I stood in front of the paper panels for a long moment, slowly becoming aware of the muttered grumbles of the cherry trees vibrating the nightingale floor. Even through tabi-socks the soles of my feet picked up on the kami’s displeasure. Whatever was angering the cherry tree spirit, it was here tonight. The hushed corridor suddenly didn’t feel like a haven anymore.
With clinks and tilting bowls, I set the tray down hurriedly and knelt next to the door panel.
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “My Lord, I am here with dinner.”
“Come in.”
I slid open the shoji with bowed head. Rising in the smooth motion I’d practiced a hundred times under Beautiful’s tutelage, I shuffled into the room with the tray.
My lordling lay on a jumbled pile of bedroll and sleeping linens obviously dragged out impatiently instead of waiting for me or Little Turtle. Ashikaga’s night robe gaped open to reveal the white linen of an undergarment. The leather tie holding back that thick mane of hair was undone, and it tumbled all about my lordling’s shoulders in long, unkempt strands.
An ache, sharp and sudden as Whispering Brook’s spring-cold presence, entered my chest instead of breath. My lordling was so very beautiful. Not the studied, purposeful way of Little Turtle, but pure and clean. The unbroken line of clear profile; smooth and unabashed like the symmetry of an eggshell or the sweep of water down a cliff face.
“Bring the tray here.”
I knelt. Pushing away stray corners of jumbled sheet provided a moment for the ache to subside. My hands wouldn’t keep to the slow, controlled movements Beautiful had drilled into me. The lid clinked against the rice bowl. Drops of miso broth tippled onto the tray. Chopsticks refused to stay balanced on the ceramic paulownia leaves of the stand.
Strong, slender fingers closed over mine.
“You’re trembling.”
“I’m sorry.”
The cherry trees’ rumble vibrated along the underside of my unease. Little Turtle’s words, my lordling’s off-kilter appearance—the familiar patterns of handmaiden with lord weren’t strong enough to disguise the undercurrents in the room.
“Are you afraid?”
I stared into the deep black lacquer of the tray. Clumsy words would bungle this. The hand tightened, prying my fingers from the tray’s rim to press into my lordling’s own. Rice wine flushed warmth all along darkened eyes and pale cheekbones.
“The cherry trees are grumbling,” I said.
Ashikaga flung away my hand like it had stung. “The kami, again? I spent the last hours forced to drink wine with my brother and Lord Hosokawa, just barely avoiding serious court blunders, feeling like a schoolboy in a council of war. Do you know what made it all the more difficult? My mind kept jumping to a disturbing image.”
I sat back on my heels. “What image?”
“Hosokawa’s hand on your arm, alone in Ryoan-ji’s garden. Then I come upon my two handmaidens speaking of the very thing that distracted me at dinner. And all you can talk about are those hell-damned cherry trees?”
“I never meant to—”
“No, you never do. That’s what is so frustrating.” Ashikaga gave a long, sour sigh. “I find myself tired and soused and without the energy to fight you tonight.”
“Shall I retire?”
Ashikaga gave me a long look from under half-lidded eyes. I’d said the wrong thing again.
“That’s too easy for you. Hand me a sweetfish. You can do penance by keeping a drunk company through the night.” Ashikaga bit into the blackened, crisp skin of the sweetfish, chewing bones and all with the slurping gusto of an old coot at Auntie Jay’s teahouse. My lordling cupped both hands around the tea bowl and slopped hot liquid over the rim.
“You forgot the wine.”
“I’m sorry, my Lord.”
“Your apologies are tiresome, too.”
The skin across my shoulder blades itched. Kami grumbling in my insides, Ashikaga’s strange mood prickling from the outside. Being in Kyo no Miyako had never felt so wrong. It was like I was a hermit crab on the strand, trying stupidly to fold limbs into a too-small shell. Absurd to think I could pretend to be a handmaiden. I longed for the straightforward solitude of Whispering Brook’s stream bank. The forest never made me feel clumsy and blundering.
The last of the sweetfish went down Ashikaga’s throat, followed by the bowl of rice. The chopsticks clattered to the tray. The tangled knot of the obi confounded my lordling for a moment as my lordling stretched long limbs out over the bedroll. I should have already eased Ashikaga into a sleeping robe and hung up the silk outer robe. I should have gotten a braided length of leather and tied back my lordling’s hair. Grains of rice stuck to the ends.
Ashikaga threw the obi over the kimono stand and rolled to a sitting position. A bundle wrapped in paulownia-printed silk nestled between my lordling’s crossed legs. It was the bundle from Zeami at their Ryoan-ji meeting. Ashikaga hadn’t opened it yet? With a grunt, my lordling jerked the cloth away to reveal a box of reddish unlacquered wood. Ashikaga laid an open palm on the lid. “Yasuko.”
Lady Ashikaga. I’d never heard my lordling so much as say her name before today. She’d lived apart in Kyoto with Lord Yoshikazu for so long, and then died six months ago. I’d thought her only a distant memory in Ashikaga’s heart, but this wasn’t the sigh of an estranged child. All this time had my lordling carried around Lady Ashikaga like a shadow in the heart, as I did my own mother? A splinter that quietly throbbed until a careless move sent a spike of pain through the chest?
“Why him?” said Ashikaga in a low voice.
Him? Did he mean Lord Hosokawa in Ryoan-ji garden?
“My lord?”
“Why give this to her rival?”
Oh. Meaning Zeami—not thinking of me, then. Prickling embarrassment and relief both flowed down my spine.
Ashikaga took off the lid. Inside was a tidy bundle of scrolls, each wrapped carefully around a bark-stripped twig. The bracing smell of tsugi cedar filled the air. Letters, then. Ashikaga pulled the tie from the bundle and cast it aside. Slowly, my lordling unrolled the first scroll. Feminine script-characters with flowing rounded half-moons and gracefully arched tails filled the white paper. The characters were as meaningless to me as the borrowed Middle Kingdom characters used by priests and nobles.
But I could read the way Ashikaga’s jaw tightened at whatever was on that scroll. My shins had lost all feeling by the time my lordling put down the first letter, picking up the next one without comment. I shifted my weight from legs to floor. The slight rustle caught Ashikaga’s attention. One free hand shot out and pressed against my knee as if to keep me from escaping. As if I meant to abandon my lordling just at this tense moment. I remembered the comment about my cherry tree talk, and bit my lip to keep silent and still.
One after another, Ashikaga read through the letters. At last only one scroll remained. This one was rolled on a rectangle of evenly cut paulownia wood, and the mulberry paper edged in patterned silk of a rich, ai-zome dyed indigo. Male characters in bold, hasty strokes covered the paper. My lordling read the last letter and set it down, unrolled in the nest of the other letters. Small spots of red appeared high on those pale cheeks.
“Father rejected her.” Ashikaga closed the lid with a sharp click. I flinched.
Ashikaga swept the scrolls into a jumbled pile. My lordling lunged, grasping my upper arms in hands with the practiced strength of sword practice. The delicate skin at the base of Ashikaga’s neck pulsed an erratic beat.
“My lord?”
“Love letters. Begging to be allowed to come to him. Every one. I thought . . . I thought she’d stayed away for Yoshikazu and because I was . . . because . . .”
I wriggled a little, testing the cruel gr
ip. My lordling’s eyes narrowed, focusing on my chest. Something shifted under that gaze, Ashikaga’s features melting from the fierce noble to something terribly intimate, a fuzziness from the drink? Whatever it was, suddenly it was clear we were not lord and handmaiden anymore.
She tipped me over without warning onto the bedroll, coming down alongside me pressed neck to knee. One leg came over my hip.
“Unreasonable, impractical love,” said Ashikaga into my hair, “soul-searing emotion.” Heated breath caressed the shape of my ear. “And Father sent back every single letter. He wrote he was at last coming to the Capital—to spend the last months of his life. But not with her.”
Goose pimples ran along my neck—Ashikaga’s power to make my body react with just tone and breath. Her frantic heartbeat overrode my own, forcing it into a matching rhythm. Ashikaga released my arms. The formerly imprisoning hands now roamed freely up my back, pressing and pinching flesh as if I were mochi dough needing to be shaped. Digging into my hair, Ashikaga reached my face and cupped my cheeks to hold me immobile. My skin felt tender and raw, as if I’d stood out in the sun too long. My heartbeat seemed to have migrated up to my throat and lips, throbbing so hard I was sure she could see me tremble in the flickering light of the brazier.
The harsh press of hands spoke of anger, but the way Ashikaga breathed and pressed against me spoke of that wanting. As if I were a purifying incense she could wrap around her limbs to quiet some shameful place within.
Ashikaga leaned in close, pausing only a breath away from my mouth. I ached to close that distance. This touch stripped me bare, imprisoning me even without my lordling’s strength, making me all too painfully aware of rough skin, bulky torso, and hands coarse with peasant work. If Ashikaga put her mouth on mine, all that would fall away. My lordling angled her mouth a butterfly’s wing of space between us.
I imagined myself jerking away, running out of this room, away from the terrible, cutting beauty of this person’s cheekbones. I could escape that wanting, and this room where I felt so close to crossing a fatal line. But the prickling of my lips held me immobile, stronger even than the deeply intertwined desire and anxiety I had about what lay under my own clothes or Ashikaga’s.
Frozen confusion wasn’t what Ashikaga wanted. I always disappointed on nights like this. “Madness,” Ashikaga rasped. “It’s all a kind of madness.” She darted forward, quick as a killifish angling for bait, and caught my lower lip between none-to-gentle teeth. Eyes never allowing mine to drop away, she bit down, hard.
Chapter Six
* * *
I GASPED. The cruel hands released me, moving down my shoulders to slip under my robe’s collar, teasing it into a looser fold. “What kind of letter would you write to me, Lily-of-the-Valley?” Ashikaga Yoshinori whispered into my mouth.
Her mouth dipped away, now coming to rest on the flesh the loosed collar had laid bare. “Or is it only the spirits you sit and sigh over?” Again, pinching skin between teeth, not hurting, just a warning of what she could inflict.
No warning was necessary. Ashikaga didn’t need hands or teeth or word to hold me. It was the fierce, undeniable brightness of her being that made warmth well up from my belly. The way she shone hotter than anything around, even on a sun-bright day, that made me want too much—that made me dare to think I could want anything.
Ashikaga wielded words like a tanto knife, slicing open the walls I had accumulated over years. The words I knew to answer that wanting sounded dull even in my own head. It wouldn’t be enough, not tonight. I craned my neck down and placed my mouth at the corner of my lordling’s—directly on the extra curve that made the sly smile that haunted me so.
Ashikaga froze.
All the nights I’d lain alongside my lordling in Ashikaga village and even here in Kyoto, and I’d never reached out for these touches, even when kisses bared flesh or when Ashikaga pressed hands inside my loosened robe. Did my lordling remember I had no mother to explain these things? Or that there had been no fumbles with village boys for a Tiger girl?
I blushed. Of course Ashikaga had never had those things, either. My lordling had experience somewhere, though, with someone. Did that girl, those girls, ever get this close?
I was not the same Lily who Ashikaga had met in the forest back home. Today at Ryoan-ji I’d crossed that invisible boundary I’d set for myself after the mountain spirit indwelling me breathed fire on Asama-yama.
If I tried to be a model handmaiden, if I kept these rash desires hidden, if I sang Jindo songs only in empty rooms—we could continue as we were. Ashikaga the lord, and I the peasant servant.
A naïve plan. I wouldn’t survive Kyo no Miyako or General Norinaga or the unhappy kami outside Ashikaga Palace as a naïve peasant girl. Certain things couldn’t be avoided. All the pretending in the world wouldn’t keep me safe from aching for the cold, utter beauty of a kami indwelling or the heady, fierce power of my lordling’s wanting.
Ashikaga had nuzzled a track, from my mouth down along my jaw, so many times. I let my lips follow the same trail on her salty skin, light touches down the slender neck, corded with straining tendons. My lordling hadn’t drawn a breath in a long moment. The tip of my tongue flickered out like a snake’s, tickling down the sharply vulnerable collarbone revealed by my lordling’s loose robe.
Tiger woman. It was time to remind Ashikaga that strength of passion was in both of us. Down further, my mouth found the rough texture of the linen wrapped always around Ashikaga’s chest. My lordling tensed, hands on my shoulders gripping hard, but didn’t stop me. I exhaled a long, steady breath through the linen, trying to warm the skin underneath. Skin Ashikaga had never revealed in all our time together. Slowly, so slowly, I traced a paulownia leaf over her right collarbone next to my mouth.
A moment passed, both of us locked into awareness of the place where my mouth rested. A pure, unsullied thrill at my daring curled my toes. I traced another leaf, and Ashikaga gasped like she’d been sliced open by a knife.
With my heart finger poised to trace a third leaf, Ashikaga pushed me away. She rolled to one side, propping her head on a cupped hand. “Lord Hosokawa left us alone quickly at the teahouse,” Ashikaga said in a husky tone. “Yoshikazu called for girls, to dance and sing at first, and then for something more.”
I grasped my lordling’s collar and tugged. My thrill was crinkling with an embarrassed heat at the edges. Words weren’t what I wanted. Ashikaga covered my hand, unplucking my fingers from the fabric. “One of them, a real Kyoto beauty with skin pure as snow and a proud arch to her nose, sat on my lap.” The mocking glint was back in my lordling’s eyes. Again, something shifted. The noble was back.
I rolled onto my back, staring up at the carved ceiling. The position made the cherry-tree grumbles resonating up through the floor feel like stinging caterpillars up and down my spine. Ashikaga had a girl already tonight. I’d thought to show what a Tiger girl could do and my lordling had already had a porcelain, Kyoto doll. Just like any other noble.
Ashikaga gave a little frustrated huff. “Lily.” My lordling sat up, stretching long legs out and pulling me up face-to-face. “Exactly like this. She was warm and willing and I kissed her.”
I’d thought my lord’s words cutting before, now they sliced me wide open, all my churning insides threatening to spill out with the tears welling behind my eyes. I tried to escape, but hands pinned me in place so Ashikaga could watch the effect of each knife-edged word.
“She tasted of sweet wine and the sea-salted uni we’d been eating.”
Was this punishment for touching the linen bandage? This was a cruelty Ashikaga had never shown before. I twisted with all my might, breaking free for a moment. Despite our more or less equal body size, Ashikaga had the greater strength in wrists and hands. My lordling jerked my wrists together behind my back and held them impris
oned with one hand. The other rose to my face to gently trace the line of eyebrow and then down my stubby, not-Kyoto proud nose.
“This is an evil delight, watching you squirm under my words. It’s the first time I’ve been sure you’re listening to me and not some invisible spirit.” That sly smile appeared. “She was delicious and beautiful and her kisses were practiced.” I jerked my wrists. Ashikaga gripped my chin harder. “No, you will sit and listen to the end. When her hand reached for my robe, I pushed her away.” Ashikaga gave my nose a tap. “Without any of my usual excuses. I just pushed her away.”
“You must be,” I started, swallowing down a lump in my throat, “extra vigilant here.”
“Ah, you’re listening, but not hearing, my Lily.” The hand on my wrists forced them higher on my back. I winced. The cruel smile faded, my lordling’s face going stern like one of the Ashikaga samurai ancestor paintings in the main hall. “For the child of the most powerful Daimyo in Yamato, a Tiger body is strong, quick, and useful. But this Tiger body could betray everything I’ve worked so hard to become.” Ashikaga let go of my wrists. “There’s only one person I’ve ever wanted close enough to risk that betrayal.”
I shivered, anger and hurt churning uselessly in my belly, suddenly robbed of their fuel. Disbelief spread like a heat across my face. Ashikaga meant me. Me. I looked down, rubbing my wrists where the red imprint of my lordling’s grip still lingered. But I did not try to escape.
“I would give my life,” I whispered. And there was the true answer to Little Turtle’s question about my feelings for Ashikaga. Fiercer than the love she asked about.
“I know. There’s only been one instant I’ve ever doubted. When I first saw you with the Pretender Emperor on top of Hell Mountain. But, as Uesugi-san has pointed out one hundred and eight times, you’ve had ample chance to betray me daily since then.”
The Straw Doll Cries at Midnight Page 7