Alas, half the other Minami children had already fallen. Eldest brother Goro was found facedown on the field with six arrows in his back. Masaru, the middle brother, sustained a nasty leg wound while riding in the cavalry, which soon soured his blood. Only her brother Keichi, youngest of the Minami boys, survived to accompany her that day.
If Shizuru was a beacon, Keichi was only a paper lantern. Lack of charisma was his plague. He lacked the heroic bearing that made Shizuru so popular, and lacked the braggadocio that made her controversial. No one could remember any details about him.
Indeed, when Shizuru asked who among the army would stay with her after Captain Araya had called for a retreat, Keichi was the first to answer. Everyone agreed on that, yet not a soul could remember what he said.
And yet I could not imagine vouching for Iori in such a way.
My own brother proved my misgivings during our first battle, a smallish skirmish two days after Captain Araya broke the siege. Again he insisted on that ostentatious armor, despite the arrows flying through the air and screams of the dying all around us.
One of those arrows landed in his side—and then it was his voice screaming, a memory from our childhood tuned to the present. Bright gold is no bulwark against sharp stone and wood.
It took five heartbeats for me to realize anything had gone wrong. I had heard the sound, the wet thunk next to me, but I did not really believe we could be hurt, not until I saw Iori swaying in his saddle.
My mouth went dry.
We were in the center of a storm, the two of us—thundering hooves, whistling arrows cracking against shields, swords crashing against armor. None of this was real. None of it could be. I was the Poet Prince, second to the crown, playing war games with my brother.
Iori, wan and glassy-eyed, rivers of red spilling from his veins over the famed Imperial Gold.
I must be Minami Keichi, I thought, though he is no Shizuru.
And so I rode to him, and I pulled him onto my saddle, and I broke off the arrow shaft with my bare hands. Then I wrapped his arms around me as best I could and galloped back to camp.
I will remember, always, the fallen in my path. Men and women I’d sat with around a fire now lay at my feet gasping for breath. More than one grabbed at my horse as I ran past, or shouted for me to stop. Some rasped my name.
There is nothing—nothing—so haunting as the look in a dying man’s eyes when he realizes you are not going to save him; when he realizes you will not even give him the dignity of his final drink of water. Here he has fallen. Without eight coins for the Mother, here he will stay, his spirit forever bound to the field of rot. How many centuries would it be before someone found his forsaken bones and gave him the proper rites?
By the time I reached the surgeon’s tent I was trembling like the last leaf of spring in autumn. As soon as the surgeons took my brother away, I emptied my stomach.
And that was the first battle. There were two more before we reached the front, but my brother’s injury precluded him from fighting. Iori spent those weeks recovering.
I do not think it’s shameful of me to say I was too afraid to return to the front lines. I was not born to be a soldier. Instead, I spent my time at my brother’s side, bleeding out my fears onto whatever scraps of paper I could find. Mind—it was not good writing. But I was trying, at least.
“Why did we get stuck with these cowards?” Iori complained. “If we had the Minami woman with us, we’d already be at the White Palace.”
Her name sounded wrong on his tongue, as if it were a foreign word he’d not yet mastered and not the name of the Empire’s oldest vassal family.
“And if you were Yusuke the Brawler, you could do it yourself. The Gods have their plan, Iori; we are here and she is elsewhere, doing important work.”
He glared at me over his shoulder. Iori and I both have amber-colored eyes, but his are darker—meant for glaring and sneering. “We are the princes of the whole Empire. What could be more important than doing our bidding?”
I could not hide my frustration with him. “We may be princes, but she is the Queen of Crows.”
Inspiration struck me as the arrow had struck Iori. Though I was seated I staggered, swaying under the weight of this new idea—the image of Minami Shizuru walking in the Mother’s shadow, a crown of black feathers on her proud brow. My hand began writing though the lines were not yet fully formed in my mind. For the first time in what felt like an eternity I was alight with passion.
This, I thought, was going to be different from anything I’d written before. These lines would be spare and unflinching. Instead of toying with meter as I so often did, here I would pray at its altar; instead of dwelling on the beauty of nature, I would turn my lens toward the frantic chaos of war—
And the woman who cut through it the way her sword cut through flesh.
Iori, of course, did not share my vision.
“I don’t know why I bother talking to you about anything important,” he said.
I paid him no mind. The poem was already forming. Within it I would find my solace, my comfort. Even if the Qorin pillaged this camp, then so long as this poem survived, I would live on.
Two weeks after that last battle—the very day I finished the first full version of the poem—we received word that the war was over. Oshiro Yuichi—son of Genichi and future lord of the province—was to be given in marriage to the Qorin warleader Burqila. Bringing Oshiro and the steppes together in such a way would help smooth relations, was the thinking, and no one could say Yuichi was an unsuitable husband. Even then he was known for his essays on legal matters; more than once he’d been called on to tutor my brother. Who could reject a lord, a scholar, and a friend to the crown? By Hokkaran standards, Burqila’s marriage was enviable indeed.