The Snow Empress

9

“How come you know Japanese?” Reiko asked.

“I live in castle…” The Ezo woman raised three fingers.

“Three years?”

Nodding, she touched her ear. “I listen.”

They stood in the shed together. It was cold, dim, and smelled of the dogs, who sniffed and wagged their tails around Reiko. Reiko felt safe, hidden from Lord Matsumae’s troops.

“What’s your name?” Reiko asked.

“Wente.” She pointed at Reiko, shy and inquisitive.

“Reiko.”

They smiled at each other. Wente bowed, humble as any Japanese peasant, and said, “Many thanks.”

Reiko nodded, aware that Wente was expressing gratitude because Reiko had stepped in to protect her yesterday. “I’m sorry for how Lady Matsumae treats you.”

Wente made a gesture of resignation that said volumes about what the Ezo endured from the Japanese. She studied Reiko as if curious about this rare Japanese who wasn’t cruel. “Yesterday. In Lady Matsumae’s room. I heard.” She groped for words, then cradled her arms, the universal sign language of a mother holding a child, and pointed at Reiko. Pity darkened her eyes. “I sorry.”

This was the first sign of genuine caring about her kidnapped child that anyone in Ezogashima had shown Reiko. It broke down Reiko’s self-control. Tears burned down her cold cheeks. Wente stood by, awkward and embarrassed.

“I sorry. I sorry,” she repeated, almost as though she were personally to blame and asking forgiveness.

“I don’t know what to do anymore.” Reiko’s tears froze as she wiped them away. A dog licked her hand. Its dumb, animal comfort jolted a sob from her. “Nobody will help me.”

“I help you.”

“How?” A glimmer of light pierced Reiko’s grief.

Eyes shining with gladness at being able to offer salvation, Wente said, “Boy here.”

Caution warred with the joy that leaped in Reiko. “But-but Lord Matsumae’s troops killed the men who brought my son. They must have killed Masahiro, too.”

“No, no.” Wente shook her head, adamant.

“How do you know?” Reiko said, desperate to believe.

“I listen. I see.” Wente beckoned Reiko to the door of the shed and pointed upward, at the white tower of the keep, which rose beyond and above the palace. “He there.”

“How did Lady Reiko get out?” Gizaemon demanded.

“I don’t know,” Deer Antlers said. “One moment she was in her room. The next time we checked on her…” He spread his empty hands.

“You idiot, Captain Okimoto! Letting a woman trick you!” Gizaemon turned in one direction, then another, so upset he was almost literally beside himself.

Sano was alarmed that Reiko had escaped, but not exactly surprised. He knew how determined she was to find Masahiro, and how clever about finding ways to go places she shouldn’t. “Does Lord Matsumae know?” Gizaemon asked.

“No,” said Okimoto. “We haven’t told him.”

“If he finds out, there’s no telling what she’ll put him up to.” Gizaemon was much less concerned about Reiko than about protecting Lord Matsumae from the evil spirit of Tekare. He mumbled to himself, “I’ve been trying to save him day and night, for three months. How much longer can this go on?”

He told Captain Okimoto, “I’m joining in the hunt. You fools take the barbarians back to their camp.” Pointing at Sano and Hirata, he added, “Lock them up.”

“No!” Fear for Reiko stabbed Sano. He leaped off the dais. “I’m going with you.”

When Gizaemon started to object, Sano said, “I can help you find my wife.”

“The last thing I need is you running around loose.” But Gizaemon hesitated, torn between his fear for his mad nephew, his distrust of Sano, and his wish to catch Reiko.

“I know how she thinks, the kind of places she would go,” Sano said. “She’ll hide from you, but she’ll come out for me.”

“Very well,” Gizaemon said reluctantly on his way out the door. “But Okimoto will keep a tight leash on you.”

Sano suddenly understood why Gizaemon was anxious to control him: He had secrets to hide. Did they have to do with Masahiro, the murder, or both?

Captain Okimoto scowled, but said, “Yes, master.” As he led Sano from the room, Hirata followed. “Hey. Where do you think you’re doing?”

“With you,” Hirata said.

“Oh no, you’re not.”

“I need you to talk to the gold merchant,” Sano told Hirata. They mustn’t delay the investigation. If they didn’t produce results for Lord Matsumae, the gods help them.

“Well, he can’t do that, either,” Okimoto retorted. “He’s not supposed to wander around by himself. Lord Matsumae’s orders.”

Then send somebody with him,“ Sano said. ”Lord Matsumae gave his permission to investigate the murder where we need to as long as we’re escorted.“

“Lord Matsumae also said everything you do has to be cleared with him in advance.”

“Fine,” Sano said. “Ask him if it’s all right for Hirata-san to go into town and interview a suspect.” Impatient because he must find Reiko before anyone else got to her, Sano added, “Come on, stop wasting time!”

“All right, all right.” Okimoto told two men to take Hirata to Lord Matsumae and the others to accompany him and Sano. “But don’t let Lord Matsumae know that the woman’s escaped or that Chamberlain Sano is looking for her instead of the killer.”

Sano realized that Lord Matsumae’s men were terrified of him even though they carried out his insane, cruel orders. Rarely had samurai duty seemed so perverted, so destructive.

“As for you,” Okimoto said to Sano and Hirata, “you’d better not try anything funny.”

As Reiko gazed up at the keep, memory cast her back to a time when a different madman, who’d called himself the Dragon King, had imprisoned her in a tower on another remote island. A sense of deja vu sickened Reiko. Now her son was the captive.

“I must rescue him!”

She started outside, but Wente ran after her. “No can go! Dangerous!”

“I don’t care!”

Wente blocked her path. “Soldiers there.” Her pretty face was stricken with alarm. “They catch you. Hurt you.”

“Not if I can help it.” Looking around the shed, Reiko saw tools hung on a wall-hammers, knives, awls, hatchets. She snatched down a sturdy knife with a wooden handle and a long, sharp steel blade.

“In case I don’t see you again, I’ll thank you now for helping me find my son,” Reiko said. “If there’s anything I can do for you in return, I will.”

“No,” Wente pleaded. Her mouth worked inside its blue tattoo as she fumbled for words. “You don’t know how go. You get lost.”

Finding her way to the keep didn’t appear difficult to Reiko, who’d navigated around huge, labyrinthine Edo all her life. “Good-bye.”

The dogs jumped in front of her. They barked and snapped. Rather than attacking her, they seemed anxious to protect her. She cried “Get away from me!” and waved her knife.

Wente uttered a command in Ezo language. The dogs retreated. She hesitated, frowned, and bit her lip. “I go with you. I show you.”

“All right,” Reiko said.

As Wente led her by the hand through the castle grounds, Reiko felt thankful to have a guide. Wente knew how to walk as if invisible. Maybe it was an Ezo talent developed while hunting game in the forests. Maybe she’d just had practice hiding from the Japanese in Fukuyama Castle. She and Reiko flitted from behind one building, tree, boulder, or snow pile to another. They avoided servants and officials who passed near them along the paths and covered corridors. Wente seemed to anticipate where the patrol guards would be. Reiko saw many across courtyards and gardens, but never near her and Wente. She felt invisible, as if Ezogashima had many different dimensions and they moved through one hidden from other humans.

Skirting the palace, they slipped through a gate and emerged into a compound. On a low hill at the center stood the keep. Seen at close range, the square tower wasn’t white but dingy gray, the plaster on its surface cracked and weather stained. Gulls swept down from the brilliant turquoise sky and perched on the tiled roofs, whose upturned eaves protruded above each story. Bars covered the small windows. Reiko squinted against the sun at them, and although she couldn’t see inside, her whole being tingled with the sense that Masahiro was there. She wanted to hurl herself at the keep.

A flight of steps led up the hill to it. The snow had been shoveled off them. At the top, the ironclad door of the keep opened. The sound of coughing drifted down to Reiko. Two young soldiers stepped out the door. They carried buckets whose liquid contents they dumped onto the snow. As they went back inside and shut the door, Reiko’s hope of rescuing Masahiro stalled like a bird shot in flight. “No can get in,” Wente whispered.

“There must be a way,” Reiko whispered back, even as she saw another soldier walk around the corner of the keep and go inside. That Masahiro was so close, yet out of reach! She could barely stand the agony.

Wente tugged at her arm. “Must go. Before men see us.”

“Wait! No!”

Reiko couldn’t leave. She felt as if an invisible chain connected her to her son inside the keep and anchored her to the ground. But storming the keep was out of the question. Even though she’d been trained in combat and won fights before, she was one woman with a knife against heaven knew how many armed guards. Getting caught would do Masahiro no good.

She let Wente tear her away. Her every heartbeat was a throb of pain as they moved from hiding place to hiding place through the castle. Reiko could hardly breathe past the sob caught deep in her lungs. The invisible chain dragged harder at her with every step.

They’d reached the garden outside the guest quarters when five soldiers appeared. Wente yanked Reiko to the ground behind a snowdrift. They lay on their stomachs, holding their breath and listening to the soldiers’ voices.

“She can’t have gotten out of the castle.”

“And she can’t hide forever. We’ll find her eventually.”

“You three stay here and watch the chamberlain’s men. The last thing we need is more prisoners on the loose. We’ll keep looking for her.”

Footsteps crunched through the snow near Reiko and Wente. Reiko was horrified to realize that the guards had discovered she’d escaped. She lost all hope of sneaking back into the guest quarters undetected. With her chin pressed into the icy snow crystals, she thought fast and hard.

“What you do?” Wente whispered.

Giving herself up wasn’t an option. The guards would lock her in and watch her more closely than before. Reiko would sit in her room, helpless. This was her one chance to reach Masahiro. She couldn’t waste it.

“I’m going back to the keep,” she told Wente.

Although her expression said what a rash plan she thought this was, Wente gamely accompanied Reiko. But search parties swarmed the castle. Reiko and Wente dived behind bushes, darted around buildings, narrowly evading one patrol after another. They circled the keep from a distance, like a moon orbiting a planet, never getting any closer. Out of breath, gasping with fatigue, they paused in the shadow of a storehouse to rest.

Its door burst open. A soldier came out and spotted Reiko. “There she is!” he shouted.

Reiko fled. Too late she noticed that Wente had run in a different direction. Separated from her guide, on her own now, Reiko ran for her life.