On Thin Ice (Prequel to Guild)

Chapter Twenty-Four: Salt In A Wound

                      Turn around. Look away. Pretend they're not even there. That you're too tall too see them groveling beneath you. That was the advice Dai had given his wife during the long journey to Ogonsekai's south westernmost port. Words he'd repeated again and again, knowing deep down they wouldn't make any difference. She wouldn't take them to heart. 

Hers was different than his, after all. Purer. Gentler. Whole.

And so gods-damned tender.

Dai knew that could make this trip very, very difficult.

"Yuina," he tried, turning out of the salty sea breeze. He put a hand on her arm but that still didn't turn her around.

She kept gazing sadly into the bushes and the deeply tanned faces peeking sheepishly out of them. Itoan peasant children- mostly. Southerners too young to have lost friends to the Scarlet's bloody waves. Too young to realize that the imperial shogun's company was not to be gaped at and worshipped from afar, but feared, respected, and obeyed.

The young Kimsura Phoenix needed to get that into her head.

"Yuina?"

Refusing to look way, his wife whispered an answer over her shoulder. "Do we have food?"

"For them?" called his eavesdropping sister from where she'd been sharpening her blades atop a shoreside rock. "Or for you?"

"Both, actually," Yuina replied, frowning at the hand on her belly. They hadn't eaten yet. Osamu thought it rude not to wait for their allies to arrive. Feast on rice and salted salmon together to mark the beginning of this partnership. This conquest. This crusade.

"How in Onsei's name can you hear that?"

Jia grinned at her husband, tossing her hair and batting her eyes. Apparently that was answer enough.

Dai just shook his head. He turned back to Yuina. "If you give them rice, they won't work for it late-"

"I don't know about that, Kimsura."

He frowned at the rustling in the grass. It deepened at the emergence of Matsumoto from the bushes. Genji Matsumoto- and not his Circle general father.

He gave a crooked smile, scattering the southerners whose heads he stepped over.

"Free food will not quench my thirst for blood, I assure you."

"Why are you here, Matsumoto."

The young man shrugged, opened his mouth-

And let his grin spread to both cheeks as he noticed Jia. As he stopped to admire the suit of armour making its wartime debut on the empress today. Funny, it had taken that and the promise of Kopere's jewels to draw Jia away from her ladies and lounges and imported treats.

Strange that Chikara's favourite blade had needed convincing at all.

But Dai knew she never did anything good without a price.

"For the pleasure of being stabbed to death by such a sight," Matsumoto offered.

Yuina groaned.

"The blood I crave could very well be my own. I would die happy in your arms."

Sliding her blade across its wetstone once more, Jia rose from her place on the rock. She left Osamu to his moping and crossed to the shogun's side.

Playfully, she tossed and caught the little dagger, twirling it over her fingers so it reflected the light of the sun- blinding many soldiers- and illuminating her smile.