Year of the Demon

AZUCHI-MOMOYAMA PERIOD, THE YEAR 21

(1588 CE)

50

The brothel in Minakuchi was called the Bridge to the Other Shore and it was true to its name. The broad reception room was in fact a bridge: a narrow brook bisected its floor, burbling pleasantly and giving the building an unusually cool atmosphere. The brothel itself was unusually long and unusually narrow, extending from the road over the brook and deep into the bamboo grove flanking the road. The interior walls were reminiscent of a covered bridge in their construction, just substantial enough to contain the milder air within them.

After a long day of hot late summer riding, Daigoro knew he should have found the Bridge to the Other Shore refreshing. Instead, he felt no less embarrassed than the first time he’d entered a pleasure house. Evidently these things grew no easier with time.

Nevertheless, he knew Katsushima had advised him rightly: he could only afford to stay with those who would not betray his presence. He had even hoped to find Katsushima here, though that was all but hopeless. The brothels along the Tokaido were countless, Katsushima could have chosen any one of them, and none of them would disclose the fact that he was there. That was precisely why wanted ronin took their lodging in a house that knew the value of discretion.

As Katsushima did not happen to be dangling his feet in the brook, Daigoro had no way of knowing whether his friend was under the same roof. He saw only the girls, so delicate that they almost seemed weightless. One of them bowed as he entered and escorted him across the zigzagging slate bridge in the center of the room. “Welcome to the Other Shore,” she said.

Daigoro endured the standard conversational gymnastics, deflecting her flirtations and bandying about food and comfort as an indirect way of discussing the price of a room. Katsushima had always found the game exhilarating, but as Daigoro had no intention of laying claim to one of the girls in the end, he only found it tiresome. He was scarcely a day’s ride out of Kyoto, he’d already gone two days without sleeping, and there was yet more to do before bedding down tonight.

But his rooms were comfortable, the food was warm and filling, and the very walls were redolent with perfume and incense and spice. He almost nodded off while drinking his tea.

It was the sensation of slipping into sleep that caused him to snap back, wakeful and wary. He’d escaped the sprawling capital, but Minakuchi and the Other Shore were still in the heart of the Kansai, and visions of General Mio’s mutilated body left Daigoro feeling cold. He would not feel safe until he was well clear of Shichio’s hunting grounds.

He called for the madam and asked for a girl who was skilled in conversation. It was one of the geisha arts, and an expensive one at that. Daigoro wasn’t sure what he’d do when his money ran out—he’d never been paid to work in his entire life, and hadn’t the slightest idea of how to go about seeking employment—but he needed to gather information and he remembered Katsushima mentioning on their long ride from Izu that this was the best way to do that. Daigoro wished he had Katsushima with him now.

The girl’s name was Hanako and her kimono was of the palest blue silk, tastefully embroidered with parasols the color of cherry blossoms. She was tiny, not as pretty as Aki but shapely enough to make Daigoro remember how long he’d been away from home. They talked about trivia first, but only long enough for Daigoro to steer the conversation toward politics. “I hear the regent has been beset by something of a storm,” he said. “One of his chief advisers retired or was sent away, I’m told.”

“Oh yes, quite the to-do,” said Hanako. “Only the adviser did not take his leave; Toyotomi-sama executed his adviser on grounds of treason. Can you believe it? It was one of his generals as I recall, a man called Mio.”

“Is that so?”

“Neh?” Hanako clearly found the whole affair terribly scandalous, and all the more delicious for that. “They say Mio-sama was caught with letters to Tokugawa Ieyasu. You know who he is, of course. Well, the regent couldn’t very well have the likes of Tokugawa killed, neh? Think of the message that would send to all the other great houses! So he ordered Mio-sama to open his belly.” She giggled. “And it was quite a belly. As I heard it, this General Mio could have swallowed a whale.”

“I heard something similar.” Daigoro forced a smile, but his mind recalled images of Mio’s terrible, gaping wounds.

“Can you imagine the mess, Daigoro-sama? A big, disgusting man like that. Not like you, my lord.”

So it’s back to bantering, Daigoro thought. He said just enough to keep the conversation going. His mind was elsewhere, trying to get the measure of Shichio. The man was as comfortable with deceit as Daigoro was with breathing. He used his lies as deftly as a sword, cutting down his enemies while defending himself. Katsushima’s suggestion of resorting to shinobi no longer seemed desperate at all. Shichio was a foe unlike any Daigoro had ever faced. Squaring off against an enemy with a sword was simple—terrifying, yes, but simple. But Shichio didn’t square off with his enemies; he maneuvered and manipulated, always from the shadows, and if a steadfast retainer was sometimes killed in the process, so be it.

Daigoro didn’t know how to fight an enemy who wouldn’t come out of the shadows. The only recourse he could see was to hire shadow warriors to fight in his stead. It shamed him even to think of it—his father would never have allowed someone else to do his fighting for him—but Daigoro didn’t see what else he could do.

“Tell me, Hanako, have you ever heard of the Wind?”

She giggled. “Have I ever heard the wind? Silly man. What kind of question is that?”

“Magic men. Shinobi. You’ve heard of them?”

More giggling. “Of course. And tengu and kappa and snow-women too. What do bedtime stories have to do with hearing the wind?”

“Shinobi are more than bedtime stories. Many daimyo hire them, especially in the Kansai.”

Now Hanako laughed out loud. “Ah! And now I understand. You aren’t from around here, are you? I knew it! It’s your accent.”

“Be serious.”

“How can I, with you toying with me like this?” She giggled, or at least pretended to in order to take the focus away from Daigoro’s hinterland gullibility. “You’ve heard about our local legends and you’re trying to scare me. The wind! Honestly, Daigoro-sama, you’re too much.”

Daigoro swallowed his frustration along with the last of the sake. Pointless, he thought; it’s all pointless. Maybe back in Izu he might have known which ears he ought to whisper to if he wanted to hire shinobi, but finding them here was like finding a snowflake in a waterfall.

He dismissed Hanako and doused the lantern. As tired as he was, he found he couldn’t sleep, which only added to his frustration. It was shameful enough that he’d resorted to hiring someone else to fight his battles for him. Simply attempting it already betrayed his father’s principles. Worse still was the fact that he’d betrayed his principles and hadn’t accomplished anything by it. He’d compromised his conscience, and his reward was exactly what his father would have said it would be: nothing. Nothing but guilt and disappointment.

He lay in bed for an eternity before the weight of his shame lifted enough that he could sleep.

• • •

When he woke he saw a man sitting at the foot of his bed.

Daigoro recoiled, his heart a ball of ice. The man did not react. He was barely visible, a presence felt as much as seen, for although the moon was three-quarters full, she shed little light through the room’s only window. The door had not opened. Daigoro was certain of that. And the window was nothing more than a long, narrow transom running along the top of the back wall; nothing bigger than a finch could get through it. Yet there the man sat, cross-legged, looking at him.

Daigoro reached for Glorious Victory and could not find her. His wakizashi was missing as well. He carried no knife and his armor was bundled in the corner. He was naked, defenseless, and alone.

“You seek the Wind,” the man said.

His voice was low and gravelly, the voice a boulder might have. Daigoro found it eerie that even when he spoke his body did not move at all. Daigoro could not even see him breathing.

“I do,” Daigoro said, and the pleading tone in his voice shamed him.

“For what purpose?”

“I have an enemy. I want him dead.”

“Then kill him.”

Daigoro swallowed. “He is beyond my reach.”

“Name him.”

“Shichio.”

Daigoro’s eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness. He could just make out the whites of his visitor’s eyes, though he could discern no other features. The man did not blink. Ever.

He stared at Daigoro, silent for so long that Daigoro wondered whether he’d actually managed to say Shichio’s name, or whether he’d heard himself in his mind but hadn’t mustered enough self-control to voice it aloud. “General Shichio,” he said. “He is Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s man.”

“He is known to us.”

“Us?”

Those eyes shifted to a point beyond Daigoro’s right shoulder. Daigoro twisted where he sat, straining in the dark to see what his visitor might have been looking at.

More eyes stared back at him.

Daigoro all but leaped out of his skin. Three more figures sat behind him, silent as statues. He could only make out their eyes. A chill washed over him, goose bumps too, despite the heat of the night. He scrambled away from his futon, crab-walking until his shoulder blades struck a wall panel. Not one of the four figures moved. Only their eyes followed him.

“Expensive,” said the only one who had spoken.

“But you can do it?”

“There is no place the Wind cannot reach.”

Daigoro’s eyes strained against the dark, trying to make out something, anything, of his interlocutor’s face. It was not lost on him that there were four shinobi, and that four was the number of death. It was a symbol; these men had brought death to Daigoro’s bedchamber.

“Name your price,” said Daigoro.

“Too high,” said the boulder-voiced man.

“My family can pay. I guarantee it.”

“You are without family.”

It was a statement of fact, not a guess. Daigoro could tell by his tone. “You don’t even know who I am,” he said.

“Daigoro. Once Okuma Daigoro of Izu.”

“How do you—?”

“There is no place the Wind cannot reach.”

Daigoro swallowed. The noise seemed terribly loud to him in the dark.

“Then you know my reputation,” said Daigoro. “The clans of Izu will stake me. Name your price and you shall have it.”

“Gold is one thing. Blood is another. We will not spill our own in killing this man.”

Daigoro braced himself against the wall. “Then why have you come? To kill me?”

“Our designs are our own. But we will help you if you wish.”

“I want him dead. You already said you will not do it.”

“Kill, no. Help, yes. Meditate again on what you need.”

Daigoro’s mother leaped to his mind. Katsushima’s suggestion to kill her leaped to mind next. “Has my man Katsushima spoken to you?”

“He is known to us.”

“I will not have her come to harm. Do you understand me? My mother is not to be touched.”

The boulder-voice snorted. “Limited thinking. Limited vision. You know not what you need.”

“I know perfectly well what I need.”

Daigoro realized he’d spoken too loudly—to say nothing of too harshly, given the fact that he was unarmed with four shinobi in his rooms. “I know what I need,” he said again, quiet and calm this time. “My mother cannot marry that madman. I need to stop their wedding.”

“Still you see as if from the bottom of a well.”

“How else am I supposed to see things?” It was an effort for Daigoro to keep his voice down. After a long day of frustrations, he had no patience for word games.

“Two are to marry. You will not kill her. We will not kill him. Broaden your vision.”

“Explain yourself, damn you. Why did you even come to me if you only plan to speak in riddles?”

“We are of the Wind. Our designs are our own.”

Daigoro’s breath came loud and angry through his nose. Some strange metamorphosis had transformed his fear into exasperation. Neither emotion was worthy of his birthright. In his mind his father’s voice chided him: the samurai makes every decision in the space of seven breaths—and not angry breaths, either.

He tried to calm himself. He had a wedding to stop, and he could touch neither the bride nor the groom. His thoughts ran to his own forced marriage. Akiko had many sisters; could he somehow force Shichio to marry one of them? House Inoue was of samurai lineage; that would satisfy that preening peacock’s need to pretend at nobility. But no. Even if he could persuade his father-in-law to marry off another one of his daughters, nothing would prevent Shichio from taking Daigoro’s mother as a concubine.

But the reverse wasn’t true, was it? If his mother was married, she would be out of Shichio’s reach.

It was a dark thought. Daigoro did not care to think of his mother as a playing piece. Neither did he care to speculate what the lords protector of Izu would think of him for marrying off his own mother as a political ploy. But he didn’t see that he had a choice. Outside of Izu, he didn’t have a single ally—apart from Katsushima, anyway, but Daigoro had no better hope of reaching him than of reaching the rabbit in the moon. In any case, this was a better prospect than Katsushima’s plan of matricide.

“I know how to stop the wedding without bloodshed,” Daigoro said. “I have no need for your assassins. I only need you to deliver a package.”

“This package, it will prevent this wedding?”

“If it reaches its destination in time, yes.”

The silhouette gave the smallest of nods. “Where?”

“Izu.”

“Expensive,” said the silhouette, in that voice one might expect an earthquake to have. “Far from here. Many eyes to avoid.”

“You said there was nowhere the Wind cannot reach. Do you stand by that or not?”

The silhouette looked at him, and though Daigoro could make out none of its facial features, somehow he was sure it was frowning. “There is no place the Wind cannot reach,” it said.

“Then you’ll do it?”

“Difficult now. Many troops in Izu. Many shinobi here in the Kansai.”

It took Daigoro a moment to grasp his meaning. “You mean Shichio, neh? He’s hired ninja to kill me?”

“Stupid question. Obvious.”

His tone was even more ominous, if that was possible. Daigoro tightened his grip on his wakizashi. “Did he hire you to kill me?”

“Our designs are our own.”

It was hardly an encouraging answer. For all Daigoro knew, their designs included extinguishing House Okuma. Or perhaps Daigoro was being deployed as a weapon against Shichio. He imagined himself as an arrow, and thought of how little the archer would care if the arrow splintered after felling the target.

He supposed he’d never learn the truth. Not from inscrutable replies like these, anyway. But he also decided the answers didn’t matter. Shichio was his target. The Wind was the bow that could launch him there. What did the arrow care why the bowstring was drawn? It cared only about the target.

“This package you would have us deliver,” the boulder-voice asked him, “is it large or small?”

Daigoro smirked. “That depends on what you mean by small.”

The shinobi looked at him sternly—a notable accomplishment for one with no discernible face.

“It’s me,” said Daigoro. “The package is me.”

51

Shichio had birds of prey on his mind.

His mask glared down at him from the shelf where he’d sequestered it. He could feel its empty eyes following him as if it were a hawk perched on a high branch, patient and deadly. He was spending another late night in his study, and the oil lamps cast fluttering shadows behind the mask that made it appear to have wings.

At the same time he imagined himself as an eagle. A map of Izu lay splayed across his writing table, and Shichio imagined himself circling over the peninsula, searching the landscape for his prey. Somewhere down there, a lone bear cub was crawling home. Shichio wanted to find it and kill it before it burrowed into some den he could not see.

The image of the eagle was fitting: a hunter, a carrion feeder, a creature that could not live except on death. Shichio had come to think of the mask in the same way. He wanted nothing more than to touch it, yet the thought of its touch repulsed him. It was making him more and more like itself. Before, it inspired a lust for swords in him. After the Bear Cub scarred the mask, that lust had become hunger, and one who could hunger could also starve. The mask’s need had become deadly.

And bloody. He’d purchased thirty swords, some of them massive odachi like the Bear Cub’s, and had sword racks installed in his bedchamber, his study, even his bathhouse, so that no matter where he went, he would be surrounded by blades. His people had scoured the Kansai in search of an Inazuma blade for him to buy. There were none, and even if there had been, Shichio knew it would not help him. There was a time when Inazuma steel would have satisfied the mask, but now it hungered for blood.

He’d hoped Mio’s death would sate it, but he wasn’t so lucky. If anything, it made matters worse. So long as he wore the mask, its hunger drowned out his moral sensibilities, but as soon as he took it off—to bathe, to sleep, or simply because the mask had come to frighten him—the memories came flooding back. Wearing the mask, he imagined tying the Bear Cub to his table; taking it off, he shuddered at the same vision.

One way or the other, he would see the Bear Cub dead. That much had nothing to do with the mask—a fact the boy should have known by now, if he had any sense. But if he’d had any sense, the boy would have recognized Shichio as a threat from the moment he learned who the abbot was and why Shichio wanted his head. Shichio’s grudge against the abbot was probably older than the Bear Cub himself. The whelp should have seen it from the outset: to make an enemy of Shichio was to make an enemy for life.

But foresight wasn’t a virtue of the warrior. No, the Bear Cub venerated that savage naïveté known as bushido. All samurai were alike: they believed savagery could be bound by rules, and that their enemies would handicap themselves with the same set of rules. Their honor code would only be—could only ever have been—their undoing.

That was why Shichio would always have the advantage over them, and it was why the Bear Cub was doomed to fail. From the moment the boy left the Jurakudai, he had but two tactics available to him: he could face Shichio head-to-head, or he could admit he was outnumbered and outclassed. The boy was smart enough to choose the latter, and perhaps he was even desperate enough to overcome his pretended nobility. Falling in with the ninja clans was the only intelligent choice left to him. But Shichio had foreseen the shinobi threat years ago, and he’d established informants within all the major houses save one. The Wind would not sell him their own secrets, not for any price. Shichio didn’t care for such peevishness from his underlings, but when he’d attempted to infiltrate their ranks with a shinobi of his own, he’d woken one morning to find his agent in his antechamber, waiting with the patience of the dead. They had flayed all the skin from his face. The message was crystal clear: there is no mask we cannot see through, and no place the Wind cannot reach.

The sight was so horrifying that Shichio never tried to make contact with the Wind again—until now. As soon as the Bear Cub left the Jurakudai, Shichio had reached out to them with a new contract: not for an informant within their halls indefinitely, but rather for a contingency plan to inform him if the Bear Cub should ever come calling. It came at enormous expense, but the gamble was worth it: he’d received a message before the week was out, confirming that the Bear Cub had made contact.

And, since he did not subscribe to the samurai’s savage naïveté, he immediately made the next move. Bushido forbade the Bear Cub from paying another man to do his fighting for him, but Shichio had no such compunctions. He did not even balk at the price—which, in this case, was extortionate. Shichio suspected they doubled their fee just for him, for no other reason than that they knew he was desperate enough to pay anything they asked. They weren’t wrong; he would empty Hashiba’s treasury if that was the price to put an end to the Bear Cub.

In fact, he’d already gone to enormous expense. Even before he’d made contact with the Wind, Shichio had foreseen the possibility that the Bear Cub would slink back home. He’d deployed ships, riders, carrier pigeons, everything he had at his disposal. He had even bullied two Portuguese sea captains into devoting their galleons to the cause. That was likely to cost Hashiba in the future—those southern barbarians were touchy, especially when it came to their ships—but Shichio could see no faster way to deploy troops to Izu in sufficient numbers. Patrols on every road, guards at every crossroads, crews in every port and harbor; nothing less would suffice. Every friend and ally to the Okumas had to be under watch. Hashiba would never have approved the expense, but as the regent’s chief logistics officer, Shichio was the only one who could give himself away.

No. There was one other, but he did not have the backbone to speak for himself.

“Jun!” Shichio cocked his head, listening for movement from the corridor, but heard nothing. “Where is that confounded man?”

He dismissed one of his door guards to hunt him down, then returned his attention to the map. It was a seafaring chart, not detailed enough for him to judge the distances between House Okuma and its neighbors by horseback. They were all insignificant houses—Shichio had heard of none of them at court—but even ignoble allies were allies. Any one of them might offer a burrow where the Bear Cub could go to ground.

None of them were likely. If Shichio’s informant in the Wind was correct, the whelp was heading straight for home. It seemed he had a mind to forestall his mother’s marriage—and if that were true, then Shichio had underestimated Mio Yasumasa. What a staggering feat of endurance that must have been, to track down the Bear Cub even after Shichio had lavished such attention on him. Those wounds should have killed an elephant, but somehow Mio must have survived long enough to reveal Shichio’s wedding plans to the boy.

Now that was a pleasant thought. Since Shichio was now Hashiba’s top adviser, revealing Shichio’s secrets was tantamount to treason. And since colluding with a traitor was itself a treasonous act, a rendezvous with Mio was all the pretext Shichio needed to name the Bear Cub an enemy of the state. It would be a pleasure to write the order for his execution.

There came a series of squeaks and chirps from the nightingale floors in the hall. The bobbing foxfire glow of handheld lamps drew closer, and at long last the shoji slid aside. There was Jun, bowing so low that his forehead touched the floor. “My lord?”

“It’s about damned time. What took you so long?”

“A messenger came, my lord. It’s—”

“Did I send you to dally with messengers? No.” Shichio extracted a little stack of lists from under his map and slid them along the floor toward his adjutant. “Now look at this. It says here that I’ve deployed a double garrison at some ‘green cliff,’ wherever that is, and but a single platoon at the compound of Inoue Shigekazu—at your behest. Why?”

“Sir, the Green Cliff is the name of House Yasuda’s most fortified compound.”

“Speak up, damn you. Explain yourself to me, not the floor.”

Jun raised himself into a less sluglike pose. “My lord, the message, it’s quite important—”

“I’ll be the one to tell you what’s important, Jun, and at the moment what I deem important is for you to stop your prattling. Now tell me, why should I care about these Yasudas?”

“Lord Yasuda’s wedding gift was most generous, my lord. Nine prized horses from excellent stables.”

“And yet he did not attend the wedding.”

That had been one of Hashiba’s better ideas, requiring all lords to keep records of who married whom, who died when, what dowries and tokens of respect were exchanged. In truth Hashiba had stolen the idea from his predecessor, Oda Nobunaga, who saw dowries as convenient cover for his enemies to amass an army. A gift of horses might have been a pretext for building cavalry; a gift of land today could easily become rice for feeding soldiers tomorrow. To Oda’s devious mind, any gathering of the powerful represented a possible conspiracy.

Shichio had never met the man personally, but as near as he could tell, Oda had been a brute and a bully—a samurai if ever there was one. But in this case, Shichio was glad Oda had ruled with an iron fist. It was through wedding and funerary records that Shichio could see his adjutant was even more incompetent than expected. “Read it,” he said, stabbing a finger at the stack of lists in Jun’s quivering hands. “Did the Bear Cub wed himself to the Yasudas? No. He wedded himself to the Inoues. So why are my troops stationed as if it were the other way around?”

“House Yasuda is thought to be the closer ally.”

“Thought to be? Come, now, Jun, you’re a bright man. You wouldn’t invite me to cut your tongue out, would you?”

Jun swallowed. “No, my lord.”

“No, you wouldn’t. So is this an idle guess of yours, or do you have what we might call evidence?”

Jun shuffled through the lists, found the one he was looking for, and passed it to Shichio, all without lifting his head more than a handsbreadth from the floor. “If you’ll read here, sir, Lord Yasuda attended both the father’s and the elder brother’s funerals, and the Yasuda retainers were more numerous at both funerals than any other clan’s. It is believed that Lord Okuma—er, the Bear Cub, that is—well, that he married the Inoue girl under duress.”

“It is believed,” Shichio said. Jun shivered, but Shichio would not be so harsh on him this time. He’d made his case. “Send a pigeon. Double the guard on House Inoue, but leave the garrison at this Green Cliff right where it is. Now, then, what other news from the north? Has there been a reply to my marriage proposals?”

“Not yet, my lord.”

“Why not? This messenger tonight had no word? What’s taking so long?”

Jun shrank into himself as if hoping to become invisible. “I’m certain my lord remembers that the Lady Okuma is quite mad. Who can say what errands she’ll attend to and when?”

“Have another proposal written up, and send it with the same pigeon. And tell the captain of the guard at the House Okuma garrison that he will return a reply from Lady Okuma or I’ll have him buried alive.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Shichio gave a satisfied sigh. “Very good, Jun. Now, what’s so important that you’d risk me cutting out your tongue?”

Jun looked up from his brush and paper, his eyes wide with fear. “My lord?”

“The messenger, you dolt. The one whose ramblings sent you running here all in a lather.”

“Ah.” Jun swallowed and cleared his throat. “My lord, the Bear Cub is dead.”

“What?” Shichio rose to his feet so fast he knocked the table over. “Where? How?”

Jun produced a small slip of paper from the pocket of his sleeve, pressed it on the floor with both hands, and slid it forward. Shichio snatched it up. In a tight, neat hand it read BEAR STRIPPED OF PELT TONIGHT. THERE IS NO MAN THE WIND CANNOT REACH.

Shichio gave a triumphant cry, crushing the note in his fist. Images flashed in his mind: the whelp’s throat cut open; the whelp disemboweled; the whelp dead with an arrow in his eye. He couldn’t decide which method he liked best. It hardly mattered. He’d receive another note from the assassin soon enough, chronicling the details. In the meantime, though, he’d relish the moment.

Before he knew it, the mask was in his hands. He couldn’t say how it got there. “Be gone,” he said to Jun. Even the most incompetent aide had his uses. It would be a shame to kill him for no better reason than to celebrate the Bear Cub’s demise.

52

Lightning struck like Raijin’s own fist, so close that the thunderclap shuddered every timber of the inn. The bolt threw a rhombus of white light through the open shoji, causing Daigoro’s bloody form to glow like a foxfire where it lay on the floor.

In the next instant all was black, darker than it should have been even for an inn nestled deep in the pines in the dead of night. That instant of brightness made the ensuing darkness impenetrable.

A lone figure stepped over the prostrated body. It opened Daigoro’s unresponsive mouth and forced a vile, poisonous liquid down his throat. Then, with fingertips striking as hard as hammers, it drove penetrating blows into vital nerve centers and pressure points. Each strike landed expertly, in precisely the right sequence, to ensure that the task was finished.

It was the last blow that forced Daigoro to vomit. His body twitched and heaved, splattering the rain-slicked floorboards with poison and blood and counterpoison. Pain bent him into a fetal position. With one arm he clutched his aching belly, and with the other hand he pressed down on the seeping wound in his neck.

Lightning flashed again, illuminating the little glass bottle that the figure astride him had emptied into his gullet. “What was that?” Daigoro groaned, his reeling eyes trying to focus on the bottle.

“Antivenom,” said the shinobi crouching above him. “An old formula. We carry it often. Too easy to be cut on one’s own blade.”

“No. I mean, what—what poisoned me?”

His shinobi did not deign to answer, leaving Daigoro to piece things together himself. He recalled collapsing to the floor. That explained his throbbing forehead, but not the sharp pain in his throat bones. Something hard and thin had struck him there.

A knife-hand strike. He remembered now. It was meant to crush his windpipe, to keep him from vomiting. And there was the vile taste a moment before, burning his tongue like fire. He’d been asleep, and he’d opened his eyes to see a shadow-clad figure above him.

They’d struggled. Daigoro could still feel it: the panic of being entangled in his bedclothes. Pain rupturing through his right hand as he landed a punch. Poison raging through his guts like wildfire. He remembered the world slowing to a crawl. His senses took on the preternatural clarity of the dying. A hissing noise like an arrow in flight, audible even over the wind and the rain. A glimmer of steel flashing past his face. A tiny thunk when it caught his assailant behind the ear.

The shuriken wasn’t fatal. It had only driven the assassin back. Daigoro had finished the rest, grabbing the shuriken with his good hand and ripping it across his assailant’s throat. The wounds went numb where he’d cut his fingers on the shuriken. Venom. He remembered stumbling toward his cabin door, delirious. Then nothing.

“You,” Daigoro said, his throat still burning with bile, “you saved my life.”

“Yes,” said the shinobi. “Most uncautious. Should learn not to sleep so soundly.”

Daigoro looked at the dead man sprawled at the foot of his bed. He recognized his face: another ninja, one of six he’d hired from the Wind. This one had been masquerading as Daigoro’s palanquin bearer. For three days Daigoro had traveled with him, even shared meals with him, and tonight he’d killed him.

Daigoro struggled to his feet. The wind knocked him over twice before he managed it, and when he stiff-armed the doorjamb to steady himself, his right hand recoiled in pain. His fingers were broken again, the same ones Sora Samanosuke had broken in their duel. Hot lines of pain burned in his left hand too, across the palm and the pads of the fingers, everywhere the shuriken had left its mark.

“What’s the time?” he said.

“Time to flee,” said the shinobi. “This inn, no longer safe.”

“No,” Daigoro said, frustrated with his inability to communicate. The attack, the poison, the shinobi’s violent curative, they’d conspired to beat his brain into something approaching drunkenness. “What I mean to say is, why were you in my rooms at this hour? How did you know to look for an assassin?”

The shinobi grunted. “Sent message to Shichio. Confirmed assassination of Bear Cub. He responded with pleasure, not confusion. Only one explanation.”

Daigoro stepped out on the veranda, hoping the cold rain whipping his face might also whip the fogginess from his mind. “How did you know?”

“Didn’t. Shichio’s reaction proved it. From there, only a matter of waiting.”

Daigoro tried to make out the shinobi’s face, but it was too dark. He was certain this was the shinobi he’d first spoken to—that lupine voice was unmistakable—but somehow he’d still never gotten a clear look at the man’s features. They’d traveled together for three days and three nights, but this one had always ridden ahead as a scout until sundown, and from sunrise onward Daigoro had always been confined to his palanquin. The Wind had chosen to disguise him as a junior emissary of Tokugawa Ieyasu, on the assumption that no one would molest even the lowliest lickspittle of such a powerful lord. Daigoro could not begin to guess how they’d stolen a palanquin bearing the triple hollyhock leaves of the Tokugawa, with uniforms and weapons to match. It was enough that the emblems were authentic, and that the six ninja in his employ were utterly fearless, even of the most powerful warlords in the empire.

“What’s your name?” he said.

“Stupid question.”

“I just wanted to thank you.”

“The Wind is without name. I am of the Wind.”

“Well, thank you anyway,” Daigoro said, choosing not to add, you stubborn son of a bitch. “For saving my life.”

“Too early to be thankful. Now matters are worse.”

“Why?”

The shinobi looked at him as if Daigoro were holding his sword backward. “Well?” Daigoro said. “Am I wrong to think I’m better off now that my assassin is dead? Does that make me an idiot?”

“We do not know how many Shichio has in our company. We do not know whether this one prearranged a second message to Shichio. We know nothing.”

“Second message?”

Even over the storm, Daigoro heard the ninja grumble. “No fool, your assassin. Must have anticipated a false report to Shichio. True confirmation of your death would be followed by a second message, verifying the authenticity of the first. A code phrase, something no one else could guess. I could have extracted it from him. You killed him too soon.”

Daigoro didn’t like the way he said extracted. He didn’t like being blamed for defending himself either. What was he supposed to do, lie back and let his assassin go about his business?

Even as these irritations crossed his mind, he also felt ashamed. Not only had he killed their only source of intelligence on the enemy, but he’d even managed to poison himself while doing it. He squeezed his left hand into a fist, mashing the open cuts in his palm. Let this be a reminder, he thought. You’re alone now. Self-pity and impetuous action are luxuries you can no longer afford.

In his mind he could hear the same warning, the same lesson, summed up in a single word: patience. He missed Katsushima more than ever.

“So what now?” he said.

“You already know.”

There was that look again, as if Daigoro were a wayward schoolboy. “All right,” Daigoro said, “I’ll work that one out for myself. You said Shichio was happy to hear I’m dead. That means the one you sent to confirm my death must have reported back to you already. When?”

“Last night.”

A rush of righteous anger hit Daigoro like a slap. This man—his hireling, bought and paid for—had let an entire day slip by with no mention of the threat on his master’s life. No samurai should brook such an offense; Daigoro had the right to behead a servant just for spilling his tea.

But Daigoro had given up his station. His highborn instincts would not serve him anymore, and in any case, this shinobi had taken heroic efforts to keep Daigoro alive. Had the man slept last night, or had he kept a vigil just like tonight, waiting for the assassin to strike? Daigoro assumed the latter—and if he was right, then this hireling of his was forged out of pure steel. As the company’s outrider he would have covered twice the distance of the palanquin bearers he scouted for. He’d been riding hard for three days in a row, he hadn’t slept in two nights, and not only did he show no sign of tiring, but he was the one saving Daigoro’s life, not the other way around.

“Last night,” Daigoro muttered absently, working out the logistics in his head. Traveling by palanquin was cumbersome. As of last night they’d been two days on the road—less than a day’s ride on a fast horse. If the shinobi’s messenger could report from Kyoto in that time, then Shichio’s second message, the one confirming Daigoro’s death, could have reached him in the same time. That meant the second message was already at least a day overdue, and maybe two. “Oh, hell,” Daigoro said. “Shichio already knows his assassin failed.”

A mute nod.

“And that means more assassins are already on our heels.”

“Amateurs. The Wind would already have killed you.”

Daigoro found it hard to take comfort in that. He was a novice at this game himself. Shichio wasn’t. If he knew his newest henchmen were not up to the task, he had only to send them in greater numbers.

“We’ll have to abandon the palanquin,” Daigoro said. It was too slow, and even if it were not, Shichio’s informants might have told him of it already. Shichio was no simpleton; as soon as he learned Daigoro rode not a horse but a sedan chair, he would understand why. It wasn’t enough for Daigoro to travel disguised; he needed complete invisibility. He was a runt who walked with a distinctive limp. His odachi was famous, and even those who knew nothing of swords could see it was too big for him. His tack alone was enough to give him away: Daigoro could not ride without the special saddle crafted by Old Yagyu, the one that accommodated his lame, wasted leg.

The only way for Daigoro to conceal his size, his leg, his saddle, and his father’s sword was to box them up and keep them out of sight. A sedan chair was the perfect solution, and traveling under Tokugawa insignia afforded an extra degree of protection. To leave it behind was to abandon his best chance for speed and secrecy, but Daigoro could see no other choice.

“To hell with it,” he said, trying to sound confident. “It was hot enough in that palanquin to boil noodles. And my mare never cared for you anyway; she’ll be happy to have me back in the saddle.”

He beckoned the shinobi into his rooms and closed the shoji behind them. It did nothing to silence the raging storm, but at least they wouldn’t get any wetter. They sat in the center of the bedchamber, farthest from the walls, where prying ears couldn’t hear them over the weather. “I wanted us to sail from the beginning. You overruled me. Why?”

The shinobi said nothing; he only nodded toward the dead man lying on the floor.

“You knew Shichio had an agent in your ranks?”

“Knew it was possible. That was enough.”

Daigoro looked at the body and shuddered. He’d contracted six men to deliver him to Izu in secret. At present he only could trust two of them. One had just saved his life. The other lay staring at the ceiling, his throat ripped open, proof positive that the other four could also be Shichio’s. Daigoro’s savior had anticipated that possibility, and that was why he’d refused to sail. Maybe the palanquin allowed him to keep his charge boxed up and safe, or maybe being trapped aboard a ship would have left him fewer avenues of escape if fortune turned against him. Daigoro didn’t need to understand his reasoning. It was enough to know that his last remaining shinobi was trustworthy, and that Shichio’s knives might be in the very next room.

But if the other four ninja were Shichio’s men, wouldn’t they have struck by now? Daigoro almost voiced the question, but then thought better of it. He was not like Shichio. Deceit did not come naturally to him, and that left him defenseless. Better to trust no one than to risk another attack. “We must leave the rest of your clansmen behind,” he said.

“At last your mind is clear.”

Daigoro was hardly accustomed to being spoken to in this way, least of all by a hired hand, but in this case he was proud he’d finally gotten something right. “Like it or not, you’re the one man I have to trust. And since neither of us is a traitor, we can travel by sea again. Unless . . . no. It’s too late for that, isn’t it?”

The shinobi made a grunting noise that Daigoro took for assent. It made sense. Ships were faster than horses. If Shichio’s riders were already on Daigoro’s heels, then his sea captains might well have reached Izu by now. Daigoro had no doubt that Shichio would send ships. He had the might of Toyotomi Hideyoshi behind him, and a fleet to rival the Mongol hordes of old. Daigoro could not set sail until this storm blew itself out, and by then, the swiftest sloop ever put to sea would not be fast enough for him.

“But where do we go now?” he said. “If the sea and the Tokaido are barred to us, the only paths I can see are to travel overland or to sprout wings—and I’m not sure the former is any more realistic than the latter.”

“You overlook the obvious.”

“Do I?” Daigoro scrunched his eyebrows and thought about it. The back roads were laid not by the great houses but by farmers. They connected villages, not cities or ports. Some ran nowhere at all; they tapered out halfway up a mountain, for reasons only the local grandfathers could remember. Few were charted, all were winding, and none were well maintained. A night like tonight would wash many of them out of existence.

“I give up,” he said. “What is so ‘obvious’ here? Where the Tokaido has bridges, the lesser roads have fords. If this storm topples trees, they’ll be cleared from the Tokaido. Not so for the other roads. Shichio will hasten his wedding plans the moment he learns I am still alive. So tell me, how am I to outrace him by clambering over every obstacle between here and Izu? I don’t even know where here is.”

“Childish. You have a mind like thin ice. No flexibility.”

“And afraid it might crack? Is that what you think? That I’m afraid?”

“Yes.”

“Then teach me to think like water, damn you. Show me what leeway I have to adapt. My enemy commands the oceans, riding the back roads will take weeks I do not have, and the Tokaido is watched.”

“Not the Tokaido. You.”

Daigoro’s shoulders slumped and his head sagged. “What difference could that possibly make?”

“Obvious. Send me in your stead.”

“That’s no solution. What I’m going to ask for is too outrageous for anyone but me to ask it.”

“New disguises, then. Your limp, easy to hide. Your weapon, impossible. Do what must be done.”

“Oh, no. If it weren’t for this sword, I wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. I’m not getting rid of her now.”

The shinobi snorted. “Then your mind is not clear after all. You are a child. As well ask for a square egg as to ask me to deliver you to your family’s home. You wish to be there without going there. You refuse straight paths and then complain of curves and corners. You would go without being seen, without surrendering that which makes you seen. Pah!”

Daigoro made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob. Pain and weariness and despair bore down on him, so heavy that he wasn’t sure he could stand. He was desperate, he’d run out of options, and now he’d managed to aggravate even his unflappable companion. He’d never seen anyone display as much anger as this nameless man now captured in a single scowl. And this was his last friend in the world.

He wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep. Even an hour would be enough. He was so tired he could hardly think. But Shichio’s riders could arrive at any moment. For the hunted man, rest was an enemy, not an ally.

He forced himself to his feet. “You’re right,” he said, marshaling what little energy he had left. “I ask the impossible. But we have three advantages in our favor.”

“Optimistic. Stupid.”

Daigoro would not be deterred. “First, any good knife can make a round egg square. Second, my family’s compound is not our destination.”

“I am to deliver you to Izu. To prevent your enemy from wedding your mother.”

“Yes, but doing that from my mother’s house is impossible. The answer to that riddle lies in the house of Yasuda.”

The furrows between the shinobi’s eyebrows grew deeper and darker. “This clan is unknown to me.”

“To Shichio too. They’re just up the road from my family’s compound. Trust me; Shichio may have men on the road, but he won’t be watching House Yasuda itself.”

“You are certain?”

“Of course. Why waste the manpower? The Yasudas are no threat to him.”

The shinobi breathed loudly through his nostrils. “You said three advantages. You named only two.”

“Ah, yes,” Daigoro said with a smile. “The third is that I have you with me. And there’s no place the Wind cannot reach.”

53

Daigoro stood proudly at the wheel, his ketch in plain view of the fleet blockading the Izu Peninsula. His starched haori snapped in the crosswind, whose gusts were so powerful that Daigoro had to brace his feet against them. Sometimes he had to clutch the spokes or else be lifted bodily overboard. The storm he’d weathered had finally broken, but by no means had it blown itself out. There were still clouds all the way to the horizon, and all of them were in a foul, blustering mood.

Another squall raked the ship, forcing him to hold tight to the wheel. His hands burned like hellfire. Fortunately his shinobi knew techniques for binding broken bones—techniques quite similar to Tomo’s, in fact—and like Tomo he’d bound Daigoro’s two broken fingers to a little curved splint. It allowed Daigoro to hold things like sword grips and the spokes of a ship’s wheel, but Daigoro feared the bones would mend in a curve, so that he’d never be able to fully straighten his right hand again.

It was while his fingers were being bound that he got his first close look at the shinobi. The man’s hair was shorter than a grain of rice, and he wore a thick beard of the same length. Judging by his pug nose and flat face, he’d never walked away from a fistfight in his life. His forearms were covered in coarse black hair, more than Daigoro had ever seen on a human being. There were even traces of it on the digits of his fingers and the tops of his toes. Daigoro had never heard of a man having hair on his chest, but he’d seen tufts of it peeking out from the shinobi’s jacket. Between the hair and that growling voice, Daigoro found himself thinking of his companion as more animal than man.

Daigoro had become something of an animal himself, sleeping under brambles and evading the eyes of men. He and his shinobi had used the storm’s fury to mask their escape. It broke Daigoro’s heart to abandon his favorite mare in the innkeeper’s stable, and with her his saddle, the only one of its kind. Both deserved a better fate than to be forgotten in the hands of a stranger, to be sold off at a whim, but his emotional attachment was exactly why he needed to leave his horse and tack behind. Anyone pursuing him would think not that he’d ridden off in the night but that he’d simply vanished. They would try to figure out where his body was buried before they ever thought to track a highborn princeling through the muck.

By morning the storm had not slackened in the least. There was no sun, only a gradual lightening from black to gray. Rain became hail, pinging off Daigoro’s breastplate. At last he could go no farther, and he and his shinobi found a stand of wind-battered pines that would ward off the hailstones, if not the wet and the cold. The princeling would have been miserable beyond description, but Daigoro the outlaw just looked for a rock flat enough to serve as a pillow.

Sora armor made a poor futon. He hadn’t managed even an hour of sleep, and awoke with his hips and back feeling just like his broken fingers. He cursed sleep for a beguiling temptress, and cursed the gods of wind and thunder for their spite of mortal man. There was no telling when the rain would change to hail, driving every sane person into shelter while Daigoro and his shinobi soldiered on.

But no sooner did that thought strike him than he understood: the storm was the greatest gift the gods could bestow. Horses would not abide the hail. Daigoro’s mare was lucky to be left behind in her stall. So long as the gods remained fickle—so long as their rain could turn to hail on a whim—Shichio’s hired swords could never coax their mounts into the storm.

Daigoro’s thinking had been wrong from the start. He’d confused his allies for enemies and his enemies for allies. Twice now, in the inn and under the pines, he’d wanted to sleep. The next time he would not forget: for the hunted man, sleep was a foe, not a friend. Even the hailstones, the worst of his tormentors, did him more good than harm. The real threat was a clear sky.

That was the realization that unlocked the Toyotomi blockade: the most dangerous enemy was the innocuous one, the one that seemed like a friend. As soon as that dawned on him, he’d arrived at a decision: it was high time he came to learn the arts of naval warfare. He decided he would become a pirate.

He and his shinobi had pressed on through a miserable day and a cold and miserable night. By the hour of the dog they’d put the worst of the storm behind them, and by midnight they’d reached their goal: a wharf, and in it a junk-rigged Toyotomi ketch rocking sleepily beside her quay. Dispatching the night watch had posed little difficulty; the shinobi was as silent as his own shadow, and Glorious Victory’s long reach was more than a match for any seaman’s dirk. Most of the crew were ashore, probably bedding whores and feeling thankful that they weren’t the ones stationed out in the rain. Together Daigoro and his shinobi made short work of the watchmen left aboard. They slipped the little ship’s hawsers unnoticed, and with a skeleton crew of two they rode the tide out to sea.

Daigoro was no great sailor, but he’d lived his entire life on the coast, with his family’s harbor for a playground. He knew his way around a junk rig, and his shinobi was evidently an expert seaman. In fact, the man seemed to do everything with an expert hand. The Wind must have trained him since boyhood. He and Daigoro had that much in common: neither of them had ever been children. Daigoro spent his childhood learning swordsmanship, horsemanship, archery, calligraphy, poetry; the shinobi must have been raised on brewing poisons, moving silently, killing men with his bare hands. Daigoro wondered at what rigors the Wind must have put him through, and how many of its disciples survived the training.

At first light Daigoro had caught sight of other Toyotomi sails on the horizon, and feared the crew of the hijacked ketch might have sounded the alarm. Then he’d realized the truth: the ships already at sea weren’t hunting him. They were just a part of Shichio’s fleet. They couldn’t have learned of Daigoro’s piracy, because the ketch’s crew had no one to sound the alarm to. They’d been alone in the harbor—hardly a typical deployment for naval vessels, so Daigoro could only surmise that Shichio must have stationed a ship in every last harbor along the coast. A lone ship was vulnerable, yes, but Shichio had a mind to place eyes and ears as widely as possible. No doubt he thought there was little risk of a crippled boy commandeering an entire warship on his own.

But Shichio had underestimated the prowess of the Wind, and neither had he accounted for Daigoro’s own boldness. It was beyond bold to propose a two-man assault on a harbor; it was rash, even foolhardy, but Daigoro vowed he would make Shichio realize the danger of driving an enemy to desperation.

Now, despite the pain in his fists, Daigoro wanted to howl at the sky. Shichio had made an animal of him, but not a mere cub. He was a prowler, a predator. As he approached the Toyotomi blockade, he felt the same hunter’s glee a tiger might feel as it slipped through tall grasses toward its prey. Hidden by nothing substantial, invisible nonetheless, the thrill of it made him feel he might actually grow claws.

Perhaps the other captains might have hailed him if he’d made straight for House Okuma’s jetty, but Daigoro was too canny for that. He ran the blockade at its thinnest, giving the other crews no reason to point their spyglasses his way. Even if they had done so, he and his shinobi were both wearing Toyotomi colors, borrowed from dead men who no longer needed them. Shichio’s fleet was spread too thin; at this distance even a hawk wouldn’t notice the ketch had too few crewmen on deck.

Daigoro had run the gauntlet. He would reach Izu after all.

54

The Green Cliff loomed over the road, tall and broad and steadfast. It was not, strictly speaking, a castle, but rather a wall surrounding House Yasuda’s largest compound. Not only was it the Yasudas’ sturdiest stronghold; it was arguably the most obdurate structure in all of Izu. Blessed by the gods of good fortune or else by kami dwelling deep in the rocks, the Green Cliff shrugged off earthquakes as easily as arrows. The land was weak just north and just south of the Green Cliff, falling away from the road in deep ravines that swallowed bridges whenever the tremors grew violent. Each time the Yasuda carpenters shored up the trestles and rebuilt the spans, and each time the Green Cliff stood fast.

The typhoons that lashed Izu every autumn had no greater effect than the earthquakes. While other lords commissioned new roofs, new gates, even new walls, against House Yasuda the driving rains only brought more moisture for the verdant moss that gave the Green Cliff its name.

Behind the Green Cliff, inside the Yasuda compound, banners of muted green snapped on their poles, causing the white centipedes adorning them to wriggle and slither. The same wind bent low the flames of Toyotomi fires, making them gutter and crackle and return all the stronger. Twenty fires, maybe more. They should not have been there.

The little cookfires illuminated the skirts of long, multicolored tents with gently sloping roofs, pitched in two long columns like horses on a wagon team. Long banner poles flanked each tent, these ones bearing not the white centipede of House Yasuda but the black kiri flower of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. They should not have been there.

The thought paced back and forth in Daigoro’s brain: they should not have been there. How had Shichio come to know of this place? Did his demon mask give him second sight? Or had he communed with actual demons, who spied on Daigoro from the pits of hell? Garrisons at the foot of Katto-ji made sense, or at the Okuma compound, but there was no reason to place House Yasuda under guard. Daigoro had told only one person of his true destination in Izu: the shinobi right next to him, who had not left Daigoro’s side since the night they’d disappeared into the storm.

And yet there they were: Shichio’s sentries, dwarfed by the Green Cliff. Tiny points of firelight glinted on their spears. They should not have been there.

Daigoro was too tired to think of anything else. For such a long time he’d been pushing himself forward on willpower alone, always with the thought of House Yasuda as a safe haven. Seeing it besieged was enough to break his spirit. There was nowhere left for him to go.

His only refuge was the talus-strewn hilltop overlooking the Green Cliff. He could not even stand; he had to crawl from boulder to boulder, or else risk being seen. His shinobi moved like a spider, swift and effortless, but Daigoro’s shoulders and thighs burned from exertion. He crawled on his elbows because neither of his battered hands could take the weight.

He assayed the Green Cliff once more, and the garrison encamped at its base. “They outnumber us twenty-five to one—and that counts only the enemy we can see. There’s no getting in there.”

“You lack imagination.”

Not true, Daigoro wanted to say. He could imagine a hundred ways in which these men might kill him. The biggest part of him wanted to get it over with. Just walk up to the gate. The sheer audacity of it might take the enemy by surprise, at least for a moment. Long enough to cut a few of them down before he died.

There were fathers who raised their sons to think such recklessness was exactly what bushido required of them. They said anything less was cowardice. But Okuma Tetsuro had raised his sons differently. He taught them to think strategically, to avoid combat whenever possible, so that when they drew blood the world would know it was necessary and right. Above all, he’d taught his sons to be of good use to their clan. Daigoro knew he could serve his clan best by gaining an audience with Lord Yasuda Jinbei. He just couldn’t see how to make that happen.

“Maybe we can get Lord Yasuda to come outside,” he whispered.

“You said he is ill,” said his shinobi. “Bedridden.”

And has been for most of this year, Daigoro thought. Truth to tell, he couldn’t even be sure his old ally was still alive. No one would have sent word to him if Lord Yasuda had passed on. Daigoro had no standing now, no face, no family. He didn’t even have a home where he could receive the news.

Daigoro set his jaw and steeled his mind. He was still samurai at heart, even if he’d given up any such claims in the eyes of the world. Speculating about worst-case scenarios was unbecoming of him. “To hell with it,” he said. “I’m going in there.”

“Better,” said the shinobi. “At last you see clearly.”

They retreated to the far slope of the hill, where they were impossible to see and less likely to be heard. Even so, they kept their voices low and their movements slow and seldom.

“When I first hired you,” Daigoro said, “you didn’t know I intended you to deliver me here, neh? You thought I was making for my family’s compound?”

“Yes.”

“And you thought to encounter soldiers there?”

“Many.”

“What was your plan? How did you intend to get me inside?”

“Walk through the front door. Kill as many as necessary to do so.”

“Oh. Right.” I guess he doesn’t share my father’s beliefs about restraint, Daigoro thought. “And now?”

“Impossible now. Had six then. Now there is only me.”

“But you had a second plan in place, neh?”

The shinobi nodded. “Sneak you in over the wall.”

Daigoro could not keep the shock from his face. “That was your second plan? It’s easier than the first.”

“No. Killing men is easy. Easier still to make them desert their posts. Much more difficult to move among them unseen.”

“But that’s what you do. You’re shinobi.”

“I am. Not you.”

“And the message can only come from me.” Daigoro frowned. “It will do no good for Lord Yasuda to hear it from anyone else. But why can’t I just follow you over the wall?”

“Loud. Clumsy. Could have managed it before. Impossible now.”

“Why?”

“Had many targets before. Now only two.”

“No,” Daigoro said. “There must be fifty targets down there—”

He cut himself short, because suddenly the shinobi’s meaning became clear. His concern wasn’t with finding Toyotomis to kill; it was with Toyotomi arrows finding targets.

Daigoro didn’t care for being thought of as a target. Still, he supposed the shinobi had a point. His initial complement of six could have created distractions in every direction. They were trained in such arts. Now there was only one to distract the enemy—enough for a lone sentry, but not nearly enough to draw every last arrow away from Daigoro.

“I don’t suppose you have a second backup plan,” Daigoro whispered.

“Ten plans. Twenty. No matter. What you lack is time.”

It took Daigoro a moment to unravel what he meant by that—he was so tired—but at length he understood: Shichio was coming. Thus far he’d foreseen Daigoro’s every move. He’d placed an assassin in Daigoro’s bedchamber, he’d locked Izu under a blockade, and somehow he’d even stationed a garrison at the Green Cliff. The one gambit he hadn’t expected—commandeering the ketch—was only possible because he had foreseen the need to put the entire coastline under watch. If the storm hadn’t driven the ketch’s crew to port, Daigoro might never have made it as far as he did. Shichio had known Daigoro was heading north almost as soon as Daigoro set out. That would only accelerate his plans to marry Daigoro’s mother; in fact, he was probably already en route. If he came by road, Daigoro had a day or two at most. If he came as he did last time, by sea, he might arrive by morning.

Daigoro needed to deliver his message to Lord Yasuda, and he needed to do it now.

He looked at the shinobi, who still wore his pirated Toyotomi garb. The kiri crest drew his eye. “I know of one distraction compelling enough to draw off all those men,” he said. “Me. I’m the only bait they’re sure to go for.”

The shinobi gave him a nod.

“Then what choice do I have?” Daigoro said. “It’s time to give them what they want.”

55

The Toyotomi lieutenant could hardly believe his eyes. There he was, the Bear Cub of Izu. He went disguised, wearing Toyotomi colors, but there was no mistaking that enormous sword of his. It flashed in the moonlight, and even from a hundred paces off the lieutenant could hardly believe the size of it.

The boy was in hot pursuit, chasing one of the lieutenant’s own men. Both of them limped as much as ran. Rumor held that the Bear Cub had a lame leg; his quarry probably hobbled because the Bear Cub had wounded him. “Archers!” the lieutenant said. “Nock!”

Ten men leaped to their feet and put arrows to their bowstrings. “Mark,” the lieutenant said. “Draw.” His man was increasing his lead, but that made no matter; he should never have fled the enemy in the first place. If a stray arrow found him on its way to the Bear Cub, so be it. An ignominious death was exactly what he deserved.

Unless. Was there some conceivable reason to retreat? Or if not to retreat, to quickly return—and perhaps to report? That was it. General Shichio had authorized the lieutenant to handpick his detachment, and the lieutenant chose only good soldiers. Brave men, seasoned men, men patient enough to endure the boredom of garrison duty. Such men knew not to flee combat, especially not when the enemy was so a prized target. General Shichio had already promised a thousand koku to the one who claimed the Bear Cub’s head. The lieutenant didn’t approve of such incentives himself—it was merchant’s thinking, offering a reward simply for fulfilling one’s duty—and he’d chosen soldiers of similar mind. Not one of them would flee the Bear Cub unless he had something invaluable to report, something so important that the Bear Cub would risk exposure to cut him down.

The lieutenant ordered his men to relax their bowstrings. “You there,” he barked, pointing at the four door guards, “go protect that scout. Drive off the Bear Cub if you must, kill him if you can—”

It was too late. The Cub’s sword shone like a comet. It flashed in a wide glittering arc and the scout’s legs died under him, limp as wet rags. He collapsed bloodlessly; with a sword large enough to chop a man in half, the Bear Cub cut just deep enough to nick the spinal cord.

“Go, go!” the lieutenant yelled. The door guards were already in motion, spears leveled. “Archers, loose! Loose at will!”

The Bear Cub stood his ground, waving his sword defiantly above his kill. Arrows sang as they took flight. The lieutenant redeployed eight spearmen to guard the Yasuda gate and rallied the rest of his unit into formation.

The first salvo from the archers fell short. They adjusted their aim and shot again, loosing haphazardly now, no longer in unison. Still the Bear Cub stood his ground, and with a deft swipe from that massive sword, he struck ten arrows right out of the air.

It was impossible. The boy must have been part cat; how else could he have seen an arrow in the dark? The thought of deflecting ten of them sent the lieutenant’s head spinning. At last he understood why General Shichio deployed fifty men to dispatch a single teenage boy.

Still his men had not formed ranks. He knew they were well trained, knew it was only the heat of the moment that confounded his mind, but to him his unit seemed to be wading through water. “Pick up your feet, you damned sluggards! Move!”

At last the Bear Cub turned to run. The lieutenant could wait no longer. He led the first platoon himself, commanding the rest to follow as soon as they managed to form up. His archers fell in behind him, dropping their bows in favor of swords.

He was the first to reach the fallen scout, who still attempted to crawl, dragging his legs uselessly behind him. The man seemed so small. “Easy,” the lieutenant said. “Easy, soldier.” He crouched beside the scout and sent the rest of his platoon around the bend in the road. “Report. What are you doing out here alone?”

“Not alone,” grunted the scout, his head hanging heavily between his shoulders. He clutched the lieutenant’s sword belt as if trying to pull himself upright. “My patrol. All killed. Ran us down outside the Okuma compound. Killed us all.”

A prayer for mercy escaped the lieutenant’s lips unbidden. He did not want to believe in boys with magic swords and cat’s eyes, but what else could explain what he’d seen tonight? There, twenty paces ahead, he spied another corpse along the roadway, lying facedown in the weeds and clad in Toyotomi colors. How many more littered this road? Could the Bear Cub have felled an entire patrol?

“You men, up here!” barked the lieutenant, his voice echoing off the Green Cliff. The remainder of his force came running, save the eight men reassigned to guard the door. “Our quarry is out there in these hills,” he said when they reached him. “Watch yourselves; this one is as dangerous as they come. Half of you, over the hill. The rest, take the road.”

The limp-legged scout still clung to the lieutenant’s belt, trying to pull himself up though he lacked even the strength to raise his own head. He seemed to weigh nothing at all. The lieutenant hadn’t even seen the scout’s face yet, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to. He felt a pang of guilt for wanting to leave this man to die on his own, a warrior who had served his daimyo well. He felt even worse for not charging out to meet the enemy with the rest of his troops, who vanished over the hillcrest or around the bend in the road even as he watched them. He should have been at their head, facing the same danger, running the same risks as the two who now lay in the road, one dead and the other dying.

“Easy, son,” the lieutenant said, not knowing what else to say.

“Much easier than I thought,” the scout said, and he thrust a knife into the lieutenant’s chin.

• • •

Daigoro did not let go of the knife because he wasn’t sure the lieutenant was dead.

He’d expected to feel a great swell of shame and self-loathing after such skullduggery, but the sad and simple truth was that Daigoro was exhausted, and stabbing a defenseless man was much easier than facing him sword to sword. Later, he thought, he’d try to convince himself that deceit on the battlefield was no stain on one’s honor, and that his ruse with this lieutenant was no different than his father’s ruse with the “ghost army” that defeated Shichio and Hideyoshi. For now, it was enough that he was still alive, and that his enemy was either dead or dying, depending on how far the knife had gone up into his brain.

He gave a quick, low whistle. Twenty paces up the road, a dead body in Toyotomi colors got to its feet and picked its way out of the weeds. It was the shinobi, who moments before had made this lieutenant believe he was the infamous Bear Cub, then batted a volley of arrows aside, then transformed himself into a Toyotomi corpse, all without effort. He’d even draped his lifeless form over Glorious Victory Unsought, concealing it from all the troops that dashed past him in pursuit of a Bear Cub they would not find.

“I don’t know how you managed that trick with the arrows,” Daigoro told him, “but that was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”

The shinobi ignored the compliment. “Your sword. Too big for you.”

Daigoro nodded and shrugged. “That sword is too big for anyone.”

“Stronger than you look. Impressive.”

For a fleeting moment, Daigoro’s fear and fatigue lifted from him. An exchange of mutual respect, between himself and the deadliest man he’d ever encountered. Daigoro had to stop and think for a moment just to be sure it had happened. Then the moment passed, and Daigoro remembered the weight of what he needed to do.

He and the shinobi made a show of caring for the lieutenant, for the benefit of the Toyotomis still manning the gate. At this distance they would need eagle’s eyes to notice their lieutenant was now the wounded one and their fallen scout had sprung miraculously to life. They would see only three men, one of them hanging between the other two like a field-dressed deer. With that disguise in place, Daigoro made the long walk to the Green Cliff.

At the gate all eyes were on the grisly form of the lieutenant. The cloying stench of his blood tainted the smoke and ash from the cookfires. Together they stank of hell. Hinges wailed like tortured spirits as the Toyotomis put their shoulders into the gates. Then the lieutenant wailed too, giving Daigoro such a start that he nearly dropped the man. Somehow the lieutenant still clung to life, and also to his duty. He tried in vain to warn his garrison of the ruse, but with the knife pinning his jaws shut, he could only moan loud and long. It sounded like his ghost leaving his body, and between that, the wailing gates, and the smells of blood and fire, to Daigoro’s weary mind the gate to House Yasuda had become the gates of hell.

He kept his head low and tried to take an accurate count of the enemy. Crunching on the gravel were eight pairs of booted feet. His own shadow stretched before him, bound to that of the lieutenant and the shinobi, as if the whole concatenous mass were the shadow of some hideous six-legged demon. Somehow the vision gave him strength: if this was hell, then at least he was the demon.

“Bar the gate,” he said. “We can’t let that Bear Cub get inside.”

He waited until he heard the bar drop before he drew steel. He killed the first of the eight with his wakizashi, then drew Glorious Victory from the lieutenant’s back. Together, Daigoro and the shinobi made short work of the rest.

56

Yasuda Jinbei had never been a large man, and illness had withered him even further. His cheeks were sharper than Daigoro remembered, as if the bones pushed through his skin with a mind of their own. His thin hands lay folded across his blanket, and there too the sallow skin sagged between the hollows of the bones. His white hair splayed limply across his pillow like a fan. The sight of it made Daigoro think of General Mio, and his mind reeled away from the memory of Mio’s terrible wounds, fixating instead on the image of the giant man gleaming in his black armor, his hair as white as the snow atop Mount Fuji. By comparison, Lord Yasuda’s hair seemed yellow, faded, brittle. His pale eyebrows were in the grips of a permanent, pain-ridden scowl.

“Lord Yasuda,” Daigoro said, kneeling gingerly at the edge of the aging daimyo’s bed. “Can you hear me?”

Yasuda opened his rheumy eyes. “Hehh,” he said, forcing a chuckle that sounded more like a cough. “I must be doing worse than I thought. You look at me as if I’m already a corpse, Okuma-dono.”

“It’s just Daigoro now.”

“So I’ve heard. A bold thing, that. Unorthodox too. Reminds me of your father.”

“You honor me.”

“Then it’s time you honored him. He was bold, not reckless. And his every breath was in service to his clan and his code. Is this the best way to serve your family?”

Daigoro felt his face flush and changed the subject. “How are you feeling?”

“Better than I look, if that face you make is any indication. Just wait and see, Okuma-dono. I’ll lick this yet.”

Daigoro tried to smile. “I don’t doubt it, Yasuda-sama.”

“Oh yes, you do. And don’t you sama me. As far as I’m concerned, you’re still Lord Protector of Izu, the same as your father.”

“That honor belongs to my son,” said Daigoro.

“Assuming you have a son.” He laughed and coughed. “Who’s to say that lovely wife of yours doesn’t bear a daughter? What will you do then, eh? Steal into her bedchamber every nine months? And who’s to mind Izu when you’re away? Those Soras and Inoues are back to squabbling like old hens. Don’t look to me to shut them up. I’m too old for that nonsense, and even if I weren’t, their houses outrank mine.”

He was right. Worse yet, even on his deathbed he could summon more vigor than Daigoro could manage at the moment. An aging tiger was still a tiger. All Daigoro wanted was to lie down and sleep.

“I saw no other choice,” he said at last. “Yasuda-sama, you must understand: if I hadn’t relinquished my name, my whole family might already be dead.”

“So what is it you prefer? To see your name dishonored? To see your mother saddled with more responsibility than she can bear?”

Daigoro smiled—a sad smile, but it was genuine, the first one in many days. “You never were one for small talk, were you, Yasuda-sama?”

“You stop it with that sama nonsense. She’s not well, Okuma-dono. You know that better than anyone.”

Daigoro nodded. “In fact, she’s the reason I came here to speak with you.”

“There’s talk of some general from Kyoto wanting to marry her. Is that true?”

“That’s what I’ve come to prevent.”

“Then go back to your family. Reclaim your title.”

“If I do that, the general doesn’t need to marry her; he’ll just kill her, and the rest of my house too. You don’t know this man, Yasuda-sama. He isn’t bound to the code as we are. He’s mad.”

Yasuda nodded weakly. “Then come at him from a position of strength. Your own position, the position of your birthright. Let a widow mourn the passing of her husband. Let a mother mourn the death of her eldest son. And if death comes, then such is a samurai’s lot. Die in your rightful stead, Okuma-dono.”

“No. I was no good at governance even while I had name and station. Let the other lords protector manage Izu’s affairs while my mother grieves. Surely they owe my family that much.”

Yasuda coughed, snorted, and spat a wad of mucus into a red-lacquered bowl held by a serving girl. “What they owe is one thing,” he said. “How little they can get away with repaying is something else again. Someone has got to mind the difference between the two, and doing that will demand more vigilance than your mother can spare.”

“Yes. I was rather hoping I might ask a Yasuda to hold things together.”

Lord Yasuda had another coughing fit. His face flushed, and the little veins visibly bulged in his temples. Whether it was from the coughing or emotional agitation, Daigoro couldn’t say.

“I told you already,” Yasuda said, “it’s beyond my reach. Too old. Too many other things to worry about. This devil besetting my lungs isn’t the least of my problems, but it isn’t the greatest either.”

“I did not presume to saddle you with this burden, Yasuda-sama. I had your youngest son in mind.”

“Kenbei? He’s responsible enough, I’ll grant you, but none of the other lords will listen to him. Izu looks to House Yasuda for strength and defense, not for fair minds and level heads. And we don’t look to the Inoues or Soras either, that’s for damned certain. We look to House Okuma.”

The devil, as Yasuda called it, possessed his lungs again, and he had to spit five times into the serving girl’s bowl before he could rest his heavy head back on his pillow.

“Izu looks to House Okuma,” Daigoro said, “and now House Okuma looks to the house of Yasuda Kenbei. I have surrendered my title as lord protector; I can only ask you as a friend. Will you help me? Will you speak to your son for me?”

“Nothing would please me more. If my Kenbei were to marry your mother, your enemy would have no recourse but to accept it. But Kenbei is already married, and his wife is at least as dangerous as this madman in Kyoto. They called your father the Red Bear of Izu, but let me tell you, they should have given that nickname to her instead. That woman is a bear if ever there was one.”

Daigoro grinned. “Direct as ever, Yasuda-sama.”

“Wait until you’re my age and then see how much time you have for dithering.” Lord Yasuda hacked and spat. “You’re a clever boy, Okuma-dono. And this fever addles an old man’s brain. You did not have Kenbei in mind, neh? You spoke of his house, not Kenbei himself.”

“Yes, sir. Perhaps someone younger—and someone not married to a bear.”

“Inventive thinking. Just like your father.”

Daigoro felt his face flush. On any other day he would have enjoyed the compliment to his father. On any other day being likened to his father would have filled him with the warm glow of pride. On this night he could enjoy neither. He could only wonder if his father would have condoned his wife’s marriage to another house, or whether he would approve of his son pawning her off as a political ploy.

Daigoro had neither the time nor the inclination to seriously pursue such questions. Shichio’s soldiers were bound to return, and Daigoro had already tarried too long. “I don’t wish to press you,” he said, “but I’m afraid time is of the essence, Lord Yasuda.”

“Then my answer to your request must be no,” said Yasuda. “I would not see your mother wedded to any one of Kenbei’s sons. The eldest got himself killed in a drunken brawl, and the younger ones are bound on the same path. Mountain monkeys, all of them. Would you set them loose in your mother’s bedchamber?”

Daigoro tried to speak, but a spate of coughs and wheezes interrupted him, making him bide his tongue. This time the fit left Lord Yasuda struggling for breath, so his voice came out hoarse and ghostly, like wind rattling through a long, thin slit in a rice-paper window. “I am sorry, Okuma-dono, but House Yasuda has no men of marriageable age to offer you. Kenbei is too old for your mother, even if that she-bear of his were to keel over dead. I have groomed him to take my seat when I die—which will not be tonight, so you can remove that pitying look from your face.”

Daigoro blushed, bowed, and regained his composure. “My apologies, Yasuda-sama.”

Lord Yasuda ignored him. “And Kenbei’s brothers are older still. They are not tigers anymore; they are trees, and their roots have burrowed deep. Their homes are far from here—and well they should be. ‘The sword arm’s strength comes from a strong stance.’ Isn’t that what your father taught you? My house defends Izu from a broad, strong stance, but that means we cannot bend even when we want to—not even to serve our most trusted friends.”

He could not keep the shame from his face. It was enough to make Daigoro want to weep, seeing his family’s strongest ally so vulnerable. Taking Yasuda’s frail, cold hand in his own, he said, “I had not looked to your elder sons. They serve Izu best where they are. Please, indulge me in a flight of fancy, my lord. If your son Kenbei spoke with House Okuma’s voice—if—then he could bring stability to the region, neh?”

The old man conceded the point with a nod. “Do you suggest he take on a concubine? He cannot—not a woman of your mother’s stature.”

“No.”

“Then I’ve told you already: I would not have those wild stallions I call my grandsons see the Lady Okuma as a broodmare.”

“No, Yasuda-sama, but suppose we take a longer view—”

A shout from outside made Daigoro break off in midthought. Daigoro turned to see one of Yasuda’s sentries hit the floor on his back, his armor clacking like a metal hailstorm. Another samurai fell beside the first, struck by something invisible outside the doorway. Daigoro’s first thoughts ran to musket fire, but there was no report. Next he thought of Toyotomi arrows, but neither of the fallen men was pierced. Daigoro had no opportunity to look out into the courtyard to see the attacker, for Yasuda spearmen instantly blockaded the doorway, their myriad spears stabbing out into the darkness.

“Daigoro-sama!” a lupine voice shouted outside. “Come out!”

Daigoro hurried through the door, pushing Yasuda spearmen aside with an armored forearm. The courtyard sprawled before him, its white gravel glowing as if the moon itself had rained down in a million tiny pieces. The shinobi crouched at the base of the stairs leading down from the veranda, his gaze flicking between the main gate and the green-clad samurai jabbing spears at him from the doorway to Lord Yasuda’s chamber.

Daigoro glanced over his shoulder at the two men lying on their backs—door guards, no doubt. His shinobi must have kicked them, punched them, thrown them somehow, and that meant he’d only acted in self-defense. If he’d had a mind to kill them, Daigoro had no doubt both men would be dead.

And if he’d acted in self-defense, then they must have reacted poorly when the shinobi had tried to enter. That meant the shinobi must have come up too quickly for their liking, and Daigoro could think of only one thing that could make him hurry. The Toyotomis were coming back.

“How many?” Daigoro asked, drawing Glorious Victory Unsought.

“Twenty,” said the shinobi. “More on the way.”

Daigoro didn’t know whether to be disappointed with Lord Yasuda’s bodyguard or to be awed by how easily his shinobi companion had felled two of them despite being unarmed and unarmored. In any case, the lord of their house was in no condition to be giving orders. “You there,” Daigoro shouted at one of the spearmen, “rouse every man House Yasuda can put in the Green Cliff’s defense. The rest of you, hold this doorway. No one gets through. And put a line of armored bodies surrounding Lord Yasuda. There will be archers.”

Armor clattered behind him; feet rustled against tatami mats; battle formations took shape. “And now,” Daigoro muttered under his breath, “what in hell do we do?”

57

On the opposite side of the courtyard, the gate thundered like a taiko drum. It seemed the Toyotomis had found a battering ram.

“Lord Yasuda!” a voice bellowed from beyond the wall. “Send out the fugitive! Do not force us to put your house to the torch.”

An empty threat, Daigoro thought. He’d seen no sign that the garrison was equipped with fire arrows, and there wasn’t enough wood on the entire island to burn down the Green Cliff’s outer wall. Nevertheless, Daigoro could not allow the ultimatum to go unanswered. The Yasudas were among his family’s oldest allies. He would not risk turning the might of Hideyoshi against them. The Toyotomi captain had no need to level the Green Cliff tonight. He had only to dictate a letter declaring the Yasudas an enemy of the throne. Then he would have as many reinforcements and as much time as he liked to raze House Yasuda to the ground.

Again the gate strained against its hinges, struck by some heavy thing wielded by many men. Daigoro couldn’t recall seeing an iron-shod battering ram among the garrison’s equipment; then again, he’d had other things on his mind during his hasty pass through their encampment. In any case, straight, stalwart ironwoods stood in rank and file in the forest outside the Yasuda compound. A makeshift ram was easy to come by.

“Do you hear that?” shouted the Toyotomi captain. “Sooner or later, your gates will yield. If it is later, it will not go well for you. Deliver the traitor and we will leave you in peace.”

The gate was huge—or so Daigoro had thought before his ride to Kyoto. Each of its two doors was broader than a wagon, all stout timbers and iron bands. Centipede motifs had been beaten into the metal, with a heavy ring dangling from the center of each door in the shape of a centipede devouring its own tail. The gate to the Okuma compound was a barn door by comparison.

But Kyoto had temples with doors this big. Daigoro’s long journey had taught him what real fortifications looked like. The great gate at Hideyoshi’s Jurakudai dwarfed that of the Green Cliff: twice as high, four times as broad, and so heavy that only a team of horses could draw it open. The battering ram that rattled the rings on House Yasuda’s doors would not be enough to wake a sleeping guard at the Jurakudai.

Even so, the Toyotomi captain had spoken the truth: whether it took an hour or a month, there wasn’t a gate in the world that would not yield. The soldiers outside had neither siege engines nor the training to use them, but they had manpower and time, and those were more than enough.

The gate boomed. Yasuda samurai shifted nervously; Daigoro could hear their gauntlets click against their spears. A warm and sluggish breeze carried the scent of horse feed. The moment he smelled it, Daigoro had an idea.

“I’m approaching the gate,” he yelled, slowly descending the steps to the courtyard. In a low voice he explained his plan to the shinobi, who nodded once and loped off silently toward the stables. “Do you know who I am?”

“If you are anyone other than Daigoro the traitor, the Bear Cub of Izu, then I do not care who you are,” the captain shouted. Again the ram thundered against steel and wood.

“I am the Bear Cub. Now stop that damned hammering. I told you already, I’m coming.”

“Lord Okuma, no,” said a voice behind him. He turned to see the captain of the Yasuda spearmen stepping forward from the formation. “You are an ally to this house. Please, stay here with us.”

“I cannot.”

“Then at least let us go out to fight at your side.”

“I thank you, but no. I will not have Toyotomi blood on your blades. I’ve brought trouble enough to my own family; I won’t bring it here too.”

Daigoro took his time crossing the courtyard, certain that his crunching footfalls could be heard on the other side of the wall. Clicks and clacks came from the other side, hundreds of pieces of armor rubbing against each other like chattering bugs at dusk. Daigoro imagined men readying swords and spears. At least they’d set down the ram, but Daigoro wondered how many had picked up bows instead. A lone swordsman stood little chance against archers.

“I have no interest in fighting you,” he shouted. “How am I to know you won’t cut me down as soon as I open this gate?”

“You don’t.” There was a decidedly defiant edge to the captain’s voice. “We will kill you if General Shichio wishes it. It is not for you to question his orders.”

“And how can I know you won’t assault the Yasudas once I give myself over? They have no part in this.”

“You have my word as a samurai. Lord Yasuda and his kin will not come to harm. Give yourself over and they may go back to sleep.”

Slow hoofbeats behind him told Daigoro that the shinobi had finished harnessing the horses. As soon as he saw the animals, Daigoro recalled his wedding present. These two could have been sisters to the horses he and Akiko had received along with Lord Yasuda’s blessing. They were majestic animals. They didn’t deserve to be harnessed so sloppily, but Daigoro was short on time.

He took the lines from one of the mares and tied her to the left-hand gate, hitching her to the big iron ring as if to a wagon. She was not stupid; she could sense the tension in the air and it had her spooked. Only the shinobi’s grip on her bridle kept her from bolting.

“I hear horses,” the captain bellowed. “Do not attempt to mount a charge against us. You will only doom innocent animals along with yourself.”

“How very noble of you,” Daigoro said. He hitched the second mare to the right-hand gate while the shinobi held both animals steady. Then, slowly, silently, Daigoro put his shoulder to the heavy wooden beam that barred the gates.

“My patience wanes. Come out now and no Yasuda will be harmed.”

“You gave me your word as a samurai,” Daigoro shouted, setting his feet to take the weight of the bar. “How can I be certain that you are samurai at all, and not some shit-stained farmer’s son like your master?”

“Enough! Break it down!”

Someone outside put a boot to the door, but it did not budge. Daigoro heard stones shifting underfoot, swords returning to their sheaths, men cursing and shuffling and taking up new positions.

Daigoro hefted the bar onto one shoulder. Its weight pressed back painfully against his hands. He retreated from the gates, and not a moment too soon. Outside, he heard big men grunting as they picked up their battering ram.

An instant before the ram’s next strike, Daigoro loosed a deafening kiai, startling the mares that were already scared out of their wits. The shinobi released the lines. The horses bolted. Hideyoshi’s gates might have required a team of horses to move them, but the Yasudas’ were lighter; they all but burst from their hinges. Both gates flew open, leaving Daigoro in the middle of the gateway with a massive wooden beam in his arms.

He was not alone for long.

Six soldiers lunged for him with the ironwood trunk they’d been using as a makeshift ram. But their target was the gate, not him, and without the gate’s mass to meet their charge, the weight of the ram pitched them forward. They collapsed in front of him in a tangle. They dropped the heavy ram, some tripping over it, others falling beneath. Daigoro heard leg bones breaking.

With almost ceremonious flair, Daigoro tossed the wooden bar onto the heap of men. It broke bones too. Then Glorious Victory was in his hands, and he rushed the first rank of Toyotomi invaders.

None of them were prepared for his onslaught. Many had returned to their tents, knowing hundreds of strokes would fall before the gate yielded to the ram. Glorious Victory claimed three lives with the first stroke.

For the first few seconds, Daigoro thought the battle was going well. He hacked off hands even as they were drawing swords. He let a mighty chop spin him all the way around, just in time to cut the knees out from under a samurai who had him outflanked.

Then the Toyotomis found their footing. In his opening gambit Daigoro had felled ten men, but thirty more now formed a wary circle around him. Most had swords drawn. Here and there an archer took aim.

Unwilling to be shot down where he stood, Daigoro rushed in like a madman. One, misjudging Daigoro’s reach, lost an arm. Two arrows went wide, both hitting kinsmen. A third archer drew a bead on Daigoro’s jugular. Then his bowstring snapped, cut from below by a shinobi who appeared out of nowhere. The whip-snapping string lacerated the archer’s eyeball. Then the shinobi was gone.

Daigoro had no more luck tracking him than did the Toyotomis. He knew the shinobi was there only because now and then a man would have him dead to rights, and in the next instant that man would fall. Then the shinobi vanished again into the swirling melee.

Once, twice, a dozen times Daigoro tried to cut himself a channel to open ground. Each time the enemy denied him, closing back around him as inexorably as the sea.

Once, twice, a dozen times the Sora breastplate saved his life. Here it turned aside a katana. There it sparked as an arrowhead struck home. One of the Toyotomi commanders managed a clear shot with his matchlock. The ball knocked Daigoro two steps back but could not penetrate the Sora yoroi.

At last Toyotomi steel found flesh. Daigoro’s right leg collapsed beneath him, blood spurting from his wasted thigh. Glorious Victory fell in a deadly arc, killing the one who’d struck him and two more as well. Daigoro fought from one knee, desperately parrying the attacks of six, seven, eight men at once.

Someone behind him let out an almighty scream. It was no shriek of pain; this was a war whoop. The ground shook. Either a horse was charging him or else a score of men. Daigoro slashed forward, driving a few assailants back, then turned to meet the new threat.

Katsushima rode through the heart of the Toyotomis, bellowing with a typhoon’s fury. His sword flashed red and silver, claiming limbs every time it fell. His charging bay shattered swordsmen as easily as clay pots. When Katsushima saw Daigoro, he kicked his heels savagely and Daigoro had to throw himself flat or else be decapitated by a hoof.

The Toyotomis scattered in the wake of the leaping horse. Suddenly the field was clear enough that Daigoro could struggle back to his feet.

Katsushima killed two more before wheeling his mount around. “Come on!” he shouted. “This is no time for patience!”

Already the Toyotomis were regrouping—what few remained. Most were dead, dying, or crippled. Daigoro hobbled over a pair of broken men, settled his left foot in Katsushima’s right stirrup, and stepped up to grab the saddlehorn with his left hand. “Good to see you again,” Daigoro said.

“I’m glad to see there’s something left of you to see,” said Katsushima. “But talk later. We’ve work to do yet.”

He nodded toward the gate, where the surviving Toyotomi swordsmen had formed a line to deny access to the keep. Heedless of the dead, deaf to the moans and cries of the wounded, they stared Daigoro down with grim determination.

Determined or not, footmen were no match for Glorious Victory Unsought. She was a cavalry sword, at her deadliest when she struck with the weight of a warhorse behind her. Katsushima charged the line. Daigoro, effectively a human outrigger, stretched Glorious Victory out long. Inazuma steel mowed down the right flank. Katsushima claimed one on the left. Their horse crushed two in the center.

Then the blood work was done. Daigoro would not honor the wounded with a clean death. Any man who bowed to a lickspittle like Shichio wasn’t worthy of such a gift. Moreover, Daigoro didn’t want killing them to burden his conscience. He hadn’t asked for this fight. Had their positions been reversed, Daigoro would never have resorted to using Shichio’s family allies as playing pieces in their private war. He chose to let his defeated foes explain why they still lived, and let Shichio bear the burden of sending them on to join their ancestors.

Daigoro limped across the courtyard, leaving a bloody footprint wherever his right foot touched the gravel. The Yasuda soldiers watched him in wonderment. Their spears still jutted out like quills from the doorway to their master’s bedchamber, as if they hadn’t yet realized the fighting was over. Daigoro looked down at his blood-spattered hakama and haori, then at their spotless moss green garb. He felt absurd: these ranks of older, wiser men gaped at him like he was a battle-hardened veteran—a veteran still months away from his seventeenth birthday.

He’d forgotten he was still wearing Toyotomi colors—what was left of them, anyway. He’d also forgotten that he was armored; only the sight of an arrow recalled it to mind. The arrow looked like it was sticking out of his gut, but in truth it had only caught in his haori after shattering against his Sora breastplate. He remembered first donning the armor on the banks of the Kamo not so long ago, remembered how heavy it had felt then, how awkward, how alien. Now he wore it like his own skin.

By the time he reached the stable to fetch tack and harness, the shinobi had reappeared beside him, noiselessly as always. Swords had sliced his clothing in a hundred places. He bled from his face, his forearms, his shoulders, his shins, but most of the blood on his tattered clothes was not his own. He gave Daigoro a silent, approving nod.

Halfway back to the horses still tied to the gates, Daigoro’s throbbing hands prompted him to wonder why he hadn’t walked the horse to the saddle instead of lugging the saddle to the horse. His mind was as exhausted as his body; his thoughts plodded along as if wading against an undertow.

“Who’s your friend?” Katsushima asked when Daigoro reached his mare.

“He is of the Wind,” Daigoro said, laughing weakly. “The Wind is without name.”

Katsushima’s eyes narrowed, and the smile of a proud father played at the corners of his mouth. “You found them.”

“I did.”

Katsushima looked at the shinobi with new eyes. “Whatever your name is, Wind-sama, I thank you for saving my good friend’s life.”

The ninja’s only response was to grunt as he heaved his saddle up over his saddle blanket. If Daigoro hadn’t known better, he’d have sworn his shinobi was actually fatigued.

“How did you find me?” Daigoro asked.

“I was on my way to your family’s place when I heard the commotion,” Katsushima said. I never expected to find you here. I thought I had a few days’ lead on you on the Tokaido.”

“We came by ship.”

“Did you?” Katsushima whistled. “You weathered an unholy bitch of a storm.”

“A Toyotomi blockade too. Shichio’s men are watching every last pebble of coastline.”

“Then we’re apt to find many more of them when we reach your mother’s house.”

Daigoro gave him a long, studious look. His friend looked back down at him, red spatter dotting his woolly sideburns. An hour’s conversation passed between them in that single glance. Then Daigoro made a final adjustment to the girth, and with energy reserves he didn’t even know he had, he stepped up into the saddle.

Katsushima had to dismount to lash Daigoro’s right leg in place, and even then Daigoro felt on the verge of sliding off his horse. His own saddle, the precious one Old Yagyu had fashioned for him, was many ri behind him. Sitting in an ordinary saddle, the weight of Daigoro’s left leg threatened to drag him down and his right leg wasn’t strong enough to counteract it. He could only stay ahorse by balancing there, the muscles of his belly, chest, and back shifting constantly, as if he were an acrobat on the tip of a pole. It was exhausting even when his horse was standing still, and impossible at a full gallop.

It was necessary, then, that Katsushima lash down his right leg. Nevertheless, Daigoro could not help thinking that usually it was the injured and dying who were tied into the saddle. When at last they set out on the road, his coal black mare shied from the twitching of pained, bloodied men, nearly throwing him. Only by gripping the saddlehorn with both hands did he manage to stay mounted.

But soon the miasma of battle was behind them and Daigoro could settle into a rhythm. “If I didn’t know better,” Katsushima told him, “I’d swear you just stole a horse.”

“Lord Yasuda knows I’m good for it,” Daigoro said defensively, realizing only too late that his friend was kidding him. “I apologize, Goemon. I’m too tired to think. Why did you ever come back? Why do you want to have anything to do with me?”

“Don’t you know?”

“I can’t even imagine.”

Katsushima’s wry smirk faded away. “How did we meet?”

“You dueled my brother.”

“And then?”

“You dueled me.”

“Almost,” said Katsushima. “We had tea first. Then dinner. Then we talked all night, at your insistence. ‘I want to discuss swordsmanship with you, and bushido as well.’ That’s what you said.”

Daigoro nodded. Even through the haze of fatigue, he could recall Katsushima’s response: I expect we have much to learn from each other.

“So let’s discuss,” Katsushima said. “Bushido demands that you fight even against impossible odds, neh?”

Daigoro nodded.

“To describe your odds of besting Shichio as ‘impossible’ seems blithely optimistic to me. Would you agree?”

Daigoro nodded. It was easier than talking; the jostling of his saddle did most of the work.

“So why not give up bushido? Following it is certain to kill you. You gave up your name. It only makes sense to free yourself of the rest.”

Daigoro nodded again—due more to the rocking motion of his horse than to his own agreement. But Katsushima wasn’t wrong either. Not entirely.

“A ronin keeps his swords and throws the rest aside,” Katsushima said. “Duty, family, lord, name, honor; they’re shackles. All you have to do is give up the shackles and you’ll be free.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not? You’ve already given up the ones you value most.”

“Yes,” Daigoro said. “I’ve surrendered my family and with them my name. I have no other lord—save Izu herself, perhaps, but without my title I’ve abandoned her too. With every sacrifice I feel I’ve done what honor demands, but my only reward is to be hunted like a traitor and a criminal. There’s no honor in that. I have no honor left.”

“Then what else remains?”

“Duty.”

“To whom?”

“To my father’s memory. To what little sense of family I still have left. To bushido itself.”

“Your father’s gone, Daigoro. When you gave up your name you gave up your family too. Why not shed the last of your shackles?”

It sounded so inviting. Done properly, it might even end the feud with Shichio. He could give up being samurai. Put down the burden of his father’s sword. Make an obsequious and public apology. Cut off his topknot and go home unmolested. Comfort his mother. Share Akiko’s bed. Be there for the birth of his child.

He could have had everything he wanted, and all he had to do was betray his code. “I can’t,” he said, near to tears. “I can’t give up duty. I don’t know how.”

“That is why I follow you.”

58

There was no shore party to greet him when Shichio made his landing at the Okuma jetty. In any other circumstances, failure to send an honor guard for the great Toyotomi no Hideyoshi might have got a daimyo and his family crucified. (Though not a convert to the southern barbarians’ religion, Hashiba found their religion’s obsession with crucifixion quite exotic. It had become his favorite method of execution.) But today the Okuma clan would receive a pardon, not because their honored guests had come unannounced—they should have seen Hashiba’s flagship from ten ri away—but because it was Shichio’s wedding day, and that had the regent feeling jovial.

The bile rose in Shichio’s throat when he remembered his last visit to this wretched place. He’d left the Okuma compound in disgrace, no thanks to that giant pig Mio. Shichio would have thought the fat man’s precious bushido code would have forbidden throwing a fight to a cripple.

Shichio supposed he owed the fat man a debt of gratitude. If it weren’t for his superhuman endurance—if he hadn’t survived long enough to reveal Shichio’s designs for marriage—the Bear Cub might never have approached the Wind, and then Shichio’s informant could never have betrayed the boy. He knew now that his assassin had failed; the absence of a second communiqué proved the first message was false. But it was enough just to learn that the boy had made contact with the Wind. Shichio had stepped up his wedding plans, while the Bear Cub must surely have gone to ground. That typhoon had forced even Hashiba’s flagship into port. No cripple could withstand it.

Shichio touched his hair, which was behaving peevishly in this all-pervading heat. He stepped out of the launch to walk side by side with Hashiba down the jetty toward the palanquin. Once inside, he carefully brushed all the sand from his fine silk stockings and smooth wooden sandals. There was little sand on the jetty to begin with, but Shichio would abide no imperfections on this perfect day.

As his palanquin rocked side to side with the footsteps of the bearers, Shichio looked out at the emerald tangle of kudzu strangling the black rocks. He wondered how long it would take him after the wedding to sell his new holdings and buy an estate in the Kansai. Only barbarians could make a permanent home in Izu. The humidity alone was reason enough to leave and never come back.

“What have you got in that scarf of yours?” Hashiba said, nodding at the little parcel Shichio unconsciously worked in his hands. It was wrapped in the finest Chinese silk, which did little to soften its horns, its teeth, its furrowed brow. Hashiba squinted at it, then laughed. “Well, I’m damned if I know what to get you for a wedding present. You name a gift that tops that mask and I’ll buy it.”

Shichio felt himself wince and quickly converted it into a coy smile. He couldn’t let Hashiba see how he’d come to fear the mask, and yet he hadn’t been able to leave the mask in their cabin, either. He wished he had. So long as they were behind closed doors, it was enough to let Hashiba ravage him. It wasn’t hard to tempt him into being a little rough. The mask would not be sated, but it could be distracted.

Shichio had wrapped it up in the hope that he could satisfy his unconscious need to hold it while avoiding the touch of its iron skin. He envied the mask; even in this heat, it would never sweat. He wanted nothing more than to disrobe it, to press its cool cheek against his own, but that was out of the question. This was no time to compromise self-control. He had a madwoman to bring to heel.

Seeing Hashiba’s expectant look, he said, “Gifts be damned. And let the wedding and the wife be damned too. Once I have her name, my mask and I come back home to serve their rightful lord.”

“Already thinking like a trueborn samurai,” Hashiba said with a wink. He smiled his impish, simian smile.

The palanquin’s woven bamboo window screens were no proof against the sweat-stink of the bearers, who grunted in time with each other as they plodded up the cliffside trail. “These commoners smell like animals,” Shichio said, grimacing. A tiny part of his mind insisted that the bearers’ parents probably worked a farm no different from the one Shichio had grown up on, but he would not dwell on that. Soon enough he would have rank, name, station, and esteem. He would be above the commoners for ever after.

At last the countless switchbacks took him to the top of the cliff trail, and through the window screen he could see the high white wall of the Okuma compound on his right. Soon to be my compound, he thought—very soon, in fact. That fact hung over him like the rain clouds he’d endured the day before, and so it was especially irksome to hear a runner coming from somewhere ahead. The man stopped to kneel beside the palanquin, panting like a horse. Delay after delay; it was the only way the lower classes could exert power over their betters.

Shichio slammed the sliding door aside and looked down upon the messenger kneeling in the weeds. “What do you think you’re doing, stopping your lord on the way to his wedding?”

The man bowed deeper. “General, your orders were to deliver any news of the Bear Cub, day or night.”

The Bear Cub? How could any word of him have reached Izu already? Shichio’s fleet had been the first to set sail after that storm, and it should have swept up all other ships in its net. No horseman could have outrun them.

He looked down at the mute messenger. “Well? Spit it out, boy.”

“My lord, the Bear Cub stormed the Yasuda compound last night. We lost fifty men.”

“Fifty?”

“He was said to have a rider with him. A ronin of some years.”

“No,” said Shichio. His spies on the Tokaido had reported that Daigoro and his haggard bodyguard had split ways at least a week past. His agent within the Wind said the boy had been alone when he hired his retinue to spirit him to Izu.

But this was not the first fantastic tale to have reached Shichio’s ears. Just this very morning a skiff had come alongside Hashiba’s flagship, delivering word that the Bear Cub had stolen a frigate after slaughtering the entire crew. It was preposterous, of course. Yes, the Okumas were a coastal power, but the boy was a cripple, not a seaman, and each of Shichio’s vessels was teeming with armed men. The whelp would need an army of pirates at his command. The tale was so ludicrous that Shichio had ordered a broadside into the skiff that delivered the message. He would have sunk the bastards for their cheek had Hashiba not heard the sudden cannonade and ordered a cease-fire.

Out of sheer magnanimity Shichio chose not to kill this messenger either. “The Yasuda garrison is playing tricks on you,” he told the kneeling man. “They take advantage of your gullibility.”

“My lord, they were most explicit: a young boy with an odachi and a lame leg—”

“Quit while you still have a tongue in your mouth.” Shichio had a sudden vision of blood oozing from the messenger’s mouth, and he realized his fingers had worked their way under the folds of Chinese silk. He was touching the mask.

He withdrew his hand as if the mask had bitten it. Hashiba frowned at him but said nothing. Shichio banged on the roof and the stinking, sweating bearers resumed their march.

When he reached the gate, Shichio was pleased by what he saw. House Okuma commanded a grand vista. Katto-ji, home to the abbot he was soon to kill, peered out from the pines on the next summit to the north. Below, on the saddle between the peaks, a double garrison was camped along the road flying Toyotomi colors. That road and the jetty were the only ways to reach the Okuma compound. Rumors be damned, Shichio thought. He would believe his eyes before he believed tales of captured frigates and samurai heroics, and his eyes saw no corpses lining the road, nor any pirate vessels anchored in the bay.

Just inside the gates, Okuma warriors formed columns of red and brown, their bear paw crests fluttering overhead on their banners. Opposite them stood a wall of soldiers in mossy green, with a fat white centipede winding its way up the length of each green banner. He remembered that crest from his intelligence reports: House Yasuda. He wondered how low a clan had to sink before it took a wriggling insect as its sigil.

In the center stood his bride, the Lady Yumiko, cradling an infant. Shichio remembered hearing the Bear Cub’s wife was with child. That wedding must have been rushed along by spearheads if the cub’s child was already born. Again exercising his generosity, Shichio decided he would let his new bride coddle her grandson for a few minutes before ordering the wedding to commence. He was happy to see the woman sober enough to stand. If even half of the rumors that reached him were true, she spent her days either sedated by poppy’s tears or wailing and running about like a hungry ghost.

The primary reason Shichio had cajoled Hashiba into coming with him was not to have his friend, lord, and lover by his side on his wedding day, but to guarantee that the wedding would take place. The matron of House Okuma had yet to respond to a single one of Shichio’s marriage proposals, and he needed a contingency plan if she chose to remain mute when her would-be husband arrived. That was where Hashiba came in: he could simply order her to marry Shichio. But seeing Lady Yumiko in her bridal dress, with her attendants and even the attendants of neighboring houses arrayed to honor the occasion, Shichio could see her will had finally caved.

“My lord regent,” he heard a familiar voice say, “and General Shichio too, what a pleasant surprise! You honor House Okuma with your attendance.”

Shichio stepped out of the palanquin and looked over the top of it. There stood the Bear Cub’s tall, lean bodyguard, the one with the bushy sideburns and tousled paintbrush of a topknot—Katsuhara, Shichio thought his name was, or Katsushira, something like that. He stood just inside the Okuma gate, looking tired and gray and not at all like a proper attendee at a wedding. Shichio expected no more of the man; he’d always struck Shichio as common.

“Why, we’re just as surprised to see you, aren’t we?” Shichio said. He set the mask in the palanquin; shabby though he was, the ronin was dangerous, and Shichio needed to keep his wits. “Word reached me that you abandoned your little cub in his hour of need—and now here you are at his homestead. Fickle, aren’t you? One who lacked manners might ask whether you had impure designs on the boy’s mother.”

“His designs on my mother are pure enough,” said the voice Shichio hated most in the world.

The Bear Cub stepped out from the midst of the Okuma column, pallid as a corpse but somehow still standing. It was impossible. Every path to the compound was under watch. But there he was, with that long and lovely sword slung across his back. Its tsuba and pommel glittered in the morning sun.

The boy bowed deeply, and Shichio responded with the slightest dip of his chin. “I bow to your superior,” the Bear Cub said, and Shichio turned back around to see Hashiba had hopped out of the palanquin.

“Ah!” said Hashiba, marching around so that he could see the gathering; he was too short to see over the palanquin. “An honor guard after all! I was beginning to think you’d lost your manners, Daigoro-san.”

“The honor guard is my mother’s,” said that odious voice, “and she and I beg your pardon alike. We did not know you were coming, my lord regent.”

“Forget it,” Hashiba said, waving his hand as if shooing off a butterfly. He inhaled deeply, flaring the nostrils in his too-flat nose, and clapped his hands against his breastplate with a grandiose and flippant air. “Smell that breeze from the sea! So different from Kyoto.”

Daigoro stepped forward to usher Hashiba inside the compound. Shichio noticed the boy’s limp was much more pronounced than he’d seen before. “Why, young Daigoro,” he said. “You seem to be limping more than usual, my lad. Is your infirmity growing worse?”

“I took a wound to the leg last night.”

“Ah, yes. Getting out of bed, was it? What a trial it must be, being unable to do all the things the rest of us take for granted.”

“It was a sword wound,” said the whelp, grinding his teeth.

“Was it indeed? Can the rumors of your assault on the Yasuda compound be true? Do tell me who cut you; I shall have to decide whether to promote him or to chastise him for not cutting deeper.”

“You needn’t burden yourself with such difficult decisions. He’s dead now.”

“Is he?” Shichio found himself unable to keep the glee from his voice. It caused the boy such obvious pain simply to be standing on his own two feet. He so plainly wanted to rest that Shichio resolved to keep him standing and talking for as long as possible. Taunting him was just a garnish on a plate that was already beautifully overfull. “I shall add his murder to the list of charges against you.”

“Why stop with one murder?” said the whelp. “Make it fifty.”

“Fifty? That’s the second time I’ve heard that number, neh? Yes, it is. You’ve become quite the little brigand, haven’t you? Perhaps the lord regent and I should have you crucified now, and get to the wedding later.”

Shichio saw Hashiba’s eyes light up at the mention of crucifixion, but on the face of that despicable boy he saw an insufferable little smile—a tiny thing, so small it was barely there, yet it seemed to hold back a torrent of derisive laughter. Shichio had seen that smile many times as a child, stabbing at him like a dagger from the faces of countless village boys, and in fact he’d made a point of riding in the vanguard when, during the bitterest of the war years, he and Hashiba demolished the tiny hamlet where Shichio had grown up. Seeing that wicked, happy smile on the face of the Bear Cub was more than he could stomach.

“That’s quite enough,” he said, striding angrily across the road until he stood chest to chest with the boy. Daigoro stood just inside the threshold of the Okuma compound, Shichio just outside of it, each one matching the other’s stare. “I’ll string you up on the gates of your own house,” he said, his voice so low that only the Bear Cub could hear him. “Your wife, your child, your servants, they’ll walk past you for days. I’ll nail your bones to the wood. I’ll have you fed and watered, keep you alive for as long as I can. And then, right before you die, I’ll kill your mother—my wife—right in front of you. I’ll flay her with your own sword. Your wife too, and then your little boy. And then I’ll drive that big sword of yours right through your—”

“My little boy?”

Shichio’s heart pounded in his ears. A sweat broke out on his upper lip. “Yes, your boy, you little runt, that newborn son of yours. He’s going to—”

“That’s not my son.”

“What?”

There was that smile again, that smallest, sharpest, wickedest of grins.

• • •

“That’s not my son,” Daigoro said again, desperately restraining a triumphant laugh. He’d never seen anyone look so baffled while trying to look malicious before. He wished he had a mirror, so Shichio could see what it looked like.

“My lords,” he said, taking a step back into his family’s courtyard—a step away from Shichio and toward Hideyoshi. “Your presence on this wedding day honors us all. Please accept my heartfelt thanks, and allow me to thank you on behalf of House Okuma as well.”

“Thanks? Honor?” Shichio spat the words. “Of course I’m here. It’s my wedding. You’re the one who shouldn’t be here.”

“Oh, because of your garrison? You may want to have words with them. It seems they don’t know about all the little lanes we’ve got crisscrossing the estate.”

“What?”

“Of course,” Daigoro said, enjoying himself every bit as much as Shichio had been a few moments before. “Connecting the orchard, the bathhouse, that sort of thing. You’ll understand when you have property of your own.”

“This is my property—or it will be, as soon as you step aside and let me get on with my wedding.”

“I’m afraid there’s been some misunderstanding. Unless . . . did you bring a bride of your own? I’m afraid all the ladies present are already married.”

“I’m here to marry your mother, you impudent little cur, and you know that damn well.”

“But my mother’s already got a husband,” Daigoro said. “Allow me to present to you the newly married Lord and Lady Yasuda.”

He stretched out his arm as grandly as Hideyoshi might have done it, and from the heart of the assembly his mother walked forward, positively glowing. Her steps were tiny—a bridal kimono did not allow the legs much movement—and so it took a delightfully long time for her to approach. Shichio fumed all the while. “This,” Daigoro said, touching his mother’s silken shoulder, “is Lady Yasuda Yumiko, and this”—he gingerly took the baby in his green swaddling clothes from his mother’s arms—“is Lord Yasuda Gorobei, her new husband.”

Shichio opened his mouth to speak; only a strangulated gurgle came out. Daigoro’s mother blushed and looked with adoration and pride at her son, then at her rosy-cheeked husband in the crook of Daigoro’s arm. Hideyoshi let out a howl, laughing so hard he had to cling to a bodyguard’s shoulder to stay standing.

“We have got to come here more often,” Hideyoshi said. “You bastards are a riot.”

The little Lord Yasuda replied with a yawn, scrunched his eyes tight against the morning sun, and nestled himself deeper into Daigoro’s kimono. He had no more hair than his great-grandfather, Yasuda Jinbei, whose compound Daigoro had just departed some scant hours before. Whatever Hideyoshi had to say next was choked off by another fit of cackling, which he tried to restrain out of respect for the baby’s sleep. Shichio nearly choked too; apoplexy still had the better of him.

Daigoro decided to make the most of the opportunity. “Mother,” he said softly, “how are you feeling?”

“Better, now that we have you home.” She smiled at him, though he winced at the word home. Her face glowed with a radiance he hadn’t seen in her in more than a year. She stroked baby Gorobei’s fat cheek with the back of a finger. “What a beautiful little husband you found for me.”

“I had hoped to speak of it with you first,” Daigoro said. “It was not my intent to marry you off without your consent. This was the only way I could think of to—”

“It’s fine, Daigoro. It was very clever of you, in fact—a much better solution than that horrid letter we got from you. I’m your mother and Akiko is your wife, regardless of what you write in any official decrees.”

Daigoro felt his face flush. “I promise we’ll have a talk about that—but later, if you don’t mind. Do you know where Aki is?”

“I’m here,” Akiko said, wending her way through the armored ranks of Okuma warriors. She wore ruby red silk, her face pale and inscrutable. It was the first time he’d laid eyes on his wife since departing for Kyoto, for though he’d reached the Okuma estate in the earliest hours of the morning, there had been distractions of every kind: introductions to be made, wounds to clean and bind, to say nothing of the hastiest wedding preparations in history. On top of all that, morning sickness had invaded Akiko’s stomach like the Mongol hordes, waking her each day with a new incursion and showing no signs of decamping.

As such, Daigoro’s first thought was to attribute her pallor to nausea. But then she narrowed her eyes at him, her shoulders stiffened, and Daigoro feared he’d angered her. But of course, his conscience said. Running off without so much as a farewell, disappearing for nearly a month—one-third of their entire marriage—sending a decree almost as soon as he was out the door, declaring that he’d disowned her; what was she supposed to do? Welcome him with open arms? Had she even read the accompanying letter, the one that explained his decision and explained how much it pained him? Or had she pitched it into the fire pit? Torn it up? Tossed the scraps into the wind?

All these thoughts passed through his mind in the space of a heartbeat. Daigoro braced himself, fearing the worst. She would hate him. She would slap him in front of the entire gathering—and he would deserve it. Aki took another silent step toward him, finally emerging from the forest of motionless soldiers. Despite his dread and self-loathing, Daigoro could not help finding her beautiful. The thought that he’d hurt her wounded him to the quick. He loved her and he’d abandoned her. Whatever retribution she visited upon him could not compete with how harshly he would punish himself.

She stepped closer. Her shoulders tensed. Her chin drew back ever so slightly, as if she were a cobra preparing to strike. Then she grabbed both of his wrists, stretched up on her tiptoes, and pecked a kiss on his cheek. “Get inside,” she whispered, her lips tickling his ear, “as quick as you can. I want you to strip me naked.”

She settled herself back on the ground, and though she tried to hide it behind a coy smile, Daigoro could see she was near to bursting. She’d missed him after all, and she was angry, and love overwhelmed the anger, and worry threatened to overwhelm the love. It was all she could do to give his wrists a little squeeze instead of wrapping her arms around him, clutching him close so he could not wander again.

Behind him Daigoro heard the faint click of a sword slipping a thumb’s length out of its sheath.

“And who might this pretty girl be?” he heard Shichio say.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, Daigoro thought. He had a venomous snake in his courtyard and he’d brought his pregnant wife within striking range. He looked over his shoulder at Shichio, whose left hand gripped the mouth of his scabbard, the fingertips of his right hand stroking his katana’s cord-bound grip. The preening peacock’s hair had become disheveled, as if his shock and disgrace had struck him like a physical blow. Daigoro only wished they’d struck hard enough to knock him dead.

“I might have guessed she’s your wife,” Shichio said with a smile, “but you don’t have a wife, do you? Not anymore. Not since you signed that decree.”

Daigoro did not take his eyes from Shichio’s face, but in his peripheral vision he noticed his enemy’s feet settling into the gravel, his thumb pushing that katana a little farther out of its scabbard.

Glorious Victory was sheathed across Daigoro’s back. She was too long to draw at this range. Shichio knew it. And if any Okuma stepped forward to his defense, the whole clan would be guilty of high treason against the regent’s adviser. Shichio knew that too.

“If she’s not your wife, then what is she?” said Shichio. “Just some girl you spilled your seed into, I suppose. But what does that make you? Certainly not a husband. Closer to the truth to call you an oath-breaker and a liar.”

It was more than any man should bear. Even as a ronin, Daigoro was ten times the samurai Shichio would ever be. The man was a viper. Deceit came as easily to him as breathing. And even if he were not, for a commoner to accuse a samurai of being a liar was more than provocation; in truth it was immoral for Daigoro not to kill him.

Shichio knew that too.

“You wouldn’t be trying to pick a fight, would you, Shichio-sama?” It was everything Daigoro could do to end that sentence with -sama and not you son of a bitch.

“I hardly need to. You’re a fugitive, aren’t you? Yes, you are. Come to think of it, the bare fact that you stand in this courtyard means the Okumas have harbored you. Ever so convenient, isn’t it? I have no need to marry your mother; I can kill her right after I kill you.”

“You might want to think twice about that,” said Daigoro.

Toyotomi samurai formed a rank behind Shichio, summoned as if they could hear his thoughts. “Seize the fugitive,” Shichio said, the very picture of nonchalance. “And his mother and girlfriend too while you’re at it.”

“Shichio!”

The shout came from Hideyoshi. “This is a wedding,” the regent barked. “By the gods, you idiot, you don’t threaten the bride.”

“Toyotomi-dono,” Shichio said, “she’s colluding with a fugitive—”

“And you’re violating every damned rule of civility ever written,” Hideyoshi said. “Have you forgotten the laws of hospitality?”

“I’m sure he hasn’t,” said Daigoro, “as your own General Mio cited them when last we met. The guest who instigates a fight under the roof of his host is to be punished with death.”

Shichio rammed his katana home with a loud snap. “Then face me in a duel,” he said, his voice dripping with acid. He stabbed one finger toward the open gate. “Outside the compound. Outside the bounds of your precious hospitality.”

Daigoro clenched his fists. Pain shot through them, broken bones in the right, deep cuts in the left. He hadn’t slept in three days. His right leg had twenty-nine fresh stitches in it. And yet he wanted nothing more in the world than to eviscerate this prideful peacock of a man.

Daigoro took a breath, eyeing the distance to the gate. It was not so far, perhaps twenty or thirty hobbling steps. In his current state, just walking there would leave him dizzy. He would have the advantage of reach, but with hands so battered that he could not hold his sword after the first exchange. His opponent was well rested and well fed. Daigoro had just enough strength to stand. And then there was Glorious Victory herself. She knew about his burning desire to kill Shichio; she could feel it in her steel. How much more satisfying would it be to kill him in front of Akiko, his mother, and his former clan? Daigoro’s mouth all but watered at the thought of such satisfaction. He would even seize glory and victory in front of the regent, who already held him in such high regard that he might well make Daigoro a general.

Indulging his need for vengeance was more than simple revenge. It would secure him victory and glory. And for that very reason his own sword would betray him.

Another breath, then another. He studied Shichio in every detail: the length of his sword, the hand he’d returned to its hilt, the tension in his forearm as if he were ready to strike.

Daigoro breathed again, trying to calm his racing heart. He knew he could not face Shichio with some other blade—or at least not face him and win. He was too accustomed to Glorious Victory’s weight and reach. Nor could he ask Katsushima to fight as his champion. If anything, Katsushima was even more exhausted than Daigoro; he was thirty years’ Daigoro’s senior, and he’d been riding day and night for a week, all the way from Kyoto.

Yet Daigoro knew the simple truth: Shichio had insulted him more than honor could bear. Daigoro took a deep breath and released it slowly. It was his sixth breath since Shichio had laid down his challenge. Daigoro knew the old maxim well, for his father had quoted it many times: the good samurai makes every decision in the space of seven breaths.

A silence fell over the courtyard, so that Daigoro felt the whole gathering could hear his pounding heartbeat. He took in his seventh breath. “If the Lady Okuma will allow it,” he said, “I will face my challenger here, on the spot where I bested General Mio.”

Shichio’s face blanched. In an instant Daigoro could tell he’d read the man correctly. He remembered his last conversation with General Mio—not the exchange of scribbles and questions while Mio was on his deathbed, but their conversation in the Jurakudai before Daigoro had gone on the run and Shichio had somehow tied Mio down and cut out his tongue. No, our Shichio’s no swordsman, Mio had said. He did all his generalship with an ink brush.

Daigoro could only guess how many times Shichio had fantasized about killing the hated Bear Cub. No doubt he’d rehearsed it in his mind: the cuts, the parries, the vainglorious pronouncements of victory. But between his obsession over the Inazuma and his flights of fancy, he’d forgotten that in all his years of warfare he’d never done any fighting. He’d made the mistake so many opponents had made: he thought of Daigoro as a cripple, not a warrior.

And then Daigoro reminded him of Mio. Mio, who was Shichio’s superior in in every aspect of swordsmanship. Mio, the giant that lame little Daigoro defeated in single combat.

Daigoro put his hand to Glorious Victory Unsought, knowing that if he drew her he could not support her weight for long. His hands hurt too much. He’d asked too much of them in the fighting the night before. His forearm twinged just from the effort of wrapping his fingers around his weapon’s hilt.

“After you, General Shichio,” he said, filling his voice with every drop of confidence he could muster, hoping it was enough to patch over the exhaustion that made his voice sound like a rasp. He motioned toward the other end of the courtyard, and the dispersing crowd opened a corridor to the very spot where Daigoro had propped his foot on the mountainous General Mio. “I’m tired of your nonsense; let’s get this over with.”

Shichio’s eyes narrowed. He took a single step toward Daigoro, just enough to put him in striking range. His slender katana would be faster on the draw. A good samurai could cut Daigoro down before Glorious Victory even cleared her scabbard. A good samurai, or even just a fast peasant.

“You’re bluffing,” said Shichio.

“The fifty up the road thought so too,” said Daigoro.

Shichio’s eyes narrowed, scrutinizing him. No doubt they could read Daigoro’s exhaustion for what it was. No doubt they would note how heavily he favored his left foot, and therefore how badly hurt his right leg really was. But they would see more, too. Shichio was a liar and a cheat. That was how he thought, and men like him thought all other men were just as devious. More than once Daigoro had assumed Shichio would act like a samurai, but only because Daigoro himself thought and lived and breathed the code. Now, for the first time, Daigoro found the advantage in thinking like an ignoble backstabbing cur. Shichio thought everyone was a backstabber.

A muscle fluttered in Shichio’s cheek. He swallowed. A tiny tremor had settled into his right hand. Daigoro’s first instinct was to remain stone still. But that was samurai thinking. Instead, Daigoro said, “Do you plan to keep us waiting all day? Come on, make up your mind.”

He counted Shichio’s breaths, which came fast and shallow now. He wondered whether Shichio knew the old adage about the seven breaths.

“A duel to the death is too good for you,” Shichio said, loudly enough that everyone assembled could hear. He took a haughty step back and rammed his katana back home in its scabbard. Brushing the hair from his sweating brow, he said, “When I kill you, I’ll have you strung up like a common criminal.”

Daigoro heard Aki sigh with relief, and his mother too, and more than a few of the guests as well. Shichio snorted at him. “Be gone from this house by sundown,” the peacock said, proclaiming it as if it were an edict, “or I will have everyone here executed for treason.” On his way to the gate he spared a sneer for Daigoro’s mother, and for the infant Lord Yasuda in her arms. “My congratulations to the lucky couple. A lunatic and an infant! I’m sure you’ll be very happy together.”

Then he stormed away, and it was as if the sun had come out from behind heavy clouds. The mood was instantly lighter; a cool breeze returned where once the air was still.

A chuckling Hideyoshi waddled over to Daigoro, looking for all the world like a shaved chimp in armor. “Nice ploy,” he said under his breath.

“Whatever do you mean, my lord regent?” Daigoro kept his voice low too.

“I reckon I’d have drawn on you.”

Daigoro inclined his head. “Perhaps my lord has a keener eye than some of his generals.”

“Perhaps!” Hideyoshi laughed, baring his sharp, mismatched teeth. “What would have happened if I’d drawn?”

“There are so many uncertainties in combat, my lord regent.”

“Meaning you’re wondering about the reach of my blade, neh? I’ll tell you this, boy: you look worn down to me. You’d better have killed me on the first exchange. I don’t foresee you holding your ground after that.”

“A keen eye indeed, my lord regent.”

Hideyoshi laughed again. “The balls on this kid! I swear, give me ten generals like you and I’d invade Korea right this minute. Damn, it’s hot this morning. Come on, walk me through the formalities so we can get down to some drinking.”

Daigoro bowed deeply. “Forgive me, my lord regent. Not a month since I became a ronin and already I’ve got the manners of a barbarian.”

He introduced his mother first, then Akiko, then the grandparents of the little groom, Yasuda Kenbei and his wife, Azami. Daigoro had known them for less than an hour, but his immediate impression was of unwavering seriousness. That was only natural, he supposed; they were wards of their grandson because little Gorobei’s father was a disgrace to the family, killed in a drunken brawl before the baby was even born. Kenbei’s hair was graying, though not nearly so white as his father’s; it looked more like storm clouds than snow, and he had stormy, steely eyes to match. He had twenty years on Azami, yet she was twice as stern, a stout pillar of a woman with forearms as thick as any blacksmith’s. She looked strong enough to punch holes in a wooden barrel.

Perhaps their severity had something to do with the fact that Daigoro had forced them to drag themselves out of bed and ride half the night to marry off their departed son’s newborn. For all of that they looked remarkably genteel, both of them immaculate in twenty shades of green, and they did an admirable job of concealing their ire. When Daigoro saw how awed they were by his conversational tone with the most powerful warlord in Japan, he thought they might even forgive him someday for so thoroughly disturbing their morning.

Everyone in attendance walked through the requisite pleasantries—praise heaped upon House Yasuda’s newest son for the strength of his grip, compliments on the surpassing beauty of the bride, kudos to both houses for choosing such an auspicious day under such auspicious signs and stars—and at last it came to the drinking Hideyoshi longed for so fervently. Daigoro, cheered at the prospect of relaxation for the first time in weeks, treated himself to three nicely chilled flasks within the first hour. He could not decide which pleased him more, the thought of Shichio sulking in some dark, stifled cabin of the regent’s flagship or the promise of a few uninterrupted hours of sitting with no other obligations calling on his time. By the time he finished the third flask he decided it did not matter, and happily ordered a fourth.

Even so, he could not match pace with Hideyoshi, who despite his small stature could drink like a demon. Before the noon meal was halfway finished, the regent was singing boisterously. Daigoro was surprised at how gifted a singer he was, at least as far as drunken warlords went.

When Hideyoshi was drunk enough not to notice, Daigoro took his leave. He and Akiko never made it as far as their bedchamber, opting instead for the top of a sake cask in the cool shady recesses of a storehouse. When they’d reassembled themselves, they marched off quietly and with great decorum to the residence, where they flung each other’s clothes off for a repeat performance.

Afterward, Daigoro could not bring himself to say what he must.

It did not matter; Akiko read his silence as if he’d shouted from a mountaintop. “I know your enemy will kill you if you stay here,” she said. She nestled her naked back against his chest and hugged his arms around her belly. “And me too, and the little one that quickens inside me. But tell me you’ll stay close.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d have me back. I thought you would be angry with me.”

“I am. I was. The next time you plan on sacrificing our marriage, I’d prefer if you asked me about it first.”

“Aki, I had no choice—”

“Yes, you did.” She reached back and pressed a warm fingertip against his lips. She did not need to look back to do it; she knew his body as well as she knew her own. “You could have accepted defeat,” she said. “You could have strayed from your path, from your father’s path; you could have kept our family whole. And perhaps in time I might have learned to respect you again. Don’t mistake me, Daigoro: I’m proud of what you did.”

Daigoro blinked. He could hardly believe his ears. “You are?”

“Of course. My parents are samurai too; I know the path as well as you do.”

Daigoro’s skin prickled; an ice-cold wave rippled over him despite the midday summer air. He hugged Akiko tight, ignoring the pain in his hands, his arms, his legs, pressing his cheek against her ear. For the second time he found himself dumbstruck. He wished for a word that expressed thanks and love and longing, all in the overwhelming measures he felt in that moment.

And for the second time, Akiko heard his silence as if she could read his very thoughts. “Wherever the path leads you, stay close to me, neh? Never leave me again.”

She pressed her back against him like a stretching cat, a kind of reverse hug, and Daigoro held her close. For the first time in what seemed like years, he felt truly at home.