Risuko (27 page)

Could Kee Sun be the
kitsune
?

I stopped, mid-sprint, panting in the dark, winter evening.
No,
I thought.
He's crazy, but if he'd wanted to poison us, the Full Moon's cook could have done it any time.
And, as Lady Chiyome had said about Mieko
-san
, he'd have done it without making a mess of it.

I ran the rest of the way to the kitchen; I had no hope that the cook wouldn't already have served Chiyome
-sama
and the Little Brothers. When I burst into the outside door to the kitchen, he was just where I expected him to be: sitting at the work table, with two lidded bowls of soup laid—one for him, and one for me.

“Poison!” I gasped.

He blinked at me, then down at the bowls. He swept the lid from one of the bowls, sniffed, and then snarled in Korean and spat on the floor. “Bitter. You said it was bitter, Bright-eyes.” With a look of panic on his face, he sprinted into the dining hall; Chiyome and the Little Brothers where slumped over the head table, their soup spilled on the ground. Lifting our mistress's head, he used his thumbs to open her eyes. “Chiyome!
Chiyome
, can yeh hear me?”

She let out a kind of snort and said something unrepeatable.

Kee Sun gave a bark of relieved laughter. Placing her head gently back on the table, he checked the others quickly—they too seemed to respond. Then Kee Sun ran back into the kitchen, sweeping past me and stumbling over to where the herbs were hung. “Bitter,” he muttered, looking along the rafters for the herb that had been used to poison the soup. “Bitter. Bitter.”

The poppies were still there—but they would have smelled sweet. He pointed up at an empty space on the beam. “Whew!”

“What?” I asked.

“Why'd anyone use
that
to poison folk?”

“What?”

He turned as if just remembering that I was there, shaking his head to clear it. “Ah. Corydalis.”

“Corydalis?” The root from which Mother used to make tea before her moon time. The root out of which he'd been making Emi's tea. “Is that... dangerous?”

“Well...” Kee Sun rubbed his hand through his mop of grey hair. “It'll make'em all sleepy and boneless, and I suppose it'll give folk an awful headache, if she's used all of it. The men-folk especially!” He started to grin, but suddenly his relief disappeared. “Bright-eyes, tell me—how much did yeh feed Masugu?”

“T-two sips! I swear!”

He sighed, “Well, that's all right. Shouldn't oughta harm him, though he's in no fit state...” Turning away from me, he started to grab herbs—what was left of the ginger after all of the day's tonic- and soup-making, mugwort, black tea, green tea, and a box of precious ginseng.

I, however, was thinking about what Masugu had been trying to tell me before the corydalis put him back to sleep.
Chimney
... “Kee Sun! Do you need my help for a few minutes?”

“What?” he grumbled, dumping the stimulating,
yang
herbs onto the cutting table. “Well, I could use some help feedin' this t'everyone, but no, I can get this prepared quick enough. Yeh need to go t'the privy?”

“The...?
No!
No, Masugu
-san
wanted me to go up to the chimney of the Retreat—I don't know why, but he made me promise as he was passing out.”

“Huh,” grunted Kee Sun, chopping madly away. The kitchen filled once again with the sharp smell of ginger and the earthy tang of ginseng. “Maybe whatever it is she's been lookin' for's hidden up there. Smart place for a man to hide a thing.”

“Oh.” I thought back—Masugu asking me if I'd visited his rooms, the night of the first snow; Lady Chiyome telling him the fox spirit had been looking for something...

I remembered that night of the first snow, Masugu walking away in the direction of the storehouse, I had thought, tapping a sealed scroll against his own shoulder.
Not toward the storehouse,
I realized:
Toward the Retreat!

“Kee Sun
-san
, I need to go get it before the...” I stopped at the door and turned. “Why do you keep calling who did this
she?”

He laughed again, sharp and bitter this time. “'Cause I know it's not me that's done it, and the other men in the Full Moon are all asleep. I'd never believe such sloppiness of a
kumiho
—a fox spirit, as yeh call it. And in this weather, I don't think it's someone come in from outside o'the wall over and over without anybody knowin', do yeh? Though if it's one of the girls who's worked in my kitchen, I'd like to remind her of a lesson or two in how to handle herbs proper!”

“Oh,” I said. “I see.” And I did. It occurred to me in that moment that it couldn't be Emi who'd done this—or Toumi either, for that matter. All of us knew poppy by sight—and if we'd wanted for some reason to poison the inhabitants of the Full Moon, there were herbs that we'd have known to use before grabbing the corydalis at random from the rafters. “I'll be right back,” I called, and waved, but Kee Sun was already bent over the table, tossing herbs into the long-handled wok, and filling the kitchen with their rich scent.

Growing up, I had always been the one who insisted loudly that there were no such things as spirits and demons, that they were just something that Mother made up to scare us with. But as I sprinted behind the great hall, I felt the presence of the
kitsune
, in spite of Kee Sun's certainty: the fox spirit, lurking in the shadows, laughing, the tips of its nine tails whipping, threatening, taunting, just beyond the edges of my vision.

Why does the
kitsune
want the scroll?
I wondered as my feet slapped the hard, frozen dirt.
It must be something important, to go to all of this trouble to try to hurt people. And she
—Kee Sun now had me thinking of the poisoner as a
she
—
must be getting frantic.

When I got to the Retreat, before I tried to climb, I went to the front door. It was open; Emi lay snoring, her cheek pressing against the cold stone threshold and the shards of her soup bowl still clutched in her hand. I would have found it funny: she always fell asleep so quickly under any circumstances that I could imagine her dropping off in mid-step, on the way to warn us of the poison. But I was worried that she would freeze, out in the winter night, or cut her hands on the shattered porcelain. I removed the pieces of the bowl, pushed her with some difficulty into the Retreat where the other women were strewn about on the floor like blown dandelion seeds, and closed the door.

Then I walked around to the far side of the building where the stone chimney butted up against the back corner of the Retreat. There didn't seem to be any crevices there—certainly none large enough to hide a scroll in. Looking up, I saw a trickle of smoke drifting from the covered top of the chimney and swirling, dancing with the falling snow.
Perhaps
, I thought,
he hid it where he could be sure that no one could find it
. Another thought gave me a guilty sense of righteousness: Or perhaps he hid it where he knew only I could find it. Reaching up, I began to scale the rough stone of the chimney.

There were plenty of handholds there, and so, cold and icy though it may have been, I quickly made my way up to the roof of the Retreat, scrambling up onto the dense thatch before I'd even started to breathe hard. There was a huge mound of snow blanketing most of the building, but there at the back, close to the compound wall, the wind and the heat from the chimney kept the roof more or less clear.

I scrambled along the stone base of the chimney; just above me I could see the top of the Full Moon's wall, where I'd knelt and listened to Masugu and Mieko's argument (not fight, he'd said). I couldn't see the scroll, nor any obvious cranny in the chimney in which to hide it.

Chimney
....
Roof,
he had said. I had assumed that he had meant that he had hidden the scroll—or whatever it was that I was looking for—in the side of the chimney, somewhere at roof-level. What else could he have meant?

Peering down, I considered the possibility that he had hidden the scroll at ground-level. That seemed unlikely—it was too easy a place for someone to find the scroll, and I would most likely have seen it when I was down there. Inside of the Retreat? No. In the first place, I couldn't see Masugu
-san
, who always tried to be so extremely proper, sneaking inside of the Retreat—except to meet Mieko. In the second, he had very clearly said
Roof
, which meant that it had to be outside.

I searched the surface of the chimney again; no loose stones, no crevices, and no place to hide anything larger than a pebble. I couldn't imagine that even a demon would make all of this trouble over a pebble.

Trying to think, I let my eyes wander up, watching the smoke trickling out from under the chimney's slanted cover.

The chimney's roof.

I stood. For a man of Masugu's height, the chimney roof would have been within reach. For me, however, it meant a little more climbing.
Not a problem,
I thought with satisfaction, and shimmied the small distance up and found a good foothold so that I could reach up under the chimney roof's soot-smeared eaves. There was a small ledge out of sight there—just right.

My fingers danced along the hot, grimy wood. At first I found nothing, and I began to worry that if the lieutenant had left a paper scroll there, perhaps it had been burnt to ash. But just before I reached the far corner, my fingers touched something warm, hard, and round. I grasped it and pulled it down.

It was a metal cylinder—the letter case that I had seen Lady Chiyome with that first day at Pineshore; the letter case that Masugu had poked me with our first night at the Full Moon. The end was closed with a seal marked with three ginger leaves.

Grinning, pleased with myself, I slid back down to the roof. The snowfall had broken for the moment, the clouds had parted to expose the black night sky and snowflake stars, and bright moonlight turned the entire compound silver as trout scales.

As I sat, preparing to make my way down to the ground and return to help Kee Sun revive everyone, I looked down at the cylinder in my hand.
What is in it?

Perhaps it was simple curiosity. Perhaps the presence of the trickster spirit had infected me. Without even considering, I pulled open the end of the case and tapped it twice, sliding the enclosed scroll into the palm of my hand.

If I had anticipated some formal letter or contract, such as my father had often prepared for Lord Imagawa, I was disappointed. It wasn't parchment, but thin rice paper. Even before unrolling it, I could see that it was a drawing. I unrolled it and was bewildered by a swirl of color that didn't seem to make any sense. I started to roll it up again—perhaps if I showed it to Kee Sun—

A flickering, golden light from the direction of the great hall caught my eye.

It came from high up on the building's side wall, a glimmering square of light set between the black half-timbers that ran up the middle of the wall: the window of Lady Chiyome's chamber, light wavering as if someone had lit a small fire there, a lamp, or—much more likely—a candle. That struck me as odd, since Chiyome
-sama
was almost certainly not well enough to have gone back up to her room, and I couldn't imagine that Kee Sun had gone up there on his own. As I scowled up at the window, I saw a small flame—a candle indeed—and then a flash of white that seemed to fill the frame. A head. It turned, showing me a fine, brittle face.

Fuyudori stared back at me, and her expression was that of a predator stalking its prey.

Stalking me.

F
uyudori's eyes locked with mine across the space, and the light from the candle in her hand made them flash red.

Then her gaze shifted downward, and I could see that she had spotted the letter. The drawing. A smile formed on her thin, red lips: a wolf's smile. Or, rather, a fox's. She looked hungry. She looked very much as if she were about to devour me.

“
Kitsune
,” I gasped, and though I know that she couldn't have heard me she blinked, and the smile grew.

Fuyudori.
Winter bird. Snowbird
, as Masugu had said.
Ghostie-girl.
Kee Sun had laughed that she'd snuck out of the Retreat, desperate to make sure that Masugu was all right, but no—she'd snuck out to finish the job and find the scroll. And to make sure that the rest of us couldn't interfere, she'd tried to poison us. And no wonder she'd used too much poppy with Masugu, and then corydalis rather than something more effective this time—Fuyudori couldn't tell radishes from turnips or pine from hemlock. She probably couldn't be bothered to care. Rage filled me and then terror, in part because it seemed awful not to care, and in part because I realized that she truly didn't care—not what happened to Masugu, nor what happened to Chiyome, and certainly not what happened to me.

Then the snow began to fall again, like a white wing sweeping between us, and I could not see her.

The spell broken, I began to move. My first instinct, as always, was to climb—to get up onto the Full Moon's exterior wall and then to escape to the forest.

I knew, however, that I couldn't leave Fuyudori alone in the compound where she might hurt all of the people whom she'd drugged. I had to warn Kee Sun and the others. I had to stop her. Against my instincts, then, I clambered down the chimney. I started to sprint back toward the kitchen, along the space between the great hall and the wall, hoping to reach Kee Sun before Fuyudori could.

As I approached the corner of the building, however, a shape appeared out of the snow-thickened gloom: not the cook's scarecrow silhouette, but a shape that shone in the dark, clad almost all in white, with splashes of what I knew to be red that looked all but black in the murk. “Good evening, Risuko
-chan
,” said Fuyudori. “How lovely to see you.”