The woman who liked to call herself a heroine watched the iron flowers burst overhead and cheered with the chi…
The woman who liked to call herself a heroine watched the iron flowers burst overhead and cheered with the children as if she were one of them. There was nothing very master-like about her.
Goshawk stood nearby with wide eyes, thinking thoughts he told no one.
She was the one who gave him his name. She had spent three full days agonizing over it, muttering to herself the whole time. He remembered almost nothing of it now, except that color seemed to be involved somehow. He neither accepted the name nor rejected it. She did not care either way. She called him Goshawk once, then again, and before long it had simply become his name.
After watching the iron flowers for a while, she stretched lazily. Goshawk immediately ran over to her.
"Will you teach me martial arts now?"
She scratched her head. "Not yet." Another burst of iron flowers went up. When the show reached its climax, she clapped and cheered all over again.
"If this isn't to your taste, there's plenty more to see at the fair. I can give you a little money. Go have some fun."
"No. I want to learn martial arts."
"None of this interests you? At your age, I was wrecking my senior brother's gadgets every chance I got."
"No. I want to learn martial arts."
"Hm... Then you've got energy to burn. Go up the mountain and bring back a wild boar. We'll eat boar tonight."
"Fine. When I get back, you teach me."
So he went, with nothing but his youthful gusto. That very night, he came back with a boar slung over his shoulders. He had once tried to rob her on the road, and he had lost. By the rules he knew, the strong preyed on the weak. If she wanted to kill him, she could. He would not run.
He gnawed on boar meat, breath steaming through his nose, eyes locked on the woman.
"You shouldn't be this strong."
To him, it was obvious! She was not ruthless enough. Not hard enough. Not guarded enough. Every time she stepped in, it was over something that brought no benefit at all: a beggar on the roadside, a sick old woman, children fighting in the street. None of it gained her anything! He had grown up brawling in the streets and taking food by force. He knew the rule people lived by!
The weak died. The strong lived! And so there was only one thing he wanted: to become stronger!
She looked at him for a long time. At the boy sitting before her, whose joy and anger had been worn away, until all that remained was a stubborn will to survive. Then, very gently, she placed a hand on his head.
"You don't have to rush so hard to become strong. One day, you won't need to."
Later, she taught him martial arts. Later, she left the temple. And later still, Goshawk learned to strike iron flowers.
He never really understood what use the craft had. You throw molten iron into the air, risk getting burned, earn a few gasps of amazement—and then it's over. The sparks die. What burned bright turns black and dull again. It all seemed pointless. And still, he kept doing it, telling himself not to fear heat or flame. Because somewhere inside that blaze, he was still searching for the truth behind his master's strength—a strength that was more than the simple law of the strong preying on the weak.