by David Kudler
If I had anticipated some formal letter or contract, such as my father had often prepared for Lord Imagawa, I was disappointed. It wasn’t parchment, but thin rice paper. Even before unrolling it, I could see that it was a drawing. I unrolled it and was bewildered by a swirl of color that didn’t seem to make any sense. I started to roll it up again—perhaps if I showed it to Kee Sun—
A flickering, golden light from the direction of the great hall caught my eye.
It came from high up on the building’s side wall, a glimmering square of light set between the black half-timbers that ran up the middle of the wall: the window of Lady Chiyome’s chamber, light wavering as if someone had lit a small fire there, a lamp, or—much more likely—a candle. That struck me as odd, since Chiyome-sama was almost certainly not well enough to have gone back up to her room, and I couldn’t imagine that Kee Sun had gone up there on his own. As I scowled up at the window, I saw a small flame—a candle indeed—and then a flash of white that seemed to fill the frame. A head. It turned, showing me a fine, brittle face.
Fuyudori stared back at me, and her expression was that of a predator stalking its prey.
Stalking me.
34—Falling Fast
Fuyudori’s eyes locked with mine across the space, and the light from the candle in her hand made them flash red.
Then her gaze shifted downward, and I could see that she had spotted the letter. The drawing. A smile formed on her thin, red lips: a wolf’s smile. Or, rather, a fox’s. She looked hungry. She looked very much as if she were about to devour me.
“Kitsune,” I gasped, and though I know that she couldn’t have heard me she blinked, and the smile grew.
Fuyudori. Winter bird. Snowbird, as Masugu had said. Ghostie-girl. Kee Sun had laughed that she’d snuck out of the Retreat, desperate to make sure that Masugu was all right, but no—she’d snuck out to finish the job and find the scroll. And to make sure that the rest of us couldn’t interfere, she’d tried to poison us. And no wonder she’d used too much poppy with Masugu, and then corydalis rather than something more effective this time—Fuyudori couldn’t tell radishes from turnips or pine from hemlock. She probably couldn’t be bothered to care. Rage filled me and then terror, in part because it seemed awful not to care, and in part because I realized that she truly didn’t care—not what happened to Masugu, nor what happened to Chiyome, and certainly not what happened to me.
Then the snow began to fall again, like a white wing sweeping between us, and I could not see her.
The spell broken, I began to move. My first instinct, as always, was to climb—to get up onto the Full Moon’s exterior wall and then to escape to the forest.
I knew, however, that I couldn’t leave Fuyudori alone in the compound where she might hurt all of the people whom she’d drugged. I had to warn Kee Sun and the others. I had to stop her. Against my instincts, then, I clambered down the chimney. I started to sprint back toward the kitchen, along the space between the great hall and the wall, hoping to reach Kee Sun before Fuyudori could.
As I approached the corner of the building, however, a shape appeared out of the snow-thickened gloom: not the cook’s scarecrow silhouette, but a shape that shone in the dark, clad almost all in white, with splashes of what I knew to be red that looked all but black in the murk. “Good evening, Risuko-chan,” said Fuyudori. “How lovely to see you.”
“You’re wearing a miko’s robes,” I said, though there were a dozen more urgent thoughts in my mind.
“A kunoichi’s.” Fuyudori took a step toward me, and I stepped back; we both froze. Fuyudori laughed her annoying little chirp of a laugh. “I thought it appropriate, given what I was going to be doing tonight, that I marry myself to Death, if only for the evening.”
The compound wall was plastered there; there was no way that I could climb to safety that way. And the great hall’s timbers were set too far apart here at the back for me to gain any purchase on such a cold evening. I was fairly certain that Fuyudori could outrun me. “We’re close to the kitchen,” I improvised. “Kee Sun will hear you.”
“I rather think not,” she tittered.
“He didn’t drink any of the soup you poisoned.”
“No.” She started to step toward me; I stepped back again. Once again, we froze in place. “However, I believe that Kee Sun will be resting quite soundly for some time.” When I gave a surprised grunt, she laughed again—not the bird-chirp titter, but a low, hunter’s chuckle. “It’s true that I’m not terribly good with herbs. They all look the same to me, you see. However, I was always quite good with the pots and pans.” From behind her back she drew what I recognized by the outline to be the long-handled wok.
“You... hit him?”
She chuckled again. “Oh, yes. This wok makes a most satisfactory ring when it strikes a hard skull like Kee Sun’s.” She twirled her weapon in her hand. “I saw that you were wearing an initiate’s sash when you served out the soup that I’d added the poppy to. You know what it is that that old witch has been training us to be. Well, there are others who are better at singing and dancing than I, but I promise you, none of them can kill half as well.”
Mieko can, I thought, but said, “Except poisons. You’re terrible with poisons. Nearly killed Masugu when all you wanted to do was drug him so that you could search his rooms, and now you thought you’d given everyone poppy—overdosing us so that you could kill us, you thought—but all you put in the soup was corydalis. It’s put everyone to sleep for a bit, but they’ll wake up soon.” I was lying—I didn’t know how long the drug would last, but I was certain she wouldn’t either. “All you’ll have done is take away their cramps.”
I could feel her body tense. “Then I shall have to work quickly,” she said, and began to move toward me.
All uncertainty or anxiety replaced by terror, I ran.
I had a lead of perhaps ten strides to begin with, but I could hear her feet slapping against the frozen earth, and I knew that her longer legs would close the distance between us before long. My first thought was to get back to the Retreat’s chimney, climb onto the roof, then over the wall, and then hide out in the woods; I might freeze to death, but I knew that Fuyudori would never be able to catch me there.
Unfortunately, I had the image of her pulling me down from the chimney, beating me to a pulp and taking the damned letter that had caused all of this trouble from my bloody, broken hand. The women in the Retreat itself might or might not have awoken, but I couldn’t risk trapping myself in there if they were still unconscious; my mental image now included not only my battered body, but those of Emi and the others.
I turned the corner of the great hall and began sprinting toward the storehouse—perhaps the rats would bite Fuyudori—when I heard her take the corner close behind me. My lead was down to three or four strides now, and I knew that I would never make it to any of the doors before she caught me and beat me to death. In my mind, terror gave way to anger—Kee Sun’s anger, actually. That’s no way to use a good wok!
The bulk of the huge hemlock blotted out the moon for a moment, and I swerved toward the tree. Fuyudori squawked as she slipped on the icy ground, trying to turn with me. For a moment I thought that I had done it—that I would be able to reach the tree and climb into its safety before she could reach me, but her relentless footsteps began to pound behind me again. I sprinted to the far side of the tree, using the massive trunk for protection.
I was a squirrel. She was the fox. She would start to try to run around the tree, and I would run in the same direction, keeping its bulk between us. She would reverse direction, trying to surprise me, and I would change course and thwart her. This was to my great advantage—I could hear her all the better—but I knew that, like a squirrel, I would run out of endurance if we kept this game up. “Why?” I gasped when we had come to an uneasy pause, each trying to wait until the other committed to one direction or the other.
“Masugu... All of us...” I stared at the letter case, still in my hand. I was thinking of Lady Chiyome’s interrogation that morning. “The letter... Who... are you doing this for? Takeda-sama—”
I had been about to say that Lord Takeda would track Fuyudori down and kill her; Masugu and Lady Chiyome said that he was a great leader, but I was quite sure that he was far from being a terribly merciful man. Of course, I was quite sure too that no one from outside of the compound would ever know it if Fuyudori managed to kill us all and escape into the snow-choked mountains. By the time that we were all found, we would all look just the same: bones. How would anyone know who was who, let alone who was missing?
Fuyudori, however, was following another path altogether. “Takeda-sama,” she spat. “He is why.”
“Lord Takeda?”
“Beast!” she snarled. “Monster. These idiot rabbits call him The Mountain, but he’s nothing but a monster. His troops destroyed my village, killed everyone, left me for dead. Thought I was dead. Stuck under my mother’s body.” She gave what might have been a sob or a growl. “Two days. Then Lord Oda’s troops took the valley back. They were burning the bodies, and one of the soldiers saw me move; pulled me out of the fire.” She tried to rush around the hemlock and catch me, but I was still listening, and kept to the far side. “That’s when my hair turned white. Ghostie-girlie,” she snapped, mimicking Kee Sun’s bouncy burr perfectly. “Lord Oda himself met me; he likes prodigies, you see, and I was twice rare—I’d lived when I should have died, and I was a young girl with white hair. Thrice rare, since I was possessed with the demon of revenge; I wanted nothing but to kill the Takeda who had done this to me.”
“My father faced the Takeda,” I murmured. “He said that they were a terrible foe.”
“Your father. Now there was a brave warrior! Ordered to kill a bunch of brats, and he couldn’t even manage it! Pathetic!”
I knew that she was trying to taunt me, to get me to make a mistake, but I couldn’t help the flood of anger that came up from my belly; I could feel the world turning red again as it had that afternoon with Aimaru. Now, however, I had no weapon, and I knew that Fuyudori would not hesitate to grab me and—“My father was a brave man!”
“Oh, yes,” Fuyudori taunted. “The very model of a samurai. Or so everyone thought.”
“He was!” I cried. My fingers clenched, one hand closing on the letter case, the other on the deeply creviced bark before me; I could smell the earthy scent of the tree mixing with the bitter scent of the snow, which was falling thickly now.
She merely laughed. “Please. Ordered to attack a party containing Lord Imagawa and Lord Takeda’s nephews and nieces and he was too weak! And rather than pay the honorable price by taking his own life like Toumi-chan and Emi-chan’s fathers, he left in disgrace to be scribe, a common scribe!”
Father, sitting there beside the fire, transcribing a marriage contract. There is honor too, he sighed, in humble service. “No! He... He had his own children! If he had died it would have killed us!”
Fuyudori chuckled. She was moving slowly around the trunk now, trying to close the distance stealthily. “Emi-chan and Toumi seem to have managed.”
I moved slowly away from the approaching sound of her voice. “They lived on the streets of the capital!” I was shaking—fear, cold, anger, and fatigue were all taking their toll. “And my sister had just been born!”
“How awful for you.”
“He couldn’t sentence us to death any more than he could those other children!” I could see Otō-san making that choice: putting our lives and those of the Takeda children above even our family honor.
“’Those other children,’” mimicked Fuyudori, sing-song. Then she gasped in delight. “You mean... you don’t know?”
“Know?” I peered behind me; the Retreat was perhaps thirty strides away. I thought of breaking for it—climbing the chimney perhaps, or the timbers at the corner—
“They didn’t tell you!” Fuyudori laughed again—a full, delighted laugh this time, though it sounded just as terrible and as terrifying as before. “Well, of course the old witch always loves to play her games. And he wouldn’t say a thing, now, would he?” Her laughter echoed in the snow-muffled quiet.
“What?” I began to step away from the tree. If I could get a good distance before she discovered... “Who wouldn’t say a thing?”
She laughed again—cackled really, and the sound raised the hair on my arms. “Masugu, of course!”
I stopped creeping, just a bit more than an arm’s distance from the tree and, in spite of myself, stepped closer, as if hearing better would make what she was saying more sensible. “Ma—? Masugu?”
Fuyudori cackled on. “Takeda Masugu!” My hands clenched on the tree’s bark again. “Son of Takeda Nobutatsu, half-brother of that monster Takeda Shingen—!”
She launched herself around the tree, the wok held in both hands above her head, ready to deliver The Key of Heaven—
But I was already out of reach, scrambling up onto the lowest of the hemlock’s branches. Relief flowed through my limbs as she stared up at me, eyes and mouth wide. Then she screeched in frustration and slammed the tree with the wok—there were stains on it; Not Kee Sun’s blood, please don’t let that be Kee Sun’s blood, I prayed. The metal pan did indeed ring out quite musically.
Nonetheless, I was beyond her grasp, and could wait until some of the others woke and could corner Fuyudori and lock her away—
With an explosive snort, she tossed the wok out into the snow that had begun to collect beyond the cover of the hemlock. Glaring up at me, she clutched at the uneven bark and began to climb.
Fuyudori was no squirrel, but she was very strong—always the first to finish with the stone-carrying exercise—and she pulled her way slowly and furiously up toward my perch among the lowest branches.
My stomach felt as if I had swallowed a large, frozen rock. I gawped at her in shock until she had climbed almost half way up the base of the trunk.
And then I bolted—straight up. From limb to limb I scuttled, higher and higher, so that the trunk was swaying in the wind and the limbs were barely thick enough to hold my weight.
At last, I reached a place where there was no further to go. The trunk itself was thinner than my wrist, and the branches merely twigs. The whole treetop danced as I tried to put as much distance as I could between myself and the madwoman below.
“Do you know,” she shouted up from below, “you really are a fantastic climber. It will take me a while to get where you are. But I will get there. You might as well save me the trouble and come down.”
“No!” I screamed.
Fuyudori laughed—the same condescending, tinkling laugh that she’d humiliated the three of us with our first day at the Full Moon. “Suit yourself. I’ll be there soon enough. Don’t freeze; it would be awful to have to pry the letter case from your icy fingers.”
I clutched the metal case to me and whimpered, trying to think of what to do—where to go. “HELP!” I shouted, but my cry was met only with silence, and with Fuyudori’s laughter.
“Do you honestly think anyone is going to help you, Risuko-chan? They’re all unconscious, or maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ve killed them. That old witch and her idiot bodyguards and her imbecile cook. Masugu, the fool, and Mieko, who thinks that she’s so special, and all of the rest. Even your little friends. Perhaps I’ll light the buildings on fire once I’ve finished with you, and then no one will escape. Yes, that would be fitting: me, a woman, destroying Lord Takeda’s little army of women, of sneaks and killers, as if I were burning out a wasps’ nest. Yes. I think perhaps that I shall.” Her face appeared among the foliage below, grinning, mad, feral.
>
I clung to the top of the tree, quivering with cold and fear, with no idea what to do to save myself.
On Fuyudori climbed. As she did, she gasped, “After all, they slew all of my allies—the Oda scouts who were trying to get my messages back to the capital. I was so angry when it was Masugu who came back through that open door, and not Lord Oda’s soldiers, ready to kill you all!”
I began to weep, I will not deny it. I considered throwing the letter case away, but then she would simply kill me and go to retrieve it. “What is in this letter?” I howled down at her. “Why are you willing to kill us to get it?”
“I don’t know,” she snarled back; she was struggling as she came to branches that could barely support her weight, which was considerably greater than mine. “All that I know is that it is Masugu’s mission to deliver that letter, and if Lord Takeda wants that to happen badly enough to risk his own nephew, then it is worth killing all of you to stop it.” She had reached the level just below my feet; when she tried to climb one branch further, it snapped beneath her foot, and she had to cling to the thin trunk to keep herself from tumbling down to the frozen ground below.
We both remained motionless there for a few breaths, hugging the tree for sheer survival.
“Give me the letter,” she spat.
I whimpered, but shook my head. “N-no.”
“Don’t play games with me!” she shouted and shook the tree trunk. Being higher, my perch swayed more than hers, and Fuyudori suddenly began to smile. “Want to fly, Risuko?” she asked, and began to rock the tree. We began to swing wildly from side to side, and I could see that I was swinging out past the branches below.
Soon, I knew, either the force of the tree whipping me back and forth would shake me loose and send me tumbling out into the dark, or the top of the tree would snap. Fuyudori might go with me, but I would be just as dead either way.
I wanted to be brave, to be like Father, accepting death as a stage along the journey, but how could I? I was young and frightened—terrified. “STOP!” I bawled. “Please, please, please stop!”
