Deadly Flowers

by Sarah L. Thomson

  The old man drew in his breath at the sight of the jewel and turned to Tosabo. “You brought this here?”

  It was not anger, not yet, but the abbot’s voice held the potential for it. Such a wizened little man; his bones looked as fragile as a bird’s. But in a way I could not account for, he made me think of Madame.

  Tosabo did not flinch. “Any blame falls on me, holy one,” he said cheerfully. “But I did not know this was what they carried.”

  “You did not know,” the abbot grumbled. “If there were a silk cord that tied earth to heaven, you would pull it apart and say you did not know.”

  “My sins are heavy,” Tosabo agreed. “But the question is, how many are left?”

  Both peered at the pearl in my palm as if it were likely to move.

  “How many what?” I demanded.

  The two old men glanced up at me in surprise, as if they had forgotten I was anything other than a hand.

  “See how thin the gold band is?” Tosabo murmured. He’d forgotten me again. “Three, perhaps?”

  “Four at the most.”

  “Three what?” I closed my fingers tightly over the pearl and glared.

  “Wishes,” Tosabo said, shaking his head a little sadly. “Put it away, my dear, do. Dreadful thing. Some foolish sorcerer bound a demon in that pearl, who knows how many years ago. The demon is the servant of the jewel’s owner. Like all servants, it must obey.”

  “And like all prisoners, it longs for freedom,” murmured the abbot.

  “A certain number of tasks, and the demon is done. Its term of service is over,” Tosabo added. “And it will take a price for its service.” His eyes were worried. “The soul of the last person to command it.”

  “So she could …” Saiko breathed. She was at my elbow. “Ask for—what? What could it give her?”

  “It depends on which demon is inside.” The abbot’s mouth looked as if he’d bitten into a sour plum. “Some of these demons can grant—well. No matter. Child, do not think of it.”

  Absurd. How could I not think of it? What could the pearl do for me, if I asked?

  What had it already done for me?

  For one heartbeat I was back up in a tree, staring down at a soldier’s helmeted head, wishing desperately that he would move. He had. Then I was lying in the grass, listening to three mounted horsemen gallop up a hill, wishing they would not hear a muffled sneeze. They had not.

  Had I spent two wishes on things as simple as that? But I had not known, then. I’d had no idea what kind of a gift Ichiro had given me.

  Could the pearl turn me invisible? Teach me to fly? Could I leap over castle walls, transform into mist or smoke, slide through keyholes or under locked doors?

  I remembered that dizzying moment of freedom I’d felt in the castle of Ichiro’s uncle, Hikosane. That knowledge that I could do anything—anything.

  And that was when I’d had nothing but myself and my wits and my training to rely on. Now I had so much more.

  And I had been planning to sell the pearl. For gold. Gold!

  “No, my dear.” Tosabo was frowning at me. “Do not be tempted. What did you plan to do with it?”

  “Take it to our uncle,” Ichiro explained. “We thought he could—um. Do something. There are rituals, prayers. That kind of thing, to keep the demons away. Maybe you …?”

  The abbot shook his bald head. “Even if we did know the proper rituals, I would not let that thing stay here. There are, no doubt, priests who serve your family. They would know exactly what must be done.”

  I quickly stowed the pearl away inside my jacket once more, tying the pocket tightly shut. I felt Tosabo’s sharp eyes on me as I did so.

  “Keep it hidden,” the abbot said with a nod. “Keep it safe. Most importantly, keep it out of my monastery. Tosabo.” He looked sternly at his monk. “Make arrangements, please.”

  Earlier, Tosabo had asked me if I knew what I held in my hand. I hadn’t then. Now I did.

  No wonder Ichiro’s uncle had been glad to kill for this. No wonder it woke demons wherever we went.

  In my pocket I had something better than freedom. Something that could make me a legend. Something that could turn me into the greatest ninja who ever lived.

  Now I knew what I was holding.

  Power.

  EIGHTEEN

  Whatever Tosabo’s arrangements were, they seemed to be taking some time.

  “We could go,” Saiko said quietly as she sat beside me. “Couldn’t we?” She didn’t do anything so obvious as nod at the main gate, open in the morning sun. But I knew she was looking at it. So was I.

  We were sitting in the courtyard, watching the business of the monastery going on around us. Monks hurried by to prayer or meditation or study or whatever it was monks did. Novices ran past in groups, shaven-headed boys younger than Ichiro. Servants carried brooms and bowls and baskets of laundry. No one took much notice of us.

  Nothing stood between us and the gate. We could stroll calmly out. The gatekeeper would probably bow to Saiko as she went.

  “I didn’t know demons had souls,” Ichiro said thoughtfully. He was kneeling comfortably on the ground, feet tucked under him, leaning back against a sunlit patch of wall. Shave his head and he’d look as if he belonged here.

  “I don’t think so,” I answered Saiko softly, ignoring Ichiro’s comment. “Over there.”

  I flicked my eyes toward a corner of the courtyard, and Saiko glanced there as well, without turning her head. A group of young monks had just stripped off their outer robes, piling them on the ground. They gathered up the wide legs of their trousers, tucking them into their belts to give themselves more freedom to move. Then they picked up wooden staffs that had been left leaning against a wall.

  Apparently the monks here did more than pray and study and meditate.

  They paired up, took their weapons, and began simple exercises of strike and parry, starting slow and then speeding up until the staffs whirled in their hands.

  They were quite good. I felt my muscles flex and tense in sympathy, watching them. There were also enough of them to be a problem if we chose to leave now and they chose to object.

  Of course, if Tosabo and his abbot were right, I could easily defeat every monk in this monastery. I could snap my fingers and they would all drop dead. I could bring the whole temple down, watch its walls crumble to dust.

  But there were three wishes left, they’d thought. Perhaps four. I shouldn’t waste any. I would have to take care and think hard about how to make the demon in my pocket best serve me.

  Besides, now I could see Tosabo—where had he come from, exactly?—walking past the monks and pausing to watch as a pair finished up their exercises and began to spar in earnest.

  Tosabo lowered a pack that he held over one shoulder to the ground. He stood with his arms crossed, and the patience was suddenly gone from his face. Then he stepped forward and tapped the shorter of the two monks on the shoulder.

  Both stopped at once and bowed, but Tosabo wasn’t interested in a polite greeting. He gestured sharply, and the taller monk nodded and launched a kick at the old man’s head that had me sure I’d see his ancient brains splattered across the dusty ground.

  Instead, the younger monk was suddenly on his back, and Tosabo, his pack in his hand once more, was on his way across the courtyard to us before his opponent was able to pick himself painfully up.

  “Come along then, children,” Tosabo said cheerfully as he reached us. “Close your mouths, my dears; it’s been a terrible spring for flies. The abbot has agreed. My penance is to escort you safely to your uncle’s castle. A few of my friends will come along.”

  A few of Tosabo’s friends turned out to be most of the monks who’d been sparring in the yard. Even a warlord’s personal bodyguard would have hesitated to confront the hard-faced warrior monks riding alongside us.

  I think Tosabo noticed a flash or two of white fur in the long grass. The fox was still with us. But he said nothing about her, and
neither did I.

  “Why do you …” I asked after we had stopped for the night. Tosabo was kneeling by the fire, his eyes closed, warm orange light dancing over his features.

  Ichiro elbowed me in the ribs for interrupting a monk’s meditation, but Tosabo merely opened his eyes and smiled. He smiled more than anyone I’d ever known.

  “Do finish the question, my dear, so I can answer it.”

  Something in his eyes, dark and bright as the coals in the fire, made me think he knew just want I wanted to ask. And that irritated me. But clearly he was not going to offer me a thing unless I put my question into words.

  I struggled for a while to find the right phrase, and then gave up. “Stay there. At the temple,” I blurted. “You could be doing something real. In the world. You could—”

  “Do finish your thought, my dear.”

  “Fight.”

  Tosabo nodded. “I do. I fight daily.”

  “I don’t mean practice sparring,” I said impatiently.

  “Neither do I. I fight in deadly earnest. Anger, laziness, arrogance. Those are my enemies. Believe me, this is the hardest struggle I have ever faced.” He laughed at the look I could feel on my face. “No, my dear. I know it is not your battle yet. But someday you’ll turn that formidable will of yours on an enemy worthy of it. Meanwhile, let’s try to keep your trinket from causing more harm, shall we? Ichiro, do you remember what I taught you while we were riding? Good. Excellent. Listen.”

  Ichiro joined Tosabo and some of the other monks as they chanted, a slow, mesmerizing murmur that may have kept the demons at bay, or may have simply been designed to wash into my dreams like ocean waves and make me restless all night long.

  But Ichiro’s face, in the firelight—I had not seen him look so happy before.

  I had never noticed the trace of anxiety that was always on his features until it was gone. With his eyes closed, his lips shaping the words of the mantra, he looked—peaceful.

  It was strange. The serene look on his face did not make me feel exasperated, as Tosabo’s smile did. But it did make me feel oddly lonely. As if Ichiro were gone from me.

  And if he were, why should I care?

  He’d been my target. Then he’d been my prisoner. Then, somehow or other, he’d become something between my client, my responsibility, and my friend.

  But once I delivered him to his uncle’s castle, our ways would part. Surely. In a day or two Ichiro and Saiko would be safe with their family behind castle walls, and I’d be—well. Where would I be?

  Free to choose where I’d go. To choose what I’d do. To choose who I’d fight.

  No, I would be more than free. I would be—invulnerable. I’d have safety wrapped around me like a cloak, power like a blade in my hand.

  If, of course, Tosabo and his abbot had been right. If I really had a demon’s soul at my command.

  The monks seemed to have finished their chanting. Some lay down to sleep; others moved to the edge of the firelight, facing out, keeping guard. In the quiet, a tendril of doubt crept into my mind just as my hand crept inside my jacket. Could it really be true, this tale two old monks had spun me? They had seemed to know, and yet …

  “When we get to our uncle’s castle, I’m going to take a bath that will last for days.” Saiko sighed. “And then I’ll pluck my eyebrows. They must look like centipedes.”

  “I’m going to sleep,” Ichiro said happily. “On a bed. With three quilts over me. No, four. No …”

  And what about me? What would I do once we’d reached our destination?

  I would become the best ninja the world had ever seen. If those two old monks had known what they had been talking about.

  Inside my jacket, my fingers touched the pearl.

  There had been that soldier under the tree, the samurai on the road. But perhaps the soldier had merely heard a badger rustling in the undergrowth. Perhaps the samurai, riding hard, simply hadn’t heard Saiko’s sneeze.

  Saiko’s face hardened as she stared into the fire. “And I’m going to make sure Uncle Hikosane gets what he deserves,” she muttered.

  “A very perilous thing, what we deserve,” Tosabo remarked.

  “He did bring the pearl to me,” Ichiro objected. “You keep ignoring that, Saiko. We don’t really know that he’s as bad as you think.”

  Saiko snorted delicately. Only Saiko could do that. “We don’t?”

  No, we didn’t really know. But perhaps we could find out.

  Find out what Ichiro’s uncle truly was. Find out whether Tosabo and his abbot were right.

  I’d never trust my life to a blade whose edge I hadn’t tested. If I were to rely on the pearl, I should know what it could do.

  My hand slipped out of my jacket, clenched in a tight fist.

  “My dear?” Tosabo, across the fire from me, sat suddenly upright. Then he was moving. But even Tosabo could not move faster than a wish.

  And I knew.

  The scene unfolded before my eyes, as if I were standing only a few feet away. Bodies of bandits and samurai lay on the bloody, trampled grass. One warlord with the Kashihara dragonfly on his breastplate stood disarmed in the center of a ring of swords. Another was before him, his shorter sword still thrust through his sash, his longer blade outstretched, its tip under the chin of the man who stood empty-handed before him.

  I didn’t need to see the two faces, so similar—the same thick eyebrows, the same strong noses and stubborn jaws—to realize that these men were brothers. The knowledge was already there, in my mind.

  It was Ichiro and Saiko’s father who stood with a blade to his throat. It was their uncle, Hikosane, who held the sword’s hilt. What had Saiko said about him? That she had never seen a colder heart?

  Then Hikosane drew back a step and let the bandits press in. His brother’s back straightened. He looked Hikosane in the eye and threw himself forward.

  There were yells; swords swung and flashed. But the weaponless man eluded every bandit there to seize the blade of his brother’s sword with his bare hands. He had not been able to choose life, but he’d found the freedom to choose the death he wanted. In moments there was a sword through his throat, and his brother’s hand was still on the hilt.

  The vision was gone, and Tosabo’s apprehensive and angry face was between me and the fire.

  I heard a faint whimper from Ichiro. Saiko was sitting very still, her perfect face blank.

  I’d wished for all of us to know the truth about Ichiro’s uncle. The brother and sister must have seen the same vision I had. They must have watched their father die.

  And now I knew that the monks had been right. This pearl could grant me—whatever I wanted.

  I should have been triumphant. Instead, a harsh feeling swept over me, as though acid had washed through my veins. I remembered feeling cold up a tree and in the grass above a road, but this was worse. Something dark and horrible chuckled. I was fairly sure I was the only one who could hear it.

  It took every ounce of my strength not to let myself shudder, not to let them all see what a wish had cost me.

  “Stupid child. Stupid!” I thought Tosabo was about to slap me. “Do you have no sense? More importantly, do you have no soul?” The little old monk gripped my chin hard enough to hurt, forcing my head close to his so that he could peer into my eyes. I should have knocked him aside, but I was too shaken and startled to do it.

  I felt his hand relax.

  “I should take it from you,” he muttered. “And I could, make no mistake—no, girl, I won’t. The abbot wouldn’t let me back in the monastery, for a start, and I owe him obedience, which is something you could stand to learn.” He let my chin go. “Look at the pearl.”

  My fingers opened.

  “Do you see? Look, child. Look at the gold.”

  The ring of gold around the pearl had been about as thick as my thumb when I had first examined it, back at the school. Now it was as narrow as my little finger.

  “Once that gold is gone, the demon is f
ree,” Tosabo said, and there was anger in his voice, humming under tight control. “The demon you just felt—oh, yes, my dear, I know you did. Do you want to set that thing free on the world? On yourself? On your friends? I know what it is to hold a weapon in your hand. But do you have the strength to hold it and not use it? That is something we will see.”

  What good was a weapon if it was never used?

  “Girl? Tell me you’ve heard me.”

  I blinked at Tosabo. Of course I’d heard him. Saiko had heard every word, too.

  Ichiro had heard nothing. Unlike me, the boy did not let his pride keep him from shaking.

  “He killed …” Ichiro whispered. “Uncle Hikosane killed …”

  “Don’t be a fool.” Saiko’s voice was sharp and clear, and Ichiro flinched as if she’d flicked a whip at his face. “I told you he had a cold heart. I was wrong. He has no heart at all. And you might have seen it any time you looked at him. But you—you wanted to trust. To love, even.” Her lip curled up in disgust. “To hope he’d be another father for us.”

  Tosabo moved from my side to put an arm around the boy’s shoulders. He looked across the fire at Saiko with a frown. I looked at her as well, startled. There was nothing soft about Saiko now.

  “Grief is a weakness,” she told Ichiro. “Our father was not weak. He saw his own death coming, and he made sure who dealt the blow. You know why he did it. Father forced his own brother to kill him because his killer could not take the pearl. He knew that Hikosane would have no choice but to bring the jewel to you.”

  For no reason I could think of, I remembered the look in Saiko’s eyes as I had peered, upside down, through a window and unexpectedly caught her gaze. I had not known what to make of her then. I didn’t know now, as her words bored into Ichiro like the tip of a drill.