Born of Love

CHAPTER VI

Yuna spent several days in the cabin until the wound was no longer a matter of concern. What did make them worry was the food; It was hard to restock when the cold should have started to go away a couple of weeks ago. Lately they had asked the monks of Omi Monastery for help, but even they were beginning to be limited.

Jin never liked winter as he considered it the deadliest season of the year; And he wasn't so far off the mark. Yuriko had told him that, a year before he was born, the snow came in the fall and delayed his departure until a little past the middle of spring. That had been the last big frost in Tsushima; as timely as stopping the Yarikawa Rebellion for many months.

The sound of dry reeds disturbed his thoughts; Yuna was weaving a new cricket cage to inhibit herself from boredom. She was very introspective from the day he told her she was talking in her sleep. Jin felt a kind of relief as he perceived that Yuna's silence was not due to his presence, but to her apparent mental conversation with herself.

One day when they had gone out for firewood, she asked without warning what was the oldest memory of which she was conscious. Jin replied wistfully that it was a day when his mother played the flute to calm him down; He remembered it half-heartedly, his mother's face blurred and the melody choppy, but the feeling remained intact. When he asked her back, she replied that she wasn't sure, and when they returned to the cabin, she continued her activities in silence.

There were a lot of things he didn't know about Yuna. He realized that despite being more outgoing than he is, she shares very few things about herself. At first, he thought that Yuna would have a past very close to the standard of any inhabitant of the island, until the day she asked him to help her destroy the Mamushi brothers, the Black Wolf, and the vestiges of the slave trade in Tsushima. Even in those moments, Jin felt that he had to put some pressure on her to tell him what had happened to her and Taka... And it had been hell. He realized that he had never met anyone with Yuna's courage and resilience. There was no one who fought and loved like she did.

Had it not been for Takeshi's advances, he would never have discovered that the two of them had been in a relationship in the past; though he still didn't know why Yuna put an end to it. The last time she opened up was that day in Yarikawa, at the top of the fortress, with a few bottles of sake on their heads and the Mongol siege outside the walls. She told him about her mother and what had happened before they were kidnapped by the Black Wolf, though at no point did she mention her father.

The whetstone slips a little in his hand and is almost cut with the edge of the katana. Aware that he is in the hut and behind him is Yuna by the fire, Jin regrets asking her about her oldest memory. Even if his savior is not an open book, he has the information necessary to deduce that any trace of memory she retains from her childhood would in all probability be a sad one. Wasn't the mere fact that she was born in Yarikawa during the Rebellion obvious enough?

"I just want to remind you that we ran out of medical equipment a few days ago, so be careful with that katana." Yuna's voice comes closer accompanied by the sound of her footsteps. "We would have bandages, but someone insisted on using two every time he cleaned my wound."

What she doesn't add is that those bandages were too thin, and he didn't want to risk infecting the cut. But trying to discuss that with her was futile, so he silently sheathed his sword and changed the subject.

"I'm worried about Kamiagata. It's already a hostile territory under normal conditions, but this frost will take its toll on people's desperation... Someone should help them."

"If there are people prepared to deal with long winters, it's themselves," Yuna says, leaving a cup of tea on the table in front of him, "Trust me. I lived with them for several years."