“Betray?” I reared back.
“That is why you are so dangerous.” Ashikaga’s heart finger slid down my forehead to the tip of my nose. “Part of me can’t help wanting to give you everything.” No smile, no mocking glint. Just the stark, unbearable words. Somehow sharper than the mockery. Ashikaga put a hand to the linen chest-binding. “I find I’m not quite ready to share this last, remaining piece. Can you be . . . can we be tonight as we have been?”
A handmaiden would duck her head and give a shy smile. A teahouse girl would give a sulky punch to Ashikaga’s chest and mutter a bawdy joke.
I wedged my two fists between us and pushed. My lordling fell backwards onto the bedroll. I straddled a wide-eyed Ashikaga, staring up at me with teeth bared in a suppressed snarl. Inside the tangled curtain of my hanging hair, I bent low, a copy of the teasing almost-kiss my lordling had given me at the start of this. “As you wish, sir,” I said in the roughest, homeliest Northern dialect I could muster.
The lovely curves of Ashikaga’s mouth quirked into a smile, erasing that terrible vulnerability. Ashikaga pushed up the last bit to press lips to mine. The heated itching eased against the cool, firm pressure of my lordling’s mouth. For a long, suspended moment, the feel of Ashikaga, all sinuous, lithe strength, filled me, leaving no more room for awe or hurt or indecision.
A basso rumble, insistent as swallow yellow jackets in a closed room, jolted me to break away. The cherry tree kami was powerfully disturbed. Then from somewhere close came a muffled, indrawn breath, rasping painfully through a grief-closed throat—sobbing just barely discernible under the angry bees.
Ashikaga grunted, glowering below me. Actually, not a glower so much as a glow?
Yes, a red glow outlined those fine features. But the light wasn’t from Ashikaga, it came from behind. I twisted around. The clear outline of a human glowed safflower-paste red through the paper.
The figure had the elongated oval symmetry of the full swept hair of a female. It hovered outside, glowing like a lantern and such a sense of wrong that I almost gagged. Dust and heat seemed to thicken the air.
“Lily!” Ashikaga sat up. Couldn’t my lordling see it? Feel it? The sound of Ashikaga’s voice brought a suffocating wave of anger from the figure behind the paper, drowning me from head to toe.
“You’re trembling. Your hands are burning up.” Ashikaga pulled us both to a kneeling position.
I shook my head. Utter despair flowed in from all around, closing my throat. Ashikaga supported me with one arm, speaking words I couldn’t understand in a fierce tone, shaking me. I couldn’t care. Wasted breath. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. All effort was wasted; what could matter when I had waited, waited so long? Nursing the bitter dregs of tender passion in my heart for a husband who never came. A husband who crumpled my carefully drawn and worded letters and threw them to the dirt. Who had given me only one son I could call my own, cleaving my other child to himself far away up North. A husband who finally came within a li of Kyo no Miyako only to waste the last of his failing health on an unnatural, wrongful love—
An angry rumble dimmed the glowing presence for a moment, the crimson veil shrouding my face, turning to a fine smoke. Breath whooshed into my lungs.
“My husband!” I fought against hands that gripped me at the waist, bucking and clawing. I had to get free, I had to go to my husband, force him to see my love.
“Calm down. You have no husband! You’re a cook’s daughter from the Ashikaga Han. Tiger Lily!”
From a place deep inside me where crimson smoke made an impenetrable haze, a cold flame flickered into life, a painful clarity cutting through the haze.
Tiger Lily.
I flinched away. Again in the crisp-cold purity of Whispering Brook’s penetrating voice. Tiger Lily!
—And I came to myself with a violent jerk. I was on hands and knees at the foot of the shoji, my fingertips scraped raw on the tatami floor. Ashikaga held me from behind with tense arms around my waist. The presence, the red-lit figure, was gone.
“Lily?” Ashikaga tugged, and I tumbled into a tangle of arms and lap, head smacking the middle of my lordling’s bandaged chest. My sides heaved like Father’s kitchen bellows, but there just wasn’t enough air in the room for my aching lungs.
“What was that? What happened to you?”
“A yurei,” I gasped. The cherry tree spirit grumbled a confirmation at the word.
“That strange light?”
Ashikaga’d seen it, too. Definitely a human spirit, then. Not kami. Relief washed over me. “Is it gone?”
“Somewhere far away, I hope. Did you use Jindo to send it away?”
I shook my head. “It let me go.” Not exactly a lie. Not exactly truth.
“You fought like a wildcat to get out the door. What were you trying to do?”
I shook my head again.
Ashikaga’s hands came down heavily on my shoulders, holding me face-to-face. “A yurei? Are you sure it wasn’t a kami trick? All I saw was a strange glow.”
My body felt watery and weak, like I was the one who’d been drinking too much rice wine. It wasn’t quite the hollow feeling I got after a kami came into me; instead of languorous, I felt wrung out. Yet I’d felt the yurei in the same place inside me Whispering Brook and Asama-yama had indwelled before. The kami welled up from that place, but this yurei had somehow forced its way inside from without.
For an instant, I’d felt the impossible chill of Whispering Brook’s voice. A sharp contrast to that other feeling. No, I was sure. Whatever that was had nothing to do with the kami. It was purely human evil. The yurei had let me go in the end, but I wasn’t the prey it hunted.
“Your father,” I said, and then slapped a hand over my mouth. Those letters had disturbed Ashikaga enough. My wild conjectures about that haze, and what it was, and why it had forced me to rant about unfaithful husbands—that could only lead down a darker path.
“What does he have to do with that thing?”
Something sticky clung to my eyelashes. I put a palm to my right eye and rubbed. “I’m not sure. I don’t know why I said that. It’s all confusing and murky.”
Ashikaga shrugged on a robe and rose. Quick hands tightened the loose, white obi and reached for the tanto knife tucked into the coarser, formal obi draped over the robe-stand. “Stay here.”
“Where are you going?”
Ashikaga stopped with the shoji half-open. “You lied just now. It scared you so much that you’re lying to me. You’ve never done that before.”
My chest felt tight. “You can’t fight it with steel.”
“I’ve met the yurei before, Lily. You have, too. It’s too late to shield me with lies.”
Met the yurei? A memory rose to the surface. The first night I’d spent in the Great House as Ashikaga lay mortally wounded by the fox soldier’s arrow, this smothering, angry presence had come to my room. Ignorant as I was, at the time, of kami, of Jindo, and what it meant for kami to indwell a human and share their power, still Whispering Brook had defended me even then from that angry presence.
Ashikaga only had me as protection.
“Stay,” I pleaded.
“It’s not after me,” Ashikaga said quietly. “Lily, I can’t just sit here and pretend. Father is dying.” The flickering brazier thinned the sharp planes of my lordling’s face, made the armorless form seem slimmer and younger and more vulnerable in a way daylight was never allowed to reveal. The shoji sliding shut made a hard, conclusive sound.
“Dying?” I whispered into the empty room. The Lord Daimyo had been ill since before his campaign against the Pretender Emperor, yes, but dying? Then again, only something drastic could have changed the Daimyo’s deeply entrenched insistence that Ashikaga stay away from
Kyoto. The sudden summons was rumored in the court to be a result of the Emperor’s insistence on meeting the person responsible for the Pretender Emperor’s beheading. Or possibly something to do with Lord Yoshikazu and the succession. I’d been so caught up in the lessons Beautiful and Little Turtle crammed down my throat and trying to make myself invisible that I’d never spent much time thinking why we were here at all.
I should have paid closer attention. No wonder Ashikaga was drinking with his brother and full of these quicksilver moods. The Lord Daimyo was dying. The man who had been Ashikaga’s whole world, the reason for who Ashikaga Yoshinori had become, was dying.
Wobbly legs got me to the door and down the nightingale hall in time to catch Ashikaga kneeling outside the Daimyo’s fusuma, ear pressed to the jamb.
I stopped, the floor quieting under my shifting weight. I hovered there in the hall, feeling each bone in my body like a rock trying to drag the weak frame of my body down. What did I think I could do here? Stop an evil spirit? Keep an old man’s body from failing? I choked back a bitter laugh. Better to retreat back to my own room, curl into a ball and hope for a brighter morning.
So hungry. So tired. So alone.
Through the paneled windows I heard the watchman cry the hour of the cow—the witching hour when even plants and animals slept. But not the cherry trees. Would the grumbling ever stop long enough to give me some peace? Anger, a strangely unfamiliar heat, curled around my toes, spiraling up my legs. All alone and beset on all sides. This was unbearable, this was—
On the opposite side of the hall, a glow started. It spread out like ripples on a pond, resolving itself into the figure of a woman in full, seven-layered court dress, her raven’s wing hair swept back into a long plait whose ends drifted into smoke and vanished into the night. Around her neck hung a polished mirror on a string. A metal strip supporting three lit candles bound her forehead. She held a wooden mallet in one hand.
Between her clenched teeth was a wooden comb, but her voice wailed clearly in my head.
Alone, he left me alone. He chose that unnatural creature over me. He left me alone.
“It’s here?” whispered my lordling, leaping between me and the glowing figure. I opened my mouth in warning. A song burst out instead, as if it had been lying in wait upon my tongue.
It is for your sake,
That I walk, careless, the fields in spring,
my garment’s hanging sleeves sodden with falling rain.
Ashikaga clapped a hand over my mouth, jerking me close. The Jindo song would not be contained. As soon as the first notes spilled out, the cherry trees’ latent grumble formed itself into a wedge of sound, driving straight into my belly. The kami rooted there, insinuating tendrils of questing strength up through my legs, anchoring them. My arms, spread themselves wide across Ashikaga’s chest like tree-limbs.
Harsh sibilants split the quite hall.
Blight. Disease.
The cherry trees grumbled as fiercely as the Ugajin boys being routed to rice-paddy duty.
The yurei glowed brighter, hotter, dust motes coalescing in the illumined air to clog my nose. I gasped, the song faltering.
What unnatural evil do you work on my husband?
The words burned like a hot poker. The cherry trees weren’t as old as Whispering Brook and couldn’t indwell as fully. The kami’s diluted strength couldn’t sustain the song. Notes faltered again. The court-lady apparition lifted a sleeve, empty of arm or hand. Somehow a bundle of rice straw dangled from the end.
My lordling shuddered, arm muscles going slack. “What is that?”
Not a bundle after all. The straw’s top third was tied off with a red thread, forming a blocky head. The bottom third was divided in two like legs. Wara ningyo. A straw doll curse.
Young as it was, the cherry tree spirit was still a kami. The roots connecting me to the ground swelled. Cool power like spring sap boiled up into my legs, and along with it, the song.
It is for your sake,
That I walk, careless, the fields in spring. . . .
The ghastly figure rippled at the notes, like gauze blown by a gust, and then resettled. Ashikaga stepped closer, hands fisting. The yurei’s other, horribly armless, sleeve rose. A thick metal nail as long as my littlest finger floated in the air. With a keening cry, the yurei thrust the nail directly into the straw bundle’s heart. The hot poker thrust down my throat, straight for my belly, scalding the kami from inside me—releasing the power from the song.
Pain surged into the empty space. The song silenced.
A groan sounded from inside the Daimyo’s room.
“Mother,” gasped Ashikaga, “stop.”
Light flared within the figure. Like a rippling pond settling long enough to make out a reflection, the lady’s features resolved into a powdery white, brows painted in angry streaks high on the forehead, lips smeared in benihana crimson. Dull black, outsized pupils swiveled towards my lordling.
Breath wouldn’t come, no matter how my raw lungs ached. Song scrabbled at the walls of my throat, vibrating like a trapped mosquito, as if the nail in the wara ningyo had pinioned me. I looked down. Above my heart, a smear of red seeped through the robe. My knees crumpled, slinging me to the floor at Ashikaga’s feet.
The yurei bore down on us, the straw doll flung upwards. The fusuma panel to the Daimyo’s sleeping quarters slid with a slow hiss. Inside the room the verandah window gaped open. Framed by the grumbling cherry trees’ uppermost branches, the moon reached pale silver fingers to stroke the sleeping face of Lord Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, Daimyo of the Northern Han.
He had withered since Asama-yama, but in sleep his cheeks were sunken, gaunt next to a slack mouth. Hitching rasps matched the shallow rise and fall of his chest.
“You will not enter,” said my lordling spreading himself across the threshold.
The straw doll lowered. The yurei rippled in unseen wind; sleeves dissolving, robe tattering to mist. It reappeared closer to Ashikaga. Far away, a woman’s voice curdled the air with heart-rending sobs.
“Mother,” said my lordling. “Don’t.”
The yurei blazed, rice wine flaring on a charcoal brazier. Pain split my breast. The seeping spot of blood seeping larger, soaking to a palm-size stain. The yurei flew at Ashikaga.
My lordling seized up, eyes going wide, tendons straining in that long neck, as the yurei reached Ashikaga—went through flesh and bone, that burning glow lighting my lordling from within for a horrific moment.
The yurei was hurting Ashikaga and I lay useless on the floor.
The yurei emerged from Ashikaga’s back with a popping pressure in the dust-choked room, floating past me to bend over the sleeping Daimyo’s face like a pink-tinged shroud.
I pressed at my sides with two hands, managing a shuddering breath that felt like needles scraping my lungs. The Daimyo’s chest rose, fell once.
Then stilled.
Ashikaga stayed stiff as a wooden statue, unmoving. Nothing stood between the yurei and the Daimyo’s life. I pulled, from deep inside my belly, tattered remnants of breath that seared the place in my chest where the wara ningyo nail had struck me. I pushed a thin, wavering stream of air across bone-dry lips:
It is for your sake . . .
A long, grief-honed sigh sounded in my ears, and then the yurei flung itself away from the sleeping man out through the window, blinking out like a spent firefly.
Ashikaga stumbled over to the Daimyo. Kneeling, my lordling put the back of a hand to the Daimyo’s forehead. Sweat glistened in the moonlight on the Daimyo’s brow, but the silent room was broken again by uneven, rasping breaths.
My lordling released a long, slow breath, head drooping.
“He rests?”
Ashikaga turned, eyes resting on me for a long moment, but not really seeing anything at all. Only the lowering of those thin shoulders signaled the end of whatever pain the yurei had inflicted. Moving without the usual grace, my lordling rose, backed out the entryway, and slid it shut, returning to pull me upright.
“How did you know the yurei was. . . ?”
Ashikaga put a finger across my lips. As if my voice alone would wake the Daimyo or his attendants when a yurei had not. “Not here. Someone will come.”
Keeping my tongue still as we made our way back to my lordling’s room required pressing arms firmly across my chest, hands curled into fists.
Ashikaga settled next to the writing desk and still-open box of letters. Reaching in, my lordling moved the letters away and pulled out a bundle of straw, tied at the top and divided at the bottom.
“Wara ningyo,” he said. “Like the one the yurei held. My mother performed a straw doll curse.”
I shivered. The room, so warm before, felt like a winter morning in the kitchen before Father blew fire from banked coals. Ashikaga glared.
“Why so silent? My dead mother’s yurei just attacked and you have no solemn judgment? No words of wisdom about balancing the old ways?”
Ashikaga lunged up and scrambled over to me between one breath and the next, thrusting the horrid, unclean straw doll in my face. Cruel fingers gripped my upper arms. My hands fell away from my chest. They were covered in blood. The stain was a soaking blot on my robe.
“Lily?” Ashikaga said, the syllables drained of the anger from an instant before. I reached for that pale face, but the room dimmed, faded, and then went completely black.
Chapter Seven
* * *
FOR A WHILE, there was only a cold nothingness. Not crystal-clear cold like Whispering Brook or the shivery bite of a winter snow. A bottomless, formless cold, an absence of heat, of life, of consciousness.
The Straw Doll Cries at Midnight (A Tiger Lily Novel Book 2) Page 8
