Chapter 20: After the Fight

Hanae reached him before he fell all the way.

She got her shoulder under his good arm and held him up, with the skillet still swinging from her wrist.

"Shiori!" she screamed. "Shiori!"

The healer came running across the yard with her sleeves already pushed up, and she did not say a word.

They carried him into the dining room and laid him on the long table among the cups and bowls.

Shiori cut the shirt away.

There was a long gash across his chest, shallow and ugly, and a purple bruise over his ribs.

"Two ribs broken," said Shiori, with her hands glowing pale. "The cut is clean. Most of the blood is the captain's."

"Most?"

"He will live. He will hurt a great deal. He is a very stubborn man."

Hanae sat down on the bench beside the table and put her face in her hands.

When she looked up, Jiro was watching her.

His face was grey, and his mouth twisted at one corner.

"I believe," he said hoarsely, "that you hit a demon with a frying pan."

"It's a skillet."

"I stand corrected."

She laughed, and it came out as a sob.

By evening the village had gone home to count its chickens, and the soldiers were burying their dead on the north ridge.

The Princess sat in the yard with a clerk, writing.

Kaito had gone up to Room Three and shut the door.

Nobody had told him to.

Nobody had spoken to him since the barricade.

At midnight the dining room was empty at last.

Hanae stood in the middle of it, in the light of one lamp, among the cushions and the tipped cups.

She could not stop shaking.

She had scrubbed the table, and swept the floor, and counted the bowls.

Her hands would not be still.

She heard the stairs creak, and the step on them, long and uneven.

He had been told to stay in bed.

Jiro stood in the door with a bandage across his chest and his coat over his shoulders.

His dark eyes went over her once, from head to foot.