Way of the Dragon (Yellow) > Chapter Four: Treason
The silence between us hung in the air like wet laundry on a hot summer day; oppressive, heavy and uncomfortable. Master Mikhail didn’t know where to begin; the muscles in his cheek twitched with failed speech. Raimen no longer slouched in his chair; he stood erect before Master Mikhail like a wave at breaking height, myself on his left and Nana on his right. Every line in his body spoke of haste that Master Mikhail had yet to order. Nana stared at the wall. She veiled her blue eyes with her thick, dark lashes, as if beguiling her teacher into exposing his secrets to her; it wouldn’t work. For my own part, I had to remember to breathe, and with each breath I took, I grew more and more frustrated by the wait. Master Mikhail knew it; his glances at me were as much apology as I had ever gotten from him in my entire life. I had never been good at waiting for inevitability to knock instead of letting itself in.
In the end, the voice that spoke stunned us all, perhaps most because it was not mine. If Nana had ever broken a silence before that moment, we had never known it. “What has happened, Master? You said we must know.”
Her brave words, spoken in her usual dream-like monotone, convinced Master Mikhail to cease his hesitation and let out his breath in a huge sigh. “You are correct, Nana. Though I have thought long and hard on how best to spare you from this, I cannot escape fate.” A bare suggestion of a wry smile crossed his face as he turned back to the rest of us. “Your Dragon, of any of you, knows best how I feel at this moment. I wish to breathe fire, and yet I am choked by the duty I have to myself, and to you, not to.”
I frowned as Nana and Raimen glanced my direction. It was obvious to anyone that I knew something of breathing fire. Master Mikhail knew I had no hope of holding it back!
“Does that mean you’re angry with us?” Raimen spoke this time, his hands searching with poor aim for his pockets. He, more than any of us, had reason to fear that! Had Master Mikhail noticed his excessive reading habit at last?
Master Mikhail shook his head. “I fear I have been angry with you for the last time, my students, and that is what troubles me so. Had I known, I would have made it count.” Our full attention rested on him, then, and on his words. Even Nana no longer looked beyond him.
I was the first to recover from the shock. “What do you mean, last time? We’re barely into our training, you can’t just leave us! We’ve come so far…” Had we at last pushed his patience too far? Myself, with my foolish challenge? Raimen, with his clandestine practices? Nana, with her lack of participation?
His eyes clouded over with an emotion I could not place as either grief or rage. “Rest easy on that, at least, my Dragon. I would never leave you by my own choice. Your weaknesses, though they are many, make me love you all the more. But the world will not see them that way. It is the world that must see them now.”
The door opened behind us with a loud creak, and Master Mikhail’s hand jumped to his blade’s hilt as the three of us whirled to greet the intruder. I did not need to glance at the others to know that they shared my immediate and intense dislike of the stranger. He was tall but muscled, twice the width of Master Mikhail, and the thick, greasy manes of black hair and black mustache he wore served to make him look bearlike. His clothing was simple but well made, in the familiar blue and gold of our own Kouda Empire, and bore a great many complicated designs and badges on the shoulders. Whoever he was, he was high-ranking military, and where he walked, oceans trembled in his wake. He did not deign to hide it from us, children that we were, let alone from Master Mikhail.
Master Mikhail greeted him, if his words could be called a greeting. “I believe I requested some time to inform them, Master Grimm. I have had but a moment.”
Master Grimm sneered beneath his mustache. I imagined I could smell his foul breath between his yellowing teeth. “A moment is all you need. You were always long-winded, Mikhail. Maybe if you’d talked less, they wouldn’t be here now.”
The absence of the “Master” honorific when addressing Master Mikhail could not be mistaken for anything other than an insult. I bristled, and Raimen took a step forward, but Nana made no motion, her veiled gaze now locked dead with the stranger’s face. He was not immune to her charms, teenager though she was, and it was with clear disgust that he looked away from her and back to Master Mikhail. “Taught this one to make eyes at gentlemen, have you, Mikhail? That’s bad for her, pretty thing as she is. Where they’re going, I won’t be able to babysit her like you do.”
Again, Nana surprised us all by speaking. “Baby me at your peril.” We stared at her, stunned by the offensive comment to anyone, let alone a powerful military officer. Was this the same Nana who had ignored us for years?
Master Grimm laughed, a loud, obnoxious bellow that made us all want to punch him just to remove the source of the noise. He moved toward Nana with more speed than we had expected from such a hulk of a man, and his grubby hand shot out to grasp her pale, skinny arm. When he pulled, it was like pulling a child’s doll off of a bed. Nana stumbled and fell, Master Grimm’s power the only thing keeping her aloft. Her lashes ceased to veil her eyes then, and the look she gave him delved deeper into hatred than any of us had reason to see before. He himself paused, uncertain, before smiling a gap-toothed grin at her. “It would seem, missy, that your Master hasn’t taught you to respect your elders.”
Master Mikhail’s sword was halfway out of its scabbard by the time Nana stumbled. When he spoke, there was an edge of warning in his voice that went beyond the ones we had heard as punishment over the years. “Master Grimm. Your orders are clear, and I will obey them without question. However, invading my home and mistreating my students is an abuse of power that will not go unpunished. I came here to do as you wish. Unless you want further trouble, I suggest you allow me to finish. This will take far longer, and will be far more difficult, if you do not.”
“Is that a threat, Mikhail? You must keep plenty of blackwine in that cellar of yours. You’d have to be drunk on something, to challenge me after so many years nursing babies in the forest.” Master Grimm laughed, and thrust Nana away from him as if she were no more than a sack of meal. As the only one not in the immediate path of the brewing storm, I found myself forced to catch her. She did not want my help; she pulled away from me as if my touch burned her, and stood tall and proud before her attacker again. I knew what it was like to feel the heat of my anger manifest, but for the first time in my life, I felt as if I could hear the wind howling like that of a monsoon storm, enraged and proud, ready to destroy everything it touched. If I weren’t still pretending to know better, I would have called it proof that the Voice of Nature did indeed have multiple Voices.
At last, I found my voice. “Get out!” Nana’s anger, and Master Mikhail’s, were becoming infectious, and I wasn’t about to be the last one yelling at this oversized monster! “I don’t know who you are or what you’re here for, but Master Mikhail was trying to tell us something important. Those marks on your sleeve are pretty, but standing in line is something that we all do, not just those of us without uniforms.”
He glowered at me, and might have resorted to violence again, had Master Mikhail not stepped forward and blocked my sword arm with his body. “Silence, Dragon.” He did not look at me; his eyes were for his fellow Master alone. “That goes for you all. What I have to tell you concerns Master Grimm, and now it has become even harder to tell you.” If looks could kill by themselves, Master Grimm would have ceased to concern us in that moment. “Master Grimm, wait outside until I have done what I must. I will keep you waiting no longer than necessary. If you suspect me of treason, so be it, but I will not have you entering my home like a common criminal, whatever your rank may be. If you leave now, the Emperor will not hear of your misconduct this day.”
Master Grimm shook his head and turned his massive back on us all, heading for the door. I half expected him to walk through it, reducing it to so many splinters, but he did not. Something about his face when Master Mikhail called me “Dragon” seemed to change, but he did not allow me more than a moment to notice. With no further word, he opened the door, took his leave and then slammed it behind him, the force of the slam making our heads ache and our bodies tremble. Beast though this Master Grimm was, the power he commanded had to be envied; at least I thought so. The others were glad to be rid of him, and little else.
Master Mikhail sighed, at last resigned to his duty. Before a moment had passed, he found the strength to continue his speech to us.
“Master Grimm, as you can see, is very high up the chain of command in the Empire’s military. He and I are of equal stature, in fact, though he lives at the side of the Emperor and I choose to live here in the forest with you as my students. He has trained a great many children in the Way, just as I have. Most no longer live. The ones that do are great warriors, destined for the blessings of the Gods.”
He paused. “You know that my teachings are not what other Masters expect. They have run counter to the Emperor’s expectations for a great many years. It seems the time has come for my incorrect teaching to end.”
“Incorrect?” My voice was louder than I expected. “We’re the best! Sure, we make mistakes, we’re nowhere near a team, but… but…”
“You are behind.” The sadness in his voice betrayed him at last. “Or so they would have you believe. You know that other children your age have seen their first war, and still others have died in it. The world is a fearsome place, and with each day that dawns, new enemies come to our great Empire, seeking glory or riches. They believe that battle is the only thing that matters. I wanted…”
His voice broke, and it frightened us all more than anything he could have said at that moment. “I wanted you to know you were not alone in the world, before you had to face that reality. On each other you must rely to survive, not just in battle, but in life. That is why I held you back, why I never pushed you as hard as the Emperor demanded. Now, you must survive in a world that will not look kindly on you for my choices.”
Raimen’s hands were shaking. I watched him clench them in his pockets to ward it off. “So you will no longer be our Master. Instead, we are to go with that man.” It was not a question, it was a statement, and Master Mikhail could do nothing but nod in affirmation. “He will fix the mistakes he sees in us. What then?”
Nana answered him, but in her usual, emotionless way. “Then we go to war, with the enemies of our Empire. We destroy them so that we may live.”
Master Mikhail’s voice was growing more quiet by the moment. “Nana is correct. They will ask you to fight, and die, for this Empire that you love so well. As followers of the Way, they will expect you to have powers that you do not, and skills that you do not. They will teach you all that you need to know in how to kill a man, or a woman. For Anri, and for Nana, these days will be dark indeed. The Emperor knows that war games are not for women. I have indulged you too far, by his eyes. You must prove to him that you are worth training.”
At that moment, I realized that everyone’s eyes were on me. Uncomfortable with the sudden attention, I tried to figure out if I had spoken out of turn or moved to follow through with some action. Instead, I realized my cheeks were wet with tears. Embarrassed, I dragged my sleeve across my face, but the wetness remained. I had to admit, if only to myself, that I was terrified. Not only were we losing the man I adored as a father figure in my life, but chances were good that we would all be separated. Raimen, the last person I would have chosen to stay with, and Nana, the strange girl that I would never understand, were not friends, but they were all I had known in life. To lose them was to lose all that remained of my history. I still had so much to learn; I wasn’t ready to be on my own! And it was obvious that Master Mikhail’s heart was breaking as much, or more, than mine was. But what could we do? The beast still lumbered outside, awaiting his call to take us away, and Master Mikhail could no longer keep us.
“They won’t take us.” Raimen’s voice was harder than I had ever heard it, and looking up at him then, I caught a glimmer of the man I had seen the night before, when he healed the wound in my hand. The foolish boy was gone, and in his shoes and clothing stood a man of no small power and no small intellect. I could not sort out in my mind whether his voice made me want to hate him, or to follow him to the ends of the earth. “We escape, of course. That brute looks to be all strength. Most of us here aren’t. There must be a way to get free and follow our own path back here.”
Master Mikhail was a man divided at these words. At once his face shone with pride, and then fell in an instant back to despair. “If you choose that path, my Breaker, know the dangers you face. They will hunt you. They will always hunt you. The war they lead you to will rage, with or without you, and your hands will not be able to join them. Right now, you may not believe there will be a reason to fight and to die. That may not always be true. War is always the last resort, but there are things in life that are worth fighting for. Joining the military after such an act will be impossible.”
“Then we fight alone.” I wondered if Raimen had lost whatever remained of his mind when he chose to continue his argument. Despite the fear we could all see in him, he was not to be dissuaded from his newfound goal. “The three of us. We’ll make it work.”
I couldn’t stop myself from laughing, and at the sound he flinched as if I had struck him the way I’d wanted to for years. Frustration won out in the end, however, and he rounded on me with every ounce of courage he possessed. “What choice do we have, Anri? Either we get caught up in this trap that’s been laid for us, or we run and try to find our own way. Neither option is best, but do you want to be a slave? If they control us now, they control us the rest of our lives. I can’t imagine you a slave for long.”
He was right about that! The future, however, I had not stopped to ponder much beyond the eventual necessity of needing to form a team under Master Mikhail. The things that were being spoken of – war, control, death in battle – had never been concrete ideas in my mind until now. The tears on my cheeks were more than enough proof of how terrified I was; I needed not tell Raimen the truth when my heart betrayed it for me. The other option, though, was to trust my life, such as it was, to this boy, this Breaker, whom I could not look at without consequence; or the girl that seemed never to see me at all. Even now she looked through me, as if trying to hone in on a tiny speck on the wall somewhere behind me. What she was looking for, I would never know, but if I placed my life in her hands, I would have to help her find it. I had enough problems of my own!
“Consider this as well, my students.” Master Mikhail broke our silence for us, which was just as well; I had not formulated a response that suited me yet. “The Voices that speak to each of you have not done more than whisper as yet. You know this as well as I do. Without training, the first Words She speaks may destroy you, to say nothing of your own first Words.” His eyes rested on Raimen then, which made both of us shift in place. Raimen had a sudden urge to scratch his head and look downward while doing it. He knew! “You grow in power every day now, but without proper guidance, you may not live to use the full extent of your abilities. Under the Emperor, you might.”
A thought came to me then, a dangerous one that I dared not speak aloud. If we learned to use our powers, could we not then use them to put an end to those that forced our hands into such decisions? If the Emperor wanted us, he could have us, in a blaze of fire.
“No, my Dragon.” Of course, Master Mikhail knew what I was thinking! “You may think this is the Emperor’s doing, and it is, but he acts for the good of us all. He is not your enemy. The world is your enemy; this world full of fear and suspicion and danger between men, women, children, animals and even the ground you now walk on. His path is to find unity between them all, and what he does, he does to this end. Right now, his hand has put you all in a dangerous place, and I suspect he knows not the full extent of what he has done, but this is not aimed at us. I cannot believe that, not while I know him and serve him.”
A voice interrupted our thoughts from outside – it seemed Master Grimm had tired of waiting again. “Finish your goodbyes, Mikhail, or I’ll finish them for you. I’ve been more than patient.”
“We have to decide.” Raimen’s eyes, blue as the ocean, were as black as a stormy sea. “We can’t stay here any longer.” Before Nana or myself could react, he knelt down on the cabin floor in front of us and bowed his head. “Master Mikhail has taught us to stand together in the face of danger. Whatever we decide, we must decide it as one. What will you do? Anri? Nana?”
I bit my lip almost in two. How dare he put all the pressure on us? How dare he insist that we were to choose? It was true, he’d given us all his thoughts already, but still, how many times had he played the “older and wiser” card, or the “man chooses” card in our past to his benefit? Then I knew, and the knowing came deeper than it ever had before; the time for childish games was over. This was not Raimen the boy, taunting us, pulling hair and threatening to marry me for the billionth time. This was Raimen the growing man, reaching out to us as equals, as partners, in a moment of weakness. He was right – if we didn’t stand together, we had no chance and no choice in what followed. I would never follow him for the sake of following him, I would sooner die; but could I, should I, follow him because he was right? Or was there another way that none of us had seen yet?
I had thought Nana would flee, if forced to rely on either of us. She had not given us any indication that she trusted us or would protect us, if need came. Neither of us had expected much from her, once we had graduated past Master Mikhail’s influence. Yet in the end, she was the first to reach down and rest one of her dainty white hands on Raimen’s head without so much as a flinch. “I will not give myself to a man like him.” We knew she meant Master Grimm, even if she would not speak his name herself. “I fear no Emperor, but if he wished my consent, he would not send such a man. Perhaps in time he will understand.”
It was the largest number of words I had heard from her. In her own way, she was as serious as Raimen was now. That left me, and I had yet to find my own answers. Master Grimm’s heavy breathing on the back of the door, and the movements of his giant shadow beneath it, seemed to mark each second of my indecision. It wasn’t that Raimen or Nana’s arguments lacked sense. It wasn’t that I thought they were wrong. It was the finality of it all; the saying farewell to the only man I had ever trusted, and walking away into the sunlight as my own woman. I was only thirteen years old, and the others not much more than that! What had happened to the peace we so cherished, the time we had to learn and to grow, as Master Mikhail promised us? Somewhere, the world had changed, and robbed us of that. In our solitude, we had not known until too late. Even Master Mikhail knew it, from the look on his face. He had lost us far sooner than he meant to; he had failed.
At those thoughts, I understood, or at least I believed I did. Master Mikhail had told us that the world was our enemy. The enemy that controlled the Emperor’s hands, and Master Mikhail’s, and even Master Grimm’s, controlled ours as well. Whatever had happened, we needed to discover it, and choose for ourselves what to do about it.
The door burst open then, and Master Grimm thundered in, his massive sword drawn and clenched in his giant fist. “Time’s up. Hand over the brats, Mikhail, or…”
I acted without thinking, much as I always did. A kitchen knife from the morning’s breakfast still lay on the table nearest us, and I almost grabbed the blade end first in my haste. Master Grimm’s onslaught paused just long enough for him to register the small drop of blood trailing from the new glancing slash across his bicep, and then come face to face with the impetuous brat that caused it – me.
Master Mikhail looked furious; Raimen looked stunned. Nana, I could have sworn, wore a hair’s breadth of a smile. I glowered at the towering Master with all the ferocity of the Dragon I had been named for, and stepped forward, putting my friends and former Master behind me. Though I was not sure, as Raimen was, that we could make this work between the three of us, I was not willing to hand myself over to the horrid man in front of us any more than Nana was. He stood in the way of the time we all needed most, and for that, I would delay him further.
“We choose, together,” I growled between my teeth. “We choose Master Mikhail.”
“No.”
The voice behind me was Master Mikhail’s, but it was quieter and sadder than it should have been, after such a statement. Master Grimm, trembling in rage from my insolence and the injury I had dealt him, prepared to put me in my place, but Master Mikhail put his hand on my knife arm, and I found myself powerless to lift it again. I tried, straining all my might against it, but my arm refused to obey my orders. The knife, useless now, clattered to the floor beneath me. It occurred to me then, for the first time, that I had never known what Voice Master Mikhail heard. From the looks on the faces of the others, neither had they. Until now, he had never had reason to use his power against us, when he could manage us so well with mere words.
He forced me backward with a gentle but firm sweep of his arm, and stood between Master Grimm and the three of us, radiating a silent authority that not even Master Grimm dared to interrupt. Then, when we were well behind him, he drew his own sword. Master Mikhail never, ever drew his sword unless he intended to fight and die, just as he had the night I challenged him. The sight of it left all of us breathless.
“You have chosen, my students. I am proud of you, though I grieve for what must come now. Be strong. Find in each other the strength you found in me. Know that my teaching, and my heart, will follow you as long as you keep them in your memory. You have been all that I wished, and hoped.”
He set his jaw then, and the rage that filled his face and his body forced me to look away; Raimen pulled me close and I did not even think to stop him for the first time in my life. Even Nana took an involuntary step toward him for protection. Master Mikhail wasted no time on customary battle preparations or honorifics; he held his blade at the ready.
“Go now, make your choice known to the world! My choice, in this matter, is to give you the chance to do so.”
Then, with a deafening crash of steel meeting steel, Master Grimm and Master Mikhail began to fight. It was a good thing that Raimen held me close; my head thundered not with the mere sounds of battle, but of two Voices. The familiar one spoke in heated, raging letters of fire, but the other was unknown to me. Almost silent, it spoke in deep echoes, but the strength therein was louder than even the power of Raimen’s crashing waves or Nana’s breezy whispers. I could not understand the Words themselves; they were another language, from another time and place, perhaps a billion years before my own birth. They called to me as if I were a child, but refused to answer the questions that built in my soul.
The building pressure on my mind and in my head grew in rapid bursts as the battle continued. I felt Raimen lift me onto his shoulders at the same moment that I began to fade in and out of consciousness.
What followed was a blur of scenes that all seemed disjointed and random when I tried to recall them later. Trees and time flew by us unnoticed. We stopped, in a dark place, alone. There were panicked flights from the beasts of the wild. Nana, with bleeding gashes made by something’s claws. Raimen, cooking something over a fire.
Last but not least, a larger fire that swept over the forest sky, in the distance, engulfing everything it touched. I remember only the scream of fury unleashed by the Voice of Fire; though Her exact Words eluded me, the intent could not have been clearer. It was this Voice, and this fire, that began my journey into the future.
Loading ...