Chapter 9: Under the blossoming cherry trees – Part 3

Mifune moved without warning.

There was no shift in his posture, no tell in the eyes—a flick of the wrist, so practised it barely qualified as motion. Three shuriken crossed the clearing in the same instant Katsuyori's body registered the threat and answered it. He gave up the ground he stood on the way the Wind gives up ground, already somewhere the throw hadn't accounted for.

Two went past into the trees.

The third caught him along the outside of his left forearm. A glancing nick, shallow enough that he almost dismissed it, the kind of cut a man takes in a real fight and puts aside for when the urgent things are finished.

Mifune watched him, a man reading a result off a page.

"I needed to see how you moved when surprised," he said. "Now I know."

Katsuyori stood in the empty clearing a moment and understood that he had probably not imagined the faint dark residue along the shuriken's edge. He had seen poisoned blades before. A coward's weapon, which didn't make it less effective.

He started moving. Standing still in a clearing with a poisoned wound and no allies within shouting distance was the kind of decision that ended men.

He'd made perhaps two hundred yards back into the trees when Mifune, still in the shadow of the cedar line, heard it before he saw it.

Hooves. Fast, closing from somewhere deeper in the forest. Not a horse being ridden towards something. A horse that already knew where it needed to be and was arriving.

Nobu came through the treeline at a full gallop and Mifune took one involuntary step backward.

The moonlight caught her all at once, the cloudless spring sky offering up something that was not quite a horse. The black of her coat didn't reflect the moon the way a coat should. It gave back something else, more like the memory of light, the way old temple lacquer seems to glow from inside long after the candles near it have gone out. Her mane moved in a wind that wasn't touching anything else in the clearing. The mark at her shoulder pulsed faintly silver where the light struck it, and Mifune knew it for a kami's mark without being able to say how he knew.

She was the most magnificent thing he had seen in a life that had seen considerable things.

She was also, unmistakably, the horse from the Takeda battle banners. Nobu. The legend the Takeda cavalry had built half their reputation around.

She lowered herself, the way no horse lowers itself, so the wounded samurai could mount. Then she was gone into the dark with him, and the trees closed behind them.

The clearing was empty.

Mifune stood in it for a long moment, in the moonlight, alone.

Then he turned and walked back towards Shigemaru's house with the unhurried calm of a man who has seen something that will require careful reporting.

Katsuyori held on with his right hand and used his left as little as he could. His forearm had already begun to feel wrong in a way that went beyond the physical, a heaviness working its way up the muscle towards the elbow with a patience that promised worse things to come.

Shika was at the edge of the clearing when they arrived. Still, alert, the obi shifting faintly at the edges towards grey.

"Sit down," she said before he'd finished dismounting.

"It's shallow," he started.

"Sit. Down."

It was a stern order.

She had his sleeve pushed back and the wound examined in the time it took him to find a position against the cedar root, her fingers quick and precise in the dark, reading the edges of the cut the way she'd read Nobu's leg that first morning at the waterfall.

"Shuriken," he offered. "Poisoned. Possibly. I'm not certain—"

"It is," she said. "I can smell it."

She worked without speaking after that. She tore a strip from her own sleeve and bound the wound tightly enough that he exhaled sharply before he could stop himself.

"You went into the village," she said, still not looking at his face.

"Minokichi needed—"

"I know what Minokichi needed. I can read a forest." She tied off the binding with a final tug. "You went into a village, started a fight, almost won it, and then lowered your guard against the one man in the clearing who hadn't moved yet."

He said nothing. She was not wrong.

"The still one is always the dangerous one," she said.

She looked at his face then, and whatever she found there took some of the edge out of her voice.

"Hold still."

Her hands moved differently now. She placed her palm flat over the wound, over the cloth, and the obi shifted again, towards the pearlescent gold he'd come to associate with power in use rather than merely present. He felt the warmth move through the cloth and into the skin below, then deeper, chasing the heaviness back down his arm towards the point of entry. It dissolved there. Not painlessly. Cleanly, the way a properly set bone aches rather than burns.

The heaviness retreated. Then it was gone.

He exhaled.

The clearing was very quiet. The waterfall murmured somewhere beyond the trees. The cedar canopy stretched high above with stars in the gaps. Nobu had settled a little distance away, watching them.

Sleep came for him the way the poison had. Patient, working inward, unstoppable once it had started. He didn't fight it.

He listed sideways, and Shika was there.

She'd been there all along, sitting beside him.

He ended up with his head against her shoulder, which was a liberty he might have thought twice about if thinking had still been available to him.

Her hand rested lightly on his, over the wrapped forearm, still warm from the healing.

"Shika-san," he managed from the edge of sleep.

"Shut up," she said. "Just rest."

"Thank you," he said anyway.

She was quiet long enough that he thought she hadn't heard.

Then, very quietly, not in the voice she used for jokes,

"No," she said. "Thank you. For choosing to live."

He was asleep before he could answer.

Shika stayed where she was.

Nobu, at the edge of the clearing, looked at neither of them directly.

The cedar canopy moved overhead in a wind that never reached the ground. The forest kept its own quiet counsel, as it had for five hundred years, and as it would long after all of this was finished.