by Zoe Marriott
Like you, I thought, but did not say. “And what of the cold?” I asked, more cautious now, since his avoidance of that question had been obvious.
He sighed but did not falter or look at me. “The maze is filled with wonders – but also with danger. There are other gardens than this one, some of which seek to beguile or even entrap. There are … beasts that roam the thorns. At the very centre of the maze dwells its creator. I call her Yuki-Onna. She is a creature of ice. Ice and magic. If you stray too close to the centre of the maze, to her home, the ice will find you.”
I stared at the side of his head until he moved around me so that he could apply leaves to the back of my arm. The Yuki-Onna – snow maiden – was a beautiful female spirit who approached travellers lost in the snow and either stole their lives by tricking and freezing them to death, or, very occasionally, saved them from the storm by guiding them to safety. I supposed it might not be beyond the power of such a creature to create a magical maze and populate it with traps for the unwary visitor.
Yet I could not help but notice that, although Itsuki spoke of this woman – or creature – and her home as dangerous, there was a sort of warmth, a softness in his voice when he said “her”. And Itsuki was not precisely a normal human man himself, was he? Could it be…?
“Is the Yuki-Onna your – friend?” I asked delicately. “Is that why you chose to live here?”
He leaned away from me to select more leaves from his basket. The silence lengthened. At last he said, “She is not a friend to anyone. Certainly not to me. I do not choose to live here, Hana-san. This is a prison, and I am its prisoner. I cannot leave.”
A prison? I stiffened in alarm, and winced as my wounds protested. “How did I come to be here, then? And how will I get out?”
“Be calm,” he ordered me, laying a hand so softly on the blade of my shoulder that it felt like the flutter of a bird’s wing on my bare skin. “The forest beyond the maze is part of the Yuki-Onna’s demesne and it is … not quite a normal forest. It is alive. Sometimes, and I know not how, it brings me things. Birds. Deer. Foxes. Creatures which are injured and will die without my help.”
“The Dark Wood,” I murmured. I knew the place he spoke of and yet … I knew I was forgetting something important about it.
“If you like. The forest brought you here and laid you at my door. But this place was not built to hold you. You are not its prisoner. The Yuki-Onna has no reason to wish to keep you against your will, for you have done nothing wrong. She is … not … unreasonable. Most of the time. If you wish to leave, you will have to face her, eventually. But you must get better first, so that you can endure the long walk through the maze, and the cold. And so that if – if I am wrong – you are strong enough to run from her.”
That is … not entirely reassuring.
I turned what he had said over in my mind, once again feeling that rising sense of urgency that I did not understand. “How long will it be before I am well enough, do you think?”
“You are strong and healthy, and your wounds are healing well. It will not be very soon. But it will not be very long, either,” he said. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought he sounded a little sad.
I chewed on my next question for some time before I eventually spat it out. “Itsuki-san, why did the Yuki-Onna build a prison just for you? What is she punishing you for?”
“I do not wish to speak of it,” he said immediately – without anger, but without any hint of hesitation or softness. “It is between the snow maiden and me. I promise that no harm will come to you at my hands, and I will do all I can to protect you while you are in this place. I would ask you not to bring it up again.”
I stammered, “I— A−as you wish. Of course.”
So my saviour was a captive. A prisoner in a cursed jail, held here against his will by a powerful, magical creature. It seemed … an unlikely story. Not that I questioned the truth of what Itsuki had told me, not really. He had no real reason to lie. But without knowing more – the whys that Itsuki did not wish to discuss and the hows he apparently did not understand – it all seemed too fantastical and outlandish to be real.
There was also the puzzle of Itsuki himself. What manner of person was he? Where did he come from? Had he been born with that face? What chain of events had led him to this pass? He was not an angry, defiant prisoner, railing against the bars that held him, that much was clear. He did not seem hopeless or despairing, either – but I thought his serenity, or seeming serenity, was hard won.
Yet … there was more to it than that. He spoke of the maze and its creatures almost with affection. And perhaps his captor, too. He had some feeling for her. Could a prisoner whose freedom was unjustly taken really come to love his prison – or pity his jailer? I didn’t think so.
That would mean Itsuki’s imprisonment was a just one.
What did he do?
I swallowed. He was trapped here in his strange prison – and for now I was trapped with him. Perhaps … I didn’t want to know what he had done to deserve the sentence.
Perhaps it was simply best to hope I never found out.
After I was firmly and completely wrapped up once more, Itsuki removed the heavy lid from the pot over the hearth and dished out a generous helping of savoury hotpot. There were chewy pale noodles in it, far thicker and more substantial than the ones I was used to, and several kinds of nutty mushrooms, and unfamiliar root vegetables, and a purple thing that Itsuki told me he thought was a kind of onion, which was sweet and still a little crunchy. He seasoned the dish with a sprinkle of dried moss. None of it tasted like anything I had ever eaten before, but it was good. After two slow and careful spoonfuls, my stomach woke up and began growling viciously, keeping up its protests until Itsuki – huffing with quiet laughter – had served me a second bowlful and some crispy, flat, golden cake-things that, again, he had made himself.
“I’m only surprised it took this long for your stomach to start complaining,” he said, as I sheepishly patted my faintly swollen belly.
“Me too,” I said, risking a tentative smile, “if all I’ve had for ten whole days is that pain draught.”
“The pain medicine is a powder. I put it in a soup of stewed herbs for you to drink. I know it is bitter and unpleasant, but it’s very nourishing. I’m not sure if anyone could survive on plain water for almost two weeks after having lost as much blood as you did. You would have become very weak. Maybe too weak to wake up.”
When a person doesn’t move, can’t eat or drink much, their body starts to fail very quickly…
I frowned as the words drifted through my head, then said, “It’s a shame we have nothing like these herbs in my village. Something like that would have helped us through our hard winters, when the stocks get low and we’re almost willing to peel the paper out of the screens and eat it.”
“There is no winter here, save for at the centre of the maze,” Itsuki said. “But without these herbs I would have starved myself, my first few years in this place, before I had learned its ways. When – when you leave, you could take seeds. Cuttings. Plant them in your home and see if they will grow there. Something to remember me by.”
I opened my mouth – but before I could reply, his sudden, obvious tension silenced me. Very, very carefully he put down the flat stone on which a few of the golden cakes remained. Then, as though that small gesture had used up all his restraint, he doubled over.
One hand slammed against the packed dirt floor hard enough to dent it, and he fell forwards onto his front. A long, agonizing ripple seemed to move down the line of his back. The knotting and clenching of his muscles was visible even through the folds of his cloak. He let out a muffled, broken sound, all the more pathetic for being nearly soundless.
There was a sharp, sickening crack, and his leg, clad in rough dark leggings, which had been exposed when he sprawled forwards … twisted. The foot turned inwards at an angle that ought to have snapped his shin bone in two, and might well have done, given that noise.
At the same time his knee bent back obscenely. There was another crack, and he shuddered. The broad straight line of his right shoulder seemed to buckle inwards. Yet he still did not cry out. He expected no help. He expected no one to care. No one to comfort him, as he had comforted me.
“Itsuki-san – Dear Moon – what is it?” I cried, shaking off the horror that had paralysed me and beginning to crawl towards him. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Stay back,” he grunted. In disbelief I saw him snatch at the corner of his cloak, jerking his bent leg in as he did so to hide it from sight. “Please.”
“Let me help,” I demanded. “There must be something—”
He shook his head. The next words emerged as a groan. “It. Will. Pass.”
I drew in a deep breath, understanding at last. No matter how sudden and horrifying this seemed to me, it was no unknown thing to Itsuki. The terrible twisting and cracking in his body was something he had suffered through before. Perhaps – many times. What had he said when I cried out with the anguish of my wounds? Pain always passes. What we know will pass, we can endure…
Still, I could not bear to simply sit here and watch him writhe. There was something I could do to soothe him, one thing that he had done for me before. I would try it. Licking my lips to moisten them, I softly began:
“Sakura, sakura, covering the sky,
Drifting like mist, and clouds…
Sakura, sakura, covering the sky,
Come, come with me now and see them…”
I had no great singing voice, and the song came out low, and mournful, because that was how I felt – but I could carry a tune at least. It seemed to be enough. The faint sounds of shallow, pained panting from beneath the cloak eased slowly into a deeper, healthier rhythm, and though the dreadful spasms still travelled through his frame they seemed to torment him a little less. That last could have been my wishful thinking. In any case, my singing was the best I could do. All I could do.
When at last the attack – or whatever it had been – passed away, Itsuki lay curled into a tight ball on the floor, every bit of him drawn into himself and hidden under the dark cloak. My voice faded away, leaving the room echoing with quiet. The fire had died down again and night had fallen in earnest. Outside, somewhere in the distance, came the peculiar, liquid cry of the white bird that I had seen earlier. Itsuki shivered.
Was this an … an illness? Old injuries suddenly paining him? No, of course not, I scolded myself. It was too sudden and too extreme for that. This suffering was nothing natural – and that meant it must be magic. A further punishment from his jailer − that cold and vengeful ice spirit? I had to know. I had to ask. My mouth opened again – and Itsuki finally spoke, his voice hoarse and quiet, barely a whisper.
“Thank you,” he murmured, voice breaking on the words. “I’m … sorry.”
I heard more in the words than simple gratitude. They were almost a plea.
Do not ask. Do not pry. I do not wish to speak of it.
I sighed. Of all the mysteries in this place, this stranger was the biggest of all. Yet he did not want to be solved, and I must respect that. It seemed little enough to ask, given all the trouble I had put him to. I repeated his own words back at him: “There is nothing to thank me for. And nothing to forgive.”
But we both knew that I was giving in. No more questions.
He shuddered once more, then seemed to relax. Neither of us spoke again that night.
Ten
A sound like thunder splits the air, trembles the ground. Behind jagged ivory fangs, the mouth glows, dark red, fire raging inside; steam rolls out as the jaws open wider, wider—
“… We might be able to keep him alive until the Moon is next dark…”
“No one comes back from the Dark Wood.”
Kyo, why didn’t you come home? Kyo, where are you?
I sat upright with a gasp that turned into a tooth-gritted groan of pain as my wounds caught fire at the movement. I wheezed, the room swooping and trembling around me, until the agony began to fade.
“Are you all right?” Itsuki asked, a little tentatively, from his place by the fire. Over the past few days he had learned I did not always appreciate that question.
As the physical pain subsided, the deep, empty ache of loss took its place. My brother was dead, and I would never see him again, and it was all my fault, and I couldn’t remember why and somehow that made it all so much worse. It took an effort to make myself nod, even if brusquely, and to keep my voice polite. “Yes. It was only a dream.”
My head might have been jumbled and confused, but of some things I was certain. I had to get better quickly. I had to get better so I could face down Itsuki’s Yuki-Onna, escape this maze, and go back to my village. They needed me. Time is running out! Hurry! Hurry!
But frustratingly, I could not force it to happen. My injuries would heal in their own time, and I had enough common sense to realize that bullying my body would most likely only set my recovery back. That didn’t make the waiting any easier.
In this, Itsuki was both ally and hindrance – for he was the most truly patient person I had ever known. Whether he had been born that way, or learned it through experience, it seemed as natural as breathing to him now. There were times when I wanted to scream at him, prod at him, throw things at his head – anything to disturb his endless, stolid serenity. But of course, I did not. He was still, ultimately, a stranger to me. One whose reactions I could not really predict, and whose tolerance I did not seek to test.
So instead I tried to learn from him. Tried to grasp his unhurried gentleness, his kindness, the soft rumble of his voice, and draw them into myself, to smooth down the jagged edges of my need to be up, moving, doing. At times it seemed to work, and those times were enough to make my enforced inactivity more bearable. But not always.
At first I needed an exasperating amount of sleep, and rest. The most ordinary activities exhausted me, and sometimes, I dozed off mid-sentence, a habit that amused Itsuki immensely, even if he never said it flat out. He did make the mistake of telling me, once, that I snored. It was a very nice snore, he assured me. Lady-like, even. He didn’t quite manage to hide his soft huff of laughter.
I resisted heaving my cup of tea in his face, but only just.
As I began to get a little stronger, though, the days fell into a bizarre semblance of routine. When we woke – or rather, when I woke, for Itsuki had usually been up for hours by that time – we ate together, and he enquired if I had slept well, if I felt any pain, or if my bandages were flaking. Assuming the answer to these questions were yes, no, and not yet, he would bring me a pan of water and a soft cloth and make himself scarce for a short while so that I could wash my hands and face, and the rest of myself as best I could with only one working hand.
Finished with the task, or having just given up, I would pour the pan of dirty water away into the little hole bored into a corner of the stone room, and answer nature’s call there, too. After I had eased a robe closed over myself, I would call my quiet friend back, and he would help me to tie the sash tightly at the waist, since my bad hand still did not have the strength to hold or pull the cloth. And then we would go out.
In the beginning Itsuki had tried – most emphatically tried – to persuade me to stay in his little room and doze the days away. Whether he wanted to keep some distance between us, or was worried about the danger to me in the enchanted prison-maze, his determination to keep me idle caused something dangerously close to our first real argument.
I wanted to be good. To be patient, and rest, as he had urged me. I knew that his advice made sense. But common sense meant little to me when each day I felt more like a prisoner. And Itsuki, no matter his kindness, more and more like my jailer.
“What is the matter with me?” I muttered into the silence of the little stone room after Itsuki had left it, my good hand pleating restlessly at the skirt of my robe. “Why can’t I be still? What is wrong with me?”
There was no answer
. But that was only the first day.
By the second day I swore I could see the damp walls pressing in and down upon me with each unmarked hour, and I felt the tide of hopelessness – I would never get better, I would never get out, no one was looking for me, I was nothing but a burden, I might as well die – rising up to meet that oppressive ceiling until I thought that it would drown me.
I twitched and fidgeted, coming perilously close to hurting myself in my desperation to move. Despite the strict orders of my healer, I eventually gave in, heaved myself to my feet and paced, slow and heavy, leaning against those hateful walls for balance.
It didn’t help.
You are hollow, a new voice – a sneering, hateful voice – whispered in my mind. You are a useless, broken thing…
Useless.
Useless.
The voice sounded like Kyo.
“What did I do? What did I do wrong?” I begged of the endless, circling recriminations in my mind.
It was your fault. All your fault, sister, was the only answer. And I felt the rightness, the terrible echo of it, aching dully in the marrow of my bones. That’s why no one wants you.
The ache made me want to cry. To scream. To run from the room as I had done before. But I did not have the strength for any of it. I found myself eyeing the pot where Itsuki kept his powdered sleeping draught with longing. Perhaps, if I could just sleep as he asked me to… Perhaps … perhaps if I took a lot of the stuff, I would sleep for a long time and wake up all better…
