Chapter Sixteen: Hey, Ho, the Wind and the Rain

Although the thunderstorm passed over Kasugayama without much rumbling, the rain did not, resulting in a jog back to the castle during a steady, heavy, warm downpour. I stopped at the tree where my clothes were hidden and exchanged the sodden and still ugly brown kimono for Katsu's equally soaked clothes. By the time I got back to my room, soaked and exhausted, it was only a couple hours before dawn. After stealing not-enough sleep, I hauled myself up again, determined to discuss what I had learned with Shingen.

Unlike many of the vassals and guards, who ate in the common room, Shingen (as well as Kenshin) generally had food brought to him in the morning. I waylaid the maid delivering Shingen's breakfast, and to her disappointment, told her I would deliver it myself. Luckily, this morning he was already awake and dressed, so there was no repeat of the full frontal Shingen show.

"Katsu?" He seemed surprised that I had usurped the maid's duty. "Was there another attack?"

"Oh, no, nothing like that. I needed to discuss something with you…" I trailed off, unsure whether to begin with the apology, or go right into my theory about the assassination attempts being psychological attacks on Kenshin's mental state.

He gestured for me to sit down and offered to share his breakfast.

"No thank you. I already ate in the common room." I didn't know if the offer was purely made out of politeness, or if it signaled we were returning to our earlier easy relationship. Hopefully, it was the latter.

He looked down at his bowl of fish and rice stew. "I forgot – you don't eat meat, do you?"

He'd noticed that? Something about his observation made me feel … ok, that's a warm fuzzy.

Before getting stuck in this era, I had been a vegetarian. Here, it was both easier and harder to maintain that diet. Easier because there wasn't that much meat available unless you lived in an area with a lot of fishing, but harder because in some places, there wasn't that much food at all. Aki had held the opinion that at his table, you ate what was in front of you, or you did not eat at all. Sometimes on the road, the only thing I could eat was what I hunted. Here at Kasugayama, though, meat, vegetables and fruits were all readily available, so I'd reverted to a plant-based diet.

None of which I could explain to Shingen without revealing too much about my origins. "No, not if there are other alternatives."

He nodded and began picking at his own breakfast. Actually, now that I thought about it, it was rare to see him eat much besides sweets. After a few moments spent in not entirely comfortable – but not painfully awkward either – silence, he asked, "What did you want to talk about?"

I took a moment to choose my words. "This might sound like a non-apology, but it's not intended that way. From the time I was a small child, I was trained to do acrobatics." Which was about the only way I could think to describe the artistic gymnastics I had done until I was a teenager. "When I was up in the tree, it might have appeared dangerous from where you were standing, but I knew what I was doing. I also am aware that you didn't know that, so I'm sorry for worrying you." I left unsaid the 'and you aren't my father' part of it all.

He remained silent, so I continued. "I feel," I paused to find a replacement for the word 'sad.' Even though it was how I felt, it was an emotion that I always kept close to my bones, and not outside of myself. Neither Toshiie or I ever threw around the words "sad" or "depressed" lightly. I started again. "I feel uncomfortable that I lost your trust. I can't promise that I'll never again take part in what might appear to be risky behavior, but if it's feasible, I'll consult you first." I also left unsaid, the 'and if you disagree, I'll do it anyway.'

"Alright, somewhere in that was an apology, and I respect that you made one. I'll apologize for doubting your skills." He ate a few more bites of his breakfast before asking. "Were you raised in a circus troupe?"

I got up then flipped backward into a handstand. Oops. Ended up facing the wrong way. Still in the handstand, I turned to face him, albeit upside down. "Something like that." I flipped back to my feet….and turned around again.

"Alright, daredevil, I'm convinced." He paused as if something suddenly occurred to him. "If you came from a family of performers, might it be possible that your brother is in a circus or a performing troupe somewhere?"

Wincing at the thought of my clumsy brother anywhere near a high wires and sword jugglers, I said, "I can't imagine it. Toshiie always planned to study medicine. And… he's not very athletic."

"Hmmm." That seemed to send him into a series of private thoughts, so I sat down on a cushion to wait. The rain continued to patter on the roof, and it was making me feel sleepy. I hastily covered a yawn. I blinked myself awake to see him watching me with concern. "Tired again? Didn't we discuss this a couple weeks ago?"

"It wasn't intentional. I was out trying to find the origins of the arrow that the assassin shot at Mai last week, and I ran into a few obstacles." One of which had been him. "Then it started raining, and I paused to wait it out, but …" I waved my hand toward the door to the garden, where sheets of water cascaded from the sky.

"If you wait for the rain to stop, you might be waiting for another month." He frowned at the sight of the downpour. "Hopefully, there won't be any flooding."

"Agreed." I still remembered the terrifying tsunami that killed thousands when I was a teenager. I'd been lucky to grow up inland, but the twenty-four-hour news cycle had made the coverage inescapable. My mother had sat blank-faced on the couch, refusing to turn on the lights, and stared at the tv for days. Not that that was uncharacteristic behavior for her – most of my memories of her involved that image of her on the couch, staring into nothing. Between her dark mood and the unrelenting death toll, it had been a bleak period.

I shook my head – that was another lifetime, and not one I wanted to revisit. "It appears that the arrow is not one that Oda's forces use currently, but a closer match to ones they were using a couple years ago." I set the arrow on his desk.

"Now I understand why you're so tired. I know you're fast, but you could not have possibly gone all the way to Azuchi and back." He idly examined it again.

For all that Shingen had paid attention to me in the past week, I could have. I doubted he noticed when I was here or not. But I'd already had a story prepared. "No. I found a man who scavenges sites of battles and sieges and re-sells what he can." I was pretty pleased with this explanation, and wished such a man actually existed, because he would be a helpful informant.

"That was resourceful." He reached for the puzzle on his desk and tossed it to me. Apparently, I had been fully forgiven… which might have made me feel better if it hadn't been a lie that had prompted it.

Speaking of lying, that brought me to the more important point. I turned the puzzle over and over in my hands, wondering how to bring it up. "Er, I'm aware your friendship with Kenshin is long-standing."

"Not so much as all that – I expect that once we take care of Oda, we'll go back to trying to kill each other, if… if there's time." He looked down at his breakfast and pushed it from one side of the bowl to the other, without actually eating any of it. "But that's neither here nor there. What is it that you're awkwardly trying to bring up?"

"You should tell him what's going on." Shingen looked like he planned to debate that, so I hurried to add. "I think he can sense that people have been lying to him."

"They call him the God of War, but he's not truly a God, you know." He pushed his mostly uneaten breakfast aside.

While I took the puzzle apart, I explained what I had meant. "I think he can tell that Mai is lying to him about something and…" Hm, what would be the words to use to convey, 'could trigger him'? Eventually I punted. "And bad things could happen if she continues to act in such a way that increases his suspicions."

He picked up his chopsticks and rolled them over hands – I had seen him do this with a brush as well and recognized it as his 'thinking' action. "That's… entirely possible. Although it's also possible that knowing her life is in danger will also bring about, to use your vague but ominous terminology… bad things."

With a sigh, I laid out the puzzle pieces in front of me in piles that designated which area of the puzzle they had originated from… and… what was this on the tatami mat? Sand? Huh. "So basically, we need to find out who is doing this, before… bad things happen."

Ugh, I was hardly making sense anymore. Bottom line? We were screwed either way.

Shingen got up and strolled to the window, where the castle walls were barely visible in the rain. "Simply because I haven't informed Kenshin doesn't mean I haven't taken precautions. I've increased patrols around the castle, had them trim back those tree limbs-,"

"I noticed," I muttered. The trees surrounding the castle had had their limbs shorn off within an hour of my infamous climb.

He continued as if I hadn't interrupted, "… and the guards at the gate question every new arrival."

What if the call is coming from inside the house? Said every horror movie audience. "What if he or she is already inside the castle? Do you know everyone here?" Then even though I shouldn't play devil's advocate, I added, "For all you know, it could even be me."

His posture stiffened, though he didn't turn around. Immediately I regretted putting the thought in his head. Once again that cold fear swept over me. If Shingen every learned of my masquerade – my deception – he would consider it a betrayal. I knew him well enough by now to know that. Despite that, I considered confessing everything right then. My disguise was precarious – if he were to learn of it, wouldn't that knowledge be better coming from me?

"I did suspect you for a while," he said. The repressed anger in his voice convinced me: I was better off keeping my mouth shut.

"Yeah, that powder trick clued me in on that." Even now, though I hadn't touched the powder, I felt the urge to wipe my hands on my clothes. I suppressed it, and concentrated on the puzzle, figuring that would be safer than looking at him. "Is that why you decided I wasn't responsible?"

He turned away from the window, looked down at the puzzle, and nodded to himself. "One of the reasons, yes. Sasuke trusts you, which goes a long way in my book. So does Yoshimoto, which, well, he doesn't always have the greatest instincts, but it's not nothing." Hm, I wondered what Yoshimoto's not great instincts were. "Furthermore, if you had hired the sniper in the woods as a way to gain my trust and get inside the castle, then you would have either made sure he escaped or you would have killed him immediately, instead of shooting him in the hand – when you proved your archery skills, it confirmed that you had nothing to do with the initial attack."

Huh, so that blindfolded archery demonstration he forced me into had served yet another purpose. "I bow to your cleverness."

"That, and the attack on Mai could just as easily have killed you," he added.

I looked up at Shingen then, but he was gazing out the window again. "I'm not worth any more dead than alive, so if it had killed me, it likely would have been the result of poor aim or the wind." I shrugged, trying to lighten the mood. "Well, people threaten to kill me a lot, but I think they're being facetious." Example, Kenshin, daily, or Mitsuhide, last night. Though come to think of it, Mitsuhide might have been serious about wanting to kill me twice a day. "I'm half convinced that the week I became the object cause of you losing your rights to dessert, that you at least considered a revenge slaying."

Oh hell. Wait. Was I flirting? Damn. I was flirting as a boy. I think. Maybe.

But Shingen was still spitballing the attacks, so maybe that went past him unnoticed. I made sure to keep my focus on my thousandth attempt to reassemble the puzzle pieces. "Along the lines of potential targets," he said, "if the intent of the attacks is to…" now Shingen seemed to be searching for the right words too, "unsettle Kenshin, then I'd wager that the target of the attack in the woods was Sasuke."

I made myself more comfortable on the cushion as I listened. I'd missed talking with him like this. I'd missed being listened to like this. "Not arguing the point, but what would be the motivation of choosing Sasuke as a victim over you?"

"Aside from Mai, no one else is closer to Kenshin. He sees Sasuke as … maybe not as a brother, but certainly family. As much as Mai can influence Kenshin, it's Sasuke that can actively talk him into or out of things." He took a deep breath, then coughed, tapping on his chest like he was clearing something from his throat.

Since I'd been here, Sasuke had been sent out on so many errands for Kenshin that I hadn't had much of a chance to observe them together. I would take Shingen's word for that though.

"Therefore, the next step might be to discuss all this with Sasuke, right?" It was a plan, and I really liked having a concrete plan.

"It… might be a good idea." Shingen returned to his desk. "I believe he's due back later today. But first…" He looked over at me, and I braced myself for being sent back out into the wet to deliver the messages. "Go back to bed. I feel exhausted just looking at you."

I swallowed a sarcastic, 'yes, dad,' because he was right. I was so tired I felt like I was swimming through molasses. Though I did at least make a show of eyeing the stack of messages on his desk.

He waved me away. "Yes, I know. These will keep. I need to edit in some newer information anyway."

A morning off!

#score

Sweet, sweet sleep, I'm coming for you.