The Iris Fan Read Free

blood, Marume shouted curses. Setsubara and Ono bound his wrists. Kuzawa tied Sano’s wrists so tight that the rope cut into his flesh. Sano glared helplessly at Manabe.
    “Four against two—are you really that stupid?” Manabe scoffed. He told his men, “We’ll take them to Lord Ienobu. He’ll want to deal with them personally.”
    The men boosted Sano and Marume onto Sano’s horse, knotted rope around them so they couldn’t escape, and confiscated the swords they’d dropped.
    “You think you know so much, but you don’t know anything,” Manabe said with a pitying look at Sano. “You’re going to wish you’d minded your own business.”

 
     
    2
     
    ESCORTED BY IENOBU’S men, Sano entered Edo some three hours before midnight. He was glad of the bad weather; there was no one around to see him and Marume tied onto his horse like captured criminals and to throw stones.
    Edo, home to a million citizens, still showed the effects from the eruption of Mount Fuji two years ago. The sky had rained sand and pebbles all night and by morning the city was ankle-deep in ash. Houses built since the great earthquake five years ago were grimy with ash that the wind still blew in from the mountains. The ash turned the wet snow on the streets and the tile roofs gray.
    The castle occupied a hill that rose above the city, its buildings constructed on ascending tiers up to the peak. Lights shone from the windows of covered corridors atop the retaining walls around each tier. Snowflakes scintillated in the lights and swirled around the guard towers. The castle looked like hazy rings of golden stars between layers of darkness. Sano had once lived there but hadn’t been inside since he’d been banned from court. When they reached the moat, Manabe’s men untied Sano and Marume. They left Marume to ride home and marched Sano up to the gate. Sano looked back on twenty years of some difficult but mostly good times inside this fortress. Here he’d brought Reiko as his bride and they’d fallen in love. Both their children had been born here. He’d risen from the shogun’s chief investigator to chamberlain and second-in-command.
    This wasn’t like coming home. It was like entering the enemy camp. The good times were over, his family life in shambles.
    Sentries opened the gate. Manabe walked Sano up through stone-walled passages to the shogun’s heir’s residence in the western fortress, on the tier of the hill just below the palace at the peak. The building had white-plastered, half-timbered walls, wings connected by corridors, and a curved tile roof. Icicles on pine trees outside dripped water on snow-glazed grass. Flames burned in stone lanterns along the gravel path. Here Yoshisato had died in the fire that had burned down the residence more than four years ago. Rebuilt, it was now home to Lord Ienobu.
    Manabe’s three henchmen guarded Sano in the courtyard while Manabe went to notify Lord Ienobu. Soon Manabe escorted Sano into the reception chamber, a long room with a lattice-and-paper wall on one side and wooden sliding exterior doors opposite. Two men sat on a dais furnished with gold-inlaid metal lanterns and satin brocade cushions, backed by a mural that depicted a garden of brilliant red and orange peonies on a gold background.
    “Here we go again, Sano- san ,” Lord Ienobu said. “You keep disobeying my orders and getting caught.” With his stunted figure, jutting elbows, and the hump on his back, dressed in a green and gold kimono, he blended into the mural behind him—a cricket amid the flowers. He looked much older than his forty-eight years. His upper teeth protruded above a tiny lower jaw; his deformities stemmed from a hereditary, painful bone condition. “When are you going to learn your lesson?” His tight, raspy voice sounded squeezed out of him, like a cricket’s chirp. In the two years since Sano had last seen him, he’d gained weight, as if fattened by a rich diet of power. Maybe he looked more