In the glade he knelt before the pillar of stone. The leaves overhead dappled it in shadow so that it seemed paley to glow through the veil of dark that touched it. Mayhaps it did, he thought, lit from below by what embers of spirit yet clung to the ashes it housed.

Or mayhaps he only wished that it did. That some trace of her yet remained in this world. A sign to him that she had not forgotten him, as he had not forgotten her.

He was not the only one who remembered. The stone and grounds were kept so immaculate he did not need to tend them. Around the glade he saw new flowers had been planted—her favorites, he knew. 

He lit incense, placed it among the vases of star anise. He bowed to pray, as only here he did. Here at this site which was more sacred to him than any temple. More sacred to him than anything, now that she was gone.

There had been another grave once, many years ago. Unmarked except to his eyes. Then a flood one summer had washed it away. He had stood stuck there in the mud, not knowing how to go on until she’d touched a hand to his arm, and his old grief had rolled away like a stone.

He’d taken the wisp of braid from the place near his heart where he kept it. He’d committed it to the river, this last piece untaken. Standing at the shore with her, he’d watched it drift away.

Since then he’d stood sentinel for her alone. He was an old man, some fifteen years her senior. He’d never thought he would outlive her. But he had. He had, and now this grave of hers was all that was left for him to watch over, this pilgrimage his final duty to her.

“My lady,” he murmured, closing his eyes.

Behind them he saw her clear, so beautiful and noble in her sadness. He knew the ache she carried in her heart always, for the man who did not love her. He knew it because it was the same ache he felt for her. The only difference was that she was entitled to her pain, and he wasn’t.

That man was her lord husband. Strange to think he might himself have been. But if he’d made that choice would she have been any happier? Only the gods knew the answer to that.

His image of her shifted. He saw her lying pale in the blood that kept blossoming beneath her, like some hellish flower. The midwives shrilling, so too the babe. He’d stood there not properly hearing them, not hearing anything except her thin breaths growing thinner.

Then her on the pyre, in the attire of a priestess. Before it burned, he’d reached through the flames, taken the white ribbon from her hair into the hollow of his hand, while his lord had turned his face away.

Opening his eyes now, he touched a hand to his arm where that ribbon remained bound. A talisman against despair.

He knew he should get going. He’d been uneasy when he’d left the city. He’d been uneasy for days, since his lord had departed with the reserve force in tow, leaving Edo with only the city guard to defend it. He had cautioned against this, but with his younger son returned home wounded, and word of his eldest imperiled abroad, his lord would not heed him. 

“General Satomi might reinforce him.”

“Satomi is a week’s march away, Uetsugi,” Kohaku had snapped, bringing his fist down on the map to make its markers rattle. “Gods know what’ll be left of him by then. I can reach him much faster from here.”

“My lord, this might well be a diversion. What reports we have from the western front strike me as suspect.”

Kohaku had glared. “How many times have I offered to promote you to general, and now you choose to lecture me on tactics? My son is beset—this is what I know. He needs my help, and I intend to give it. You will mind your post here, captain, unless you fear you cannot manage it on your own.”

“No, my lord,” Uetsugi’d replied stiffly, bowing his head.

And so Kohaku had left in haste, possessed by a furor which had been ripening in him over the course of the past year. It was as if his mind had been disturbed by some event, driven to recklessness and distraction. Uetsugi sensed that Kohaku had gone off to fight more for the sake of it than for his son’s.

After all, did he not have two sons and a daughter here to protect?

Uetsugi had endeavored not to let his misgivings take shape. But more and more now he thought of what the boy had said to him, of the blue-eyed young woman he’d glimpsed leaving the castle. A child’s fancy, he told himself. But the description…

If it was her, she could not be a young woman. Not naturally, at any rate.

And perhaps this was what he dreaded most, that in the absence of Rin’s holy presence some new devilry was afoot—

And they were all of them defenseless.

He stood to leave, his creaking joints protesting the motion. Around him dusk had fallen. The trail silvered in the fading light. Following it to the edge of the woods, he halted there, squinting down at the sprawl of the city below.

Something was amiss—he sensed it even before he saw it, in the form of sprouting flames and thickening smoke.

Fast as his aged legs could carry him, Uetsugi ran. He was halfway downhill when all hell broke loose around him—

Enemy riders charging the gates that were fast giving way. Enemy soldiers swarming the walls with ladders and spears and arrow cover. Volleys of return arrows streaking past his head, thudding into the trees around him. Clash of sword on sword, clang of sword on armor. Curses and shouts and through the rising din of it all the deepening of that stinging haze.

His eyes streamed as he barrelled ahead, straight into the fray. Without his sword and armor, they took him at first for some fool civilian, hulking as he was, until he ripped a spear from one of them and bashed in the man’s skull with the blunt end. Before another could shout, Uetsugi shoved the point of the pike into his throat, tearing it out in a gush of blood. He saw the whites of his enemies’ eyes as they drew back from the spray.

“It’s the Demon!” one cried.

“Demon Uetsugi!”

Uetsugi’s lip curled as he advanced upon them, spattered with blood. That stupid nickname had always grated on him. He’d fought real demons, and he knew firsthand he was about as equal to them as the earth to the sun.

A few foes scattered, bolted. The ones who held their ground before the ladder he dispatched handily, snatching down one who’d tried to scale it by the leg. He caught the man by the neck as he fell and smashed his head into the wall. 

Climbing the rungs two at a time, he reached the top of the wall with broken spear in hand. The guardsmen who’d covered him from on high sagged in relief at the sight of him there, but Uetsugi only glared and started barking out orders. 

As they hurried off to do as commanded, he stared out at the chaos raging down below. The city streets were a bloody riot of battling soldiers and fleeing civilians. Great swathes of flames blazed in the growing gloom of night, sweeping toward the castle. Enemy soldiers poured unchecked through the felled main gates, following in the wake of the flames. 

Determined to outpace them both, Uetsugi seized a fresh spear and fought his way down the splintered steps of the nearest watchtower. Headlong he burst out onto the streets, wincing at the sear of the air. It was perhaps a full minute before a mounted samurai spotted him and reined his horse around, spurring it into a gallop toward him. 

Throwing his bloody spear aside, Uetsugi reached for a commoner’s ax instead, dodging the samurai’s swipe and hacking the horse’s hindleg out from under it. The horse screamed, careening past him before it collapsed, crushing its rider beneath it. Panting, Uetsugi approached his fallen foe with spear in hand. Blood bubbled from the samurai’s gasping mouth. Uetsugi drove the spearpoint between his glazed, disbelieving eyes, and took off with the larger of his two swords.

Through backalleys he cut a path toward the castle, avoiding battle as much as he could yet finding plenty all the same. The journey was a blur of blood and roaring flame, smoke and deafening clamor. Another samurai slashed him across the chest before Uetsugi overpowered him, shoving him back into a house afire, over whose crumbling threshold he tripped and tumbled back into the conflagration, shrieking until a fiery beam fell down to silence him.

Uetsugi grit his teeth as he leaned against a fencepost, trying to catch his breath in air that was mostly smoke. Not sure whether it was his shirt or his skin he was holding together, he kept a hand clapped to his cut chest and trudged on. 

He could see the castle gates now—or what was left of them. Too late, he cursed himself as his grip on the sword grew bloodless. The heavy gates had been stoven clear in, and the force still defending them had been driven back well beyond. The stone walls about the palace yet shielded it from the advancing flames, but the wind was ill. It was only a matter of time until some spark jumped the stones, and caught fire to the courts beyond.

Changing course, Uetsugi fought his way to the closest barracks. They were aflame, though not entirely. Entering the dark stone stables, he hoped he might find some sort of horse with which to mount a final charge. The stablehands had long since died or fled, and so as he shoved his way past the bolted door, he was surprised to find a pair of dark eyes glinting up at him in the gloom.

“Uetsugi!” the boy cried, flinging himself at him. “You have to help me! They took him, and when I wouldn’t stop fighting them they locked me up in here.”

Prying the boy off his waist, Uetsugi knelt. “Prince Ieyasu?” He scanned the boy over as best he could in the spare light, holding him by the shoulders. “Are you unharmed?”

“I’m all right,” Ieyasu said, trying to squirm free, “but they took him! We have to go and get him back!”

“Slow down, boy. Who took who?”

“My friend,” Ieyasu said impatiently, still struggling toward the door. “Takechiyo. He works here in the stables. We were playing prince and pauper like we always do. He still had on my clothes when the bad guys found us. They thought he was me and took him away. We both kept yelling that he wasn’t but they wouldn’t listen. Why would they do that, Uetsugi? Why would they want to take me away?”

Uetsugi grimaced. He could think of several reasons, none of which were good.

“I don’t know,” he muttered. “But you’re not safe here.”

It wouldn’t be long before whoever’d taken the boy’s friend discovered they were wrong…

Ieyasu nodded. “I know. So let’s go. You’ll help me rescue him, right? Then we can go back to the castle. I’ll bet my sister’s worried sick. She’s always getting on to me for sneaking out.”

Heavily, Uetsugi frowned. He’d seen the fallen gates, the raging flames. By now the castle must be overrun. It was one thing for him to charge headlong to his death, but this boy…

Rin’s boy.

It had always been easy for Uetsugi to love the other three. They favored her so, Princess Reiko and her two eldest brothers. He would have died for them gladly.

This youngest, however…

He was so different from her, so shrewd and subversive. When Uetsugi looked at Ieyasu he saw Rin not at all. He saw the dark-eyed brooding killer the boy would become—

The killer he already was.

Uetsugi screwed his eyes shut. Gods help him but he had blamed this boy. How could he not, with his birth having killed her? But then again, how could he?

He’d been only a child. He was only a child still.

Uetsugi saw her then, once more. A fragment of memory forgotten in his ensuing grief, of her heavy with this child. Looking down at her belly, she’d been crying.

“You’ll watch over my baby, Uetsugi, won’t you?”

He’d told her that he would. Without thinking he had given her his word. He had never imagined it would be so difficult for him to keep it.

Opening his eyes, he settled them firmly on the boy. “We are not going back to the castle.”

Ieyasu frowned. “But my sister, my brother, they—”

Tightly, Uetsugi said, “We are not going back.”

In his hold, the boy began to tremble. “A-all right. But Takechiyo—”

“Listen to me, boy. Your friend is dead.”

“No!” Ieyasu shouted, thrashing. “You’re wrong! They wouldn’t kill him—they think that he’s me!”

“If he’s not dead now, he soon will be. You must forget about him.”

Ieyasu’s dark eyes were glistening. “F-forget about him?” he whimpered. “But it’s my fault they took him. If he’s d-dead it’s because of me…”

Uetsugi relaxed his hold. “I was wrong to say that about him. He’s your friend, and you should remember him. But if we do not leave now, they will catch you and kill you, and your friend will have suffered for nothing.”

Rubbing at his eyes, Ieyasu hung his head and wept. Uetsugi wondered if he had been too harsh with this boy who was still so young. Not knowing what else to do, Uetsugi pulled Ieyasu to his blood-crusted chest, surprised at the ferocity with which the boy hugged him back.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Ieyasu.

To his mother.

Finding a dusty old nag no one had bothered to steal, Uetsugi led her grudgingly out of her stall and hitched her to a cart. The boy was already in rags, but he spit and cringed when Uetsugi rubbed dirt and filthy straw all over him. Uetsugi dirtied himself the same, though he was a bloody mess already. He tore what clothes of his were not yet in tatters, until the last of their finery was obscured. Finding a musty old blanket on a shelf, he draped it over him and affected a hunched, stilted gait until the boy remarked that he looked old and stupid. A frayed strawed hat completed his hapless peasant’s guise. He turned to Ieyasu.

“Get in the cart now,” he said as he threw in bales of hay, random implements. His sword he sheathed under the blanket at his back, in a makeshift holster of leather straps. “I’m going to cover you, but if you’re found, make as though you’re ill and dumb. Do you understand me?”

Ieyasu nodded. He climbed into the cart and curled up on his side. Uetsugi covered him with another stiff and musty blanket. 

“I have a knife,” the boy said, muffled. “I took it off one of the soldiers, but I didn’t get a chance to use it.”

“Keep it close then,” Uetsugi said. “You may have need of it yet.”

With that, Uetsugi led the old mare from the stables, shuffling along beside her slow plodding step. For all appearances he knew he must look no more than a poor, crippled looter, ambling down the burning streets as fast as he could with his sorry spoils.

The enemy was everywhere. Laughing, gloating. His teeth gnashed and his blood boiled, but no one bothered him as he made his way to the closest gate. By some stroke of good fortune it was as of yet unmanned. He slipped through the high city walls as quick as the nag and his ruse would allow. 

Through the woods he found a dirt path, followed it some miles down to the river’s distant edge. There was a small fishing village here, as yet untouched by the scourge that had ravished Edo. The night was still thick, and the residents sleeping. He wheeled around as steathily as he could to the docks below, then drew the nag to a stop.

“Boy,” he whispered harshly, “get out.”

Ieyasu clambered warily out of the cart. Uetsugi gestured to a crude wooden boat tied to a post, and the boy crept in. Tying the nag and her cart to a tree, Uetsugi left her as a payment of sorts, before he climbed into the boat himself, making it dip with his weight, and then cut the ropes free.

“Don’t look back,” he warned, knowing that the boy would do so anyway.

Together with Tokugawa Ieyasu, Uetsugi paddled all through the night.

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

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