The Tent

She heard the struggle through the canvas and went in as she was — sleeping robes, no blade, nothing but the one thing a court woman is taught so that she can save her own skin, spent on someone else's.

A morning of law in Moto Gaheris's tent, and a night that ended with Doji Setsuna unconscious on the floor of another one and the Imperial Envoy dying.

Moto Gaheris served chicken so aggressively spiced it was plainly a test. The magistrates ate it without comment, which was the correct answer.

Then Doji Setsuna laid out the law of the betrothal, and it came out better than she had any right to expect. The contract sits in a grey area. Shinjo Altansarnai, as Unicorn Champion, may be able to nullify it unilaterally. The Lion case rests on a contested reading rather than a settled one. And the whole dispute turns on the difference between precedent that binds and precedent that merely persuades. Everything afterwards was built on that.

Moto Gaheris named who he thought had arranged this war. The Scorpion, which the party had already got to. And the Crane — because the recent Crane–Lion treaty happens to have cut the Owari Plains off from the reach of the Unicorn's allies, which is a convenient accident. Kakita Kazumi turned it aside with circumstances we cannot discuss. Doji Setsuna, sitting in Crane colours in a Unicorn tent, let him do it and said nothing in the Crane's defence. Her authority in that tent is Imperial, and she kept it Imperial.

Bayushi Monban — not Doji Setsuna — asked for the escort west to the border, and used the Emerald Magistrate's badge to make it a requirement rather than a favour. She supplied the legal ground; he made the demand.

Then she did the quiet thing. She asked Moto Gaheris's guards to carry a message to the Shinjo, without naming which one, and watched them try to pretend there was no such person in the camp. Half an hour later they came back having decided otherwise, which confirmed Shinjo Altansarnai was already there without obliging Moto Gaheris to admit it. The message gave her name, mentioned that her husband Shinjo Harunobu is a Lion prisoner — a credential in that camp — stated what the mission was for, and asked one question: who else was party to the dissolution of the betrothal? This was not a stranger writing to a stranger. Shinjo Altansarnai was a guest at Doji Setsuna's wedding. The outrider's answer came back as how interesting, which is a door left open.

In the evening Miya Misato asked the party whether any of them had unmarried relatives, hunting for a substitute bride. Doji Setsuna said she has a younger sister, Doji Emika — and that Doji Emika is already intended for a different marriage treaty.

That night the party took tents inside the joint Lion and Moto camp. Miya Misato and Ikoma Tadayoshi, her yojimbo, in one; Doji Setsuna in the next. In the small hours there was a struggle through the canvas.

There were three armed men in the envoy's tent. One had a knife at Miya Misato's throat and a hand inside her kimono. The other two were holding Ikoma Tadayoshi down rather than killing him. Nobody was meant to die. This was an extraction, handled quietly, with the exits kept open.

Doji Setsuna went in as she was. Sleeping robes, no wakizashi — it was not on her and she did not stop for it. She was in the tent ahead of Bayushi Monban, who was further away and said so.

She has one martial skill and it is unarmed. It is the training a high-status court woman is given so that if she is ever seized she has some chance of getting loose. She used it on somebody else. Coiling Serpent Style, targeted on the knife rather than the man — and the three of them had already filed the unarmed woman in nightclothes as not a threat, which is exactly why it worked. The knife came away from Miya Misato's throat. In the same breath she told Miya Misato to knee him, and Miya Misato did, and he was briefly out of it. Two court women in sleeping robes fighting ugly in the dark for ten seconds, and it held.

Her fear caught up with her as she came through the flap. She let it, took what it cost her, and kept going.

Then she made herself the largest thing in the tent. I am Doji Setsuna, Emerald Magistrate, and advisor to the Emperor's Ambassador. Drop your blades or my yojimbo here will ensure your death is slow and dishonorable. It landed on every one of them. One broke and ran.

On the third exchange one of them put her on the floor. He tackled rather than cut — they had worked out that she was worth more alive than dead — and she took a knife badly enough to open her up. She ended it unconscious and bleeding, past her endurance, and she lived.

While she was going down, Bayushi Monban said something that was not Bayushi Monban. The lady Doji is mine, and Onahime will have her doom. There was a shadow ringed like a snowflake across his face — Onahime, one of the two Kuni Warden Hunter visages he has worn painted on his mask since the road to the Castle of the Swift Sword. Later, after another blow landed, Shiba Midori heard a child's laughter, a girl's. Shiba Midori saw it and Kakita Kazumi saw it, and perhaps Ikoma Tadayoshi did. Doji Setsuna was already down.

It ended with bodies in the tent, at least one man away into the dark, brown armour on the one who had been holding Ikoma Tadayoshi, and Miya Misato dying on the floor of a camp guarded by two armies.

Setsuna

She put herself between them and Miya Misato, not between them and herself. Everything she did in that tent was about getting the envoy free — the knife first, then telling her how to hurt the man holding her. She owns one martial skill, it exists so that a court woman can save her own skin, and she spent it on someone else while unarmed and in her nightclothes. A duelist running into that tent is doing their job. She was doing something nobody had ever asked of her.

They came to take Miya Misato alive. That is the single most important fact of the night and it should govern the whole investigation. Nobody in that tent was killed who could have been. Ikoma Tadayoshi was pinned. She herself was tackled rather than cut once they had placed her rank — being worth more alive is not a compliment, it is a brief. An assassination and an extraction are ordered by different people for different reasons. Whoever sent them wanted the envoy in their hands, not in the ground.

The failure of the escort is the leverage, and it is enormous. Five Imperial persons were attacked in their tents inside a joint Lion and Moto camp. There are only two readings. Either one of the two escorting forces did it — a faction inside an army seizing the Emperor's envoy mid-mission — or a third party walked through both perimeters, which means both commanders failed the duty they took on. There is no third reading and no innocent version. Their dishonour is already established; they simply have not been told yet.

That is the ground she wakes onto. Put to both commanders in the plainest, most courteous terms available — help her clear their names and run the investigation, or answer for having let this happen in their custody — it is not a threat but a description of where bushidō has already placed them, with a way back offered. The courtesy is what makes it impossible to refuse.

If Miya Misato dies, the mission does not. It is a charge, and charges pass. She is the Personal Advisor, an Emerald Magistrate, and the person who has done the substantive legal work; she can carry it in the envoy's name. Whoever ordered this assumed the mission was a woman. It is a document.

Shinjo Altansarnai can probably end this by herself. If a Champion can nullify the betrothal on her own authority, then the entire war is waiting on one woman's signature, and that woman is in a camp two tents away and has just been told there is a Crane who wants to talk — a Crane whose wedding she attended, married into her own clan. That is not a back channel. That is an acquaintance who has not been called on. The back channel was the best thing she did all day and it is now the most urgent.

And Moto Gaheris is not a fool about the Crane. He is wrong that they arranged this war. He is right that a Crane treaty has quietly rearranged the north to Crane advantage at Lion expense, and right to notice that the Crane in the room is the one saying least. She was correct to let Kakita Kazumi answer him. She should also register that a man who reads her clan that accurately, from that little, will read her the same way eventually.