“Oh? What would you use to hunt a fox?” she asked.
“Why would I hunt a fox?” Mitsu looked indignant. “They barely have any meat on them, they’re clever and useful creatures, and they keep vermin populations low. There’s no point in hunting a fox.”
“You wouldn’t want to hunt one just to say that you had?”
Mitsu looked as perplexed as if she’d just suggested that they dance in the treetops naked.
“Why would I?”
Mishi thought about that for a long moment. She’d never hunted much. When she needed to survive in the wild, she knew of a handful of herbs and berries that were safe to eat, and she thought she might be able to set up a snare for a rabbit now that she’d watched Mitsu and Taka do it enough times. But she was trained to kill people, not animals, and she didn’t know if it would be possible to take down a deer with a katana. She didn’t think she would enjoy killing an animal that had never done anything to harm her if it wouldn’t provide much food, though she’d had no qualms about killing the chickens they’d eaten at Kuma-sensei’s school, and she didn’t think snaring rabbits would bother her. But she could understand why Mitsu wouldn’t want to kill a fox. She wondered why some men seemed to take pride in killing animals that they considered dangerous.
“Do you think it would be interesting to hunt an animal that could hurt a human?”
“A fox can hurt a human just fine,” Mitsu replied.
“What about a wolf, or a bear? One of the large cats?”
Mitsu shook his head.
“All of those animals help keep deer and other animal populations lower, which in turn protects the trees and the rivers. I wouldn’t want to reduce their numbers. They struggle to survive well enough as it is.”
“Why do some men hunt them, then?” Mishi didn’t think that Mitsu would have a new answer that she did not possess, but she wondered what he thought of the matter. She liked the idea of knowing how he thought. He had an interesting mind, similar to hers in some ways, but decidedly different in others.
“I think they fear things. Perhaps the animals they hunt, or perhaps what others will think of them if they don’t hunt them. Either way, I think their actions are driven by fear.”
Mishi considered that, and decided it rang true. Men did seem to be motivated by fear all too often. After all, wasn’t that the reason why the Rōjū Council had been formed to begin with? Fear that something like the Yūwaku would form again, followed by fear that women with power would rise up against the establishment that had suppressed them over centuries. Mishi wondered if fear had ultimately driven the leader of the Yūwaku, all those centuries ago. Had she, too, been led by fear to commit the atrocities that she was now famous for?
“What are you afraid of, Mitsu-san?” she asked, after a long pause.
Mitsu stared at the fire silently for a long time.
“I’m afraid that the person I love won’t love me in return,” he said quietly, barely loud enough for Mishi to hear.
Mishi swallowed, wondering what he meant by that. She didn’t know what she was supposed to think about that kind of statement. Did he mean her? Did he mean someone else? He could just as easily be referring to his sister, couldn’t he? Or was he just speaking in generalities, and didn’t mean one person at all? And what did he mean when he said love? What kind of love? Romance? Family? Friendship?
She was bewildered for a long moment, but eventually she decided that she liked his reply. It was honest, and she thought it was a good answer, no matter who he was talking about. If it was her, she worried that he was right. She wasn’t sure if she was capable of love, and she certainly didn’t think she deserved it. If it was Taka he was referring to, she thought he was probably safe. Taka had grown very fond of Mitsu in the short period of time they’d known each other, and Mishi thought that her friend was well on her way to considering the man an older brother regardless of what they discovered about their own history. But the thought of Mitsu loving her troubled her, and she didn’t know what to say in reply, in case that was what he meant.
“What do you fear?” he asked.
Mishi considered that for a long time, even though the answer came to her immediately. She wondered if anything else scared her more than what first came to mind. Certainly, the remaining sanzoku were frightening, their large band of trained Kisōshi bent on destroying the lives of those who had never harmed them. And whatever was behind that band of sanzoku frightened her even more. While the sanzoku were just men, and might simply be following orders, something was leading them. Something was causing them to attack innocents, and ransack villages, and she thought it unlikely that they all uniformly agreed on how to go about it without any kind of leadership. Their attacks were too well organized, too well staged for maximum effect on the people who would stumble across the wreckage. Someone was organizing all of that, and that meant that someone believed very strongly in a cause that wished to wipe her, and everyone like her, from existence. That frightened her too, but it was a vague fear, and one that she couldn’t control, so it made little difference to her on a day to day basis. When she focused on it, it frightened her, but it was a distant fear.
No, the answer that came to mind instantly was truly the thing she feared most. She almost hated to say it aloud, but she had already resigned herself to the fact that she wasn’t worthy of Mitsu’s love, so she went ahead and said it anyway.
“I’m afraid of killing the people closest to me,” she said, in a voice just above a whisper. She knew that she could have phrased it differently. She could have said hurting, or harming, but she worried that then he would take her statement as a figurative fear. That he would think she feared pushing people away, or causing them emotional pain. She didn’t fear those things, not really, but she thought she would always have nightmares about killing the people she loved.
“You would never hurt someone you loved,” Mitsu said, with a confidence Mishi did not share at all.
“You can’t know that,” Mishi protested. “You don’t understand what I’m like. You don’t know me. Not really.”
Mitsu shook his head.
“I may not have known you as long as Taka-san, who, for the record, doesn’t think you’d ever hurt the people you love either, but I’ve seen so much of you in the past few moons. I know you wouldn’t hurt anyone who hadn’t done anything to hurt you.”
“You don’t know that.” Mishi felt like she was just repeating herself over and over again. “You’ve never seen me in a rage. You’ve never seen what I can do when I’m truly angry. And besides, what did the men I’ve killed ever do to deserve death? They were only ever following orders.”
“Only following orders? Mishi-san, they were trying to kill you! Orders or not, if you hadn’t killed them, they would have killed you. You didn’t start this war. You didn’t ask them to attack you.”
“Didn’t I? I infiltrated their city, stole their scroll. I knew I would have to fight to defend myself. Why didn’t I use the sleeping draught that Tenshi-san concocted on all the men I battled in Rōjū City during my escape? Why didn’t I keep my sword treated with it at all times? I could have just nicked the skin, and they would have collapsed without a fight.”
“Could she have made enough for all those men? Would it have still been on your blade by the time you escaped? And did you even have your own blade with you, at that point? I thought you said that you were pretending to be a young Kisōshi’s maid. Did you have your katana with you?”
Mishi sat in silence and fumed for a moment. It wasn’t as though Mitsu was wrong about those points. In fact, she hadn’t had her own sword with her. It had been vital that she not be caught with anything resembling a weapon for the earlier part of their plan to work, but that didn’t make Mishi feel any better about the men that she’d killed. Nor did it make her forget the night that Sachi had died. It was that, above all, that haunted her.
“You don’t understand, Mitsu-san. I didn’t kill only men who tried to ki
ll me. The night that Sachi was poisoned, I…” she paused, unsure if she could actually tell Mitsu what she had done. Mitsu just looked at her expectantly, and she found she could only continue if she stared into the fire. “I hunted them down, Mitsu-san. After they’d poisoned Sachi-san, once I knew she was dying, I…I tracked them down and killed them. I had the sleeping draught on my blade. I didn’t have to do permanent damage to them. A scratch alone would have brought them down, but…I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing her, and I couldn’t bear the thought of losing anyone else to those kami-forsaken hishi. They would have just come back to fight us again, and I couldn’t stand the thought feeling that pain again. But it didn’t matter, did it? They still took Kuma-sensei from me. I’ll never see him again, no matter how many hishi I kill. And I’ll never see Sachi-san again, never hear her laugh. And now I can’t even bear to be around Ami-san or Katagi-san.” Mishi was crying now, tears pouring silently down her face while she spoke, her voice unbroken. “I can’t bear to be around either of them, Mitsu-san, because they were both there that night, and they were both there when Kuma-sensei died, and they both knew him, and they knew about his life, and seeing them just reminds me of all the things I’ll never share with Kuma-sensei or Sachi-san again. Do you have any idea what that’s like? To push away all your friends because you can’t overcome the loss of someone you loved? To turn away the first person who loved you because you know you don’t deserve him and, more importantly, because you can never give him what he needs, since you can barely stand to be in the same room with him?”
Mishi paused, startled, as she had never meant to bring up Katagi-san and his feelings for her, or hers for him, but she realized it didn’t matter, since Mitsu was never going to love her anyway, not after all of this, not after he knew the truth. So she just kept talking, for the first time since Kuma-sensei had died, she just said everything that she felt and let the tears and words pour out, like blood from a wound.
“The nightmares that I have every night? The ones that I wake up screaming from? Do you know what those are? Taka-san is convinced that I wake up reliving the battle at Rōjū City, or maybe the night that Sachi-san died. She’s half right. I relive those moments, those terrible moments, but ultimately, by the end of the dream, I’m forced to watch Sachi-san die, over and over again, or some nights it’s Kuma-sensei, even though I never saw him die to begin with…. But the part that never changes, the part that stays the same every night, is that in the dream…I’m the one holding the sword.”
Mishi took a deep breath, shuddering as she let it out.
“So don’t tell me that I would never hurt the people I love, Mitsu-san,” she said defiantly, through the sobs that now wracked her body. “I have killed them. Two of the people I loved most in the world…and I kill them, over and over again, every night.”
She finally stopped, then. That was the worst of it. The part she was sure that no one could understand or forgive, the part that she was sure marked her as a monster, deep within. After all, you could pretend to be good all you wanted, but if your mind made you evil in your sleep, you had to know the truth, didn’t you?
Mitsu was silent for a long time, and Mishi prepared herself. She expected the rejection to hurt. After all, try as she might, she had still come to care for Mitsu quite a bit more than she had planned to. So she tried to take some deep breaths to steel herself against what was coming. She assumed it would be bad, though she didn’t know if it would take the form of anger, or merely disappointment. She took another shuddering breath, and waited.
When Mitsu finally spoke, his voice was quiet, but he sounded as though he, too, had been crying. That thought made her cringe, but she found herself unable to turn and look at him. She didn’t want to see the rejection in his eyes any sooner than she had to. Instead, she listened to his voice and hoped that, whatever he had to say, he would say it quickly. She didn’t want to draw this out.
“Yanagi-sensei used to ask me about my dreams,” Mitsu said, and Mishi wondered for a moment if he’d even listened to her before he made his reply, but she kept her silence. She deserved whatever it was he chose to tell her. “I would wake up screaming in the night, long into my childhood,” he continued. “And Yanagi-sensei would ask me every morning what I’d dreamt of, but for the longest time I refused to tell him.”
Mitsu paused for a long moment, taking one of the sticks that sat beside the fire and using it to adjust some of the logs. It was a completely banal movement, but one that Mishi found oddly comforting in its normalcy.
“But every night I would wake screaming, and every morning Yanagi-sensei would ask me what I had dreamt. Eventually, after a few moons of this, I finally told him the truth, or at least part of it. I told him that every night I watched my parents burn in the fire, heard my sister’s screams from within the house, and sat in silence, hiding inside the log where my mother had hidden me.”
Mishi cringed at the thought of a small boy reliving such a terrible memory, night after night. She wanted to reach out and take Mitsu’s hand, but she didn’t want to risk him rejecting her touch, so she simply sat beside him and watched the fire in front of her.
“But that was only part of the truth. The dream, as I told it to Yanagi-sensei, would have been an accurate account of what had happened. I sat hidden in my log, and listened to my family burn in a fire that was claimed to be an accident, although some believed it had been set by hishi. But the dream was much worse than that. In the dream, all those details were the same as my memory, all but one. In the dream, I was the one who had set the fire.”
Mishi gasped briefly, and now understood why Mitsu was telling her this story.
“It took me a long time, cycles and cycles, to finally tell Yanagi the truth of those dreams. And in those intervening cycles, the dreams stayed the same. I would dream them over and over again, and every time, I was the one who had started the fire. It got so bad that for a period of time I wondered if I really had been the one who had set it. After all, no one else had been around to confirm or deny my story. I could have set it. What if I had set it and had simply forgotten about it? What if I had set it and had somehow remembered it differently when I was awake, because I couldn’t take the horror of being the reason my family was dead? I had almost believed that, for a cycle or more, when Yanagi finally pried enough to get me to admit what was happening in the dreams. And then, he told me something about dreams that helped me to accept that it wasn’t me who had killed my family, no matter how responsible I might have felt, for whatever reasons. He said that dreams, good dreams, can represent our greatest hopes, and nightmares, especially the terrors that haunt us after something horrible has happened to us, represent our greatest fears. You already answered my question honestly. I know that. Your greatest fear is that you’ll hurt the people you love. What better way to present that fear, than with you killing the people so dear to you that you’ve already lost? My mind did it to me after my parents were killed, when I thought that Taka was dead, and I used to blame myself for their deaths all the time. Even when I knew I hadn’t killed them, I thought I was somehow guilty for not having died with them, or for not being able to prevent their deaths.”
“But you were a five-cycle-old boy, you couldn’t have—”
“That’s right, I was a five-cycle-old boy, and there was nothing I could have done to stop my parents from dying in that fire, or to have prevented it from being set. I couldn’t even have resisted my mother, when she took me to that log and hid me there. All I could have done was gotten out when I’d been told not to, and possibly died with my parents.”
“They wouldn’t have wanted that, they would never have wanted that.”
“Of course not. No one wants their children to die with them, not anyone sane, at any rate. But that doesn’t mean my mind always understood that, or that my sleeping mind would let me escape the thought that I had somehow done the wrong thing.”
Mitsu took a deep breath, and Mishi wo
ndered what he would say next.
“For a very long time, I thought I was a monster. I thought I was an evil child, who had managed to kill his own parents. I didn’t think I was worthy of anyone’s love or friendship, and it was only with the help of Yanagi-sensei and Kiko-san that I started to understand that I was worthy of love, and hadn’t done anything wrong.”
He turned to look at her, and Mishi couldn’t help but turn to meet his eyes this time.
“Mishi-san,” he said, reaching forward and grabbing her hand. “I can’t imagine what you’ve gone through. I’ve never had to fight the way that you have, or had to kill just to stay alive for as long as you have. I can’t understand all that you’re going through, but I know what it’s like to believe that you’re a monster, and to think that you’re responsible for hurting the people you cared about most in the world. I can’t fix any of this for you, and I don’t think you need me to, but…I care about you, and I believe that you deserve that, and while you may think you’re a monster still, I know that you aren’t. And if you’ll let me believe in you while you try to believe in yourself, I’d be happy to do it. I would be honored to be a part of your life. I would be honored if you would let me love you, even if you can’t love me just yet…even if you never can.”
Mishi couldn’t break her eyes away from Mitsu’s green ones, and she didn’t know how to react to all that he’d just shared with her. Words failed her. She still couldn’t believe that she wasn’t a monster, despite all that Mitsu had just told her. Mitsu’s story had moved her, truly, but he had been a boy who had just seen his family killed before his eyes, while she was a fully trained Kisōshi. She’d been taught to kill, and she’d used that knowledge to harm others, sometimes in self defense, but once in a rage spurred on by revenge. She knew that she wasn’t as innocent as Mitsu had been.
But he’d heard her story. He knew the whole truth now, and he insisted that he still wanted to love her. She didn’t know how she felt about that. She was sure she ought to try to convince him that it was a terrible idea. He should know it himself, but she would remind him of it if she had to. Still…he knew the truth, and he wasn’t turning away from her. In fact, if anything, those emerald pools that he called eyes were beckoning her closer, and the memory of the other night surged forward. She felt a rush of blood through her body as she remembered the kisses they’d shared.
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