Those Who Walk the Flame Road
The room was getting lighter. Balsa stayed lost in memories, thinking of Jiguro.
Were you happy that you saved me? Did you want to raise me? Didn’t you suffer?
She remembered feeling his hands resting gently on her head and his soft voice as he tried to explain himself to her and wondered, Was I ever so soft with Chagum? Does he know how much I care?
Chagum was leaving with the Kanbalese cavalry tomorrow morning. New Yogo was going to war. Balsa might never see his face again.She wanted to find him and tell him everything, but she held herself still. He needed rest, and he was busy. She wondered if he was haunted by the things that had happened to him in his past.
Balsa closed her eyes and breathed deeply. It was true that she’d seen herself and the world more clearly at the age of twenty than at fifteen, but now that she was past thirty, there were so many things she didn’t understand. The world beyond her own experience was terra incognita: just as undefined and hazy as the world her younger self had lived in.
“Being fifteen is like walking through a dark wood, all alone and lost. It takes five years to find the way clearly. It seems like such a long time…” She remembered Jiguro’s voice, as clearly as if he was in the room with her.
The cry of a hawk pierced the early morning stillness. She could see it flying in lazy circles through her window. She kept watching it fly until she fell back to sleep.
This is the end of Those Who Walk the Flame Road.
There is another other side-story in the Guardian of the Spirit series, Where the Wind Takes Us.
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