Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale (Seasons of the Sword #1)(49)

“Robes!” barked Kee Sun, but I was already through the door.

“I will be right back, Kee Sun-san.” The fact of the matter is that I was happy to be away from everyone—not to have to think about who was talking about me, who was watching me, or who was trying to ignore me. The night was cold and the snow was barely falling—tiny flakes appearing out of the dark sky around me as swarming moths around a torch.

Squirrels should be hibernating? I thought, stomping toward the door that led through the back wall to the rubbish pit. Ha!

As I put down the steaming basket of bones and burnt rice to unbar the small rear gate, I heard a bang in the darkness—not from the great hall, but from the direction of the Retreat.

I have no memory of making the decision to climb the wall in order to creep across to the other side of the compound and investigate. It was more as if the decision made me. I found myself atop the thick wall, stepping carefully between sharp spikes of bamboo, wondering what it was that I thought I was going to see, and what I could possibly say to whoever had made the sound if they caught me. The faint light of the great hall—spilling from the shuttered doors and windows of the opposite side—caused the ice and snow on the wall top to glisten very slightly, or I would have had no idea where to put my feet.

A sound wafted through the falling snow, muffled and indistinct—a voice. Two? The same as the ones I’d heard in the woods?

I made my way along the wall, lifting my feet carefully over the spikes and loose pebbles. The snow flurried, dancing in the wind, and I lost sight of the great hall, so that the whole world seemed to be bounded by snow: just the top of that wall and me.

I heard the sound again, closer but still ahead of me. It was definitely two voices, but they were still too muffled for me to understand what they were saying, or even to know for certain to whom they belonged. Then the wind whipped across my face and I had to move forward even more cautiously, feeling my way with my hands.

At the edge of the bubble of flake-filled air that bounded my vision, I made out two looming shapes: one to the right—a roof, the Retreat—and ahead of me the corner of the compound wall.

I stopped. The voices couldn’t have come from outside of the compound, could they?

“You know, there are a hundred and eight ways that I could kill you.” The voice was colder than the air that bit at my face and hands, and so clear that I stumbled and nearly fell off of the wall.

“You killed me five years ago,” said another, sadder voice. “I don’t think any of the other hundred and seven could have been any more effective.”

I looked to my right: the Retreat’s stone chimney with its wooden cover stood within touching distance; the voices were floating up like smoke from inside the small building. My heart stopped racing.

“Please,” said the first voice, and now it sounded as if the voice, which had been as keen as a knife’s blade, had crumbled like shattered ice. “Please. I had no wish—”

It was Mieko. And I knew, before hearing the other speaker answer, that it was Masugu.

“Of course you didn’t. You did what you had to do. Your duty. As you do in all things. As do I.”

I listened intently, but the chimney conveyed nothing more but silence.

—

When I stumbled, shivering, back into the kitchen, Kee Sun was in the midst of pulling on his winter coat. “Where were yeh, idiot-girl! I was thinking yeh’d turned into an icicle out in that storm!”

“G-got t-turned around out in the s-s-snow.” I put the empty basket down. Emi and Toumi were both gone—cleaning out the baths, no doubt. I should have left immediately to help them, but the kitchen fire was warm and I was wet and chilled to the bone; I couldn’t move.

“Going out without yehr robes. Fah!” The cook frowned at me, and grunted. “They’re already well on their way to draining the tubs. If I count it right... Well, it’d probably be a good night to give Smiley-girlie a pot ‘o that mint-and-poppy tea. Why don’t yeh stay here and brew her up a pot.” He tossed me a huge towel, which I wrapped gratefully around me as I stumbled over to the area where the herbs were stored.

I blinked up at the shelf beneath the Buddha shrine on which the oils were stored; where the small clay bottle had been that Kee Sun had shown us the morning when he started teaching us about herbs, there was an empty space. There were bottles on either side of the space, but they were clearly marked in his blocky hand: oil of chrysanthemum, oil of mint, oil of clove, oil of pine... “Kee Sun-s-san,” I asked, teeth still chattering. “D-do you want me c-cut up some of the dried poppies to make the t-tea? The b-bottle of p-poppy juice is g-gone.”

“WHAT?” he bellowed, stomping over to where I was standing and rifling through the bottles and jars. He spat a torrent of what I was fairly certain was Korean and assumed to be quite profane; he searched on the shelf again, and then on the floor below. Finally, he glowered at me. “Yeh didn’t take that too, did yeh, Bright-eyes?”





27—Killing Dance


We had to brew Emi’s sleeping tea with corydalis root instead of poppy; the poppy had gone missing. Kee Sun snarled in frustration. It wouldn’t work as well.

By the time I arrived to deliver the tea, Emi and Toumi had in fact finished draining the baths and were back in our room getting ready for sleep. The others were, as usual, already snoring in their bedrolls. Fuyudori, of course, had her own chamber, which I had never resented more than that night.