Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale (Seasons of the Sword #1)(55)

“Ma—?” I sat there, unable to move. “Marry you?”

“He doesn’t mean you,” whispered Mieko, her voice deathly low. “He thinks he’s talking to me.”

“Kill me ‘gain,” sobbed Masugu. Then his eyes rolled back into his head, his hand fell limp from my chin and he drifted back into the open-eyed sleep that I’d first seen him in.

Kill me again. What did he mean?

“Don’t let him fall unconscious again!” barked Mieko, but she was crying—tears of guilt no doubt, at his accusation.

“You!” I snarled, the ginger forgotten in my hands. “He wouldn’t want to marry you! He knows you tried to kill him!”

Mieko sat back on her heels, apparently surprised by the vehemence of my attack. “What are you talking about?”

“He knows you’re the one who poisoned him, who... destroyed his rooms, and—!”

“Me!” Mieko let out an angry growl of a laugh. She dropped the pellet—it had apparently burned her fingers in her inattention—and had to smother it with the sleeve of her robes to keep the straw tatami from catching light. “He knows that I would never hurt him. You were the one—”

“I heard him!” I was suddenly standing, my feet wide. “Last night! In the Retreat! He said that you’d tried to kill him five years ago. I heard him.”

She stared up at me. “You heard—?” I expected her to become angry again, but her expression bowed downward into sadness. She shook her head, lighting another pellet and applying it to the lieutenant’s feet. “Oh, Risuko. I thought that I had heard someone moving about outside. This idiot told me that I was imagining things, but I knew.... You are one of us after all, aren’t you? You gave him too much of the poppy, and you made a mess out his rooms, but you are a kunoichi after all.”

“NO!” I howled, rage coursing through my body. If I had had a sword then.... Well, I would have used it, in spite of everything. No harm. “No! I’m not a killer like you! Lady Chiyome talks about kunoichi being ‘a special kind of woman,’ but that’s all you are, all of you! You’re murderers! Assassins! I couldn’t be one of you. Not ever!”

Mieko’s sad gaze never broke from mine. “Yet you drugged Masugu’s wine. He could still die from that, you know—and though it is me that he wants to marry, he is quite fond of you.”

“Drugged?” I spluttered. “I never! You—!”

“And why?” sighed Mieko. “Just so that you could ransack his rooms. What a waste.”

“That was your work, not mine.” My fists clench around the clay pot and the ginger. “Remember, I know that you were the person he accused of trying to kill him!”

“Five years ago,” sighed Mieko, the sadness spilling over into tears, “he asked me to marry him. And I—”

“She refused,” said Chiyome-sama from the door behind me, “knowing her proper duty.”

Mieko and I both gasped and turned. Our mistress favored us with her usual smirk of sour amusement and walked toward us. Kee Sun trailed at her shoulder, scowling.

“Congratulations, Risuko,” said Lady Chiyome. “You have earned an initiate’s sash.” Her face. “The question, I suppose, is whether we shall have to use it to hang you as a traitor.”





30—Battle of White & Scarlet


“I am no traitor!” I shouted, and then dropped to my knees and bowed. The ginger spilled onto the mat. “Mieko was the one who—!”

“No,” said Chiyome-sama. “While I suppose that Mieko might have gone against her own sentiments and drugged Masugu there to search his rooms, she would never have done it so sloppily.” I looked up in surprise. Lady Chiyome was staring at Mieko, who was bowing beside me. “And of course, if she had wanted him dead, he would have died. No doubt without any of us being any the wiser.”

Chiyome-sama sniffed and looked back down at me. “This was done by an amateur. A child.” She gestured around the jumbled room in disgust. “None of my kunoichi would have made such a mess of such a simple job. Least of all my Mieko.”

I turned to accuse the maid, but she had gone silently back to burning pellets of mugwort against the soles of Masugu’s feet. Kee Sun was lifting the tonic to the lieutenant’s lips, forcing the liquid down; Masugu seemed to be gagging on it.

“Risuko. Look at me.” Chiyome-sama’s sharp tone pulled me back around. “I visited the ladies in the Retreat just now. Fuyudori and Mai tell me that you were wandering about late last night—and they seldom agree that the sun has risen. I learn now that you used your delightful talents to spy on the lieutenant and Mieko.”

I tried to speak, but fear bound me, squeezing my throat, my chest, my bowels. I tried to plead with her with my eyes, but her face was empty of any humor at all and I could only look away. Behind her, a scroll hung askew from the door screen.

“Perhaps,” Lady Chiyome said, her voice low and cold, “you chose to visit Masugu’s rooms while he was gone? Perhaps you brought the drugged wine along in case he returned before you were done? Kee Sun tells me you’ve been learning about herbs; of course, he swears to me that you’re far too deft to have used a whole bottle of poppy juice at once.”