Deadly Wish: A Ninja’s Journey

  From Jinnai’s anxious breathing, I’d guessed that he might be thinking the same thing. How many nights had this city-born boy spent in a forest? To him, the tiny creatures of the darkness probably sounded like stealthy wolves or ravenous bears.

  Among all the sounds that wove together to make up the nighttime hush, I had heard no hint of anything human. Jinnai had likely been telling the truth, at least when he’d said he was alone.

  I’d also heard no hint of anything inhuman. No ghostly whispers, no demon laughter. Nothing to suggest that the pearl in my pocket had stirred the local bakemono to life, unless a few of the rustling wings belonged to curious tengu. But if so, they were keeping their distance. I could only hope that the calm would last.

  As for Jinnai’s other words—of course I knew them to be false. He was simply trying to use his charm on me, as I’d seen him use it so often before. He must have hoped that a claim of something as absurd as love would confuse me. Distract me. Keep me from remembering why he was truly here.

  He believed I had something of value. He’d followed me to steal it. He was a thief. It was all he knew how to do.

  “Didn’t you guess? You must have guessed,” he said now, leaning against his tree trunk and eyeing me curiously.

  I snorted and busied myself kicking apart the ashes of my fire. With a sharpened stick, I dug into the dirt beneath it to retrieve a bundle of cloth. I’d soaked it in water last night and wrapped it around a handful of rice. Now the rice, though cool, was soft enough to eat.

  “You notice everything. I’ve never seen you miss a detail. Close your eyes and tell me what I’m wearing.”

  I didn’t close my eyes, but I didn’t look up from my meal. “Indigo jacket. Gray trousers. Socks that aren’t white anymore. Sandals. The right one’s been mended twice. Brass earring in your ear—your left ear. Ivory amulet under the jacket that you should keep better hidden.”

  “See? And you tell me you never noticed the way I looked at you?”

  If I’d never noticed such a thing, it meant there was nothing to notice. I swallowed the last of the rice, leaving none for my captive—if he wanted food, he should have carried it himself. Next I picked up my round straw hat, tied the strings to secure it under my chin, and let it hang down my back.

  Then I got to my feet.

  “Kata?” Jinnai sat up straight. The bruise I’d left on his face four days ago had faded to brown and yellow, and the red weal made by the branch in our struggle last night cut across it, straight as if drawn with a brush. His clothes were muddy from our tussle and from whatever sleep he’d gotten among the roots of his tree. “You wouldn’t,” he said, clearly unconvinced by his own words. “You wouldn’t actually …”

  Leave him there? Of course I shouldn’t leave him there. What I ought to do was kill him.

  I had a mission. He was a threat to it. Every threat to your mission must be eliminated.

  Jinnai’s confusion was slowly giving way to alarm.

  The kind thing, in fact, would be to cut his throat quickly. It would be less cruel than leaving him where he was, at the mercy of hunger and thirst and predators. Oh, maybe he’d attract the attention of some charcoal burner or hunter or old wife gathering roots and herbs, and maybe whoever found him would set him free instead of killing him for his earring and his amulet and whatever coins might be in his pockets. But maybe not. In any case, he’d face a long, cold, hungry wait for a rescue that might never come.

  To hesitate was weak, but I did not like the thought. I’d dodged Takeda guards with Jinnai. I’d stood on his shoulders to scale walls. I’d relied on him to distract dogs while I worked my way through hedges. Must I leave him to what would likely be a lingering death simply because he’d plotted to steal from me?

  I’d been living among thieves for two years, and I knew that any one of them would have done the same. Jinnai had been faithful to his training; that was all.

  He’d be faithful to that training no matter what, I thought. And that meant I didn’t need to kill him—or leave him. There was another way.

  I slid my knife from its sheath along my forearm.

  “Kata? I really think you ought to listen to me now,” Jinnai said, wide-eyed, twisting his hands in his bonds as apprehension quivered in every word. “I can see I was in the wrong to follow you. I won’t make that mistake again. But you don’t give a man many chances to declare his devotion. You must realize that. And of course I knew you’d never believe me. But I think you’ll regret—”

  In three steps I was beside his tree. I dropped to one knee, brought the knife swiftly down, and slashed the cords with which I’d tied his hands.

  With a groan, Jinnai flopped onto his back among a litter of twigs and dead leaves. “Don’t do that to a man,” he said feebly. “I won’t have any heart left to love you with if you make it burst with terror.”

  I rose to my feet. “Just—,” I started to say, but stopped.

  He quirked an eyebrow at me from where he lay. “Just what?”

  Just remember I could have killed you, I thought.

  “Just don’t slow me down,” I said as I turned and strode off between two trees.

  He followed me, as I’d known he would. He wouldn’t leave me, not as long as he still thought I had something he could steal.

  EIGHT

  I didn’t know this landscape as well as I did that of the province where I had grown up, in Madame’s school, studying Madame’s maps. And Jinnai was no help at all. As I’d suspected, this was the first time he’d been outside the walls of the harbor city where he had been born.

  “If you wanted to know how to find a particular tea-house in the pleasure district, I could tell you easily,” he explained, keeping close behind as I ventured along a narrow, rocky path that might have been made by hunters or by deer. “Or the alleys down by the wharfs? I can find my way there blindfolded and with my ears stopped up, just by the smell. But out here—are there snakes? Is there a reason you don’t want to take the main road?”

  “Yes.” I let go of a branch. He ducked as it whipped back over his head.

  “You wouldn’t want to tell me what it is, would you?”

  “No.”

  “Or what there is about you that’s so valuable someone paid Master Ishikawa more than what a shipload of excellent rice wine is worth?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I didn’t think so. You should be more careful of him, you know, Kata. He’s not a person you want angry at you. About the snakes?”

  I knew the direction I wanted to go, and I kept at it, guided by the angle of the sun, picking my way from one broken-backed trail to another, forcing my body through scrubby undergrowth and along muddy streams, hiding only the time I heard feet somewhere in the distance. A hunter after game? Or a ninja after me?

  Jinnai could keep his tongue still enough when it mattered. The footsteps faded without either of us catching a glimpse of their maker.

  The other girls would be traveling more swiftly and easily, and also a bit more conspicuously. Masako should reach the city a full day, perhaps two, before I would. Then she’d disappear neatly into her old life, and anyone following her trail would find that it had gone cold. That should leave me free to enter and find my way down to the harbor, to choose a ship that would take me and the pearl out of Madame’s reach, out of Saiko’s.

  I hoped.

  And what would I do with Jinnai, then? Push him into the ocean, perhaps. It would be satisfying.

  We spent our second night on a cliff overlooking the harbor, a bowl of sea scooped out between the encircling arms of two mountains. I’d lived the past two years in the town by that harbor, but this was the first time I’d surveyed it from such a height—a jumble of roofs, thatch and tile, looking like things thrown pell-mell into a bag. As the morning light strengthened, I perched on an outcrop of crumbling rock, my knees under my chin, studying the scene below me.

  I could see the broad avenue that began at Ryujin’s shrine and ran
downhill to the jetty, where trading ships and the largest fishing boats were moored. My eyes traced the river winding through a gap in the mountains to cut the city in two. There were also three main roads leading through the heights and into the warren of streets and alleys.

  Each road passed through a gap in the rugged hills, and in each gap was a wooden fort where soldiers kept an eye on all of the traffic. Where the river entered the city, it flowed through a stone gate watched by more armed men.

  I didn’t need to see those men up close to know that each had the chrysanthemum of the Takeda family embroidered on his jacket or lacquered on his armor. Ishikawa Goemon might rule the city’s underworld, but the Takeda family ruled everything else. Nothing went into the city by land or water without their knowledge—and without paying handsomely for the privilege.

  At least, that’s what the Takedas thought.

  “Not the roads,” Jinnai said, as if reading my mind. “What about the river? I know a few flatboat men who owe me a favor, or would like to have me owe them one. But are you sure that’s where you want to go?”

  He sat at the foot of a dead, gray, wind-gnarled cedar, his gaze moving back and forth between the city and me.

  “Two minutes after we’re back, Master Ishikawa will know about it,” he continued, his face more serious than usual. “I think even the rats report to him. He won’t be any too pleased with me, since I didn’t have his permission to leave. But you … Did you steal from him? Actually, it doesn’t much matter if you did or not. You’re valuable, Kata. He knows it. What’s to keep him from trying to sell you again? He’s a dangerous man. Haven’t you ever looked at his hands?”

  It was such an unexpected question that it captured my full attention, which was probably what Jinnai had intended.

  “My mother always told me that hands are important. For people like us.” He stretched his own out before him in the sunlight and flexed the fingers, studying them critically. “She always bandaged up every little cut and took out every splinter. A thief’s hands are his life. That’s what she said. And she taught me that hands show the soul.”

  I dropped my gaze to my own hands. Strong. Calluses from a sword hilt along the base of the thumb and the pads of the fingers. White scars over more than one knuckle.

  Then I thought of Sakuma’s soft, plump hand reaching for the place where he hid his treasures.

  And Master Ishikawa’s hands? I’d last seen them sorting jewels in lamplight. They had long, pale fingers, narrow at the tips. Perfectly clean nails. Careful and precise.

  What was that supposed to tell me about his soul?

  “I saw him catch a bird once,” Jinnai told me. “A sparrow that had blundered into his room somehow. It was flying into screens and walls, trying to escape. He just reached out and—took it. Quicker than anything I’ve ever seen. He held it in those hands. A tiny brown thing. So frightened. And he—”

  Jinnai’s own hands knotted into fists.

  “Be careful of him, Kata.”

  An actual shudder inched up my spine and clawed its way over my scalp. Impatiently, I turned away to study the traffic along the nearest road.

  My current mission had nothing to do with Master Ishikawa. That did not mean I’d forgotten his betrayal, but Jinnai’s warnings and his gruesome little story were nothing but a distraction from what I needed to do next.

  On the road below us, women lugged baskets and men carried bundles strung between two poles. Oxcarts trundled up to the fort and back down the slope into the city. One cart in particular, its contents concealed under a heavy cover, caught my eye.

  I rose and began to pick my way back down the slope we had climbed the day before, aiming to intersect the road along which that cart was making its slow way. Jinnai followed. “Well, if we must,” he said ruefully at my back. “At least a road will be easier on my sandals. But we’re not going to simply stroll up to that fort, are we? Kata? Are we?”

  We broke free of the trees not many yards ahead of the cart. Its driver, a mountainous hulk of a man with a badly scarred face, had stopped to let his beast stick its snuffling nose into a trickle of a stream that ran across the road.

  I came to a halt, casting my gaze up and down the roadway, empty except for the cart, the ox, and the driver.

  “We,” I said shortly to Jinnai, “are not going anywhere.”

  While he frowned in puzzlement, a man took a few steps out from behind the thick trunk of an oak.

  “Well timed,” Commander Otani said. “And well met.” A black feather had been tucked into the belt that held his plain brown jacket closed at the waist. He’d had the sense to conceal his battered armor under unremarkable clothes, but anyone with eyes to see would notice how straight he stood, how he kept his hands free, how deftly he balanced as he picked his way over roots and rocks and leaped down to the road’s surface.

  He no longer wore his hair in a samurai’s neat topknot, although he’d retained the vanity of a mustache, long and flowing, carefully combed. Warriors did cherish their mustaches. If one lost his head on the battlefield and an enemy carried it away in triumph, at least the sweeping black facial hair would tell the world that the dead man was a samurai, not a commoner—or worse, a woman.

  But it wasn’t only the mustache or the two swords at his side that announced what this man was. He moved like a warrior but was dressed like a farmer, and that would show anyone who was paying attention that he was a masterless fighter. A ronin.

  “Of course you did not keep us waiting, Flower,” he said cheerfully. He knew my name perfectly well, but the second or third time I’d hired him to help with one of Master Ishikawa’s jobs, he’d come up with the nickname. It seemed to amuse him, or maybe all that amused him was that it annoyed me. “Your message didn’t say there’d be two of you,” he went on. “A change in plans?”

  “No change.” I returned my gaze to Jinnai, whose body had snapped to attention with Otani’s appearance. A sharp sliver of a knife was in his hand, and I hadn’t even seen him draw it.

  I reached out casually while his eyes were still on the ronin and pinched the nerve at the wrist, just where the thumb joins the hand. Jinnai gasped in shock as his fingers, suddenly strengthless, let the knife fall. I kicked it into the stream, seized two handfuls of the thief’s jacket, and thrust him at Otani. He grabbed the boy by the shoulders, both to restrain him and prevent the two of them from falling flat in the muddy road.

  “Keep him,” I told Otani, who, a full handspan taller than Jinnai, looked at me over the thief’s head. “Don’t hurt him,” I added, a bit reluctantly. Why should I care if Otani damaged the thief? Still, if I’d wanted him injured, I could have done that in the forest. “But don’t let him follow me, either.”

  “Kata!” Jinnai protested indignantly. “What are you—”

  Otani clamped a large, rough hand over the boy’s mouth. “Certainly. Delighted to do you the service. May I assume our usual fee?”

  I slipped a hand into my belt and slid out a string of silver coins. Since Otani’s hands were occupied, I stepped forward and tucked his payment into the folds of his own belt.

  Then I met Jinnai’s outraged gaze, but I had no words for him. I simply could not let him imperil my mission.

  “Excellent,” Otani said, shifting his grip on Jinnai’s arm and twisting it up behind his back to stop his struggles. “Such a pity we have no time to chat, Flower, but I prefer not to be seen this close to the city. I hear that Lord Takeda is less than pleased with my activities in his province lately. Noritomo will take you the rest of the—ah!” Jinnai had stamped on his foot. “Do stop wriggling. Yes, I said I wouldn’t hurt you, but I’m not all that trustworthy. Good fortune!” he called as I headed toward the oxcart a bit farther along the road. I lifted a hand in response and farewell.

  The hulking driver did not even turn his head as Otani dragged Jinnai into the undergrowth and I crawled beneath the rough cloth that covered the straw in his cart. A hollow had been dug into the dried gr
ass. I nestled into it. The cart jolted into motion, bumping into the rutted tracks of the road. We plodded and creaked uphill for a time before the driver stopped to pay his toll at the hill fort. I felt the cart’s motion change as we headed downhill toward the town I’d left in a different oxcart only a few days before.

  When the ox stopped moving and the driver got off, the cart rocking and groaning under his bulk, I stirred. And when Otani’s man slapped the side of the cart in passing, I was ready to slide quickly out.

  Noritomo had pulled the cart into a narrow alley alongside an inn. He was now strolling toward the establishment’s front door, as if he had nothing more than a cool cup of rice wine on his mind and was utterly unaware of the bedraggled figure crawling out of his straw.

  Shaking dust and wisps of grass from my clothes, tucking my hair under my hat, I headed in the opposite direction.

  While in the cart, I’d had time to take care of a few things. My clothes were now even more ripped and ragged than my journey through the forest and the battle with the two-tailed cat had left them. One of the ceramic jars Masako had brought me had contained soot, and a bit smeared well over my face and hands had darkened my skin. Another pot held pine pitch. A pinch of that, secured to my upper lip, twisted my mouth in a permanent grimace that was quite repulsive. I saw the gazes of passersby skate over my face and away, and I felt quite satisfied.

  If you can’t be invisible, become someone no one wants to look at.

  A pebble slipped between my foot and the sole of my sandal gave me a convincing hobble, and, all in all, I looked very little like the ninja Madame and her girls would be seeking, or the thief who had served Master Ishikawa for so many months. Careful not to pause and stare, I limped along, casting quick glances from under my hat to discover where the oxcart had taken me.