Twelve years passed.
Saito was born first the oldest, which she wore with the easy authority of someone who was never going to be anything else. Her brothers came after: Tatsumi and Tatsumaki, loud and inseparable and perpetually in orbit around their sister as though she were the fixed point everything else organised itself around.
The hill above the village caught the morning light before anything else did.
John and Saito trained there had always trained there, since she was old enough to hold a wooden sword without dropping it, which had been earlier than anyone expected. He moved and she followed, or tried to. This morning she came at him fast a rush of footsteps and then the wooden sword swinging in a rapid combination that had real thought behind it.
John stepped slightly. The counter tap landed on the top of her head with a clean, decisive sound.
Saito spun and hit the ground and lay still for a moment, holding her head, staring at the sky.
"BIG SIS!"
Tatsumi and Tatsumaki came running up the hill with the energy of people for whom the morning has been going on for quite some time already and they are ready to share it with someone. They dropped down beside her simultaneously.
Sato reached the top of the hill behind them, slightly less urgently.
"They're energetic this morning," she said.
"You could say that," John agreed.
He looked down at Saito still on the ground, brothers now sitting on either side of her like small loyal bookends and waited until she looked back up at him.
"Your sword isn't just a weapon," he said. "It's an extension of your will. Everything you are goes into it when you swing it. You're strong I know that about you. Stop holding yourself back from the blade. Put everything you've got into it."
Saito sat up. Looked at the wooden sword in her hand.
She stood.
She looked at John across the field. Then she moved.
She covered the distance before he registered that she'd started not quite teleportation, just speed that had found something it hadn't had before and swung.
John blocked. He moved back.
She didn't give him the step. She was already moving, reading his recovery, not letting the rhythm reset. He leaped upward to create distance.
Saito looked at the sword in her hand. She looked at the figure above her. She felt something a warmth, a presence, something that had been waiting at the bottom of her like a held breath.
She gripped the hilt and let it out.
"BURNING BLADE!"
The wooden sword caught fire not gradually, not partially. All at once, completely, the flame moving up from the grain of the wood with the certainty of something that was always going to happen. She swung.
The sword burned to ash in her hand.
John came down and knocked her out with the flat of his own before the ash had finished falling.
He stood over her and stared.
Burning Blade, he thought. I've never heard that technique. Did she He frowned. Did she just create her own technique?
Something connected with the back of his head.
He turned. Sato was standing behind him with the expression of a woman who has had this conversation before and has made peace with the fact that she will have it again.
"Sorry honey," he said. "I forgot. Again."
Saito came around slowly, holding the new bump on her head, looking up at the sky with the dazed expression of someone taking inventory.
John crouched beside her. "I should have pulled that. I'm sorry, sweetheart."
He extended his hand.
Saito bit it.
Then she stood up, tucked the hand John was examining under her arm and walked back down the hill with her mother and her brothers without looking back.
John watched them go and decided he deserved that.
The stream was cold and clear and Saito crouched at its edge with the bucket, letting it fill.
The two women passed behind her on the path. They did not lower their voices.
"She's the one born from the witch, isn't she."
"Look at her eyes. No one in this village has eyes like that. No normal child."
One of them kept walking. The other stopped. Saito heard the pause in the footsteps and knew without turning what was coming next.
"Demon child."
The words landed in the water in front of her. Then the footsteps continued and faded and the stream went back to its sound.
Saito stayed where she was.
She looked at the surface of the water. At the face looking back up at her from it. She studied it the way you study something you are trying to find fault with, or find truth in, going over each part separately. The red hair. The pupils that split at the edges, not quite round, not quite anything else either.
She slapped the water.
The reflection broke apart in the ripples and she watched it break and then she scooped water with both hands and pressed it against her face. Again. Again. The cold of it finding her eyes and her cheeks and her jaw. She kept going until her hands were shaking and then she stopped.
The water dripped from her face.
Then something else dripped from her face.
She sat in the stream with the bucket half full and let the crying happen without doing anything about it, because there was no one on the path anymore and the water was already cold and it didn't matter.
"WE DID IT."
Tatsumaki's voice carried down the stream from somewhere upstream. Saito looked up.
Tatsumi was holding a fish above his head and jumping with it, the fish flopping, his face completely committed to the victory of the moment. Tatsumaki was beside him doing the same jump without a fish, purely in solidarity.
Saito watched them from where she was crouching.
Three boys came around the bend. Older. The kind of older that means something in a village where size is the vocabulary of every disagreement. The largest one walked up to Tatsumi and took the fish out of his hands the way you take something from someone smaller when you have decided you want it and the decision is the whole conversation.
Tatsumaki started crying.
Tatsumi looked at his empty hands.
Saito stood up.
She walked toward them, the wet hem of her clothes heavy against her legs, and stopped in front of the large boy and looked up at him. The fish was in his hand. She looked at the fish and then at his face and waited.
He looked down at her.
"What do you want, demon."
He pushed her. One hand, flat against her shoulder, the weight of someone who has never had to consider the consequences of pushing. She went back a step. He turned and started walking.
Saito watched him go.
She looked at Tatsumi's face. At Tatsumaki's. At the fish getting smaller as it went away from them.
She ran.
She covered the distance in the way she covered distances when she stopped thinking about covering them and just moved, and she left the ground and landed on his back and her teeth found the back of his neck before he understood what had landed on him.
He screamed.
The village came to the sound of it.
When they arrived they found the large boy flat on the ground with his hands pressed to the back of his neck, crying, and Saito standing over him with Tatsumi and Tatsumaki behind her.
John came through the crowd.
He looked at the boy on the ground. He looked at Saito. She looked at the ground beside her and not at him.
He apologised to the boy's mother. Brief, direct, the apology of someone completing a necessary thing. Then he turned and walked back through the crowd and the crowd parted for him and Tatsumi and Tatsumaki's hands found his on either side and he kept walking.
Saito followed a step behind.
He did not look back at her. He kept his eyes forward. They walked the path back through the village in the late afternoon light and when they had cleared the last house and the village was behind them John spoke without turning his head.
"Did you bite him, Saito?."
She walked for a moment.
"Yes."
John smiled. It started at the corner of his mouth and went the rest of the way at its own pace.
He looked at her.
"Nice."
Saito looked at him. Something loosened in her face that had been held for the better part of the afternoon. She moved up to his side and reached up and took Tatsumi's weight from him, hoisting him onto her back, and Tatsumi grabbed her shoulders and held on and they walked the rest of the way home like that.
That night the house went quiet in the way it went quiet when Tatsumi and Tatsumaki had finally stopped fighting sleep. They were draped across each other on their mat, one arm of Tatsumi's thrown over Tatsumaki's shoulder, both of them already somewhere else.
John called Saito's name.
She sat beside him. Outside the window the village had gone to its own quiet, the fires burning low, the sounds of the last conversations fading.
"You already know where your strength comes from," John said. He looked at the low flame of the lamp between them. "A Dragon is pride and glory." He looked at her. "And you are my pride." He held her gaze. "Don't let what they say reach the place where it can change that. You're destined for something they can't see yet." He paused. "I know it because you're my daughter."
Saito looked at him.
The smile came slowly, from somewhere genuine, the kind that doesn't perform itself.
"I don't go easy on you because I enjoy it," he said. "I go hard on you because I need you to be stronger than me. Stronger than anything I can teach you."
Saito looked at the lamp.
"I promise," she said. "Stronger than you."
She said it clenching her fist and looking up at the night sky when sleep took her.
Before the sun rose Saito was gone.
John heard her leave and lay still and listened to her footsteps fade. He stared at the ceiling for a moment.
Then he smiled.
The morning came up bright and warm and Saito worked through it alone on the hill swinging the wooden sword in repetitions that had long since passed the point of counting, her arms burning, her breath finding its own rhythm. The sun moved across her shoulders and she didn't stop.
Tatsumi and Tatsumaki appeared at some point with bread and the hopeful expressions of people bearing gifts.
She shook her head without breaking rhythm.
They left. She kept going.
Her knees found the ground eventually not failure, just the honest limit of what the body had. She breathed. Looked at the tall tree at the edge of the clearing. Breathed again.
She stood.
"BURNING BLADE — DRAGON SLASH!"
The blade found the tree at its base and the impact that followed was not a cut so much as a conclusion the tree simply ceased to be a standing tree, the trunk separating and the whole thing toppling with a crash that sent birds from every surrounding branch simultaneously. The shockwave of it knocked Saito backward. She hit a rock on the way down and the world went sideways.
She came back to consciousness with the sun higher and her head aching and the destroyed tree lying across the clearing in front of her like evidence.
She stood up. Looked around.
"It's night!?"
Saito looked at the tree then she threw both arms up and yelled at the top of her lungs.
The birds that had just settled back into the surrounding trees left again.
The yell was still fading when she smelled it.
She turned.
To the south, above the tree line, a light that had no business being there orange and red and wrong, pulsing with the particular rhythm of something that is consuming rather than illuminating. Above it, thick black smoke rising into the sky in a column wide enough to see from here.
The village.
Saito was already running.
She smelled it before she saw it smoke and something underneath the smoke that had no name but that the body recognises as wrong before the mind catches up.
Saito ran into the village and stopped.
Bodies. Everywhere. People she had known her entire life, scattered across the ground between the burning huts like they had simply stopped mid-movement. She stood at the edge of it and looked at all of it and made herself keep looking until the fear found somewhere to go.
Then she ran toward her house.
She didn't reach it.
Her legs stopped on their own.
Sato was on the ground outside. Tatsumi beside her. Tatsumaki a few feet further, one arm outstretched toward his brother, as though he had been trying to reach him when it ended.
Saito walked toward them. Each step felt like moving through something thick. She knelt down and put her hands on her mother's shoulders and shook her and called her name and shook her again. She called Tatsumi's name. Tatsumaki's. She kept calling until her voice broke and then she kept calling after that.
The tears came without permission and she didn't stop them.
She was still kneeling when the thud hit something enormous impacting a nearby structure, the ground shaking with the weight of it, debris skittering across the dirt around her.
Footsteps.
John came around the corner of the collapsed hut at a run. His left arm ended at the shoulder. He was moving anyway, the way people move when the body has decided that the damage is secondary information, and when he saw Saito his face changed completely relief and grief arriving at the same moment, one on top of the other.
He crossed the distance and crouched in front of her.
"Saito. Listen to me." His voice was steady in the way that voices get when someone has made a decision and is executing it. "I need you to run. As far and as fast as you can. Don't stop. Don't look back." His eyes found hers and held them. "Everyone is gone. I can't lose you too. Please."
He was crying. She had never seen him cry before.
She couldn't move. The village and her mother and her brothers and John's missing arm were all trying to exist in her mind at the same time and none of it would resolve into something she could act on.
Then she felt it.
Something behind her. A presence vast, attentive, the specific quality of a predator that has just noticed something it missed. John felt it at the same moment. She watched his expression change.
If it sees her, he thought. She could read it on his face. If it looks at her
He pulled her into his chest and held her arm around her, her face pressed against his shoulder, the warmth of him surrounding her completely despite everything his body had already given up this morning.
"We love you," he said quietly. "Your mother. Your brothers, Me. We will always be with you." He pressed his lips to the top of her head. "Always."
His hand found the back of her neck.
The pressure was gentle and precise and the darkness behind her eyes arrived immediately.
She felt herself going. Felt him lower her carefully. Felt the brush of leaves and earth around her as he settled her into the concealment of the bush.
And then she felt him stand.
And then she felt him run toward it.
"My," said Scream, looking at him. "Persistent." She tilted her head. "After everything I've done to this village you're still standing. Your going to ruin your flavor if you keep up with that"
John said nothing. He kept moving.
Scream appeared in front of him.
The blade went through his chest cleanly, the way precise things do not slowly, not dramatically. Just done.
John looked at her. Then he looked past her, in the direction of the bush, the way people look at the last thing they want to see before they stop being able to see things.
He fell.
In the bush Saito had not fully lost consciousness.
She saw it.
She saw all of it through the gap in the leaves, through the tears she couldn't stop, one eye open and her body refusing to move and the sound of John hitting the ground carrying across the ruined village like the last note of something.
A single tear ran down her face.
Then she was gone.
Scream moved through what remained of the village with the efficiency of someone completing a task.
"I should have saved some to eat later" she paused looking up at the night sky.
"I should leave before Arcturus feels my presence"
A beam of light came down and took her.
The village burned.
When Saito woke up the sun was risen and the fires had become embers and there was no sound anywhere.
She looked at John. At Sato. At Tatsumi and Tatsumaki.
She looked at all of them for a long time.
Then she found what she needed and she buried them all four of them, in the earth of the village they had built and lived in and loved and when it was done she stood over them for a while longer.
Then she picked up what she was going to take with her and she walked into the forest and she didn't look back.
The day that followed had no particular shape to it.
She walked. The forest gave way to other forest. The sun moved across the sky and she moved beneath it. She didn't eat. She didn't stop. She was operating on something below thought the basic animal instruction to keep moving that takes over when the part of you that makes decisions has gone somewhere it can't be reached.
Christopher saw the deer first.
He held up a fist and James stopped beside him, both of them going still in the trained silence of hunters who have learned that sudden movement costs them the morning's work. The deer was grazing at the edge of a clearing unaware, unhurried.
Christopher was already raising his bow when he stopped.
A girl had walked into the clearing.
She moved like someone who wasn't entirely certain the ground was going to stay where she put her feet. Her clothes were dark with dried blood not her own, by the way it had settled and spread. She was small. She was alone.
She walked directly toward the deer.
The deer looked up. Regarded her. Didn't move.
Saito raised a rock.
She brought it down on the deer's head.
It went down. Saito brought the rock down again. And again. And again past the point where it was necessary, past the point where it was anything other than grief finding the only available direction, her whole body behind each impact, tears running down her face and falling into the grass while she kept going and kept going until her arms stopped and she was crying too hard to continue.
James and Christopher stepped into the clearing.
"Hey." James kept his voice the way you keep a voice when you're approaching something that might bolt. "Are you alright?"
Saito spun around.
She looked at them two living people, in a world that had contained only dead ones for a day and a night and something in her simply gave out. Her legs went. She hit the ground and stayed there, unconscious before she finished falling, the rock still in her hand.
James reached her first. He crouched down and looked at her at the blood that wasn't hers, at the state of her, at the absolute spent-ness of her, the way a person looks when they have used everything they had and then kept going.
He picked her up.
He looked at Christopher.
Christopher nodded.
They took her home.