“But you don’t,” I interrupted. I didn’t care as much as these two exactly who it was that wanted the boy dead; I had other things on my mind. “You knew your brother was the target all along,” I said to Saiko. “And so you decided to save him.” To save him by ruining my first mission. No, I had not forgotten that.
She shook her head. “Not until I saw Ichiro sleeping there. I only knew my uncle wanted someone—removed. I wondered who. I admit that. But I did not know.”
“And now the pearl is yours,” Ichiro said, turning to me. “I’m sorry.”
He glanced sideways. I was not sure whether his apology was meant for Saiko or me.
“It calls to things. As my sister said,” he went on. “Ghosts and demons. Bakemono. Creatures. Monsters. They’re drawn to it. As if they’re …” He paused. “Hungry for it.”
“The way a moth hungers for light,” Saiko said, with her eyes on me. “As long as you have it, they’ll come after you.”
I kept a cautious eye on the road, the yard, and the fields out back the next morning, but no tengu seemed to be lurking in the trees, no giant centipedes slithering up from the well, and no nameless, faceless creatures of hunger hiding behind the stables.
All I could see was sunrise, the time for three young travelers to set off on a journey.
Last night I had sat by the hearth, holding the pearl in both hands as the girls and Ichiro talked and argued and wondered. Their tangled, crisscrossed words seemed to weave a net in the dark air over and around me, until I felt as if I were under the sea myself, where the pearl had once been. Floating. Drifting. Loose and unanchored, with firm ground nowhere in sight.
“Destroy it,” Masako said. “Cast it into the fire.”
“No!” Saiko sounded alarmed. “We don’t—we don’t know what might happen if we did that. What we might set free.”
“Do pearls even burn?” someone else asked.
“Throw it into the ocean, then,” Masako countered.
“It could wash up on shore. Or get caught in a fisherman’s net.” Ichiro didn’t like that idea. “You can’t just throw it away. Another demon might get hold of it. Or if Kata were to die, then the next person to pick it up—”
“But she can’t stay here with it!” Fuku’s sharp whine was irritating to my ear. “Are we supposed to fight off monsters every night?”
“Bakemono are stirring now because of the blood,” Ichiro explained. “Because the pearl has a new owner. It’s—awake now, I suppose. In a way. As long as Kata keeps the pearl safe, they’ll settle back down after a while. Mostly.”
“Mostly?” Kiku sounded alarmed.
“In a while? How long is a while?” Fuku demanded.
“I don’t know.” Ichiro sounded unhappy. “There are ceremonies and things you can do to keep the demons away, but …”
“But what?” Fuku demanded.
“But I don’t know how to do them.”
“Well, who does know?” she persisted.
There was a pause.
“Uncle Hikosane might …” Ichiro started to say.
“Ichiro, he plotted to kill you,” Saiko snapped.
“We don’t know that.”
“I know it well enough. Fine, then. Even if it is Daigoro and not our uncle who wants you dead, we can’t go back to that castle.”
“Uncle Yoshisane, then,” Ichiro said.
Saiko sighed, perhaps reluctant, and nodded.
“Who?” Masako asked.
“Uncle Yoshisane,” Ichiro repeated. “Our father’s other brother. I think he might help us. He doesn’t like Uncle Hikosane. Much.”
“Might?” Masako questioned.
“In any case, we can’t—” Ichiro looked up, as if he’d taken new courage. “We can’t just stay here.”
“But the demons will follow Kata wherever she goes,” Masako objected. “As long as she has this thing!”
“Most of them can’t. They’re tied to their places. A river sprit must stay near its river. Even tengu have their own territory. If we keep moving, we’ll be safer.”
“You’re sure?” Masako pressed.
Ichiro shrugged. He looked very young. “I think so.”
“There’s one other way.” Saiko’s voice seemed to startle us all. I glanced up, briefly. She was looking right at me.
At my hands, and at what was cupped between them.
“You could give it away.”
My hands tightened into fists.
“It’s a burden to you. A danger. You do not need to bear it. It was given to our family. A samurai family. Not someone like—” She paused and decided not to finish her thought as the face of every girl around the fire hardened slightly. “I mean to say, you can let it go, with honor. Someone else can face the danger.”
And of course, I could. Slice my own hand and give this thing away, as easily as Ichiro had given it to me.
Give it to whom? To one of the other girls at the school? To Madame, when she returned? To Ichiro, who was no more than a boy?
To Saiko?
She was kneeling, very upright, very still. Awaiting my reply. They all were. The nets were floating above my head.
I stowed the pearl quickly away in an inside pocket of my jacket.
Ichiro was speaking again. “Blood on it twice, sister? In just a few days’ time? That can’t be wise. It might awaken—well, something worse.”
And Saiko bowed her head humbly, acknowledging that he was right.
But the truth was, I’d decided to keep the pearl before Ichiro had opened his mouth. And Saiko, who had been watching me so closely, knew that perfectly well.
A gift from a god? It might be dangerous, but it might be valuable as well. There was no reason to simply give it away before I learned the truth about how much it was worth.
And I could face danger. I’d been trained to do that all my life.
“Your uncle—your other uncle—is Kashihara Yoshisane?” I said to Ichiro, keeping my eyes away from his sister.
A nod. “He lives in—”
“The next province,” I interrupted. “We’ll need to cross the river and make it through the mountain pass. Three days’ travel.” I stood. “We’ll leave at dawn.”
Perhaps we should have left in the middle of the night, even with the darkness outside full of demons. How much worse could demons be than Madame?
The second Madame walked through the school gates, every chance of escape would be lost. Every chance of my keeping the pearl as well. I had to hope she’d stayed the night at the castle of Ichiro’s uncle and would not return until the morning was well advanced.
The moment gray light began to glow outside the ruined shutters, I was rousting Saiko and Ichiro from their beds. Stars were still glimmering faintly in the west as I waited in the yard for them to join me.
It had not been two full days since I’d left the school on my first mission, a student no longer, a ninja at last.
And now? I had another mission, I supposed. I had a castle town to reach and enemies to face. With that in mind, I quickly scanned the dirt of the practice yard, looking for any tracks from what had attacked us last night. It would be useful to get some clues about what, exactly, we might be fighting.
But a hard rain just before dawn had washed most of the traces away. All that was left were some vague furrows in the mud beneath the windows that told me something large and heavy had stood there. And some perfectly ordinary prints where a small stray dog must have sniffed around the door after the rain was finished.
It seemed almost right that no readable prints would be left to be seen in the clear light of day. Last night had not been ordinary life, had nothing to do with the pale sun in the sky, the wisps of fog rising from the rice paddies, the flies buzzing around the stable. Last night had been something out of a legend. One that did not belong to me.
Fighting demons was a job for an emperor’s son. Or at least a samurai or a warrior monk. No ninja was ever the hero of a story like that.
/> “Rice,” an urgent voice behind me said, and when I turned Masako thrust a bundle wrapped in a large cotton cloth into my hands. “A pot. A little miso and some other things for soup.”
I took the pack from her. It was enough to keep us going for a day or two, and I had a few copper coins in my pockets as well, given to me for my mission in case the first plan went awry and I needed to bribe a servant or buy some information. Back when I’d had a mission. Back when my life had been hard, but more or less what I’d expected.
“Yuki put in some bandages, too, and some of that salve.”
I nodded.
“You don’t—” Masako sounded worried. “Kata, you don’t have to leave. We’d find a way to defend ourselves. We did it last night. And when Madame comes back …”
When Madame came back and learned about the pearl, she would do anything to get it for her own—including slicing my hand off at the wrist.
I shook my head. “We have to go. How’s Kiku’s arm?”
“She hurts. But Yuki’s not worried. It will heal. She’s given her some plum wine.”
I nodded again.
“Madame.” Masako leaned closer and lowered her voice. “Kata. What will we tell Madame?”
“The truth.”
Masako looked more worried still. “But she’ll—”
“She’ll come after us anyway,” I told her. “She’ll guess where we’re going, or she’ll find our trail. If you try to deceive her, it won’t help me, and all of you will suffer. Just tell her. Or let Fuku do it. I’ll have a few hours’ start.”
“Will that be enough?”
“I’ll make it enough,” I answered grimly.
But that wasn’t all. There were more words I needed to say. It was strangely hard to force them out of my throat.
“Last night—” I croaked.
There, two words. Masako lifted her eyebrows helpfully and waited for more.
“You were—” Curses. Two more words and I was stuck again.
Didn’t I have an ounce of courage? Could I face soldiers and demons, could I infiltrate an enemy’s castle, but not admit my own blunders?
“You were our general,” I said at last. “They fought for you.” I swallowed the bitter taste of my own misjudgments, years of them. “They would not have fought like that for me.”
To my surprise, Masako reached out and took me in her arms, as a sister might.
I’d had a sister, long ago. For a moment I held Masako tightly.
“I won’t ask you to come back,” she said, low in my ear. “Don’t. If you get away, stay. But send us word, Kata, if you can. And keep safe.”
ELEVEN
Our few hours’ start was slipping rapidly away as we walked past farmers at work in their fields, past villages too small to have names. Ichiro could keep up with me as long as I didn’t run, but every time I glanced back over my shoulder, Saiko was farther behind.
I sighed and slackened my pace a little more. “So. If we keep moving, the demons won’t attack?” I asked the boy.
He nodded, a little breathless.
“What about the night? How long can we rest?”
“I don’t know,” he puffed.
I slowed down yet more. “Well, when you inherited this thing, how did you keep from being eaten by demons? There were ceremonies? Isn’t that what you said?”
“Yes. I mean, I don’t know.”
I turned to him with growing anger. Was he being unhelpful on purpose?
He shook his head. “My uncle brought the pearl to me. Hikosane, I mean. It was at night. He just—” The boy swallowed. “Handed it to me. And told me. That my father. Was dead.”
Well, so was mine. With wars and feuds and skirmishes boiling over in every province, with bandits in the mountains and little enough law left in villages and towns, a dead father was nothing out of the ordinary.
“And then?” I prompted impatiently.
“He took me to a temple. For about three days, I think. There were a lot of prayers and some rituals. I didn’t have to do anything but sit. I didn’t pay much attention.”
His head was down; I could not see his face. And we did not have a temple handy, nor three days to spare. As slowly as Saiko was walking, we did not have two minutes to spare. I would have to do something about that. But for the moment I sighed again and sat down on a roadside stone, listening to the frogs croak from the ponds in the rice fields and waiting for Saiko to catch up.
“What about your mother?” I asked Ichiro.
He blinked at me. “What?”
“You said your father died. What about your mother?”
“She died when I was born.” His eyes went to Saiko, still toiling her way along the road. “My sister remembers her a little. I don’t.” He looked out at the women in the fields, ankle-deep in mud, making their way with their hoes from row to row. It was what women everywhere did. It was what my own mother had done.
A child wearing nothing but mud toddled up to one of the women. She fended the brat off with one hand but then gave in and snatched it up for a hug, mud and all.
Strange, the way that sight, or maybe Ichiro’s sigh, so quiet he probably thought I had not heard, shook a memory loose deep inside me. Cold mud nearly up to my knees, and the sharp green of young rice plants close to my eyes. And over all, the blue vault of the sky, glowing as it does only in the spring, scrubbed clean with the rain and polished by the sun.
Against that blue, a face smiling so widely that the narrow cheeks looked plump and dimpled, just at the sight of me.
I did my best to slam a door shut on the face inside my mind. It was not safe to think of it. I had learned that these moments of memory were invariably followed by others.
Hiding beneath those same vivid green leaves, feeling the ground underneath me shaking. It was the hoofbeats from galloping horses that made it tremble, as if the earth were as afraid as I was.
Smoke. Screaming.
Walking barefoot on roads that never ended. Stealing moldy radishes and soggy greens out of a trash heap. Sleeping curled up in a hard knot by the roadside with a crust of burnt rice in my fist, saving it until morning.
That was where Madame had found me. And why had I let this come back to trouble me now? Why should brown mud, blue sky, green leaves sting me with such a sense of loss? What had been taken from me? Nothing I could truly remember. Nothing I’d ever grieved for. Madame had told me once I’d been the only girl she’d taken in who’d never cried.
“So you both went to live in your uncle’s household, after your father died?” I asked Ichiro, my voice a bit more patient.
He nodded without looking at me. “My other uncle, Yoshisane—he wanted us to come and live with him. I heard the two of them arguing. But Uncle Hikosane is the oldest brother, now that my father is dead. He said it was his right to raise me. I’m the only boy, you know. The heir.”
Lord Hikosane’s house could not have been much of a refuge for either of them, I thought. Madame Chiyome’s had probably been a kinder shelter.
Ichiro was frowning. “I think—I think Saiko must be wrong,” he said thoughtfully. “About Uncle Hikosane. He never paid her much mind. She’s a girl. But he did take her in, and me as well. And he brought the pearl to me. He can’t be—like that. Not as bad as she thinks.”
“Do you want to go back to him, then?” I asked bluntly. “It wouldn’t be hard. You can sit here on this stone, and his men will probably find you within the day. I won’t stop you.”
Ichiro was quiet for a little while. Then he shook his head.
His sister caught up with us at last, and we went on.
Our road was in no hurry, even if we were; it wound us past endless fields of rice and millet and through villages too small to have names. And everywhere we went, past women working in the rice paddies or old men walking behind ox carts or children splashing in ditches, people’s heads lifted and their eyes widened.
We had found Saiko a broad-brimmed straw hat to wear against
the sun’s glare, but she’d taken it off for the twentieth time to smooth her hair back behind her ears.
“Keep your hat on!” I ordered under my breath. “Don’t you see people looking at you?”
She pulled the hat down over her eyes. “I can’t help my face,” she protested.
I was tempted to smear a handful of mud across it. “No, but you could help your—your—”
How she kept her steps small, her feet close together? How she lifted the hem of her robe as she stepped across a puddle, as if she wore seven layers of silk and not one of rough cotton? No, she probably couldn’t help those things.
She had on a dark blue kimono from the school’s stores, shabby and plain. Straw sandals on her bare feet. Her hair under her hat was slipping loose from its braid. And she looked … Well, like an empress’s daughter in disguise. And a poor disguise at that.
Ichiro was not much better. Perhaps he wouldn’t catch a stranger’s eye, the way Saiko did. But if anyone stopped to look at him, they would not be able to help seeing how boldly he walked. How he kept his chin up and his gaze forward. How he didn’t hunch his shoulders or bow his head when we met someone on the road, just in case the passerby was of higher rank and would give him a kick if he didn’t.
I could stride like a nobleman as well, if I needed to. I could also limp like a beggar or drift like a nun with her mind on her meditation. A ninja learned to slide as easily from caste to caste as a fish darting from warm to cool water.
But these two had never learned. They could not look like anyone but themselves. Which meant that neither of them could look the slightest bit like a peasant, no matter what they wore.
Strangers were rare enough in these little villages. Two strangers who looked like these siblings—they’d be remembered.
Perhaps that was something I could use.
About midway through the hour of the horse, when the sun was getting high, we stopped at a farmhouse to buy some rice and pickles, saving our supplies for later. A kindly farmer’s wife smiled at us, patted Saiko’s cheek, and gave us three small cakes she’d just made because “it was a pleasure to see such a pretty girl.”