Ink Raindrops

The sinking feeling in my gut from Raimen’s newfound art of healing, and the embarrassment of walking into a large number of his little games designed to inform me of how much choice I had in our relationship, left me in a foul mood.  I practiced for several hours in a haze of frustration and anger, barely stopping to acknowledge that girl when she at last showed her face to bring me my lunch from the cabin.  I had not seen Master Mikhail all day either, but his absence was more noticeable than hers.  I wanted to ask her where he’d disappeared to, but as usual, she paid me no attention and wandered back into the cabin, lost in some trance, hearing music or seeing ghosts that none of us could or would.  I didn’t even need to wonder how long it would take her to return to her room.

She was a strange one, and I’d done my best to avoid her; a sentiment she seemed to share in regard to the rest of us.  She had come under Master Mikhail’s tutelage more recently than Raimen or myself, thus giving us seniority.  Though Raimen and I had not become fast friends quite in the way that Master Mikhail had hoped, this girl was a different matter.  We were not enemies, but we were not friends.  In fact, it was safe to say that she noticed us only in bursts.  Master Mikhail had been making excuses for the better part of two years, claiming that her shyness kept her from communicating well, and that she would just take time to come to terms with all of us, but we had decided between ourselves that she must have been, to quote Raimen’s usage of the term with me, a dummy.

Still, for all the unawareness she seemed so content with, the girl was gorgeous, and a talented fighter on top of it.  My own looks were nothing to consider for very long, or so I thought, but that girl – her name was Nana, I thought I remembered – could have been a princess based on her face alone.  At fifteen years old, she was head and shoulders taller than me, and could almost look Raimen in the face if she had ever wanted to.  She ate and drank little, unlike the rest of us, and the lack of “excess” showed well in her figure, but less so in her strength.  Still, when it came time to practice, she could do impossible things with her blade, things the rest of us had yet to consider, and she did them with such accuracy and speed that they put even Raimen on the defensive.  I wanted to believe that maybe he had such trouble with her because of her wide, haunting pale blue eyes or her long blonde hair, but he ignored all such hopes and suggestions toward that end, of course.

To top it off, the tale of her life before coming to live with Master Mikhail was, if anything, more complicated than my own.  Where I knew nothing of my own past and could not have told anyone had I wanted to, Nana did know, but refused to speak of it.  Anytime family or parents were mentioned, or anytime things in the cabin got too cozy, as if we were all a real family bound by blood, she got even quieter than usual and disappeared into her room again, refusing all visitors, including Master Mikhail.  To add to the strangeness, this behavior he accepted without question.  If Raimen or myself had done any such thing, I had no doubt that he would have been in our rooms within the hour, but Nana he seemed to leave alone with an awkward but acceptable grace.  Her secrets were her own, and would forever stay her own, it seemed, since he was unwilling to shed any light on them for the rest of us, who might have been interested in getting to know our house sister.

Though Raimen and I knew it was cruel, we had created a game between ourselves to see which of us could get through her fog enough to produce some sort of a reaction.  She had spoken to us perhaps a handful of times in the two years she’d been with us, and all of them were short bursts, free of discussion or extrapolation on anything.  If given an order, she would obey it and then return to doing nothing; if asked a question, she would answer and fade into the background, or shrug without words if she didn’t know.  She did all the things that most normal people do – eating, sleeping, basic hygiene – but beyond that, she was in a class by herself, a class where nobody spoke and everyone stared into the distance as if there was something very interesting there all the time.

A soft voice behind me – Nana’s – brought me to the realization that the subject of my thoughts had come back outside to join me.  I looked at the ground rather than into her perfect face; it was painful at best to pretend she was normal like the rest of us.  “Anri.  Master Mikhail says to work on your form.”

My heels dug into the ground.  “Thanks.  I’ll tell him how much that means to me when I see him next time, if I ever see him again.  Is he even watching us?”

I watched her shadow shake its head.  “No.  He’s gone.  He got a summon this morning.  He left that in a note for you.”

“Note?”  I blinked.  “I didn’t see any note.  Who did he go see?”

She shrugged, pulling a practice blade from the bin between us; I took that to be all the answer I was going to get about Master Mikhail’s whereabouts.  “You didn’t see the note because Raimen put it in the fire this morning, before you woke up.”

“Figures.”  I spat in the dust, ignoring Master Mikhail’s warning about doing so from days ago.  It somehow gave me courage to fly in the face of expected behavior around this strange, ethereal ghost of a girl.  I had always believed that girls needed to be twice as strong as boys, in order to be their equal and surpass them, but Nana seemed to disagree.  Her mannerisms and behaviors were all delicate and polite, even when fighting.  It made me want to hurt her just to see if she could get dirty.

As I expected she would, she stepped around the place where I spat and onward toward her training dummy on the other side of the field.  Just like that, our conversation was finished.  She couldn’t even say goodbye or “I have to go” like any normal person would.  The urge to trip her or break her sword or something just to get her attention was beyond difficult to ignore.  Sighing, I returned to my own practice, stray thoughts swirling about in my head as they always did.  I was going to have to work on my focus, first and foremost, if I ever wanted to beat Master Mikhail!

The most difficult part of living at the cabin with Master Mikhail, Raimen and Nana wasn’t that our differing natures made it hard for us to co-exist in peace.  It was the knowledge that we, the students, were supposed to be more than just strangers to each other.  Master Mikhail had chosen us, out of all the students interested in practicing the Way, because he felt we were the brightest and the best, with the most potential.  At some point, we would have to stop being children.  By the estimates of some Masters that Master Mikhail made acquaintance with, we had been children too long already.  They looked down on him for letting us grow and learn as people, not to mention the fact that he had not forced us into a team yet.  That team was the problem, as far as I saw it.

The training that Master Mikhail put us through was designed to make warriors out of us.  Only Raimen, I thought, had taken this to heart.  I loved to fight, and to win, and Nana – who knew what Nana thought?  Raimen, on the other hand, was learning things like tactics, and skills that did not rely on his blade alone.  As I had said before, he was the eldest, and that meant that he was a step ahead of the rest of us in realizing where his responsibilities and expectations for the future lay.

His parents, both respectable merchants in the nearby city of Kino, had given him to Master Mikhail hoping that some of his headstrong behavior would be removed by the time they next saw him, and also that he might find a respectable wife to help him carry on the family tradition.  I knew what he thought of the former, but it seemed as if he had accepted the latter without further discussion or argument.  Still, I had met his parents once or twice before, and come to the immediate conclusion of what they would think of his intended bride!  Women, of course, did not belong in the Way.  If not for Master Mikhail’s reputation, training Raimen with the intention of introducing him to a team with two females in it might well have ended his time with us years ago.

A team of students seeking the Way spent their lives together.  They learned to guard each other’s backs, make up for each other’s shortcomings, and work as a perfect, cohesive unit to handle anything that came their way.  The very idea of this as a future made me want to giggle, and it was an urge I could not fight in the end.  Nana did not even glance at me, which just further confirmed my amusement.  How Master Mikhail expected us to even tolerate each other, much less defend and protect each other through death and beyond, was beyond me.  It might even have been beyond Raimen, though he had never said as much near me.

In my eyes, we had an un-winnable combination.  A headstrong girl with no memory of her past and no hope of ever getting it back, a boy more interested in books than fighting, and with enough clout in his life to get whatever he wanted with minimal effort, and a girl that nobody knew or understood enough to guess at what she might be thinking – these things would never make a team!  But then, Master Mikhail had chosen us.  However hard he worked us, and however strange his methods might have been to outsiders, he was the only one of us that could avoid the title of “dummy.”  He was amazing, both as a teacher and as a person, and we would have done anything for his praise, anything at all.  My failure would not have been so crushing if this were not the case.

In light of this, we tried.  We had had very little training as a group, and most often each of us acted on our own instincts.  I was the one that got us into the most unexpected trouble.  Raimen wanted to end everything in one strike and go home for dinner.  Nana rarely even noticed she was in trouble until the blades started flying, and after that her opponents didn’t last long.  I wanted to believe, somewhere inside me, that Fire, Water and Air could combine into something more powerful than each of them alone, but the reality of such a task seemed impossible.  If anyone could do it, Master Mikhail could, but could it be done?

Just as I had stopped laughing and returned to my training, leaving Nana behind me, the silence of the cabin and the surrounding forest was interrupted by the sound of frantic hoofbeats.  Master Mikhail, on the back of his favored horse, arrived out of a gathering cloud of dust, a dangerous frown on his face.  He wasted no time in arriving at the cabin, dismounting, and ushering his horse into the small adjoining stable that he kept for our mounts.  We all had them, but only Nana ever did more than ride hers; she even talked to the things as if they were human!

Master Mikhail turned away from the stable and looked out at Nana and me.  His eyes were serious and sad in a way that I had never seen them before.  If he hadn’t been our esteemed teacher and someone worthy of at least some respect, I might have asked if his best friend died, or perhaps his dog.  It worried me more than I cared to admit.  He was always the firm one, the calm one in the face of anything.  What could have happened?  Where had he been summoned, and what grave news had he received there?  Hadn’t he just accepted my failed excuse for a challenge with grim amusement just two days prior?  To look at him now was to see a man aged ten years in a single day; no, a single afternoon.

The feeling of despair that had started with Raimen’s careless healing and worsened with thoughts of how we were ever going to band into something approaching a team was getting stronger.  When Master Mikhail spoke, it reached newer heights again.  “Anri, Nana, I have something you need to hear, and the sooner you hear it, the sooner you will be prepared to face it.”

I went inside, with no argument, and Nana followed, moving as fast as I had ever seen her move before.  It was the least I could do for a man I respected so much, and who had tried, at least, to humor my selfish need for attention via a challenge I should have known I could never win.  Whatever news he brought was grim indeed, and I wanted to be sure that I was the first to hear it for myself.

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