.
The gods had despised the Kiyosato. Those higher beings held in contempt every crawling mortal person and every blade of grass that the people were foolish enough to call their own. The dips of the valleys, the glistening, rippling streams - they were only paths and pools for all the eddying waste and evil and refuse of the mountain spirits, the earth gods, the sky.
That was what Sagara Sanosuke believed.
He couldn't even look at the women around him. Women were the worst. Always working, always trying to play the game - bring in the harvest, appease the gods. Escape. Survive.
And this little one, this storm-touched girl, was so far gone she seemed to think they were actually moving toward something instead of just crawling for cover, hoping to escape the notice of the gods.
Always marching forward with her eyes ahead and her head cocked to catch any sound from behind - as if that samurai lover of hers, the little red-headed one, the one Sanosuke remembered as a youth with a smoldering temper - as if he would survive, would come galloping over their slow, dragging footsteps to find them.
Damn all women.
Idiotic beliefs - that the future would be better.
That they all had to fight to the end.
That it was honorable to die fighting.
At least the samurai had the sense to set all that aside, live in their bloodlust, their armor, their swords.
And the unwed servant men had it the best. Nothing to do but drink and gamble what little they had and flirt with the servant girls.
How that used to infuriate the fox - drive her half-mad, make her even more haughty and cruel.
Ordering him around, ignoring him, banishing him from her presence like he was a dog.
As if they hadn't come from the same village, known each other all their lives.
And what would he have done? Stayed and fought? Died by his beaten plow-blade, not even a sword?And for what? For that sick, deranged old man? For that cursed valley? For the soldiers? For the courtiers and the concubines sucking all the sweat and blood from the peasants of the land?
No, but he couldn't even slink off to make his own escape. She had to order him away, steal whatever scrap of dignity he had.
He would have stood in the face of armored samurai, standing naked in his peasant clothes with his peasant weapon.
And she would have laughed.
She would have laughed herself sick.
She would have still been laughing when they cut him down in front of her.
Choking with laughter as she died.
As if he could have protected her.
Just as well she had refused him that last humiliation.
On her terms.
Always on her terms.
It made Sanosuke angry enough to want to go back there and... Show her. Find her.
Save her.
Just as well it was far too late.
This little one, though, this little one...
He tried to avoid looking at her.
She had too much determination.
She was like a lamp burning in the midst of a starless night, like a hot fire surrounded by snow.
If he watched, he noticed her falter sometimes.
Sometimes she tripped.
If he watched, he noticed that she was fading.
She was burning herself out.
.