"Sonzai" is Japanese for "Existence." I got the title from the Takui song of the same name. All said and done, this is a fic about the existence of the Seiryuu seishi - affirming that they did exist, and even through Nakago's manipulations and their own tragedies, their lives meant something.
Fushigi Yuugi and all characters are property of Watase Yuu.
Please do not repost this fanfiction without permission.
Sonzai (Existence)
One:Yui
It was dark.
Her first thought was that she had overslept, that her alarm hadn't gone off and she was late for school. She panicked. Didn't she have a test today? She was sure she had something - a test, a presentation...perhaps she was missing physics, and there was that packet she had to turn in. Surely Miaka would be waiting for her at the train station, and she'd make Miaka late for-
Miaka.
She jerked upright in the darkness, and for a moment she thought she heard screaming before it abruptly vanished into nothing and she realized she was alone, that it was dark and she was very very cold and very much alive. There had been...blue light, she remembered, and spots swam before her eyes at the memory. What had it been about blue light and...a voice? It had been warm. No, hot...she had been burning...
Hands clenched on the thin blanket and the world shrank to a pinpoint of blackness before widening out again, like perspective on a video camera, smaller and then larger, then smaller again. A burst of light, like fireworks, except all the light was blue and as she squeezed her eyes shut she could see two glowing pinpoints of light gleaming at her through the darkness, and she opened her eyes, gasping, but nothing was there.
She grasped at the memory. There was something about Miaka. Something about...there had been a book, she recalled with effort that made her head swim. A book and something about...
Footsteps.
The hair seemed to stand up on the back of her neck as she caught the sound of feet striking stone, making their way down what sounded like steps. She clutched the blanket to her, scooting as far back as she was able, but her back met hard stone and there was nowhere to hide, nowhere to run, and she did not even know what she was running from except that she was afraid.
A light pierced the gloomy darkness and she squinted. It was only a candle flame, but the light burned her eyes and she looked away. There were light-spots on the stone walls and she blinked rapidly several times before something clicked and she froze.
Stone walls. To her right, to her left. At her back. She swung her head forward, already knowing what she would see there. The bars of a prison cell door rose up stark and black before her, shivering ever so slightly in the light of a torch in the hand of the man who stood there motionless.
"Did you sleep well, Yui-sama?"
"Nakago," she said, though she had no idea where the name came from, how it escaped from her tongue without her conscious thought. It was simply that the name matched the man, as did other things, other memories that made her stomach recoil with the thought, but she did not know why.
A faint smile, catlike, in the torchlight. She wanted to recoil, but there was nowhere to go. "I see you have been well-rested."
"Where I am?" she whispered. "What have you done?"
He laughed, the faint derisiveness in his voice mocking her even as she sat there shivering in the cold and the damp of the cell. "You are being rewarded for a job well done. You don't like your new quarters? Yui-sama."
"A job well..."
He stared at her for a moment, and then the blue eyes held a note of comprehension. "Ah. Don't you remember, Yui-sama? You summoned Seiryuu."
Seiryuu.
The memory came like flashes of lightning tearing through the stormclouds, a blue dragon and a battlefield, and something about honor and sorrow that had been swallowed up in the midst of so much death. Something had happened. Something....terrible had...
Kaijin.
"I...I can't..."
He waved a hand in dismissal, and she caught a glimpse of golden hair wisping behind his back with the movement. "It matters now. Suzaku is sealed. Their seishi are dead. You did a marvelous job, Yui-sama. I regret that I must...leave you in this manner."
There was something in his voice that left her blood cold, and she made a sudden lunge for him. "Nakago! Let me out of here!"
He had been turning to go, but he stopped, looked back at her, and laughed. The firelight caught his face at just the right angle, and she saw the man whose features had been so familiar to her - the blue eyes and the long blond hair and the arrogant jut of the jawline, but something had changed. There was something different, something wrong.
"I'm sorry, Yui-sama. I can't grant that request." He paused, as if to reflect. "You see, I don't trust you."
"Trust me-!"
And then she realized what was different about him. He was no longer wearing the armor. Instead, there were robes around his shoulders, and a crown, robes and a crown that she had only seen once before when he had taken her to meet the Kutou emperor, when she had...when she had first...
"You bastard," she whispered. "You've killed the emperor!"
"The crown is mine," he said coldly. His eyes bored directly into hers, all pretense of gentleness gone. "The crown has always been mine, and you have given it to me. You've been of wonderful use, Yui-sama, and perhaps one day, you will be of use again."
"Let me go!" she cried. Her frantic steps took her to the edge of her prison and she wrapped her hands around the bars of her cage, hammering and kicking with all her might. The triumphant gleam in his eyes as he watched her was one of victory. "Nakago! You bastard! Let me out of here!"
He did not answer, simply made a gesture, and two guards stepped out of the shadows. There was a crack of something stinging and painful across her knuckles and she let go of the bars with a gasp, falling back to the floor, her hands raw where the whip had lashed them.
"You'll be more courteous to the emperor of Kutou, you whore!"
She cringed away as the guard made to send the whip through the bars again, but Nakago made a curt gesture, and he subsided, replacing the whip in its holster and giving her a nasty grin instead. A sound strangely like a whimper escaped from her lips. Nakago was watching her again. She could feel his eyes on her, but she would not give him the pleasure of staring at her face.
"I'll make you an offer, Yui-sama," he said, the honorific suffix smooth and honeyed on his tongue. "I dislike having to have you here as much as you dislike being incarcerated, I am sure. I can't set you free, for that would be disastrous, and having you languish in here would break my heart."
She said nothing.
"One of my generals has made me an offer, but of course I could not accept for you. You are, after all, my miko."
Miko?
She raised one trembling hand to her lips. There was....something....
"So I thought I would make you a deal. Will you accept the offer of this gentleman, or will you choose to remain here for the rest of your days? It's a long time to wait, you know, and I am not so inhumane as to order your execution."
"Kill me then!" she burst out, slamming her hands against the floor. "What are you waiting for, Nakago? That's the plan you've had for me since the beginning, isn't it? I was just your tool, something to get what you wanted. Well, you've finally gotten it! Isn't that all you wanted? What's the point of keeping me here, then? Kill me and get it over with!"
He made a clucking noise and a whisper of cloth that she knew was the sound of him shaking his head at her huddled, drained, on the stone floor of her prison. "Yui-sama. I can't do that. That would be too easy."
"I hate you," she whispered.
"I give you three days to decide," Nakago said coldly. "I'll be waiting for an answer."
The sound of his footsteps and the clang of the prison door as it shut and the key turned in the lock seemed muffled to her, sounds from far away penetrating the muzziness that was heavy in the air here, something stifling her, making it hard to breathe. She did not stop the tears as they gathered in the corners of her eyes and coursed their silent way down her cheeks, ticking like the second hand of a clock onto the cold ground. She did not care if she cried. She did not care if she died.
Miaka.
She didn't know why she thought of that name just then, only knowing that there was something about her friend's name that made her stomach recoil, but not in hatred and not in loathing. Something had happened to Miaka, she knew, and she had tried to save her, but that had only gone horribly wrong, and now she was here in a prison cell, sitting on the floor in nothing but a threadbare robe, sneered at by a man who she did not remember but whose name and past and motivations and life she knew as if they had been her own.
Why?
She pushed herself up, wiping the tears from her face with the back of her sleeve. Her hands were only a little bruised, it felt like, from the whip, and nothing seemed broken. The skin, save for the backs of the knuckles, was smooth and sound. She felt her way up her arms, across her chest, down her stomach and her legs and then raised one hand to touch her face.
She was not injured.
But yet she hurt all over, like her whole body was a mass of sores and wounds and bruises, even with the unbroken skin that her hands were showing her. This couldn't be. Surely she was hallucinating, dreaming some horrible nightmare, and she would soon wake up in her familiar room to the sound of her father leaving for work and Miaka on the phone wondering where she was.
She curled up into a little ball and sobbed.
The guard found her like that several hours later, lying on the floor of her cell where she had fallen asleep, exhausted, after sobbing and screaming and pounding the walls, shouting for help though she know no one was listening. What a shame, he thought as he slid the tray of food under the bars. He'd seen her around the palace when she'd still been the miko, and he had liked what he had seen of her, although she'd never spoken to him. There had been a resolve in her face then that there wasn't now, as if summoning the god had drained everything away.
Yui woke an hour later to the smell of the cooling meal. At first she was inclined to say she was not hungry, but common sense won out over pride, and she ate everything. She thought briefly that the meal might be poisoned, then decided that she did not care. What would Nakago gain by poisoning her?
The black spaces in her memory yawned open wide, and she pushed them away. It did not matter now that she could not remember. She remembered enough, and even that was almost too much to bear. She thought of Miaka again, of the phantom of guilt between them though she did not know why, and the tears came to her eyes again. Squeezing them shut, she gulped down the last of her rice and retreated back to the hard stone pallet on which she had woken, trying to work out a logical observation to the mess inside her memories.
She was somewhere where she did not belong. That was obvious. How she had gotten here had something to do with Miaka. She chewed on one fingernail, thinking. It was not Miaka's fault, or was it? That did not matter at the moment. The main problem, then was how to get back to the place she had come from, to Tokyo, which this place definitely was not.
The first obstacle preventing her from doing that was this man Nakago, who she most decidedly had known before the gaps in her memory. She had known him, and from what he had said, it seemed she had helped him. She frowned at that, because how would she, Hongou Yui, have helped such a man as that if she had been of sound rational mind?
That didn't matter either, she decided. The first thing she needed to do was escape this prison. Her eyes went to the four sturdy stone walls, to the heavy barred door set at the front, to the too-faint torchlight that was her only source of illumination. There was most likely some way to escape from here if she possessed the technical know-how and the experience of an escape artist, but she was no escape artist. That route was no good. She could perhaps wait and somehow overpower the guard when he came to retrieve the empty tray of food from her cell, but then where would she go? Searching her memory, she had the faint picture of familiar corridors and passages...but no memory of this dungeon. She would be lost and they would find her, and that would be the end of that.
There was one other way.
He's made an offer for you, Nakago had said. She was fairly sure what the 'offer' consisted of, but that did not mean she would have to do such a thing. As long as it brought her freedom from this prison, as long as she could get out of this place, she could escape, perhaps run to...somewhere. It did not matter where.
What is this country? she asked her brain, and it thought for a long while before replying.
This is country is called Kutou.
It was useless to try and remember anymore at the moment, so she stopped trying and instead thought upon Nakago's words, trying not to think of Nakago's face as he said those words. It was a face that was familiar, too familiar, she thought. She had been used. She would not let them use her again. She was alive, she was able to move, though it hurt to do so. She could still walk. She could say yes to Nakago's command and be gone from here.
Is that what you want, Yui?
Yes, she told herself firmly. That was the only course of action she could take, and obviously, Nakago knew that. But did he take her for such a fool that he would think she would simply accept and be done with it?
Perhaps inside those gaps in her memory, she had been a fool, and that was why she had lost Miaka.
The day seemed as long as centuries, and she spent the passing hours curled up on the bench, revisiting memories of school, of her family, of Miaka. Some of them made her smile, some brought tears to her eyes again. What could possibly have happened between her and Miaka? That was the largest mystery of all, because there had never been anything that could have separated the two of them, and she could feel the truth of it looming on the edge of consciousness, that there had been someone who had lied, and the lie had been big enough to drive them apart.
As she clenched her fists at the almost-memory, she heard the prison door open.
She sat up, preparing to see Nakago, but it was only the guard. He looked surprised to see her awake, surprised and a bit wary, but she simply crossed her arms over her breasts and looked at him.
"I won't try to escape," she said. "Tell Nakago instead that I have thought about his request, and I have decided to accept."
The guard looked confused, hesitating as if waiting for some more explanation, but she simply stared at him, and he finally bowed slightly. "I understand," he said. "I will tell him."
She did not wait for him long, and when she heard the clank of the dungeon door open again, saw the flicker of torchlight coming down the stairs, she was ready. She stood at the door of her cell with a confidence in her face that she did not feel, standing proud even though it felt as if her body had been torn to pieces and her legs could barely hold her. She would not think of that. She would not think of that something that had taken her heart and ripped it to shreds. She would not cry now.
"Yui-sama," he said, and before he could say anymore, she held out one hand.
"I've decided to accept your offer," she said. "I know I mean nothing to you, and that my fate matters nothing to you. But I don't see what other choice I have."
Those blue eyes gleamed and she barely suppressed a shiver. "I always knew you were an intelligent woman, Yui-sama." A gesture to the guard, and the prison door swung open. As he stepped into the cell, something came with him, and it felt suddenly as if a thousand arrows had pierced her open, and the world was on fire. She gasped, stumbled backward as the involuntary tears came to her eyes, falling, bracing herself for the impact of hitting the ground before she felt the jerk of a hand on her wrist, holding her up.
"Silly girl," Nakago said, but for the first time she heard something else in his voice besides the ever present sneer, as if by not addressing her by that forced honorific title, he'd freed some obligation from his shoulders. "Here," he said to the guard, passing her from him as if she were some piece of baggage. "Take her up to her old rooms."
She did not remember the rooms in which they left her, but they must have been familiar once. There were several items of clothing scattered about, and at the sight of them in the flickering lamps of the dark room, she knelt, began conducting a frantic search through the trunks that stood against one wall. It was only after several minutes of searching that she realized she had no idea what she was looking for in the first place, but she knew that if she saw it, she would know.
She did not find it.
Everything hurt all over and she was so tired, yet as she slumped against the big four-poster bed, she felt that she could not stop moving, for if she did, the thing that pursued her would surely overtake her and rip her memories to shreds. She could not let that happen, she thought. She needed those memories, because without them, how could she ever get home again?
But finally the exhaustion won, and when she awoke with a start, she realized that the pink light coming in through the window was the rising sun, and she had slept all night.
The palace was quiet.
Was her room guarded? It came to her that she could make a run for it now, before the sun had risen and before the palace began to stir. She began to get up, then stopped. No, Nakago would expect her to do something like that. He had ways of watching her, she knew, though she did not know how she knew. It would be best to wait.
Stretching experimentally, she found that everything hurt less, though the muscles in her neck and back were sore and tight from having been hunched over against the bed post all night. There was no way around that now. The baths were around to the back, she remembered from somewhere, and taking up the first of the gowns that she saw scattered around the clothing trunks left over from her night of frantic searching, she went to find some water.
Nakago came for her when the sun had fully risen above the lip of the valley. That scene from her bedroom window, where valley met mountain met sky, was familiar to her also, and she had spent the time after her bath seated on the window seat staring out at the scenery, wishing that it, at least, had been new and unfamiliar so she could at least take in some of the peacefulness of the morning. But the windowseat was full of disquiet, and her thoughts turned to Miaka again, wondering where her friend was now, if she was also waking up in Tokyo ready for another day of classes and preparing to meet a friend who was no longer in that world.
She slid off the seat as the door opened. Nakago looked very different in the daylight, tall and broad and formidable in his dark royal robes. She shied away from him as he reached out one hand to her, and he dropped it.
"Surely you haven't changed your mind, Yui-sama," he said.
"No," she said barely audibly, "no. It's just...I'm not used to you yet."
One arched eyebrow was all that indicated he understood, and he simply stood there as she looked at him and pretended not to. The old emperor had been a thin man, dark and hunched and generally unpleasant. But Nakago stood arrogantly resplendent in those long court robes, golden hair hanging loose about his shoulders and wearing no crown now. There was still something that bothered her about him, something that took her long minutes to realize. He was no longer wearing the blue earring.
"If you're ready, Yui-sama, we will proceed."
She blinked at him, and for some reason she felt like crying again, though for herself or for him, she didn't know. But that was ridiculous, because why would she weep for a man she hated?
It seemed as she looked at him, that she was only seeing half a man, and where the other half had gone, she did not know.
"Yui-sama," he said patiently, and she looked around the room that had once upon a time been hers, and nodded.
"I'm ready."
She had expected to be taken to the throne room, but the room to which he escorted her was not the throne room she remembered in her bits of memories. This room was modest, lined with shelves of scrolls and other literary texts, and the lord seated in the chair was not as sleazy as she had pictured him, but she had no doubt he had something shady in mind for her.
That didn't matter, she reminded herself. As long as she could get out of the Kutou palace, it didn't matter what he had planned.
"This is Lord Chin," Nakago said from beside her, and the lord rose from his chair and bowed respectfully. "Lord Chin, our former Seiryuu no Miko. I release her into your...care."
She heard the hesitation before the final word, saw the look pass between the two men and clenched her fists. "I hate you, Nakago," she said again, and heard him laugh as she whirled, turning her back on him fury. She would not do him the honor of looking at his face before he left her.
"You're out of my hands," he replied, and she noticed how he did not use her name altogether, as if by eliminating the sound of it he was cleansing her from his memories, from his country, from his very life. "Farewell."
The door slammed.
She stared at the short, fat man in whose hands her life lay now, wondering what on earth he could gain by taking someone like her into his custody. He stared back at her, fat, ringed hands stroking the sides of his robes absently, and she felt herself hate him immediately, without knowing anything of him or what he had come for. He had shifty eyes, she noted with distaste. Shifty eyes and the countenance of someone who could not be trusted.
Just like Nakago.
"Well, Miko-sama," Chin said at last, smiling wide and showing black, rotted teeth. "If you would do me the honor of accompanying me."
"Where do you think you're taking me?" she demanded.
"You'll see," he responded, reaching out one hand to grasp her arm, and she slapped it away. He looked faintly surprised at the fact that she was capable of defending herself, pitiful though the attempt was. When he reached out again, it was with the same look of distaste on his face as she was sure she had on his, and his grip was like iron. She cried out as his fingers clamped around her upper arm, and she heard him laugh.
"Don't try to fight me, Seiryuu no Miko. You've won in your arena, but this is mine."
She learned all too soon what his arena was, as he dragged her around the back corridors of the Kutou palace out to where his caravan of several pack mares and mutinous-looking servants were waiting. No one tried to stop them. She would have cried for help, but there was something about the atmosphere of the palace through which they tread that seemed to forbid it. The air was heavier here than she remembered, hushed and oppressive, like the coming of a summer lightning storm, leaden and full of secrets.
It was easy to imagine that besides the two of them moving through the palace corridors, there was no one else left alive here.
But the weather outside was that of a crisp, cool fall day, and she stood without complaint as one of the servants bound her hands behind her, forced her onto the back of one of the pack mares, and they set off through the wide gates. She ignored the wide eyes of the gate guards, looked resolutely forward and focused her eyes on the point where the road narrowed and shrank to nothingness through the streets of the city. As the gates groaned closed behind them, she did not look back.
They passed through the city and to the upper ground beyond the capital, and the wind through the grass that should have calmed her only made her cold and jittery. They traveled the entire morning, stopping only to water the horses, and she sat quiet and still during the break. There were no prison walls around her, nothing to hold her back, but she felt simply very tired and empty, with a throbbing behind her eyelids that was threatening to break open her skull.
Lord Chin's camp was half a day's ride from the capital, small but efficient, wagons arranged in a circle with watchfires all around and sentries ringed around the few tents that were still standing. Wooden circles of stakes were all that remained of what had obviously once been other tents, and the air was alive with the bustle of breaking camp.
"It's good to see you back safe, Lord," said the sentry who hailed and halted them as they drew near, and Lord Chin said something that Yui could not catch, which was most likely to do with the time they were due to move out. The sentry glanced at her curiously as they passed, but did not comment.
"Where are you taking me?" she asked the Lord's fat back astride his horse, the first words she had spoken all day since leaving the palace, and he smiled, again showing his black teeth.
"Sairou."
The words took a moment to fully form inside her mind. Sairou was a country, her brain told her. A country...but not this one.
"Sairou?"
She grasped the full meaning of his words too late as he dismounted and dragged her off the horse with him, handing her roughly to one of the sentries standing guard, saying, "put her with the others." The "others," she found, were all bound with their hands and feet in loose but heavy manacles just as she was, huddled together within the wagons that had been at the center of the camp, because it was natural to put one's most precious goods at the center of one's camp, and that was what she had become.
She held nothing against Nakago for giving her to a slave trader. It was, she supposed, the most prudent thing he could have done. In Sairou, she would be out of the country and out of his way, and if she lived, it would be as someone else's property, and if she died, it was no blood on his hands.
Something broke inside of her for a split second as the door to the wagon slammed and she heard the shift of warm bodies inside the wagon as they adjusted to the presence of someone new among them. She wanted to cry for Miaka, but Miaka was not there, and even if she was, how could she help now?
"You from the northern villages too?" someone said, and it was several seconds before she realized the voice was talking to her.
"N-no," she stuttered. Talking seemed very difficult, and her mouth was woolen. "From the capital."
"Ah," the voice responded, and said no more as the wagon began to move.
The first night she passed alone in the corner, with no one offering a word of comfort. She didn't blame them. How could they, they who had been cursed to share the same fate? She didn't know how it should be with the prisoners of a slave wagon, but she heard murmured conversations and saw, as her eyes adjusted to the dim light, that even here there were groups of people, alliances and friends, in which she was a sole island. Perhaps it was only because she was the new girl, or perhaps it was because they saw something in her they disliked. Again, she didn't blame them. Not even she understood the scars she carried, but if she had been anyone else, she would have shied as far away as she could.
The second evening, she had been shivering alone in her corner as the wagon bumped over rough stone, listening to the rough voices of the men outside driving the caravan, when someone spoke in her ear.
"Would you like a blanket?"
She jumped at the unexpected nearness of it, and when she turned to look she could make out nothing of the speaker's features in the half-light. But the voice was low, soothing, and she nodded hesitantly.
"Thank-thank you."
"Don't mention it," it said, and then it was gone again.
The blanket was rough and scratchy, but it was warm enough for the cold night, and as she wrapped herself in it that night she wondered if her mysterious benefactor would be cold. Around her, a mass of other warm bodies lay dozing, and she wondered who among them was the one who had taken pity on a stranger girl. She regretted having taken the blanket before asking for a name.
The wagon traveled for a third day, a fourth and a fifth and a sixth, and the mysterious voice did not speak to her again. The doors opened at regular intervals and some guard would throw in food as if they were dogs, but she was so hungry that she did not care. There was some sort of system within the wagon that she did not understand, but the food was distributed evenly, and she ate her portion in silence, wondering when the journey would end. They must be out of Kutou by now, she thought. The air through the tiny windows had grown increasingly dry and uncomfortably hot, and they had not stopped travel at all, not even during the night. Sairou lay to the west, she remembered, opposite from Kutou to the east, and it seemed to her that they had been traveling for a long time and would never stop.
The sixth night, they were attacked.
She did not remember what awakened her, but her eyes jerked open only a second before shouts filled the air, and she sat bolt upright, clutching her rough blanket. The other prisoners around her were awakening now, too, murmuring among themselves, and then something exploded violently against the side of the wagon, and she screamed. The wagon teetered for a long moment as she felt herself and the others around her slide helplessly to one side, and then she felt the vehicle groan around her as it fell a long, long way to the ground.
Her head hit the floor with the impact and she lay, stunned, feeling that she must have died and wondering what was taking so long, but at last the lingering haze cleared and she realized she was not dead, that the wagon had toppled over and that the night air was rushing in through the suddenly open doors.
A collective shout, and she pushed herself to her knees as the wagon rapidly emptied, prisoners shuffling as fast as they could through those doors, clanking of arm and leg irons loud through the crackling of fire from outside. She tried to stand, but her robe had somehow gotten tangled in her manacles, and she slid helplessly to the ground. Her arms were so heavy.
The air had grown hotter, she realized, and as she tried to breathe and instead coughed through the sudden influx of smoky air, she saw that everything had grown hazy, little sparks shooting up before her eyes and exploding like fireworks. She could not move. She could not even crawl.
"Miaka," she gasped, one hand working feebly against her side, knowing she had to get out, get out! before the fire consumed her, because it was a fire, and if she did not get out before it reached her, she would die. "Miaka...help me...Mia..."
The roar in her ears might have been from the fire sweeping into the place where she had been, or maybe it was from the throat of the one who snatched her up gently in a grip that nevertheless felt made of iron, to bear her up and out of the wagon which groaned again and then collapsed in a shower of sparks and smoldering wood and metal. She squeezed her eyes shut against the pain of cool night air mixed with the stinging of what were most likely charred bits of fire cinders caught in her eyelashes, and did not speak as she was carried away from the camp, away from the glowing destruction of the slave trader's worldly possessions, and it did not hit her until they stopped, swaying, that she was free.
She would have opened her mouth to speak, but suddenly she was falling, and the half dirt, half brush ground in which she landed bruised her hip so that she rolled over, moaning at the pain. She caught a glimpse of her rescuer against the foliage then, but there was no moonlight, so all she saw was an indeterminate shape looming up against the silhouette of trees and stars.
"Who are you?" she whispered, but the other simply paused and then was gone, a whisper of night wind.
She pushed herself to her feet and staggered forward.
She did not know how long she walked, only that the hem of her robe was torn and muddy and ragged by the time she came to the river, only that the first light of dawn was beginning to show and that she had lost one shoe, that the metal manacles were cutting into her arms and legs and that her ankles and wrists were raw with the chafing. She had heard the sound of water from a long way off, and that alone had encouraged her to walk on, because all she had seen after leaving the little wood in which she had been deposited were hard rock cliffs and the wind whistling through unseen canyons.
The banks of the river had once been property of one such canyon, but millennia of water rushing over its banks had gradually worn the rock away, and she felt dry, crumbly dirt between the shoeless toes of her right foot as she dragged herself to the river's edge. There were small plants here too, fern and weeds and even some tiny flowers. She had never been so glad to see flowers.
She stared at the sluggish river water, looking down into its muddy depths, then toward the horizon as it flowed on, swirling currents heading toward some unknown destination. She could follow it, she thought, and see where it led. But the thought of Lord Chin and his caravan turned her head as she scanned the landscape behind her. It was safe to assume that everything had been destroyed in the attack and the fire, though who would attack a slave trader, she did not know and did not care to guess. If she stayed on this side of the river, she put herself in danger of being followed.
No, she had to cross.
She shuffled down to the bank and put first one foot, then the other in the water. It was cool to her sore feet, and she smiled at the refreshingness of it, as if she had never seen water before. It was shallow enough here, and she could wade for a distance to see if there was any sort of bridge where she could cross. The manacles on her hands and feet were too heavy for her to risk swimming, but it would be nice to walk through the water.
She had taken two steps when she realized she was thirsty, and she knelt to drink.
Thinking back on it later, she wasn't certain if it had been the leg irons that had dragged her under, or if she had just been so exhausted and weakened by lack of food and water that she had not been able to stand up to the rushing of the river current. The water pounded at her and she barely had time to scream before she was pulled under.
Everything was eerily quiet and blue-green under the river surface, and she tried to struggle before she realized that she could not even do that, because the metal links binding her wrists and ankles were too heavy. As she sank, she opened her eyes, gazing blurrily at the daylight rapidly fading above her, spiraling down to the bottom, and then she thought of Miaka again. Save me, she thought, but the words vanished too soon in her mind as spots began appearing before her eyes, and there was no mysterious benefactor to soothe her this time, no strange rescuer to bear her out of the blue tomb into which she was sinking. There was not even Nakago.
It was a strange hallucination of the drowning, she thought to herself, that made them think they were being rescued. She fancied there were two arms around her, a strong force drawing her upward, but the light was growing dimmer, and she could no longer draw a breath. The water rushing down into her lungs strangely did not frighten her. She had faced death so many times that it was no stranger to her now.
But instead of the soft bottom of the riverbed, she felt harsh, prickly grass under her back, and someone was shaking her. She tried to shake her head. No. She wasn't going to get up. She didn't want to be rescued. It would be better for her to just die.
"Oi," said someone. "Miss. Wake up."
No, she tried to say, but the word was interrupted by a great fit of coughing, and she doubled over on herself as the water rushed out of her lungs and empted itself in a rush onto the shoes and pants of the person who knelt beside her. He backed away hurriedly, but not too much, she realized hazily, because as soon as the coughing subsided he was beside her again, one hand on her shoulder and another patting her back.
"Can you speak?"
She coughed again. "What," she began. Her voice rasped in her throat. "Where?"
"You're safe now, miss," the voice said soothingly. "I saw you on the other side of the river as you stepped in...that wasn't very smart of you, you know. With your hands and feet like that. It was obvious you weren't going to make it. This river has a nasty sort of god playing in it, and he likes his pranks a little too much sometimes."
She tried to move one hand and her arm gave a sort of floppy twitch that reminded her of a dead fish. "I hurt," she said instead, and her rescuer moved one arm to support her head as she pushed herself upright, balancing herself on his knee and managing to sit up.
"You look like you've been through an ordeal," he said in return. "Can you stand? I'll take you to my parents' house. We don't live far, and we've an extra bed or two."
"I don't want to-" she began, and she felt him shake his head.
"It's not an option. You look half dead."
She tried to laugh a bit. "I feel half-dead. I guess I am."
"Come on," he said. "We'll go home and get some food in you, and some medicine, and then you can sleep a bit and you'll feel better." Leaning down, he reached out both hands to her, and for the first time, as she reached out her own hands, she looked up at his face.
The blond hair, the light eyes, so wide and trusting, the familiar shape of the face that stared down into her own she had seen a thousand times in her dreams and a thousand times waking, had longed to see again just one more time and did not even know it till now. But this had to be some sort of nightmare, because he was dead. She had felt him die, had seen him die over and over again.
"Oh gods," she whispered, one hand moving to cover her mouth. "Suboshi. No. You...you're dead."
The handsome face blinked at her, the forehead puckering into a slight frown, then something passed over the boy's expression, a struggle of emotion as if there was something familiar in her words that he should know. "I'm sorry, miss, you must be mistaking me for someone else," he said politely, offering his hand again a little hesitantly. "My name is Kaika."