Chapter Text
Reading novels was a waste of time.
As a medical student, Asahina Mafuyu should have known better than to set her eyes on a childish-looking hardcover on display inside a bookstore she passed by on the way home, but the shiny golden letters that formed its title baited her into picking up the book.
The Way to Freedom
The words made Mafuyu remember the suffocating feeling that constantly followed her. They reminded her of how her limbs were attached to invisible threads that directed her every movement. But when she brushed her fingers along the cover and flipped it open, those feelings eased – she had just torn herself away from her puppeteer.
She should be reading a textbook, but instead she became engrossed in the heroic story of Princess Emu’s fight against her own family in order to liberate the people of Hinomori from Ootori occupation. It was wishful thinking that in real life someone in a position of power would turn against the institution that bestowed their privilege in favour of helping subjugated foreigners. Even if such a person existed, the abandonment of their previous power would mean that they would now have no means to help and would themselves fall prey to retaliation. This unrealistic tale should have no appeal to a down-to-earth young woman like Mafuyu. She could not understand the reason for indulging in fantasy when it would change nothing about real life. Still, she was compelled to pay for the book at the counter and read it one more time when she reached home.
She was unsure whether she ever finished her second read-through. At some point that night, she collapsed from exhaustion.
……………………
Mafuyu awoke to disturbing noises. She could recognize some of the sounds as screams, but the clangs of metal against metal interwoven into the cacophony were alien to her ears. She sat up from the autumn leaves on which she had previously lain, surprised to see that she was not in her pajamas but rather some sort of kimono-like robe that did not seem to belong to the modern era. Her surroundings were full of vegetation – she looked to be in a forest. Cast to her side was a basket of foraged materials: wild honey, some mushrooms, and herbs.
Was this a dream?
The notion that this was unreal gave Mafuyu the courage she would not otherwise have had to move closer towards the violent noises. As she walked, the woods thinned to a dirt road where masked men were attacking a grand procession. She could not see past an archer blocking her view of the carriage he was protecting, but that soon changed when the man fell to a thrown spear, and the masked enemy now charged towards Mafuyu with a drawn sword.
Should she run? No, it was probably too late for that. Her only hope of survival was to fight with the weapon the archer had left behind. Mafuyu had not shot a single arrow since high school, and she had certainly never touched a yew bow with whale tendon as its string. She predictably missed her first shot, but it stalled the enemy’s charge and gave her the information she needed to adjust her draw. Her second shot was still imperfect, but it caught the man’s leg as it was falling in its trajectory, dropping him to the ground.
“Stand back! Protect the princess!” someone shouted at her before she was shoved back against the carriage. She could smell blood from the window that was slightly ajar. Whoever was inside was gravely injured.
Mafuyu’s medical training gave her a sense of responsibility towards patients regardless of their background or status. This compelled her to open the carriage door to speak to those inside, “I am a medical student. I can help.”
A pair of red eyes found Mafuyu’s own. They scrutinized her from top to bottom before gesturing for her to enter. “Come in. Don’t leave the door open.”
She did as she was told. There were only two people inside the carriage. The one who had talked to Mafuyu had a head of unusual pink hair. The sword on her belt had a three-leaf clover engraved on its pommel.
Why did her appearance match that of royal guard, Momoi Airi, from The Way to Freedom?
The appearance of the other woman in the carriage confirmed Mafuyu’s suspicions that she was either dreaming of or somehow transported into the world of the novel she had been reading last night. The woman’s unworldly beauty more than lived up to the story’s description – her silken hair was the colour of a glacier, her striking azure eyes were like clear alpine lakes, and her delicate features lay beneath skin smoother than perfect porcelain. She had a beauty mark beneath the right corner of her now bluing lips.
“Princess Shizuku of Hinomori,” Mafuyu muttered.
“Forget the formalities. Go take a look at the arrow wound on Her Highness’ thigh. Do you think you can treat it?” Airi cut off Mafuyu’s musings in a hurried voice.
“I will try.”
Mafuyu might have said that to Airi but, in all honesty, she was unconfident. That was because the events of the novel were precipitated by nothing other than Princess Shizuku’s death.
The assassination of Princess Shizuku en route to a border negotiation would cause war to break out between Hinomori and Ootori. The country of Hinomori would collapse during the war and its people subjected to genocide by the Ootori army.
Mafuyu forced herself to cast away her uncertainties to focus instead on the task at hand.
“How are you feeling, Your Highness? Are you injured anywhere else besides the arrow wound?” she asked the princess while taking her breathing rate and pulse.
“Not too unwell actually – a bit cold and slightly nauseous. And I am not injured anywhere else,” the princess answered with a smile. “When the arrow struck me, it felt like a hot iron. Then the area around it tingled. Now it feels numb.”
“When did Her Highness sustain the injury?” Mafuyu asked Airi.
“Only a few moments ago. The time that has passed would be about the amount of time needed to steep a cup of tea.”
To enable further inspection, Mafuyu tore away the clothing around the wound and cleaned the area with water from a calabash bottle she had found strung to her belt. The arrow was protruding at an angle and did not seem to have penetrated too deeply – an indication that it had likely been deflected from another surface before striking the princess. Despite the stench of blood that could be smelled even from outside the carriage, the bleeding was not so profuse as to be lethal on its own. The location and depth of the arrow’s entry made it unlikely for a major artery to have been punctured. Mafuyu palpated around the wound while asking her patient questions – it would seem that the numbness was intensifying and spreading with time.
This made Mafuyu ponder. The princess’ current condition was not too poor – her breathing was more or less normal, and her pulse, while not the strongest, still had a good rhythm and pace. In the novel, the aconite poison on the arrow’s tip contributed to her death, and her pale, cold, and clammy skin and the tingling followed by numbness in the wound were consistent with this description. However, it was unlikely for a single aconite-laced arrow to kill an adult human by poison alone. There would have to be some other factor to her death. Perhaps more poison made it into the circulation than otherwise expected due to the arrow having been left in the wound for too long, or that it was improperly extracted? Or it could be that a poor arrow extraction caused massive bleeding, or the wound became infected later on. Either way, Mafuyu must be careful in removing the arrow as quickly as possible so as to not aggravate the situation.
“Don’t pull the arrow! The head is barbed. You have to push it through,” Airi exclaimed the moment Mafuyu reached towards the arrow. Mafuyu’s brows furrowed when she heard the comment. Indeed, some kind of uneducated opinion might have been what truly put the princess six feet under in the original novel.
“The wound is not too deep. Blindly pushing the arrow through might damage a larger vessel, causing more bleeding. Also, the arrow is tipped with poison. We do not want the poison to enter further into the circulation. We must remove the arrow as soon as possible and clean the wound thoroughly, but it must be pulled rather than pushed through in this case,” she answered.
Ignoring Airi’s reaction, Mafuyu rummaged through her own clothing and basket for instruments she could use for the arrow extraction. Finding nothing suitable, she then turned towards the small boxes within the carriage. There were precious gems and perfumes and silks and jewellery, but none of that was useful. What Mafuyu took interest in was a box of exotic-looking quills. She took two of them with suitably long and thick shafts. Taking out the pocketknife she had found in her robes, she proceeded to strip away the vanes from the shafts.
“What are you doing!? Those are made from the feathers of a rare bird from across the southern seas! They are a peace offering to the royals of Ootori…”
Mafuyu cut Airi’s rant short. “You will not see peace if the princess dies.”
Satisfied by the smoothness of the quills’ shafts after removing the vanes, Mafuyu wiped them clean with a moist handkerchief. She then applied the honey from her basket onto the quills as both a lubricant and antimicrobial and proceeded to insert the quills into the wound. After some gentle probing, she found the barbs on the arrowhead and capped each with the hollow shaft of a quill. Gripping firmly onto the arrow shaft and the two quills, Mafuyu first nudged them side to side to test for resistance. Finding none and, therefore, confident that the barbs were no longer protruding, she proceeded to pull the arrow out.
The arrow came out rather smoothly and blood started oozing from the wound, making dark red trails along Princess Shizuku’s pale skin. Though Airi had certainly seen worse injuries throughout her military career, she still winced at the ugly sight – she blamed herself for letting this befall her kind lady.
“It is okay, Airi-chan. It does not hurt too much,” the princess said.
Airi gave her a halfhearted glare and said in a tone that sounded like she was scolding a naughty child, “But it should. That is the problem. You are not feeling it because of the poison, Princess.”
Mafuyu poured the rest of the water from her bottle onto the wound in an attempt to wash out the poison and other pathogens that might have been introduced by the arrow. “Do you have more clean water?” she asked Airi.
“Here,” Airi handed her a bottle of her own. “We have more supplies, but they aren’t inside the carriage. I can go outside and try to fetch them.”
“No, it is not safe outside, Airi-chan.”
Airi laughed at the princess’ remark. “I am a soldier. I should be fighting alongside my comrades and not holing up here in the first place. Besides, it isn’t as though this carriage is perfectly safe either. Didn’t you get hit by a stray arrow, Your Highness?”
“But you should stay to protect the princess,” Mafuyu interjected bluntly, making Airi scowl at her in response. “We do not just need more water. This is no place to continue the princess’ treatment. Keep a look out on the situation outside and help us retreat whenever it is secure to do so.”
“Bold of a peasant like you to be ordering me around, but I’ll listen this once because you are making sense,” Airi replied. She peeked out the window to see that the fight was dying down – most of the masked enemy had already been slain. “Our side is winning. For now, anyway – we would be in deep trouble if the enemy has reinforcements. We’re still on Hinomori territory, but the closest town we could retreat to is on the other side of the Asagiri Pass. I’m afraid we would be ambushed along the way if more of the enemy had managed to sneak around us while we were occupied with this fight. Ideally, we should call for additional men to secure the mountain pass before moving through it, but I’m uncertain whether we can afford to wait.”
Mafuyu did not want to speak on the medieval military tactics that she had only briefly encountered in history textbooks, but she did know the medical necessity for an evacuation. “The patient cannot wait. Her Highness’ wound must be thoroughly washed, then closed and dressed to avoid infection.”
“Very well. We can hide somewhere in the forest while we call in reinforcements to secure the mountain pass. But we need a place with the supplies you require for the princess’ treatment, right? Do you know where to go? You’re the local here,” Airi asked.
But Mafuyu was not a local. She was a stray traveler from a whole different world. But why did Airi’s words evoke images of a hut in the forest that stood next to a waterfall? Those were not her memories. Such a place was never mentioned in the novel.
Were those the memories of Mafuyu’s parallel self, the original owner of the body she now inhabited?
“I cannot be certain whether I would be able to find the hut in the forest, but if you are willing to bear the risk, I can try and lead the way.”