“Get back here!” Saiko whispered fiercely.
She pulled me around the corner of a stall selling rice wine. An instant later, I saw why.
He was riding down the street, rather too fast for the crowded town, and surrounded by a troop of samurai, each with the dragonfly emblazoned on his brightly lacquered armor. People scattered out of their way, two porters nearly losing the load they carried from a pole over their shoulders. A fan seller leaped for safety and dropped his basket, spilling his brightly colored wares into the dirt where they lay like trampled butterflies.
I’d last seen him in a vision. I’d hoped not to see him again.
“Uncle Hikosane,” Saiko whispered.
She put her hands to her face, as if to shield herself from flying mud. The warlord and his samurai went thundering up the street toward the castle, strong and well defended on the crest of a hill.
So that put an end to any thought of simply knocking at the gate.
“What is he doing here?” Saiko whispered, anxiously.
“Looking for Ichiro, probably. Looking for you.”
“But now—what will we do?”
The rice wine dealer was starting to glare at us. We were not buying, and yet we were blocking access to his stall. Luckily, a crowd of customers charged up just then, claiming his attention as we moved a few steps away.
“We’ll have to make sure Hikosane doesn’t see you, that’s all,” I said, keeping my voice low.
“We don’t know how long he’ll stay,” Saiko protested. “We could wait until he leaves, but—”
She didn’t need to finish the thought. We could not hide days, or weeks, with the pearl in my pocket, demons stirring, and Lord Hikosane’s samurai roaming the town.
The drinkers were still clustered around the booth, complaining loudly.
“Mud all over my kimono, look.”
“That’s nothing. My hair! Look at my hair!”
“I nearly had to dive out of the way. Suppose I’d sprained my wrist?” fretted a lean, droopy youth, rubbing his fingers tenderly. “I could have broken something.”
“Here, have another cup to get over the shock,” suggested a plump man, his eyes gleaming with a touch of malice.
“Certainly not!” A bulky man with a harried look and a bold mustache snatched the pottery cup and drained the wine himself. “Trying to get him drunk won’t make you the foremost performer at the castle tonight. Right, then. Is everyone here? Is everyone safe? Is everyone sober? If no one has more to complain about than a bit of mud, we’re all well off. No, not another cup! You’ve got to sing tonight!” The sour-faced woman who’d been fussing about her hair set down her cup with a drawn-out sigh. “Chokei, settle up. Give the poor man a tip for putting up with the likes of this lot. Honest merchant of the elixir of heaven—” There were groans from the drinkers, and the plump man took a sip of his wine and burst into exaggerated coughing. “Kindly tell all of your customers that this ragtag band of drunken reprobates will perform the finest songs and stories tonight at the castle for the entertainment of the warlord Kashihara Yoshisane himself!”
So, they were actors. I saw Saiko draw herself aside, pulling in her skirts to avoid contamination. She’d probably never been close enough to touch riverbank dwellers like these in her life.
“To the inn,” the mustached man insisted. “No, I said no more! Hurry along, we’ve got three hours or so to make ourselves presentable. And that’s barely enough time for Hideo to comb his hair.” He gave the sake dealer an elegant bow of thanks and herded his troupe along the street.
My eyes met Saiko’s, and we both nodded. Together we started off after them.
Three hours later, you would not have known them. The harridan who’d shrieked about her hair looked as prim as Saiko, in a pale gold kimono; the plump man who’d tried to get his colleague drunk looked as solemn as a tax collector. The mustached leader had on a fine blue robe and a samurai’s swagger, and he kept a hand on the elbow of the lean young man, who was humming and seemed to be paying no attention to anything that went on around him.
They were all much too busy thinking about their upcoming performance to notice two girls trailing them from their inn to the castle gates.
It had taken most of the three hours to find Saiko a kimono. She was fussy, and I wasn’t willing to spend every one of the gold coins I’d stolen from Commander Otani. It had not been wise of him to leave a bag of looted treasure lying on the floor of the cave as we were talking. And he’d been quite right that I was in the wrong profession if stealing bothered me. Fortunately, I’d tucked the gold coins into one of the small and secret pockets along the hem of my jacket, so they had not been lost with the rest of our money when I’d left my pack behind in Okui’s house.
After Saiko had rejected the first twelve kimonos, I’d lost patience and gone to wait under a tree, whittling sticks into slivers with my knife until she finally chose a robe of cheap, thin silk, dyed orange-red and embroidered with black diamonds. Once she had it on, it contrived to look showy rather than garish. Our leftover copper coins from Ryoichi’s villagers had been spent on camellia oil for her hair, rice powder for her face, and safflower paste for her lips.
She should have looked like a child playing with her mother’s clothes. But somehow, she looked—well, if not elegant, at least interesting. Like someone who might be allowed through the castle gates if she happened to come along behind a troupe of entertainers.
When we reached the gates, I moved away from her. She might have looked the part of a singer or a courtesan or both, but I did not.
Luckily, a band of samurai had just dismounted. I moved over toward them and grabbed the reins of a black mare with a nose as white as if she’d dipped it in paint. My hair was hidden under a hood, and hopefully I’d seem just another stable boy, unworthy of anybody’s notice.
Saiko glanced behind her, and for one quick moment, our gazes met. She lifted a hand to her throat to touch the necklace that hung there.
It was a simple piece, a white pearl inside a ring of gold, hung on a black silk cord. But it would surely catch the eye of her uncle Yoshisane. It was more than an artifact of power, now. It was our passport to her uncle’s notice. All she needed to do, once inside the castle, was to get herself into his line of sight.
It only lasted a moment, the look that passed between us. But it said all that needed to be said.
I still didn’t like her—much. She was not particularly fond of me. But I trusted her to do her job, and she knew I’d do mine.
At least for this brief mission, she was a ninja after all. Like me.
When a hand in a heavy leather-and-iron gauntlet fell on my shoulder, and a voice bellowed, “What are you doing with my horse, boy?” she didn’t even turn her head, but swept through the gates right behind the troupe of actors, leaving me behind.
The hand spun me around, and I lost my grip on the mare’s reins and nearly my balance as well. “Only taking her to the stables, please, master,” I whined, cringing.
My gaze went up to his face, and I felt my head jerk back a little in shock. Something soft—my hood—slithered down the back of my neck.
“So Yoshisane has stable girls looking after the horses now?” bellowed the samurai who had ahold of my shoulder. He seemed twice my height, was certainly twice my weight, and had the dragonfly on the breastplate of his armor. And half of his right ear was missing.
“Oh, master, please,” I whimpered, hiding my dismay. “There’s a boy, he works in the stables. Please, have mercy. I only wanted a word with him. He promised me—” And I cast a pitiful glance downward at my belly, hoping Daigoro would take the hint.
Of all the horses here, I’d had the bad luck to pick the one belonging to the man who’d chased me across a mountain range. Lord Hikosane’s trusted retainer, the one Saiko had called his loyal dog.
“You?” Daigoro shouted, and I caught a waft of sour rice wine on his breath. “I doubt it, I very much doubt it. The stable boys have pigs if they’re that desperate!” By now he had collected quite a crowd, and he looked around proudly as they laughed and I writhed in mock humiliation.
“Why are my retainers making a display of them selves at the castle gates?” asked a smooth and level voice behind me.
I was alarmed by the way the man holding me and all his laughing comrades fell instantly silent. Daigoro was a bully, and stupid to boot. Whoever he was afraid of might be trouble for me.
“Forgive me, my lord,” he stammered. “I caught this little thief trying to steal my horse!” And he gave me a shove, so that I fell at his warlord’s feet.
I looked up into the face of Kashihara Hikosane.
The man barely glanced at me. “And don’t you know what to do with a thief?” the warlord said impatiently. “Throw it in the moat and waste no more time.”
But the moat was not where I’d been planning to end up. It was still broad daylight. I could hardly swim across the water and scale the castle walls with the whole town looking on.
Daigoro seized my arm and yanked me up.
Well, if it was a thief they wanted …
Every kind of armor has joints built in, or the warrior would be unable to move. If that warrior is going to be riding a horse, the joints at the crotch must be generous. So that’s where I landed my best kick.
As Daigoro folded in two and let go of my arm, Lord Hikosane reached for my hair. I dodged his hand, seized the jade-and-gold earring in his ear, and yanked. Now he and his loyal retainer would match.
Hikosane roared with pain and surprise, and I darted downhill toward the town, clutching my handful of bloody gold. They were all so shocked that I actually had to slip and let myself fall to give them time to catch me.
A horse thief they might have tossed in the moat to drown. A hellion who’d ripped open a warlord’s ear—for her they had different plans. So I was told at length, before being dragged inside the gate, manhandled down a flight of stone stairs, stripped of my weapons, and tossed into a tiny cell. The door clanged shut, a bar slammed down across it, and footsteps clattered up the stairs.
Well, at least I was inside the castle.
I wiped my bloody nose on my shoulder and set about getting my hands free. That took longer than I would have liked. Daigoro had been the one to tie them behind me, and he’d done it much too tightly. If they’d left me like that all night, I’d have been a cripple by morning.
I wondered how Saiko was managing.
By the time I had the ropes off, both wrists were bleeding and I had to spend time I didn’t have to stretch and massage my fingers. I couldn’t rush it, though. I needed my hands in working order for the next thing I had to do.
Two choices now: the door or the stinking hole in the floor. I pried up the grate to take a look, but the smell nearly made me throw up, and the hole was narrower than my shoulders. I wasn’t that desperate yet.
So, the door.
Not a simple latch, which would have taken me half a minute. Through the crack between the door and its frame, I could see the width of the wooden bar that held it closed. Thicker than my wrist, and heavy as well.
They’d taken my knife, but hadn’t bothered to search me carefully enough to find the length of cord around my waist or the slender steel rod sewn into my right sleeve. One end was pointed and as sharp as a needle. The other was bent into a hook.
The rod fit neatly through the crack between the door and its frame. With the hooked end, I was able to draw the cord into a loop around the right end of the bar. Then I looped the free end of the cord around the bar’s left end. With my sleeve wrapped around my fingers, so that the narrow cord would not cut the skin, I pulled gently and steadily upward. The bar came out with no trouble, and I eased the door open with my shoulder.
Once I was outside the cell, I set the bar back down into its rests, hoping to make it look as if I’d simply vanished. By the next morning, they’d be saying I was a demon. Soon the story would be that I’d bitten off Lord Hikosane’s ear and flown away.
If they knew demons as I did, they would not speak of them so lightly.
There was no guard outside the door or at the top of the stairs. Perhaps they’d have set someone to watch a valued prisoner, but why bother for a girl thief? The cord went back around my waist, the rod into my sleeve. I did my best to clean all the blood off my chin and cheeks and hands, and pulled my loose hair over my face to cover what I hadn’t been able to rub off. One good thing about dark clothing is that blood doesn’t show.
In any castle, it’s always fairly easy to find the kitchen. Most of the servants are headed there. You simply pick one to follow. My first led me to the laundry, which was not helpful, but then I caught sight of a skinny boy lugging a heavy basket of radishes and greens across an inner courtyard. It wasn’t hard to bump into him and knock him sprawling.
“Clumsy pig! Look what you’ve done!” he shouted.
“I’m sorry, so sorry,” I whimpered, and dropped down to crawl after an errant radish. “I’ll help. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to!” We scooped up the slightly bruised vegetables and piled them back into the basket. “Let me,” I panted, and seized one of the handles. “You take that one.”
He only grunted, but he was glad enough of the help, and it gave me an excellent excuse to enter the kitchen.
There, everyone was too busy to notice me at all. Fish were being skinned and boned by knives far deadlier than anything in Madame Chiyome’s armory. Rice was steaming and bear paws soaked in honey were simmering. And apparently the pitchers of rice wine could not be filled fast enough.
When a maid thumped a full one down on the table, I snatched it up. By the time she turned her head to look for it, I was following two more servants back outside the kitchen and across a courtyard to the mansion and its banquet chamber.
The guests were all kneeling around low tables or leaning back on bright cushions. Servants knelt to fill wine cups and offer trays of sharp little pickles, or cakes oozing sweet bean paste, or sliced fish arranged to look like flowers in full bloom.
It was not easy to spot Lord Yoshisane through the crowd. Did he look like his two brothers, the ones I’d seen in the vision? I could not be sure. As I knelt to pour wine into cups thrust toward me, I sent my gaze darting about the room.
The music that had been dancing over our heads finished with a sweet swirl of notes, and I saw the tall young man from the actors’ troupe take his wooden flute from his lips and bow humbly before a man wearing a white sleeveless robe over a long black kimono. On the white silk, a silver dragonfly fluttered its wings with the man’s every breath.
A hand in a brown sleeve thrust a cup at me, and I splashed the wine in carelessly, my eyes on the man in black. Some of the pale liquid sloshed over the rim.
“Forgive me, master,” I whispered, cringing. Stupid and careless of me. Now the samurai, whoever he was, would probably kick me. It wouldn’t be in character for me to dodge, and certainly not to break his leg.
But there was something odd about that sake. Instead of dripping off the man’s hand, the liquid began to bubble on his skin. It sizzled like water on a hot pan, and then vanished into the air with a little plume of steam.
As I stared, not quite believing my eyes, the man whose sake I’d spilled, instead of kicking me, reached over to take a firm grasp on my hair.
I gasped. His hand was hot, and the skin on the back of my neck ached as it would after a long day in the sun.
He had a bloodstained bandage on one ear.
Frowning, he turned my head slowly from side to side, as if he were studying my face or the arrangement of my hair. His eyes were black, like any human eyes, but something red flickered over their surface, a reflection of flame. Something inside him was burning.
I’d spilled sake on Saiko’s uncle. And Saiko had been wrong about him. The problem wasn’t that he had no heart. The truth was, he had no soul—at least, no human soul.
Kashihara Hikosane was a demon.
I’d have to kill him. It was my only chance. But his own samurai were seated all around him. I might stab him through the heart with my sharp steel rod or the knife I’d stolen from the kitchen and hidden in my sleeve, but what were my chances of getting out of the room afterward?
Not good.
Lord Hikosane’s hand tightened at the back of my neck, and I felt the skin there about to burn. Then something across the room seemed to catch his attention. I strained my eyes sideways and saw that he was looking at a man wearing a black kimono, and at a girl in a bright orange-red robe kneeling at his feet.
Hikosane rose, flinging me aside harder than should have been possible, so that I tumbled across the floor, sprawling in a litter of broken pottery and spilt rice wine. He stood up and took a step toward Saiko.
He did it clumsily, as though walking were something he was not used to doing.
I rolled to my knees, drew my kitchen knife from my sleeve, and threw it. But it was not balanced like the throwing knife I was used to, the one Hikosane’s men had taken from me, and my aim was off. The knife sang through the air inches from Lord Hikosane’s head and forced two guests behind him to dodge, before it tore through a paper screen and vanished.
“Saiko!” I shouted, over the panic that was starting to fill the hall. “Don’t let him touch you!”
Good advice. Hikosane had flinched from my knife, stumbled, and fallen. Where his hands touched the polished bamboo slats of the floor, two black, smoldering patches appeared. Whatever was inside him was coming to the surface, his human façade burning away like a wisp of silk in the fire.
Saiko screamed and scrambled back as the demon that had once been her uncle heaved himself up and reached for her throat. Or, rather, for the necklace hanging there.
Hikosane’s neck was lengthening. His hair was falling out. All around, people were screaming, cursing, running, crying. No one had any weapons, of course; no one would have insulted Lord Yoshisane by coming armed into his banquet hall.
Someone tripped over me and fell, headlong, while I sat on the floor, staring openmouthed, as if I had never seen a demon before. But this one—this one was worse than all the rest.
A monstrous snakelike creature writhed out of Lord Hikosane’s kimono, leaving a puddle of brown silk on the floor. A mouth gaped; yellow fangs seemed to grow by the second. I’d wrestled a giant centipede, I’d punched a double-mouthed woman in the teeth, I’d fought off a nue—but this? I’d never been trained to fight a snake three times as large as me.
Lord Yoshisane had staggered to his feet and was shouting for his men. Armed soldiers poured into the room. Arrows flew at the demon, but they burst into flame in midair.
Bamboo, teak, paper, lacquer—this banquet hall would be burning like a torch within a moment.
My knife was gone. My garrote was useless. The steel rod in my sleeve would do as much damage to this creature as a mosquito’s bite. But what about fire? Could I fight this demon with its own weapon?
I leaped up and ran, heading for a lantern hanging from a wall as the demon reared up to strike at Saiko. She dodged and screamed. The snake snarled, a sound that might have been a laugh.
Lord Yoshisane shouted again.
My hand closed around the lantern.
The snake’s tail lashed, toppling Lord Yoshisane like a doll.
I flung the lantern at the demon’s head, splattering burning oil onto its face.
The snake hissed, snapping its head around to look at me and giving Saiko a few seconds to back away. A black tongue flickered from its mouth, licking hungrily at the flames.
Well, perhaps fire was not the right weapon …
“Kata!” Saiko shrieked. “Catch!”
And she flung the pearl at me. Even the demon was startled, I think. It snapped at the jewel in midair, like a dog trying to catch a bothersome wasp, but it missed.
Before my hand had even closed around the pearl, I’d wished.