a battered old cane in his right hand.

  “Ebisu?” I whispered.

  “You don’t have to keep your voice down. You won’t wake your parents. You won’t wake anyone.”

  I stared at my mum and dad. “You froze them?”

  “No, my dear. I’ve just blessed them all with a nice, deep sleep. They’ll have beautiful dreams that they’ll never quite remember, and wake feeling much the better for it. In the meantime, I think you and I should have a little chat. How do you feel about a walk?”

  I blinked at him, head spinning. “Walk?”

  “Well, I’ll walk. You’d better stay sitting, I think. Yes? Good, good. Carefully does it…”

  Without really understanding how it had happened, I was gently and competently detached from my heart monitor and IV drip, shoehorned out of bed and into a dressing gown, then tucked into a wheelchair with a blanket over my knees.

  “Hold this,” he said, placing his cane across my lap. “It won’t bite.”

  I closed my hands tentatively over the cane to keep it from rolling off as he wheeled me out into the corridor. “You’re … oddly good at this. Competent.”

  “I learned to care for humans as a child,” he said matter-of-factly. “I grew up among them. The Ainu people found my sister and me drifting in the water after my father abandoned us, and took us in. They did not know what we were, only that we were helpless and alone. They taught me that simple kindness, human kindness, was the most valuable thing in the universe. A lesson I have always clung to, even in my darkest moments.”

  We rolled past a waiting room. I caught a glimpse of three familiar figures slumped together on a row of blue chairs: Jack, Rachel and Hikaru. Rachel’s face was buried in Jack’s shoulder – Jack’s cheek rested on the top of Rachel’s head. Hikaru was lying down, with her head in Jack’s lap and her feet dangling off the edge of the last chair. She looked a bit pale, and I saw the edges of bandages peeking out of her clothes, but her lips were creased in a faint smile. One of Jack’s hands was tangled with Hikaru’s. The other rested protectively on Hikaru’s head, as if she’d fallen asleep stroking Hikaru’s long red hair.

  The sight sent a pang through me. My stomach churned with it. I quickly looked away.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Not far,” Ebisu said. He hummed under his breath as he pushed me up one corridor and down another. The hospital lay quiet around us, wrapped in a sort of peaceful stillness. The odd snore drifted in the air.

  Ahead of us, a set of double doors swung open and stayed that way. The walls beyond were clear plastic from floor to ceiling, so that the whole of London seemed to spread out before me, bathed in the soft light of the low winter sun. It all looked so calm. So … normal.

  “Well?” Ebisu asked.

  “Well, what?”

  “It’s still there. You did it. How do you feel?”

  I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. There was a long, aching pause. Then I put my hands over my face, head bowing as my shoulders scrunched up. Tears squeezed out and plopped onto the front of my hospital gown. My whole body shook. I cried in near silence; sobs wrenched out of me like chunks of my heart.

  “There, my dear. There.” Ebisu’s hand rested on my shoulder. His long, straight fingers seemed to radiate warmth. “It was too great a burden for anyone to carry, too great a sacrifice for anyone to make. But you did it all the same. And you survived.”

  “How?” I choked out. “How? I was supposed to die! This was all supposed to be over.”

  “Honestly, that has me in something of a confusion,” he admitted. “Everything I knew told me that you could not survive. The knowledge grieved me deeply. Yet here you are. So perhaps I am not as clever as I like to think. Or perhaps…”

  “What?” I demanded.

  “You were the sword-bearer, Mio. You are a Yamato, and your family had bathed in the power of the blade for a very long time, you more than any of them. It’s possible, just possible, that you are no longer – quite – human.”

  “Not human? What does that mean?”

  “I can’t tell you yet,” he said. “But I’m sure we’ll figure it out. Whatever the truth, I am glad of it, my dear. I am more glad than I can say that you are still here.”

  I wanted to shout, I’m not! I wanted to turn around and punch him. I wanted to throw his cane back in his face, stamp my feet, and scream, I wasn’t supposed to have to do this! I wasn’t supposed to live through it. I wasn’t supposed to have to go on afterwards. Alone.

  But Ebisu had lived for five hundred years as a prisoner in his own body, unable even to set foot outside his front door. He had hidden the wakizashi, and kept the secret, and each day he had suffered for it. He had helped me. Helped us. He had been … kind.

  He was the last person in the world that I could throw a tantrum at over the bitter injustice of my life. So I swallowed the bitterness down, down, and nodded slowly. “I’m glad … that you’re free. I’m glad for you.”

  Ebisu patted my shoulder again. “You’re a nice girl. Come along now.”

  He wheeled me back the way we’d come. I assumed the strange little interlude was over and held myself rigid, determined to keep it together until he left me alone. But at the big double doors he turned left instead of right.

  “This is the wrong way,” I said dully.

  “Don’t you want to visit?” Ebisu brought us to a stop outside a door, and again, it opened untouched. The room within was dark. A familiar beeping almost drowned out the sound of someone’s quiet, even breathing.

  “Visit … who?” I’d already seen everyone.

  “Your young man.”

  I sat like a stone, listening to the noises of life coming from inside the room. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be true. I couldn’t believe it, because if I did, and it wasn’t real, I would break and nothing and no one would ever be able to put me back together again.

  My heart made a desperate, soundless plea. Tell me! Tell me it’s true! Tell me how! Somehow, Ebisu heard it.

  “His wound was fatal – absolutely fatal – five hundred years ago,” he explained. “Nothing could have saved him then, I’m afraid. But in twenty-first-century London? Well, if someone got there in time to stop the bleeding, and then there was a good surgeon available at a good hospital, and after some fairly extensive stitching and patching up it was possible to give him a nice, fat blood transfusion … suddenly it wouldn’t be fatal any more. In fact, all he’ll have to show for it is a rather dashing scar. You won’t mind that, will you?”

  I didn’t answer. I was already fighting with the blanket, hands fumbling, almost tipping myself out of the chair in my struggle to get free. Ebisu’s cane clattered to the floor.

  “Now, now, there’s no need to be in such a panic,” he said, calmly disentangling me and helping me to stand on noodle legs. He met my eyes and smiled his cherubic, joyful smile. “You have all the time in the world.”

  I staggered away from him, into the room. One step. Two steps. Three steps brought me to the bed. My eyes quickly adjusted to the gloom. I stared down at the boy lying there. I felt dizzy, lightheaded, as if I was under some kind of euphoric spell.

  He was pale − deathly pale, almost grey. Dark circles made his bruised purple eyelids look sunken in his face, and his cheeks seemed gaunt. His hair was a tangled mess. His whole chest was wrapped round and round with layers of bandages. I’d never seen him look worse.

  And he was alive. Alive, alive, alive.

  By the time I thought to look up at the doorway again
, Ebisu was gone.

  “Thank you,” I whispered. “Thank you.”

  Slowly I eased down onto the edge of the hard hospital bed, shaking fingers reaching out. The skin of Shinobu’s bare shoulders was chilled. I pulled the blanket up over them. His eyebrows had furrowed in his sleep, and his eyelids were flickering as if he was having a bad dream. I smoothed the hair off his forehead and tucked it behind his ear, watching his sleeping face gradually relax.

  “It’s OK,” I said softly. “I’m here.”

  Lying down on the narrow space next to him, I nestled my face carefully into its perfect place in the notch between his shoulder and neck, and breathed deep, cherishing the faint scent of smoke and pines underneath the hospital antiseptic. Cherishing the annoying, beautiful, steady blip of the heart monitor, and the shape of his body against mine. I would never say that I hated hospitals again.

  “So. Looks like we have … another chance,” I told him shakily, threading my fingers through his. “None of this epic star-crossed love crap this time, OK? No more monsters, no more magic. Just you and me. And we’ll do so much better this time, I promise, Shinobu. This time … where you go, I will follow.”

  Maybe I imagined the soft, almost soundless breath against my hair that sounded like, “Always.”

  Then again, maybe not.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I’m strongly tempted here to just fill half a page with OH MY GOD I DID IT IT’S FINISHED HURRAY! Because there were many points when I thought that wasn’t going to happen, and the relief in being wrong is truly overwhelming. If I had realized at the outset how incredibly challenging it would be to write a trilogy, I would probably have been too chicken to start. But the fact that this book – and this series – was completed, and is actually something of which I can be incredibly proud, is largely down to … well, all these people I’m about to name.

  Boundless love and thanks go to:

  Wonder Editor – Annalie Grainger – and Super Agent – Nancy Miles – for keeping me (mostly) sane throughout, and staying patient even when I inevitably began to babble about running away to herd yaks in Tibet.