She knew she shouldn’t let Mitsu love her, but a part of her was smart enough to understand that she had little choice in the matter. If he loved her, he loved her, she couldn’t control the way he felt. But did she love him? She didn’t know. She’d wondered the same thing about Katagi, once. He’d offered his love to her, and she’d wanted to accept it, but she’d never been sure how she felt about him. She’d often worried that she’d wanted his affection simply because no one had ever shown her that kind of attention before. She’d never considered him as an object of her affection until after he’d told her that he cared about her. Then, whatever feelings she might have had for him had been buried under the grief she felt for the loss of Kuma-sensei and Sachi-san, the fear that she might hurt Katagi or Ami, and a mix of memories that she would just as soon have forgotten.
Mitsu, on the other hand…she’d been attracted to Mitsu from the moment she’d met him. Something in the way he moved had drawn her to him, in a way that she’d never felt drawn to Katagi. And the time they’d spent together since then had only made her feel more connected to him.
She’d always felt as though Katagi didn’t really know her, and had only fallen in love with an idea of her, rather than the person she truly was. She was still convinced that she didn’t deserve Mitsu’s affection, but she couldn’t deny that he understood who she was. He had just made that much perfectly clear.
Did she love him? She didn’t know. She wasn’t sure she wanted to love anyone again, after losing two of the people she cared about most. It was devastating enough to think that something might happen to Taka, or Ami, or Katagi, or even Tenshi. She didn’t think she wanted to add to the list of people whose loss could hurt her so badly.
But she enjoyed his company, and his kisses thrilled her. She wondered if that could be enough for him. She didn’t think that was how love worked, but what did she know?
“I….” She wanted to say all of the things that she’d just considered in that long silence. She wanted to be honest with Mitsu about how she felt, and what she feared. But when it came time to put it all into words, she found she didn’t know how to say any of it. “I can’t,” she muttered, her face flushing with embarrassment at how poorly she had translated her feelings into words. She looked away, unable to face her own cowardice.
Mitsu said nothing for a long moment, but he eventually let go of her hand and stood up.
“I understand,” he said, as he moved to deal with the rabbits.
Mishi thought he probably did, despite the fact that she’d completely failed to explain anything, and she wondered what she’d done to deserve his understanding.
~~~
Mishi’s eyes widened, and her jaw dropped, as she took in the sight below her. She and Mitsu sat high in a tree, staring down at a crimson and black serpent that slithered its way through the valley below, silencing the usual forest sounds and replacing them with the footsteps and barked orders of over a hundred sanzoku, with half that many horses, marching along the trail to the southwest. The sky was clear and sunny, but that did nothing to stop the chill that coursed along her spine as she thought of what a force like that could do to a small village, or even a much larger town.
They descended from their vantage point only after asking Riyōshi to follow the sanzoku horde and report back to them. They would attempt to follow in parallel, but couldn’t risk being seen. They wouldn’t be able to overcome the number of archers and armed soldiers that the sanzoku would send after them in the open forest.
As they ran from there, Mishi wondered where the additional sanzoku had come from. She hadn’t thought the camp they’d nearly destroyed a few days prior had held nearly that many men. Were there more bands of sanzoku still hiding in these mountains? Was that why they were so difficult to pin down? Had they split into multiple bands, only coming together in order to wreak havoc on their next target? The thought made her ill. Now she doubted that the New Council would be able to send a force large enough to enact the ambush they had originally planned, but they still had to try.
She was brought suddenly out of her musings, back to the present—where she was following on Mitsu’s heels while they flew through the woods as fast as their feet would move them—when she nearly ran headlong into Mitsu’s back as he came to a very abrupt stop.
Perhaps he had been as distracted as she by the overwhelming sight of so many sanzoku, or perhaps he had been so focused on using his kisō to be sure that none of the sanzoku followed them, that he hadn’t been focusing on what lay ahead.
Which was a band of twelve sanzoku, headed straight for them.
Mishi tackled Mitsu, noting the archer who already had an arrow nocked and ready, and wondering idly how many arrows she’d kept out of Mitsu’s hide since they had met. She was rolling away from him even before they’d hit the ground, and she came up running, charging the closest sanzoku with a fierce battle cry intended to draw the enemy’s attention to her.
It worked, perhaps too well, as she found herself dodging another arrow and more than one thrown wakizashi—surprising, as the short swords weren’t balanced for throwing, but she supposed the sanzoku were rather desperate to disable her. She dodged them all, her body falling into the rhythm of the fight as easily as it always did, and she was finally glad that she had begun traveling with her katana at her side once more. She had decided it wasn’t sensible to add the extra step of retrieving from Mitsu’s pack every time they were attacked, especially now that she had no need to protect Mizu and Tsuchi.
She had her katana out and slashing through the closest archer before he could switch from his bow to some close-range weapon that might have served him in defending against her. She moved to the next man, and the next, dodging arrows as she went, suddenly grateful that these men were mounted and that she and Mitsu were not, as she found plenty of cover from her next target between the trees and the fallen men’s horses. Between her attacks and Mitsu’s, the group of twelve mounted men seemed disordered and confused, and she wondered if they were truly meant to be scouts or if they had been sent out for some other purpose. There seemed to be no organization to their attacks, and they had seemed genuinely surprised to encounter two opponents in the woods, though they’d let fly their arrows readily enough once they’d spotted them.
Soon Mitsu was by her side, and they had taken down six of the twelve men. She was shocked to find the remaining six splitting up. Three abandoned their fellows and made off in the direction of the hundred men that she and Mitsu had spotted earlier. She expected the other three to engage her and Mitsu, but they turned in the direction they had been traveling and kept riding that way. Mishi and Mitsu exchanged a brief glance, and then turned to follow them as best they could.
It wasn’t long, however, before they saw where the men were headed. Then they promptly turned and ran, hoping that no scouts followed them.
Over the ridge that they had been following when they had first encountered the small group of sanzoku lay a valley filled with yet another band of a hundred or more.
~~~
Exhaustion swept over Mishi as she and Mitsu collapsed into a tiny clearing long after sunset. They hadn’t stopped running since they’d come across the second mass of sanzoku.
Luckily, Riyōshi was content to keep track of the movements of at least one of the bands, both if he could, and report back to them. He had clear warnings to avoid detection, lest a scout try to follow him back to their location. Of course, no scout would be able to keep up with his unencumbered air speed, but at this point they didn’t even want to point anyone in the right direction.
Mishi could barely move her legs and arms after so much running and the fight with the twelve sanzoku besides.
“I’ll get us some rabbits,” Mitsu said, after lying still to catch his breath for a moment. “We’ll need to eat.”
Mishi’s jaw sank to her chest, or would have, if she had been able to spare the movement from the intense breathing she was still engaged in.
&
nbsp; “You have the energy to hunt now?”
“Catching rabbits takes little enough energy, and if we don’t eat, we’ll be good for nothing at all tomorrow. Rest up. Start us a fire, if you’ve the kisō to spare.”
She lay still for another handful of heartbeats after Mitsu had disappeared into the gathering dark, and then she stood to gather some wood for the fire.
Of course, she could use her kisō to power a fire without wood, but it would take a stupid amount of energy to maintain it. If she had fuel for the fire, she could simply light it and then control its temperature with a minimal use of her kisō. It seemed only reasonable to manage her kisō as sparingly as possible, considering what they might be up against in the coming days, so she set about collecting deadfall from the woods that surrounded them. She looked for the drier bits of wood and pine needles, even though it technically didn’t matter; she could call fire to even the wettest wood.
By the time Mitsu returned, she had a cozy cooking fire burning and had even set up a spit, which rested between two sets of crossed branches, tied with a thin creeping vine she’d found on a nearby tree, so that they could suspend the rabbits over the fire with ease. Considering how stiff her limbs were and how taxing she found even small movements, she considered this a great accomplishment.
Mitsu made no comment on her accomplishments, but simply produced a brace of already skinned and cleaned rabbits, which he then proceeded to skewer with her spit and set above the fire.
Once their dinner was cooking, he produced a full water skin. Mishi was once more impressed by his comfort in the wilderness.
“You seem more at home here, days away from the nearest village or road, than anywhere else,” she noted aloud. She wasn’t sure why she bothered to say it, but the notion intrigued her. Mitsu seemed as comfortable in the widerness as she would have been in her own room at Kuma-sensei’s school, before it had burned to the ground.
Mitsu smiled.
“The wilderness is my home, much as it is Taka’s now, but I’ve been living in the wilds since the age of five, and Taka only began to live in the wilderness at the age of twelve. And of course, I’m older than she is, so I had a head start anyway.”
Mishi contemplated that.
“How old are you anyway?” she asked, her curiosity piqued.
“Twenty-one cycles,” Mitsu replied, as he took a moment to turn the rabbits on the skewer.
That made him five cycles older than she was. For just a moment, the thought made her feel young, as though Mitsu had experienced more of life than she had. And perhaps he had, but the feeling didn’t last long, as she remembered all of the things she had experienced, especially during the past few moons. She shook her head, trying to dislodge the memories that came pouring back into her mind’s eye. She didn’t want to remember any of those things, not the past few tendays, not the moons before that. She just wanted all of the death to go away.
She tried to take deep calming breaths, but the air was tinged with the smell of cooking rabbits, the smell of fire and flesh only helping to call forth memories of screams and shouts, the sounds of the dying and those still fighting for life.
She felt Mitsu’s presence beside her suddenly, though she hadn’t heard him leave the opposite side of the fire. She felt his hand rest gently on her shoulder. She was reassured that she recognized that it was him, and aware that she was in front of a fire and not in the battle that played out before her eyes.
“Mishi-san, what can I do?” he asked.
She tried to take another deep breath, and this time she was able to recall that it was rabbits cooking, and not human flesh burning, close by.
“Keep talking to me,” she whispered.
“Very well. What shall I say?” Mitsu asked.
“Tell me about the woods around us. Tell me what your kisō enables you to sense that I can’t sense.”
“Well, I’m not entirely sure what you can sense, but I can describe what I sense well enough, I suppose.”
She felt his hand begin to leave her shoulder, and she felt her muscles tense in response. It wasn’t a conscious movement, just the reaction of her body.
“Would you like me to keep my hand there?” Mitsu asked quietly.
Mishi nodded. Mitsu returned his hand to where it had rested on her shoulder and Mishi felt her muscles relax. How odd, she thought. I once almost killed Mitsu when he put his hands on me in this state, and now my body insists that he maintain the touch. She almost wanted to laugh at how paradoxically her body and mind sometimes behaved, but the images that still flowed before her eyes drove any humor from her mind.
“I can sense the animals,” Mitsu began, and Mishi felt herself relax further, as some part of her that wasn’t experiencing images and smells from a hellish memory did its best to pay attention to Mitsu and his voice. “I can generally tell where they are, and where they’ve been. I’m not sure why I can sense life so well, aside from the idea that some amount of earth is in every living thing. That’s certainly what Taka believes. In addition, the earth itself tells me things. There are the things I can track with my eyes, shapes and trails left behind in the ground after someone has passed by, but there are also things that the soil tells me when I call to it. And, of course, the wind brings me scents and sounds. Does fire ever tell you anything?”
Mishi was fascinated by what she heard, and she was so busy trying to discern what Mitsu meant by fire “telling her things” that she barely noticed that the nightmarish memories that she had been experiencing moments ago were fading.
“I don’t know what you mean, exactly. What are you asking? I call to the fire, and sometimes it calls to me, but I don’t know that it ever tells me anything.”
Mitsu’s voice continued right next to her, his hand still firmly planted on her shoulder.
“When the earth tells me things, it…it’s not like a voice conveying information. It’s not even like the animals that send along their emotions or ideas, which I can then discern a message from. It’s more like…it’s like what someone’s skin can tell you if you touch them.”
Mishi considered that for a moment, and thought that perhaps she understood what he meant.
“You mean the way an opponent's body might tell you what they plan to do next by the way that it moves?”
“Something like that. Or…or the way that a lover’s skin might tell you that they’re enjoying your touch.”
That suggestion made the blood race to Mishi’s face, and she wondered if Mitsu had said that just to get a reaction from her. But even as her embarrassment faded, as she convinced herself that Mitsu was simply talking in general terms, trying to explain this phenomenon to her, her thoughts strayed back to the way that her skin had felt the last time that Mitsu had kissed her.
She remembered, unbidden, the way that her skin had reacted to his. The way that having his lips pressed to hers had sent an electric jolt through her body. The way that his hands on her back had felt, as his arms embraced her.
She cleared her throat and tried to focus on the present, but she thought she had a much better idea of what Mitsu was talking about when he talked about a lover’s skin reacting to something.
“I think I understand you,” she said, trying to swallow the feeling of embarrassment that tried to rise up inside her. She had nothing to be embarrassed about. Mitsu had brought up the subject of lovers as an example, and it was perfectly natural for her mind to conjure images of that to help her understand what he was speaking of.
“Mishi-san?” Mitsu’s voice was much quieter than it had been earlier, and she couldn’t help but notice that his hand had strayed from her shoulder to her exposed collarbone. She felt fire race along her skin where his fingertips touched her, and she worried briefly that she had actually allowed fire to course over her. That worry was erased when Mitsu’s hand remained where it was, then began to trace the line of her shoulder.
Her breath caught, momentarily, when she realized that she was no longer seeing images fro
m her past. Her eyes opened, and she was surprised to find that Mitsu’s eyes were the first things that she saw. She hadn’t realized that she’d tilted her head to meet his gaze. His green eyes flared with an emotion that her mind refused to identify, and she considered closing her eyes against the sight of it.
“Mishi-san?” he asked again, but this time his hand stayed in place, and she wondered if she’d been imagining his hand wandering earlier. She wasn’t sure what he was asking her.
“Yes?” she asked, wondering if perhaps all he wanted was a demonstration that she could still hear him, a sign that she wasn’t lost in the visions again. She refocused her eyes on his face, and then raised them to meet his gaze once more, just to prove that she was still present.
Mitsu held her eyes with his for a moment, and tilted his head to one side as though asking a question that she didn’t understand. When she didn’t make any sort of reply, a small bit of the light seemed to leave his eyes.
“Are you all right?” he asked at length.
Mishi nodded, though she didn’t say anything. She was well enough. Confused, still slightly embarrassed about the misunderstanding about lovers and skin, but well enough.
Mitsu removed his hand from her shoulder, shifting his seat so that he wasn’t pressed quite so close to her. Mishi hadn’t noticed just how close he was, until his absence left traces of cold all along her side, and she instantly wished she had answered differently. Whatever answer would bring him back to her was the one she wished she had given.
She shivered slightly, the cool air feeling frigid after having had Mitsu’s warmth pressed against her.
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