Scars and Shadows

Karahaya took an apology out of him, a scar from his jaw to his hairline, and a piece of his scabbard for the governor's floor. She was not touched once.

Doji Setsuna spent the day of the duel in the governor's tower and did not see a moment of it. Everything reached her secondhand — in a letter, in a play-by-play shouted across a drawing room, and finally in the victor's own report, delivered in front of her.

She was still living up there, with Miya Misato and under Governor Miya Tetsuya's roof, and Ryu and So had been seen carrying boxes of her clothes up the stairs. The court had drawn the cheap conclusion — that the Crane magistrate was the governor's private guest in the other sense — and she had not troubled to correct it. She had gone up there to be inside one wall with the person she is sworn to keep alive.

Shiba Midori was still badly ill. The poisoning had been deliberate, and it had left her dazed and unable to keep anything down. The physicians the castle produced disagreed with each other and none of them cleared it; a shugenja ran Pathway to Inner Peace over her and got her stable, and no further. The ring wounds she has been carrying for weeks made everything slower. She dictated a message to Bayushi Monban through Kitsuko Ayoko, to be handed over only after the duel was decided: if he died in it, she would haunt him for the rest of eternity.

Daidoji Shin set up on the Unicorn docks across the water with a gaijin spyglass. Matsu Tsuki and Ikoma Ukyo were on the wrong bank and said so at length. Ikoma Tadayoshi found a vantage inside the castle, nobody being permitted off the island.

Karahaya came in full ashigaru armour and walked Bayushi Monban out along a dock that put the whole town in view of it. She offered him one last chance to apologise for what he had said about her lord and her men. He lifted his mask, spat on the boards in front of her, and did not bow. She told him she meant to leave him alive with his shame, and that she would kill him if restoring her lord's honour turned out to cost that.

He opened his robes on a tamami gazoku — foldable armour — and drew.

He moved first and his opening cut landed. Then he went for the follow-up and found that the technique he wanted needed a snaring weapon and that a sheath is not one. That was the whole of his advantage, and it went there.

She blocked, countered out of earth, and pushed him past his limit. Compromised, he was open to a finishing blow and she took it at once. He got the scabbard up in a shattering parry; it broke in half and the cut went in anyway, opening him from the side of the jaw across the eye and into the hairline.

He unmasked. How dare you disfigure a member of a great Clan. He called her worthless and lucky and spat blood at her, on a dock, in front of the town and the children who had run down to watch. She shifted her stance a little to invite him in, feinted him, and hit him again. He did not touch her once for the length of it.

He conceded — it seems you have won this contest. She lowered the blade and named her terms: apologise to her and to her men, and withdraw what he had said about their lord. He agreed to both. She gave him a curt bow, wiped his blood off her sword, sheathed it, and said she was satisfied. Across the river Daidoji Shin called the whole thing as it happened to everyone in the drawing room, down to the concession.

Bayushi Monban walked to the Geisha House with his face open. The madam met him with alarm; he asked her for thread, a needle and a candle, sat down in front of a mirror, and sewed it shut himself. Then he asked for a replacement scabbard, charged to the Emerald Magistrate account. The Ifrit spoke up in his head while he worked — I could have burned her alive for you — and he turned it aside without arguing, back to the business of getting the thing home to its desert. It did not press. He told it to let him sleep, and left word that he would ride as soon as the two horses and the guide arranged through his Ide contact were ready.

Up in the tower, Doji Setsuna went on teaching. The night before had been rhetoric. Now she gave Miya Misato the two things she has in depth — how a government actually moves, and how to hurt someone with her hands and with whatever is lying on the table. Go for the eyes. Everything in a room is a weapon.

Karahaya made her report in the audience chamber with Doji Setsuna and Ikoma Tadayoshi standing in it. She had an apology out of the unmasked Scorpion; he had not landed a blow; he had shamed himself several times over; and she had left him a permanent reminder. She laid a piece of his broken scabbard down as a trophy. Governor Miya Tetsuya smiled broadly and said something warm about the honour of those who serve them. Daidoji Shin began composing a song. The ronin had already settled on the name.

The letter came up from Shiba Midori afterwards — the poisoning, the ejection, the duel and the loss, the state of the island. Kitsuko Ayoko had begun it and Shiba Midori had taken over and finished it herself, and Doji Setsuna read the seam: the hand changes, and so does the voice behind it, and each of them had chosen what to put on her side of the join. Reading it properly was the best hour of her week. Shiba Midori, for her part, noted from Kitsuko Ayoko's reply that Setsuna was being described as a private guest of the governor, and approved.

Then Doji Setsuna turned to Miya Misato and told her what to do about it. Tell your uncle that you intend to leave with us, and anyone Shiba Midori needs to travel safely — and at your earliest convenience, feel free to command us all to leave with you. The order would be the envoy's. The timing, the conditions and the baggage were Setsuna's.

Governor Miya Tetsuya briefed Ikoma Tadayoshi, Daidoji Shin and Karahaya on the shinobi. Central Island has four shores. The docks are already covered; guards would go on the north; Ikoma Tadayoshi and others would take the west and the east, with the rooftop archers able to answer either way. And there was a second thing: a large body of Lion samurai — Matsu, a whole team of them — was trying to cross to the Unicorn side. The governor had asked them not to land at the City Of The Rich Frog, and expected to have their exact position by midday tomorrow, at which point a meeting could be arranged.

Miya Misato asked to leave in the morning. The governor agreed, and attached Karahaya to her as yojimbo, along with whatever Shiba Midori needed to travel.

Late that night Doji Setsuna could not sleep. She was reading Shiba Midori's letter by the western window when she saw them — figures crossing the rooftops, cut clean against the dark red tiles by the moon. She called two guards over, pointed, and they ran. Then she went down to Miya Misato, who was half awake over documents with ink on her fingers, made her tea, and mentioned while she poured that the guards seemed to have spotted the evil-doers, and that she hoped they would catch them.

Ikoma Tadayoshi had the west shore, walking the beach with a lantern in air stance, and the full moon gave him the whole length of it. Shiba Midori was found sleepwalking in a corridor by a guard, slurring something about your brother and hoping he was alive. She woke, dressed properly, looked in on Kitsuko Ayoko — asleep over a half-written letter — and went down to join him, coming up on him quietly enough not to be noticed and then setting herself facing the castle while he faced the river, so that between them they had all of it.

Watching the castle is how she saw them: four men running the rooftops, shooting fire arrows and shouting. Those were Karahaya's ronin. Three shinobi came off the roof ahead of them and ran for the water.

Ikoma Tadayoshi stepped out from behind a tree and took the first with a rising cut the man never saw, and the leg came off below the knee. Jumped up, peasant-born scum. Shiba Midori went at another with her jitte, open-handed, and got a shuriken in the shoulder for it — thrown off-hand, which told her the man was ambidextrous — and the wound went deep enough to tear her water ring. She caught a spinning blade with a shattering parry at the last moment and the jitte broke doing it.

Then a shinobi put a noxious red smoke bomb at Ikoma Tadayoshi's feet. It went through armour as though there were none, and left them both dazed and exhausted. A second one came at him and missed; he went under it, and it struck a tree, bounced into the river, and boiled the water where it landed, sending green steam up off the surface.

Shiba Midori took stock — wounded in more rings than she could afford, dazed, exhausted, her weapon gone — steadied her breathing enough to move, and ran for the castle shouting for help. She passed Karahaya's ronin coming the other way at speed.

Ikoma Tadayoshi stayed on them to the waterline. Compromised and half blind in the smoke, he could not land anything, and spent what he had making the last one's flight worse. The archers dropped another off the roof with three arrows in him. It ended there: two shinobi dead or dying, one still going for the water under fire, and the ronin closing.

Setsuna

Her yojimbo is beaten, scarred, named, and gone. Bayushi Monban was defeated in public without landing a blow, apologised on the dock, withdrew what he had said about the governor, and rode out of the city. The governor's own ronin are calling him the unmasked Scorpion and Daidoji Shin is putting it to music. That is not a private humiliation she can manage — by the end of the week it will be a song, and the song will name the Emerald Magistrates.

Karahaya is inside the escort now. The woman who took her yojimbo apart is attached to Miya Misato as yojimbo for the road. She is plainly the most competent fighter anyone has seen this month and she gave Bayushi Monban two chances to walk away before she cut him, which is a fair record. She is also Governor Miya Tetsuya's officer, travelling with the governor's niece, alongside a magistrate the governor has already had reason to doubt. Setsuna should treat her as an asset and assume she reports.

The assessment from last week is confirmed on the record. Ikoma Tadayoshi was given a standing instruction to watch whether the magistrates' own methods endangered the envoy. Since then their yojimbo has insulted the governor, been ejected, drawn steel on the guard, lost a duel over it, and left the city. The governor's caution has been vindicated in front of witnesses, and every request Setsuna makes from here is made against that.

The Matsu are the thing to move on. A whole team of Matsu warriors is crossing to the Unicorn side, has been asked to keep clear of the city, and will be located by midday tomorrow — the morning the embassy rides west with an Imperial writ ordering the Lion to stand down. Last week she was warned the Lion escort would come with a price. Whose troops these are, and who ordered them across, is a question she should have answered before the envoy's column is anywhere near them.

She traded a rumour for a room and it is working. She is not correcting the talk about the governor because correcting it would cost more than letting it stand, and it has put her inside the tower with the envoy at the hour when people are being taken out of guarded rooms. It has also put her in the mouths of a court that includes a Unicorn delegation, in a city she entered to get her husband out of a Lion prison. That bill arrives later and she should know it is coming.

What she actually did this week was teach. Miya Misato can now argue, has some idea how a government moves, and knows to go for the eyes. She is sixteen, she carries the Emperor's writ, and she is riding to a war. Of everything on this island, that is the piece most likely to still matter in a year.

And she saw the roofs herself, from a window, and had guards on them inside a minute. Two shinobi are dead and one went into the water alive. If the ronin take that one, it is the first person in this whole affair anyone can question.