Disciple of the Wind (23 page)

She nodded. They had discussed the matter many times—usually because Daigoro was too thickheaded to understand her the first time through.

“Well, who outranks Hideyoshi’s wife?”

“Precisely. This is bait, Daigoro. It’s too good to be true.”

“And yet it makes sense. Imagine if Shichio was
my
advisor. As my wife, wouldn’t you want him dead?”

“Yes. But Shichio knows that.” She clutched his hand hard enough to make him grateful that she held his left hand, not the right with its still-mending fingers. “I am your wife. I don’t care what pact you signed with the regent; I am still your wife.”

“Aki—”

“Listen to me. So long as you are my husband, it is my duty to obey you. You tell me how you can be certain—
certain
—that this is Nene’s work, not Shichio’s, and you have my support.”

She wasn’t wrong. Daigoro knew that. For a woman raised by a spymaster,
certainty
took on a particular meaning. She allowed no room for doubt.

The daughter of a spymaster. That was it.

Daigoro held up the letter—more a curled paper ribbon than a letter, really—as if presenting her with a new piece of evidence. “This is your father’s hand,
neh
?”

“Yes.” It was well known within House Inoue that the lord was so paranoid that he wrote all his messages himself.

“And
he
says this is Nene’s will, not Shichio’s.”

“Yes.”

“Then the question is, can we trust him? Did he write this idly, without proof that this is not Shichio’s doing? Or did he corroborate with his spies first, and confirm it was Nene before taking up his brush? If he holds true to his promise, then he cannot knowingly send me into enemy hands. If his promise is empty, then we can only speculate on who waits for me at Osezaki Shrine.”

“Knowingly,” Aki echoed. She looked not at Daigoro but at the black pigeon. Perhaps she hoped it would tell her something of her father’s mood. “That’s the riddle. If he
knows
Shichio has set a trap for you, then he breaks his faith by sending you there. But if he simply chooses not to find out . . .”

He clasped her shoulder with his right hand. The smooth, cold feel of silk felt good against his palm. He hugged her close and kissed her
forehead. “Believe me, Aki, I want certainty as much as you do. But I have no time to visit your father and read him for myself. I must speak to Lord Sora immediately, before Kenbei hears anything of Streaming Dawn. From there, on a fast horse, with no Toyotomi patrols on the road, I
might
make it to Osezaki in time.”

“All the more reason for doubt. Two days is not enough time. Your only option is to rush in headlong.”

That is often what
bushido
demands, Daigoro thought. He knew Katsushima would agree with him. But Katsushima would have another word for him too:
patience
.

To Aki he said, “That means everything hangs on this question: does your father mean to maintain his honor, or only a thin veneer of it?”

He was afraid he already knew the answer.

19

O
sezaki Shrine was a little frightening in the middle of the night.

It was not quiet. The moon was a white sliver; behind its veil of clouds, it illuminated almost nothing, but there was still much to be heard. Low waves lapped invisibly on all sides. The first of the autumn crickets had come to sing. After Izu’s extended drought, most of the leaves were dry and brittle; the wind made them sound like clacking teeth of the ghosts of a thousand children. The night before, sailors’ voices would have been audible, but this morning Hideyoshi had sailed back to Kyoto with the fleet.

It was chilly this close to the water. Nene was surrounded by trees, but their foliage wasn’t dense enough to serve as a windbreak. Nene nestled her hands deeper into their opposite sleeves, snugging her arms a little closer to her chest. Her long hair was heavy enough to keep the cold off the back of her neck, but the salt wind off the bay chilled her cheeks.

She would have preferred to wait in the shrine itself, out of the wind, but that was the only place where her bodyguards could remain completely invisible. Four would guard her directly and four more were hidden within the oratory, whose lattice windows afforded arcs of fire over the entire grounds. The tactical benefit was coincidental; the shrine was not built to shelter armed men. Nor were its pristine floors intended for filthy, booted feet, but Nene’s bodyguards had not troubled themselves to remove their boots.

Nevertheless, Nene was not one to argue with experts about how to carry out their own duties. The captain of her guard positioned her just in front of the shrine, by a stone bench she found much too cold to sit on. Two foreboding lion-dogs looked down on the bench from their pedestals, their stone teeth bared to ward off evil spirits. Nene had a guard at each pedestal, a third directly by her side, and a fourth standing at the
torii
overarching the footpath leading up to the shrine. That was the captain. His station was the coldest, and the farthest from Nene’s side, but it provided the best view of the path running from the peninsula to the shrine. He wanted to be the one to spot the Bear Cub first.

He didn’t get his wish. A twig snapped right behind Nene, much too close for comfort. It gave her guards such a start that the closest one whacked her robe with his scabbard as he spun around. She would wait until her business with the Bear Cub was finished before she dismissed him from her service. For the moment, she forced herself not to whirl around, but to turn slowly, as if she’d known the intruder was there all along.

Even over such a short distance, the shade of the surrounding trees thoroughly occluded the meager moonlight, so that Nene could only make out the Bear Cub’s silhouette. He had a tousled mop of a topknot, as if he’d just leaped off a galloping horse. She could tell he was armored, for there were lighter patches in his silhouette: the chest, the forearms, the thighs and shins. He wore large rectangular
sode
on his shoulders, and at this particular angle they made him appear to have wings like a
tengu
. Nene could see something in his left hand but she couldn’t make out what it was. Not a sword, surely; it looked more like a fistful of spindly, twisted sticks.

“You’re taller than I expected,” she said.

“I hear that a lot.”

“I asked you to meet me at moonrise. That was some time ago.”

“You’ll understand if I took precautions.”

She approached the Bear Cub in the small, shuffling steps allowed to her by her kimono. A patch of moonlight caught the black tuft of
his topknot, but she still could not see his face. That made him dangerous; if she could not read his eyes, she had no way of knowing what was on his mind. “We have a common enemy,” she said. “I cannot kill him without raising my husband’s ire, but you can. I can give him to you.”

He backed deeper into the shadows. “Why should I trust you?”

“Because I am here. You are the most feared
ronin
in these lands, and I am a lady whom the emperor himself sometimes invites to tea. Why would I leave myself so vulnerable if I thought there could be no trust between us?”

“Vulnerable? Yes, you’d like me to believe that.”

With his left hand he tossed whatever he was holding at the feet of her nearest guardsman. Four short bows clattered against the flagstones. Their bowstrings were cut, dangling from the ends like so many fisherman’s lines.

The guard who hit her over-robe with his katana scabbard spun again, looking back at the shrine. Nene did not bother. There would be nothing to see. The Bear Cub was as skilled as the rumors said he was. He’d disabled all four men in that shrine, stripped them of their weapons, and probably left them for dead, all without anyone hearing a peep.

“You spoke of trust, yet you came with assassins,” he said.

“Bodyguards. Clever ones. There’s a difference.” She saw him incline his head as if to say,
as you like
. “But even if we call that a betrayal, let us say we are even. I brought archers; you eliminated them. Are you willing to call that a fair exchange?”

He thought about it for a moment, then nodded. Just then, serendipity gave her a glimpse of him. Even as a gust of wind parted a few branches, the clouds thinned just enough to cast a single fleeting moonbeam on the boy’s face. His dark black hair was totally incongruous with his eyes, which were careworn and brooding, even wrinkled at the corners. . . .

“Taller than I thought, and now older than I thought,” she said. “Much older. You’re not the Bear Cub.”

“That’s right,” a voice called out behind her. This time she did whirl around. Her guards drew steel. The pale, weatherworn door of the shrine slid aside, and out stepped a wisp of a boy dressed all in white. Even his armor was white, as if he intended to be buried in it—or, more forebodingly, as if he’d come to this meeting anticipating a funeral. He walked with a limp, just as the rumors said, and he carried the longest sword Nene had ever seen.

“Daigoro,” Nene said. “At last we meet.”

“We’ll meet on better terms if you tell your guards to sheathe their weapons.”

The captain of the guard came sprinting up the footpath, taken aback by the noise coming from the shrine. His armor plates clacked and clattered as he ran. “Hold,” Nene said. She approached the Bear Cub as quickly as she could—not very quick at all, given the constraints of her kimono. But walking toward him at any speed was signal enough that she felt the boy posed no threat to her. The captain stopped, dropping to his knees so abruptly that Nene feared he might shatter his kneecaps inside his armor. Seeing him kneel, all the men in his command did likewise.

The man behind her came out into the light. He was a hand taller than the Bear Cub, and much older, even older than Nene. His hair was the same color as hers, a uniformly deep and glossy black, from which Nene deduced that he used hair dye. Was that normal for him, or did he do it just this once, to masquerade ever so briefly as the boy? Judging by his woolly sideburns and shabby cloth, Nene assumed this man was Katsushima Goemon, a known associate of the Bear Cub. If that was right, then he showed uncommon loyalty for a
ronin
. By all accounts Katsushima cared nothing for his appearance. Dyeing his hair would be anathema to him. What must he have thought of dyeing it solely to complete an illusion that was only designed to last a few moments?

Katsushima circled around her to stand at Daigoro’s side. Both of them were careful never to come within sword’s reach of Nene, lest they spur her guards into action.

“I’m impressed,” she said. “You’ve proven most resourceful. And not just with your little ambush. In truth I was not at all sure my invitation would reach you.”

She hadn’t sent birds, riders, or criers. She couldn’t have. She didn’t know where to send them; the Bear Cub was constantly on the move. Besides, Shichio’s hunters combed the countryside in search of bear tracks. They would have intercepted any message she sent directly. The only option left to her was to put whispers in the right ears and hope that some of those ears belonged to friends of the Bear Cub—or at least friends of friends, or paid informants, or even enemies too weak to kill him but willing to gamble that this might be a trap. The boy showed remarkable foresight in establishing a net of spies. If Nene’s intelligence was correct, he’d only been
ronin
for a matter of weeks.

“You said you could give me Shichio. How?”

“I have already estranged him from my husband. I have given him everything he could ever ask for: land, lordship, even a samurai’s birthright. Most importantly, I have given him a home far from here and even farther from the Kansai. But none of that will sate him. He will stay away for as long as he can, but soon or late he will wheedle his way back to my husband’s side.”

“Let him. I know the truth of the Battle of Komaki. I have already sent missives to Hideyoshi—pardon me, to the regent, to General Toyotomi. Once he learns Shichio is responsible for his most public defeat—”

“I’ve intercepted your messages. All of them. My husband will hear nothing of them.”

That got a surprised blink out of the boy. “Why?”

“Because Shichio is a snake, and it is in a snake’s nature to wriggle out of tight spaces. He will find holes we cannot see.” And I have ends of my own, she thought; it gains me nothing to shame my husband. “Your abbot’s story is a deadly arrow to Shichio, but it is no mean feat to shoot a snake. . . . Have I said something to amuse you?”

The boy wiped the smile from his face. “No, my lady. It’s just that
you remind me of . . . of my beloved.” That last word seemed carefully chosen. “May I speak candidly, my lady?”

“Please.”

He bowed. “Begging your pardon, Nene-dono, but I do not think you need my help to kill Shichio. Nor will I believe that you crossed half the empire on the chance that I would accept an audience with you.”

Nene granted him a nod and a little smile. “True.”

“Then if I may ask, my lady, why are you here?”

He has uncommon grace for a
ronin
, she thought. “Myths, some would say. In Kyoto, the nobility sometimes entertain themselves with ghost stories and the tall tales of farmers’ wives. I happen to believe that some of these fables contain a kernel of truth. The legends of the Inazuma blades, for instance. Is it true that you carry Glorious Victory?”

“Glorious Victory Unsought.”

Nene was not accustomed to being corrected, but she chose to let it pass. “And is it true that the man who wields this blade cannot be defeated?”

“No, my lady.”

“Yet you bested fifty men in single combat.”

“It is not
single
combat with fifty on the opposing side,” said Katsushima.

The boy bowed, perhaps to conceal the hint of embarrassment in his face. Katsushima reacted quite differently; he swelled up like a rooster, filled with an almost fatherly pride. “Begging your pardon,” the Bear Cub said, “but the truth of the Battle of the Green Cliff was . . . well, rather complicated.”