The Lady of The Rain

by Queenblue96

When Game of thrones meets Naruto. The back drop of the series is the War of the Roses/Cousin's war, just with Naruto Character's and Oc's The Narrator of the story is Hibiki Hyuga, Hinata's mother. "Hibiki fights for her king, her queen, and her daughter Hinata Hyuga, for whom she senses an extraordinary and unexpected future."

6. The Land of Rivers Summer-Winter 1430 P6

Castle of Water,Near Tanigakure,Land of Rivers, Summer-Winter 1430 PT.6

In November, I am awakened in the darkest of the night, and I sit up in the little bed I share with Eiko the maid, and listen. It is as if someone is calling my name in a sweet voice: very high, and very thin. Then I am sure I can hear someone singing. Oddly, the noise is coming from outside out window, though we are high up in the turret of the castle. I pull out through the crack in the wooden shutters. There are no lights showing outside, the fields and woods around the castle are black as felted wool, there is nothing but this clear keening noise, not a nightingale but as high and as pure as a nightingale. Not an owl, far too musical and continuous, something like a boy singer in a choir. I turn to the bed and shake Eiko awake.

"Can you hear that?"

She does not even wake. "Nothing," she says, half-asleep. "Stop it, Hibiki. I'm sleep."

The stone floor is icy beneath my bare feet. I jump back into bed and put my cold feet in the warm space near Eiko. She gives a little a bad-tempered grunt and rolls away from me, and then - though I think I will lie in the warm and listen to the voices - I fall asleep.

Six days later they tell me that my great-aunt, Jakuri-n of Goto, died in her sleep, in the darkest hour of the night, in Beppu, beside the great River Kuma. Then I know whose voice it was I heard, singing around the turrets.

As soon as the Land of Fire Duke of Konohagakure learns that Jomei has lost her greatest protector, he sends the judge Suizei Yamato, with a troop of men behind him, to negotiate for her ransom. She is summoned by a Church court on charges of heresy. Enormous sums of money change hands: twenty thousand livres for the man who pulled her off her house, ten thousand francs to be paid to my uncle with the good wishes of the King of The Land of Fire. My uncle does not listen to his wife, who pleads that Jomei shall be left with us. I am too unimportant to even voice, and so I have to watch in silence as my uncle makes an agreement that Jomei shall be released to the Church for questioning. "I am not handing her over to the Land of Fire," he says to his wife. "As the Lady asked me, and I have not forgotten, I have not handed her over to the Land of Fire. I have only released her to the Church. This allows her to clear her name of all charges against her. She will be judged by men of God, if she is innocent they will say so, and she will be released."

She looks at him as blankly as if he were Death himself, and I wonder if he believes this nonsense, of if he thinks we, being women, are such fools as to think that church dependent on the Land of Fire, with bishops appointed by the Land of Fire, are going to tell their rulers and paymasters that the girl who raised all of the Land of Rivers against them is just an ordinary girl, perhaps a little noisy, perhaps a naughty, and she should be sent back to her farm, to her mother and father and her cows.

"My lord, who is going to tell Jomei?" is all I dare to ask.

"Oh, she knows already," he says over his shoulder as he goes out of the hall, to bid farewell to Suizei Yamato at the great gate. "I sent a page to tell her to get ready. She is to leave with them now."

As soon as I hear the words I am filled with a sudden terror, a gale of premonition, and I start running, running as if for my own life. I don't even go to the women's apartments, where the page-boy will find Jomei to tell her the Land of Fire are to have her. I don't run towards her old cell, thinking she has gone there to fetch her little knapsack of things: her wooden chopsticks, her sharp dagger, the prayer-book that my great-aunt gave her. Instead I race up the winding stair to the first floor above the great hall, and then dash across the gallery, through the tiny doorway where the archway knocks my headdress off, tearing at the pins in my hair, and then I hammer up the circular stone stair, my feet pounding on the steps, my breath coming shorter and shorter, my gown clutched in my hands, so that I can burst out onto the flat roof at the very top of the tower and see Jomei, poised like a bird ready to fly, balanced on the wall of the turret. As she hears the door bang open she looks over her shoulder at me and hears me scream. "Jomei! No!" and she steps out into the void below her.

The worst thing of all, the very worst thing, is that she does not leap into nothing, like a frightened deer. I was dreading that she would jump, but she does something far worse than that. She dives. She goes headfirst over the battlement, and as I fling myself to the edge I can see that she goes down like a dancer, an acrobat, her hands clasped behind her, one leg extended like a dancer, the other bent, the toe pointed to her knee, and I see that heart-stopping moment as she falls, she is in the pose of the Hanged Man, and she is going headfirst to her death with his calm smile on her serene face.

The thud when she hits the ground at the base of the tower is terrible. It echoes in my ears as if it is my own head that has struck the mud. I want to run down to lift her body, Jomei, the Maid, crumpled like a bag of old clothes; but I cannot move. My knees have given way beneath me; I am clinging to the stone battlements, they are as cold as my scraped hands. I am not crying for her, though my breath is still coming gulping sobs; I am frozen with horror, i am felled by horror. Jomei was a young woman who tried to walk her own path in the world of men, just as my great-aunt told me. And it led her to this cold tower, this swan dive, this death.