The journey that had taken Sumire and her family many longs months to make through the wilderness they completed in less than a fortnight by traveling along the main roads. Still the snows raced ahead of them, blanketing the western countryside in such thick drifts that the scars of war were largely hidden. Yet Sumire glimpsed them all the same, in the spear-studded fields, the burned-out huts and the grim faces of the peasants. She strained her eyes for familiar sights, yet few greeted her in that whited-out landscape. When they reached the outskirts of the city she’d called home for more than forty years, she beheld it with a stranger’s eyes. 

The armed escort Kohaku had sent with them accompanied the family as far as the new city gates. Seeing soldiers in their midst, the gatekeepers halted them well in advance. They were an unfriendly lot, these new city guardsmen, with a sly look about them which Sumire distinctly misliked. With little attempt at civility, they bid the escorting soldiers depart at once. After a moment’s decision, Kouta nodded to them to go. Sumire suppressed her misgivings as Kohaku’s men nodded back to him and rode away.

They’d barely rounded the bend when the guardsmen descended like vultures. It was nothing short of a shakedown. Immediately, the family was ordered to turn out their gold and valuables for so-called inspection. Kouta’s jaw was clenched and his features hard, but what could he do? The guardsmen were already rifling through their possessions, chuckling at what loot they found as they tossed aside the rest like so much chaff.

When his daughter began to cry, Kouta’s temper snapped. Angrily, he strode forward. With a raised fist the captain threatened him back, but it was his wife’s desperate hold on him which stilled him. 

“Good man,” the captain said, giving Shurei a leer which made Sumire want to charge him herself. “You want to pass, you’ll pay your dues same as any other.”

“Bribes, you mean,” Kouta bit out, despite his wife’s attempts to quell him.

The captain’s ugly sneer turned uglier. “I’d watch my tongue if I was you, or it’s milord’s pardon you’ll be begging. I’ll warn ye, he’s not a man who takes kindly to having his peace disturbed.”

Balefully, Kouta fell silent. In the end, they were stripped of everything of worth they’d brought with them, both from the west and back again. Even Shurei’s wedding jewelry, so well-hidden, was found and taken from her, despite her tearful pleas.

Lowering the jade pendant he’d been ogling, one of the guards muttered aside, “Who’re you scowling at, brat?”

When little Kenichi continued stubbornly to scowl, Sumire rushed forward and swept him up.

With scarcely more than the clothes on their backs, they were waved through the gates. Within, the city was so changed Sumire and her family struggled to gain their bearings. Adrift in this foreign home of theirs, they wandered through the snow-churned streets. The new fortifications and facades glared in their fresh-hewn rawness. The old structures tottered, blackened and bleak from the ravages of war.

Glorified squatters occupied the repaired Inoki estate. These loyalists to the new regime sneered in Kouta’s face, daring him to challenge their claim. But it was the fate of his displaced family which concerned him most. 

In the squalid shacks at the periphery of town, he found them, the ragged remnant of his clan that remained. His father had perished, his ashes interred in a pauper’s grave. His mother was a bedridden shell of herself. Most of the men had been put to the sword, but the rest had not fared much better. All were maimed, though not necessarily to the eye. Several of the women were near-catatonic from their traumas. Like the living dead, they ambled about the hovels, staring vacantly and speaking not at all.

As Kouta took himself off in his grief, to seek after his father’s remains, Shurei and Sumire fell at once to tending to the dispirited survivors. Long into the night they labored. Scrounging about for food and fuel, they fed and warmed the wasted children, the battered women and crippled men. They cleaned and patched up the drafty, sooty rooms and their occupants as best they could, setting Sumire’s children to work fetching fresh water, wood and straw.

Unable to sleep, in the forbidding chill of predawn, Sumire set off with only the stars and moon to guide her. Yet she could have tread this path with both eyes blinded.

Near the riverbank she drew to a stop, frozen still at the sight that met her eyes. Where the brothel house had been, with its tall strong walls and sweeping courts, there was now only a dim outline. Brittle black shards of broken beams stabbed up through the snow, like a scattering of charred bones among the ashes.

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi