Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale (Seasons of the Sword #1)(57)

I snapped my jaw shut, but couldn’t bring myself to lower my gaze as I ought.

“Pick up the sash, Risuko.” Lady Chiyome’s voice was warm—for her.

I stared down at it.

“Put on the initiate’s sash, Kano Murasaki,” said Chiyome-sama.

My fingers heard the order and obeyed.

When it was knotted around my waist, Lady Chiyome sighed and said, “Your father...”

I did not dare to look up.

“Mukashi, mukashi, long ago, when you were just a baby, there was a great battle in a valley not far from this. My husband commanded Takeda-sama’s heavy cavalry at Midriver Island. They were routing the Uesugi and their allies, driving them at last from Dark Letter Province. Only one island of resistance stood—troops lent by the Uesugis’ ally, Lord Oda.”

I looked up.

Lady Chiyome’s gaze was still directed at me, but she was looking elsewhere. “Your father... Kano Kazuo faced Mochizuki Moritoki sword to sword, there on the battlefield. Kano Kazuo prevailed.” Her eyes regained their usual sharp focus, but they were dew-rimmed. “Though my husband fell, the Takeda nonetheless won the day. The Uesugi and their allies were shattered.” She sniffed, looked away and then looked back again. “For some time after the news arrived—after Kee Sun came back and told me—I hardly left the walls of this room. One day, my servants came, telling me that a lone samurai was approaching on horseback. His swords were bound across his horse’s back, but they were worried for my safety. I bade them open the gates to him. I did not particularly care for my own safety, you see.”

I waited for her to continue.

“It was your father, of course. He told me that he was sorry for my loss, but that my husband had died with honor. That it had been an honor to face him. That... That a battlefield is not generally a place of honor.”

I found tears beginning to spill from my own eyes.

“I spoke with him for some time. He spoke of you, of his family. Of how in taking my husband’s life, he had felt as if he were taking yours.”

A sound began to whistle up from my throat. I did not have any sense that I was making it myself.

“I reminded him of the Buddha’s saying: All life is sorrow. All that lives, dies. The same forest gives birth to the tiger and the deer. Who kills and who is killed are one.”

We sat there for some time, she and I. The old woman and the young girl. She weeping silently, I keening. Each of us mourning what we had lost long before.





31—Taking Up the Blade


I stumbled down from Lady Chiyome’s apartment, tears and memories leaving me blind, and so I walked into the Little Brothers at the bottom of the stairs. The larger one gave me his customary blank look, and then turned back to face the entrances—the front door and the door to the kitchen.

The other Little Brother smiled. From behind his enormously wide back, he drew two bound bundles of bamboo. Each of the bundles was slightly curved, and seemed to have a handle at one end.

“Swords,” I whispered.

“Practice swords,” said the Little Brother with a nod and another grin. “Since you are now an initiate, it is time for your proper training to begin.”

When the Little Brother held out one of the swords, however, I stood there frozen like river-grass in winter. “Murasaki-san?”

“I... I cannot. I cannot.” I looked up into his frown—the same frown he’d been wearing when I had arrived in Masugu’s rooms that morning. That morning? It felt as if that had been a memory from a previous lifetime. “My father... I—”

“Murasaki-san,” said the Little Brother, his voice low. “Our lady wishes you to learn to defend yourself. You are Chiyome-sama’s servant.”

“I live,” I said, my tongue thick, “at Chiyome-sama’s pleasure. But I cannot kill. I will not.” I knelt and touched my forehead to the cold wood. “If our lady wishes this humble servant killed for her disobedience, this humble servant will gladly die.”

The Little Brother hissed. “Get up. Don’t... There is a difference between learning to defend yourself, Risuko, and killing people.”

I looked up; his broad face was creased with concern. “I know what the kunoichi are. I know what it is Lady Chiyome expects me to do.”

He grimaced and shook his head—whether to deny what I was saying or to clear his mind I did not know. “Do not be so sure. Your father would have wanted this, I think. Take up your sword.”

“Little Brother. Sir...” I stammered.

“To learn with a bamboo sword how one defends oneself is not to kill.” He held the sword out to me. “Take the sword.”

I thought of my father. Wrapping away his blades.

Hand trembling, I took the handle.

The leather-wrapped hilt fit in my fingers as if it had been created created for no other hand but mine. I stood there, my feet spread, the bamboo practice sword held before me. Without thinking about it, I had taken the first position in Mieko-sensei’s dance. Of the sword exercises that Otō-san used to do every morning out in the courtyard, right up until that last morning when he was summoned by Lord Imagawa. I stared at the bundle of tightly-bound pieces of split bamboo, seeing in my mind’s eye the impossibly bright steel of Father’s katana.

My vision flared.