CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Thalia looked at Saya and Seizo. “I need to go in with him. He’s trapped in a nightmare he’s making, and doesn’t realize it. I can pull him out, if he’ll let me.”

There was a pause; then Seizo asked, “What do you want us to do?”

“Try to keep the nurses at bay. I hope not to need more than an hour or so, but if I’m longer than that and you can’t keep them out any longer, it’s all right.”

Saya nodded, her face determined; Seizo just looked at her anxiously.

Thalia took his hands in hers and kissed his forehead. “We’ll be fine,” she said softly.

“Promise, Kaa-chan,” he said, not caring that he sounded like a child.

“I promise, Sei-chan,” she replied with a smile, cupping his cheek in one small hand. She turned to Saya, who was staring with profound confusion at them both. “I’m sure he’ll explain while I’m gone, Saya-chan. Thank you for helping me; I think you’re a marvelous, beautiful, strong goddess.”

Saya felt like crying for some reason, so she threw herself into Thalia’s embrace, remembering to be careful with her healing arm.

“Be careful, Thalia-neesan,” she said in a small voice, though it seemed ridiculous that they were all treating this like a physical journey fraught with peril.

“I will,” Thalia promised. She climbed into the hospital bed carefully, inserting her body between Harada’s back and pillows so he lay against her. She looked small behind him, yet strong. She put her arms around him protectively and closed her eyes.

“How the hell is she your mother?” Saya demanded jealously the moment they could tell she was no longer present in her mind. Seizo sighed.

***

Thalia opened her eyes inside Tetsuya’s dream to find darkness and fog; she was on a street, but the surroundings were vague. This, no doubt, was because he was uncertain of his location, so did not know what properties to assign it. Everything in this place was a product of his mind; she needed to keep that awareness.

“Where are you?” she asked in a low voice, not expecting a verbal response but looking around for likely places.

She decided on a nearby warehouse that looked a lot like the one at which he had been captured, and approached it boldly. The door opened just as she reached it, startling her. She looked up; a tall man with a traditional samurai helmet obscuring his face stood in the doorway.

“I’m here for Harada Tetsuya,” she said in a clear voice.

“Excellent!” came a booming voice from inside the helmet. This was not what she had expected, but then dreams never were. The warrior turned and announced, “The judge has arrived!” He ushered her inside.

Thalia was intrigued by this reception; had Tetsuya subconsciously expected her to come in after him, even planned on it? On consideration, she believed it wasn’t so much an expectation as a determination that if she came for him, this was what must happen. The immediate future was riding on the outcome of this dream she had entered, she realized, her skin prickling.

The warrior ushered her up arched stone steps, onto a platform in the center of an enormous room filled with silent people. There was little light save one central spotlight illuminating the platform. Few real details of the room or the people filling it could be observed; again, she understood in an intuitive flash that this indicated the nature of Tetsuya’s thoughts and feelings. He assumed these people existed, but did not really know or recall many specifics; their shadowy forms lurked at the edges of his conscience, haunting him with imagined sins.

Thalia looked down at herself and realized she was wearing a black gown with belled sleeves that opened in front, in the style of certain kinds of judges. She looked up sternly. “What is the meaning of this?” Thalia demanded of the warrior, trying to sound judicial.

The warrior deferred to an elderly man leaning on a staff, who stepped forward and cleared his throat. “You are a Fury, are you not?” he asked in a dry, pedantic voice.

“I am,” she agreed. She took note of the way Tetsuya’s mind personified thought patterns, assigning traditional roles to warrior and elder. She knew he had his own judge also; a stern, implacable one who saw no place for mercy. The balancing voice of compassion was often there in him for others, but never for himself. In many people, the opposite would be closer to the truth.

That Thalia now stood here wielding judicial authority instead of his own internal judge was significant; it showed he trusted her judgment even more than his own. That gave her a chance of success.

“You bring justice; it’s your duty, your function. You cannot ignore injustice when it is brought before you; you cannot forgive the guilt of a murderer’s bloodshed. Am I correct?” he continued.

“You are correct,” she replied.

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“Then we have a matter that needs your immediate attention. Bring him!” he called. The crowd stirred, and the room filled with the hiss and growl of angry whispers and murmurs.

A door opened, and through it two large figures drove a third between them. The middle figure was Tetsuya, his hands tied behind his back and his arms bound back as they’d been on board Hellfire Rising's ship. There was one difference: thick vines studded with wickedly sharp thorns bound him now, not ropes.

His hair was very long instead of cut to shoulder-length, which stabbed her with unexpected longing; he looked more than ever as he had back when they first took form on Gaia as part of the Fae race. She saw that this was his own projection of who he was, based on his youth in Kato’s dojo, where they had still dressed traditionally. The uniforms and haircuts had been part of the necessary exchange for the privilege Kato won for them of having their swords restored to them.

“ 'Berserker Bastard',” Thalia murmured one of the nicknames of his unhappy youth, wincing at the blood streaking his skin and welling up afresh from dozens of small wounds inflicted by the thorns.

Thalia understood this now; his mind, finding him unable to move, speak, or see in the hospital, had assumed he was still a prisoner. It had continued to play out that scenario, but modified it to become more than a comatose dream: it was a metaphor for his self-image, an unconscious self-portrait of pain; and now, a way for him to purge his conscience.

His mind had constructed this scenario because he needed her to know his guilt as he perceived it. Once she truly saw who he was, he had little doubt she would reject him, judging him as he judged himself. It wasn’t that he wanted her to; it was that he believed she must.

Hot stinging tears streaked her face. She did welcome the chance to settle this, but the need for it broke her heart. She was aware, too, that she must play it out honestly or it would continue haunting him. He had not looked up until now, but finally he lifted his eyes to hers; they were as beautiful to her as ever, but filled with misery. How cruel he was to do this to himself all these years, she thought.

She was crying, he saw when he looked up. “You idiot,” she said to him through her tears. “You blind, judgmental, stubborn idiot.”

His captors thrust him forward; he could not catch himself, but he rolled to avoid cracking his skull on the stone floor. Even now, he thought, despising himself, his first instinct was survival.

She knelt to catch him; the back of his head pressed against her. She put her arms around him.

“Don’t,” he said, leaning away from her, “you’ll be cut. The thorns are sharp.”

“You still don’t get it,” she said, pulling him close again and letting her blood mingle with his, though he winced. “Your thorns only hurt me because you let them hurt you. I have far more right to be near you than they do.”

He stared up at her, speechless.

The elder cleared his throat and spoke: “It is the function of the warrior to bring death; killing is evil. All warriors will be punished in the afterlife until such time as the blood can be cleansed from their hands; this is known. As something impure, it is a warrior’s duty to dirty his own hands protecting what is pure. No warrior has business with purity; their families share their taint.”

“Yet priests and elders – such as yourself – beg protection of these ‘impure’ warriors, is that not so?” Thalia demanded, her eyes beginning to glow with the Fury’s anger. “In fact, is it not so that it is the elders and priests, as well as the leaders of nations, who demand the establishment of a warrior class?”

“Irrelevant,” the elder said, glaring back at her.

“I think not,” she snapped.

“Then perhaps you should hear testimony,” the elder suggested coldly.

“By all means,” she said with a gesture of defiant invitation. “Who is this fool styling himself wise, Tetsu?” she demanded.

He was astonished at her irreverence. “You must not disrespect Sensei, Thalia,” he said in a low, urgent voice. “He is the one who raised me in my brother’s house.” When he told her this, Thalia saw many of his childhood memories in this ‘classroom’: a weekly beating with rods began his lessons; his cousins, untainted by his ‘impurities’, were permitted to participate in this when they chose. If he made noise, the beating was prolonged; he soon learned to bear it in silence.

The abuse began there, and continued relentlessly; the only bright spots had been the infrequent times he spent alone with his brother. He never complained to Yuuichi, and his injuries were put down to training hard, so his brother had not known of the constant abuse.

“Hateful!” Thalia cried out, enraged. “How dare you call yourself that child’s caretaker!” She turned on the elder, ready to kill him.

“I built strength into one who was born defiled and worthless!” he yelled, still defiant. “The warrior class was the best he could hope for with his birth. Weakness could not be tolerated,” the elder shouted back at her. “You are clearly a weak woman, unfit to stand as a judge,” he added. “Get rid of her,” he ordered the warrior.

Thalia took a strong stance, bracing herself to fight; but the warrior, though he bowed to the elder, refused the order. “Forgive me, Sensei, but she outranks even you in this court,” he said.

The old man’s face became purple with indignation. “Then bring forth the testimony,” he sputtered.

Thalia allowed herself a small triumphant smile as she waited, and ran her fingers through Tetsuya’s long, silky hair. He trembled at her touch, and whispered her name as if it haunted him.

She felt she was beginning to understand how to help her beloved purge what haunted him. She was fighting the urge to simply give in to her Fury, to destroy everything that was hurting him; but that would not ultimately help him, she knew; this was perhaps the one chance they would have to face and conquer this together in this lifetime. She must not fail him; not this time. It must be he who destroyed the thorns that bound and cut him; if she did so, it would be only a temporary victory.

He had not moved away from her again, though he still flinched every time she touched a thorn and marked her translucent skin with blood. He knelt looking stunned and uncertain; but that was to be expected. It had never occurred to him to question the authority of the one he had called ‘Sensei’; though he rebelled as he grew older, he had believed himself to be condemned for that rebellion.

It was promising that he had already come back to himself enough to establish her so firmly in his mind’s hierarchy, over even the one who had molded his young years with such cruelty. She had more hope now than she had since his terrible words after their lovemaking on the beach, which now seemed distant.

After several moments, the elder ushered three men of varying ages to stand before her.

“Here stands a family destroyed by this unworthy one you seek to protect,” he said. “Hear them, and fulfill your function.” With that, he stepped back into the edge of the crowd.

The three men were a family, she saw that at once; three generations in one family line: the elder, his son, and his grandson. They looked up at her with mingled awe and uncertainty.

She smiled warmly at them. “Come, do not be afraid,” she said, “I would hear your grievance. Fear not, but tell me all.”

“Why do you protect him?” the patriarch said, his voice full of grief and anger. “He destroyed my family! My line is ended because of that man you embrace!”

Tetsuya tensed, wanting to move away from her. She kissed his cheek and rose, then stood a little in front of him.

“Look at me, Ojii-san, and tell me if you can entrust your justice to me,” she said, descending to look him in the eyes. She was confident in

his response, because although these were representative of real people, this was Tetsuya’s mind. She already knew that he himself put confidence in her judgment; so would these others, then.

The old man looked long and hard into her silver-blue gaze, and at last he nodded. “I will entrust my family’s justice to you, Kamisama,” he said, addressing her as a deity.

She inclined her head with respect. “Thank you, Ojii-san,” she replied. “Please show me what happened. All you need do is look into my eyes and remember; I will see it as it happens.” This was not precisely the usual way her power worked, but it should be within the parameters of this situation.

The old man nodded, then concentrated his gaze upon hers once more.