He clasped her shoulder with his right hand. The smooth, cold feel of silk felt good against his palm. He hugged her close and kissed her forehead. “Believe me, Aki, I want certainty as much as you do. But I have no time to visit your father and read him for myself. I must speak to Lord Sora immediately, before Kenbei hears anything of Streaming Dawn. From there, on a fast horse, with no Toyotomi patrols on the road, I might make it to Osezaki in time.”
“All the more reason for doubt. Two days is not enough time. Your only option is to rush in headlong.”
That is often what bushido demands, Daigoro thought. He knew Katsushima would agree with him. But Katsushima would have another word for him too: patience.
To Aki he said, “That means everything hangs on this question: does your father mean to maintain his honor, or only a thin veneer of it?”
He was afraid he already knew the answer.
19
Osezaki Shrine was a little frightening in the middle of the night.
It was not quiet. The moon was a white sliver; behind its veil of clouds, it illuminated almost nothing, but there was still much to be heard. Low waves lapped invisibly on all sides. The first of the autumn crickets had come to sing. After Izu’s extended drought, most of the leaves were dry and brittle; the wind made them sound like clacking teeth of the ghosts of a thousand children. The night before, sailors’ voices would have been audible, but this morning Hideyoshi had sailed back to Kyoto with the fleet.
It was chilly this close to the water. Nene was surrounded by trees, but their foliage wasn’t dense enough to serve as a windbreak. Nene nestled her hands deeper into their opposite sleeves, snugging her arms a little closer to her chest. Her long hair was heavy enough to keep the cold off the back of her neck, but the salt wind off the bay chilled her cheeks.
She would have preferred to wait in the shrine itself, out of the wind, but that was the only place where her bodyguards could remain completely invisible. Four would guard her directly and four more were hidden within the oratory, whose lattice windows afforded arcs of fire over the entire grounds. The tactical benefit was coincidental; the shrine was not built to shelter armed men. Nor were its pristine floors intended for filthy, booted feet, but Nene’s bodyguards had not troubled themselves to remove their boots.
Nevertheless, Nene was not one to argue with experts about how to carry out their own duties. The captain of her guard positioned her just in front of the shrine, by a stone bench she found much too cold to sit on. Two foreboding lion-dogs looked down on the bench from their pedestals, their stone teeth bared to ward off evil spirits. Nene had a guard at each pedestal, a third directly by her side, and a fourth standing at the torii overarching the footpath leading up to the shrine. That was the captain. His station was the coldest, and the farthest from Nene’s side, but it provided the best view of the path running from the peninsula to the shrine. He wanted to be the one to spot the Bear Cub first.
He didn’t get his wish. A twig snapped right behind Nene, much too close for comfort. It gave her guards such a start that the closest one whacked her robe with his scabbard as he spun around. She would wait until her business with the Bear Cub was finished before she dismissed him from her service. For the moment, she forced herself not to whirl around, but to turn slowly, as if she’d known the intruder was there all along.
Even over such a short distance, the shade of the surrounding trees thoroughly occluded the meager moonlight, so that Nene could only make out the Bear Cub’s silhouette. He had a tousled mop of a topknot, as if he’d just leaped off a galloping horse. She could tell he was armored, for there were lighter patches in his silhouette: the chest, the forearms, the thighs and shins. He wore large rectangular sode on his shoulders, and at this particular angle they made him appear to have wings like a tengu. Nene could see something in his left hand but she couldn’t make out what it was. Not a sword, surely; it looked more like a fistful of spindly, twisted sticks.