“Thank you, Kin-san,” Ayane was whispering.
“You have nothing to thank me for.” The boy shook his head. “We do what’s right up here. Yukiko’s a good person. She’s just suspicious of the Guild. She lost a lot because of them and the government. Most people here have.”
“Her father.”
“Friends too.”
“Are they going to hate me? The Kage, I mean?”
“Probably.” Kin glanced back at Atsushi and his nagamaki. “They don’t trust our kind … I mean, the kind we used to be.”
“Then why do you stay?”
It was a long time before Kin answered; a wordless space filled by faint rain drumming on the canopy, as if a distant army were pounding earth with hollow bamboo. Yukiko could see him watching her, walking there in front of him, Buruu beside her. He looked at the forest, slowly turning the color of rust, cupped in the palms of autumn’s chill. And finally, he shrugged.
“Because there are things here I love. Because I’m part of this world, and I’ve sat by and watched it falling away for far too long, hoping someone else will save it.”
“So now you will save it, Kin-san? All by yourself?”
“Not by myself.” He shook his head. “We’re all in this together. We need more people to realize that. More people willing to stand up and say ‘enough.’ No matter what it costs.”
Ayane glanced at Kin and smiled, and her eyes sparkled like dew on polished stone. Beneath the fear, there was a strength in her voice, old as the mountains looming around them, deep as the earth beneath their feet.
“Enough,” she said.
The pain crested and swelled, hot and sharp, too much, too harsh. Yukiko broke away, slipped back into her own thoughts like a thief, wiping the blood from her lips. Buruu cast her a sideways glance, saying nothing, saying everything. She sniffed thickly, spat salty scarlet into the underbrush.
Hundreds of eyes followed them as they walked away.
6
DOWNSIDE UP
The other servants never called her by name.
The girl was short for her eighteen years, famine-thin, her impish face set with hollow cheeks and pointed chin. Raven-black hair was cut in a messy bob, damp with sweat. Her right eye was covered with a patch of dark leather, the faint stippling of scar tissue in her cheek, a deep hairless gouge bisecting her eyebrow. Her good eye was large, almost too round, so dark as to be nearly black.
A visitor to the Shogun’s palace would have taken one look at her winter-pale complexion and wagered the girl was Kitsune-born—pasty as all the Fox clan were. But a glance beneath the cotton covering her right shoulder would have revealed no clan ink on her skin; shown her to be a lowborn mongrel, unfit for all but the most menial and unclean of labors.
Hence her nickname.
“You!” a voice called. “Shit Girl!”
The girl stopped in her tracks, sandals scuffing on polished floorboards. She turned to face the approaching house mistress, her gaze downcast, hands clasped together. As the plump, over-powdered woman stopped before her, the girl focused on the floor between her toes. Night was falling out in the palace grounds, but she could hear a lone sparrow singing—choking, really—its lungs full of oily lotus haze. The leaves in the wretched gardens were failing, autumn creeping into Kigen city and painting all with gray and rust-red during the sunlit hours. But the Shit Girl only roamed the palace after dark—the less seen of her in the harsh light of day, the better.
“My Lady?” she said.
“Where are you going?”
“The servant’s wing, my Lady.”
“The chamber pots in the guest wing need emptying when you’re done.”
She bowed. “Hai.”
“Go on then,” the woman waved. “And bathe tomorrow, for the Maker’s sake. There may be no Shogun, but this is still the Shogun’s palace. Serving here is an honor. Especially for one of your breed.”
“I will, my Lady. Thank you, my Lady.”
Bowing low, the girl waited for the mistress to retreat before continuing on her way. She shuffled to the servants’ quarters, the loose boards of the nightingale floor chirping and squeaking beneath her feet. Outside each door, a chamber pot awaited—black kiln-fired clay, a little smaller than an armful, with gifts inside just for her. She would carry each pot to a night soil drain at the rear of the grounds and dump the reeking contents. Wash them out and trudge back though the palace. Watching the slow, orchestrated chaos around her, ministers and soldiers and magistrates, scrabbling for power and gathering in tiny, muttering knots.
And she, beneath it all.
The house mistress had spoken truth—serving in the palace was an honor few lowborns ever enjoyed. Burakumin like her were the bottom of the barrel in Shima’s caste system, only employed at tasks regular citizens found unwholesome. Male clanless could join the army, of course, serve out a ten-year stint in exchange for genuine clan ink at the end of his tour. But that wasn’t an option for the Shit Girl, even if she felt the suicidal urge to serve as fodder for the gaijin lightning cannon. Besides, that plan hadn’t worked out so well for her father …
So here she was, slinging chamber pots in the Shogun’s palace. Derided. Shunned. Constantly reminded she was unworthy of the honor. But lowborn or no, in the two years she’d worked those opulent halls, she’d learned a simple truth she’d suspected her entire life—no matter how honorable the backside producing it, shit never fails to stink.
Making her way back to the servant’s wing, she would slip the chamber pot through a slot in the bedroom doors, working her way down the row. Each room was sealed with a shiny new lock—Lady Aisha’s maidservants were all under house arrest, recently moved from Kigen jail. In fact, more than a few of the palace serving staff had been imprisoned after Shogun Yoritomo’s death, suspected of either assisting the plot, or failing to stop it. But the Shit Girl? The clanless, worthless, bloodless mongrel wrapped in third-hand servant’s clothes? She swam as she always did. Beneath their contempt. Beneath their notice.
It had worked out well, all things considered.
She knelt by the final door in the row, reached inside her servant’s kimono and retrieved a small pad of rice-paper, a stick of charcoal. Glancing up and down the darkened corridor, she scrawled some hasty kanji on the paper, slipped it through the door slot.
The name of a little-known village somewhere in the northern Tora provinces, where years ago, a peasant uprising had been quietly quashed by Shogunate troops. To most, the name would mean nothing. To the girl imprisoned within the room, everything.
Moments later, a note was slipped back through the slot, kanji marked in lipstick.
And so it began. Paper slipping into the hall, her eye scanning the notes, replies marked on the flip side. Listening for approaching footsteps as the girl imprisoned within the room scratched a new message, passed it through the space between doorframe and nightingale floor.
