Year of the Demon

hasten his wedding plans the moment he learns I am still alive. So tell me, how am I to outrace him by clambering over every obstacle between here and Izu? I don’t even know where here is.”

“Childish. You have a mind like thin ice. No flexibility.”

“And afraid it might crack? Is that what you think? That I’m afraid?”

“Yes.”

“Then teach me to think like water, damn you. Show me what leeway I have to adapt. My enemy commands the oceans, riding the back roads will take weeks I do not have, and the Tokaido is watched.”

“Not the Tokaido. You.”

Daigoro’s shoulders slumped and his head sagged. “What difference could that possibly make?”

“Obvious. Send me in your stead.”

“That’s no solution. What I’m going to ask for is too outrageous for anyone but me to ask it.”

“New disguises, then. Your limp, easy to hide. Your weapon, impossible. Do what must be done.”

“Oh, no. If it weren’t for this sword, I wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. I’m not getting rid of her now.”

The shinobi snorted. “Then your mind is not clear after all. You are a child. As well ask for a square egg as to ask me to deliver you to your family’s home. You wish to be there without going there. You refuse straight paths and then complain of curves and corners. You would go without being seen, without surrendering that which makes you seen. Pah!”

Daigoro made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob. Pain and weariness and despair bore down on him, so heavy that he wasn’t sure he could stand. He was desperate, he’d run out of options, and now he’d managed to aggravate even his unflappable companion. He’d never seen anyone display as much anger as this nameless man now captured in a single scowl. And this was his last friend in the world.

He wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep. Even an hour would be enough. He was so tired he could hardly think. But Shichio’s riders could arrive at any moment. For the hunted man, rest was an enemy, not an ally.

He forced himself to his feet. “You’re right,” he said, marshaling what little energy he had left. “I ask the impossible. But we have three advantages in our favor.”

“Optimistic. Stupid.”

Daigoro would not be deterred. “First, any good knife can make a round egg square. Second, my family’s compound is not our destination.”

“I am to deliver you to Izu. To prevent your enemy from wedding your mother.”

“Yes, but doing that from my mother’s house is impossible. The answer to that riddle lies in the house of Yasuda.”

The furrows between the shinobi’s eyebrows grew deeper and darker. “This clan is unknown to me.”

“To Shichio too. They’re just up the road from my family’s compound. Trust me; Shichio may have men on the road, but he won’t be watching House Yasuda itself.”

“You are certain?”

“Of course. Why waste the manpower? The Yasudas are no threat to him.”

The shinobi breathed loudly through his nostrils. “You said three advantages. You named only two.”

“Ah, yes,” Daigoro said with a smile. “The third is that I have you with me. And there’s no place the Wind cannot reach.”

53

Daigoro stood proudly at the wheel, his ketch in plain view of the fleet blockading the Izu Peninsula. His starched haori snapped in the crosswind, whose gusts were so powerful that Daigoro had to brace his feet against them. Sometimes he had to clutch the spokes or else be lifted bodily overboard. The storm he’d weathered had finally broken, but by no means had it blown itself out. There were still clouds all the way to the horizon, and all of them were in a foul, blustering mood.

Another squall raked the ship, forcing him to hold tight to the wheel. His hands burned like hellfire. Fortunately his shinobi knew techniques for binding broken bones—techniques quite similar to Tomo’s, in fact—and like Tomo he’d bound Daigoro’s two broken fingers to a little curved splint. It allowed Daigoro to hold things like sword grips and the spokes of a ship’s wheel, but Daigoro feared the bones would mend in a curve, so that he’d never be able to fully straighten his right hand again.

It was while his fingers were being bound that he got his first close look at the shinobi. The man’s hair was shorter than a grain of rice, and he wore a thick beard of the same length. Judging by his pug nose and flat face, he’d never walked away from a fistfight in his life. His forearms were covered in coarse black hair, more than Daigoro had ever seen on a human being. There were even traces of it on the digits of his fingers and the tops of his toes. Daigoro had never heard of a man having hair on his chest, but he’d seen tufts of it peeking out from the shinobi’s jacket. Between the hair and that growling voice, Daigoro found himself thinking of his companion as more animal than man.

Daigoro had become something of an animal himself, sleeping under brambles and evading the eyes of men. He and his shinobi had used the storm’s fury to mask their escape. It broke Daigoro’s heart to abandon his favorite mare in the innkeeper’s stable, and with her his saddle, the only one of its kind. Both deserved a better fate than to be forgotten in the hands of a stranger, to be sold off at a whim, but his emotional attachment was exactly why he needed to leave his horse and tack behind. Anyone pursuing him would think not that he’d ridden off in the night but that he’d simply vanished. They would try to figure out where his body was buried before they ever thought to track a highborn princeling through the muck.

By morning the storm had not slackened in the least. There was no sun, only a gradual lightening from black to gray. Rain became hail, pinging off Daigoro’s breastplate. At last he could go no farther, and he and his shinobi found a stand of wind-battered pines that would ward off the hailstones, if not the wet and the cold. The princeling would have been miserable beyond description, but Daigoro the outlaw just looked for a rock flat enough to serve as a pillow.

Sora armor made a poor futon. He hadn’t managed even an hour of sleep, and awoke with his hips and back feeling just like his broken fingers. He cursed sleep for a beguiling temptress, and cursed the gods of wind and thunder for their spite of mortal man. There was no telling when the rain would change to hail, driving every sane person into shelter while Daigoro and his shinobi soldiered on.

But no sooner did that thought strike him than he understood: the storm was the greatest gift the gods could bestow. Horses would not abide the hail. Daigoro’s mare was lucky to be left behind in her stall. So long as the gods remained fickle—so long as their rain could turn to hail on a whim—Shichio’s hired swords could never coax their mounts into the storm.

Daigoro’s thinking had been wrong from the start. He’d confused his allies for enemies and his enemies for allies. Twice now, in the inn and under the pines, he’d wanted to sleep. The next time he would not forget: for the hunted man, sleep was a foe, not a friend. Even the hailstones, the worst of his tormentors, did him more good than harm. The real threat was a clear sky.

That was the realization that unlocked the Toyotomi blockade: the most dangerous enemy was the innocuous one, the one that seemed like a friend. As soon as that dawned on him, he’d arrived at a decision: it was high time he came to learn the arts of naval warfare. He decided he would become a pirate.

He and his shinobi had pressed on through a miserable day and a cold and miserable night. By the hour of the dog they’d put the worst of the storm behind them, and by midnight they’d reached their goal: a wharf, and in it a junk-rigged Toyotomi ketch rocking sleepily beside her quay. Dispatching the night watch had posed little difficulty; the shinobi was as silent as his own shadow, and Glorious Victory’s long reach was more than a match for any seaman’s dirk. Most of the crew were ashore, probably bedding whores and feeling thankful that they weren’t the ones stationed out in the rain. Together