Our trail took us up through the woods and, at last, back to a wider road that twisted and wound along a valley floor while mountains rose around us. The rice fields were gone; orchards took their place. The fields grew smaller and stonier. The villages grew shabbier and poorer, and farther apart.
I would not stop and bargain for a midday meal. We were slower than I liked already. Raku might have fished herself out of the water by now, if she had survived. Willow had probably found a way to cross the river, broken wrist and all. And there were other things to worry about in the forest, things deadlier than deadly flowers. Not long ago, I would not have believed that was possible.
Just before the mountain pass that would lead us into Kashihara Yoshisane’s country, there was a small village. I was determined to reach it before nightfall. But darkness comes early in the mountains, and the sun was touching the ridge above us when I looked over my shoulder for the hundredth time to see that Saiko was limping and leaning on Ichiro.
I backtracked to meet them. “What is it?”
She gestured at her foot, and I looked down to see her ankle marked with a dark line of bruised flesh where Raku’s snare had caught her. The flesh on either side of this line was beginning to swell. My gaze moved to her brother’s face. Ichiro’s mouth was pinched at the corners, and I could see his eyes aching to close.
I truly hadn’t thought it was possible for the two of them to be slower. And yet it was.
“Oh, you poor dear,” the headman’s wife exclaimed when we knocked on her door. At least I assumed she was the headman’s wife. Her house was the largest in the village—two entire rooms—and so we’d headed straight there as the last, lingering bit of the evening’s light slipped from the sky.
“Come in, of course, hurry now, and let’s get her off that foot,” the woman said as we entered. Even as tired as she was, Saiko still managed to slide into a graceful heap on the mats, stained and worn thin with the tracks of many bare feet.
A warlord’s daughter had probably never been inside such a humble building in her life. The wooden walls had obvious cracks between the planks, and the air was dim with smoke from the open fire that burned in a square pit dug into the dirt floor. However, if Saiko felt herself too good for such surroundings, she did not reveal it, though she did blink a little as if the smoke stung her eyes.
“Please forgive me for giving you such trouble,” she said meekly to our hostess.
I nearly snorted. Trouble for this village wife? What about the trouble she’d been for me? I’d practically carried her for the last mile, every step of it uphill.
“Trouble, no such thing,” the woman exclaimed. “Travelers often stay here. We’re glad enough to have them, for we wouldn’t have much news otherwise. Though of course we’re poor people here …” She was wrapping a damp, mostly clean rag around Saiko’s foot, as she let her sentence trail off, expectantly.
I’d reluctantly agreed to give up the last of our copper coins for meals and bedding, when the doorway darkened. I looked up, trying to slip my hand toward one of my throwing knives without being too obvious about it. But our hostess’s glad cry was reassuring.
“There you are, Ryoichi! Tell me you’ve brought something for the pot. For look, visitors! The first in, oh, well. Tell me, you killed something? Didn’t you?”
The man at the door ducked his head to come in and revealed himself to be much younger than I’d thought at first.
“Here, Mother.” He handed her three or four good-sized fish hanging from a forked stick threaded through their gills. So she was the headman’s mother, not his wife. She kissed his cheek in delight and set about scaling and cleaning his catch, while the young man came and sat by the fire.
“Don’t you worry, we’ll have something for you in a heartbeat; nothing makes you hungrier than traveling,” the woman chattered as she worked. “You must tell us, where are you headed? We know all the best roads, of course.”
I nodded at Saiko to do the talking. Perhaps it wasn’t wise; I shouldn’t let her draw more attention to herself than she could help. But lies sounded better coming out of her mouth. No one was inclined to disbelieve that face.
Besides, somehow, my eyes wanted to rest on the young man beside the fire.
Perhaps he was five or six years older than I was. His mother had called him Ryoichi, hadn’t she? The firelight turned his skin bronze and stroked the smooth planes under his cheekbones. He was smiling faintly as his mother talked, but he didn’t seem to be listening closely. There was something on his mind, and I found myself wondering what it was.
My thoughts, and the young man’s, too, were interrupted by his mother’s gasp of horror.
“Oh, no, you can’t go that way!”
I looked up as Saiko, confused, stopped speaking. Ichiro, yawning in a corner, was no help to anybody.
“I was just telling our hostess that we’re headed over the mountains,” Saiko said apologetically, as though our travel plans might have caused offense.
“Oh, no, no, never. Ryoichi, aren’t I right? Such nice young people, all on their own, too. We can’t let anything happen to them. Ryoichi, tell them!”
“The pass?” Ryoichi was frowning. “No, my mother is right. It’s not safe.”
“Rock falls?” I asked.
A pack of thieves, it seemed, had moved into a cave a few months ago and had been preying on travelers ever since.
“They have swords,” Ryoichi said, frowning at the fire. “Bows. Fine weapons. They must be ronin. Perhaps their warlord died, and they decided he wasn’t worth avenging.”
Saiko looked scandalized. Unlike ninjas, hired by anyone who could pay them, a samurai should follow a single master all his life. If one did happen, through ill luck or poor planning, to outlive his lord, the correct response was either a sword through the stomach or an existence devoted to vengeance. Certainly not a choice to sell his fighting skills or use them to take whatever he wanted.
“What about your own lord?” I asked. “Why hasn’t he driven these bandits away?”
“We have no lord,” Ryoichi answered.
“You’re a free village?” Startled, I looked at him closely.
“You belong to no one?” Saiko looked more scandalized than ever. If it was distasteful for a samurai to live with no lord, it was appalling for peasants to do so.
“We live between two Kashiharas,” Ryoichi said. “And each one needs us.” His back straightened a little with pride. “It’s very difficult—in fact, it’s impossible—to find the way through the pass between their territories without a guide who’s known the mountains since childhood.”
Impossible? Maybe for most travelers. But most travelers did not have the advantage of untold hours spent studying Madame Chiyome’s maps.
“Those two lords might have fought over this village like two dogs over a bone,” Ryoichi went on. Ichiro squirmed until Saiko flicked him a glance. “But my father—he was the headman before me—offered them a different solution. We serve both and neither. We give free passage to anyone who wears the Kashihara dragonfly. Then there is no way one brother can hold the pass for himself and keep the other out. In return, they leave us in peace.”
That headman had been a clever man to come up with that plan, I thought, and bold as well, to propose it to not one but two warlords who both had the power to cut off his head and hang it from their castle walls for insolence if they’d been so inclined.
“We’ve lived free since that day,” Ryoichi went on. “We obey no master. We belong to ourselves.”
Saiko smoothed her hands over her skirt, tucking it under her knees. Her face was a well-bred blank.
“But who protects you?” Ichiro asked, fully awake now and leaning forward with concern. “If another warlord comes with an army? Or thieves, or men like those bandits?”
“The mountains protect us,” Ryoichi said quietly. “We know where to hide if we must. And we protect one another.” He sighed. “Or we have until now.”
“Those bandits don’t trouble us,” his mother put in. “We’re too poor for them to bother with, I suppose. But the travelers … they’ve all but stopped coming. You’re the first we’ve seen in weeks. We can grow our own vegetables and catch our own fish. For some things we need money, though. We can’t grow rice up here, or millet, either. Shizuko’s little boy is ailing, and the doctor won’t take what we can trade. And priests need paying for the rituals they do. Still, our troubles aren’t yours, are they? Come, the meal is ready.”
She filled our bowls and the three of us shoveled hot, flaky white fish into our mouths. Saiko coughed the bones delicately into her hand. I spat mine directly into the fire.
“You need to hire someone,” I said, holding my bowl out for Ryoichi’s mother to spoon hot broth into it. “To fight those bandits off.”
Ryoichi snorted. “The whole village together doesn’t have the coins to pay a single soldier, much less a band of them. These days, there are enough battles to keep every warrior in the land busy. Why should they fight for what we can afford to pay?”
“Not a warrior,” I answered him with a shake of my head. “You need a ninja.”
And that was why, the next night, I lay flat on my face in sparse grass, most of the way up a mountain.
I’d been waiting here while the sun slid down the western sky. Now the remaining light was dim and shadowy enough that I dared ease myself forward to peer over the edge of a steep drop.
Below me was the mouth of a cave, with a small plateau before it. Beyond the flat area, the land dropped again down to a ravine with an icy creek tumbling along its bottom. Downstream, the ravine gradually widened and flattened until it reached a valley where the shoulders of two mountains leaned together. Between those shoulders was the pass that led into Lord Yoshisane’s territory.
Travelers who wanted to reach that pass would be in full view of anyone watching from the mouth of the cave. Which was why the bandits had chosen it to live in.
Perhaps thirty feet below me, one of the bandits was crouched, keeping an eye on everything below him. Fortunately, he did not think of looking up, and I was careful to give him no reason to, letting the stillness of the stones around me soak into my muscles and bones. I kept my ears alert, though, and not only for sounds from the cave. How many bakemono did this mountain hide, buried in deep caves, lurking in hidden pools, drifting without form or shape in the cold mists that clung to the highest peaks? How many of them might be stirred to wakefulness and hunger by the pearl in my pocket? The white fox had said she could offer us some protection, as long as we were on this side of the pass. But could she save us from every demon? Could I even count on her to try?
Trust no ally for more than you’ve paid him. Or, in this case, her.
And demons were not the only threats. Where was Willow? And was she the only ninja on our trail? I had to hope so, which meant I had to hope that Raku had drowned. It was obviously better to have one shadow warrior tracking us than two.
So it was odd, that little flutter of hope that dwelled inside my ribcage. I hadn’t seen Raku’s body, after all. Maybe she was injured, but not dead. Maybe she’d crawled out of the water far enough downstream to be no real threat to us as long as we kept moving. Maybe …
Maybe I should keep my mind on my mission.
At the moment, at least, my ears heard no sound of pursuit, human or otherwise. The man outside the cave stood, shifted his weight from foot to foot, and turned his head, letting his gaze move steadily back and forth over the terrain.
Then something new came to my ears, faint and distant: running feet, sandals slapping on stone. The bandit on guard snatched a bow from his shoulder, pulling a bamboo arrow from a quiver and fitting it quickly and expertly into place.
Below him, a man broke free of the tree line and headed up the slope toward the creek bed. He paused briefly, holding out his hands to show that he was unarmed. Then he resumed his steady jog, as if he had no time to waste.
The guard called out, and two more men came out of the cave behind him. I squinted in the growing dark to see them more clearly. Ronin beyond a doubt. Their armor, once fine, was dented and scratched, the lacquer chipped off the metal plates. Their hair was unkempt, loosed from the neat topknots that showed a samurai’s rank, and one had so far forgotten his dignity as to let a beard cover his chin. But each wore two swords through his belt, and each stood like a fighter, easy on his feet, alert, strong.
While the first guard kept his arrow aimed at the approaching stranger, the two newcomers started off down the slope toward him. They met the running man where the creek spread out into a dozen rivulets across the flatter ground. One of the ronin drew his longer sword. The other simply stood with crossed arms, listening. I could not hear the words they traded, but I could see their reactions. The one with the drawn sword grabbed the intruder by the scruff of his neck and thrust him uphill toward the cave. Soon they were close enough for me to recognize Ryoichi’s face.
I had my own sword at my belt, but it would be little use from where I lay. Both knives were in their sheaths along my forearms. I’d never promised Ryoichi I’d come to his aid if things went wrong, but I found myself calculating distances and chances. Two knives. Three men. Very little hope that I’d be able to do much if the young village headman proved to be a poor actor or if the bandits were more clever, or less cowardly, than I’d hoped.
A fourth man stepped out of the cave. The bandit holding Ryoichi pushed him forward. The way they all looked at the new arrival confirmed what I’d guessed—he was their leader.
Darkness was falling—no, not falling. Up here, in this land of stones and sky, the darkness seem to rise instead, as if it were leaking out from every crack and hollow. I couldn’t clearly see the details of the little gathering below me, but I could sense how the men stood: the upright confidence of the bandit leader, the way Ryoichi leaned forward, his shoulders hunched, his hands making quick, tight gestures. He looked nervous. He looked worried. He looked fearful.
Ryoichi flung out one arm, gesturing toward the ravine below, the thick line of trees, the way down to his village.
I was careful not to hold my breath, but my fingers tightened in the short, tough grass until I found I’d pulled a handful up by its roots. Which was careless. Suppose I accidentally loosed a little shower of dirt over the edge and one of the men below glanced up? Suppose they spotted me?
They’d slit Ryoichi’s throat first, and I’d be next. And on top of that, my plan would be a failure. I forced my fingers to relax.
The bandit leader had turned his head to follow Ryoichi’s gesture. He nodded. Then he reached into a silk pouch hanging at his belt and flipped something small and round through the air toward Ryoichi.
Ryoichi caught the coin, glanced at it, lifted his chin, and tossed it back.
My gut clenched. That had not been part of my plan. How would the bandit react? Would he be startled? Would he begin to think more carefully about who Ryoichi was and what he had said? Why hadn’t that fool of a headman simply snatched the coin in gleeful gratitude and run?
Ryoichi spoke a few short words. My whole plan hung in the balance, success or failure depending on a conversation I could not hear.
Then the headman began to jog lightly and quickly down the slope, surefooted even in the gathering dusk. The three bandits before the cave turned to their leader, but all his attention was focused on the flickers of warm yellow light that, far below, were beginning to shine through the trees.
Close to Ryoichi’s village, something was moving. In the darkness, a darker line stretched across the slope of the mountain, visible only here and there where it moved between stands of trees or clumps of brush. The head of the line broke free from a copse of pine and a figure on horseback could be glimpsed in the glow of the torches carried by two men on foot. There was a flash of bulky red armor, a helmet crowned with horns.
It appeared that a troop of soldiers had come to rout troublesome bandits out of their mountain pass. A large troop of soldiers with a samurai at their head.
The bandit leader shouted, the cave behind him burst into frantic activity, and I began to crawl backward. Once I could move without being seen, I followed the trail Ryoichi had marked for me when he guided me up. Each time I passed one of his signals—a stone balanced on another, three sticks laid to form an arrow—I kicked them apart, leaving no sign that either of us had been here.
I slipped over a ridge and down its other side, and then I could move more freely, cut off from the vision of anyone who might be watching from the cave’s mouth. At last I worked myself down to the lower slopes and the cover of the tree line. Then I paused in the ink-black shadow of an ancient cedar, waiting to let the line of advancing troops make their way up to me.
They’d been toiling slowly up the mountainside, as heavily armed men would, of course, toil, allowing the bandits time to empty their cave and move on. The ronin wouldn’t head over the mountain pass, since that would be too close to their enemy, but they’d be fools if they hadn’t mapped out another escape route, or two, or three.
I stepped from the shadow of my tree in front of the mounted leader, holding up one hand.
“Kata!” Ichiro cried, stopping in his tracks.
I took a few quick steps and caught hold of his stirrup. “Don’t shout!” I ordered, keeping my voice low. “And don’t stop. Keep the horse moving.”
Ichiro’s eyes, excited and anxious, peered down at me from the depths of his oversized helmet. “Did it work?” he asked.
I nodded, and the boy nudged his mount, a good-natured and skinny wreck of a beast owned by all the villagers together. The animal heaved itself into a shambling walk once more. I kept pace alongside. “It’s going well,” I told him. “They were clearing out of the cave when I left. Keep moving, but go slowly. Don’t leave the forest. When you reach the end of the tree line, stop there and wait for me.” I stepped back into the shadows to let Ichiro and his followers pass.
We’d cobbled the boy’s outfit together overnight, using every scrap of red cloth that the village possessed, padding his jacket and trousers with straw to make him seem bigger than he was. The helmet had been carved out of bark and glued together with pine pitch, topped with a pair of horns that were actually twisted tree roots. One good clout would have knocked the thing to pieces, but from a distance on a dark night, glimpsed by torchlight, it looked just enough like something a samurai might wear into battle to terrify his enemies.
The villagers trailing behind Ichiro were dressed in their darkest clothes, some with furs or quilts over their shoulders to make them look as bulky as armored warriors, most with cooking pots on their heads to pass for helmets. The hunters carried their own bows and had quivers on their backs. We’d pulled the blades off hoes and sharpened the sticks into points so that they’d look like spears, and used broad leaves to imitate naginata, the long poles topped by heavy, curved blades.
Old grannies and aunties hobbled determinedly along, grandfathers marched behind them, girls dressed in their brothers’ clothes kept pace, boys jumped out of their skins with the thrill. I spotted Ryoichi’s face under a cooking pot as he passed, his hand under his mother’s elbow, helping her along. Even Saiko, her foot much improved by a night of rest, had a pair of trousers on and an old rake in her hand.
There couldn’t have been more than forty of them, all told, but every time they passed behind a thick clump of trees or a rocky outcrop, some of those in front would douse their torches and sprint to the back of the line, there to light them again. It would be hard, I hoped, for the bandits to guess the true numbers of such a confused and straggling procession.
I turned back the way I’d come. If I returned to the ridge I’d crossed earlier, I’d be able to get another glimpse of the cave, to be sure the bandits had not left a rearguard or lingered to pack stolen treasure. It wouldn’t do to let Ichiro and his ragtag army of children and grandmothers, not to mention his useless sister, come across any real threat.
Then something thick and black and heavy came down over my head, smothering my scream, and I was dragged into the undergrowth so quickly and deftly that, if Ichiro or Ryoichi or any of their band had looked back, they would have noticed nothing.
I had vanished as quickly and utterly as if a ghost had stolen me.