“How did she look?”
“Bruised. Sick. Sad.”
“Wedding?”
“Proceeding. Dragon and Phoenix clanlords both en route.”
“What news from the Iishi?”
“Kuro Street safe house hit in dawn raid. No way to talk to Iishi.”
Cold panic set her jaw to clenching, breath catching in her lungs. She glanced over her shoulder at Ichizo’s sleeping form, licked at suddenly dry lips.
“Raid? How? Anyone taken?”
“Akihito safe. Staying with me. Others maybe scattered. Maybe imprisoned. Checking drop box again today with Akihito when shift finishes. No word yet.”
“If we cannot speak to Iishi, must save Aisha ourselves.”
“The three of us?”
“Wedding must be stopped.”
“Cannot even escape room?”
Michi sat for a handful of heartbeats, listening to Ichizo breathing, the wind whispering in the stunted gardens outside. Eyes roaming the bedchamber that was her prison. Mind racing.
“Wait.”
She stood, moving like smoke. Formless. Soundless. Stooping beside Ichizo’s clothes tumbled at the foot of the futon, she fished amongst silk and cotton, fingertips finally brushing a cold circlet of iron. And holding it tight in her fist, the clink and tink muted beneath the fabric, she drew the magistrate’s keys out into the flickering light.
With a soft breath, she blew out the candle in her window, its center melted into a deep scarlet pool about the smoking wick. She poured the wax into a saucer from her tea service, waiting a few moments for it to cool. And holding up Ichizo’s keys, she chose the one she’d seen him use on her bedroom door more times than she cared to remember, and pressed it into soft, blood-red warmth.
She watched him, counting his breaths, refusing to remember the feel of him inside her. The way he breathed into her hair afterward, speaking his lies. Talk of courting and love, promises she would attend Hiro’s wedding on his arm, that all whispers of her treachery would soon be put to rest. She’d played the fool of course, pretended she believed him, thanking him in the most obvious way a dishonored lady in waiting could. But the truth was she was a warrior, this bed just another battleground, her body just another weapon.
The lotus must burn.
Pulling the key free of the candle wax, she squinted at the impression it left behind: good and deep, sharp lines, more than enough to craft a forgery. More than enough to free her from this serpent’s nest.
She slunk back across the boards, eyes on Ichizo, not making a sound. Kneeling by the door she slipped the saucer beneath; a soft scrape of porcelain upon polished pine. No One’s note swiftly traveled back across the threshold.
“Key to your room? Why not come with me now?”
“Will not leave this palace without Aisha. Can work with this?”
A tremulous pause.
“Can have Akihito carve replica.”
Michi nodded, glanced over her shoulder at the man in her bed.
“Be swift, No One. Sleeping with a snake. Will bite me soon.”
She heard No One rise, quiet as she may, the faint click of her sandals and the scrape of the chamber pot upon the pine. And then she was moving, just another servant on night duty, floorboards singing beneath her. Ichizo frowned and murmured in his sleep, and Michi stood, lotusfly-quick, slipping the kohl stick into her pocket and the keys back into his belt.
She shrugged the kimono from her shoulders. It crumpled about her ankles as she slipped back to bed, crawled naked beneath the sheets. And as the motion across the mattress finally roused him, eyelids fluttering open, she pressed her mouth and body to his, hands descending, whispering his name.
He was awake then, if he hadn’t been before. And though his mouth tasted of saké and sugar, she imagined she could taste the venom beneath, the poison of the chi-mongers seeping through his veins and onto his tongue.
But not if I bite you first …
Daiyakawa was the village where she’d been forged, but the Iishi was the place she was honed.
She’d wanted to be a warrior, to fight in the field with the other Kagé on the day they rose against the Shōgunate. And so she trained hard—perhaps not as strong as the boys, but faster again by half, her blade swift as dappled sunlight through the trees. She practiced with Sensei Ryusaki until her fingers bled, until the blade was no longer in her hand, but part of her arm, and more, until there was no blade and no arm at all.
But to fight with steel in hand beneath a burning sky was not to be her fate.
She was perfect, Kaori had insisted. Young enough to unlearn her provincial ways, pretty enough to enjoy the attentions of the duller sex, but not so beautiful she would stand out in a crowd. And so they began training her for a different battleground, just as deadly as those stalked by Iron Samurai and bushimen. A battleground of polished pine and fluttering fans and rippling curtains of blood-red silk.
Kaori had been raised in the Shōgun’s court, privy to the upbringing of a “lady of station.” And so, she became Michi’s new sensei. Hour after hour, day after day. Music lessons. Poetry. Philosophy. Dancing. The crushing, mindless tedium of tea ceremonies, intricacies of courtly fashion, poise, diction, face. And then came her weapons training. Innuendo. Rumor mongering. Eavesdropping. Lip-reading. Flirtation. Sex. And if the thought of it all terrified her in the long, empty watches of the night, she needed only think of her cousins lying beheaded in the street, the emptiness in her uncle’s eyes as he plunged the blade into his own belly and dragged it right to left, and the fear became less than nothing; the weakness of a girl-child who had perished beside her cousins in the village square.
“Remember,” she would breathe. “Remember Daiyakawa.”
They smuggled her to Yama, and from there to Kigen. Paid an iron fortune to have her irezumi re-inked by a master artisan, decorating her flesh with the artistry a woman of her “breeding” deserved. She played the role of a sole-surviving daughter to a noble Tora family, murdered in a fire lit by Kagé insurgents, come to beg the First Daughter for mercy now that the Shadows had taken everything she was. And the Lady Aisha had looked at her with narrowed, puff-adder eyes as Michi told her story, false tears spilling down her cheeks, lower lip trembling just so; an audition for a role in the most dangerous treason afoot in all of Shima.
And then the Lady had smiled.
“You are perfect,” she said.
21
WEBS AND SPIDERS
Rebel. Traitor. Servant. Sister. Clanless. Kagé. Nothing. No One.
The line between who Hana was and wanted to be was growing more indistinct by the day. At the turning of dawn and dusk, she would peel away her mask like a snake shedding skin, one identity left crumpled in the corner as she shrugged on the new one, hoping it still fit.
And she had never felt more alive.
Evening hours were spent shuffling through the Daimyo’s palace. Watching the wedding preparations unfold, guest rooms being prepared for the clanlords of the Dragon and Phoenix, the huge retinues each would bring in tow. Listening for the tick-tick-tick of the spider-drones, watching for the palace bushimen, other servants, the house mistress and her powdered scowl. Cautious steps. Downcast gaze. Head bowed. Playing the role of the lowly Shit Girl nobody saw or heard or cared about. Counting down to the day they would have no choice.