pause. “There is something to what you say. So let us take another path. Prior to my husband, rule belonged to my friend Oda Nobunaga. His relations still hold power, and none of them is so destitute as to find Shichio’s bounty worth pursuing. Through them, you can reach me. Will that suit you?”
“Yes,” said the boy, though Nene had meant it as a rhetorical question. She did not much care what suited him. His boldness was wearing thin. But she had to admit he’d impressed her, and in any case she had few options left. None of her other spies had ever laid eyes on Streaming Dawn. If the blade existed, then Daigoro was the one to find it. If it did not, then she would find some other prize worthy of Shichio’s head.
One way or the other, he was just the bait she needed to trap Shichio. One of these days she would have to sit down and write that haiku about the bear trap.
20
Daigoro watched as Nene took her leave. Her soldiers did not bother to collect the dead archers in the shrine. Daigoro supposed she meant to leave him to clean up the mess, since he and Katsushima were the ones who killed them.
He wished that hadn’t been necessary, but even in hindsight he could see no way around it. In fairness, the only reason she’d hidden them there was to kill Daigoro if need be. Katsushima said he’d killed them out of prudence, even if he couldn’t quite call it self-defense. How he’d known they would be there, and how he killed all four without raising the alarm, was beyond Daigoro’s ken. Daigoro only knew that he himself had arrived just in the nick of time, with Nene and her bodyguard practically on his heels. Katsushima told him to hide in the shrine—among four dead men whose presence he hadn’t bothered to explain—and then hid himself among the trees.
Now he and Daigoro sat outside the shrine, on a cold stone bench between statues of two lion-dogs, watching Lady Nene and her bodyguard take their leave. “How did you fare in your meeting with Lord Sora?” Katsushima asked.
“I survived. Which is to say I didn’t grow tired of his ranting, run my sword through his bloated heart, and get cut down by his honor guard.”
“You know what I’d have told you had I been there.”
Patience, Daigoro thought. A thousand times patience. He didn’t need to say it aloud.
“So tell me,” Katsushima asked, “what did he have to say?”
“He thinks I have Streaming Dawn. He kept insisting that nothing else could have saved Ichiro’s life after the duel with Oda Yoshitomo.”
That was an awful memory. First was the terror of watching Oda’s sword slice through Ichiro’s neck. Oda called it his “Diving Hawk” technique. He boasted that it had won him nearly forty duels, and slain just as many opponents. In fact, Ichiro was the only man to survive it, and just barely at that. Old Yagyu had stitched him shut with silk thread and a thick smear of pine resin, then buried him up to his neck in rice so he could not move. For three months Ichiro languished in that pit, flea-bitten and sunburned, mired in his own filth. No privy had ever smelled half so bad. In the end he survived, only to square off against Oda Yoshitomo once more. Both of them died that night, Ichiro on Oda’s blade, Oda on Glorious Victory Unsought. That was Daigoro’s first duel and his first kill. Since then he’d seen far too many of both.
It was Yagyu, not Streaming Dawn, that had saved Ichiro’s life. The old healer was as talented as they came; he’d trained with southern barbarian doctors in Nagasaki and Chinese masters in Nanyang. But Lord Sora had no way of knowing that. He’d heard what everyone else had heard: that young Lord Okuma had his head chopped halfway off and lived to tell the tale.
“He is a swollen, red-faced fool,” Katsushima said. “But in this case the more foolish, the better. If he is willing to undermine Kenbei and give up the Green Cliff, all in exchange for this silly knife, then he’ll serve our purposes perfectly.”
“That’s assuming we can find the knife. Sora insists I’ve loaned it to the Yasudas. He thinks that’s why Lord Yasuda has held on this long.”
Katsushima shook his head and rolled his eyes. Rising from the bench, he ambled slowly down the footpath toward the shore.