Year of the Demon

MUROMACHI ERA, THE YEAR 198

(1533 CE)

44

The waves roared so loud that Kaida could hardly hear the thunder.

Lightning ripped another gaping rent through the dark gray underbelly of the sky. It was just after midday, and yet the lightning’s claws stood out clearly against the clouds. Kaida had never seen a storm so angry.

If anything, the sea was angrier still. Another huge, rolling wave tossed the rowboat as easily as Kaida could skip a stone. Her mother held her close with both arms, her knees and feet pressed hard into the sidewalls of the boat to keep herself and Kaida stable. She sang in Kaida’s ear, and though Kaida could scarcely hear her she knew which song it was. No other girls’ mothers ever sang this one. It was the song about the Kaida-fish, a little lullaby about a make-believe creature, which she’d been singing for as long as Kaida could remember.

Her father was the very opposite of calm. He clenched his teeth so hard that the tendons in his neck stood out. He back-paddled like mad, trying to keep their bow pointed into the waves. The muscles of his arms stood out like braided cords. He snarled and cursed and battled with the sea, a samurai armed with twin oars.

The boat lurched again, and for a fleeting moment Kaida was atop a mountain of water instead of falling down into a valley. She looked toward Ama-machi and saw nothing but flinders. Her mother told her the village would be destroyed and that they’d build it anew, but Kaida hadn’t understood what that meant until now. There was no home. Nothing to re-build, nothing there to repair. Just a beach and the rolling walls of water that pounded it, grinding down what little remained of Ama-machi.

This was the way, her had mother said. The ama had always lived like this. Kaida had taken comfort in it when the storm was still on the horizon, but now she saw it as an empty promise. She could not see a future for her village, for her family.

Kaida’s stomach dropped, the boat falling with it. For an instant she could see Ryujin’s Claw. It ripped the guts out of a rogue breaker and then vanished, swallowed by the water. The teeth of the Maw were always visible above the waterline, but the Claw was in deeper water. Kaida realized these waves were far bigger than she’d suspected if the troughs were so deep as to expose the Claw.

But her mother would protect her. Even in the face of this hell-spawned storm, she sang the song of the little Kaida-fish.

Thunder clapped again. A wave moving in the wrong direction smacked the stern and spun the boat like a little child throwing a stick. Kaida’s father lost his grip on one of the oars. Her mother’s hand darted out faster than Kaida thought possible. She snatched the oar’s grip in midair and thrust it back toward her husband, who damned the wind and the waves and his spent, wet hands.

Kaida felt her mother’s arms wrap around her once more. She would be all right. All of them would be. Storms are stronger than men, her mother always said, but they have no patience. We only need to outlast them. That’s what she always said, and already Kaida could tell the thunderheads had blown out most of their anger. She could hear her mother’s lullaby a little better now.

Her father never saw the other boat coming.

It caught them broadside, flung by a rogue wave. Wood screeched louder than thunder. Then it burst apart, shooting splinters everywhere. Kaida caught a volley full in the chest. Only afterward did she realize her mother took as many in the arm, protecting Kaida’s face.

Kaida watched her family’s boat crumple like washi paper. The other family’s boat plunged on, shearing itself in half like a giant barracuda opening its mouth wide, bearing down to bite Kaida’s boat in two. The sidewalls split down the middle, the bottom half submerging with the keel, the top half exploding into a hail of splinters as big as the bones in Kaida’s forearm. The bottom half of the boat dragged its occupants down with it. Still the two boats plunged on, ripping each other apart. Huddling against her mother, Kaida watched the other family go under. She could feel it through the soles of her bare feet when one by one the keel crushed their heads to pulp. It was merciful; at least they would not drown.

Drowning was every ama’s worst fear, and Kaida knew she and her parents were likely to face it soon. Their boat wasn’t taking on water; the water was taking it. The starboard side was no more than a jumble of ragged timbers. Kaida felt her guts heave up into her throat. The boat crested high above the sea, carried by the biggest wave Kaida had ever seen. For a terrifying moment she could see Ryujin’s Maw. Its black teeth dripped with white foam.

Then the sea dashed her family right into the Maw.

The world was nothing but darkness and noise. Kaida thought drowning would be quiet. She did not expect it to thunder so loud that it drowned out her other senses.

She tried to clap her palms over her ears, but she could only move her right arm.

Just for an instant, the noise abated. Just for an instant, there was light. Kaida saw her mother huddled over her, hugging her close. She saw her father too, his back against sheer black rock, holding on to the inside of their rowboat as if some crazed mob were trying to pull it away from the other side. Then she understood. Somehow they’d landed between two of Ryujin’s fangs, and the weight of the water wrapped their little boat around them, trapping them as snugly as a turtle in his shell. But a turtle had flesh and bones to keep its shell attached. Kaida had only her father, fighting the sea with a tenacity found only in wild animals and madmen.

Kaida tried to help. It was stupid—she was a little girl, without a tenth of her father’s strength—but she tried to grab the boat anyway. She couldn’t reach with her right hand; her mother was in the way, so she tried with her left. Once again her left arm would not move. She looked down to see why.

Her hand looked like a stomped-on crab.

It was almost next to her nose when she turned to look at it, so she could see all the details clearly. Part of the boat pinned it to the black, bloody rock. Some of her fingers were still intact. The hand itself was nothing but jagged bones. They stuck out in crazed directions, all a-jumble.

The world went black again, the water pressing their turtle shell back down with deafening fury. When the noise relented the light came back, and Kaida got a good look at her dead mother.

• • •

Kaida sat bolt upright under her covers. She didn’t scream—not with her stepsisters around; she knew better than that—but she remembered screaming back then. She remembered the echoes of her cries within the wreckage of the boat, the intermittent fits of blackness and noise, the hope in every black moment that perhaps when the light came again she’d see she was mistaken about her mother. But the dark had been worse than the light. In the light she could see what was. Once the dark closed in around her, she could only imagine, and imagining made it worse.

She pressed her stump to her chest, trying in vain to slow her panicked heart. The house seemed smaller when she was afraid; the ceiling felt too close, as if it might collapse at any moment. She couldn’t stay inside. She couldn’t stay inside.

As silently as she could, she slipped out of bed. She tried to think of Masa, how quiet he could be, how he had melded into the sand the night she met him. Then she thought of how his dead body slumped when his friends dropped him in the shorebreak.

A moment’s inattention was enough. She didn’t crouch low enough when she passed by the window. She’d exposed her silhouette, and she should have guessed her father’s injuries would make it hard for him to sleep.

“Kaida? What are you doing awake?”

“I’m sorry, Father. I just have to go outside.”

She tried to make it sound like she just had to pee, but her heart was still racing; she couldn’t keep the tremor out of her voice.

“Kaida-chan, what’s the matter?” said Cho, her voice raspy and sleepy. Even now, after all these nights, Kaida still forgot Cho slept with him. Hearing Cho’s voice coming from her father’s bedroll startled Kaida every time.

“It’s all right,” her father said. “She just gets frightened sometimes.”

“Father, no—”

He didn’t hear her, but Kaida couldn’t risk raising her voice, couldn’t risk waking her stepsisters. They couldn’t hear what was going to come next. They just couldn’t. It would be the end of her.

“Father—”

“She was right next to her mother when she died,” he said, oblivious. “Dark, close spaces have troubled her ever since.”

Kaida froze. She held her breath, the better to hear whether anyone else was awake. If even one of the other girls overheard him, Kaida’s life would descend into a kind of misery that made everything she’d suffered so far feel like a mild sunburn.

But no one stirred. No one’s breath changed its pace. Kaida lingered for a moment just outside the door, listening, but she was safe. Her stepsisters were all asleep.

All the same, she stayed outside until she could make herself pee, close enough to the hut that Cho would hear her. Better for Cho to be confused in the morning. She was still groggy from sleep; maybe she’d remember the peeing and not the rest.

Kaida crouched outside and hugged her knees. It was cold, but she forced herself to count to a hundred before she went back inside. If the disturbance has jostled any of her stepsisters even halfway out of sleep, Kaida would allow them plenty of time to sink back into their dreams.

At last she crept back inside. Wiping the sand from her feet first, she padded over to her little bedroll. Just as she reached it, skinny, cold fingers tightened around her ankle.

“To think,” Miyoko whispered, “all the things we’ve contrived to torture you, and all we really needed was to put a sack on your head.”

Kaida’s guts went cold. She wanted to cry. She wanted to stomp on Miyoko’s hand, maybe break some bones. But that would only make things worse. Her father and Cho would hear. Then Kaida would be the villain, not Miyoko.

“Or maybe flip over a boat, neh, Kaida-chan? Sit on it with you under there. Maybe even bury it. What would you think about that?”

Kaida could almost hear Miyoko’s triumphant smile.

45

Ama-machi was just waking when the outlanders invaded. Kaida was the first in her house to hear them; her father lived close to the center of the village, and screaming from somewhere on the outskirts roused Kaida from a fitful sleep.

She felt like she hadn’t slept at all. First the nightmare, then thinking of Miyoko’s new weapon all night; it was enough to make anyone exhausted, and an ama’s life was exhausting to begin with—especially an ama with only one good arm. Nonetheless, Kaida pushed herself out of bed, shivering at the transition between the warmth under her covers and the cool dawn air. She knew she had to move quickly, just as she knew it was the outlanders who had caused the screaming.

A loud shriek from next door woke everyone else in the hut. Her father sat up in bed. In his dreams he’d forgotten his injuries; instantly he was flat on his back again, favoring his ruined arm and wincing. Kaida could see his teeth clamping down, oddly bright in the twilight. She wished she could stop for him, tend to him, do something for him. But she also knew that Miyoko might well kill her today—and if not today, someday soon. Miyoko already had no sense of when to quit. She could not begin to guess how terrified Kaida was of close spaces, and that meant every word of protest would goad her on. Even Kiyoko and Shioko wouldn’t be able to talk her down.

And that meant Kaida had to escalate weaponry too. She’d figured that out last night, lying in her bed and staring up at the thatch, listening intently to Miyoko’s breathing and wondering what would happen if she just smothered Miyoko and got it over with. In many ways that was the easier course. She’d do more than free herself of Miyoko; she’d be exiled from Ama-machi for life. It wasn’t much of a punishment for someone who wanted to leave anyway. But Kaida wasn’t like Miyoko. She didn’t delight in causing pain. And as much as she hated Kiyoko and Shioko, as much as she wished her father had never met Cho in the first place, she knew Miyoko’s death would hurt them so deeply that they’d never recover. Kaida knew what it meant to lose family. She wouldn’t resort to anything so extreme unless she had no other choice.

And since Miyoko had no such compunctions, Kaida knew she might have to resort to extreme measures soon. She slipped through the doorway and immediately saw one of the outlanders moving in her direction. His back was turned—he was talking to someone just out of sight—and Kaida threw herself behind her family’s hut before he turned back around.

She pressed herself to the wall, heart pounding, and heard him barge into the hut. There were shouts, protests, the sound of ripping cloth. “You get out there or I’ll kill you in here,” the outlander said, and everyone inside had wisdom enough to see he meant it.

Kaida froze, listening to them make their way outside. It sounded like Cho wasn’t alone in getting her father to his feet; Kiyoko might have been helping, but it was hard to be certain. “Get out,” her father said. “What right do you have to threaten my family?”

“Is one broken arm not enough for you?” There was a grunt from the outlander, a slapping sound, a cry of pain. “I’ll break the other and send you out for a swim. Move!”

A small part of Kaida wanted to have sympathy for her father. He certainly wanted for it. But the greater part of her was bitter and hurt. “My family,” he’d said. He could have asked the outlander what they’d done with his trueborn daughter, but no: his first concern was for Cho and her evil offspring.

It was not hard for Kaida to wait in silence as the outlanders dragged her “family” away. She heard her father groaning in pain, but she could do little to help him even if she wanted to, and at the moment that urge was unusually easy to suppress. She didn’t move a muscle until everyone was well clear; then she sprinted toward the sea cliff behind the village.

She found the old camphor tree with its big gnarled root pointing at the foot of the cliff. When she dropped to her knees, she was still panting so hard that she could see each breath hit the sand. A flat rock the size of a rice bowl lay nearby; she picked it up and started digging.

When she was elbow deep she wondered if she was digging in the wrong spot. Then the edge of the rock rasped on something hard, and with a little more digging with her fingers she found her knife.

Yesterday she’d given thought about keeping it under her pillow, but that was far too risky. Nowhere in the village was safe enough; there were too many eyes, too many people wandering about, too many little children playing games in all the good hiding spots. The knife didn’t do her much good this far away, but she didn’t want to just throw it back in the ocean either. And now she was glad she hadn’t; if Miyoko wanted to take their little war to deeper and more dangerous depths, now Kaida could go deeper too.

It took a little work to hide the knife properly, but for once her stump worked to her advantage: her yukata never fit right—the left sleeve was always much too long—and with her teeth and her right hand she found a way to tie the scabbard tightly enough to her stump that she could hide the knife up her empty sleeve.

By the time Kaida got back to the village, everyone she’d ever known was huddled together on the beach, a dark, whispering mass not far from the Fin. Kneeling and sitting as they were, they looked like a shoal of big, docile birds. The outlanders surrounded them—but only if surround was the right word to use for six people corralling a hundred. As soon as she thought of it that way, Kaida marveled at it. How could six men imprison a whole village? And how could the people she’d grown up with be so utterly cowed by only a handful of outlanders? She had no love for life in Ama-machi, but she did respect many of her neighbors. That respect was ebbing away even as she looked at them.

She moved cautiously, remembering all too well how easily Genzai and Masa had disabled her, fearing what the outlanders might do if they found her armed. Genzai might believe her if she said the knife was for her stepsisters, not for outlanders, but none of the other outlanders would care. Flitting from the shadow of one house to the next, she got as close as she could to the beach without being seen. In the end she had to sneak into one of the elders’ huts—a grave transgression; she could hardly believe she was bold enough to do it—and peer out the window.

Genzai marched up to the base of the Fin, holding one end of a long, bulging, rolled-up tarpaulin. The one-eyed hunchback held the other, and Kaida wouldn’t have been surprised if they had a full-grown seal rolled up in there, because it looked unbearably heavy. Genzai was as strong as any man in the village, and the muscles in his arms stood out as if they were about to tear free.

“We come with an offer,” Genzai announced. As ever, his voice was deep but soft, emotionless but utterly riveting. The villagers strained their necks forward to hear him.

“There is a shipwreck in the bay, and somewhere deep in the wreckage there is a sword. Its name is Glorious Victory Unsought. No doubt that name means nothing to you. In a place like this its power is meaningless. This is a sword capable of carving out an empire, while your village is no more than a barnacle clinging to the edge of the empire, so far away from anything that matters that you’re not even aware it’s an empire you’re clinging to.”

He said it without the slightest hint of derision. For him it was a simple observation, and if any villagers took offense to it, Genzai showed no sign of noticing. He spoke to them just as he might have spoken to a cluster of barnacles, Kaida thought.

Genzai still held his end of the heavy, rolled-up tarpaulin; the tendons in his arm quivered, taut as an anchor line, but he still spoke as if he were sitting calmly on the beach. “Even the dullest of you will already have guessed we have taken our turn at diving on the wreck,” he said. “The brightest of you have already guessed that we have not yet found the sword. I have decided that one of you will find it for us.”

“Why should we?” said Kaida’s father. Even with a ruined arm, even though his every breath pained him, he was always the first one to defend Ama-machi’s interests. Even though she still felt hurt, Kaida found herself feeling proud of him too. “The Maw is treacherous. Why should we risk our lives for a sword that’s no concern of ours?”

“Because you’ll be amply rewarded,” said Genzai, and without ceremony he dropped his end of the rolled-up tarpaulin. Gold spilled out like water. And not just gold; jewelry, jade, treasures of every sort Kaida had found and then some. Miyoko gasped with delight. Shioko did too, and a beat later Kiyoko followed suit. Their mother, Cho, had a similar reaction, and she was not alone; at least half of the adults rose halfway to their feet, the better to see the riches gleaming before them.

Kaida thought it was stupid. What could they buy with all that pretty gold? The sea provided everything needed for life in Ama-machi, and to the best of her knowledge, Kaida was the only one who wanted a life elsewhere.

“Name your price and you shall have it,” Genzai said, “if you are the one to retrieve the sword.”

A wave of chittering swelled up among the villagers, but the loudest voice belonged to Kaida’s father. “What price is so great that we can enjoy it in the afterlife? Show us what else you took from the sea yesterday. We saw your friend’s body.”

That caused chittering of a different tone. “You said it yourself,” Kaida’s father went on. “That sword of yours means nothing to us. We have no intention of risking our daughters for it, and neither will we risk them for you.”

“A commendable position,” Genzai said. “I salute you.” He scratched behind his beard. “You put me in a difficult position. I told my men any ama village worthy of the name would provide us with good divers, and as you well know, I am a man of my word. So if none of your daughters will dive for us . . . hm. I’ll have broken my word. That won’t do.”

He folded his legs and sat in the sand beside Kaida’s father. As if speaking to a co-conspirator, his voice so low that Kaida could scarcely hear him, he said, “But I think there may be a way out. If I were to kill every last one of your women, down to the newborn girls, it would no longer be an ama village worthy of the name, would it?”

Seated as he was, he was vulnerable. The villagers outnumbered the outlanders more than ten to one. And Genzai had just threatened every family among them.

Kaida felt a crushing surge of shame. Not one of the villagers reacted. They would never have greater provocation to kill this man, the leader of the outlanders. Nor would they ever have a better opportunity. Yet they sat and did nothing. Some even had the temerity to glance at the heap of riches Genzai and his one-eyed henchman had dumped so indifferently at their feet. Now more than ever, Kaida wanted to get away from this place. She could never look her neighbors in the eye again. They were no fiercer than a shoal of sticklebacks: skittish, flighty, impotent even when traveling in huge schools.

And yet she was proud of her father. He alone stood up to Genzai, and he was the one with the best reason not to. He knew exactly what kind of violence this man was capable of. If she’d ever felt certain about leaving Ama-machi, about leaving her father to his new family, that certainty was crumbling now. Her father would stand up for the whole village, but who would stand up for him?

She took a deep, tremulous breath and told herself it was her long run, not fear, that made the breath flutter in her throat. Then she stepped out of the elders’ hut and made a straight path toward Genzai. She had never felt so exposed.

His eyes caught her first. Then he turned to face her, arms folded, the corners of his mouth turned up ever so slightly. She wanted it to be a smile of paternal pride. More likely it was the thrill of anticipation in seeing wounded prey.

“I will get your sword,” she said, wishing her voice wouldn’t quiver.

46

“It’s too heavy,” Cho said, adjusting the demon mask on her face.

Genzai watched as the one-eyed outlander—Kaida remembered his name was Tadaaki—gave a last tug on the leather ties, undoing the little adjustment Cho had just made to the mask. Tadaaki had bound it to her head tightly, with twice as many ties as were necessary. “What does it do?” Kaida asked.

She was ignored. “I cannot dive with this,” Cho said. “We put our weights on our feet, not our faces.”

“Weight is weight,” said Genzai, rocking easily in the prow of the boat. “Diving is diving. Just get the sword.”

He and Cho weren’t in Kaida’s boat. Their boat was abeam of Kaida’s, in a whole fleet of ama rowboats. All the village women were out, and all the girls of diving age too. They were clothed in light yukata, not naked as they usually went, because usually they spent their time in the water, not cooking in the hot sun in their boats. The outlanders would only allow them to dive one at a time, for they had only one mask.

The ama boats floated in close company like so much flotsam, rising and falling each in their turn as the waves rolled in. There were not enough outlanders to go around, so Genzai could only man one boat in four with one of his own people. Once again Kaida’s village embarrassed her. In every boat the outlanders were outnumbered, and spread out as they were, none could come to another’s aid—not immediately, anyway, and it didn’t take long to brain someone with an oar.

Genzai shared his boat with two other outlanders: Tadaaki and the other one she’d seen sitting by the fire two nights ago, the one with the wild, white, wispy mane and the ragged clothing not so different from his hair. He stank of days-old sweat, and his cloth was so tattered that Kaida wondered why he wore it at all; it certainly did nothing in the name of modesty. He made a ceremony of handling the mask, caressing it almost like a lover until Tadaaki took it from him to tie to the next ama. Kaida thought she heard him chanting under his breath, but his hair and beard conspired to cover his mouth and the wind was coming in too strong for her to hear clearly.

But she could hear Cho well enough. “It is the mask that prevents us from finding your sword,” she told Genzai. “Our way is to let our sandbags carry us down, then let our rowers pull the bags back up. We never swim back up with anything heavier than a catch bag.”

“Not today. Dive.”

Cho sighed in defeat. She was the tenth diver of the morning, and the other nine had worked themselves to exhaustion, all with nothing to show for it but a series of failed experiments on how best to dive under these conditions. They’d fastened an anchor line from the prow of Genzai’s rowboat to the widest hole in the carrack’s hull, so that no effort need be spent steering the course of their descent. And they dived with extra sandbags too; the faster the extra weight could bring them down, the more bottom time they’d have for searching. Yet none of them had so much as laid eyes on their quarry.

“At least let me dive without this silly tether tied to my ankle,” Cho said.

“No. That mask is one of a kind. We need to be able to pull you back up if you should drown.”

Cho’s face blanched. Until that moment, Kaida had been a little proud of her—begrudgingly so, to be sure, but she was the first to speak up to Genzai. It was obvious to all of them why these outlanders hadn’t found their sword; they knew nothing about diving. But only Cho had said so, and Kaida thought that bespoke courage.

But Genzai cowed her with a stare. Cho got in the water and did as she was told, and to no one’s surprise she did not find the sunken sword. She dived again and again came up empty-handed. Kaida watched her as she went down. Cho was as pale and lithe as her eldest daughter, and like Miyoko she swam as gracefully as any creature of the sea—but much deeper, staying down much longer. An ama’s lungs tended to get stronger with age, and wisdom and experience gave insights into diving that none of the younger girls understood. The oldest ama didn’t move at all on their descent, and when they swam it was only little flicks, like a sea turtle’s: small, strong, precise. Every movement, every flexion or tension of the muscles consumed the body’s breath. Kaida understood the principle better than any girl her age, since with her handicap she needed to make the most of every movement. On most days, she tried to let the principle direct her dives, but on this particular morning she could not help but resent it. At this rate, one of the older women was certain to retrieve the sword before she could get to it herself.

She already knew the reward she’d ask of Genzai. She just needed to get to the sword before anyone else. But the ama had decided among themselves that the oldest would dive first. They were the strongest, and it was better for the village not to risk girls of marrigeable age. Diving on the wreck was precarious enough by itself, they said, even without the hungry ghosts that must be circling it like sharks. But Kaida wasn’t afraid of ghosts. She was only afraid that someone would find the sword before she had her turn. At thirteen, she was close to the bottom of the list.

Her mind raced. She had to think of a way to make Genzai choose her, and more difficult yet, she had to think of a way to find his precious sword. She’d already scoured every corner of the wreck; she’d pulled up every treasure she thought outlanders might want. There weren’t any swords down there.

Not in the open, anyway.

But then there were the dark spaces, the holds that were still intact, still locked up tight. She’d never mustered the courage to get into those.

As if to mock her, Cho’s pale silhouette wriggled into the gaping dark maw of the carrack. From the surface, it looked exactly like the wreckage had gobbled her up.

“Scary, neh?” said Miyoko. Kaida looked up to see her stepsisters riding abreast of her. Sen was their oarsman again, gazing blankly from under the shadow of his broad sugegasa. Kaida wondered what lies Miyoko had conjured to coax him into rowing his boat closer to Kaida, within tormenting range. Her thoughts strayed to the knife she’d bound to her stump, still concealed by the loose sleeve of her yukata. It was of no use to her at the moment, but she was glad to have it nonetheless.

“Neh, Kaida?” Miyoko said it as sweetly as if she were talking to a newborn. “What a fright it must be, swimming inside that dark shipwreck. It must feel like the walls are closing in.”

“Not such a difficult problem to fix,” Kaida said. “Don’t dive.”

“Oh, but if we don’t dive, how can we win the treasure? You do want the treasure, don’t you?”

Kaida didn’t feel like exercising patience today. She jumped headfirst over the gunwale, thankful for the cold water rushing past her ears. Genzai’s boat was close, but she chose to swim under it and surface on the far side, out of sight of her sisters.

“Why is that sword so important to you?”

Genzai looked down at her, frowning. “That is no concern of yours.” He turned away, redirecting his attention to the wreck and the ama within.

“I can tell you how to get it,” Kaida said. “Tell me what it’s for.”

He gave no hint that he’d even heard her speaking, and Kaida had almost resigned to swim back to her boat when finally he broke his silence. “The man who tames Glorious Victory cannot be defeated in battle. In the right hands, that blade can change the fortune of an empire.”

“And you want to be emperor? Is that why you’re here? You’re a warlord?”

“A broker.” He smirked. “Battlefields are for fools. Those who prefer their heads attached to their shoulders find other ways than war.”

Kaida thought about that for a moment. “Is there a battle coming? There is, isn’t there? And you want to choose who wins. Is your plan to give the sword to some other warlord? To tip the balance in his favor?”

A laugh rumbled in Genzai’s throat. “You are no fool, Kaida-san. Shortsighted, but not a fool. There are many battles to come, and we do not leave their outcomes to chance. Now tell me, what is your secret for retrieving the sword?”

“If I tell you, will you choose me next?”

Genzai gave her a grunt of disappointment. “So you can be the one to claim the sword? So you can demand that I take you with us when we go? No, Kaida-san. If a little ribbing from three little girls is too much for you, you’ll not fare well with us when we leave.”

“You were listening?”

“That is what you want, neh? For me to take you away from those sisters of yours?”

“You said whoever gets the sword gets whatever she wants. You said she could name her reward.”

“I did.” He glanced down, prompting Kaida to do the same. Cho was just emerging from the wreck. “Tell me your secrets, Kaida-san. How would you reclaim Glorious Victory?”

“I will say nothing until you agree to take me with you.”

He scratched behind his beard. “Very well. If you tell me how to make these women retrieve the sword, we will bring you with us when we take our leave.”

Kaida felt a thrill of triumph. “One more thing: promise you’ll let me dive next. Before the rest of the older ama.”

“Because you’re so sure someone else can use your secret to find the sword?” He gave her a studious frown, as if she were some new breed of seal no one had ever seen before. At last he grumbled his consent. “As you like. Reveal this secret art of yours and you will dive before any of these grown women.”

Kaida all but floated with glee. “We cannot swim with that tether tied to our ankles. Tie it to your mask instead. That way you won’t lose your mask if I get into trouble, and I can dive deeper because I won’t have to make my ascent with that big iron weight pulling me down.”

Genzai looked at Tadaaki, then at the other one, the outlander with the hair and beard like clouds on a stiff wind. “The mask must be worn to serve its purpose,” said the wild-haired one. It was the first time she’d ever heard him speak a coherent word.

“Bind it to me if you like,” Kaida said. “Just not as you’ve been doing. Tie it so I can take it off.”

Genzai looked to the old man again, who frowned as he thought about it. At last he gave a curt nod.

Another thrill of triumph ran down Kaida’s spine. Her skin bloomed with goose bumps not born of the chilly water. “You, girl, get in the boat,” Genzai said.

Kaida started to get in, but Genzai told her, “Not you. The tall one.”

He pointed, and Kaida followed his finger to Miyoko, whose broadening grin bespoke victory and malice and joy all at once. She looked at Kaida as a flame might look at dry kindling.

“No,” Kaida shouted. “Genzai-sama, please, you swore you’d let me go with you—”

“If you found the sword,” Genzai said. “I will stand by my word: no grown woman will dive before you. But I have no desire to drag a crippled peasant girl in tow. If you should retrieve the Inazuma blade, I will carry you along with the rest of our luggage. But I intend to give every one of your sisters the chance to find it first.”

47

Kaida was heartbroken. All she could do was sit dripping in her wet yukata. She’d sealed her own fate.

On any other morning, she would have no fear that Miyoko would claim the sword. The water was just too deep. But between the anchor line and the extra weight of the mask, Miyoko could reach the carrack with no effort at all. Worse yet, all the ama who dived before had worked out a sort of verbal map of the ship’s innards. Kaida’s best advantage had been her knowledge of the wreck. She’d dived on it dozens of times, while everyone else came to it for the first time. Now Miyoko had detailed instructions about which holds had already been combed over, which way to turn after swimming through this hatch or that one.

On top of that, Miyoko had the mask. Every ama who wore it said she felt it pulling her toward the sword. Kaida didn’t quite understand how that worked; all of them admitted they hadn’t seen the sword, and Kaida could not grasp how they knew they were being pulled toward something none of them could see. But that hardly mattered. Miyoko had one unsurpassable advantage over Kaida: she wasn’t scared of closed spaces.

Miyoko positively glowed as Tadaaki fixed the mask to her pretty face. “Take care not to snag the line,” he told her, just as he’d told every ama before her. “Should you lose the mask, we will send your corpse down to join it. Understand?”

He’d said that to all of other divers too. Miyoko nodded and promised and did everything else a good little girl was supposed to do. Then she flashed Kaida a sinister smile and made her first dive.

Kaida hoped she’d drown. Then she saw Cho’s face.

Cho knew perfectly well that none of her daughters had ever been as deep as the wreck. Kaida’s aptitude for deep diving was freakish for girls her age. Cho couldn’t hide her apprehension: she bit her lower lip; her hands clasped tightly to each other; she held her breath.

Only when a slender white form slipped out of the battered hull did she allow herself to breathe normally. Kaida saw the tension pour out of her shoulders, and she realized then that she couldn’t wish any of her stepsisters dead. Not really. She imagined her father with the same anxiety, and then with the same relief. He would have been a more attentive father if Kaida were a boy, and that was wrong of him. The death of a son would have hit him harder than the death of a daughter. But whatever his failings, a father should not have to bury his child, and the same was true of a mother like Cho. Kaida could wish her stepsisters would disappear, but she couldn’t wish them dead.

“Too deep,” Miyoko gasped when she surfaced. “It’s too—I can’t—”

“I can do it,” said Shioko, exactly in time with their mother’s saying, “It’s all right, sweetheart, they can send someone else.”

“Get back down there,” Genzai said, as deadly calm as ever.

“I can’t,” said Miyoko, still panting. “It’s too deep.”

“Not for me,” Kaida said. “Give me the mask, Genzai-sama. I’ve been down there. You know I can do this.”

For once Shioko ignored her. “Did you see the sword, Miyoko? I can do it. Just give me the mask.”

“No,” said Genzai. “This one goes next.” And he pointed his finger at Kiyoko.

Ever the follower, Kiyoko agreed. But she trembled as Miyoko removed the mask and actually broke down crying when she donned it herself. She did not shed tears so much as squirt them. Fear gripped her entire body; she looked as if she was about to faint.

“You don’t have to do this,” said Cho. “Please, Kiyoko-chan. . . .”

As it happened, Genzai and Cho both got their way. Kiyoko dived, but she only made it halfway down to the wreck before she lost her nerve and flailed for the surface.

“I can do it,” said Shioko. At last she had the chance to outdo both of her sisters. All she had to do was touch the hull and she’d have surpassed Kiyoko. Surpassing Miyoko had been her goal for as long as she’d been alive. Her whole life she’d been catching up. Now, at long last, she had her chance to excel. And Kaida wasn’t sure she’d survive the attempt.

“Shioko, this is foolish at best,” she said. “Suicide at worst. You’ve never been that deep. You only stand to get yourself hurt.”

“Shut your mouth!” Shioko said. “I’m a better swimmer than Kaida. Just look at her. Please, Genzai-sama, let me go next. I can do it.”

Genzai looked at Kaida, then at Cho. If there was even a trace of compassion in him, Kaida could not see it. “This one goes next,” he said, and he summoned Shioko into his boat to don the mask.

She rushed her first dive, paddling with her arms to hasten her descent; by the time she reached the wreck, she had to come right back up. With coaching from Miyoko she made the second dive in fine form. Kaida started counting when Shioko disappeared within the wreck, beating time with her thumb against the haft of her hidden knife, which she’d been concealing by crossing her arms and sitting hunched—no doubt seeming sullen to everyone else. Now she forgot herself, counting forty-nine raps of the thumb before Shioko emerged again. It was a good dive. At this depth Kaida herself didn’t always stay down that long.

Shioko came up gasping, swallowing as much air as she could. Cho’s relief was almost palpable; Kaida imagined waves of it rippling through the air. “Well?” said Miyoko.

“I saw it,” Shioko said when she could manage to speak. “With the mask I saw it. It’s just as you said, far forward, almost at the bow. It’s so dark in there. You can only see with the mask.”

Kaida couldn’t make sense of that. The mask had eyeholes, not eyes. But Miyoko and Cho nodded as if Shioko made sense, and in any case Kaida had other worries. As Shioko described it, the sword was in the deepest, darkest, narrowest part of the wreck. The mere thought of such a place made Kaida’s throat grow tight.

A sudden splash broke her out of her reverie. Miyoko was back in the water. She swam over to Shioko and gave her a hug. Then, softly enough that their mother couldn’t hear, she said, “You have to get it, Shioko-chan. She can go deeper than either of us. We can’t let her have it.”

“You’re a fool,” Kaida said. “Better to cut her throat than to kill her this way.”

Genzai shot her a sharp glare; he must have thought Kaida was talking to him, and clearly he wasn’t fond of peasant girls calling him names. Cho made a face at her too; she’d heard none of her daughter’s conversation and she must have thought Kaida was talking to ghosts.

“Cho-san,” Kaida said, “you must get your girls out of the water. Do it now, before—”

“Enough,” Genzai said, as angry as Kaida had ever heard him. “You, girl, get back in your boat. And you, the mask stays on, you stay in the water. You will dive. Now.”

“Shioko, you must,” Miyoko said. Then she did as she was told, returning to Sen’s rowboat.

Shioko dived again, and again Kaida beat time with her thumb as soon as her stepsister entered the broken hull.

She reached fifty-nine and there was still no sign of Shioko. Kaida told herself that was to be expected; she was going a little deeper this time. At seventy-nine Kaida feared the worst. At eighty-nine, everyone but Cho understood what had happened, and at a hundred there was open weeping in every boat but Genzai’s.

Tadaaki tugged at the thick, taut tether. When it suddenly gave way, it was obvious he’d snapped the mask from Shioko’s corpse. Nothing floated to the surface.

“You dive next,” Genzai told Kaida, before Tadaaki had even finished reeling in the mask.

48

“It’s her fault,” Miyoko screeched. “She was the one who told us how to dive deeper. If it weren’t for her, Shioko never would have stayed down that long.”

Kaida didn’t bother to defend herself. The truth was plain for anyone who wanted to see it: it was Miyoko who killed her sister. In fact, it had been a joint effort, Shioko’s sheer competitiveness weighed down by Miyoko’s prodding. Kaida had seen it coming before it happened. She’d warned them all. No one listened.

Cho sat dumbstruck in her boat, so stunned by her Shioko’s death that she couldn’t do anything but stare at the water. The tears ran down her face but she couldn’t even cry out loud. Kiyoko was at her side, hugging her close, Cho returning the embrace. But more importantly—to Kaida’s eye, at least—was that Cho made no effort to console her eldest daughter. Apart from Kaida, Cho might have been the only one who grasped the whole, horrifying truth.

Guilt and shame tugged at Kaida like sandbags, pulling her mind into deep, cold places. She should have said something more convincing. She should have argued more forcefully with Genzai. But her better judgment said none of that would have mattered. No one would have listened. No one ever listened.

But they were listening to Miyoko. “She killed my sister! Kaida killed my sister!” It was a litany, a mantra, maybe even a magical spell. If she said it often enough, perhaps she could beguile herself into forgetting her own part in her little sister’s suicide. A part of Kaida hoped it would actually work. Make yourself happy, Kaida thought, so long as I can get away from you first.

She swam to Genzai’s boat and clambered in. “Someone shut that girl up,” she heard Genzai say, “or I’ll send her down to join the other one.”

“Don’t,” Kaida said. “Her mother has lost enough.”

Genzai snorted. “So says the one who means to abandon her own father. Since when did you start listening to conscience, Kaida-san?”

“Shioko wasn’t the evil one. She was only trying to keep pace.”

“And you? How evil are you?”

Kaida didn’t know how to answer that. Not long ago she thought she wanted her stepsisters dead. Now she thought that was wrong. Not long ago she’d been certain she wanted to leave Ama-machi behind her. This morning, having seen her father take a stand for the whole village, she’d felt qualms about abandoning him. But Shioko’s death would drive Miyoko to new depths of cruelty. Leaving Ama-machi was no longer just a dream. She’d be killed if she stayed. And it would break her father’s heart if his stepdaughter murdered his only trueborn child. So Kaida’s only answer to Genzai’s question was “I’m not evil. I just do what it takes to survive until tomorrow.”

That earned her an approving grunt from Tadaaki. “Spoken like a true shinobi,” he said. “You may be one of us after all.”

Kaida felt a strange sense of satisfaction in hearing that. She didn’t know why. These men felt nothing at having just sent a young girl to her death. For Kaida to throw in with them now was almost suicidal. Of course, staying in the same village with Miyoko was suicide as well, so Kaida supposed she might just as well have the admiration of her potential killers, rather than their scorn.

Kaida stripped off her yukata and was now naked but for the knife strapped to her left arm. Genzai narrowed his eyes at it and gave a little harrumph. Kaida took it as a sign of approval. The strangest of the outsiders, the one with the streaming white hair, stared at her, and she felt his gaze as surely as she felt the sun. He muttered guttural chants as he caressed the demonic half mask. When Tadaaki took it from him, the old man seemed reluctant to give it up. Something in the way they handled it made Kaida suddenly afraid of it. They held it as one might hold a sleeping venomous animal.

Tadaaki leaned in toward her, and being so close, she could see into the bottom of his hollow eye socket. It was awful, all filled with scars. She supposed everyone must have looked at her stump the same way. She hated the way their eyes lingered on her scars, then darted away as if they’d never seen a thing. Now she condemned herself for doing the very same thing to Tadaaki. She looked away from his missing eye, focusing on the iron mask she’d inexplicably come to dread. Tadaaki cupped the back of her head in one hand, and with the other he pressed the demon mask to her face.

The metal was coarse, pointy in places, and the instant it made contact with her skin she felt a strange hunger she’d never known before. Hunger wasn’t even the right word for it. Hunger could be patient. Hunger could be sated. This was like a new set of muscles under her skin, writhing with need. It made her want to move, to go and take hold of something she simply had to have, but she could not figure out what that thing was. Suddenly she understood why the wild-haired one never stopped moving his hands over the mask. The same force that moved her was moving in him.

She felt Tadaaki’s fingers move to and fro around her head, around her mask, but paid them little attention. Even when he pulled the bonds tight, mashing the coarsest part of the mask against her forehead, she paid him no heed. Such trivial concerns were nothing in the face of this new craving.

The strangest thought occurred to her, one that distracted her from her fear, if only for a moment: was this the way Miyoko felt? Was she driven by some deep-seated hunger? One like the mask’s, a nameless, formless, all-compelling need? Perhaps some demon possessed her, one with a face like the mask, one that spawned a visceral urge to dominate and subjugate and hurt. If so, then Kaida could understand why Miyoko took such pleasure in it: the greatest hunger promised the greatest satisfaction. She knew what she needed. She had only to dive down and get it. Without the mask, impossible. With it, inevitable, even if it killed her.

“You know what must be done,” Genzai told her. “You understand the price of failure.”

Kaida barely heard him. She got in the water and fixed two sandbags to her feet. Tadaaki handed her a modified kaigane, its scoop curled like a bird’s talon so Kaida could hitch it to the anchor line leading down to the wreck. Everyone else could do that with one hand while holding on to the prow with the other. Kaida could not, so as soon as she hooked the line she was already plunging toward the bottom.

She’d never gone down this fast. Equalizing the pressure in her ears was impossible without a free hand. She felt like someone was pushing chopsticks into her ears.

But soon enough her toes touched down on the broken, silt-covered carrack. When she freed herself from her sandbags, one of them slipped into the hole in the hull and instantly vanished. The sight of it terrified her. In her eyes the wreck had just devoured the sandbag, and now its mouth was open and waiting for her.

Even the mask’s strange hunger did little to quell her fear. Her throat grew tight. Her heart started pounding; she knew it would consume her body’s breath too quickly. The sheer length of the mask’s tether frightened her too. She’d only used a third of its length in getting down this far. She had a long way to go yet, and all inside the gutted wreckage.

Steeling herself, she drew her little knife from its sheath on her stump, and in one deft stroke she snipped the tether linking Tadaaki to the mask. The outlanders wouldn’t be happy with her for that, but she’d planned on doing it long before it was her turn to dive. The thought of being snagged by the face while trapped in the wreck was too frightening to contemplate. Freeing herself of the tether was the only way she could make herself go in.

She let the mask’s weight pull her inside. Its craving had a direction now. She could not yet put a name to that hunger, but its object was directly below her. And the hold was not as dark as she thought. Remembering what Genzai had taught her about imagination and fear, she let herself fall deeper.

An open hatch lay before her. She swam through it face-first, pulled downward by the mask. The light was lower in here; what little she could see was purple, not blue, except for the yawning black mouth of another open hatch. She avoided that one. Others had gone down there. It was a dead end. But there was supposed to be a second hatch here, right next to the first. Was she in the wrong hold? Had she gotten lost already?

She looked up to find the sun and find her bearings. Shioko looked back down at her.

It was her stepsister’s last ambush, but it gave Kaida such a fright that she thought her heart might jump out of her chest. Shioko’s pale face almost glowed in the twilight of the wrecked ship’s bowels. Her eyes stared blankly; her mouth hung open. Her arms and legs dangled like braids of seaweed from a mooring line.

Recoiling in horror, Kaida accidentally found the second hatch. It must have fallen shut somehow, and in the low light it was indistinguishable from the rest of the bulkhead. She’d only found it by backing into it. Now she wondered: had it fallen shut on Shioko, trapping her? Had she spent her last breaths pushing it back up? How hard she must have fought to free herself, only to see daylight just as the water filled her lungs?

More than anything, Kaida wanted to retreat. Push off hard and kick for the surface. Get her panic under control and dive again. But she knew she could never make herself enter the ship’s corpse again. Not after seeing Shioko. Not after seeing where her own body would come to rest.

Kaida hefted the closed hatchway and fell through it. It was the hardest, bravest, most foolhardy thing she’d ever done. Drawing her knife again, she stabbed it into the swollen wood, jamming it so that the hatch could not close. It would still be heavy, held down by all that water, but at least Kaida would be able to see its outline when she came back up. If she came back up.

And now she had no choice but to surrender herself to the mask. She could sense the object of its desire quite clearly now. It still lay deep below her, calling to her somehow. A long, graceful curve, glowing in the darkness the way sunlight glowed through closed eyelids. It could only be a sword.

The mask pulled her straight down. Kaida couldn’t see a thing. Something clubbed her in the shoulder. Kaida tried not to imagine what it might be. She tried to focus more on the craving of the mask than the demons conjured by her imagination. Her throat was as tight as if Miyoko were choking her.

She fell headlong, cold water flowing over her skin, and soon collided with a wall of soft, waterlogged wood. She hit face-first; tiny pinpoints in the mask bit into her forehead. She pushed the pain out of her mind. In so doing, she became aware of her body’s other pains. Those chopsticks were back in her ears, pushed in deep by all the water overhead. Worse, her lungs burned as they’d never burned before. Now Kaida understood how Masa had died. It was the mask that killed him after all. The demonic hunger of the mask erased the pains of the body, and those pains were the only voices telling Kaida to go back up for air. The closer she got to the sword, the less she feared drowning, and that lack of fear was more dangerous than anything else in the ocean.

Her fingers probed this way and that until she found the lip of another hatch. It wasn’t heavy like the last one. As soon as she opened it, she saw the welcome glow of purple light. Ryujin’s Claw had raked open the keel, and through those gashes she could see coral. These were the wounds that condemned the outlanders’ ship. This was the sea dragon’s deathblow.

And trapped in a mashed, splintered corner was the sword. The mask let her see nothing else. She dived for it. It was a good way down, four or five body-lengths at least. As soon as her fingers wrapped around it, her desire for it vanished, and all of a sudden she felt the wild heaving of her diaphragm. She’d all but expended her body’s breath. And she was twice as deep as she’d ever gone before.

She looked down at the coral and up at the hatch she’d come through. The shortest route to the surface went straight up through the wreck. But there was no straight line there, only a dark and circuitous path. The clearest route lay outside in the open water, but she had to swim farther down to get free of the carrack. She was already far too deep. And the sword was as heavy as an anchor.

It was never the easy choice, swimming down instead of up. But obviously Shioko had tried swimming upward. Kaida was the stronger swimmer, up or down, but Shioko hadn’t shared Kaida’s fear of being trapped in the wreck. And Kaida had already spent too much time choosing. Black spots formed drifting schools in her vision.

Up, down, both options were probably fatal. There was no doubting it. Kaida gave herself over to the mask and the sword. They pulled her downward, out of the wreckage.

Escaping its innards was such a relief that it gave her newfound hope. She even had a flash of insight: she knew she lacked the strength to drag her two anchors all the way to the surface, but perhaps she could use the hull as a sort of ladder, launching herself one push at a time, just like kicking off the sea floor. Suddenly the broken carrack became the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.

Then she looked up. As soon as she realized just how deep she was, she knew she’d never make it.

49

The black spots in her vision pressed in, multiplied, reeled drunkenly. She saw more darkness than light. Being the strongest diver of her generation meant less than the fact that, unburdened, her body would float to the surface even if she were dead. At least her father would have the chance to give her a proper funeral. Shioko’s mother could not say the same.

Kaida’s lungs had long since stopped hurting. Even her diaphragm had given up its death throes. Kaida pushed off the wreckage one last time, then let her body’s buoyancy do what it could for her. She didn’t think it would count for much.

She blacked out entirely. She could no longer sense the water moving around her, and because of that she was no longer sure she was even floating upward. She vomited into her mouth. Pushing the filth out let seawater in. Kaida knew it was the first taste of drowning.

And then she broke the surface. Her gasps of breath didn’t even sound human. Still seeing black, she nearly slipped below the surface again, but sheer animal instinct forced her legs to kick.

Soon enough daylight pressed its way into her vision. Genzai’s boat was not far away. It bobbed crazily on the waves—or was it Kaida’s mind lurching, throwing everything off-kilter? He was saying something, but she had to get her breath under control before she could hear him.

“Where is the mask?” he bellowed. It was the first time she’d ever heard him raise his voice.

“Down,” she said, gasping, paddling toward his boat like a wounded animal. “Down there.”

“The tether is broken,” he said. She saw Tadaaki beside him, holding the dripping, limp end of it. “And broken cleanly. You cut it?”

“Had to.” Kaida’s breath still came raggedly. “Can’t—can’t dive with it.”

“You cut the cord to the mask,” said Genzai. He’d regained control of his temper. “If you’ve lost it for us, I will kill you. You know this.”

“Anchor line,” Kaida said. At last she reached Genzai’s rowboat. She didn’t want to swim to him, but his was the closest boat, and her body swam to it instinctually, without her willing it.

“Make sense, girl.”

“Anchor line,” she said, hooking the gunwale in her feeble grip. “Haul it in.”

“I felt it the moment you cut it,” said Genzai, his fury so hot she thought she could see it rising from him like the sun shimmering on sand. But that too might have been a trick of her staggering air-starved mind. “I can only assume you cut the anchor line for spite. That will not be the offense I kill you for. Tadaaki, pull in that line. And you, girl, tell me about my sword and mask.”

At first Kaida could not answer. Her relief at having something sturdy to hold, some reason to think she might escape drowning, left her incapable of anything other than a weak, exhausted smile.

“Well? Speak! I will have you tell me where you left the mask before I send your body back down to join it.”

“It was too heavy,” Kaida said. “The sword too. I couldn’t swim back up with them. So I tied them to the anchor line.”

Even as she said it, the demon mask rose toward the surface. Trailing it was a broken wooden spar, the anchor point that had connected Genzai’s little boat to the wreck until Kaida kicked it loose, her last conscious act before ascending to the surface. Trailing the spar and the mask was the sword known as Glorious Victory Unsought.

Kaida watched the light play on them as they came up. They were the strangest school of fish she’d ever seen.

Genzai rumbled like distant thunder, and his anger seemed to lessen somewhat. His breath was less audible, at any rate, and his shoulders and jaws relaxed. Perhaps it was relief at seeing the sword, and no abatement in his anger at all. Kaida wondered if he still meant to kill her.

At length, begrudgingly, he said, “I suppose you’ll be wanting me to make good on my word.”

“And then some,” Kaida said.

He grunted again. “You press your luck too far, little girl.”

“You said whoever got the sword could name her reward. And you promised to take me with you if I told you how we could dive better. So I did. I told you to tether the mask, not our ankles.”

“What of it?”

The strange fish were almost to the surface now, close enough that she could make out the fangs and horns of the mask. “So you were sworn to take me with you even if the sword remained at the bottom until the ocean dries up. Now you owe me my reward as well.”

He grunted again, almost growling. She didn’t look up, but she could hear him scratching behind his beard. “This one’s too clever by half,” Tadaaki said.

“She is. And damn it all, I’m a man of my word. Name your price, Kaida-san.”

“Not here,” she whispered. “There are too many people listening.”

She wasn’t wrong. Every last villager fixated on her, agape, stunned into silence. Not only had Kaida spared the village from Genzai’s wrath, but she’d also pulled off the impossible, diving deeper and longer than the best ama in the village. She did not meet their stares, and did not speak again until all the other boats had turned in to shore. She waited until the wild-haired grandfather had his iron mask back in hand and Tadaaki had bound the Inazuma blade to his own body, so that even if he were killed it would not sink out of reach again. All the while Genzai scowled at her wordlessly.

At last she asked him, “You’re shinobi, neh? Men of magic?”

“There are no magic men. The only place you’ll find shinobi is in fairy tales.”

“Fairy tales and in this boat. You said it earlier. ‘Spoken like a true shinobi.’ That’s what you said.”

“Too clever by half,” he muttered, frowning at her. “If I were any other man, I’d drown you here and now.”

“But you’re not. You’re a man of your word.”

His grimace became a squint-eyed scowl. “Name your price, then.”

“I want to be one of you. A shinobi. I want you to train me.”

He scratched behind his beard. “You do not know what you ask.”

“What need is there to know? I know I cannot stay here. I know my father would do better to see me go than to see me killed by his own stepdaughter’s hand. And I know if I go with you, you’ll sell me off as a whore at your first opportunity. Neh?”

“The thought had crossed my mind.”

“Then I need you to make me one of your own. I cannot dive and fish for the rest of my life. Now I see how much more is possible. I don’t want to be pushed around ever again. Nobody pushes you around. You overpowered my whole village with six men. I want to learn how to do that.”

Genzai scowled. A guttural growl rumbled out of him.

The wild-haired one finally broke the silence. “She has her uses,” he said, caressing the mask in his hands. “She has proven her fortitude. And cripples pose no threat. We can put her close to targets we could not otherwise approach.”

“Nonsense,” said Genzai. “There is no place the Wind cannot reach.”

Kaida had no idea what that meant. They didn’t give her time to puzzle it out. “She did retrieve the sword for us,” said Tadaaki, seeming to meet Kaida’s gaze with his missing eye.

“And you would speak to me of what? Debt? Morality?” Genzai scoffed. “The Wind recognizes neither. We have the sword in hand. What is past is irrelevant.”

“Your word isn’t,” said Kaida. All this talk of wind made little sense to her, but she understood moral obligation well enough. “Your word may be in the past, but it matters in the present. You said I could name my reward. Do you stand by that or not?”

“Watch your mouth or I’ll sew it shut,” said Genzai. “Do not take that tone with me again.”

There was an uneasy silence, broken at last by the old man with the wild white hair. “There is another consideration. We have achieved our ends, yes. With or without the girl, we can deliver the Inazuma to whomever we wish. But when that man falls, or when his ambitions no longer coincide with our own, we must place the sword in new hands.”

“What of it?” said Genzai.

“For that we may require the mask again. The other divers did not succeed with it. Can we say with certainty that we know why? Perhaps this cripple was the stronger swimmer, or perhaps her spirit has an accord with the mask, one we do not yet understand. This girl may be a tool for us, just as the sword and the mask are tools.”

“Then we will forge another tool. I will not be a wet nurse.”

“Masa spoke highly of her,” said Tadaaki, seeming to study her again with that empty pit that should have been an eye. “Sharp ears and a strong heart, that’s what he said.”

“He did,” said Genzai.

An image flashed in Kaida’s mind: Masa’s drowned body falling lifelessly to the sand. Then came another image: Masa falling to the sand in a fit of laughter. She’d felt embarrassment at the time, but now she understood that he hadn’t been mocking her; he’d merely been taken aback by her naïveté. If he was mocking anyone, it was Ama-machi.

Hearing he’d spoken up for her gave Kaida a little surge of pride. It also gave her hope. Masa had perceived Ama-machi’s true nature; he understood why it could never be Kaida’s home. His vote of confidence in her said she could find a home among these men. And Masa and Genzai had been good friends. Kaida was sure of it: she’d seen Genzai’s distress when Masa died. Genzai would take Masa’s word seriously. He just had to take Kaida in. She had no other prospects for survival.

“No,” Genzai said. “I cannot. I will not.” Kaida thought he meant to speak with finality, but she also thought she heard a hint of doubt in his deep, grating voice.

“Consider it this way,” Tadaaki said. “You may get lucky. Like as not she’ll die in the training.”

That got an appreciative nod out of Genzai. “What do you say to that, little girl? He has it right: you may not become one of us. You’re far more likely to become a corpse.”

“Better than dying in Ama-machi.”

“Is it?” He scratched behind his beard. “I suppose it may be at that.” Then he shook his head, as if snapping out of a bad dream. “No. You will find no place among us.”

“Then you lose nothing by taking me in,” Kaida said.

“We have no soft futon for you, only a dirt floor. We would sooner serve you shoe leather than fish. Do you think your sisters torment you? Our sensei are worse. Do you think it was difficult, diving for Glorious Victory Unsought? We will push you into the depths of hell. Do not underestimate the comforts of home.”

“A crippled girl is not at home anywhere. My mother is gone and my father has turned his back on me. My village is a prison and my house is a cage of predators. If a cold corner on your dirt floor is all the home you can offer me, it is still more than this crippled orphan can expect.”

“You may live to regret those words.”

“Then make me regret them. Take me with you.”

The two of them studied each other a long time. Kaida could not put her finger on what it was—a slight relaxing of the shoulders, perhaps, a hint of resignation in his breath—but she knew it the moment he changed his mind.

“You cannot kill me willfully,” Kaida said. “You must swear to do your best to train me. If I die anyway . . . well, that’s the fate I get.”

“We shall see soon enough. Welcome to the Wind.”