Shinta took his place among the soldiers that summer.
When he was younger, he could only practice the sword and the spear in between running errands for Kiyosato-sempai, fetching his weapons and looking after his armor. The men had mocked him for his servant duties, his peasant manners, his surliness, his stature, his sun-reddened hair, even his name.
"Shinta? Are you a lover in a song? You'd better pick a stronger name than that if you want to become a samurai."
"If you don't grow more muscles than my youngest daughter we're going to start you washing laundry with the other women!"
But the daimyo himself had taken Shinta in to be a younger brother, a companion, a follower to Akira, as the old man had no other sons. And so, the daimyo's retainers tormented Shinta in good humor, to toughen him up.
Shinta no longer displayed his smoldering resentment at their jokes. He focused only on practicing and on sparring. He grew stronger, harder, faster, while their tongues fell silent. The men began to see Shinta as a swordsman worthy of respect.
It wasn't a time for joking, in any case. Akira had been admired - even loved - by nearly everyone, from the samurai to the servants to the shamans and advisors. The echoes of his humor and his joy - the sudden onset of his illness, the change in him - it left a chill.
The old daimyo was grieving deeply for his son. He seemed to pull into himself, while his hopelessness drifted like an illness throughout the household and even to the villages and fields. His plans, his amusements, his relationships... Nothing changed, but everything the old man did was muted, delayed, as though his soul were already moving into its grave, while his body kept on living. The samurai, the servants - all went into limbo with him and prayed that he would find strength.
While the Kiyosato clan tried to console itself, heal itself, the warlords who controlled the surrounding lands could sense this weakness, as a pack of wolves, miles distant, smells injury and fear.
.
There had finally been a spell of genuinely hot weather - good for the crops after such a cold and wet spring, the winter that had not wanted to let go.
Shinta felt the sun on his back, the ache in his muscles, the sweat trickling down his skin as he rested after a long series of katana swings. He wanted his body to remember this heat. He wanted to forget that the cold had ever existed.
He was getting stronger. He was as quick as any swordsman the daimyo could call upon. If he could continue to develop his technique over the next few years, he would be able to hold his head high among the best of the daimyo's samurai.
The thought disturbed him. Shinta had always been low, an oddity, an outsider - desperately poor as a child and then kohai, a follower, an adopted son, after his family had died. He would have starved to death if the daimyo hadn't found him.
He couldn't imagine... Position. Prestige. Honor. Aristocracy.
But he couldn't stop practicing.
Learning to deliver death.
Meanwhile, the slash of his blade through wooden stands and training dummies reminded him of so much wheat, falling before the scythe.
He would have been a simple farmer, if his parents had lived.
He could still remember the smell of the earth through the different seasons. It had seemed as though they were always outside, in all weather, only at dark going to sleep in a hut that might as well have been a burrow.
He remembered his mother holding him. He remembered being fascinated by his father's hands.
They might have died another year, if the plague hadn't taken them. They might have all been killed in a raid.
Shinta raised his sword for another strike - something caught his eye on the horizon.
Smoke.
The signal.
An attack.