[Concluding chapter 14]
Hiroki woke to the sound of rain on the roof. His face was as wet as if he had been bathing or swimming, and he felt short of breath as if he had been running or fighting.
Suddenly he knew why the arms master had been summoning exorcist monks to him. Lady Tomiko had become an onryō — a vengeful ghost. If she was haunting her brother, it was because the lord had wronged her sufficiently as to cause her death; the haunting was part of the vengeance she could never have wreaked upon him while she lived. But how had he wronged her? As her elder brother there was very little he was not justified in doing to her.
And why has she visited me?
Surely the answer to that question was obvious: Hiroki had not done enough to solve the mystery of her death, to bring her killer to justice. Instead he had let himself be distracted by the attacks on Lord Naitō and himself, trying to persuade himself that the attacks and Lady Tomiko’s murder were somehow connected.
They are not, he knew. He didn’t know why he was so sure of this now, but if the ghost’s visit had shown him nothing else it had persuaded him of this. We stepped into the middle of something when we arrived in the capital, he now understood, and would have been at risk even had Lady Tomiko lived.
So: he had to find the killer, and quickly, in order that he be able to protect Lords Naitō and Matsukata from further attack. Even if the only way to do that was to remove them from the capital, with or without any agreement between Lord Tanuma and either shōgun.
A broken reed, he thought. The shōgun’s family is also a broken reed, and we must stop trying to support ourselves with it.
Someone had thoughtfully left a soft cloth beside his futon, and Hiroki mopped his face until it was mostly dry. The air in the room was cool enough that he was certain he ought to shiver, but he did not. In fact, he felt very comfortable, a gentle sort of lassitude in which even the pain in his knee seemed to be drowsy.
The fever has broken, he realized. Smiling, he lay back and let the rhythmic tapping of rain on the roof pull him back down into sleep.
Next Characters Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6
Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14
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