Chapter 19

The rider reached Lord Sanada’s territory nine days after departing the estate, having pushed himself and his mounts past what any reasonable calculation of distance and endurance should have permitted, and found Fuyuki midway through yet another circular afternoon of negotiations that had, by his own private estimation, advanced scarcely further than they had stood a full week before. He recognized the rider’s household colors the moment the man was announced, and felt an immediate, instinctive dread settle over him that no amount of diplomatic composure could fully disguise from the assembled company.

The negotiations that afternoon had been circling, yet again, the same tired ground they had covered a dozen times already — Lord Sanada’s endless qualifications about troop commitments, his careful hedging on matters of tribute, the elaborate courtesies both sides exchanged before arriving, inevitably, at another polite deferral rather than any genuine progress. Fuyuki had grown, across the preceding weeks, almost numb to the tedium of it, his attention drifting more than once toward thoughts of home despite his own best efforts at diplomatic discipline. The messenger’s arrival cut through that numbness instantly, a cold clarity replacing it before a single word of the actual news had reached him.

He excused himself from the negotiations with a brevity that would, under any ordinary circumstance, have constituted a serious breach of protocol, and found the rider waiting in an antechamber, exhausted nearly past the point of coherent speech, a sealed letter extended toward him with a hand that trembled from more than simple fatigue.

“My lord,” the rider managed, “I bring word from your household. I was instructed to reach you as quickly as the road permitted, whatever the cost to myself or the horses.”

Fuyuki broke the seal with hands that had gone suddenly, uncharacteristically unsteady, and read Meimi’s careful, urgent account of the attack in a single unbroken pass, his composure fracturing more with each successive line — the three-point breach, the fight in the banquet hall, Hikari’s wound, the fled attacker still unaccounted for, and finally, near the letter’s close, the assurance that both women remained safe, however shaken, followed by the single line he found himself reading three times over before its full weight settled: that she loved him, and that nothing about that night had changed how completely she intended to go on loving him.

He stood motionless for a long moment after finishing, the letter still gripped in hands that had not yet stopped their unsteady trembling, and felt something close to physical pain settle into his chest at the thought of what his wife and sister had endured while he sat in comfortable, tedious negotiation hundreds of miles distant, utterly unaware that the two people he most needed to protect had been fighting for their lives.

“When did you depart the estate?” he asked the rider, his voice carrying a controlled calm that cost him considerably more effort to maintain than it would have a week before.

“Nine days past, my lord, the morning after the attack itself.”

Nine days. Fuyuki did the calculation with a coldness that surprised even himself, weighing the distance yet remaining in Lord Sanada’s negotiations against the distance home, and found the answer arriving with a certainty that admitted no debate whatsoever. Whatever diplomatic cost his abrupt departure might exact, whatever displeasure it might draw from the shogun himself, he could not remain in this province one day longer than absolutely necessary while his family recovered from an attack he had not been present to prevent.

He found Lord Sanada in the same hall where the negotiations had been proceeding, the elderly warlord’s expression shifting to open curiosity at Fuyuki’s return after so brief an absence, and offered his host a bow considerably deeper than strict protocol required before delivering the news that would end, at least for the present, whatever progress the past weeks of careful diplomacy had achieved.