Five thousand of the enemy below the mountain, sixty-one men inside who can still hold a spear. The relief army has stopped coming, and the castellan, having counted the last of the rice and the arrows, has written the order in which her people will die into the ledger. You see the patch of earth where each of them will fall. Under that castellan alone, you see nothing at all.
The stage is a lone fortress in the mountains at the tail end of the Warring States, cut off from relief and from any road to surrender. Toba Tsuyu, who lost her husband young and took the whole castle onto her shoulders, is the kind of lord who counts the rations and the blades that are left and then writes down in advance the order in which her people will die. The wandering swordsman who washes up at her gate has eyes that show him the ground where a person will fall before they show him anything else, and from his first day he is taken for an enemy scout and made to stand under a spear point. Each time he moves one name in that order, the castellan questions him harder, and the harder she questions, the more of what each of them has kept covered comes into the light. Which runs out first, the days the castle can hold or the days it takes these two to trust each other: that is the fight.
- The moment Toba Tsuyu, who leveled a blade at you and called you a spy, breaks her own rice ball in half in front of her starving soldiers, presses it into your hand, and turns away without a word.
- The moment when you alone know which stone of the wall a man must not stand in front of, force a soldier to change posts with no reason you can give, and that same night an arrow buries itself in exactly that stone.
- The moment on the night before the fall when, with the ledger of the order of deaths open between you, the castellan cannot fit your name into any box, the brush stops, and one drop of ink spreads into the paper.
The moment Toba Tsuyu, who leveled a blade at you and called you a spy, breaks her own rice ball in half in front of her starving soldiers, presses it into your hand, and turns away without a word.
