Tall Maiden reached for Dad’s arm, purposefully grasping his sleeved forearm above the bare skin of his wrist. Okay, so she’s rude, but not an idiot. I tapped her forearm. “What’s your name?”
She bristled, eyes widening for a second as if I’d hurled a curse instead of asking the name of the person putting their hands on my father.
Ken cleared his throat. In English he said quietly, “We don’t ask names.” Ah yes. I’d forgotten the whole names-have-power thing. After blabbing Kwaskwi’s and Thunderbird’s name to Ullikemi back in Portland, the whole reason Kwaskwi was mixed up in this at all, you’d think I could remember Kind were touchy about names. I sighed.
“We will bring Herai-san to an anteroom. The Council will proceed with formal introductions.” Tall Maiden used extremely formal Japanese. Her nose wrinkled. “You may wish to refresh yourself before the Council arrives.”
Ken squeezed my knee painfully hard as I opened my mouth to respond. I whacked him with the back of my hand. With a bright, tight smile I said, “This meeting is such an honor. I humbly thank you for your kind offer.” Tall Maiden didn’t get my sarcasm. She nodded in approval and took over the wheelchair, hustling Dad along the gravel path.
Shrine Boy wrapped up his conversation with Kwaskwi and followed after, casting a glance back over his shoulder just before the three disappeared behind more lushly rioting wisteria. I jumped out of the limo, followed closely by Ken.
“Hey, wait for us.”
“It’s okay,” said Ken. “Trust me. They will take him directly to Yukiko-sama and the Council.”
“What the heck I gotta do to get with him?” Kwaskwi said. It took me a second to process who he meant. And then I mentally went over what I knew about Kwaskwi. Usually my gaydar worked better than this.
“You need to treat this more seriously,” said Ken in English. “The Council won’t appreciate your little jokes.”
Ken had turned into quite the uptight guy since getting on the plane. I wondered if the Ken I had gotten to know in Portland was just a temporary persona he’d been using. He was a trickster Kitsune, after all.
“I ain’t joking,” said Kwaskwi. “That boy is a serious fox.”
“More like serious wolf,” Ken said. “He is Horkew Kamuy.”
Kwaskwi ran a hand through his hair and straightened his battered, leather jacket. “First peoples, then. No kidding.” He shot a startled glance at Ken. “The Council chose these two on purpose. Damn, they’re slick.”
I looked questioningly at Ken. He made an impatient gesture and set off down the path. “What? What does Horkew Kamuy mean?”
Ken stopped in the middle of the path, hands clenched into fists at his sides. “Neither of you seem to understand the power the Council may wield over you. You can’t be flippant. They are here to judge you.”
“I understand,” I said. “I am taking this seriously. I just don’t understand why both of you are freaking out over the shrine youth.”
“They are Kind of the Ainu. The Council chose them to meet us especially because they knew Kwaskwi would be with us.”
“Trying to get on my good side. Aw, shucks. They don’t have anything to fear from little, old me,” Kwaskwi said.
I would have lifted an eyebrow, Spock-wise, if I could. Kwaskwi had no trouble reading my disbelief anyway. He chuckled.
Ken huffed impatiently, then returned down the path and grasped my elbow, hustling me forward.
“You should stay close to Herai-san.”
“Huh? You literally just told me he was safe here. Welcomed with open arms.”
“There is no danger to Herai-san. Just…stay close.”
The gravel path widened into a little yard surrounded by an army of pines clipped as carefully as poodles, standing at attention in dozens of straight rows. A paved road curved deeper into the trees and up a slight rise. The pointing leaves of a wooden signpost bristled in several directions.
Alas, the archaic characters were beyond me. The one leaf pointing along the path started with “hon,” which I vaguely remembered could mean “central,” but I had no clue about the Kanji it was paired with. All those Saturdays spent whining as Dad forced me to practice writing them over and over rose up like a mist of vague uneasiness.
When I was little, the sense of Dad’s otherness was like an aura that only manifested when we ate together in restaurants, or when he came to school events.
I am in Japan. It felt oddly dreamlike and freeing not to be able to read the sign. Like going back to childhood. Or it could have been just a bonus side effect of the lack of caffeinated milk in my immediate vicinity.
Kwaskwi pointed up the path. “We going to the main shrine, the Honden?”
“You can read Kanji?” So not fair!
“It pays to learn the language of the Evil Overlords.”
This earned another pursed-lip look from Ken. I had only a hazy idea of Kind politics, but did he mean this Council in Japan somehow ruled over Kind even in the States? My entitled American self was offended.
Up the path, the shrine youths’ red hakama turned a corner, disappearing into the trees. All of a sudden an urgency to not let Dad out of my sight welled up within me. Whether it was due to Ken’s warning, or just being in a foreign country, I didn’t know, but I stepped lively past Ken and reached the turn just as the shrine youths pushed Dad up a ramp into a low, yellow building shingled with traditional, curved, dark tiles over roughly hewn wooden eaves. Nestled in a grove of trees bounded by a dirty, concrete block wall, it looked nothing like my imagined version of a shrine.
The shrine boy bent down and pushed the ramp away from the entrance, saw me, and beckoned in that ‘go away’ fluttering motion I’d only ever seen Dad do before. A large, white sign held the Kanji for “cha” and “ie”. Teahouse. The Council met in a teahouse? I guess the main shrine must be beyond the groves of trees. I hurried over to the entrance, strangely low even for a historically shorter-statured people, and entered the teahouse.
A man shorter than my sister wearing shiny, faux-leather pants, and a dark button-down shirt open to a muscled, hairless chest hovered over Dad’s chair. The slicked-back hair and sunglasses worn low on his nose gave him a Rockabilly air that screamed Harajuku dancer from an old Gwen Stefani video.
“What did you do to him?” he demanded.
“You must forgive me, I dared to administer a sedative on the plane,” said Ken, coming to stand close behind me, slightly hunched over due to the low ceiling. The exchange was in Japanese, but I barely could follow the convoluted honorifics in Ken’s sentence. This must be a Council dude, then. Was he Kitsune like Ken? Rockabilly really didn’t hook into any kind of Japanese myth I’d ever heard.
Rockabilly sucked in a slow breath through closed teeth—a sound I associated with Dad at his most disapproving. “He is lost to madness, then?”
“He isn’t mad. There are moments of lucidity. The airplane was hard for him.” Rockabilly looked at me, as if appalled I’d spoken at all.
Hairs on the back of my neck suddenly stood at attention. I shivered. A tall, willowy woman stepped into the room. Her skin was a colorless white, like skim milk, and her hair a glossy sheen of ivory. Her eyes were so dark a brown that the pupils bled into the irises, creating twin slits of narrow black in a face with sharply slanted, cut cheekbones. She raised an arm, the sleeve of her asymmetrically cut white robe billowing in an impossibly graceful gesture, and shook her head. Rockabilly deflated a little, visibly backed down.
Ken bowed to her, holding the bow an absurdly long time.
She lowered the hand on Dad’s shoulder. Then she turned to Ken with an artfully raised eyebrow I realized must be entirely painted on her otherwise lashless and hairless face.
“Herai-san’s daughter,” said Ken formally. “Pierce Koi has accompanied us home.”
She made another graceful arc of hand and wrist, indicating Dad. Ken cleared his throat. “He should awaken in the next hour. There is one more traveling compa
nion I should introduce.”
I glanced around. The lady raised an eyebrow again, her lips pursed. Kwaskwi was nowhere to be seen.
“I will retrieve him.” Ken bowed and retreated backwards out of the little entryway room. Without him at my back, I suddenly felt tired and nervous about being left alone with Rockabilly and Snow Lady. Awkward. I couldn’t leave Dad here alone with them, could I? What the hell was taking Ken so long?
“Why is there a blue jay perched on Pon-suma?” said a male voice from the next room. Rockabilly slid open a paper shoji door behind him to reveal the main room of the teahouse where a bald man in ochre robes sat neatly on folded knees in seiza, hands folded into a perfect triangle on his lap, his gaze directed out the window.
Snow Lady and Rockabilly went in the other room, too. I followed. Apparently Kwaskwi had found the shrine youths again. They held brooms made of bundled rushes and were attempting to sweep up a light carpet of blue feathers from the pristine gravel, but as soon as the boy swept up a pile, the blue jay perched on his shoulder let fall another small flurry. Tall Maiden followed behind with a dustpan.
“Does the Siwash Tyee mock us with this behavior?”
Snow Lady gave a meaningful glance at me. The bald monk turned, slowly. He looked me up and down. “You are?”
“She is Herai’s daughter,” said Rockabilly.
“Baku?”
“So says Fujiwara Kennosuke.”
“Ah, so.” Apparently this wasn’t important news to the monk. He addressed Rockabilly as if no one else was in the room. “Enough. Gather the Americans.”
Rockabilly clicked his heels and gave a military bow, strode back through the antechamber to scuff his feet into traditional wooden clog geta. Through the window I saw him issue a series of commands. The shrine youths dropped their brooms. Pon-suma, evidently the boy, carefully lifted the blue jay from his shoulder with both hands and flung it with surprising strength ten feet in the air.
Screeching, the blue jay frantically flapped its wings for balance, pausing at the apex of its journey, and then folded them tight against its body so that it made a streamlined dive-bomb straight back at Pon-suma’s upturned face.
The shrine boy stood his ground unblinking. At the very last instant, the jay veered to the right, skimming over Rockabilly’s pompadour. The Council dude flinched.
Snow Lady gave a slow exhale. Somehow it conveyed a long-suffering disdain at the same time as it cooled the air in the room several degrees.
Ken, Kwaskwi, and Rockabilly filed into the anteroom in a cluster of cleared throats and steely glares, trailed by one blue feather that wafted slowly through the dusty air to settle on the spotless tatami floor, as garish as lipstick on a white collar.
“Your father is waking,” Ken whispered in my ear. His warmth at my back was the only thing holding me in place. Every survivalist instinct within me jangled to get out of there.
Too many people. Too little space.
In the past week I’d learned enough from Dad and Ken to take care of minor, accidental brushes with most people. It was like coughing to dislodge something stuck in your throat, a brief flare and the dream fragment would be gone. But none of the people in this room would have minor dream fragments. Kind dreams were a whole different kettle of crazy fish.
“It’s okay,” Ken whispered in English. “Go stand with him. Ease his waking.”
Kwaskwi flashed me his trademark toothy grin as we did an awkward shuffle past each other in the doorway.
Dad’s eyes were open. “This is the Teahouse?” he asked quietly.
I pressed his clothed arm with both hands, kneeling beside the wheelchair, nodding, trying to give and receive strength at the same time.
Dad’s hand trembled in the air as he reached for my head. It rested there, heavy. I braced myself, but no dream or fragment sparked between us. Lucid, Dad was lucid. Enough to know where we were. Enough to hold back his own fragments.
“Why did you warn me away from the Black Pearl? Are you afraid of the Council?” I whispered, wary that those gathered in the next room not hear our conversation.
“The desire is hardwired into all of us,” said Dad quietly in Japanese. “To be with our own Kind. Japan may have emerged from World War II with a new constitution and no army, but Japan is an island country with an island mentality. It is no coincidence the Council meets at Yasukuni Shrine.”
“Dad,” I said. He was side-stepping my questions.
His hand moved to cup my cheek. His skin felt like brittle, dry parchment. “I never meant for you to have to…to be here. They will bring you to the Black Pearl. The Council will ask you to eat dreams.”
“They will meet you now,” said Ken, pulling me up by the elbow. Dad and I exchanged a look so crammed with emotions I could barely breathe. He stood up from the chair, moving with steady purpose instead of as the befuddled, weakened man I’d traveled with across the Pacific.
Ken lead us back into the main room. There, Rockabilly and Snow Lady flanked the monk, all three sitting in formal seiza, symmetrically spaced in front of the tokonoma alcove. Behind them rested an ink-and-brush painting of foxes, a lone Calla lily in a rustic, ceramic vase, and a glass bowl of water.
Aesthetic perfection like this made my teeth ache. I helped settle Dad into a cross-legged position flanking Kwaskwi.
Ken knelt and bowed so his forehead brushed the perfect triangle of his hands on the tatami. “May I present to the esteemed Council Herai Akihito, Pierce Koi, and a representative of the Western Alliance Kind, Tyee Kwaskwi.”
The monk frowned. “Tyee Kwaskwi is known to us, of course, but you were charged with giving full names at this presentation, Bringer.” Ken’s face changed. His eyes went full black, the planes of cheek and jaw sharpening, elongating—what I thought of as Ken’s true face, his Kitsune face.
Bringer, the monk had called him. The servant of the Council. He took a deep breath, bowing his head. “Koi AweoAweo Pierce. Tyee Kwaskwi Wematin.”
Shock hit me like a snowball to the face. For a moment, Kwaskwi and I mirrored each other with perfect, comical expressions of disbelief. Ken had given them my name. My full, true name. Kwaskwi recovered first.
“Your humble servant,” he said with a mocking tone that made it absolutely crystal-clear he was only momentarily thrown for a loop and not afraid at all.
“Why?” I asked quietly. But Ken turned back to the Council.
“Asylum for the Hafu Baku girl, and treaty negotiation for the Siwash Tyee is requested,” he said.
What did you just do, Ken?
Cold shock was joined by an icy trickle down my spine. It was the realization that I could have been fooled all this time by Kitsune illusion. Was everything he’d said in Portland a lie? Even the kissing?
I bit my lower lip. No, I’d tasted Ken’s dreams. They were honest, earthy fragments of running in primeval forest. It was his dream fragment in the final moment of my fight with Ullikemi that had helped me hold on to myself long enough to set that ancient dragon free of its Vishap Stone prison. He’d revealed a shining, warrior version woman in his fragment that turned out to be how he saw me.
Or was that an illusion, too? It had been in Ken’s best interest to release Ullikemi so he could bring us to Tokyo. I was only a baby Baku after all. What if he had manipulated the dream in some way I could only guess at?
There was only one person in this room I could truly trust. “My father is ill. The Bringer,” I emphasized the title hoping Ken noticed the little dig, “said that you could heal him.”
The monk’s direct regard felt like putting your face directly over a cup of Plaid Pantry coffee—sour heat and an impenetrable sludge of black. God help me, would I ever drink a Stumptown latte again?
“Herai-san has not explained, then, what his illness is?” The monk turned that powerful gaze on Dad. “It is because you fight your true self that you lose your way in the mists of your mind.”
“This is a greater issue than the question of
my true self!” said Dad, thumping an open hand on one thigh.
Snow Lady put out a flat palm and the air got several degrees colder. Everyone tensed, as if unsure if Snow Lady was going to soothe Dad or casually gut him. She rose in one, smooth glide and beckoned for Dad to follow. Dad had been startled by her gesture, but now a rueful smile crossed his face as he struggled to stand. I rose, too, but Ken put a hand on my shoulder, pushing me back down. I brushed away the hand. “Don’t touch me.”
A muscle ticked in his clenched jaw.
“Yukiko-san will attend to your father while assessing his condition,” said the monk. Then, as if appeasing a small child, “She can give him a measure of peace.”
“It okay,” said Dad in English. “She old friend.”
Kwaskwi answered my worried look. “Yukiko is known as fair and impartial.”
I watched them leave the Teahouse with a sinking heart. I didn’t trust these people, but Dad evidently thought it was in his best interest to go. If she could help him, it was worth the trip, all this fear, and even Rockabilly’s current infuriating smirk. Why couldn’t I help Dad? What was the point of being a baby Baku if I was so helpless?
“Now for the Hafu. I will give you a fragment. Show us your Baku power,” said the monk. He pushed back a sleeve. “Come.”
“You already have my name,” I said. “Isn’t that enough?”
Rockabilly’s smirk got bigger. “She is not truly Baku, is she?”
“I do not lie,” said Ken. “She ate Thunderbird’s dreams, taking in his power. She set Ullikemi free and stopped his human servant, Mangasar Hayk.”
“Herai Akihito is known to us.” The monk looked to Rockabilly as if for confirmation. Rockabilly raised his chin, and almost seemed to sniff, as if something was faintly rotten in my direction. He gave a slow nod. “You are not. Show us what you are so we can deal with you.”
“Put you in your place is more like it,” Kwaskwi muttered. The monk turned the implacable stare his direction, but that trademark grin only got bigger, teeth gleaming white in the soft shadows.
I considered several ways to refuse the monk and decided honesty was probably the easiest all around. “I’m inexperienced. Kind fragments are overwhelming. Is there a regular, old human around I could touch instead?”
Black Pearl Dreaming Page 4