“Yoritomo was a pig,” she spat. “A rapist. A baby-killing bastard.”
“You knew what my oath meant to me.” Hiro shook his head. “I told you I was samurai before all else. I never pretended to be anything different.”
“You pretended to be a good man. An honorable man.”
“I am an honorable man!” A bellow, face twisted into a snarl. “Do you know what I’ve sacrificed for honor’s sake? Do you think those men you just murdered would—”
“Don’t you dare preach to me about murder—”
“I am sworn to the Kazumitsu Dynasty! To defend my clan! My lord! Without those oaths I am nothing! I told you that from the very beginning!”
“This isn’t about clans or oaths. This is about you and me!”
“Gods, how you flatter yourself…”
“You should be dead, Hiro! You failed Yoritomo, and you should have killed yourself to restore your honor. But when the Guild offered you a chance to come after me, you grabbed it by the throat and held on for dear life!”
Yukiko stepped forward, Hiro stepped back, muscles ridged, blood trickling from his nose. The Honorable Death shuddered as her belly clipped Yama’s outer walls, the sky-ship sinking lower as her sundered inflatable continued to collapse.
“You never wanted to rule an empire. You didn’t want the Tiger throne or to reforge a dynasty or to marry Aisha. You wanted revenge. To hurt me the way I hurt you. You call yourself honorable, but underneath your codes and oaths, you’re just a spoiled little boy. Stamping his feet and dragging the nation to ruin because he didn’t get his way.”
She waved her hand at the destruction going on all around them.
“You know what the Guild are. You know what will become of this land if they remain. But you didn’t give one solitary speck of shit for your family or your clan or your country when they offered you your noose. You didn’t sacrifice a godsdamned thing except your honor when you got into bed with those bastards.”
“And you?” Hiro spat. “What have you sacrifi—”
His question was snapped in half by a hoarse cry of pain. He sank to his knees, iron fist at his temple, thick, salty floods spilling from his nose.
“My father isn’t enough for you? My friends?”
“You … you did not give … them. They were … taken.”
“They were taken,” Yukiko leaned in close, teeth bared. “By people like you. But not anymore. You won’t ruin this place, or our children. You won’t do to them what you did to me. I want you to know that as you die. Everything you’ve done has all been for nothing. It’s all going to burn. And I’m the fire you helped create.”
“And years from now … when you speak to those children … will you tell them you killed their own father?”
Her smile was the color of murder.
“Who says I’m ever going to speak to them about you, Hiro?”
She tightened her grip on his mind, hand clenching to fist.
“They’ll never even know your name…”
Squeeze.
45
ALL THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN
“Father!”
“Kaori!”
The Truth Seeker’s engines drowned their shouts, hissing trails of shuriken fire filling the space between each breath. Their ladder unraveled thread by thread. They swayed in the grip of the wind, momentum, gravity, skies filled with pursuing Guild vessels, spitting death. Daichi’s muscles were tearing as he clung to the ladder with his right arm, his daughter’s hand with his left. Black on his lips. Bubbling from his lungs.
Gods, not now, please …
Kaori’s scream. Paper-thin across a bleeding sky.
“Let me go!”
“N-no!”
“If you don’t we’ll both die!”
Fingers numb. Grip melting.
“I will not let you go!”
Guild corvettes swarmed about them, the Seeker’s ’throwers riddling the closest with spinning steel, the craft splitting open and dying on the deadlands below. But three more skipped and spun through the glimmering hail, blood-red eyes staring down iron sights at the pair who’d slain their father. Their foremost. Their First Bloom.
Popopopopopopopopop.
Shuriken fire tore his shoulder, his stomach, deep into his chest; bursts of bright pain. Kaori screamed as he lost his grip, fading beneath the rushing wind as they fell. And still he held her hand, pulling her close as they tumbled earthward, the space between them wet with blood, the pain nothing at all. End over end as he held her tight, just as he’d done when she was a girl. She wrapped her arms around him and closed her eyes, tumbling, spinning, over and over. Nothing mattering save they were together, here, at the last.
“I love you, Daughter.”
The wind snatched the words like a thief. Carried them away with sticky fingers. But she squeezed him tighter. She knew.
Its roar filled him now, muting all else. Nothing but wind. Sight fading as the blood fled, painting her face and the black snowflakes behind. The roar filled his ears, swelling until it engulfed him, the color of new snow on Iishi peaks. Glittering with metallic opalescence, cut through with swathes of deepest black.
Amber eyes.