The Choice

My father is looking at me. Seijiro leaves one of his crew at the haul end and finds my hand again.

The man who had my mother's head taken off in this compound, ten years ago, in the same yard where he's standing now. The man who brought a younger concubine into the yakata and decided his wife was an inconvenience and solved it the way he solves everything: with authority and the absolute certainty that his decisions are the same thing as justice. He looked at my mother the way he's looking at me now, I think. The same appraisal. What she could do for him. What she could cost him.

His eyes are on me.

I know that look because I've been reading his face for twenty-two years. Stop this. You can stop this. He'll listen to you. He won't say it. He'd rather hang than beg. But his eyes on mine are saying what his mouth never will.

I could.

I know I could. Seijiro would stop. The Oni at the wall and the kneeling soldiers have seen the way he looks at me. They've seen the coat on my shoulders, his hand on mine in the burning street, the captain of Tielong's Daughter watching my face instead of his prisoner's. I could turn to him, say don't, and he would stop. The word is mine to give.

I look at my father.

I see the compound. Not the one burning around me. The one from ten years ago, the morning sun in the same yard, the same stone under different feet. My mother kneeling. Her hair unbound, which was wrong. They always unbound the hair. The executioner behind her, a man whose name I never learned, whose face I never saw clearly because I was twelve and standing at the window of the room where Itsumi was supposed to be keeping me away. I pressed my face to the screen and watched through the paper.

She didn't look up. My mother didn't look at the window. Maybe she knew I was there. Maybe she couldn't bear to check. The sword went up and came down. The sound hit the paper and wood and stone and stayed there. My father's face as he watched: neutral. The same expression he wears when he signs a customs document. As if this was paperwork.

Ten years of walking the paper walls where she walked. Ten years of the sand garden, her rake, her gravel, the lines she laid in patience that he erased by existing. The jitō watching me, reporting me, smiling at me with the same deference they showed my mother in the weeks before she died. Ten years of my father's hand on my life, arranging, containing, the absolute conviction that caging his daughter is the same thing as loving her.

He put my mother on her knees. He put me behind paper walls. He can hang.

I turn my face into Seijiro's chest.

His smell hits before his hand does, cedar and the particular smoke that clings to him when he's been working, and my body goes warm before I've decided to let it, some stupid animal response to two months of dark rooms and his hands on my skin. I press it down. Not now. I close my eyes and I can hear the compound. The scuff of boots on stone. A chain link clinking. The creak of the rope taking weight.

His hand comes up to the back of my neck. Warm, steady, his thumb settling at the base of my skull where it always goes. My shoulders drop. His chest shifts against my cheek. Behind us, boots scrape across the stone.

No crack of thunder. No shout. The rope tightens and the beam groans through the stone, and then there's a sound, the body swinging into weight, and then silence.

My lungs fill against Seijiro's chest. His hand rests on my neck while smoke rises over the compound walls. For the first time in ten years, the breath reaches the bottom of my lungs.

The yakata is burning on the hill. The paper walls where my mother walked are going up room by room, screens bright for a moment and then dark, the frames standing empty before they fall. Her silk screen is ash. The indigo cranes, the cloud-pine, the brushwork I traced with my finger when I was eight, gone now. Good.

He stands still. Arms around me, hand on my neck. That's all.

I step back. I look at the compound.

The body hangs from the gate beam. One glance is enough.

I walk toward the access ramp that leads down to the harbor. Seijiro walks with me, his hand on the small of my back, and the boarding ramp of Tielong's Daughter waits at the bottom of the hill, iron-banded, wide enough for two abreast, spanning the gap from dock to ship over empty air. The crew parts for us. For him. For me, now.

On the dock, something is happening. My father's jitō, Itsumi and Fumino and the quiet one, stand in a line with their wrists bound. The crew has pulled Itsumi's silk robes open at the collar, and one of the men is working the knot loose at her shoulder, checking the fabric like a merchant checking cloth for flaws, his eyelids barely lifting as he works. It's the amber silk. I know that robe. She wore it the morning she took my elbow in both hands and steered me back from the garden gate, her grip harder than her face let on, murmuring about what was appropriate. She chose it for formal occasions. A second crewman has Fumino by the chin, turning her face in the light, and I hear him call something back to the dock about her teeth. Fumino, who never blinked when she read my father's orders aloud, is blinking now, her neck rigid, trying to hold still and not managing it. Someone on the far side laughs. The bids come in ragged and loud, numbers and crude opinions about relative value, about what they're good for, about which one goes first. The quiet jitō is being turned in a slow circle by a woman with a rope in her hand. She keeps her eyes on the dock boards.

I stop on the ramp. I watch. Itsumi sees me. Her mouth tightens. Her eyes flick from me to the crewman at her shoulder and back again. Ten years I spent reading that face. Neutral in every doorway, composed at every threshold, one expression for me and a different one for my father's steward and she thought I never noticed. I noticed. The face she has now is one I have never seen before. She wants the same thing my father wanted. Help me. You could help me.

My spine straightens. My hands stay at my sides. The formal smile breaks into a grin. I watch Itsumi's amber silk come the rest of the way off her shoulder while the crew calls their numbers, and I do not look away, and I breathe in cold air and harbor smoke and the smell of things burning on the hill.

Overhead, the blood-red sails snap in the morning wind. Seijiro gets a hand under my knees and one at my back and hauls me up the ramp against his chest, and the crew loses their minds. Hooting, a loud whistle from somewhere midship, someone shouting something about the captain's taste. He carries me all the way up and sets me down on the deck with no ceremony and turns back to give orders before the noise has stopped. The harbor burns below. The yakata glows on the hill, stone shell intact, everything inside it gone.

I face the ship and keep walking.