Read Online The Disfavored Hero by Jessica Amanda Salmonson - Free Book Online

maneuver. But one of the peasant women intervened by shouting, “Tomoe! Desist!”
    A peasant could not command a samurai, yet Tomoe turned slowly, her dark eyes settling on the younger of the two women in rags.
    â€œTomoe!” she said. “Who is your master!”
    Throughout the past month, Tomoe had operated under the supposition that she was a masterless samurai, without allegiances. But the voice reminded her of a day in a garden, a day which now seemed lives ago, when she was glad to be tricked into making an oath. Tomoe replied, “Whoever else I serve, I also serve Toshima.”
    Toshima said, “Then go from this field now, Tomoe. Go into the hills and meditate on what you have done this day and for many days before this one.”
    Goro Maki regained his feet and, protecting Toshima and her mother, led the disguised women away from the battlefield. It was doubtlessly Lord Shigeno’s last command to his vassals, that his family be removed from the valley if the battle went badly or threatened the mansion.
    Tomoe blinked her eyes, and the blackness of them became a cloudy grey. She was somehow isolated on a knoll amidst the field of combat, able to see that five distinct encounters were spread across the center of the valley. From her vantage point, she could see the inevitable outcome far better than the combatants. She blinked her eyes again, and the whites reappeared around each iris.
    Tomoe Gozen was shaken by what she beheld, and by what she remembered. She scanned the scene, looking for Ushii, but he was not presently where she could see him. Poor Ushii! For love of a comrade he had risked face and sanity, and lost both! And until this moment, she had not cared. What could this say of her own face? Of her own honor? She had behaved as a masterless samurai, an unrestrained ronin , without loyalties; she had slain Lord Shigeno as heartlessly as Ushii killed Madoka—yet, all the while, she had had a master and had forgotten. She had broken faith with her bushido; and if she could not regain it in some other way, there was only the knife strapped to her thigh …
    In the east burned Shojiro Shigeno’s mansion. To the west, an edge in sight, was the unharmed palace of Huan, sorcerer of Ho. On three sides of her, battles raged without grace. North into the hills was the only direction by which a coward, or the disillusioned, might flee. There, a tall, narrow waterfall shone in the afternoon sun, its beauty inviting.
    For the first time in her career, at the command of her master, Tomoe Gozen left a battle not yet done.
    Behind the waterfall was a small cavern. In the darkness of this place Tomoe Gozen sat with legs crossed, meditating on her late behavior. The sheet of water plunged before her like a supernatural deluge, the roar of its descent drowning the sound of distant battle, lending to her sense of oblivion. The fall was a living, diamond window distorting her view of trees and smooth boulders, so that it seemed she looked out onto an alien landscape, looked out from a hellish dark place into a lit paradise.
    She ached to leap through that window, which would part for her passage—to find herself truly in another world, a world where Tomoe Gozen had never lived, had never dishonored herself, had neither slain the great man Shojiro Shigeno, nor helped Ushii Yakushiji become a hunched and haggard spirit within a samurai’s strong body.
    Had she never lived, perhaps the sorcerer Huan would not have seen to the destruction of Naipon’s mightiest warlords. Without Tomoe Gozen, a ghoulish army might not have been victorious and prepared to march further, as Huan had promised, unto the Imperial City itself.
    Her mind’s eye envisioned thousands of samurai in the valley, strewn about the land with heads and teeth and faces bashed in by crude stone weapons. The eerie victors feasted. They picked amidst the dead for clothing. They replaced their own severed parts with