What Happened While She Was Ill

Her yojimbo stole her horse and rode west. Her colleague was called a liar and took an eye for it. She was on her back with a fever for a week and heard about all of it afterwards.

The war moved, the treaty was carried without her, and by the time she was well enough to stand, two of the four magistrates were gone and a Lion hero had lost an eye.

Doji Setsuna was ill for about a week. Nobody has a name for it. She was nauseous, feverish and mostly asleep, and Kitsuko Ayoko kept her in tea and got her through it.

Bayushi Monban left. He took Kogarashi out of the lines one night without asking, lost the Unicorn riders who went after him, and went up into the mountains. Shiba Midori brought the horse back the next day. Somewhere up there the Lady of Decay took exception to him — the record says he was punished, and the punishment was cleaning out a troll's cave like a peasant, at real cost to his standing. He came down the far side of the mountains and arrived at Khanbulak, the walled trade city at the western end of the Empire's road, with one sword pawned at a bath house, ill-fitting clothes bought off a stall, and no Emerald Magistrate's badge — lost somewhere in the sand outside the walls.

That left Kakita Kazumi as the only Emerald Magistrate in the Lion camp when the treaty had to be presented. He did it in the dead of night, to Lion commanders summoned out of their beds, holding a document rebuilt out of what people remembered of it with a scorched Imperial seal attached, no envoy, no witnesses, and a Crane face.

Akodo Kage called him a liar. Sensei to both Akodo Toturi and Akodo Akihito, in front of every Lion officer of consequence.

Kakita Kazumi answered it the Kakita way rather than the Doji way, and demanded satisfaction. And the man who took the challenge was not Akodo Kage — it was Akodo Akihito, freshly titled Renowned Warrior, who had wanted a rematch since the Topaz Championship and could not refuse one in that room.

It was not close. Kakita Kazumi knew every weakness Akodo Akihito has, held the initiative from the first exchange, and cut him twice across three already-wounded rings. Akodo Akihito lost his left eye, permanently. Shiba Midori has been treating him since.

Which is how the Lion came to hold Battlemaiden Castle, with the Unicorn army a day or two out and closing, the Lion facing encirclement on three sides and no appetite for that battle — and with every Lion in that camp resenting the Crane magistrate who humiliated their hero two days ago.

It is late summer. The invitations to Winter Court are going out.

Setsuna

She was not there for any of it, and that is the whole of the problem. The treaty she wrote was carried into a tent full of Lion commanders at midnight by the one magistrate in the party least equipped to be believed — a Crane duellist, alone, holding a document reassembled from memory around a burnt seal. Of course Akodo Kage called it a lie. She would have called it a lie.

And the answer to being called a liar was a duel, which is exactly what it should not have been. Kakita Kazumi was entitled and he was right. He also took the eye of the one Lion in the Empire who had already conceded that the Phoenix were owed, who is the Champion's nephew, and who was the party's natural advocate on the Lion side. The insult came from Akodo Kage and the price was paid by Akodo Akihito, which means the wound is still open at both ends: Kage is unanswered, and Akihito is maimed and diminished for something he did not say.

Her yojimbo is gone, on her horse, without her badge. Whatever else that is, it means the Scorpion currently has a magistrate's authority unaccounted for somewhere in the western desert, and the party has no idea where he is or what he has told anyone.

She is, at last, well. Everything she has to repair happened while she was asleep.