Attack on Najida

The attack on Najida was a violent episode in the wider coup-era danger surrounding Cajeiri: shells were directed at a house while assassins were inside it. Recalled after the immediate crisis, the attack carries an additional weight in his account—not only as a threat survived, but as part of the violence he still struggles to understand and keep from his young guests.

Context and Protection

Cajeiri and his bodyguard had gradually come to recognize that the coup concealed a deeper problem. His bodyguard and Ilisidi’s had quietly gathered intelligence, tested their channels, and tried to distinguish reliable contacts from people constrained by procedure or implicated in the danger. The inquiry unfolded within the Assassins’ Guild, whose secrecy and procedural rules made information difficult to obtain.

That effort to protect him extended to the Aiji and the heir. The two bodyguards had carried the three through several dangerous situations, including misinformation that nearly got Cajeiri killed on the peninsula. The attack on Najida belongs to this broader record of threats, although the recollection does not detail its full course or identify who directed it.

The Attack

At Najida Peninsula, shells came against the house, and assassins were in the basement. The danger was not merely anticipated: the attackers had entered the house, while the shelling put the household under fire from outside. Cajeiri later remembered that the adults around him had not been able to manage every peril themselves, even as his bodyguard’s role was to protect him.

The account offers no precise sequence of the attack, its duration, or a complete account of its casualties. It does establish the combination that made the episode so frightening: an assault on the house and an armed threat already within it. Cajeiri’s later guests had themselves come close to a frightening moment of this kind, which made the subject especially difficult to discuss with them.

Memory and Aftermath

Cajeiri’s recollection connects the attack with his own experience of killing during the surrounding crises. He remembers killing someone, and believes he had killed on two separate occasions, one nearly a year earlier and another that spring. The passage does not establish that either killing occurred during the attack on Najida; instead, it shows how the attack belongs to a larger accumulation of violence that he cannot neatly separate or explain.

He is unsure whether he should feel pride or shame, or whether what he did was right or wrong. The uncertainty remains unresolved: the adults are upset, his bodyguards are unhappy that he had to act in their place, and Cajeiri has not found a way to ask the people closest to him how he should understand what happened. His decision not to tell his guests about the fighting and political troubles keeps the memory private, but does not make it settled.