“You won’t breathe a word of this conversation to him or anyone else.” Ienobu’s eyes gleamed; he enjoyed Yanagisawa’s distress. “If you do, I’ll have Yoshisato killed. You’ll never see him again.”
Yanagisawa boiled with fury and hatred. “I’ll kill you!”
“If anything bad happens to me, or if you refuse to support me as the next shogun, Yoshisato dies,” Ienobu said.
In spite of himself Yanagisawa felt a grudging esteem for Ienobu, who’d bettered him in imagination and audacity. Yanagisawa had never dreamed of, let alone attempted, such a move.
“If you cooperate with me, you get him back safe and sound.” Ienobu smiled expectantly, confidently. “Well? Do we have a deal?”
The wild beast inside Yanagisawa thrashed and bellowed. Yanagisawa desperately wanted Yoshisato to return. Rationality screamed at him not to be deceived. “You’ve no reason to bring Yoshisato back. If you do, the shogun will disinherit you in favor of him. You’re going to string me along, while I dispatch your enemies for you, until you’re shogun. And then you’ll kill Yoshisato so that he can’t raise a revolt against you.”
“That’s a definite possibility,” Ienobu agreed. “But remember: Unless you cooperate, Yoshisato dies. For real.”
All his life Yanagisawa had taken pride in his ability to find a way around a problem. Now he found none, saw no choice but the bargain offered by Ienobu. Desperation pushed him to accept even though he didn’t trust Ienobu to uphold his part of the bargain, even though it was so humiliating. He would accept for Yoshisato’s sake.
“All right.” The words tasted as foul as excrement in Yanagisawa’s mouth. “You win.”
Ienobu nodded as if he’d never doubted he would. “By the way, you can keep your post as chamberlain. It will give you the authority to do what you need to do for me. Oh, and when you dispatch my enemies, start with your friend Sano.” He turned and shuffled over to his guards. They accompanied him into the palace.
Yanagisawa stood alone in the garden, consumed by rage yet less bereft and lost than when he’d walked out of the assembly. “You win for now,” he said to the absent Ienobu. “But I’m going to find Yoshisato. And I swear that as soon as he’s safe, I will kill you, you bastard.”
* * *
Still groggy from the medicine the doctor had given her, Taeko sat on the veranda, her right arm in a sling, watching the ducks swim in the pond. Yesterday seemed like a dream. Her shoulder had hurt so bad that it had blanked out her memory of much that had happened. She did recall her mother crying over her, the doctor saying her shoulder had been dislocated, and fainting because of the awful pain when he reset it in the socket. The rest was hard to believe.
Masahiro came out of the house. Taeko snapped fully alert. He looked as shy as she felt with him. He crouched near her and asked, “How’s your shoulder?”
Looking sideways at him, Taeko said, “Better.”
He nodded, then frowned. “You shouldn’t have climbed up on the tower. It was stupid and dangerous. When you caught me, we could have both fallen and been killed!”
Taeko was relieved as well as saddened by his scolding. The scene on the tower really had happened. She glanced at Masahiro’s ankle. Just above the top of his white sock was a purple bruise that encircled his ankle, dotted with raw, red gouges from her fingernails.
Masahiro sighed. “That’s not what I meant to say.” He said gruffly, “You saved my life. Thank you.”
She heard new respect in his voice. It gave her the confidence to look directly at him. Their eyes met. His were serious, without the usual annoyance, teasing, or condescending affection.
“Why?” Masahiro sounded puzzled. “Why did you risk your life to save me?”
Taeko didn’t have the words to express her feelings, but she couldn’t hide them, either. As she gazed at Masahiro, all her love shone out from her eyes.
His eyes darkened with astonishment. A shadow of fear crossed his expression. This boy Taeko had thought wasn’t afraid of anything was afraid of how much she cared for him, how much she was willing to do for his sake. Something in the air changed. The garden shimmered and flowed, like a painting with water poured on it. Masahiro’s image blurred. Taeko had a sense that years had passed in an instant. She knew, without knowing how she knew, that she was seeing the future. Someday, when she and Masahiro were older, they would be much more to each other than they were now. Their fates were connected.
Clarity returned to the world. Masahiro abruptly stood up. He looked confused, as if he’d experienced something he didn’t understand and didn’t know whether he liked. His trousers covered the bruise around his ankle, but Taeko knew it was there. She had the strange, comforting idea that she’d put her mark on Masahiro.
Without a word he went into the house. Taeko had no urge to run after him. She smiled.
He could leave, and she didn’t mind, because he would come back to her. He would always go, but he would always have to come back.
* * *
Sano hesitated at the threshold of Reiko’s chamber. His wife was just as he’d left her this morning-in bed, her tear-swollen eyes gazing into space, her frail hands clasped over her empty womb. When he knelt at her side, she looked at him as if she were alone with her grief on one side of an ocean and he on the other with the rest of the world.
“Are you feeling better?” Sano asked.
The misery on her face intensified. He knew he’d said the wrong thing. Everything he’d said since he’d come home and found her weeping over their stillborn son had been wrong. He couldn’t seem to find the right thing to say.
“I was just at the shogun’s assembly,” Sano said, resorting to conversation that was impersonal, less fraught with hazards. He told Reiko that the shogun had officially voided the charges against them and reinstated him and Masahiro to their positions. “It looks like Yanagisawa will be forced out of the regime.”
“That’s good.” Reiko hardly seemed to care.
Sano was sorry about losing their child, but his grief couldn’t equal hers. He hadn’t carried it inside him for six months. It had never seemed as real to him as their other children, and he realized he’d been bracing himself to lose it; Reiko had been through so much during her pregnancy. He hated that she had paid such a high price for the solution to their problems. Her love for him and her effort to save him had cost her the child for which she’d longed.
To distract her from her grief, and himself from his guilt, Sano said, “The shogun has named Ienobu as his heir.”
“Oh.” Reiko’s tone was indifferent. “What are you going to do?”
Once she would have said we, Sano thought sadly. She’d have rushed to help him prevent Ienobu the murderer from becoming the next shogun. “I’ll find other proof that Ienobu had a hand in Tsuruhime’s and Yoshisato’s deaths. There must be witnesses or evidence somewhere. When I have enough, I’ll go to the shogun.”
Reiko didn’t respond. Sano knew it was selfish to mind the change in her, but his heart ached with loneliness. Many times he’d tried to prevent Reiko from involving herself in things that were dangerous. Now he would give anything to restore her to her normal, feisty self.
“There’s something else I have to do.” Sano didn’t like to bother Reiko with problems, but he had no one else to confide in about his other unfinished business, and he couldn’t help trying to draw her back to him. “It’s about Hirata. The time I gave him to resolve things himself is up. I have to arrest him and his friends in the secret society and prosecute them for treason.”
Alarm overshadowed the misery in Reiko’s expression. For the first time Sano had her full attention. “You would really do that to Hirata?”
“I don’t want to.” There had been few things Sano wanted less. “I have to.”
“But he’s been your friend for fifteen years. He saved your life.”