Free Child of Vengeance by David Kirk Page B

lord entrusted Hayato with nothing that had any real meaning. Hayato knew he was expected just to be, to endure the long days as an insurance that had no purpose in life until his father should happen to die. All he did was drink. He had a bottle of sake in his hand now, and he swigged from it with indolent rage.
    He turned to look out upon the world, across the manicured vistas of his father’s gardens. He looked at everything and nothing, losing track of time, anger building in him as it always seemed to.
    A door slid open behind him. Two young handmaidens were there, pretty like dolls. They were talking to each other quietly, but the sight of the lord checked them into silence. They smiled and bowed, keeping their eyes low. Hayato looked at them with a dispassionate eye, trying to remember if he had taken either of them before.
    The hallway was narrow, and they had to file one after the other to pass him. They did so demurely, and he turned so that they had to brush almost face-to-face with him. The first one he did not know, but the second he suddenly recognized. It was the koto player from the palanquin after Shinmen’s battle. He remembered a lull in the music and a hot burn across his cheeks.
    “What are you laughing at?” he said, stepping forward to force her against the wall.
    “My lord?” she said, her face blank and her eyes not meeting his, as was proper etiquette.
    “ ‘What are you laughing at?’ I said,” he snarled, and tried to take her wrist.
    Instead she wriggled free and dropped onto her knees, placing her hands and her brow flat on the ground as she blabbered apologies. Her companion stood shocked, but she knew she could not interfere. She clasped her hands together and turned to one side, trying to keep her face still but with worry in her eyes and in the quivering of her bottom lip.
    Hayato watched the girl grovel, the black circle of her bound hair bobbing. For a moment he considered bringing the bottle down upon the back of her head, but he stopped himself. He knew she was a particular favorite of his father, and if she turned up to serve him with shards of pottery stuck in her skull, the old letch would ask questions.
    She was just another painted crane. The young lord dismissed her with a disgusted grunt, and together she and the other scurried off down the hall backward, bowing and apologizing until they were gone.
    It was not her he was truly angry at, Hayato knew, nor the sniggering of some dullwits whose purpose in life was to bear him aloft. You could not punish crows for eating carrion, after all. She—all of them—had merely laughed. It was not they who had insulted and belittled him in front of his father. It was not they who had robbed him of a domain and condemned him to linger here.
    No, that was someone else entirely.
    That was someone worthy of anger.
    He basked in his ability for level magnanimity for a moment, and then the young Lord Nakata went to plan. He had found purpose.

    A week of tomorrows passed, but still Bennosuke could not find the courage to speak to Munisai. Instead, he and his father existed in some awkward, unspoken standoff. It was impossible to avoid eachother entirely in a village so small, and sometimes the boy would feel the man’s gaze upon him from a distance. Their eyes would meet for a second, then Bennosuke would blush, bow, and walk away. Munisai never followed.
    The boy followed him, though—he was drawn to the landward ridge whenever he had a free moment in the day, to see whether Munisai was down among the ruins. And more often than not, he was. He imagined sitting beside the man in silent contemplation, that this would somehow make things better. It was a stupid fantasy with a beginning and an end, but no middle. The middle was what he needed to know, and the lack of it eluded and taunted him whenever he put his mind to it.
    BENNOSUKE WAS IN the dojo one afternoon with his arm around Tasumi’s throat. He was clinging to the samurai’s