This was not good, although I was not sure why. My eyelids were as heavy as though fathoms of water were pressing down on them. Still, with immense effort, I dragged them open.
The warm, yellow light that greeted me was not bright, but it was still intolerable. I squeezed my eyes shut again and blinked over and over, fighting the sting of salt water as well as the dazzle of light.
While I struggled to see, the hands managed to pull my jacket off.
I reached for it, and more hands, gentle enough, caught my arm and held it still. My vision steadied at last, and I saw that someone was bandaging a deep cut just below my collarbone where the dragon’s claws or teeth must have scored through my skin.
The thing that was taking such care of my wound was a demon.
It had the shape of a man, but its skin had a ghosly pallor, as if it spent much of its life underground or underwater, far from the touch of the sun. Where it was not that unearthly color, it was spotted and speckled with loathsome brown blobs. Hair sprang from its head in stiff, unnatural curls, the color of fire or rust or sunset. Worst of all were its eyes, a queasy bluish-gray color rather like the flesh of trampled slugs.
Here was an enemy. Something to fight.
But why was an enemy bandaging my wound?
Confusion smothered my first impulse to kick and punch my way free, leaving room only for a shudder of revulsion that worked its way from my bones to my skin. I didn’t want this creature touching me.
As I tried to pull away, other hands caught me. These were deep brown, as though their owner had been baked too long in a fire. I turned my head to see a dark demon whose head and face were both smothered in black hair like tightly wound wire, whose teeth showed bright white as it spoke to me in words that made no sense at all.
There were more demons in the background, and they babbled and cawed at me in sounds that could not be called speech. A stench rose from them that clogged my nose, a mix of sweat and stale clothing and long-unwashed bodies and sour breath and rotten meat.
Did other demons smell like this? How had I never noticed before?
My vision blurred again in horror, and my stomach heaved. I struggled, but every muscle was appallingly weak, and pains stabbed my chest with each breath. In this state, I could not have fought off Ozu.
More hands came to hold me down, and the darkest of the demons held a wooden cup against my lips, spilling something cold and bitter into my mouth. I gagged and spat, but still some of it ran down my throat, and slowly the will to fight ebbed from my body.
The pale, speckled demon finished wrapping my shoulder and one of the others picked up my bloody jacket from the floor. He had bronze skin and soft black hair, and so he looked a little more human than the rest.
I focused all my effort on my right arm, which felt as limp as a strand of seaweed, and heaved it up, reaching out to him. My jacket … I needed it. Straining, I managed to snag the sleeve in my fingers.
The thoughts inside my head seemed to be muffled in soft, fuzzy cotton. Still, I knew there was something about my jacket, something important. But the bronze-skinned demon smiled at me and patted my hand, and my fingers slipped from their hold on the wet cloth.
It was too hard to keep fighting. I’d been doing it for so long. I’d defeated or outwitted every enemy in my path. I’d faced down demons and ghosts and friends. Of course, I knew I should be running, shouting, wrestling, kicking, freeing myself from these hideous creatures and their plans for me. But I was tired now, so tired it hurt to think. No one could fight forever.
I gave up the jacket and whatever was so important about it. Let him take it. It was his now. All I wanted was sleep.
My eyes closed, shutting out the sight of the demons. Their inhuman sounds swirled around me and melted away.
After some time, I felt my jacket, still damp and stiff with salt, being wrapped around me once more. Someone picked me up. I turned my head drowsily from the feel of rough cloth under my cheek. A fresh, damp breeze touched my face. The rocking grew stronger. Small waves slapped on wood. Oars swept through water. But everything was dark, as if my eyes had been glued shut with cobwebs.
I could not give up, though. Not now.
There was something I needed to do. A mission. I had a mission, and I could not complete it flat on my back with my eyes closed.
I could not rest. Could not sleep. Could not let the peaceful darkness keep me.
With a huge effort, I wrenched myself awake, to find that the demons had vanished. Had they flown off on the wind, dived beneath the sea, melted into the air? I could not guess. But they were gone, and I was lying in a hut next to a smoky driftwood fire. A wrinkled old woman knelt beside me, peering into my face. She jumped back when my eyes struggled open.
She was, I learned after we’d both gotten over our moment of surprise, the mother of the fisherman who owned the hut. She was kind enough to me, as were her son and his wife. They gave me the freshest fish and the softest sleeping mat and the warmest spot by the fire. They leaped to bring me anything I might want before I had time to ask. But they were clearly wary of me, which was only natural, since I’d been brought to their door by a boatload of demons.
They told me how the demons had rowed ashore, wearing the most outlandish clothing, babbling like animals and stinking like garbage. One, speckled and pale as a fish’s belly, and another, dark as burnt rice, had handed me over. Others had filled up barrels of water at a nearby spring and, with gestures and more of their squawking attempts at words, indicated a desire for half my host’s store of dried and salted fish.
They’d offered in exchange a few outlandish coins which, the fisherman said, did not even have a hole in the center. When the man would not accept them or anything else in trade, the demons had gabbled a bit among themselves and then taken their fish and their departure, rowing off toward an enormous ship like a floating castle anchored not far offshore. They’d left several of the strange coins on a rock by the waterside. No member of the family had been brave enough to touch them, and the tide had washed the little golden heap away.
I’d slept a day and a half before finally hauling myself awake.
It was clear to the fisherman’s family that they were supposed to care for me. It was clear to me that they would be happy when I was gone.
But I couldn’t concern myself too deeply about their fears, or about the baffling behavior of the demons. In all my encounters with bakemono, I had not met any who bargained for fish. Or who were merely and simply kind.
I barely wondered at it, however. I did not have the heart.
When I’d opened my eyes to find the fisherman’s old mother peering anxiously at me, I’d sat up and instantly clapped a hand to the pocket inside my jacket, then frantically torn the ties loose and pulled the pocket itself inside out.
It was empty. The pearl was gone.
Had it been washed out in the water? Had the dragon snatched it? Had the demons stolen it? It didn’t matter. It was gone, and that meant I’d failed.
Whenever I died—and that might be soon, considering the number of enemies I’d managed to accumulate—the demon I’d carried in my pocket for two years would be set loose. I’d had a chance to banish it back to the underworld, but I’d been slow, and stupid, and weak, and now that chance was gone.
I’d been handed a mission by the gods themselves, and I had not been able to get it done.
I spent that first day curled up by the fire, staring into the black coals at the heart of the flames, feeling nothing but the dull, deep ache of failure. On the second day I drank a cup of salty soup so that the fisherman’s wife and mother would stop offering me the bowl, taking turns to creep near and then retreat anxiously when I looked up or waved them away.
It was irritating.
At last I snatched the bowl from the wife’s hand and gulped the soup down. And suddenly the little hut, its single room smoky from the damp fire in its center, fishing spears leaning in a corner, nets strung from the rafters, wa
s chokingly small and smelly. It was also insufferably crowded, even if there were only two people in it apart from myself. Both women, huddled together, watched wordlessly as I surged to my feet, wincing from the ache in my bandaged shoulder. I pushed my way outside.
Their hut stood by itself on a stony stretch of beach, scooped in a curved bay as if the sea had taken a hungry bite out of the land. The boards of the little building had weathered gray under the rain and the salt winds. The stones were gray. The clouds overhead were gray. The sea heaved and rumbled as shallow gray waves spat dirty white froth against the shore.
Not too far from my feet, I spotted something round and flat and not-gray, wedged half under a rock. I bent to pick it up. It was one of the demon’s gold coins.
On one side was a design of two crossed lines, on the other a shape like a shield. I straightened, rubbing my thumb over the cold, slick, wet metal, pondering the oddity of demons who carried coins, who tried to pay for what they took, and who’d picked up a drowning girl from the waves.
Then a flash of white caught my eye.
Where the bay ended, a grassy slope rose to a little headland. The fox was sitting there with her brushy tail tucked neatly against her feet, waiting for me.
I’d been a failure, but that did not mean I had to be a coward, too. I set my teeth and trudged across the smooth, shifting, treacherous stones until I reached the headland, climbing up to kneel before the fox.
I bowed.
“I am sorry,” I said into the short, wiry grass beneath my face. “I failed.”
I wouldn’t add more, anything weak or sniveling like I tried or I did my best. Trying did not matter. Only the mission mattered. And the mission had not been fulfilled.
Gentle fingers touched my shoulder, and when I looked up, a beautiful woman in a snow-white kimono knelt before me.
Her eyes held pity. I did not want pity. I wanted myself back, the self who had never failed a mission, not since I was sent to murder Ichiro and rescued him instead.
I wanted to be the Kata who had stolen every jewel and coin and scrap of information Master Ishikawa ever wanted. Who had won every bout in the practice yard. And she was gone. I could never be that girl again.
“Kata, no,” the fox-woman said.
Her deep voice was warm as fur, rich as earth.
“You did not fail,” she told me.
“The dragon,” I protested, my tongue clumsy with shock. “It took the pearl—or I lost it—or—”
“The dragon came to help you,” she said gently. “I told you you’d find new allies in the sea, did I not? As loyal as those you found on land. The dragon saved you.”
Saved me? It had cut my shoulder open and hauled me through the water until I nearly drowned. If it hadn’t been for the dragon—
If it hadn’t been for the dragon, the umi-bozu might have devoured me. If it hadn’t been for the dragon, I might have wished on the pearl one last time.
The woman in the white kimono nodded when she saw I was beginning to understand. “After it kept you from spending the pearl’s last wish, the dragon brought both you and the pearl where it knew a ship had been blown far enough off course to find you,” she told me.
I remembered the storm that had shaken Mori’s ship. Had it also brought the demons’ vessel close to this shore?
“On that ship, you did what you were meant to do,” the fox-woman went on. “You gave the pearl to its next guardian.”
I gave the pearl? But it had been mine. I did not—I would never—
My fingers touched the empty pocket of my jacket, the cloth still stiff with salt and dried blood.
The black-haired demon had picked up my jacket from the deck. I’d struggled to seize hold of it, but at last I’d given in. Let him take it, I’d thought. I’d handed over the jacket, with the bloody pearl inside it.
After fighting for two years to keep the pearl safe, I’d given it to a demon.
“And that guardian will complete the mission you were sent on,” the fox-woman said, speaking clearly over the new and sickening swirl of failure and guilt inside my head. “He will take the pearl far from these shores. At such a distance, the demon’s power will wither until nothing remains. It will never grant another wish, and so it will never be freed. Oh, I see company has arrived.”
As I sat back on my heels, too stupefied to be happy or even relieved, she glanced up at the sky. I followed her gaze and saw a great flock of dark wings overhead, all swirling together like a single scrap of black silk caught in a gale. They might have been crows, but I believed they were not.
“I asked them to act as guides,” the fox-woman said. “They’ve brought someone you may like to see.”
When I looked back down from the sky, the fox was loping away, a spot of white that soon merged into the gray and windswept landscape.
The tengu wheeled above my head and up into the sky again, cawing their raucous laughter, and at the end of the beach where the fox had disappeared, I glimpsed a familiar lean figure.
Jinnai stumbled and slid over the loose stones along the shore, climbed the headland, and collapsed into a heap beside me.
“Following you does lead me into the most desolate places,” he said, looking with distaste at the lonely shore and the humble hut.
“Why do you do it, then?” I asked, but I couldn’t find any exasperation to lace into my tone. I had not failed after all. My mission was over. The pearl was gone but safe, out of my hands, out of this land.
“I told you. I’m in love with you. Despite the fact that, apparently, you don’t listen to a word I say. So are there ghosts here who are about to attack us, or giant snakes in the water, or anything else I should know about?”
I cast a glance at the tengu, vanishing now into the cloudy sky. “No. I don’t think I’ll see many bakemono from now on.” But I’d always know they were there, filling every shadow. I’d always know that the world was stranger, more dangerous, and more astonishing than most people would ever believe.
“Excellent!” Jinnai’s grin was wide. “So all we have to worry about is the fact that Master Ishikawa will be hunting you down? I did warn you that it was a bad idea to steal from him. And, of course, that the entire Takeda family would be delighted to have your head? Possibly mine as well?”
I thought for a moment. “I think that’s all.”
“Marvelous. Nothing we can’t handle between us.” Jinnai sighed with what looked like genuine satisfaction. “That is …”
He glanced at me and then away, and I saw something remarkable in his eyes. Was it uncertainty?
“Those flying friends of yours were quite insistent that I come with them,” he said, keeping his gaze on the restless water. “It’s not exactly easy to refuse.” That was certainly true. If an entire flock of tengu wanted me to go somewhere, I knew that I’d have little choice.
“But I don’t have to stay. I know you never …” His voice trailed off. My brain, dulled by exhaustion and the degradation of failure and then the astonishment of relief, began to stir slowly to life.
Not just uncertainty from Jinnai, but humility as well? That was certainly new.
“If you tell me to, I’ll go,” he said simply. He did not turn his face away from the sea.
He was offering me what I thought I’d wanted since the night I’d dragged him out of a bush. It would be simple enough to take it.
All my life, I’d been taught to trust no friend, rely on no ally. It was my failure to follow that training, surely, that had put myself, my friends, and my mission in peril.
And yet—what had the fox spirit said? That the water dragon had been as loyal an ally as those I’d found on the land?
To my surprise a memory flickered inside my head. When I’d been Saiko’s prisoner, Madame had studied the two of us, as if she were deciding who would win.
But she hadn’t merely looked at me and Saiko. Her gaze had moved to the others as well. My allies. My friends. Madame had weighed them in the balance, too. A
nd then she’d made her choice.
All I’d been able to see was the ways my allies had imperiled my mission. I’d been blind to the ways they had saved it.
Without the water dragon, I would have sacrificed my soul when I spent the pearl’s last wish.
Without Yuki, I’d have been lost in a forest that never ended, or inside thoughts that would not let me go.
Without Jinnai, the pearl would likely be in Saiko’s hands this moment.
Without Masako and Tomiko, I’d have stayed in a cage. Oh, I could have wished myself out—but if I had, I’d have been trapped inland, miles from the sea, with the demon of the pearl calling on every bakemono between me and the water to block me from my destination.
If I were faithful to my old training, I’d leave this beach now, alone. I’d find my way to a new city—the capital, perhaps—where my skills would earn a living. I’d walk off into the world by myself, as Tomiko had done. I’d live for my own advancement, as Saiko always would.
But if I’d been faithful to my old training, my mission would have failed. Instead, it had succeeded. I was free.
Free to decide what I would do. Free to decide whom I might trust, even if the person I chose to trust was a thief and a liar.
Free to believe, perhaps, what this thief and liar had once said—that he had never lied to me. Not even when he claimed to love me.
Which didn’t mean that I had to love him in return. But it did mean that it might not be ridiculous to consider it.
I cleared my throat.
“I suppose,” I said, and heard uncertainty in my own tone. Perhaps even humility.
“If you want to …,” I went on. “You can …” I paused to cough. “Come with me.”
Jinnai’s entire body twitched. He sat straighter, turning to me, the surprise on his face melting into delight.
I scowled at him. I’d made no promises. All I’d said was that he didn’t have to go away.
But before I could remind him of this, he took my hand.
My eyes dropped to his fingers. Deft, and warm, and very gentle, they brushed across the bandage he’d wrapped around my palm, so firmly and so well that it had stayed in place through all my underwater battles, my days and nights of despair.