The Straw Doll Cries at Midnight (A Tiger Lily Novel Book 2)

by K. Bird Lincoln

  A choked sound came from my lordling’s throat. The arms around me stiffened, and then pushed me away sharply. “Protect me? I am not running around with fox-spirits and singing forbidden Jindo magic. It’s you who needs protection.”

  “You can’t stop Jindo magic with a sword or fancy moves.”

  “No? Didn’t I do just that on Hell Mountain? I seem to remember making it through an army of fox soldiers by wits and sword-edge.”

  I gritted my teeth. Ashikaga was foolhardy and cocksure. “You and the fox general thought you spoke secretly, but I was here all the time. Jindo didn’t help either of you today.”

  I let my gaze fall. My lordling was wrong. I hadn’t needed kami to know Ashikaga was the unseen presence I felt watching. Hosokawa-Norinaga, too, probably knew all along that Ashikaga was watching, probably enjoyed the idea of my lordling discovering us in a compromising meeting. Ashikaga was wrong. My eyes followed the flow of Otowa’s water down the mountainside. My lordling had beaten the fox general once, back in Ashikaga Province, but this was Kyo no Miyako. It wasn’t just Norinaga this time. It was Lord Motofuji and the court. Ashikaga needed me.

  “And you plan to fight the yurei with a sword?” I said.

  “Do you really think bringing the fox general into my father’s residence will help? You trust dangerously. It’s safer to take care of this my own way.”

  “Without my song?”

  “Without you.”

  Without me? I put a hand over the hard bump of the netsuke.

  “The yurei only walks the residence when a new girl spends the night in the family rooms. If you are not in the Residence, the yurei will not walk.”

  My chest tightened. “Don’t send me away.” It was all I could do not to expose a sudden frantic feeling in the words. If Ashikaga heard how scared I was, my lordling would never relent.

  “Uesugi-san leaves this afternoon.” Ashikaga cupped my cheek, thumb rubbing a line under my trembling lower lip. “You’ll be safer at home. That’s where you want to be anyway, isn’t it? Back home in your forest with your Jindo kami and your father. Far away from all this.”

  Far away from Hosokawa-Norinaga.

  The sun still beat down. I felt lightheaded. The green of the trees, the clear water, it was all too bright, too harsh. I closed my eyes. Ashikaga was sending me away. I knew that tone of voice, that outthrust chin. Ashikaga thought to handle everything alone: the yurei and Motofuji and Hosokawa-Norinaga.

  No. Whatever I was, whatever we were to each other, I was not someone who ran away. It was another layer of hurt that my lordling would ask that of me, thinking I would turn tail and run at the slightest hint of danger. I was the one that slogged through trouble, the one who made sure my sisters and brother were fed after mother disappeared in the forest and father disappeared into his grief. I didn’t turn away then; I had no intention of leaving now.

  “Please.” I turned my face into the palm cupping my cheek, kissing the rough skin, trying to send all the force of my plea into the warm flesh. “Don’t make me leave.”

  Ashikaga’s mouth curved into a smile that did nothing to lessen the cruel intensity of the dark eyes boring into me. “Now I have your attention. The only time you go soft on me is when I’m sending you away.”

  “You make light of what I feel?”

  One eyebrow arched on Ashikaga’s forehead. I’d never responded before to those little jabs. Maybe letting them slip by had been a mistake. “Is my heart smaller than yours? Do you think I feel less sharply this thing between us?”

  My lordling brought another other hand up, my face caught between elegant, strong fingers. The calloused fingertips roughly caught on the skin of my cheek as one thumb stroked up and down.

  “Sometimes,” Ashikaga breathed, and then loomed very close, mouth hovering, breath caressing my lips into strange awareness. Ashikaga’s dark—almost black—eyes sliced through me, trying to uncover some hidden kernel of truth.

  A sob rose in my throat. I had nothing to hide, no secret needing to be torn apart to uncover what I felt. This vital being gripped me with a force so relentless—filled me, swelled up under my ribs so strongly I thought they might crack. Without Ashikaga’s fierce bright light, the world was a barren place.

  How could Ashikaga ever doubt my attention? Those eyes, that arched brow—at once a tender question and a knowing smirk—had my whole heart. The Jindo parts of me, the parts I thought reserved for the kami and memories of my mother, had slowly been swallowed up. They sang for the kami now just so I had something of my own, some vital essence to offer my lordling other than my peasant hands and oversized body.

  Ashikaga made a frustrated noise, low in the back of the throat, and then crushed lips over mine. A hungry, mindless pressure, no soft seduction this time. I wound my hands in the knot of the eta-hinin plait and pressed back, matching my lordling’s urgency. Ashikaga’s mouth had a salty-dusty taste—like swallowed grit. I didn’t care. A moment passed with us both mindless, rough, then another. Urgency made me gasp, as if we were held underwater, lungs burning for air. No matter how close we pressed, I could not reach the sweetness, that buzzing feeling along my palms that came with the connection I’d felt ever since I found Ashikaga stuck with an arrow in the woods.

  My lordling’s teeth caught on the corner of my upper lip—a small pain, but one that made me jerk, brought back to the physicality of my own body. This was wrong. My lordling couldn’t send me away. Surely it was obvious? Didn’t Ashikaga feel the muddiness in our connection?

  Ashikaga pulled back, thoughts secreted behind shuttered eyes and blank face. “Go home to Ashikaga Village, Lily.” Bright spots of red colored my lordling’s cheeks. “I can’t do what I need to—be who I need to be with you here. Go home and wait for me.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  * * *

  FROM INSIDE THE SEDAN chair I could see Uesugi-san’s horse dance back, wheeling around for the third time over the crunching white gravel of the outer courtyard, as eager as Uesugi-san to leave.

  The exact opposite of the heavy feeling in my chest.

  We appeared to be waiting. Ashikaga had not come to bid farewell to his lieutenant. Possibly Uesugi-san was as reluctant to leave as I without laying eyes on our lordling one final time.

  The long line of Little Turtle’s travel head-drape hid her expression. The inside of the sedan chair was a stifling, dim box in the sun’s full afternoon glare. She’d chattered nonstop before, helping me to pack my few belongings when I’d returned to the Residence trailing behind a swift-striding Ashikaga. She’d been so happy to have me as a travel companion. I’d felt ashamed of my inability to join in her glee. Or even to find any words at all that didn’t end with a curse.

  But now that I wished for the distraction of chatter, she was silent.

  Did she regret leaving Kyoto? Something twinged in my chest. Leaving my lordling? There’d been a time back at the village when Little Turtle had let me know in no uncertain terms that she considered herself the hen to Ashikaga’s tiercel. With sharp words as fussy as Auntie Jay in a snit, she’d fluttered and pecked at me every time I came to the Great House. Sometime after Hell Mountain, though, when Ashikaga returned, triumphant with the Pretender Emperor’s head, Little Turtle had stopped fussing and befriended me instead.

  She’d seen how pitifully unprepared I was to be in the Great House, let alone attend on my lordling. Since then, Uesugi-san had received the greater share of Little Turtle’s sighing looks. Under the head-drape, she faced the curtain opening. Watching Uesugi-san? Maybe returning to Ashikaga Village with Uesugi-san was what made her so cheerful. If only my lordling would accompany us, too. Duty bound Ashikaga Yoshinori here in Kyoto. While my heart’s roots bound me to my lordling, Ashikaga had decided that meant less than some misguided feeling th
at navigating the capital would be simpler without me. A distraction, Ashikaga called me. As if I were a youngling underfoot in Father’s kitchen instead of the only person here who could help.

  The yurei. Ashikaga said it was only dangerous to women sleeping near the Daimyo’s rooms at night, but it had hovered so close over the Daimyo’s sleeping form. Straw doll curses were dangerous—even Norinaga-Hosokawa had said so. Hate poisoned the heart until even the yurei itself became so polluted the hate spread beyond the original target. Ashikaga was ill-equipped to handle twisted Jindo magic. I could.

  But, oh . . . home meant Little Brother, and Father, and the haven of my own woods unspoiled by the gravel walking-paths required by mincing Kyoto lords, or the constant irritation of countless wood fires, or the pure, restful silence the city never could manage when street peddlers gave harsh cries at all hours. To feel the spring-fed chill of Whispering Brook cool the soles of my tired feet . . .

  I longed to be home, to see how May was faring. Had Auntie Jay teased her out of that shell she’d hidden in since the fox soldier had carried her into the bush last spring?

  “Lingering, Uesugi-san?” Ashikaga appeared, dressed in a black robe embroidered in gold and silver, hair oiled into a high, shiny warrior’s knot. On the way to some gathering of Kyoto nobles, no doubt, walking straight into a pit of vipers while the two servants who loved Ashikaga best prepared to leave.

  “You are sure?” said Uesugi-san, flinging one arm towards Mt. Higashi-yama, towering over the city. “Events have changed. If you need me here . . .”

  Ashikaga arched an eyebrow, lips curling into a superior smile that didn’t reach the eyes. “Changing colors so easily? And I thought your heart was set on something—someone—at home.” The words flowed in the lilting, flowery inflections of Kyoto dandies.

  Uesugi-san scowled. “Fancy-talk won’t get my horse on the Oshu-Kaido road if you still need a soldier at your left hand.”

  Arch amusement drained from Ashikaga’s face. For a moment, that fierce wanting, that vulnerability my lordling hid so thoroughly from the outside world, shone through—a testament to what the two warriors shared. A feeling like a Biwa’s string plucked suddenly in the stillness of a moonlit room twinged against my ribs—a short, sharp dissonance. There was a bond between Ashikaga and Uesugi-san; an easy familiarity and long history that I would never taste. Uesugi-san had grudgingly learned to tolerate me. I smiled and gave way to him as my lordling’s bosom companion, but inside my skin was a rotten kernel, a small, festering part that saw the love in Uesugi-san’s eyes for my lordling and wondered if those eyes saw through the clothes and hair and posture. Did he think my lordling beautiful as I did? Did he see something like Zeami’s alluring, unsettling mix of female and male?

  I shuddered, trying to throw off such thoughts.

  “I need my lieutenant at Ashikaga village. Lord Steward is faithful, but the situation requires someone who can fight both foxes and court intrigue back home. Lord Hojo is too gleeful, too friendly to the other Northern Lords here at court. I don’t trust that gleam in his eye.”

  Uesugi-san slid from the horse and came to sharp attention before Ashikaga. He bowed low, eyes determinedly stuck on my lordling’s hemp sandals. “It shall be done,” he said in the stark inflection of warriors.

  My lordling nodded. A few barked commands and Uesugi-san remounted as the entire retinue shuffled into marching order—including our sedan chair bearers. Little Turtle jostled into my right side as our chair was lifted and settled onto the shoulders of the brawny young men the Ashikagas had hired from the itinerant workers who traveled the Oshu and To-Kaido roads.

  They were a rough lot. After we passed out of the packed-dirt roads of the capitol and onto the grassy width of the Oshu, the conversation they threw back and forth to each other, like the harsh cries of crows, was peppered with language that made me blush. Or maybe it was just the oppressive heat inside the closed compartment. The travel hoods were stifling, even when thrown back and pooled down my back. Little Turtle kept up a constant stream of chatter speculating about how village life had changed back home.

  Traffic was light on the road. Most merchants and lords were either staked out in their Kyoto residences paying court to the Emperor or safely hidden away in their country estates supervising the flooding of the rice fields.

  We stopped for a midday meal at a bend of the Oshu-Kaido near a thin stream. No expensive tea house or inns for servants when Ashikaga wasn’t here. Instead, Little Turtle and I stirred gruel and handed out plates of dried fish and persimmon to Uesugi-san and the others. Only peasants and merchants, and once a small troupe of players pulling their shuttered prop-cart behind them, passed by on the road.

  I put a wooden cup into Uesugi-san’s hand while Little Turtle poured the remains of the gruel on the fire.

  “Better off without you,” he said softly. Bushy eyebrows drew together in the center of his wide forehead. “Less rumors, less threads for him to try to tie off.”

  I blinked, pressing lips tight against an upswell of anger. Better off, was he? If everyone was so dead certain Ashikaga could handle Norinaga, the Emperor, and the yurei without any help from me, why did they feel the need to repeat it so often? I moved to turn away and Uesugi-san thrust out a split-toed boot.

  I glared at his big toe. “I’m going home, he’s staying here. You’ve got what you wanted.” Gloat to himself, would he?

  “Head like a cedar barrel, sometimes,” said Uesugi-san, shaking his own. “What I want is Ashikaga beside me on this road with Lord Yoshikazu alive and well and dancing attendance on the Emperor so court intrigues and rumors of Jindo witches can’t touch him.”

  Jindo witches? He wasn’t serious? Uesugi-san stared challenge at me, those brows like stinging maimaiga caterpillars, dangerous and prickly. These were no careless words.

  I thought I’d been so careful. Never singing around the other handmaidens. Keeping to myself outside of Little Turtle and Beautiful. The Jindo heart of me, outside of my meeting with Norinaga-Hosokawa, folded up tightly inside my ribcage like a morning glory bud before the sun rose.

  Had Kazue seen me with the cherry trees when I thought her safely asleep with the other handmaidens some morning? Or had a guard overheard my lordling and me speaking about the yurei? Or Lord Motofuji’s residence: one of the guards might have seen something suspicious. I combed through the last few weeks in my mind as Uesugi-san led us further up the Oshu road.

  Evening blurred the view between the swinging curtains of the sedan-chair window, and we were still far from the official way station. It was early yet, but Little Turtle and I were happy to hear Uesugi-san giving orders to find a camping spot. Not too much later we stopped, the chair-bearers dropping us with groans of exhaustion.

  We were latecomers to the spot. The acting troupe had attached their prop cart and sleeping bundles to the camp of a small group of warriors in the livery of some minor lord, from the looks of the baggage. They had a pavilion tent—the warriors escorted someone from the Emperor’s court?

  Uesugi-san’s official position rated such a tent, but I didn’t question the absence of such trappings in our retinue. Uesugi-san spoke the phrases and inflections of the nobility, but his father was the headman of a village in the northernmost reaches of Ashikaga Han, Iwaki, a village of no more than 100 koku of rice—nothing at all compared with Ashikaga Village’s 2000 koku. Maybe Uesugi-san’s dislike of me came from knowing far too well the gulf between a peasant and Ashikaga.

  I let the curtain drop and settled back on the hard wooden frame of the sedan chair.

  “That troupe is here,” Little Turtle murmured.

  “And some lord’s retinue.”

  “Strange they’ve camped here,” she said, echoing my own thoughts. It wasn’t unheard of for minor nobility to rough it outsid
e of a way station, especially if their lord didn’t have particularly deep cellars and needed to save money for the required court-gifts.

  Little Turtle and I uncoiled stiff legs, emerging into gray twilight like two groaning old ladies.

  Uesugi-san barked orders, and then strode toward the pavilion tent after a hurried exchange with one of the other party’s warriors. Troupe members, hair unbound and wild over their shoulders, hunched at the fire, staring openly at us. Uesugi-san disappeared into the tent.

  Little Turtle, still draped in travel-cloth, made for a copse of trees. Bats wheeled overhead, diving for their dinner of mosquitoes and moths. I shook my head. Little Turtle would return with itchy bites in hard-to-reach places if she relieved herself in the woods. I wasn’t so modest as to require trees. Making for the tall grass and loosestrife along the edge of the stream, my mind busied itself with our own dinner plans. We could borrow embers from the other travelers. I pushed back my head cloth and lifted my robe. Dried fish again unless Uesugi-san allowed hunting. I’d have Little Turtle ask him when we—

  “Lily-of-the-Valley,” said a male voice. I bolted upright, tugging down my robe.

  A slender boy—no youth—with cheeks covered in the downy, curled bean sprout of a first beard approached from downstream. Hairs stood up on the back of my neck. What was this? Not one of Uesugi-san’s men or a warrior. I shifted back a few steps.

  The youth raised an arm, palm out. “Zeami Motokiyo bids you attend him.”

  Zeami?

  “I . . . I. . . ?”

  “Come this way and I will take you to him.”

  I made no move to follow. The youth made an exasperated noise in the back of his throat. Like I was a youngling being forced to bed. “He told me you would balk at his summons, but not that you’d stand there like an ox with your mouth open for anyone in camp to see. Come along; my dinner’s getting cold.”