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

by K. Bird Lincoln

  “Always you take what you want then throw the remains on to the trash heap.”

  The Daimyo drew himself up straight in formal posture. “It was you who threw me away, Madam.”

  Despair sucked at me, trying to pull me down into an emotional quagmire, leaving more space inside my body for the yurei to fill with anger and hatred. I was drowning, struggling to keep breath in my lungs, struggling to unclench my hands from the comb. I wouldn’t be the cause of harm to my lordling or the Daimyo, but the yurei was deeply rooted within me.

  The Daimyo was still talking. “. . . maybe it is Lord Motofuji you should be haunting?”

  Zeami put a hand on the Daimyo’s shoulder. “I was wrong. This isn’t your wife. Lady Ashikaga isn’t here to be reasoned with, old friend. This is but an evil echo.”

  “Tonight is a night to lay old ghosts to rest,” the Daimyo said.

  The red haze blurred across the small window of vision remaining. My erratic, thudding heart and a sound like a downpour hitting a metal drum blocked out everything else. I held on to a sense of Lily, of humanity, by a thin thread . . .

  I’d cut off the yurei’s power at first by pulling the straw doll from the kami’s cherry tree. For a moment the yurei had been vulnerable. But then it had entered me. As long as I was a prisoner in my own head, Norinaga’s chant wouldn’t work.

  Fight her, Tiger Lily.

  I pushed and struggled and only got sucked deeper inside. I couldn’t force the yurei out, and there was no straw doll to pull out of my stomach—only heart and lungs and liver. If I stopped struggling to breath, would my lungs’ failure affect the yurei?

  I stopped struggling, willing every muscle in my body into a lax stupor. Sensation returned in a flash, an intense cramp that racked me from neck to thighs. The red haze retreated all the way to the edges, and the sight of what the yurei had done with my body made me gasp.

  Fingernails raked down the Daimyo’s cheeks in red furrows—my raggedy-edged fingernails. He knelt before me, wide-eyed with terror.

  Zeami lunged forward with a punch to my throat that sent me tumbling back against Ashikaga. My lordling clamped down with all four limbs and rolled so that I was crushed against the rough tatami. The Daimyo’s mouth opened and shut with angry words, but along with breath, the downpour and the red haze returned.

  The yurei would take over completely. I couldn’t even feel the rough reed weave under my cheek. Blind, deaf, and violent. All they’d see was a mad woman fit only for prison or worse.

  Tiger Lily.

  I held on to the syllables of my nickname, a clear, cold thread in the burning pit of the yurei’s jealous despair. Everything I was, daughter, peasant, handmaiden, sister was being stripped and burned away in that fiery, choking hate. Lady Ashikaga’s vile curse, her black and twisted spirit seeped into me, into that kami-place where the last bit of me hid.

  Stripped of everything, I became pure will to survive. My stubborn, pure Tiger year refusal to give way. Like a paper lantern’s cover burning away to reveal naked flame, the core inability to give up, the Tiger heart of me that made me unfit as a village wife, a disobedient daughter, the tomboy that roamed the forest. The singer of outlawed Jindo songs in defiance of the very Emperor. My core would not bend, would not break.

  I remembered the crone’s cackle from the prop cart. All that worrying and needing and wanting in a body’s head keeps you from feeling what your bones know.

  My bones would not give up. The kami had to answer me.

  Help me!

  Flesh swollen with the yurei’s anger enclosed the sustained, agonizing notes of my plea. A last gasp, a teardrop dissolving in the ocean. Pain flared. Oh, Ashikaga.

  Somewhere, outside me, I felt a stirring.

  Then, more than a stirring, a turbulence in the unrelenting despair. A note, and then another one, and then another one like thin threads of light. The threads twined together, forming a melody. I clung to that melody like an anchor in a gale-tossed sea. A hint of fragrant tartness bled through Lady Ashikaga’s heavy musk.

  Just as I am

  I shall wait for my lord

  Till my hair falls white like frost to the ground. . . .

  An unfamiliar song, but a familiar, throaty grumble. The cherry tree kami. Had it answered my plea? Somehow the kami sang with my throat and the Jindo song penetrated the yurei’s despair. I pushed myself into that simple thread of melody, sinking into the blessedly cool notes.

  The yurei’s answering anger blasted hot and sharp, but the kami’s song spun another thread, and another, flashing white in the yurei’s fire but never quite burning away. Slowly, I found a sense of Tiger Lily returned enough for me to sing as well, the unfamiliar words a struggle to form, even inside my own mind, but the melody the cool caress of a mother’s hand on a fevered brow. The twin strands of melody spun around my prison, coating the sides with sticky webs like a spider’s nest. Every time the yurei surged, trying to burn me away, the scent of musk stuck to the web, sinking into the song we spun together, becoming part of my joining with the kami. Making it stronger.

  A taste of the yurei’s own medicine, trying to usurp the sacred, pure power of human and kami singing together to sustain its vile curse. I remembered the outrage of Asama-yama when Norinaga had called on the mountain kami’s power to kill Ashikaga’s men on Hell Mountain. Death was pollution, repugnant to kami. Asama-yama had chosen my quiet song over Norinaga’s killing will. The cherry tree kami did, too.

  The anger, horror, and despair that enclosed me thinned to almost transparency, like pink and white strands of stretched-sugar, chitose-ame handed out on children’s day festivals. The song swelled, a molten sugar-bubble expanding, encompassing the yurei’s anger and feeding it to our joining—equal parts pleasure and pain. Heat and musk diminished. Inside my woven nest of song was only the innocent fragrance of cherry blossoms and a tartness on my tongue.

  My tongue. A sense of my own limbs returned to me. I tried flexing fingers. It was like moving through thick, soy slurry, but I made my own fingers move! Still blind, I discovered my arms were wrenched awkwardly behind my back, secured at the wrists. Like eagles’ screaming over distant mountains, the Daimyo’s and Ashikaga’s voices rose and fell from somewhere that sounded like the end of a long tunnel.

  I pictured the web of song the kami and I had spun. It absorbed the yurei’s anger, but it also kept me locked inside my own head. I had to risk breaking through.

  . . . white like frost to the ground . . .

  I sang on, but knew it wasn’t enough. Not this song. No, I had to be a commander like the crone said—and order the yurei away. I took the chant I’d practiced, thinking of Mitsusuke’s imperious manner, and made the strange foreign words heavy on my tongue, forming them in my mouth like masticating a bite of chewy, glutinous rice cake. I pushed the words through an irregularity in the web, pushing the yurei away with all my might . . .

  . . . and landed fully inside my kneeling, aching body like I’d been dropped from the height of the Residence’s peaked roof.

  Air whooshed into my lungs, scouring like salt-water.

  “She stopped singing,” said Zeami’s voice. An arm around my neck and a black-clad shoulder held me immobile. I couldn’t turn my head to see. I coughed.

  “Lily?” said Ashikaga’s voice. The hold loosened.

  I opened my mouth to reply, but the noise that emerged was a frog’s croak. Hands gripped my shoulders, not tightly but still painful on tender flesh, and flipped me around. My lordling regarded me from a face with shadowed eyes, bottom lip bleeding at the corner, and parallel scrapes down one cheek.

  “Mother?”

  I waved my hand limply in front of my chest. A fit of coughing, dry and painful, burst the tense silence.

>   “It is truly gone?” said the Daimyo. He stood at the tokonoma alcove, arrested in the act of drawing a wakizashi from an ornate scabbard in the place of honor, Zeami’s hands on his forearm all that kept him from attack. The Daimyo slowly slid the half-drawn blade back home.

  Zeami let out a long sigh and adjusted his sleeping robe to fold smoothly under his knees in formal seiza. “She’s not trying to kill us anymore.”

  Ashikaga’s grip stayed on one shoulder while the other hand flat-palmed me between the shoulder blades. The coughing eased. “It’s gone.” It was true. The cherry-tree kami and Norinaga’s chant had pushed away the yurei.

  My lordling swiveled us to face the Daimyo. “I’ll take her to my rooms.”

  “You’ll take her to the stone kura cellar.”

  I exhaled slowly, tasting nothing of the yurei’s musk, hearing only the cherry tree kami’s low hum in my bones. But the center of me, the place where our songs twined together and became whole, was raw and smashed. I couldn’t join the song if I’d tried. I was broken.

  My breath caught. Ashikaga squeezed me tight thinking I feared the Daimyo. What if the yurei still rooted there inside me? Could I risk Jindo songs ever again? Or worse, what if I had broken that part of me when I shattered the yurei’s hold?

  “She’s no danger under my watch.”

  “I hurt you,” I said, softly, forgetting for a moment I should keep quiet before these nobles. Ashikaga frowned at me. “I was never in any danger.”

  “No,” agreed Zeami. “Lady Ashikaga’s curse was directed at males.”

  The Daimyo gave Zeami a warning glance. Ashikaga hadn’t told the Daimyo about revealing the secret of his physical body to me? I thought on Zeami’s words. The yurei had haunted the corridors of both the Ashikaga Residences—back home in the Northern domain as well as here. But the spirit had turned murderous only with Zeami’s physical presence in the Daimyo’s rooms.

  “You cannot mean to keep her with you, still?” the Daimyo asked. “It won’t do. Not with her stinking of Jindo magic and scandal. The heir of the Northern Domain—”

  Ashikaga interrupted with a short, barking laugh. “Why not, father? The Ashikaga Daimyos are notorious for their flaunting of convention.” Everyone carefully avoided glancing at Zeami. “Why should I be any different?”

  The Daimyo sighed. The aura of command slipped a bit, revealing an old man with crow’s feet sunk deeply into the corners of his mouth and eyes, signs of the illness stealing his life. “The court is in a delicate balance. Everyone jostles for position since Yoshikazu’s death. The Emperor has not yet acknowledged you as heir. If Lord Motofuji gains the upper hand . . .”

  “Would it be so terrible if Lord Motofuji became Daimyo?”

  Zeami sucked in breath through closed teeth. I held still like a mouse caught in an owl’s sights.

  “You ignore the family honor.”

  “Family honor,” scoffed Ashikaga, releasing me to draw up into full, formal posture, back straight as a board, a wild glint in those dark eyes, throat flushing pink. “Is it not family honor when I speak of Lord Motofuji?”

  The Daimyo lunged forward on one knee with the quickness of the warrior he had been, gripping Ashikaga’s collar and balling it in a fist at my lordling’s throat. “You are my child.”

  I crab-scrabbled backwards, bowing low to the tatami. The promise of violence loaded the Daimyo’s words. The two Ashikagas glared at each other, breathing loud and harsh in the predawn light that made the paper in the verandah windows glow faintly. Tiger stubbornness was in the grim line of my lordling’s mouth.

  Intense emotion burned brightly in the eyes of both. Was it love or pride? I looked to Zeami, but he sat motionless, his gaze towards the window, as if the dawn were more important than the sight of the father and child at odds. It had to make his heart ache as heavily as mine.

  “I am not your son,” said Ashikaga, quietly.

  The Daimyo rocked back on his heels, releasing Ashikaga’s collar. Zeami’s hand made a quick, aborted gesture. As if he’d thought to reach out to the tired, old man in a Daimyo’s night robe that had replaced the warrior so swiftly at Ashikaga’s words. Neither of us had the right to interfere.

  “You are my child,” repeated the Daimyo. “You are a main branch Ashikaga, the captain that defeated General Norinaga on Hell Mountain.”

  “Let me be content with that honor,” said Ashikaga. On the bent knee closest to me, my lordling rested a fist. Slowly, the hand opened, palm up. “I am content.”

  Should I feel happy at the implication, or nervous Ashikaga dragged me into this conversation at all?

  “No,” said the Daimyo. “It is the only way. How else can I be sure of you or Hisako when I am gone? You must succeed me. You must give this one up. Send her away. Out of Kyoto.”

  “She saved your life, all of our lives,” said Zeami.

  Now he broke his silence? He had some hand in Ashikaga’s childhood, somehow helped make my lordling into Ashikaga Yoshinori. He’d passed on Lady Ashikaga’s letters, and when my lordling tried to banish me from Kyoto he’d brought me back. Deep in my bones I knew there was love for both Ashikagas in the actor’s heart. Taking my part now must mean the actor thought Ashikaga better off with me despite the scandal. Was it true? The yurei was gone. My usefulness was over.

  “Saving the Daimyo of the Northern Han’s life no longer merits a reward?” said Ashikaga, retreating into the sardonic, formal tone my lordling usually wielded against courtiers.

  “This was no battle,” said the Daimyo.

  “Wasn’t it?” countered Zeami. “Didn’t she risk her life? Wasn’t blood drawn? Let Yoshinori keep her. As long as the flower-viewing party goes smoothly there won’t be any scandal of a grade you haven’t weathered before.”

  The Daimyo looked me up and down, eyebrows furrowing in disapproval. “She may ask a boon of me. Let her decide.”

  Three pairs of eyes skewered me. A boon? A Daimyo’s boon was no small thing. Was this a test, then? The Daimyo thought he could bribe me away from Ashikaga? I thought of father, of Little Brother’s temple learning, and of May. I pictured my lordling, all alone in the Capital after the Daimyo’s death, surrounded on all sides by scheming courtiers.

  Ashikaga’s eyes narrowed, impatient at my silence. “Go ahead. Ask to stay.”

  “Please, my lord,” I said carefully. “May I humbly request some time to think?”

  The Daimyo let out a guttural laugh. “Not as tame as you pretend, are you girl?” He jerked his chin toward the door. “Go, now. You have until tomorrow evening. Think carefully.”

  A clear dismissal. Ashikaga bowed to the tatami mat. Impatient with my slow scuttle backwards toward the door, my lordling gripped me above the elbow and all but force-marched me into the corridor. The floor sang softly under our feet despite Ashikaga’s careful, toe-first steps. Neither of us wanted to meet other members of the household. But it wouldn’t be long before Jiro was lighting kitchen-fires and the other handmaidens were stirring.

  I collapsed into seiza next to Ashikaga’s unused, carefully laid-out bedroll. My lordling stood, towering over me with hands on hips. Face set in hard lines. The fierce hawk of the North.

  The wanting was there again, thickening the air between us so that I almost expected to see it shimmer in the air the way heat did in the deepest summer. But that Tiger pride was there, too, making it impossible. I bit my lip. Would my lordling ask why I hadn’t asked for the boon of remaining a handmaiden here in Kyoto? How could I explain when I didn’t know myself why I’d asked for time? I was tired, exhausted really. My bones weighed so heavily they might as well be lead. My insides were scraped raw.

  All I craved was sleep. Instead, I leaned forward and put my cheek against Ashikaga’s hard
thigh. My lordling crouched, hands on my shoulders, and pushed me down on the bedroll. “We’ve got a little time,” my lordling said. “Rest with me.” The arm curled around my middle made a tight band, but we both knew Ashikaga wouldn’t force me to stay.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  * * *

  IT FELT LIKE ONLY a moment passed between falling asleep, stiff in Ashikaga’s arms, and waking, shaken by Beautiful. My lordling was gone.

  “Come on sleepybones,” she said. “Jiro saved you okayu and dried horse mackerel. Then you can join the rest of us crazies.” She was in such a hurry that she forgot to tease me about where I’d spent the night.

  Beautiful wasn’t overstating the chaos. When I emerged from Ashikaga’s room, people were running around like ants whose nest Little Brother had poked with a stick. Handmaidens fluttered dusters and polishing rags. House guards scrambled over the gravel outside, setting up temporary enclosures, the gardeners trailing behind with willow brooms to contain the damage to the well-swept yard. In the kitchen, Jiro was literally penned in by boiling pots and scullery maids peeling a garden’s worth of radishes, carrots, and burdock. As I gulped down rice gruel, three fishmongers arrived with bamboo crates packed with straw and ice.

  At my last swallow, Beautiful dragged me back to the empty handmaiden room to get me changed into a silk robe with contrasting under-robe, apply smooth white paste over the worst of the scratches and bruises on my face and throat, and then oil my hair into a long tail at the back of my neck.

  We joined a row of handmaidens beating embroidered zabuton cushions with wicker beaters, the dust puffing out in great clouds that the light morning breeze carried towards the newly erected posts and lengths of rippling cloth forming the skeleton of a grand pavilion. Every swing of my beater made muscles in my aching shoulders and waist protest. It was like the yurei had beaten me inside and out. But the muscle pain was welcome, a good pain, an honest pain. At least I was alive to feel it as myself.