“I asked you to meet me at moonrise. That was some time ago.”
“You’ll understand if I took precautions.”
She approached the Bear Cub in the small, shuffling steps allowed to her by her kimono. A patch of moonlight caught the black tuft of his topknot, but she still could not see his face. That made him dangerous; if she could not read his eyes, she had no way of knowing what was on his mind. “We have a common enemy,” she said. “I cannot kill him without raising my husband’s ire, but you can. I can give him to you.”
He backed deeper into the shadows. “Why should I trust you?”
“Because I am here. You are the most feared ronin in these lands, and I am a lady whom the emperor himself sometimes invites to tea. Why would I leave myself so vulnerable if I thought there could be no trust between us?”
“Vulnerable? Yes, you’d like me to believe that.”
With his left hand he tossed whatever he was holding at the feet of her nearest guardsman. Four short bows clattered against the flagstones. Their bowstrings were cut, dangling from the ends like so many fisherman’s lines.
The guard who hit her over-robe with his katana scabbard spun again, looking back at the shrine. Nene did not bother. There would be nothing to see. The Bear Cub was as skilled as the rumors said he was. He’d disabled all four men in that shrine, stripped them of their weapons, and probably left them for dead, all without anyone hearing a peep.
“You spoke of trust, yet you came with assassins,” he said.
“Bodyguards. Clever ones. There’s a difference.” She saw him incline his head as if to say, as you like. “But even if we call that a betrayal, let us say we are even. I brought archers; you eliminated them. Are you willing to call that a fair exchange?”
He thought about it for a moment, then nodded. Just then, serendipity gave her a glimpse of him. Even as a gust of wind parted a few branches, the clouds thinned just enough to cast a single fleeting moonbeam on the boy’s face. His dark black hair was totally incongruous with his eyes, which were careworn and brooding, even wrinkled at the corners. . . .
“Taller than I thought, and now older than I thought,” she said. “Much older. You’re not the Bear Cub.”
“That’s right,” a voice called out behind her. This time she did whirl around. Her guards drew steel. The pale, weatherworn door of the shrine slid aside, and out stepped a wisp of a boy dressed all in white. Even his armor was white, as if he intended to be buried in it—or, more forebodingly, as if he’d come to this meeting anticipating a funeral. He walked with a limp, just as the rumors said, and he carried the longest sword Nene had ever seen.
“Daigoro,” Nene said. “At last we meet.”
“We’ll meet on better terms if you tell your guards to sheathe their weapons.”
The captain of the guard came sprinting up the footpath, taken aback by the noise coming from the shrine. His armor plates clacked and clattered as he ran. “Hold,” Nene said. She approached the Bear Cub as quickly as she could—not very quick at all, given the constraints of her kimono. But walking toward him at any speed was signal enough that she felt the boy posed no threat to her. The captain stopped, dropping to his knees so abruptly that Nene feared he might shatter his kneecaps inside his armor. Seeing him kneel, all the men in his command did likewise.
The man behind her came out into the light. He was a hand taller than the Bear Cub, and much older, even older than Nene. His hair was the same color as hers, a uniformly deep and glossy black, from which Nene deduced that he used hair dye. Was that normal for him, or did he do it just this once, to masquerade ever so briefly as the boy? Judging by his woolly sideburns and shabby cloth, Nene assumed this man was Katsushima Goemon, a known associate of the Bear Cub. If that was right, then he showed uncommon loyalty for a ronin. By all accounts Katsushima cared nothing for his appearance. Dyeing his hair would be anathema to him. What must he have thought of dyeing it solely to complete an illusion that was only designed to last a few moments?