Sisters of Heart and Snow (19 page)

Drew squeezes her mother's hand back. She listens to the waves breaking onshore, the caws of seagulls and the traffic going by. They sit for a while longer.

M
IYANOKOSHI
F
ORTRESS

S
HINANO
P
ROVINCE

H
ONSHU,
J
APAN

Spring 1175

T
omoe refused to meet her mother's reproachful glare. She kept her eyes on the sloping riverbank, placing her feet carefully on the slippery new grass. Yamabuki stumbled over the uneven, rain-soaked ground in her
geta
and white
tabi
, carrying a basket of laundry down to the stream.

Yamabuki must learn to be strong,
Tomoe thought.
We do her no good by coddling her
.

The girl had been here nearly two months, and this was the first time she had emerged from the house to do anything besides sit on the sidelines, watching. When she volunteered in her spectral voice to help with the day's washing, Tomoe handed her the basket of laundry without a word.

It was spring. The snow had melted. Wasn't spring everyone's favorite time? When the dullness of winter vanished and new energy filled your legs? But Tomoe felt dimmed, rusted as a blade stuck and forgotten in dirt. She scrubbed a kimono on a rock, her hands nearly frozen in the cold water, her legs bent in a squat and her pants hiked up high. In a country fort like theirs, even the wife of Yoshinaka had to do her share of work. This was not Miyako.

“She's used to sitting inside, doing nothing but staring into space as she thinks of poetry,” Tomoe muttered to her mother. She couldn't imagine such a life.

“She's barely more than a child.” Chizuru wrung out underclothes. They watched Yamabuki pick her way down the bank, waving. Chizuru waved back. “She doesn't know what to do. Think of how she feels.”

“Good medicine tastes bitter in the mouth.” Tomoe quoted the Japanese proverb. “We must push her into this new life, 'Kasan. The sooner she gets used to hard work, the sooner she will be happy.”

Yamabuki shrieked, took a step, and shrieked again as if the mud was biting her white
tabi
socks. Impractical. “Yamabuki!” she called. “This is not the city. This is the country. We don't wear
tabi
to do chores. You understand?”

Yamabuki bowed her head. “I apologize,” she said in her whispery voice. Even the skin on her head was moonlight-white, Tomoe thought. The sun would turn her into ashes.

Yamabuki knelt in the mud beside Chizuru, the folds of her delicate kimono crushing down into the dirt. Tomoe wondered if there was something wrong with her brain.

“Oh, no!” Chizuru said. “Don't kneel. Squat, like us.”

Yamabuki tried to imitate them. She managed to sink down only about halfway. “I can't. It hurts.”

“Try again,” Chizuru urged. “You only need practice.”

Yamabuki attempted to squat once more, but couldn't put the heels of her feet down fully to the ground. As Yamabuki's bottom neared the earth, she lost her balance and fell. “Oh!” Yamabuki held up one egg-white hand, covered in mud.

Tomoe supposed Yamabuki had only knelt on the comfortable tatami mats—squatting was customary for those working outside, but was not proper for noble women. Tomoe stood and faced Yamabuki. If the girl was to survive in any capacity, she would need help. “Hold my hands.”

The girl did as instructed. Her hands were very small and cold, the skin papery and dry. Tomoe's own hands had long, strong fingers and were warm from her near-constant exercise.

“Now, I will squat, too. You hold on to me.” They bent their knees, lowering their bottoms slowly, arms outstretched, until their legs landed in the squat position. Yamabuki's eyebrows went up into surprised curlicues.

Yamabuki squat-walked over to the water, her
geta
squishing in the mud, her white
tabi
splattered brown. Tomoe stifled a giggle. The girl dipped a kimono into the water gingerly, observing how Chizuru was scrubbing before attempting an imitation. “This place is so beautiful, Chizuru-san. I love the mountains.”

Tomoe looked about. She had grown up in the north, and after twenty-two years she noticed the landscape only as it practically affected her, assessing the weather to determine if she needed a
tanzen
jacket for the cold or how much water to pack when it was hot.

Yamabuki scrubbed ineffectually at the cloth. Tomoe wrinkled her nose. They would be better off with a toddler's help. She glanced at Chizuru, hoping her mother would correct Yamabuki, but Chizuru said nothing.

Suddenly, the girl stopped scrubbing and spouted a poem:

“Timid, the pines sway in the springtime breeze.

Birds look for their homes.

An iris blooms in the still-hard ground.”

The girl blushed, as though embarrassed. Chizuru clapped. “Beautiful! How lucky we are to have such a girl here. Our lives have been too long without poetry.”

Tomoe frowned. Chizuru shouldn't encourage such foolishness. The girl needed hard physical labor of the body, not the silly mental convolutions of poetry. “The ground isn't hard. You're in the mud.”

Chizuru clucked. “Oh, Tomoe. The poem is about her. She is the timid pine.”

“And you are the iris in the frozen ground,” Yamabuki said with a shy smile.

“Oh.” No one had called Tomoe an iris before. Once, Yoshinaka had told her that her skin was like fresh snow, but he said it in such an impersonal way that she knew he was only describing what he saw. As if he'd said, “The stew is hot.”

“Is that what you did in the capital? Sat around and thought of poetry?”

“Sometimes.” Yamabuki returned to her ineffectual scrubbing. “It was boring there, honestly. I spent most days alone. When visitors came, my mother made me sit behind a screen. She is very old-fashioned.”

Tomoe wondered if Yamabuki had ever come across Wada. He and Yamabuki's father were both courtiers, after all. Wada and his poetry, his round face and earnest air . . . She smiled at the memory. No, she would not ask. Even if Yamabuki were to tell her, Tomoe was not sure she wanted to know. Wada might be engaged to someone else in the capital by now. Besides, Tomoe was glad she'd not chosen court life. She might have turned into Yamabuki herself.

“This must be quite shocking,” Chizuru said. “All these people. All these men!”

“Yes, Yoshinaka was quite . . . shocking.” Now Yamabuki colored and scrubbed harder, her pale hands flashing in the icy water.

“Don't worry. You'll get used to him. I did.” Tomoe giggled, surprising herself with her boldness. It was fun to tease Yamabuki, who bowed her head even lower, her face deepening to crimson.

Chizuru reprimanded Tomoe with a soft slap to her shoulder. “Tomoe Gozen. Ladies don't speak of such things.”

“Nor do real ladies wash laundry.” Tomoe wrung out the last kimono and stood. “We are far from ladies out here. You'd better help Yamabuki, Mother, or we'll have to rewash everything.”

Yamabuki burst into tears, clapping her hands over her face. The pants she'd been scrubbing caught in the stream's current and began to drift away. Tomoe rushed forward and grabbed the material out of the water. “Yamabuki! What has crying ever solved? Your weeping will not finish the laundry.”

“Tomoe, hush.” Chizuru put her arm around Yamabuki and rocked the frail girl against her side. “She has been torn from her family. I am as close to a mother-in-law as she has. And you are her sister. You have always had your family. You always will.”

“My mother sold me to Yoshinaka after my father lost his court job,” Yamabuki sobbed through her fingers. “She wanted me to be gone. She hates me. She called me a useless burden.”

Shame swept through Tomoe in a hot rush. Going from a life of doing nothing to a life in the north with a huge hairy husband would be wrenching, Tomoe thought. It wasn't as though Yamabuki had chosen Yoshinaka. All things considered, Yoshinaka surely preferred Tomoe's hardiness and practicality to Yamabuki's fragility. And Yoshinaka and Tomoe were close, the product of having known each other their entire lives. Yamabuki must feel like an outsider.

“I wish I could be like you, Tomoe,” Yamabuki said, lifting her head. The light bounced off her skin as though it were a precious metal.

“And what am I? Wife to no one. Captain of a farmer army, a soldier in a war that may never come.” Tomoe started washing another garment with vigor.

Yamabuki touched Tomoe's arm. “No. Brave and energetic. Good at everything!”

Tomoe thought of how Yoshinaka had not been to see her at night since Yamabuki's arrival. But that was not the girl's fault, she reminded herself. “Not at everything, apparently.”

The afternoon sun flickered like candlelight through canopies of tree branches. “You don't know,” Yamabuki whispered. “You don't know what you are. How special.”

“Yamabuki, you must listen to me.” Tomoe peered into Yamabuki's reddened eyes. Why, she was no more than nineteen, Tomoe thought with a pang, yet had no experience in practical matters. Her parents had kept the girl locked away for so long. Tomoe smoothed Yamabuki's cheek gently, as she would an infant's. “We'll go into town today. Buy you some mochi.” She lifted the girl's hair. It was as soft as rabbit fur, smooth and glossy. In the sun she saw hints of blue tone under the black. “Maybe a pretty new comb. Would you like that, Yamabuki-chan?”

Yamabuki smiled. “I'd like that very much.”

Tomoe handed Yamabuki the pants that had floated away. “But you must finish the wash first.”

 

S
AN
D
IEGO

Present Day

D
rew waits for Chase to show at the appointed place after school, across the street, under a tree by the yellow fire hydrant. Her sister, as always, was very specific.

She reads the samurai story on her phone. The translator's sent quite a few pages in the past few days. Tomoe—how incredibly resilient she was. If they could bottle that, Drew would definitely drink it. Tomoe had to attend to domestic duties instead of being a kick-ass warrior twenty-four/seven. Even when her love married another, she kept on going. Of course, Tomoe had no other choice. She couldn't pack up and leave when things didn't go her way.

This makes Drew think of her mother. If only her mother had been stronger, surely she could have gotten a good lawyer and divorced Killian. Set herself up well. Taken Drew and Rachel with her. Things would be different.

Chase opens the back door and throws his backpack into the car before getting in. “Can we stop at the library? I need a book.”

“Sure. Hello. How are you?”

Chase turns to her, speaking with exaggerated syllables. “Very well, thank you. And you?”

“Great, thank you back.” Drew grins at her nephew. “Good manners. I'm impressed.”

“As you should be.” He bows his head. She drives the short distance to the library and parks. She can't get over how much Chase looks like a man. She doubts he'd be carded at any bar. Dark blond hair covers his upper lip and his shoulders threaten to burst out of his T-shirt. If he was a comic book character, he'd have energy lines zapping out of his restless body.

What a terror he was as a toddler. Drew stopped by Rachel's to say hello to her niece and nephew one Christmas when Chase was two, Quincy eight. Rachel asked Drew to watch him for a moment while she finished something in the kitchen. But Drew had gotten distracted by something—the television, or Quincy showing her a toy—she doesn't recall. Before she knew it, in seconds, it seemed, the boy scaled the seven-foot bookcase in the living room and was tossing down books. “Chase! Get down!” Drew shrieked, and Chase, startled, fell. He needed six stitches on his chin. Her sister had been mad, to say the least. Drew couldn't blame her.

Drew pulls into the parking lot. “What subject is the book for?”

“Uh. Science.” Chase leaps out of the car almost before she can get it into park. He slams the door too hard.

She follows him down the flight of steps and inside. The library's one of the smallest Drew has been in, but there's an airy atrium attached and a public meeting room from which soft music floats. Drew peeks in. Toddlers doing yoga with their parents, sort of. Drew smiles at their attempts to do downward facing dog. Most of them fall over.

Middle school kids sprawl out over the tables in the library proper, talking in not-very-library-like voices. It's a sea of overloaded backpacks and instrument cases and unwashed teenage bodies. One kid even lies on the floor, a book in hand. An older patron steps over him, shaking her silver head. “Get up,” the older woman says, and the boy ignores her.

Drew can't believe how noisy it is. When she was in school, the librarian would have booted them out for talking above a whisper. “Is it always like this?” Drew asks Chase, horrified.

“Pretty much.” Chase shrugs off his backpack at a table. “I've got to find a biography about George Washington.” He lumbers off.

“I thought it was science,” Drew says, to the air. She makes her way to an empty spot, almost tripping over black musical instrument cases sitting in the aisle. She settles at a round table across from a couple of girls, who ignore her as they text and giggle.

It's October tenth. Drew can't wait any longer to pay rent. She pays it with her phone, using the money Killian gave her. Don't think about it being his money, she commands herself. It would cause more trouble if she didn't take it than it would to take it.

Well, when she gets paid for her viola gig she can stop using it. She's going to have to make a decision soon about the apartment. Give notice or return. She imagines going up back up to L.A., reteaming with Jonah and the band. Would it be different this time?

Would she and Jonah get back together? She allows herself to think about him for a moment. How they cuddled, naked in bed, the exact way his muscles tensed against hers. The sex, Drew remembers, had always been incredible. No matter what angry names had been flung out during their fights.

A boy plops a medium-sized iguana down on the table next to Drew. She glances at it, her brain not processing what it is, looks at her phone, looks back. An iguana? “Hey! Get that thing away from me!” she shrieks, and he laughs. Drew decides maybe she is better off being childless. “What the heck are you doing with an iguana in a library?” Drew says. “They can carry salmonella. Plus, somebody might squish it.”

“It's my service animal.” The boy has a sly smile. He could be Tom Sawyer with those freckles.

Drew squints at the boy. Honestly, she has to tamp down her impulse to use a bad word. “How the heck is that your service animal?”

“It sticks out its tongue if I'm going to have an anxiety attack.” He demonstrates by sticking out his own tongue.

She leans forward. “I don't believe you.”

He pets the iguana gingerly. The spines on its ridge look sharp. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Alexander. I must draw the line at iguanas,” a deep voice, tinged with a British accent, says from behind her.

“Come on, Mr. Tennant.” The boy picks up his iguana. “I swear it's true.”

The voice tsks. “Take Iggy home before something bad happens to him. You know better than that.”

Alexander picks up Iggy and sticks the unfortunate lizard into his backpack before sauntering off.

“I'm so very sorry.” The man moves in front of Drew. She sees khakis, an argyle sweater vest, and a smile hovering above it. He has deep-set dark brown eyes with crinkling lines in the corners and a closely shaved face. A thin, well-shaped nose with thick eyebrows. Strong jaw. He doesn't look like a librarian, Drew thinks. He doesn't even have glasses. But what's a librarian's supposed to look like? She's staring like she needs to memorize his features for a police sketch and forces herself to blink. “Ever since we had this law passed about not being able to ask for pet assistance identification, we've had this kind of thing happening. We don't want to be sued.”

Drew swallows and closes her mouth, which she only now realizes is hanging open. “Oh.” She clears her throat. He continues to stand there, as if he's waiting for her to say something else, his head cocked to the side. His shock of light brown hair falls into his eyes and he brushes it back impatiently.

She wants to say something flirtatious, but this pops out of her mouth instead. “Whatever happened to being quiet in a library?”

He laughs softly, the sound reminding Drew of a saxophone, and sits in the chair opposite her. He laces his hands together. His knuckles are bigger than his fingers, his hands strong, and he's not wearing a ring. He lowers his voice to a whisper. “I suppose it's my fault.”

Drew raises an eyebrow. “Really? I thought the British were very proper.”

He leans forward. “In my quest to be American, I may have gone a bit too far. Now it's all gone to the dogs, as it were. You see, these kids had nowhere to go after school to do homework. Their own school library isn't open. I want to keep the library relevant. They asked if they could do study groups. I said of course. But the noise level went up and up and up.” He shakes his head. “Now it's irretrievably broken.”

Drew glances around at the kids. A few tackle their homework, but they're mostly playing video games. “I guess it's free childcare, basically. Doesn't anybody come in here to study?”

“A few.” He holds out his hand. “I'm Alan Tennant. The head librarian.”

“Drew Snow.” They shake hands. Drew's hands are hardly tiny, given her height, but his still dwarfs hers, envelopes it pleasantly. They shake for a second too long.

It's awfully warm in here. Drew has to restrain herself from flapping her shirt. She looks around for Chase and sees him standing by the encyclopedias, talking to a redheaded girl wearing a basketball jersey that says “Browning High.”

“Is that your brother?” Alan inclines his head toward Chase. “Chase, right? He comes in here a fair amount.”

“No. My nephew.” Drew studies Alan. Surely he can't think she's that young. She figures he's about her age, maybe a bit younger. She glances at the circulation desk and sees a model-pretty librarian with long black hair and teeth that glow white even from this distance, helping out a student. They must hire librarians from the local modeling agency here. She figures he's dating that girl, or somebody else, ring or no. Because nobody this good-looking, with an accent like that, can be single for long. She imagines single mothers bringing their toddlers to storytime, dropping and picking up books while wearing short skirts.

“Ah. Are you a teacher?” He shifts back in his seat and regards her.

“No. Why would you think that?” She cocks her head.

“It's the teachers who want me to do something about it, usually.” He ducks his head. “The parents are merely glad that their children have someplace to go.”

The noise level crescendos as the toddler class lets out. A middle school boy shouts at another, computer to computer. Drew grits her teeth, momentarily forgetting about Alan. She's neither teacher nor parent, but she can't take it anymore. “Good Lord. You know what?” She has an idea. “I'll bet you I can make this whole library go quiet.”

“Yelling won't help.” Alan settles back, his keen gaze on her. “Believe me. I've tried it.”

“No yelling involved.”

He leans forward and his eyes flash wickedly. He lowers his voice so much Drew's sure he's about to proposition her. “I'll bet you—”

Drew holds her breath.

“A cup of coffee.” He holds up a hand. “Not that you're obligated to accept.”

Drew grins. Why not? Having coffee with an English librarian would be the most interesting thing that's happened to her in, oh, about a year. She holds out her hand and shakes his again. “Deal.”

She looks around at all the music cases until she finds the likeliest suspect. “A viola?” she asks the girl sitting at the computer. The girl nods, squinting suspiciously at her. “May I please use it?”

The girl shrugs and glances at Alan. “I guess. Don't break it.”

“I won't.” Drew takes it out. It's a student model, inexpensive, but Drew still handles it carefully. She draws the bow over the strings, tunes it. She's aware of Alan watching her from the table. The library chatters on.

Drew closes her eyes. What to play? A classical song? Her mind goes through what she knows. One of the songs she wrote? They won't recognize it. No—they need something they've heard.

A melody settles in her head. “Somebody That I Used to Know,” by Gotye.

She plays the first few notes to make sure they're okay. Afraid of being rusty. It's been a long time since she's done a proper performance, like this, in front of live people. No retakes allowed.

Drew climbs up onto the chair. Now the library goes quiet, anticipating something. “Can I get you guys to clap your hands?” She gives them a beat. “Do it all through the song—I don't have a drummer.” Only Alan and the other librarian and one mother do it. The students stare, stone-faced.

She smiles at all of them radiantly anyway, feeling a burst of excitement. Her skin tingles. She starts out by plucking the opening notes, as if she's playing the guitar. The kids murmur excitedly as they recognize the song. Quickly she lifts the viola to her shoulder. Her wrist bows with perfect grace and the song bursts out of her viola. She plays with abandon. Acting as if she's onstage before an audience of thousands, instead of in a tiny public library full of rather stinky teens.

She plays as she has forgotten how she could play.

When she lifts the bow off the viola, it is so quiet that she can hear the hum of the fluorescent lights above. She opens her eyes.

The library bursts into applause. “How'd you do that?” “Can you do another?” “Can you play the Big Butts song?”

Smart-aleck. “I actually can, but I'm not going to.” She plays the first few bars just to prove it. The kids whoop louder.

Drew takes a little bow. Alan's standing up, sunbursts radiating out from around his eyes. “Well done!” he says.

“Now, kids,” she says. “This is a library. That means quiet. If you want to be noisy, go to the park. Nobody will stop you.” She points to the kid on the floor. “That means you, too—there's plenty of grass to lie on outside.” The boy sits up but doesn't budge. Oh well. Alan will have to handle it.

She looks around for Chase, but he's not in the corner where he was.

Hastily, she returns the viola to the girl, who has been paying the least attention to this performance because she's got her headphones on. Drew walks to the place where he'd been. No Chase. She does a sweep of the room, but he's nowhere.

She goes to the bathrooms and knocks at the men's room. No answer. She peeks in. A single stall—empty.

Shoot.

She exits the library and looks across the parking lot to the wide grassy area between this building and the pool. There, partially obscured by a tree and part of the pool fence, is Chase. With the girl in the high school jersey. Very close together. Drew moves a little closer. Oh shit. They're making out. Not just a little bit, either—Chase's hands move up and down inside the girl's shirt.

Drew bounds across the asphalt like it's a bed of coals. As her feet pound, one thought echoes.
Rachel is going to kill him
.