On the top of the castle wall, I shoved whatever the boy had given me into a pocket so I could have both hands free to tie knots in my belt, one every two feet. I heard my fifth and last gunpowder box blow, drove one of my iron stakes into a crack between two stones, and dropped the loop of the belt over it.
“Slide down. Go,” I whispered.
Saiko peered into the watery blackness. “I can’t swim.”
Of course she couldn’t. “Can you?” I demanded of the boy.
He nodded.
“Then you go down first. Swim for the opposite side. Saiko, you climb down next and wait till I come. Hold onto the belt. I’ll get you across.” If I didn’t leave her to drown as she richly deserved for turning my simple mission into this—I didn’t even have a word for it, what the three of us were in the middle of. This—this mess.
The boy went over. I didn’t hear the splash. But I did feel the rope go slack.
Then Saiko.
And then me.
The water of the moat felt cool on the aching muscles in my arms. I whispered to Saiko to float on her back. She had both hands still locked around my dangling belt, and she didn’t obey. I could feel her shaking.
“Drowning is a better death than being hit by an arrow,” I growled at her. “Let go!”
With a gasp, she did so, and I pulled her onto her back and set out to drag her across with me. She gripped my forearm, across her chest, with both hands as tightly as a samurai grips his sword. She was terrified.
Well, she deserved to be. She should be peacefully asleep on a soft futon inside the castle at this moment. She was supposed to be there. She was not supposed to be clinging to my arm, slowing down my escape.
And the boy … the boy was supposed to be dead.
“It’s all right,” I gasped, and spat out a mouthful of water and scum. “I won’t let you drown.”
I wouldn’t swear not to strangle her once we reached the shore. But I supposed I could promise not to let the water have her. We’d gotten to the other side of the moat when a soldier found my belt hanging from the wall.
One day some genius of a ninja will invent a rope that unknots itself and comes when you call it, one that you don’t have to leave hanging behind to announce how and where you escaped.
The guards would never have spotted me, all in black, like my ally the night. But Saiko was in white silk, and the boy in undyed cotton. Arrows came humming through the air like maddened bees. All we could do was run.
They would not follow us down the wall; soldiers were trained for fighting, not for climbing. Not in full armor, certainly, and carrying weapons and shields to weigh them down. They’d have to run along the wall to the stairs and then find a gate. We had a few minutes.
Maybe two.
At least one.
We headed uphill, for the forest where I had watched the sun go down. Fortunately, I hadn’t been idle while I was waiting.
“Get in!” I gasped, sliding to my knees beside the muddy hole I’d dug under the shelter of a little overhang along a small ridge of rock. The boy understood, and slithered in. Saiko gave a gasp of horror. I knew what she was thinking. Dirt, spiders, centipedes, worms …
I shoved her in, piled dead leaves and branches over both of them, and leaped for a limb of the pine tree overhead.
I had only dug one hole. I hadn’t thought I’d need to hide anyone but myself.
One last effort from my tired arms, and I was up. But not high enough. There was another, wider branch above me that I had my eye on. I made it just before the first of the soldiers burst into the wood.
I lay flat and still, pressing my face against the tree’s rough bark. The living sap inside the wood sent back a faint echo of my heartbeat.
This is how to stay invisible: Be where no one will look.
When people are searching a wood at night, they look behind trees. They poke spears into bushes. They shout “There you are!” to startle their quarry into movement.
But they do not expect their prey to turn into a badger or a mole, and burrow into the earth. Or into an owl, taking refuge among branches and leaves. They rarely look down. And they rarely look up.
Rarely, of course, does not mean never.
One of the soldiers stopped beneath my tree.
Once, when I was younger, I’d held my breath when I was hiding, until I could not hold it anymore. My gasp for air led the instructor right to me. I remembered the crack of bamboo across my shoulders.
So I did not hold my breath now. I let it ease out slowly between my lips. Moving air in the nose may squeak or hum. Moving air in the mouth is silent.
I welded myself to the branch. It was broad enough to stay steady beneath me.
He could not have heard me. He could not have seen me.
But he didn’t go.
I stared down at his helmet. His shoulders. The dark lumpish shape of him in the shadow.
Why wouldn’t he just go?
I still had my sword. But this was a man, bigger than I was, older and stronger, too. Most probably a soldier who had survived many a battlefield. Which meant that he was used to killing enemies.
And I was not.
Still, if I leaped down, I’d surprise him. That might allow me to kill him. It would not, however, allow me to kill his companions if they heard the two of us fighting for our lives.
If he looked up, I’d have to do it.
Should I do it before he looked up?
It would make noise. I couldn’t risk it.
If he looked up and saw me, then he’d make noise.
No reason he should look up. No reason he should stand there, either. But he was doing it.
Go away, I thought fiercely. Go away, go away, go away.
He didn’t seem to be listening.
I’d count to one hundred. If he didn’t move before then, I’d do it. I’d jump.
But, oh, how I wished for something—a rustle in the undergrowth, an owl’s ghostly call, a glimmer of moonlight on a shaking leaf—to catch his attention before I was done counting.
Eighty-eight, eighty-nine, ninety …
Something snorted and scrambled in a thicket, not twenty yards off. My soldier’s head came up.
Would he really go? Yes, he would. Whatever had moved in the bushes—badger, bear, mole?—had been enough to keep his attention. He followed the sound, sword out, and then he was lost in the darkness.
A shiver took hold of me from the inside, shaking me as a dog does a rat. How had it gotten so cold? I commanded my muscles into stillness. I wasn’t safe yet.
The noise of the searching men gradually died away. I did not move. The smaller sounds of the night came back, the sweet rasping of the crickets, the dashes and scurryings of little hunted things.
Then, finally, I slid down, stiff and sore and clumsy from lying so long without moving. I made my way to the hole I’d dug and pulled off the branches and brush.
“Time to go,” I said to the two filthy faces looking up at me.
I hauled them out of their burrow and dragged them as far as I dared, cutting off every attempt at talk. At all costs, we must be as far away from the castle as possible before daybreak. Briefly I even risked the dark, deserted main road, and the risk paid off; we met no one.
But they were both clumsy and slow, caked with mud (which at least made them harder to spot in the darkness), and stupid with tiredness. The night had worn me down as well. My first mission, my very first, and it had turned into this.
After the boy had fallen twice, and needed my help to get up the second time, I led them both off the road and up into the trees. A little clearing gave us a stretch of flat grass. We all sank down, panting.
A ninja out of legend would have stayed awake for what was left of the night to watch for pursuit. A ninja out of legend could go for days without rest or food.
There were no legends here. If I didn’t give myself a few hours of sleep, I’d never get us all home.
Home?
That was a strange word to drift into my head as I stretched out on the hard ground next to Saiko and her little brother, feeling my tense muscles ease one by one. I had scraps and tatters of memory connected with the word home, and they were not of the school. A dark farmhouse with a single room. Sleeping snug between a brother and a sister, on the floor beside the hearth. The smells of sweat and dirt, wood smoke and warmth.
But that had been long ago.
Now I had the school, and Madame—no. That was wrong.
Cold fear drenched me like water from a bucket, sending shivers from my scalp to my toes.
I didn’t have the school any longer. Madame had trusted me with my first mission, and I’d failed. More than that—I’d failed and survived.
That was not supposed to happen.
No girl came back to the school after her first mission. If she lived, she was sold. If she died, she was dead.
But where else could I go?
I had no family, no village, no lord. No one to take me in. I could not simply … run. No one ever did.
The school was harsh, the training difficult, but no student ever tried to escape. We all knew that the world around us held no place for orphan girls who were not pretty enough to be courtesans, humble enough to be nuns, or rich enough to be wives.
Running away would mean being not just alone but adrift. Forever.
I had been both of those things once, when home had vanished, washed from the earth like ink from a wet stone. Not again. Never again. The school was a hard place, but I had made it into my place. Somewhere to belong.
I would have to return. I’d have to take Saiko with me.
And the boy, still inconveniently alive? Perhaps there was something that could be done about that …
I laid my sword beside me, the blade bare on the grass, where I could snatch it up in an instant if I needed it. Then I curled up and slept alongside Saiko and the boy, dreamless as usual, until someone giggled very close to my ear.
My hand was reaching for my sword before my eyes had opened, but then I paused.
Something else was interested in my sword as well.
I lay on my side with my face half in the grass, and the little creature was just tall enough to look me in the eye. In the cool gray light before dawn, I could see that it was black and feathered, with a sharp, curved beak. But its eyes, peering craftily at me over the hilt of my blade—its eyes were human.
Clearly I was dreaming.
Ghosts riding the night air, monsters lurking in mountain passes, demons huddled in the darkest shadows—any sensible person understood where they might be and wore a charm or knew a mantra to keep them at bay. But no one ever expected to see one.
A tengu, looking in my eye? A tengu studying my sword? A tengu making a very rude gesture with the clawed finger on the end of one feathered wing?
It couldn’t be. My eyes were muddled by sleep. I blinked and, with a hoarse caw of laughter and a flash of dark wings, the little creature, half-crow, half-man, had flitted into the branches overhead.
I sat up and reached out quickly for my sword. The smooth weight of the hilt was a comfort. Then I shook the boy awake, and Saiko, too. She opened her eyes, moaned, and shivered. “Oh. It’s cold. Is it—it’s morning? Do we have any food?”
I was tempted to slap her. “This isn’t a picnic,” I growled.
“I know.” Saiko dropped her gaze modestly. “Please forgive my rudeness.”
I had a lot more than rudeness to forgive her for, and I didn’t plan to do it. She sat there, eyes meekly downcast, gingerly rubbing one foot. I stripped off my sandals and thrust them at her. To her credit (and I was willing to count very little to her credit, just then), she hesitated to take them.
“Put them on,” I snapped. “I can walk barefoot. You can’t. And the sandals won’t fit him.” I waved a hand at the boy, who was sitting up nearby, rubbing his face and eyeing the trees and brush around us nervously. “You.” I frowned at him. “What’s your name?”
“Ichiro,” he said hesitantly, as if he were afraid it might be the wrong answer.
“Your other name,” I insisted.
Now he sounded even more apologetic. “Kashihara.”
I groaned. “You’re a Kashihara?” But of course he was. Because that was the only thing that could make this mission any worse.
The Kashihara brothers had divided the province between them like a sweet rice cake. Their feuds and alliances had kept samurai and soldiers and ninjas, too, employed for years.
Quickly, my brain sorted through everything I’d learned about the family. There had been three brothers, until recently. One had died not many months ago. And he had been the only one of the three to produce any children.
One girl. And one boy, who would inherit all that the Kashihara family had to leave.
I was stranded in the wilderness with the sole heir of the most powerful family for a hundred miles. And I could think of only one thing to do with him.
“Well, Kashihara Ichiro,” I said, drawing in a deep breath. “Now we’re—”
Then Ichiro did something that startled me so much I stopped talking. He turned toward me, got on his knees, and bowed, bringing his forehead down completely to the ground.
Most samurai’s sons or little lordlings would have swallowed a razor rather than kneel to a ninja. Particularly one who happened to be a girl. And this one was a Kashihara. Bending his neck for me?
“Your name is Kata?” he said, courteously, as he rose again. “My sister told me.”
I glanced at Saiko, who was now slipping on my second sandal. She was a Kashihara, too. Which I supposed was the reason I was in this predicament. Saiko must have known, or suspected, that it was her little brother who was not supposed to wake up in the morning, and she had decided to do something about it.
“You saved my life,” Ichiro said. “My thanks to you.”
I looked blankly at him for a heartbeat or two, while something hot and uncomfortable writhed and coiled in my gut.
It was shame.
Well, I should’ve felt ashamed, certainly. I’d failed in my very first mission. The living proof of that—yes, that was the point, living—stood before me.
The boy’s face was open, and pleasant, and a little puzzled about why I was staring at him. He was truly grateful. He was grateful to me.
“I haven’t saved anyone yet,” I said shortly, and reached down a hand to pull Saiko to her feet. “No more resting. Time to go.”
As we moved under the trees once more, something bounced off the top of my head and hit the ground in front of me. A pinecone.
I looked up, and the second one hit my nose.
A faint snicker drifted down from the tree above me, but nothing stirred the dusky green needles.
I broke into a jog, dodging between trunks. Saiko followed. The boy brought up the rear.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him he’d just been kidnapped.