Shadows on the Moon (6 page)

Youta steadied my hands.

“I feel — I feel as if I am mad. I am so angry all the time, and so sad, and it screams inside me and never stops. Cutting is the only thing that eases me.” I met his eyes pleadingly. “I usually only make a little mark — but tonight it was not enough. I did not mean to hurt myself. I swear it.”

Youta did not react with shock or disgust. He helped me to lift the bowl to my lips again, saying, “I have heard of such things. Your feelings are natural, Little Mistress. It would be insanity if you were not angry and sad. But instead of being angry and sad with the men who hurt your family, it seems that you are angry and sad with yourself, and that is not right.”

“It is not like that. I am not punishing myself. The cutting makes me feel
better.
”

“Hurting yourself makes you feel better?”

I bit my lip. It was no use. He had not seen what I had seen. He had not watched them die. No one else could know how I felt.

Youta sighed. “You have made yourself very unwell. So much blood lost. And these wounds will leave scars. It will be hard for anyone to miss what has happened to you.”

I went rigid with horror as I realized the truth of what he said. For a moment I wished that I had simply stayed in my room and bled to death.

“I can help you,” Youta said, breaking into my spiraling panic.

“How?” I whispered.

“I will assist you back to your room, and clean the blood, and take your
yukata
away to be burned. If, when tomorrow comes, you are too weak to leave your bed, you must feign an illness. Young women of noble birth are notoriously delicate. The important thing is that you rest.”

“What about the scars? How shall I hide them?”

“Let me ask you something. When Tsuki no Ouji-sama’s men came to your father’s house, they pursued you through the orchard. How did you manage to escape so many armed men?”

“I do not know,” I said miserably.

“You do,” he said, and his definite tone made me look at him in surprise. “Try to remember.”

“I don’t know,” I insisted.

He gave me an impatient look.

I closed my eyes, forcing my mind back to that time of terror. So much fear . . . so much pain . . . running, seeing Aimi fall and then . . . the light. I had reached out into the light, bent it around me like a shield, like a mantle. I had imagined myself invisible.

And I had run past the soldiers and they had not seen me.

“It was not real,” I whispered. “It couldn’t be.”

“If you remember it, why should it not be real?”

That made me blink.

“And in the fireplace,” he continued, “it was not really the ashes that covered you. I made a blanket of darkness to hide you from the soldiers, just as earlier you had made a mantle of light. You are Kage Oribito. A shadow weaver. One who can weave illusions from the threads of the world. When faced with death, you instinctively used your talent to save yourself.”

“But I — I am not . . . Such things do not exist,” I stammered, shaking my head. “You are speaking of — of magic.”

“The skill is real. The men who taught me believed that Kage Oribito are favorites of the Moon, allowed to share in Her special gift of concealment; for does She not cloak Her face in the shadows of the sky? You may have been using this power in tiny ways, unbeknownst even to yourself, all your life. Or it may never have manifested itself were it not for those terrible events. I do not know. I do know that what you did was an extraordinary thing. To walk before those men in daylight, unseen, is a feat I could never have achieved, and you might never work such a weaving again. It was the Moon’s protection — Her gift — that saved you.”

A sense of wonder filled me. “How do you know so much about this, Youta?”

“I was not always as you see me now,” he said, his eyes turning far away for a moment. “Once I had a different life. I, too, was born with the Moon’s gift, though it does not work so strongly in me. As a young man, I was sought out by a group of men and women who had this skill and who made it their mission to find others like them and train them. It was done in secret, and I was told always to keep it so, except with others of my kind. We are drawn together. No one knows why. Instinctively we find one another. Instinctively we help one another. Perhaps that is another gift from the Moon. I do not know. ”

“Then you did come here to find me?”

“Yes. I had to. One day you, too, will feel that
knowing,
and will be compelled to aid other shadow weavers in need.”

“So when you said you would help me . . . ?”

“I can teach you to use your skill again. A small illusion to cover your arms should be within your power.”

“I have no idea what I did,” I said warily. “You call it a skill but, for me, it just happened, as easily as reaching for a blanket in the cold.”

Youta carefully drew my right arm out straight. “Watch what I do. Follow me not just with your eyes but with all your senses, and that extra part of you should be able to follow, too.”

I squinted, tensing as if my muscles could help me to see. At first I saw, felt, nothing. Then there was a strange sensation, not in my arm but in the air around it. A brightening of the light and an intensity of the colors: a sort of stillness in the air. I had an intuitive flash of understanding — I knew what was going to happen — and as the grayish lumps of bandage smoothed out into pale skin, I knew that Youta was right. I
could
do this. I did it all the time.

For weeks, whenever Mother or Terayama-san looked at me, I had been putting on the mask of Aimi’s gentle smile without ever realizing what that mask was. A shadow-weaving.

Youta now supported a perfect, unblemished arm in his rough hands. It was not quite my arm. The faint patterns of hair, the tiny lines at the wrist, were subtly wrong. But the bandages were gone.

“Do you understand what I did?” Youta asked.

“Yes!” I said, hearing the surprise in my own voice.

I knew I could do this. In a strange way, it felt the same as picking up my
shamisen
for the first time. When my fingers had closed on the instrument, I had just known what to do.

I hoped I was better at this than I had been at playing, however.

“Let me try.”

Youta laid my right arm down carefully and helped me to hold the other one out straight.

I stared at the lumpy bandages, then closed my eyes and imagined how my arm should look.

I sketched in my mind the skinny wrist, white but flushing to peach near the base of the palm. Faint lines ringed it, and there was a pattern of blue veins just under the surface. As my forearm thickened, the skin did, too, hiding the veins. A gleam of soft hair on the other side, and a tiny mole, and then the sharp point of my elbow pushing against the skin. Just as I saw Aimi’s smile as a mask, I saw the arm as a close-fitting sleeve that I pulled into place on top of the bandages. I felt a ripple of power, a tingling of pleasure and excitement that reminded me again of holding a musical instrument, and I knew, even before I opened my eyes, that it had worked.

There it was. My arm. Unscarred, unbandaged, mole and all.

“You have a good eye for detail,” Youta said.

I touched the weaving gingerly, half expecting to feel skin — but my fingertips found the bandages, which my eyes insisted were not there. The difference made me feel queasy.

“We have the ability to change only what the eye can see,” Youta said, noticing my grimace. “A shadow weaver’s principal tool is misdirection. You must try to prevent anyone from touching your arm, but if they do, simply act normally, and they will usually believe they have imagined it. That is the trick the senses play, you see. People trust their eyes above all else — but most people see what they wish to see, or what they believe they should see, not what is really there. It takes long study or intense desperation to overcome the illusions most of us carry in our own minds.”

“Will I need to think about it all the time? To keep it there?”

“As you grow used to it, it will become easier, just as you barely notice the concentration it takes to sit properly or to read. There are stories — my teachers told me — that at one time shadow weavers could fix their illusions in physical things so that the door in the wall would always be hidden or the piece of twine would always appear as a gold necklace. It was said that they could change the substance of things, too: turn a stone into a flower if they wished or simply
wish
a flower into existence. I have never met one of those people, though.” Youta smiled.

Hesitantly I reached out, wincing, and laid my small, white hand on his large, sooty one. “I would be dead twice over if it were not for you. Will you be my teacher, Youta? Teach me to see things as they really are and to create more illusions.”

His smile grew wider. “I will teach you everything I know.”

What Youta had said was true. Given a choice between what was real — but improbable — and what was false — yet expected — people really did see only what they wished to.

Although I had never been indisposed during the months I had lived with Terayama-san, when I lay in my bed the following morning, groaning that my woman’s time had come and that I dare not move for the pain, Mai believed me without question.

The room was darkened, cold cloths were laid on my forehead, and I was left in peace.

Normally lying in bed without anyone to talk to or anything to do would have bored me into a restless rage within half a day. Instead I found myself dozing and daydreaming, too drained for temper. It was four days before I felt well enough to get dressed, and even then I was wan and listless: forced to move carefully for fear of dizzy spells. If my mother had observed my slow, careful movements, she would very likely have approved, all previous attempts to instill grace in me having failed.

Of course, Mother was not there.

The weeks that Terayama-san and my mother were gone should have been a miserable and lonely time for me. I took all my meals alone — except for Mai, sitting watchfully in the corner in case I choked on an eel bone or was attacked by spiders. If I needed something, Mai arranged it — but the sharp efficiency that Terayama-san inspired was notably absent, and I thought the servants must be treating it as a kind of holiday. I did not mind; it felt the same to me.

I read a little, walked in the garden a little, and tried to improve my painting skills once my arms had healed somewhat. Mostly I enjoyed the chance to be . . . whatever I wanted to be. If I was sad, I could stare out the window without guarding my face. If I was cross, I could stamp my way through the garden and throw stones in the river. There was no one to ask me what was wrong or to tell me that I must forget the past, be happy, be grateful.

Once I was strong enough, I made my way down to the kitchens each night and sat cross-legged on the floor with Youta. I listened to him talk for hours, and he taught me to turn a drifting piece of ash into a fluttering black butterfly, to transform his wispy pale hair into a glossy wave that reached his waist, and to hide him with a cloak of darkness that turned him into nothing more than a shadow. The control necessary to keep my arms concealed soon became second nature to me. I also learned to pierce Youta’s illusions, to detect them and see through them, though I could never see through my own.

If there was a part of me that asked why, with such an astonishing talent, I had made no attempt to save my cousin, my father, my home . . . I tried not to hear it.

After nearly five weeks had passed, Mai woke me early one morning. Since I spent almost all my nights wide awake and talking to Youta, I normally stayed in bed until nearly midday, and Mai let me. On that day, midmorning had barely arrived when shaking hands folded back my coverlet, and the screens at the window were pushed away to let in the sun.

“Nakamura-sama, the master and mistress are home. The mistress has sent a message for you to join them; she is anxious to see you.”

Mai’s face clearly demanded some expression of delight from me, so I smiled and thanked her and let her dig me from my warm bed, while inside my stomach dropped. It might be disloyal and ungrateful, but seeing my mother suddenly seemed a poor exchange for my solitary peace.

The kimono Mai helped me into was a new one; a soft, pale pink embroidered all over with red and blue chrysanthemums and tiny brown thrushes. The sleeves were long enough to brush the ground as I walked. The obi and
obi-age
that wrapped my waist and rib cage were crimson and pale blue, with patterns of tiny flowers, and a new red
obi-jime
belt was tied carefully over the top of these. My hair was coiled into a smooth knot at the base of my skull and held in place with more new things, a tortoiseshell-and-gold comb and an elaborate tortoiseshell pin that dangled tiny coral plum blossoms over my right ear.

“The honored mistress sent these things,” Mai told me, obviously giving up on me asking for myself. “She brought them back for you.”

“They are beautiful,” I said dutifully, but really I was surprised that Mother had thought of me at all on her trip. A sneaking twinge of pleasure found its way into my depression.