Traitor's Hope

by Virginia McClain

  She supposed that if his sister were a water kisō then pretending that he could call water as well as earth would make sense to a child who didn’t know that no such combination of kisō existed.

  “I see,” she said, looking between the two children. “Well, you can call forth a ball of earth or water for this exercise, though it’s typically done with wind or fire.”

  In fact, it was only ever done with wind or fire as far as Mishi knew. She was well aware that earth and water Kisōshi became yukisō like Taka, and wind and fire Kisōshi became senkisō like herself, but she didn’t know if that was the way it had to be, or the way that society said it should be. For centuries, the people of Gensokai had insisted that female Kisōshi could not exist, but that had never been true; it had only been an illusion used to force society to conform and eliminate a supposed threat. What else had been forced upon them in all those centuries?

  She didn’t know if earth and water Kisōshi would make good senkisō, but judging by what she’d seen Taka do over the cycles they had spent growing up together, she thought it likely that the girl, at least, would be able to do a simple form with a water globe. Earth would likely be more difficult, but if the boy was resourceful, he might be capable of it anyway.

  And so, without meaning to, she began an impromptu lesson on kisō, and unarmed combat forms. Mishi made a point of addressing both children, even though the girl kept looking away and feigning disinterest.

  The sun was halfway to its zenith by the time that the boy managed to create a ball of earth that he could take at least partway through a form.

  “Excellent!” Mishi said, her eyes alight with enthusiasm. She turned to the girl.

  “Now you try,” she said.

  The girl’s eyes widened, and she shook her head frantically.

  “I can’t,” she whispered.

  “I think it would be easier with water than with earth,” Mishi said, smiling. “I’ve already shown you that I can do it with fire.” When she still saw fear in the little girl’s eyes, she got down on her knees so that she was eye level with her and continued. “Do you really think I would turn on another female Kisōshi? I have been training to fight men like the ones who attacked your village since I was your age. My sisters and I all trained together to stop them. I thought we had succeeded when we helped take the Rōjū Council out of power.” She frowned then, as the truth of her next words sank in. “I hadn’t considered that there would be men evil enough to keep harming innocents even once they knew the truth of their own actions. I had thought that once they realized that the Rōjū were treating infant girls as the enemy, no Kisōshi would stand with them, and they would be left powerless. I suppose I should have known better. It seems that others knew what would be coming.”

  She stopped speaking then, thinking of the Zōkames and how they must have had some idea of how much more work would remain to be done after the rebellion. She thought of how old Tsuku-san had looked in their last meeting, how heavily the weight of all the New Council’s decisions seemed to weigh on her. She shook her head as if the action would make the burden of that knowledge go away.

  “That’s why Mitsu-san and I are here now,” she continued. “We are looking for female Kisōshi, either newborns and their parents, or girls like you and me, who managed to survive somehow when the Rōjū were still actively killing us off. We’re trying to find them and tell them that they can be trained now, if they want, in healing, or as senkisō, Kisōshi of rank, to defend the people and protect them from the kind of men who are attacking villages like yours.”

  “It wasn’t our village,” the girl said, and Mishi was so startled by her reply that she said nothing for a moment.

  “What do you mean?” she asked, when the girl offered no further explanation.

  “It was never our village,” the girl explained. “We were born somewhere else, and brought to another village when were three cycles old. There was a nursemaid who brought us, but she went away. We left that village moons ago, and then we came here. The people of the village never liked us. They just wanted to take my brother away from me. And then….” She paused and took a deep breath before she continued in a whisper. “And then they were going to give her to those men.”

  Mishi blinked, confused.

  “Give who to the men?” she asked.

  “The baby. The baby who was like me. The sanzoku came for her, and at first her parents hid with her, but then the villagers…they found them and brought them to the square. They gave her to the sanzoku. They were going to let them kill the baby, without even trying to fight.”

  Mishi’s mouth closed into a tight line. It was a child’s interpretation of what had happened, of course. There were probably…reasons. The sanzoku had in all likelihood threatened the whole town, a threat they clearly could make good on. Still, something inside her fractured slightly at the thought of people offering up a baby to those monsters, simply to protect their own skins. She supposed they had paid for it, and dearly, despite whatever “deal” the sanzoku had offered them. She felt her stomach tighten, and wasn’t sure which horror was worse, the fate the villagers had been willing to hand an infant over to, or the fate the villagers had all received.

  At least now she thought she understood why the girl had said that the villagers deserved what had happened to them. She wasn’t sure that she agreed, but she wasn’t sure that she could argue the point, either.

  She sighed then, all at once weary of the world and the kind of people that brought these things to pass.

  “If you ever wish to learn how to fight those kinds of people,” she said, locking eyes with the tiny brown-eyed girl before her, “you let me know, and I will be sure that you do.”

  The little girl nodded once.

  Mishi stood then, and took a brief look at Mitsu, who had somehow prepared the morning meal without any of them noticing what he was about.

  “What can we call you, children?” she asked. “I know that orphans often don’t have the names that their parents gave them, but we always used to name ourselves. What do you call each other?”

  The boy looked at his sister, waiting until she gave him a brief nod before speaking.

  “I’m Tsuchi,” he said quietly.

  “And I’m Mizu,” the little girl added.

  “Mizu-chan, Tsuchi-kun, it’s a pleasure to meet you. My name is Mishiranu, but you may call me Mishi, and this is Mitsu-san.”

  Mitsu smiled and added, “Mitsuanagumi is my full name, but you can call me Mitsu. And Mishi-san’s real name is Ryūko-san, but she tries not to tell people that.”

  Mishi ignored the jibe and instead bowed to both children.

  “It is a pleasure to meet two fellow Kisōshi.”

  Mizu scanned the woods around her, looking up and downstream along the creek. Having confirmed that there was no one nearby, she turned to her twin.

  “We need to go,” she said.

  “Why, Mizu-chan? They seem nice.”

  “The villagers seemed nice. That doesn’t mean we trust them.”

  “But that lady is a Kisōshi, just like you.”

  “She might be a Kisōshi, but she said she was trained, and she has a real name. She can’t be just like me, or like you. We can’t trust them. Even if they’re nice, they’ll try to separate us. All grownups do. They won’t let us stay together because they’ll try to make us go to different schools. Even if they don’t want to kill me for being a Kisōshi, they’ll want to train me, and they’ll want to train you, and do you think they’ll let us train together?”

  Tsuchi shook his head. He knew as well as she did that the grownups always tried to separate them.

  “So we have to go,” Mizu said again.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Tsuchi nodded.

  “Is that why you asked to go pee?” he asked.

  Mizu nodded.

  “They won’t come looking for us for a little while yet. We’ll stick to the creek. I’ll ask the water to hide our steps, and
you can keep the earth from telling on us.”

  Without further discussion, they took off up the stream, heading farther into the woods and mountains, planning to leave the roads behind them.

  ~~~

  They’d gotten nearly a league away from the camp they’d made with Mishi and Mitsu when Mizu heard a shrill whistle from the tree tops that made her stop in her tracks.

  “That was no bird,” she said to Tsuchi.

  The boy said nothing, but she could sense him pushing his kisō outwards, trying to figure out what waited in the trees that towered above them.

  She felt a small but sharp pain in the back of her neck and briefly wondered why Tsuchi had pinched her, then she heard him cry out and her world went dark.

  Mishi wiped another splash of creek water from her face and shivered, as she felt the icy water soak its way into her hakama. Her view consisted of Mitsu’s back, and she was close enough that she kept getting water in her face, but the alternative was to let him get far enough ahead that she might lose him. The man could move damnably fast, even over a rough creek bed filled by a swift moving current, and they were trying to move as quickly as possible. Her only chance of keeping up with him was staying so close that she could place her feet wherever he placed his, thus avoiding obstacles that remained invisible to her.

  It had taken them far too long to realize that the children were missing. When they had finally gone to check on them, Mishi’s first thought was that they had been abducted by sanzoku, but Mitsu had quickly established that they had left on their own, since he found no signs of anyone else in the area. Mishi supposed that made sense anyway, as the sanzoku surely would have tried to take Mishi and Mitsu as well, rather than only the children. They had no reason to suspect that the young girl was a Kisōshi, after all, whereas Mishi was well known as one, and an enemy of the Rōjū at that. Besides, they would likely have heard the commotion if there had been any sort of altercation nearby.

  No, it made sense that the children had simply run away, though she was sad to think that she hadn’t really gained their trust that morning. The problem was that they’d run farther into the mountains, and now she and Mitsu would have to do all that they could to try to reach them before they stumbled on a group of sanzoku, who would have no qualms about killing two small children simply to keep their location a secret.

  They were almost running, Mitsu in the lead, using his connection with the earth and wind to discover which direction the children had gone. Mishi was surprised that they’d kept to the creek bed, as the water was cold and there were times when it was quite deep, but she supposed that with a water kisō to aid their travels they would have been able to make decent time, and it was certainly an excellent tactic to avoid being followed.

  Unless it was Mitsu who followed you.

  Mishi was yet again impressed by his abilities. She had asked him once how his tracking skill worked, but he had only said, “The earth and wind speak to me, as I imagine fire speaks to you.”

  She didn’t think of fire as speaking to her, really. She thought it called to her and that she called back. Was that any different? Perhaps not, but she didn’t think that fire actually told her anything. Not information, anyway. Not the location of game, or the way a quarry had gone. Though she supposed she never asked it those kinds of questions.

  She was so focused on Mitsu’s movements, and so lost in her own contemplations, that she almost missed the sound of the arrow that split the bark on the tree behind her, as an archer missed the shot he’d taken at her head.

  Without thinking, she tackled Mitsu to the ground—half in the creek and half on the bank—and came up in a single motion, her katana gripped tightly in her right hand, taken from the pack on Mitsu’s back without conscious thought. At the same time, her left hand called forth the fire that always lingered near its surface, and she sent it soaring toward where she calculated the archer to be, not waiting for the scream that confirmed her aim before turning to seek out her next target.

  She was vaguely aware of Mitsu rolling to his feet and running into the trees to her right, the creek behind them both, as she ran to the left and brought her sword up, just in time to parry the blow of the katana held by the nearest sanzoku, a man who had apparently been waiting behind a tree for her approach.

  She didn’t wait for his next blow, or even try to engage him blade to blade, she simply called forth fire to the leaves at his feet and sent it shooting upward, searing his skin and causing him to drop his sword, as she ran him through the chest and moved on to the next ambusher.

  She heard a cry from her right and hoped that it was Mitsu’s opponent and not Mitsu himself who had issued the sound, but she had no time to check, as she saw a man ahead of her standing over two small prone forms that lay still on the ground. The man was facing her, rather than the children, and he stood between her and them. She hoped that they were still alive, since he seemed to be guarding them, and she was relieved to see that he wasn’t preparing to injure them. His sword was out and pointed toward her, so she launched a fan of flames in his direction, making sure it was aimed high enough that it didn’t risk scorching the children. The man ducked, then rolled toward her, closing half the distance between them, and Mishi obliged him by charging in his direction.

  Instinct and many cycles of practice with an archer for a sparring partner made her roll hard to the left, partway through the charge. She regained her feet in a fluid movement, rolled again to the right, then charged the rest of the way on a diagonal. The arrow shafts vibrating in the ground behind her were the only evidence that she wasn’t crazy. The archer remained out of sight.

  But the angle and depth of the arrows gave her some insight into where the archer might be, so she threw more flames into the nearby trees, hoping that she and Mitsu would have time to quench any fires she might be igniting in the forest during this fight. It was something she would have to worry about later. Now she had drawn level with the man who guarded Mizu and Tsuchi and he claimed her full attention. She had to hope that she had either eliminated the archer, or that he would be too concerned about hitting his ally to take any more shots at her now.

  This swordsman was more prepared than the last had been, or perhaps was simply a better fighter, but he dropped away from her as soon as he saw her raise her hand in the motion she used to call forth fire. She felt flames lick at her own feet as the man tried to use the same tactic on her that she’d just used against his ally.

  The difference, of course, was that fire wouldn’t harm her. Tatsu said that was true of all the most powerful Kisōshi, that the element they were tied to was also one that they were immune to. She didn’t understand why it wasn’t true for all Kisōshi…shouldn’t the element that aids you refuse to hurt you? It was true for Taka and water, and it was true for her and fire. As a child, she had simply thought it was the way of things, but after she began training with Kuma-sensei, she had learned that many Kisōshi were still susceptible to their own element.

  She let the fire her opponent had thrown at her grow in the leaves beneath her, and she smiled as she caused the flames to grow, then willed them toward the man who had called them into existence.

  His eyes widened so much that she saw as much white as she did iris, and his eyebrows reached for his hairline. She pushed the flames at him in a final single burst, then charged right behind them, unafraid of the heat that flowed around her even as she came in with a high strike that her opponent barely managed to block.

  In three more moves he lay at her feet with a gut wound that was likely to keep him down permanently. Gut wounds were vicious, and Taka wasn’t here to heal the man, so she ran him through the heart.

  As she pulled her sword out of the corpse, Mitsu came running through the trees and stopped beside her.

  “I only sensed five, plus the children. I think we’re safe.”

  She nodded, suddenly self-conscious about how she had killed the man at her feet even after he was already down. She knew it wa
s the humane thing to do, but she still thought it felt wrong to take a man’s life so callously.

  Then she shook herself. She was a monster, and it was only appropriate that Mitsu understand just how much of a monster she was. She didn’t need to be self-conscious about it, she just needed to protect Mitsu and the children. It was that simple.

  She moved toward the stream to wash the blood from her katana while Mitsu checked on the children.

  Mitsu might understand the kind of monster that Mishi was, but she didn’t think a five-cycle-old girl and boy would. She focused on rinsing the blood from her blade and did her best not to make eye contact with any of her companions.

  “I want to learn how to do that,” Mizu’s voice chimed from behind her.

  Mishi turned, wondering what the girl was talking about.

  “Can you teach me to fight like that?”

  7th Day, 3rd Moon, Cycle 1 of the New Council

  TAKA TOOK A deep breath and found that the air smelled mildly of blood and sweat, but it wasn’t overwhelming and didn’t make her want to gag. She smiled, taking in the inside of the healing tent and its occupants, and couldn’t help but feel rather proud. There were very few patients left, and the handful of men who needed longer periods of rest to recover were mostly helping to treat those who were still unable to get up from their palettes.