Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale (Seasons of the Sword #1)(41)

That broke the spell. They both laughed.

Emi and I began walking toward the gate to the offal pit and Aimaru stomped straight-legged and straight-armed toward the stables. Before we’d gone more than a step or two, Emi laughed her strange laugh. “Look!” She was staring down at the patch of snow where we’d been standing. “It’s the Chinese character for goat!” she giggled.

There in the white, trampled snow the blood dripping from one of the baskets had drawn what did indeed like a Chinese kanji character. All I could seem to see, however, was the blood.

—

After we had emptied the baskets, Emi and I were on our way back to the compound when we both heard a noise.

“What was that?” Emi’s brows pursed.

I listened, but heard nothing but the sound of the wind swirling through the tangled woods. “A... a horse? Maybe?” I was thinking of the voices I’d heard when I’d climbed through the oaks. Masugu? And... Mieko?

“Emi-chan! Risuko-chan! You should not be out here speaking to this boy!” Fuyudori seemed to have appeared out of nowhere just inside the Full Moon’s rear gate. Her white hair disappeared into the snow, which was falling again, and her cheeks glowed red.

“Yes, Fuyudori-senpai! Sorry, Fuyudori-senpai!” Emi and I both spluttered, hurrying back inside under her glare.

—

Late that night, as Toumi, Mai and Shino all began to snore in a sort of odd, grating musical chord, Emi and I whispered quietly about Mieko’s lessons—and about Aimaru’s questions concerning our work in the kitchen.

“Do you think they have anything to do with each other?” whispered Emi, looking thoughtfully at the thin door to Fuyudori’s room.

“I can’t imagine what,” I answered. Stifling a yawn, I whispered, “Maybe you should ask Aimaru.”

Her eyes got round and she looked at the door again. “We’re not supposed to talk to boys,” she answered loudly. Then she turned over. “Good night, Murasaki.” As always, she was asleep before I had even finished answering.

As I tried to follow her, I remembered the sound we had heard outside the gate. Had it been a horse? Had it been Inazuma, Masugu-san’s charger? I drifted off to the image of black hair and white snow.





23—Poppies in Winter


Evidently, Emi did not sleep as well as usual. When we three walked into the kitchen the next morning, Kee Sun looked at her and scowled. “Smiley, yeh look like the demons have been chasing yeh.”

Emi frowned her most ferocious frown, and her neck turned pink. “I... could not sleep.”

“And yeh, there, Falcon-girlie?” the cook asked Toumi, who was slumped against the big wooden cutting table.

“Stomach ache,” muttered Toumi, though I couldn’t think why the previous day’s work would upset anyone’s stomach—thankfully, it had just been chickens, not a pig or another cow.

Kee Sun grunted, and then gestured toward me with his cleaver. “Well, at least Bright-eyes here looks like she’s had a good night. But since I don’t want none of yeh slicing off any of those fingers o’ yehrs belonging to the lady, perhaps we’ll be starting on something I was going to teach yeh later.”

He finished filleting a carp in four smooth, swift passes of his thin boning knife, wiped the blade, placing it carefully on cutting table, and then walked over to the beam where dozens of herbs hung, dried and drying. He ran his fingers almost reverently along their tips, and then looked at us, crossing his arms. “In Korea, we call this Hanyak. Medicine. Plants, yeh know, can make our food taste good—basil and ginger and garlic and pepper and the like. But they can do more than just that.”

He pointed up again. “Ginseng. Mugwort. Wormwood. Corydalis.” He waved his hand at what I now realized where not just cooking herbs but hundreds of different plants. Leaves. Fruits. Roots. Dried mushrooms. “Herbs. Yeh little beggars know about the five elements? The two forces?”

We all nodded, but I could tell that neither of the others felt any more sure of her knowledge than I did.

“Right. Yeh know how we’re always careful to balance the flavors, the colors in meals? Sour, bitter, sweet, hot, salty? Green, red, yellow, white, brown?”

Now we nodded more certainly; he’d been drilling that into us for weeks. The evening meal the night before had included green negi onions, red smoked trout, yellow squash, white daikon radish and brown mushrooms. Of course, in Kee Sun’s opinion, which he shared with us during the preparations for every meal, the Japanese taste in food ran far too much to brown and sweet.

“Well, it’s not just ‘cause it tastes good or looks good. We’re all of us made up of five elements—fire, wood, earth, metal and water. Each o’ them matches up with a color and to a flavor—so wood is green and sour, and fire is red and hot, and so on. And each of them elements has two sides—light and dark, or, if yeh’d rather, hot and cold. Female, male.”

I remembered Otō-san telling me about the same things once as he was drawing a sketch of the cherry blossoms on the tree outside of our house.

“Yin and yang,” said Emi.

“There yeh are. Those’re the Chinese names for ‘em. So we’re all made up of these, and just like a good soup has just the right balance of broth and meat and this and that, so’re we. We need balance. So we have to eat in balance—sour, bitter, sweet, hot, salty. Green, red, yellow, white, brown. Understand?”