Hunching her shoulders, she offered him and the spectators a sickly version of her usual, ingratiating smile. She looked guiltier than anyone Masahiro had ever seen. The people nearest them saw her guilt, too. Skepticism in their expressions gave way to belief. The troops stood dumbfounded.
“Everybody can see that you did it,” Masahiro told Korika. “You might as well confess.”
Huge sobs wracked Korika, as if she would vomit up her guilt. She doubled over, leaning on Masahiro. “I’m glad I did it!” She seemed as much relieved to give up her secret as she was distressed at being caught. “He was a fraud! I couldn’t let him be the next shogun!”
Voices babbled as people farther down the procession asked what was happening and spectators closer to Korika told them.
“His real father hurt my mistress,” Korika wailed. “My mistress and I were afraid they would get away with it. We wanted them both to suffer. So I burned Yoshisato’s house.” Tears streaked her makeup. They trickled over the self-righteous smile she gave the spectators. “Was I so wrong to make them pay when nobody else would?”
Masahiro was astonished. He’d feared that his mother’s plan to exonerate his father would fail; now Korika had confessed in front of hundreds of witnesses.
“Was the fire Lady Nobuko’s idea?” he asked.
“… No. It was mine,” Korika said.
Her pause raised doubts in Masahiro. “Did she ask you to kill Yoshisato?”
“No, she didn’t.” Korika called to the crowd, raising her voice above the hum of voices reporting her confession. “I acted alone! Lady Nobuko didn’t know I was going to do it!”
If she was telling the truth, then Lady Nobuko had done nothing wrong. If she was lying, then she was protecting her guilty mistress. But that didn’t matter. Masahiro called to the troops, “Here’s the arsonist. Take us to the shogun, so she can confess to him and I can tell him that my father and my mother and I are innocent.”
The troops that had been guarding his family were standing close to Masahiro and Korika. The leader said, “Let’s take her to Chamberlain Yanagisawa. He can sort things out.”
“Not Yanagisawa!” Masahiro was horrified. Yanagisawa would kill Korika, ignore her confession, and put Masahiro’s family to death anyway. “We have to speak to the shogun.” That was his only chance of overturning the court’s verdict.
“It’s not up to you,” the leader said. “You’re going back under house arrest, and you’re going to tell me where your mother and sister and friends went.”
He seized Masahiro by the arm. As they tussled, Korika broke loose from Masahiro, stumbled a few paces down the passage, and halted at the crowd blocking it. Soldiers advanced on her. Whimpering, she turned to her right and looked up at the vertical hillside. On her left, the unfinished wall was waist-high. She awkwardly heaved herself up on it. The soldiers grabbed for her legs. She squealed, kicking at their faces. They leaped backward. She crawled onto the surface of the wall’s dirt foundation.
“Get her down!” the leader ordered while he struggled with Masahiro.
Korika staggered up the foundation, which ascended above the downward-slanting passage beside it. Masahiro punched the leader’s nose. The leader yelled. Blood poured from his nostrils. He lost his grip on Masahiro. Masahiro climbed onto the foundation, which was some ten paces wide. Eight troops were already bounding up it after Korika. She looked over her shoulder, saw them, and screamed. Tripping on her white skirts, she veered toward the sheer drop on the other side of the wall.
“Look out!” Masahiro cried, hurtling up the slope.
Spectators groaned in consternation. Korika teetered at the edge, arms flapping. The soldiers were almost upon her when the foundation began to move. Their feet sank into the dirt as they ran. Masahiro felt the packed earth under him loosen and slide sideways. He heard clunking, skittering noises. On the wall’s other side, stones fell off and bounced down the slope. The builders of the wall had done a shoddy job, hurrying to finish it. The weight of people running on it had destabilized the structure. The whole foundation canted toward the sheer drop.
“The wall is collapsing!” someone in the procession exclaimed.
Korika screamed as the ground gave way under her, Masahiro, and the troops. She ran toward the unfinished watchtower. As the foundation spilled over the drop, Masahiro fell on his stomach. The soldiers, higher on the foundation ahead of him, went down, too. They all crawled frantically against the flow of earth, toward the side of the wall that bordered the passage. A sound like a waterfall thundered as the foundation cascaded down the slope. Masahiro reached the rim of facing stones. But the soldiers slid faster than they could climb.
“Help!” they shouted as the avalanche swept them downward.
Terrified, Masahiro flung his arms over the stones’ jagged edges. They held firm while the foundation collapsed and the crowd moaned. At last the thunder faded. The world went still. Masahiro could hear his heart pounding. His breath pumped so hard he thought his chest would burst. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that he was lying on a long, narrow ridge of flat earth-all that remained of the foundation. Below him, dust swirled from a swath of dirt, rock, and sand that covered the hillside all the way down to a retaining wall on the lower tier of the castle. Nothing moved. The avalanche had buried the soldiers and apparently killed them all.
Masahiro turned to the people staring at him from the passage below. The angry leader with the bloody nose said, “Come down from there!”
The rest of the foundation could collapse and kill him, Masahiro knew. But he couldn’t go back under house arrest. He had to take Korika to the shogun. Alarm struck. He’d lost sight of her after the avalanche started. Had she been killed?
He looked up to his left. Korika stood on the base of the watchtower, holding onto the wooden framework and crying.
Masahiro scooted up the ridge toward her. The troops shouted at him to stop, but they didn’t come after him. They were afraid to climb onto the unstable wall. Masahiro kept going. The ridge crumbled. Sand slithered downhill. Masahiro crawled through a gap in the framework onto the tower’s base. It was solid, level. The wall foundation that extended from the tower’s other side was also intact, too high for the troops to scale. Masahiro lay there a moment, panting with relief, then rose.
Korika sobbed, pressing the knuckles of one hand against her mouth. Masahiro glanced down into the passage. The foreshortened figures of priests, mourners, and troops stood with heads tilted, raptly watching him and Korika. The leader called, “Somebody fetch a ladder!”
“You have to come with me. You have to tell the shogun that you set the fire,” Masahiro said, even though he didn’t know how he would get Korika to the shogun.
“I can’t.” She shook her head violently. “I’m afraid.”
She sidled between the wooden posts of the framework, to the edge of the base that overlooked the hillside. Masahiro gazed down the vertical stone surface. Below was the castle’s official district. The houses on the street directly under Masahiro had been crushed when the old tower fell during the earthquake. The debris had been cleared; a new retaining wall braced the slope. On either side of the street were mansions under construction. Beyond them, the tile roofs of finished mansions extended to a breathtaking view of the city below the hill. Masahiro didn’t know how far above the street the tower base was-maybe five or six stories. But he was up high enough that waves of fear rippled from his toes to his chest.
Standing at the edge, gazing down, Korika said forlornly, “I’d rather die here, now.”
40