The family who ruled this town and this province spent most of their days in their castle. It was out in the countryside, well walled and defended, far from the perils and pleasures of city life. But every warlord will want to visit his largest town now and then, if only to collect the income from the ships sailing into his harbor or to stop by a temple on the occasion of his youngest son’s marriage. And of course he’d need a suitable dwelling.
That dwelling was somewhere behind the hedge. Between the dense wall of bushes and the street there ran a deep ditch, full of water that made the stinking stew of the harbor look clean.
“Keep her out of trouble,” I said to Otani. I nodded at Ozu, crouched a few feet away. “And wait for us to come back.”
Otani brushed back the hood he’d kept well over his head all the way from the harbor to the city’s finest avenue. “If you don’t come back, Flower? What then?”
If Jinnai and I found our way into the Takeda mansion, but not back out, I already knew there was no point in asking Otani to come in after us. In the first place, I didn’t have the coins left to pay him for a madly dangerous enterprise like that. And in the second, it would have been useless. He was a bandit, and he’d once been a samurai, but since the four of us were not about to charge the place with our swords flashing and arrows humming over our heads, it hardly mattered. He knew nothing of infiltration, of quiet and secret work in the dark. His idea of disguise was a hood over his head. He could not help us even if he wanted to.
“Get her back to her family,” I answered. “Masako’s husband will look after her.” At least I hoped he would, in memory of his wife.
I reached into my belt for another string of coins, but Otani shook his head. “I never fulfilled my first obligation to you,” he said quietly, glancing at Jinnai, who was waiting behind me. “This will settle the debt?”
I agreed, rose, and touched Ozu lightly on the shoulder. She looked up, and I wished I had words to offer her anguished, trusting face.
I’d seen that face for the first time the day Ozu had arrived at Madame’s school. She’d been nearly five years old, skinny enough to be ugly, with a head of tangles that, in the end, had to be shaved off and a set of lungs that any warrior, bellowing his rage in battle, might have envied.
An aunt had dropped her at the gate, a wizened old peasant woman with next to no flesh on her bones. As a farewell, Ozu bit her. Then she tried to climb the gate. Then she just screamed.
When the tumult had died down, I went to see what I could find out about Madame’s newest girl.
Ozu had dug herself a hole under the hedge and was huddled there, refusing to come out, her fierce, wet face peering suspiciously between her grubby knees. Masako was kneeling nearby, talking to her gently. The older girl had the puffy, reddened beginning of an impressive black eye.
When I knelt down as well, Ozu drew in a breath to scream again.
“Make more noise and I’ll slice your ears off and put them in the soup tonight,” I told her.
Ozu shut her mouth.
Masako glared at me. “No one will hurt you,” she told Ozu. “Don’t try to scare her, Kata!”
“Don’t lie to her.” I looked at the little girl in her muddy hole. “That’s not much of a hiding place,” I offered. “I could show you a better one.”
Ozu eyed me skeptically. Masako frowned, got to her feet, pulled me up as well, and dragged me a few paces away.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
“The same thing you are.”
She snorted. “Hardly. You never show any interest in the new girls. What’s special about this one?”
I shrugged.
“Let her alone, Kata. She’s terrified.”
“She fights when she’s terrified,” I answered.
I’d seen plenty of girls arrive at the school. Some were brought by families who could no longer feed them. Others Madame found by the roadside. Usually they wept, or hid, or fearfully obeyed every command. Very few bit, or punched, or screamed until dust fell from the rafters.
Masako set her face in an expression as stubborn as an ox who wouldn’t pull a cart another step. “Don’t, Kata.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t try to …”
I lifted my eyebrows.
“Don’t try to make her like you.”
I let my breath out slowly through my nose. “You think she’s safer being like you?”
“Just let her be. I’ll get her out of there.”
I shrugged again. It was not worth fighting over a starving scrap of a girl. Let Masako have her, comfort her, look after her, the way she did with all the younger girls. If such coddling ruined what might have been a vicious fighter, what did it matter to me?
“As long as she keeps quiet,” I said, and left the two of them together.
Now the same face that had peered out of the hole in the hedge was looking up at me, and I wanted to promise that I’d return safely with the girl who’d been a mother to her. But I could make no such promise.
And if I were too late, or if Masako’s prison was too strong, then I would have been right on that day by the hedge. It would have been better for Ozu to learn to be more like me, instead of taking her example from Masako’s tender heart.
I flicked a glance at the mouth of the alley, and Ozu dashed off, her muddy sandals slapping the ground. Otani followed her, and a moment or two later, Jinnai and I moved out into the street.
A narrow wooden bridge over the ditch led to a gate in the mansion’s hedge, but that was not our destination. Only a fool attacks the enemy’s position at its best-defended point. Jinnai led me along the ditch to a corner, and when we turned it we were in an alley even narrower than the first.
On either side was an earthen wall, each higher than my head and topped with a narrow peaked roof to keep off rain and discourage climbers. The Takeda mansion lay to our left, and another estate was to our right, no doubt that of a retainer and ally who’d be delighted to capture a pair of sneaking thieves and hand them over to the city’s lord.
Ahead of us, where the alley met another street, I could see Ozu’s small form kneeling in the dirt, playing some game with pebbles and sticks. Glancing behind, I saw Otani, hood over his head again, leaning against one of the walls, cleaning his fingernails with his dagger and looking like he might be there all evening.
I turned my gaze back to Jinnai. “You could,” I pointed out, “simply tell me about the layout of the place. And the guards. And everything you know.”
“I could,” he agreed cheerfully, “but I don’t want to. Then you’d leave me behind.” He’d reached a bamboo pipe protruding through the left-hand wall, dripping an unpleasant ooze into the ditch. Was this his way in? I was not fastidious, but I’d never yet had to crawl through a sewer into a latrine to finish a mission. I’d just as soon not start today.
Jinnai shook his head, as if he’d guessed what I was thinking. “I can manage better than that,” he said, and pointed to a second drain, farther down the wall, wider than the first and more pleasant to the nose. All that seemed to be dripping out of it was water.
“The bathhouse drain?”
He nodded. “Follow me.”
I’d rather have delayed until full dark, but Jinnai and I had argued this out while we waited for the sun to set. He claimed that, once the light was entirely gone, the guards would begin to patrol the grounds. “Better to make our move early,” he’d insisted. “Everyone will have their minds on dinner.” Since he knew the territory and I did not, I’d agreed. But it made me nervous all the same.
Now Jinnai looked ahead, to where Ozu knelt, and behind, at Otani. Neither gave any signal of danger, and he seemed satisfied. “Come on.”
Without a moment of hesitation, he stepped into the ditch. Mud swallowed his legs up to the calves, but he worked his way across, grabbed the lip of the drain, and heaved himself into it headfirst.
I did hesitate, feeling exposed with the last of the daylig
ht lying across my shoulders. But then I tossed my hat aside and stepped down into the stinking mud as well.
Jinnai was skinny enough to make a good thief, and I was less wide in the shoulders than he was, so I could worm my way into the pipe after him. Not quickly, and not easily. I’d felt exposed before, but that feeling was nothing to letting my backside and legs hang out for all the world to see. Still, I forced myself to trust that Otani and Ozu would keep the alley clear, and at last I wriggled my entire body into the tube.
The pipe seemed to constrict around me. Each breath tightened my ribs and shoulder blades against its surface. I inched forward in darkness, moving up a gentle slope, Jinnai’s feet not a handsbreadth from my face, and told myself firmly that of course there was enough air. I was not going to die here, trapped like a rat in a sewer. Like a pebble in a bank of hardened mud. Like a stupid girl who’d trusted a thief.
Each breath tasted stale and damp. I wondered how far we’d gone. I wondered if I could wiggle backward if I needed to, back to that filthy ditch and the free, if foul, air.
Ahead of me, Jinnai’s feet stopped moving. I heard a rasping sound, like the chirps from a cricket made of metal, that seemed to go on for several hours, possibly an entire year. Then came Jinnai’s whisper.
“Brace my feet.”
I squirmed farther up in the pipe. His slimy toes fumbled at my head. I inched up more so that his feet could rest on my shoulders and tensed myself against the sides of the pipe.
Jinnai pushed. There was a grunt of effort. He pushed harder, and something grated and snapped.
Shoving against my shoulders once more, Jinnai moved forward. It did not take long before his form vanished from the pipe in front of me. Then an arm came groping down, and I seized it and was pulled out.
I gasped for air and wiped damp strands of hair out of my mouth. Crouched beside me, green mildew smeared across his face, Jinnai grinned before he picked up the tiny saw, shorter than his hand, that he’d used to cut through the bamboo slats of the grille covering the drain’s mouth. He replaced the saw neatly in a quilted silk bag that he tucked inside his jacket. I glimpsed other tools as well. He came on a mission well prepared.
Two tubs, shoulder height, lurked in the gloom, and buckets were lined neatly against the wall, but there were no signs of bathers or servants. It seemed Jinnai was correct. Everyone, master and mistress and servants alike, was busy with the last meal of the day.
As Jinnai carefully fit the bamboo grille back into place over the mouth of the drain, I stepped off the wooden platform where the tubs and buckets were kept and crossed the smooth earth floor to the bathhouse door. Kneeling, I lowered my head close to the ground, so that my face would not be at eye level, ready to catch the glance of any passerby. Then I slid the door open a crack and peered out.
A formal garden lay ahead of me, dull gray in the fading light, surrounded by a thick hedge on three sides. On the fourth side, to my left, was a wall of the Takeda mansion. Shadows passed behind screened windows; voices drifted through the paper. Someone was playing a wooden flute indoors, no doubt entertaining the warlord and his guests.
Jinnai came to crouch beside me, studied the garden for a moment or two, slid the door open just enough to squeeze through, and vanished. I went after him.
Only a paper screen separated us from the inhabitants of the mansion at their meal. But at least neither the warlord nor any of his family or friends chose that moment to step outside, slip on their sandals, and take an evening stroll to appreciate the moonlight reflected in the garden’s pond.
Still, my back itched as if there were a hundred eyes upon me. I followed Jinnai, sauntering across the smooth stone paths just like an invited guest with every right to be here. We turned and ducked behind the protection of a willow tree dangling its leaves to the ground. Those leaves brushed a hedge with a gate in it, similar to, though smaller than, the one in front of the house.
Jinnai slipped the latch loose and peered through. I joined him.
The last of the light was vanishing, the sky above deepening its shade every minute, stars sharpening from dim sparkles to distinct pinpricks in the blue. And now we were in our keenest danger yet.
We were looking out at a dirt yard where the working buildings of the Takeda residence stood. Directly across from us was a stable with a well nearby. Beside it, a long, low structure that was probably a barracks for soldiers or guards stood against the compound’s back wall. On the left side of the yard I glimpsed the kitchen, a small, separate building whose open door let light and heat and smoke spill out. Servants were leaving with full trays and pitchers, returning with empty ones. They seemed to be carrying their burdens into the mansion through a side entrance, rather than crossing their lord’s private garden.
The same thing, unfortunately, could not be said of a man who shoved back the door of a latrine alongside the stable’s nearest wall, straight in front of us. He stepped out into the quiet night, adjusting the skirts of the short kimono he wore over his full trousers.
The rich brown weave of his clothing was embroidered with maple leaves in red and black; his obi glittered with gold. No servant wore clothes like this. He was a guest or a member of the household, I thought in dismay, as he sighed in relief, stretched, and headed straight across the hardpacked dirt toward us, clearly intending to wander through the garden on his way back to dinner.
I wanted to glare at Jinnai, but he was already burrowing into the roots beneath the hedge, ducking his face against the earth so that only his black hair showed. I eased the gate shut and stepped to the willow tree, slipping through its curtain of leaves, setting the trunk between myself and the intruder.
I pressed my face against the bark, letting my hair blend with the shadows, as Jinnai had done. I could feel my heart thumping against the tree and breathed slowly, easing air in and out between my lips, trying to think of myself as an extension of the willow, living its slow life between root tendril and leaf tip.
Those leaves were still swaying from my passage through them when the garden gate swung open.
Slow breath, slow heartbeat. I didn’t dare turn my face to see if Jinnai was well concealed beneath the hedge, to check if the man had noticed a lump beneath the bushes or the restless willow leaves on a night without any wind.
The gate swung shut. Sandals scuffed on the stone path.
The man was humming. With slow, easy steps, he made his way around the pond, passing within arm’s reach of the tree where I was hidden. His pace never faltered. I turned my head a fraction of an inch and, through the strands of my hair and the long leaves of the willow, saw him slip off his sandals. In spotless white socks, he stepped onto the veranda. A screen slid open, and warm lamplight streamed out. But all it did was cast deeper shadows over Jinnai and me in our hiding places.
A graceful figure in a long white kimono, hair sweeping smoothly over her shoulders, welcomed the man inside. The screen slid shut.
I stayed still, counted slowly to a hundred, and then peeled myself away from the tree, giving it a soft pat of thanks. Jinnai wriggled out from beneath the hedge.
“I told you we should have waited until they were asleep,” I said, with as much venom as I could infuse into my softest whisper.
“And I told you the guards patrol when the family goes to bed,” Jinnai answered as we both came to kneel by the gate once more. “Besides, it wouldn’t be half as exciting if everyone was snoring.”
My eyes went sharply to his face.
His own eyes were narrow but bright. A smile was tugging at a corner of his mouth. His body was as tense as a bowstring, ready to twang if plucked. His whole face was so vividly alight that I almost didn’t need the illumination from the mansion at our backs to see it.
He’d spoken the truth. He was enjoying himself. My mission and my friend’s lives were at stake, and the partner I’d reluctantly accepted was having fun.
ELEVEN
At the sight of my outraged face, Jinnai only grinned w
ider.
“Do you think I don’t know you, Kata? You wouldn’t be half as good if you didn’t love this, too,” he said under his breath. Then he eased the gate open for a second time.
Servants were still passing back and forth from the kitchen, but fewer now, with longer gaps between them. Jinnai seized one of those gaps to dash through the gate. In a few quick strides he was across the yard, up on the roof of the latrine, then onto the roof of the stable.
I waited, fuming, while a maid moved briskly from the house to the kitchen with an empty pitcher and returned with a full one. How dare Jinnai insult me by claiming I was as reckless as he was?
How dare he know that it wasn’t fear or worry for my friends that was quickening my heart, tightening my breath, making my blood rush through my veins until my fingers tingled and twitched?
On my very first mission I’d learned how it felt to be alone in an enemy’s stronghold, with nothing but my skills and my silence to guard me from discovery, imprisonment, even torture and death.
It felt like soaring.
It felt cold and sweet as ice.
It felt as if fear itself was sharpened to a tool in my hand.
Every mission was like that. Even this one. Even now. But Jinnai had no right to know it.
Once the maid had disappeared from sight, I took my chance as Jinnai had, charging across the yard, onto the latrine, and up onto the higher roof. I lay flat and rolled over the peak onto the sloping side farthest from the mansion.
Jinnai was there before me. Side by side with him, facedown in the bristly thatch, he and I stretched ourselves out with just our eyes over the roof’s highest point. Below, I could hear horses shifting their weight from hoof to hoof. One let out a long, juddering sigh through soft lips.
For the moment, despite my misgivings, Jinnai and I were probably as safe as we could be. If servants or guests or householders passed this way, they were not likely to look up. People rarely did. And even if a restless glance did travel upward, we’d be invisible in the gathering darkness, unless we were fools enough to sit or stand and let ourselves be silhouetted against what little light remained in the sky.
Deadly Wish: A Ninja’s Journey Page 8
