When I finally raised my face, Hosokawa was chuckling.
“So greedy for the kami? There are better ways to quench that thirst.”
I glared. “Tell me how to put the yurei to rest.”
The broad face stilled. Hosokawa turned his nose up to the sky and sniffed exactly like the fox he’d resembled moments ago. “Someone else is here. Were you followed? Your tame lordling, perhaps?”
I shook my head in a lie, remembering my lordling’s last words to me. Then I was struck by the perfect timing of the distraction provided by the eta-hinin man’s bucket against the side of the shop. A lord lowering himself to pose as an unclean caste? I felt heat-spots blossom high on my cheeks. But the eta-hinin had disappeared so quietly after the guards had left.
I looked around, suddenly feeling a prickling between my shoulders. The path ahead ended in a low, stone wall and then pine wilderness beyond the shelter. No one was in sight. No one disturbed the peacefully whirring crickets in the long grass lining the path behind me, either. I looked up, half-expecting to see the sharp gaze of my lordling peering down from the viewing platform above.
Nothing. No one—and yet I was as sure as Hosokawa that somebody else was here, that someone other than Otowa stirred in the underbrush. It had to be my lordling.
“It is no matter. I have come here as you asked. Will you not tell me what I want to know?”
Hosokawa left off searching the tangled gorseberry and came over to stand in front of me. He placed both hands on my shoulders. Instantly the warm, musky taste of his fox magic began filling in the places Otowa’s water had scoured clean.
“You can’t do this alone,” he said.
You must wake a kami.
“There is a cherry tree kami at the Residence,” I said.
Wake Otowa with me now so you can feel what you must do.
Wake Otowa? The cherry tree was young, grumbly, but nowhere near the crushing presence of Higashi-yama or Whispering Brook. Otowa would be ancient as the rock of this hillside. Hosokawa-Norinaga had hardly borne Higashi-yama when he sang the kami awake at Lord Motofuji’s Residence.
“This is a big risk.”
One side of Hosokawa’s mouth quirked upward. He leaned in, the musky sweat of him making my eyes water. “You would prefer risking the yurei? How long can it feed off the Daimyo before it kills him? How long until it seeks other prey?”
If this was the only way to deal with the yurei, I really had no choice. I nodded my head, slowly.
The planes of Hosokawa’s face sharpened, shifted, a gleam lighting up his dark eyes. Sing.
As the mountains birth rustling winds to sweep bamboo plains,
I will be steadfast and never leave you.
And then, because the stirrings in the underbrush were becoming louder and I was afraid, I changed to the song my mother used as a warding.
It is for your sake, that I walk, careless, the fields in spring,
my garment’s hanging sleeves sodden with falling rain.
Down from the pine-guarded height of the hill streamed crystal-cold—a spring’s sudden thaw of packed winter snow. It filled my lungs, spilled into my chest, quickly filling me with the cutting, ice-clarity of the kami’s presence. It was too much, too quickly. Like the troughs of water tumbling from the shelter, Otowa overflowed from me into Hosokawa where his hands rested on my shoulders. He arched away, tendons clenching in his neck.
My song faltered.
A fierce expression took over Hosokawa’s face. Fingers dug into my shoulder joints.
Sing. His voice joined the song mid verse, weaving a deep tenor line under my weak alto, buoying up the song in the treacherous eddies of Otowa’s stream. Joints locked into place, the song flowed out of me into Hosokawa. The gleam in his eyes caught fire. I remembered the smothering heat of the fox general when had first found me in Whispering Brook’s forest. He’d tried to trap me, then. I fought against the stream of Otowa’s chill power binding us together, aching to pull away from the weight of the kami as badly as if my arms trembled under a full koku of rice.
An undercurrent in Otowa’s stream bubbled to the surface, releasing a murmur into the song.
A song. A song. A song.
Not Hosokawa. Otowa itself, awaking.
She did it! Otowa comes to her cawing call. So many faded. So many lost to endless dreaming. Why Tiger Lily? Why does her song wake them?
Cold rushed in, a swelling flood pouring through chest and bones passing from me into Hosokawa. Our eyes bulged outward in their sockets, skin pulling taut against the pressure.
Hosokawa let go of my shoulders to grab my hands. He moved my right hand in the air like a monk painting foreign characters on scrolls. Using the edge of my palm like a knife, he cut a horizontal slash in the air between our faces.
“Rin,” he intoned. Another horizontal slash, another syllable “Pyo.” He continued, five slashes in total, the air hazy—or my eyes fogged, I couldn’t tell—so that I could almost see wavy lines remaining in the air where our hands had passed. Then, another set of four slashes, up and down this time. He intoned another set of syllables ending in “zai, zen.”
With the last slash, Hosokawa pulled my hands down with a jerk that made my teeth come together in a clatter.
The streaming ice of Otowa’s presence subsided to a trickle.
I rubbed my eyes hard, pressing them back into my skull. They opened just in time to catch the last traces of the wavy lines dissipating like drops of water on hot coal. Hosokawa gave a pleased fox smile.
Hosokawa had pronounced those syllables in an archaic, formal tone—the kind foreign priests used.
“Warriors descend and arrange yourselves in front of me. Is that what those words mean?”
Hosokawa nodded. “It’s borrowed from one of the Middle Kingdom’s native traditions.” He shrugged. “Jindo doesn’t deal with death beyond purification rituals. We borrowed the hand slashes—nine in all—and the words from the foreigners, but the power animating it was from you and Otowa, all true Yamato spirit.”
I patted my limbs and middle, relieved to find everything more or less still in place, although my heart still beat like a fire drum. Otowa hummed in the background.
“We woke Otowa.”
“Partially.”
“You said the kami hadn’t woken in years.”
“Yes,” said Hosokawa, in a tone that did not invite discussion. I remembered those thoughts I’d heard just as Otowa awoke—Hosokawa probably hadn’t meant to speak them in my mind at all. The kami responded to me. To my cawing call. I stepped forward into Hosokawa’s space. “Kami like me better. You couldn’t wake Otowa without me.”
The sly smile slid off his face—suddenly realizing I wasn’t the same naïve village girl he’d met in Ashikaga Province. “Go-Daigo invited you, a cook’s daughter, to be his handmaiden before your overeager samurai took his head. A human whose song calls to the kami so strongly even the most ancient awake. You are one of a disappearing breed.” Hosokawa’s eyes glittered on those last words. The skin on the back of my neck prickled.
“And you can’t wake them yourself.”
The fox grin returned, exposing canines. “At the Emperor’s decree, all Yamato chants now to foreign gods from the Middle Kingdom. Jindo spirits fall asleep—withdrawing their spirit from the land. Without the kami’s protection, filth and feculence take over. Why else would a mere human, with no shaman training at all, be able to enact a Straw Doll curse? Why else would it curdle and turn the caster into a yurei?”
The yurei was related to sleeping kami? To the Emperor’s edict against Jindo?
Of all the places Hosokawa could have chosen to teach me the way to banish the yurei, right under the
priests’ noses at Kiyomizu-dera was very bold. Did he plan to use Otowa’s power now that I’d awakened it?
“This body, this form you’ve taken,” I said carefully, trying to find words that balanced between the knife-edged paths this conversation was taking. “Does it replace a real man?”
Hosokawa blinked, clearly not expecting this particular stab. “The human Hosokawa?”
“Where is he?”
“He no longer lives.”
I glared. Hosokawa put out a raised palm. “I took advantage of a Hosokawa’s fate, but had no hand in determining it.”
That was good. I wanted to believe Hosokawa’s purpose here was only to somehow manage things in Jindo’s favor. The kami did not promote death. Hopefully Norinaga-Hosokawa had learned that lesson on Hell Mountain when the Asama-yama had chosen me—and life—over Norinaga’s death-song.
Still, I’d heard enough of Auntie Jay’s fox tales not to trust him completely, no matter how my heart yearned to do so.
“You will come with me to banish the yurei?”
Hosokawa’s smile became polite regret. “As much as your trust gladdens me, I find that I can’t see any good result from sneaking into the Ashikaga Residence—in this form or in any other.”
“You fear Ashikaga?”
Hosokawa shook his head, looking like Auntie Jay at her teahouse standing over a drunk geezer with an empty wallet. “I do not fear any human,” he said, making it clear I was included in that statement. “The Daimyo has been an enemy of Yamato’s true spirit for years. But the Ashikagas are not all so stubborn and blind.”
The nape of my neck prickled. “Ashikaga Yoshinori will never go against the Daimyo—”
“I don’t speak of your lordling.”
Oh. Hosokawa had been at Lord Motofuji’s Residence when Lord Yoshikazu was killed. Did he mean Motofuji’s branch of the Ashikagas?
“You know the words, the gestures. You can wake a kami to fill those words with power as we did today. You don’t need me.”
I didn’t, not really. But I was afraid. I turned again to look down the path. Still empty. A dragonfly hovered lazily over the rushing water of the first trough, iridescent wings winking in the morning sun. The monks’ chanting drew to a low, drawn-out close. All at once I was sure as the skin on my nose that someone listened to this conversation from a hidden place.
“. . . but I may need you,” Hosokawa was saying. “When you’ve taken care of the yurei, and your lordling is named heir—”
“Named heir? Impossible!” I clapped an open palm over my mouth.
“Impossible?” He laughed. “Lord Yoshinori must remain in the capital with all the other heirs according to the Emperor’s edict.”
“That can’t happen.”
Hosokawa smiled, the sly fox confident again. “The Daimyo has but two sons, yes? It’s customary to make the younger heir if the older one dies.”
I took a deep, shuddering breath. All this Kyoto business was difficult, but I’d always seen us going home at the end of it. Back to Ashikaga Village—back to our real lives. Lord Yoshikazu’s death killed that dream. What could the Daimyo do? Scandal if he named another heir over his own flesh and blood, scandal if he named Ashikaga. And if Ashikaga managed to keep all the secrets anyway? My lordling would become Daimyo of the Northern Hans. A shiver ran down my spine.
“There is no one else?”
Hosokawa’s gaze searched every part of my face like the stain of secrets might show on my skin. “Are you asking this because you fear the lordling would give you up if he became heir? He’d have to marry at the court’s pleasure, but he needn’t give you up.”
“That’s not it,” I said. “Ashikaga can’t be Daimyo. It wouldn’t . . . it wouldn’t suit him to be so constrained by the Kyoto court.” I flushed, aware I’d said too much.
“There is a nephew,” said Hosokawa.
“Lord Ujimitsu,” I murmured. Hosokawa’s involvement here was slowly becoming clear. He wanted the Motofuji Ashikaga branch to ascend. But if the Daimyo did name Lord Ujimitsu his heir, my lordling could go home. We could go home.
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” said Hosokawa. “Many fears at court would be allayed if the power of the Northern Daimyo stayed closer to Kyo no Miyako.”
“Would the Daimyo consider Ujimitsu?”
“He is a stubborn old coot,” said Hosokawa. “Pride won’t easily allow him to choose Lord Ujimitsu.”
“Maybe,” I said, and then closed my mouth to swallow traitorous words. I’d been considering a confession of Ashikaga’s deepest secret to Hosokawa.
I couldn’t trust this man. I shouldn’t want to trust him. But the scared part of me wanted to lean on someone—anyone from my old life. Looming in the future, I could see only darkness, a fearful contrast to the hot sun burning my arms and neck. The only way out of this darkness might be an even darker path. “Maybe if Ashikaga were . . . discredited in some way? Then the Daimyo would have no choice but to name another.”
“My, my,” said Hosokawa, upper lip curling, “look at the rough spun linen suddenly wanting to seem silk. We may make a Kyoto-ite out of you yet.”
“Ashikaga has my entire loyalty.”
“I have never doubted that, Tiger Lily,” said Hosokawa. “The yurei is Ashikaga’s mother. If he were to be discovered participating in a forbidden Jindo ceremony to lay that tortured spirit to rest, the Emperor could not approve his designation as the Northern Daimyo’s heir.”
Betrayal.
That was what Hosokawa suggested. Strange how that betrayal seemed more bearable than the urge I’d had just a moment ago to confess Ashikaga’s deepest secret.
“How?”
“We agree on the night you will attempt to banish the yurei.”
“And you discover us?”
“My position on the court fringes means I alone will not be sufficient.”
“Who, then? I won’t have Ashikaga put in danger.”
“Lord Motofuji has an interest in keeping the Ashikaga name clear enough from scandal that his own son could ascend to Daimyo of the Northern Hans.”
Would I do this? Deliver my lordling into the hands of his rival? I thought of Ashikaga on horseback, racing Uesugi-san across the narrow strips of grassland between paddies in the Eastern fields; being thrown to the ground by a guardsman during fighting; my lordling’s expression shifting from haughty to troubled by sun-dappled shadows sifting through needles of a hinoki cedar. Ashikaga was a fierce hawk of the North, and I knew deep in my heart, where lies could not survive, that the life of a caged songbird in Kyoto would slowly strangle that hawk. Even if Ashikaga’s secret remained undiscovered.
“Yes, I will do this,” I said, ignoring a sharp twinge in my chest at saying the words out loud. “I don’t know yet when Lord Ashikaga will let me do the exorcism. How will I get word to you?”
Hosokawa wrinkled his nose. The air shimmered with musky heat, tasting of Hosokawa’s power. The shimmer grew heavier, blurring the shape of the man. He melted, shrank down and became the oversized fox I’d first seen in my forest so long ago. Shivers ran down my spine. All this time I’d known this was the fox general, believed it with all my heart, and yet this was the first time my eyes saw it. He was a fox spirit—and no matter how tame, no matter that he was our only link to Jindo, I had to remember not to trust him.
On the night of the exorcism, leave this hanging over the wall-post nearest the servants’ entrance. That will be our signal.
A small, round object rolled towards my foot. I bent down and scooped it up. A dull gray netsuke carved from sea pine coral in the shape of a fox curled in on itself. It grinned over its curlicued tail from my palm. Hosokawa-the-fox would be able to slip in and out of the As
hikaga compound freely. I shivered again. Had he done so before? Hosokawa yipped, muzzle in the air. I slipped the netsuke charm into the side of my obi and nodded slowly.
He circled three times, flashing me a sharp-toothed grin, and then sped off up the hill into the trees.
The dull hiss of water flowing down the mountain was the only sound, yet I felt every muscle in my body straining, as if I were bracing for a cuff to the head, or the first shock of a plunge into cold water.
Behind me, a twig snapped.
I whirled around, neck tingling like Little Turtle’s embroidery needles pricked at my skin.
“Lily,” sighed my lordling, emerging out of the shadowed crisscross of logs supporting the monk’s verandah above. Ashikaga still wore the dirt-streaked robe and short loincloth of the Eta-Hinin, but now with head-covering untied. “You tried betraying me to Norinaga before. That ended with the Pretender Emperor’s head in a box.”
I winced at the sharp tone. Of course my lordling was here. Of course this looked like me conspiring with the enemy. A blush heated my cheeks. I must seem a traitorous fool. Not quite trusting, even after everything we’d gone through, all those dark nights together. I stood silent and defenseless. Ashikaga pinned me with a gaze so intense I felt devoured.
Ashikaga closed the tense space between us, crushing dandelions and tall grass. Grasping my elbow, my lordling pulled me, placing a hand to the nape of my neck to press my nose to the rough-spun robe. “You little fool.”
I tried to pull back. My lordling did not relent, slim arms solid, unmoving around me.
“I was trying to protect you,” I said into the cloth. This was why I had gone to Ashikaga’s rooms first—so there would be no question why I was meeting Hosokawa-Norinaga. Whey then did I feel the heavy warmth of shame?
The Straw Doll Cries at Midnight (A Tiger Lily Novel Book 2) Page 18