Free Shadows on the Moon by Zoe Marriott Page A

Terayama-san and my mother. The game of rejection and pursuit.
    Now I had the answer. It had not been in the ruins of my father’s house, or in the few missing days before that. The game had begun before I was even born, when Mother was the same age as I was now. It had begun when she had chosen Hoshima Daisuke instead of Terayama Ryoichi. And it had lasted all those years.
    Mother seemed to think that it was devotion and love that had kept Terayama-san’s interest. But I could not free my mind of the image of the cat at its mouse hole, so still, so patient.
    He had come to our house all the time. Laughed with my father. Eaten at our table. All the time, he had been looking at her. All the time planning, watching. All the time waiting, waiting, for his chance.
    He had lost the first time.
    He had never given up.
    I burst out of the corridor, the door slamming back with a sharp crack that was hidden by the rush and boom of the water against the ship’s hull.
    It was overcast, the sky as white and hard as the inside of a tea bowl. The air was cold and tangy with salt. I stood for a moment, panting, my fists clenching and unclenching. After a couple of long, deep breaths, I pulled the door closed behind me.
    A few yards away, a thin wall of wooden planks curved around the entrance to the deck. I could look out only by standing on tiptoe and peering through one of the moon-shaped piercings in the wood. A sailor went past carrying a coil of rope over his shoulder that was as big as my torso, and a seagull flew low over the deck. I sighed.
    I had hoped, since we all shared the same corridor and door onto the deck, that I might meet the strange foreigners here. However, so far they had managed to avoid not only me but also Terayama-san. He had been talking about it —
again
— last night, while my mother and I had pretended to eat. He had spoken of little else since we had come aboard. He was convinced that by gaining some influence over the men he would gain influence over the Moon Prince, too — but it seemed to me that this was almost irrelevant now. It was the chase that consumed him. The more the foreigners evaded him, the more determined he became to corner them. The more he was thwarted, the deeper his obsession grew.
    Just as it had been with Mother.
    Yet once he had caught her, his frenzy had subsided. I saw the puzzled looks she gave him sometimes now, as if she, too, realized that something was different but could not understand what. He cared for her, treated her kindly, was proud of her beauty and the fact that she carried his heir, but his focus had shifted away from her. I believed he did love her, in his way, but his burning need to possess her had faded now that she belonged to him. She was his wife, and she could never leave him.
    Once the mouse was dead, the cat lifted his paw.
    I leaned against the wooden wall and kept squinting through the little pierced moon shape. I wanted to get out of the enclosure and walk — pace up and down, stamp my feet and work off the unhappy, confused feelings that were boiling inside me. But I wasn’t allowed to go out there, not without Terayama-san to escort me.
    A tiny, rebellious thought flashed through my mind. I knew a different way to get rid of the confusion and restlessness. A quick and easy way. I had my own little cabin, adjoining Mother and Terayama-san’s. I slept alone now. Mai was on the other ship. I would be able to pull the pin from my hair and make a quick, smooth cut. . . .
    I squeezed my eyes shut. I needed to get out and walk, now, before I gave in. I would endure whatever punishment my mother or Terayama-san meted out later.
    I reached out for the brass latch of the gate, but before I could press it down, a shadow passed across the moon piercings and Terayama-san opened it himself. I snatched my hand away and dragged a mask of calm across my face.
    Terayama-san stared at me, his eyes blank in the way that I knew meant anger. “What are you doing out