Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale (Seasons of the Sword #1)(56)

The inscription on the scroll was a familiar one:

Soldiers falling fast

Battle of white and scarlet

Blossoms on the ground

The calligraphy too was familiar. It was my father’s.

“Who are you spying for, girl?” asked the old woman. “The Imagawa? They’re finished.”

The scroll was, in fact, identical to the one hanging inside of the door at my home, except that instead of a picture of cherry blossoms, the bottom of the parchment was taken up with a carefully rendered circle—the full moon that is the Mochizuki crest.

Father. A brush poised like a knife. I was just learning to write myself, and I loved to watch him practicing his calligraphy and his drawing. He sat in our yard, staring at the bare cherry tree, a length of rice paper on his scribe’s lap-desk. I tried to imitate with a stick in the dirt Father’s beautiful handwriting, the beautiful blossoms. As he wrote out the poem for what felt like the hundredth time and began to draw the cascade of flowers, I asked him why he was drawing cherry blossoms in the autumn. He thought about that for a moment, put down his brush, and said, “The blossoms fall just once each winter, yet in our memories, they fall every day.”

“SQUIRREL!” snapped Lady Chiyome. “What on earth are you staring at?”

Without even looking back at her, as I should have, I pointed and gasped, “Where did you get my father’s poem?”

Lady Chiyome blinked at me and then at the huge scroll. When she looked back at me, her furious expression had been replaced by a more familiar one: shrewd calculation. “Your father’s?”

“Of course!” I blurted. “I know it by heart! I would recognize that handwriting anywhere! I swear that is my father’s poem!”

“I know,” she said. “He gave it to me.”

Masugu groaned.

I blinked at her, and then suddenly remembered where I was, who I was. I fell to the tatami, which still reeked of pickled ginger, and began to apologize for my rudeness.

Chiyome-sama interrupted. “Come, Risuko. We shall let Kee Sun and Mieko care for the lieutenant. You will come and explain yourself to me.”

I looked up to answer, but she was already striding away. I scampered after her out of the guesthouse and into the bright cold of the courtyard. The Little Brothers fell in on either side of us. I wasn’t sure whether they were protecting her, keeping an eye on me, or both.

I felt, in fact, very much as I had that first day, stumbling along beside her palanquin away from our village, from my home, and from my life.

—

We marched back to the great hall, empty now except for Aimaru, who stood at the bottom of the narrow stairs that led up to Chiyome-sama’s rooms, shifting from foot to foot. His usually bright face was dark and troubled; he looked away from me as we approached.

“This puppy can go back to guarding the guesthouse,” Lady Chiyome barked, nodding her head at Aimaru. “With Mieko and Kee Sun caring for Masugu, I don’t think anything can go wrong there that hasn’t already. You two,” she said, gesturing to the Little Brothers, “keep an eye on things down here. I don’t wish our conversation to be... interrupted.” She began to stride up the stairs. “Come, Risuko.”

I followed. Halfway up the stairs I turned back. The Little Brothers had faced away, watching the doors. I drew a deep, unsteady breath, turned, and fled upward.

By the time I entered Lady Chiyome’s chamber, she was already kneeling at her desk, mixing ink in a small bowl. I found myself coming to a stop in the doorway with one foot in the air, the memory of my one previous visit to her rooms rendering me as cold and as still as if I’d been encased in ice.

“Much easier simply to climb the stairs than the outside wall, isn’t it, my Risuko?” said Chiyome-sama without raising her gaze from whatever it was that she was writing. “And if you’ve been invited in, there’s no point in trying to hide. Especially in the middle of the doorway.”

I stumbled forward and knelt before the desk. “Chiyome-sama,” I said, trying to keep the trembling whine out of my voice, “this humble servant could never, ever try to hurt Masugu-san, or search his rooms, or—”

“I know,” she said, and then gave her dry, rasping laugh. “Another humble servant. Just what I need.”

“Yes, Chiyome-sama.”

“Kano Murasaki,” she addressed me, very formally now, and with no laughter, “answer me: why are you here?”

“In... your room?” She raised a carefully drawn eyebrow. “Oh. I am here because you wish me to become a shrine maiden, Chiyome-sama.”

“And?”

“And... And a kunoichi.”

“And what, Kano Murasaki, is a kunoichi?”

“A kunoichi...” In my mind’s eye, I could see her writing the word that first afternoon at Pineshore, her brush slashing across the paper. “A kunoichi is a woman trained to kill, Chiyome-sama.”

She gave a quiet grunt. “Close enough.” From beneath her desk, she drew a length of red silk with white edging—an initiate’s sash. “Red is the color of weddings. White is the color of death. A miko is married to that which cannot die. A kunoichi is married to her duty. And to Death.” She held the sash out to me.

Dumb and terrified, I stared at it.

She snorted and let the silk fall to the floor before me. “In the first place, I must admit, I can’t see you turning the guesthouse over like that—it doesn’t seem like your style at all.” She leaned forward, her gaze impaling me. “In the second, I saw your face when you spotted that poem. Either you’re the greatest liar I’ve ever met—and I have met some very accomplished ones, young Kano—or you had never been inside of those rooms before, and they had been searched by our clumsy fox demon at least twice before last night. Close your mouth, child. You look like a frog waiting for flies.”