A family scattered. A land in flames. A century of war begins.
Aoyagi Jinzaburō is twenty-seven and has never had to choose between the two things he is.
His lord's order is read aloud to every retainer in the yard: no household leaves the capital without leave in writing. His wife Aya has counted the storehouse and walked every route out, and her conclusion is that they must go.
Both of them are right. This book is the distance between those two facts.
He is burned wrist to elbow in the first hour of it and the hand never closes again. Nothing here heals. Everything he tries fails, and nothing fails through villainy — a bought refuge opened from the inside, a brother who comes back over a bridge carrying loot in front of witnesses, and finally his own faction firing his compound, correctly, to deny a lost ward its strongpoints.
He is a man watching the institution he has served faithfully behave exactly as it should, and destroy his family while doing it.
He has one thing left that the fire cannot take: people believe him. It is worth exactly one use, and he will have to decide whether to spend it on his lord or on his wife.
