29.

Feudal Japan

APRIL, 1743

Kyoto

“I’m working,” Saburo growls at the graying disciple who inexplicably remains with him, after so many years. Lord Inaba’s court poet scowls at the characters he has just brushed across the page.

Still not right. The sheet crumples in his fist, ink still wet.

“Tell him to go away.”

“I did,” his number one follower says, in a tone that tells Saburo he’s not going to give in so easily this time. “But his servant is waiting for a reply, and he sent this.”

Coins clink softly inside the doeskin bag he lowers onto the poet’s writing desk.

“And this.”

He hands the poet a letter, sealed with the family crest of Lord Inaba’s chamberlain.

“I really think you ought to reconsider,” insists the disciple, a little less deferentially. “These pleasant rooms are ours at his behest, after all.”

Saburo picks off the seal and scans the contents, casts it aside.

“Does the son have any talent?”

“I think he might,” says the disciple diplomatically. “Given time. And a little teaching.”

Which his loyal follower would provide, since Saburo takes little notice of the would-be students who continue to pound at his door despite his refusal to take them on. In fact, the more he refuses, the louder they pound.

All he cares about is finishing his masterwork, and it’s not going well. Which makes no sense—in the years since he became court poet, a day hasn’t passed when he hasn’t pondered the Eight Attachments.

In his first years as court poet, he’d enthusiastically turned his hand to the work demanded of him—“coaching” the daimyō in the niceties of composition, while actually ghostwriting poems he could pass off as his own when court society required. But when he sat down to his own work, he’d been utterly unable to compose the poignant—yet uplifting—verses that had originally garnered him so much acclaim.

Try as he might to marshal words into sentiments that were insightful and inspiring, they always veered off in dark directions. If he wet his brush to convey an undiscovered facet of self-confidence, or the joy that comes from hard work yielding mastery, he would rise from his desk hours later to find the paper filled with bitter musings on pride, rigid thinking, ambition.

It took him years to realize the true nature of the deal he had made with his demons, on that long-ago day when he’d tied Hikitoru into his traveling bundle, leaving behind the potter’s deathbed wish. Yakibō’s spirit now hovers at his elbow day and night, twisting his words. He fears that it will haunt him, not only until he dies, but into the next life and the next, that it will dog him throughout eternity until he finds some way to appease it.

The poet frowns at the pale leather bag still sitting on his desk. His disciple has disappeared, which means he has probably interpreted Saburo’s silence as a tacit “yes.” Another unknown face will join the small circle that surrounds him on the rare occasions when he agrees to hear them recite their meaningless efforts. He’s far kinder to them than his own master had been, mostly because he spares them only a sliver of his attention. The rest of his mind is occupied with whatever Attachment is sitting on his desk, as he examines each link of the chain, trying to understand it well enough to break it.