After a while, I became aware of form, feeling the shape of limbs as vague outlines and a vague sense of pressure. The cold hurt. Trying to push it away, I opened myself to it further, and that cold darkness rushed in, gleefully worming its way inside.
A flash of heat, a sound I strained towards through the bitter dark.
Something popped, and a slicing pain blossomed in my middle. A harmonic rumble faded just past the edge of hearing—and then the cold darkness swept everything away to an absolute nothing.
I awoke suddenly. Mind one moment pitch black, the next, full knowledge of who I was and that every muscle ached like I’d spent the night curled inside a sake cask. Only a sense of safety and blessed, blessed warmth kept me from trying to return to the dark.
Crusted sleep layered my eyelashes shut. Blinking didn’t help much, but then someone gently wiped at the corner of my eyes. My lordling’s face peered down at me, brow tightened with worry lines. Not a trace of the customary, sly glimmer showed in strangely flat eyes. Ashikaga had slicked back unruly hair into a tight plait, and changed robes to a formal jacket with overlaid kataginu vest that made that narrow chest look fuller. After all that had happened last night, my lordling chose to be the polished noble this morning. The sense of safety slipped away.
“You are awake? You have returned?”
“Did I go somewhere?”
“There was blood streaked down your robe. After the . . . the yurei your eyes were open but you were dead to the world. I couldn’t wake you.”
With a groan, I flopped my arm onto my chest. Questing fingers found only unmarked skin. No cut, no welling blood.
“How do you feel?”
“Ravenous.” My voice croaked like a crow’s.
Ashikaga gave me a smile that didn’t change the dull eyes—like an unpolished bronze mirror. Lying still beneath that gaze wasn’t comfortable at all. I tried to sit up, failed to work muscles gone limp as cooked noodles, and gave up.
“And the Lord Daimyo?” If Ashikaga were here with me, surely the Daimyo had come to no harm, but I wanted Ashikaga’s attention elsewhere. I needed time to think, without Ashikaga’s heavy presence, on what had happened last night with the yurei, the cherry trees, and this woundless blot on my robe.“As cranky as usual to judge from how quickly the handmaidens scampered this morning.” Ashikaga’s head tilted, the worry line blooming into a full-fledged furrowed brow. “I never thought that thing would hurt me, but it . . . it was stopping father’s breath.”
I focused on straightening the frayed end of my obi. My head ached. “I know nothing about that . . . abomination. But it wasn’t friendly.”
“You and your cherry trees don’t have a song to ward against yurei?”
I spread my hands. Despite my Jindo song, the yurei had hurt Ashikaga, almost hurt the Daimyo. What strange moods gripped my lordling? I didn’t have the strength to figure out how to react. “The wara ningyo curse can sometimes turn back on the person who performs it. If your mother killed herself, the curse might have twisted her spirit.”
“My mother is not a suicide,” said Ashikaga in that quiet, controlled voice that raised prickles all along the back of my neck. I should have held my tongue.
Ashikaga scooped up a handful of scrolls and dumped them into my lap. “All these are love letters. Pleading for father to let her come home. These are not the words of someone who planned to give up.” The rumors surrounding his mother’s death half a year ago had mostly been whispered by old coots and biddies in Auntie Jay’s teahouse. Lady Ashikaga had been gone in the Capital for so long that I barely remembered what she looked like. At the time, I hadn’t paid more than cursory attention—I had other, more immediate things to worry about. But it was an open secret in the village that the way Ashikaga Yasuko’s body had been found stank of suicide.
So Ashikaga wanted to believe Lady Ashikaga hadn’t killed herself. Was it easier to believe someone had hated her so much as to take her life?
Ashikaga’s hands curled into fists. “If she were planning to kill herself, she wouldn’t have done the wara ningyo curse. She didn’t want to die, she wanted her rival to die.”
“Rival?”
Ashikaga gave me a sideways glance with the sort of hauteur usually reserved for the other handmaidens. Somewhere in the past few minutes, Ashikaga’s rigid posture and tone had become all Kyoto noble, forcefully reminding me of who and what I was. I felt like he’d tugged the robe clean off me, leaving me exposed and vulnerable.
“I am my honored father’s progeny,” said Ashikaga slowly, using a register reserved for court speech. Each word dropped like a stone into the tense quiet. One fist rose, opened to a cupped palm, and closed deliberately and roughly onto the curve of my breast. “In all important ways.”
I jerked back, a blush furiously staining my cheeks. The past months spent coaxing me into relaxing my guard, making me believe we had some kind of common ground between us, erased in an instant. The flimsy illusion was broken. This was Ashikaga Yoshinori and I was a peasant. Was this how Ashikaga had felt all along? I’d dared speak of Lady Ashikaga and now I would pay.
The words sank in. My father’s progeny.
Ashikaga was the Daimyo’s child—this relationship was what my lordling tried to make me see. My memory flashed onto the picture of Zeami at the temple. A man, but one with fine features and the polish of a woman. The love that brought the Daimyo to Kyoto in his great illness wasn’t a rival court lady.
Zeami.
A flush broke over me as if I were soaking in an oak tub of hot water. Did my lordling mean for me to fill a role like Zeami did for the Daimyo? What could that mean? I wasn’t a player or a courtier to bridge the gaps between classes. Anger rose like bile in the back of my throat. Ashikaga couldn’t expect to play these subtle games if he wanted to remind me I was just a hick. We were not the same as Zeami and the Daimyo. This thing between us wasn’t the same.
Little Turtle’s polite tone sounded outside the fusuma. “Apologies for the disturbance, Lord Yoshinori.” She slid it open. Whatever I might have said, it was too late. Ashikaga turned dark and shuttered eyes on me again for an instant, but I couldn’t tell if it was meant to warn or wound before resolving into a bland expression. Drawing away from me. I scampered to the side just in time as Little Turtle pattered in with a tray.
“Lunch, as you requested,” she said, setting the tray down on the little table already crowded with scrolls, brush, and inkstone. She carefully did not look at the scattered scrolls on the tatami, my disheveled appearance, or the blood stain on my robe in a way that promised there would definitely be an accounting once she had me back in our own room.
Oh no. I’d slept the morning away. Why hadn’t Ashikaga woken me? I’d be grilled like a sweet potato on live coals once Little Turtle and Beautiful got their hands on me. Ashikaga made a throat-clearing noise. “That will be all.”
Little Turtle rose, but stood waiting, head downcast, hands perfectly folded at her waist.
“Yes, what is it?”
“I am bid remind Lord Ashikaga that Lord Hojo arrives today to present his Barbarian screens to the Lord Daimyo.”
Ashikaga gave a dismissive nod.
“And also to relay that the Chamberlain humbly requests that Lily help with preparations, if her services are no longer required here.”
The cold nothingness of the night before was preferable to enduring this mix of devilish glee and curiosity Little Turtle managed to convey with her delicate vocabulary and demure, high-pitched tone despite Ashikaga’s glower. My status among handmaidens surely irritated the Chamberlain. He’d carefully assigned me no evening duties unless it was attendance on my lordling. He always carefully phrased his work orders to me as part of a trio with Beautiful and Little Turtle—neatly sidestepping
the need to pinpoint the exact degree of politeness to use. He must be in a real tizzy about Lord Hojo’s arrival if he dared send Little Turtle to pull me away from Ashikaga. Not that I minded. It would be a relief to leave the room and my lordling’s strange mood.
“Tell the Chamberlain she’ll join you shortly,” said Ashikaga.
I pushed myself off the floor with arms and legs. The room gave a quick spin, went blurry for a moment, and then came back into focus.
“She will come in bit,” said Ashikaga harshly. “You may leave.”
“Until later,” said Little Turtle, bowing. My lordling had a noble’s right to do anything, but I was the one who would scrabble for answers for the scene she’d encountered here. After the door slid shut behind her, my lordling gave an exasperated huff and moved the table, scrolls, tray and all, next to me. Tugging me down to a sitting position and placing a cup to my lips, Ashikaga barely gave me time to open my mouth before bitter, young-leaf tea flooded down my throat.
My stomach cramped around the liquid. I was ravenous. The sight of boiled daikon and mountain potatoes next to a bowl of glistening oysters in broth made my stomach give an audible rumble.
Ashikaga delicately plucked a chunk of daikon between the lacquered chopsticks, holding it just in front of my lips. So I wasn’t even to be trusted to feed myself?
“The yurei will come again.”
“Yes,” I said, and craned forward to bite the radish off the chopstick. I’d had enough talk. Ashikaga was playing the haughty lord but had sent Little Turtle away. I was too hungry to think about possible motives. My lordling wanted me to eat? I would. I covered Ashikaga’s hand with my own and tugged the chopsticks free, eagerly threading them through the holes in a thick slice of lotus root.
“You can’t stop it?”
I shook my head. The oyster broth was perfectly salted to bring out the sweet flesh of the shellfish. Better even than Father’s. “The yurei is something different. Not fox magic. Not kami. The cherry trees warned me something was wrong.”
“This is not Jindo magic?” Ashikaga grimaced around the sourness of a pickled plum.
The food quieted the roiling tension in my belly, but I wasn’t ready to forget—or forgive—Ashikaga’s retreat to noble hauteur a few moments ago. I swallowed the entire bowl of oysters. Hah, take that as punishment.
“Human magic?”
“It’s unclean and malevolent. I don’t know its nature exactly. I’m not sure who would know.” Especially after Ashikaga’s father decided to support the Emperor’s conversion to the True Path, enforcing the pronouncements of ochre-robed, foreign monks from overseas. Nearly everyone worshipped in temples rather than face imprisonment or a noble’s sword. There might not be anyone left who knew what a yurei was. So much lost already. With a pang, I thought of the small, hidden shrine to Whispering Brook, now neglected. Kami slept and slowly Yamato became something else around them, something less pure.
“Ask your cherry trees how to stop the yurei.” There was a hint of teasing in my lordling’s tone, but the strongest undercurrent was still dark and husky.
“It’s not that simple, my lord,” I said.
Ashikaga spit out the plum-pit. It hit the porcelain dish dead center with a loud ping. “Back home, everyone knew the hour of the cow was best spent safely tucked inside one’s own bedroll. I never saw the yurei take shape there; it was just a stifling presence. A sense of shadows stirring.”
How to approach this without making Ashikaga go all prickly like a hedgehog. I’d been too direct before speaking of Lady Ashikaga. Words I could say hovered on my tongue, but I discarded them. How strange it was that I had become a person who tried to wield words instead of just speaking them.
“The yurei is probably more restless now that the Daimyo is closer to where Lady Ashikaga passed away.”
“Murdered,” said Ashikaga. “My mother risked defilement by performing that wara ningyo curse, but could the curse twist her soul so darkly that she would attack me, or father? Only the stain of murder could make her so violent.”
“Murdered? But who?” I blurted. I thought of Zeami, but managed to swallow that troublesome name.
“My father has been teetering on the edge of collapse for a long time now. He made Yoshikazu his heir, but it’s no sure thing the Emperor will name him Lord Daimyo of the North.” Ashikaga’s head hung forward as if the weight of keeping that stiff neck was momentarily too much. Something turned over and over inside my lordling’s mind. No outward turmoil showed, but after these many months, the stillness, the tight jaw, and the slight twitching of fingers made my hackles raise.
When Ashikaga looked up, a manic, determined gleam was in that gaze. The same as the night my lordling announced the suicide sneak attack of General Norinaga at the top of Hell Mountain. “She entrusted her letters and the straw doll itself to her worst enemy, her rival, to give to me. She had no one else to turn to, no one else she could trust. She knew death had marked her. She meant me to know of her murder.”
Ashikaga? Why not the son who lived close, why not Yoshikazu? Surely my lordling could see what flimsy logic this was. Ashikaga was a hairsbreadth away from declaring a search to find a killer. A hare-brained, romantic, doomed-to-failure task—exactly what a second son of a North Country Lord with something to prove in the country’s capital yearned for. As if discovering Lady Ashikaga’s killer would anchor Ashikaga against the dissipation of Lord Yoshikazu or court politics, or even against whatever it was the Lord Daimyo wanted here.
“Is there some other reason destiny brought me those letters?”
“I think there’s no guarantee the yurei will find peace even if you discover the murderer.”
“Someone hurt my mother—made her into this evil thing. I can’t ignore that.”
“You could go home.”
Ashikaga flashed me a look equal parts anger and exasperation. “I can’t run away.”
“It’s not running away if the Daimyo returns home, too.”
“My father has stopped denying himself anything. He meets his love openly at Ryoan-ji. He flaunts his obsession. No wonder the yurei has become restless.”
“Perhaps he thought it didn’t matter any longer, since Lady Ashikaga is gone.”
“She isn’t gone!”
I flinched. Ashikaga saw the movement and pounded the table with a closed fist. Dishes clinked and tipped over. “My father put himself, put us, on this path. I will make him see it through.” My lordling’s voice broke over the words like raked gravel.
How much of this passion to untangle his mother’s death was fueled by a need to wrestle with the tangled relationship between my lordling and the Daimyo? With what Ashikaga may have been, or wasn’t, to Lady Ashikaga?
Last night we’d come the closest to the kind of touching Little Turtle and Beautiful already assumed we shared. I didn’t fully understand this desire to touch me in those ways, much as it stole my breath and spread flush across my skin like I’d just arisen from a hot bath. But it wasn’t me who had stopped us last night. It was fine as long as Ashikaga was doing the touching, controlling. But when I’d tried to undo the linen bindings . . .
I was doing no good by my presence here, only adding fuel to the confusion. My knees protested a little when I rose, but my legs held. Lying all night and half the day in bed made me as stiff as Father on winter mornings. I needed movement. Helping Little Turtle with Lord Hojo’s screens would give me something to stew over besides Ashikaga.
A stale odor came from the bunched cloth of my robe. Definitely a bit of a wipe down and change of clothes was in order. I reached for the tray. When it hit the place across my chest that had seemed to bleed the night before, pain gave a sharp little twinge. Dishes rattled. Ashikaga looked up at me sharply.
“What are you doing?”
Escaping from you. “Trying not to make the Chamberlain angry.” I tugged at the collar of my robe one-handed, baring unmarked skin. “See, no wound. No excuse for me to be slug-a-bed in a lord’s chamber.”
Ashikaga gave a curt nod. Maybe as relieved to see me go as I was to escape. My lordling turned to the pile of jumbled scrolls as I left. Sliding the shoji closed, I saw Ashikaga bend down to a scroll held in one hand and inhale deeply, as if ink and paper could reveal something of a mother’s heart.
Chapter Eight
* * *
MY LIMBS LOST MOST of their stiffness as I returned the tray to Jiro in the kitchen, wetted a cloth to wipe away the worst of the brown streaks on my collarbone, and tied back my hair into a neat bundle. Washing was needed soon. I only had two outer robes fit for handmaiden duties and this one was now marred with blood. I set it to soak in a bucket and went to find out which room Little Turtle was using for Lord Hojo.
By the time I found her unwrapping a straw-stuffed bundle in a room down the main corridor, the outside light had turned the afternoon the light gold of ripe yuzu. Two screens already stood open across the back of the room. Men with skin the color of ground seashells, in boy-short divided hakama, opened red-gashed mouths under noses as big as tengu. On the right-hand side a ship with black sails idled at port. A long line of shaven-headed men in long brown robes like priests descended down a wooden plank. Chains with a symbol like the Middle Kingdom script “ ┼” for “ten” hung around their necks. The colors were so vibrant, I reached a fingertip to barbarian lips, half-expecting it to feel wet. The screens back home were all painted decades ago. These must have come freshly painted by artists in the south. The island of foreigners—Dejima.
“Help me with this one,” said Little Turtle. Nested inside the opened packing was a more detailed portrait of a barbarian man. Against a sea of black, the barbarian’s skin reminded me of the ghostly pallor of the yurei. Strange curly hair the color of overripe persimmons made him resemble one of the demons in Little Brother’s fairy-tale scrolls. No horns or rings through his nose, though, only a strange metal brace resting on his nose with two open holes in front of his eyes.
The Straw Doll Cries at Midnight (A Tiger Lily Novel Book 2) Page 9
