La de da. On I go. I'm having a heck of a time keeping people even slightly in character. So sorry if you think my job lacks competence, but to make everything fit I had to tweak the story a bit and the characters as well. It's like a merging of it all, or more like a crash.

Please tell me they are staying at least enough in character to make it decent. I have a constant running fear that I am somehow Sue-ing Kaoru. It's a fairy tale, after all, where she is the prettiest girl in the land, so I guess some of that feeling results from the fact that nearly every fairy tale heroine is a Sue. . . but but. . . I'm trying to make it more than that!

I was just thinking about how Kaoru gets Sue-ed so much. I know it's sort of the way of things, but I really want her to be more than a pretty face and a quick temper. Darn it all.

Not too many chapters left, honestly. I think maybe two after this one(?)

Disclaimer: (see Ch. 1)

Chapter 5

"How are boys this disgusting!"

Kaoru grabbed a gob of something that looked like rotting meat from the back of the pantry. There had been a horrible smell emanating from it for a couple days, but she hadn't gotten together the courage to really search for the source of the odor until today. It seemed to be a fish, or what had once been a fish. There was a gaping mouth, and some bones sticking out of the black parts at creative angles. She dropped it when the breath she had taken before entering ran out and she was forced to evacuate the area for another deeper one. This time she would just pick it up and run out as fast as possible. It was a terrible day when she looked back fondly on her time spent around the smell of manure.

It had been surprisingly easy to become part of the woodwork, so to speak, in the house. At first it had been hellish, sorting out what needed to be cleaned, how, and if it were possible to salvage or throw away various things that were discovered in the process. The most mysterious thing was how she kept finding cards. If she could locate a jack of diamonds and the seven of hearts then she would have the whole deck. She would have been happy for a game of something. The only games that were played in this house were in the mind. The family dynamic was still a thing of terrible strangeness.

Yahiko was more polite to her these days after she had taken his side in an argument about taking time off his training to go see his friend in town. The idea of having close friends at all made Kaoru wistful and if the poor kid was stuck up here all winter then why not let him have as much time in summer as he could with his friends. And she thought the fact he had a girlfriend was adorable. Aoshi had not taken kindly to her outspoken opinion, but Yahiko had stopped making loud complaints about her cooking and even tried to help her with the laundry. It was because of her that so much more of his time was freed so he was right to be grateful. Whatever his attitude, he was still more child than adult and her presence somehow gave him more leave to be a kid again than when he was with his brothers. They made him train all the time for some strange reason.

All the older brothers were in more or less states of truce with her over various arguments. Sano, she discovered, was lazy. If she didn't get on his case about doing a chore then he wouldn't do it. Kaoru made up lists of what needed to be done and by whom. Invariably, if she had to pick on someone to make sure it happened, it was always the tall brown haired man. It was an adventure to hunt him down as he found new places to hide and sleep to escape her wrath, but she knew once the weather began to turn he would no longer be able to hide. Since she was often nagging him whenever she saw him, he would jokingly accuse her of acting like a fishwife. With persistence, accompanied by much grinding of teeth, she got along with him.

The way Kaoru interacted with Aoshi was far more careful and much less jovial. When he wasn't off on trips, he was working on correspondence that he would never talk about or helping her cook. Mainly Aoshi cooked when he was there and Kaoru simply stirred things, but there was an underlying resentment that was simmering between them. Kaoru had come to see the inside of the house as, in a way, her domain. Aoshi clearly did not like her interference. It wasn't on the level that Aoshi clashed with Enishi, but they had differences that made things less than harmonious between them and Kaoru felt it. She would have thought that he outright hated her, but he did remember when she asked him to pick up things in town for her and he had never complained about the cost of anything. He even got the bread recipe from the town baker she had wanted. No, Aoshi had good points to go along with the bad ones.

Since everyone was a mixed bag of personality traits, but largely got along with her, Kaoru was wondering more often these days if Enishi was adopted. He was the one who ignored her if he felt her requests weren't important enough to interrupt whatever his own plan was. He was the one who balanced the household accounts and told her she was spending too much on material for clothing or spices from town. He was the one who practically monitored her every movement, especially if she left the immediate vicinity of the house. The man was more watchful than the bodyguards she had had as a child. This enraged her rather than anything else. After a month she expected that he would possibly take her at face value, letting her live among them and manage the house without trouble. No such luck.

Kaoru marched outside where Yahiko was rather happily beating a rug to get the dust out of it.

"Yahiko, when you said you were going fishing two weeks ago, did you happen to catch anything?"

The boy paused, leaning on the stick and looking into the sky. Then his flushed face turned a darker red. "I put one in the pantry because it was the coolest place in the house I could think of. . ."

"And then. . ."

"I forgot that we were having some dried beef that night. I like beef better than fish. I thought I'd tell you about the fish for breakfast." He grimaced and looked down at the ground. "Um. There's a fish in the pantry."

Kaoru tried not to explode. "It didn't occur to you that that funny smell we've all been accusing one another over was the fish!"

Yahiko shrugged. "Last summer there were all sorts of horrible smells in the house."

"Well, it isn't last summer. As long as I'm here you can be reasonably sure that if something smells bad it's because something's wrong and I don't know why." It was useless to get mad now and Kaoru forced herself back to something like calmness. She was simply getting overheated acting like this, and she had been sweating enough as it was today. Summer was exerting the last of its influence as they eased into harvest season. She almost longed for the cool stone of the castle. "Remember to tell me about things like the fish next time, you got it?"

"Yeah yeah. . ." Yahiko put extra effort into beating the rug. He had taken to being told off pretty well today. Usually he would at least put up a cursory argument. Maybe he was just happy that odor would be gone. It had been funky. It was more likely his good mood had to do with the fact that in another week they would be down in the village and he could see Tsubame as much as he wanted.

Kaoru went back inside, wandered over to the corner, and picked up some sewing. All the windows were open because she was airing out the house and she like the feeling of the light breeze on her skin as she worked on making a sturdy dress for winter. It was a little weird looking, but she had assumed a skirt wasn't too hard to figure out and doing it herself wasn't going as badly as it could have. She had only really messed up on the first one, the skirt that had come out so tight that she had been forced to hobble around the house until she could make a new one. After that she knew she needed to give some leeway in her measurements. If her own clothes came out ok, she was thinking of perhaps making some shirts for the boys. . .

It was so easy to think that life could go on like this. Really, it wasn't the life she had been raised to want or to dream of, but it was happier than anything she had had before. Sometimes, Yahiko would bring her some berries he found that he knew she liked. Or Sano would make up a long and funny story about why he hadn't been doing his work not just to get out of another long session of nagging but to make her smile and laugh. He said he liked to hear her laugh. Aoshi had been showing her how to cook, with infinite patience, even if she still couldn't do it well. Even Enishi surprised her sometimes, offering unsolicited compliments on details that she thought no one noticed like when she put out flowers on the table. Nothing escaped his attention. The moments weren't frequent, but that they occurred at all gave her a warm glow inside.

For the first time in her life she wondered if she could dare to use the word family as something other than a classification for those who shared her surname. All of those people were dead and gone at any rate, she thought, and a lump rose in her throat. It was only four weeks ago that her bloodline had nearly been finished. What if all she was doing was endangering these people she was beginning to care about? Winter was too hard to think of navigating on her own. She would ask to stay on in winter and then she would plan on leaving in spring. By then she should have a good idea of where to go and how to get there. Aoshi was often traveling, maybe he could give her some names of people who needed a person to work for them. She should also give serious consideration to changing her name. . .

"I found this in the last page of the ledger." Enishi had somehow appeared beside her as she had wandered off into her mind and Kaoru promptly stabbed herself with the needle that had been half into the fabric. Now it was fully in her hand. She drew in her breath and made a sour face.

"Why do you always have to sneak up on ooooh!" The needle hurt but it didn't leave a hole big enough to bleed much. It was a glancing pain that throbbed in the background as she exclaimed in pleasure over Enishi's find: the long lost jack of diamonds. "Thank you so much! Just one more and then we can all play cards. It's been so long and I don't remember all the rules to some of the games, but I'm sure I'll remember and you'll all be happy that I bothered when we're stuck inside because of snow. It snows a lot, Sano said, so I know you all must get stir crazy. I really appreciate this."

Her gushing was greeted with no more than a raised eyebrow and Enishi began to retreat back to the upstairs bedroom when he instead turned around and came back to Kaoru. This time she was pulling the cards out of her sewing basket, where she kept things she didn't want to lose, and adding the new one into the deck so there was no stabbing as he startled her again.

"We were talking last night, and when Aoshi comes back again, we might start building a shed so that we can clean out the storage space upstairs and turn it into a bedroom for you. It would be small, but you wouldn't have to sleep in the living room anymore."

Kaoru was more than a little overwhelmed. Her own room again. It had been so long. . . .

"I don't know what to say. . ."

He seemed to take that as all the answer he needed, so when Kaoru was so moved that she needed to hug someone, Enishi's back was the only target available. The man's body was stiff as steel as she wrapped her arms around him, but he softened enough to place one rough hand over her linked ones before they were interrupted. Sano, who had come in the open door to fess up to napping in the heat of the afternoon and grab a snack before he continued digging a new outhouse pit, whistled and Kaoru and Enishi sprang apart.

"So this is why you wanted to get her her own room. . . heh." Sano waggled his eyebrows and chuckled knowingly.

"As usual your childish stupidity amazes." Enishi made tracks for the back door.

Kaoru told herself that her heart was beating hard from the excitement of the news of getting her own room, but she wasn't entirely sure. The alarming disappointment of having to let go of the most annoying brother was giving an added burn of shame to the embarrassment.

"I'm really happy about the room. Won't making a shed be a lot of work for you all?" Even if it did, she didn't care. She would build the thing herself so long as she had permission and time. Now that the idea was there she felt tenacious.

"Nah." Sano said. "Mainly for Enishi. He's the one stuck up here while we all go down to help with the harvest, unless you come with us. . ."

"No!" Kaoru felt her blood drain and hoped that she wouldn't have to go through all that again. The argument about her coming to town had been a ferocious one. Her adamant refusal to live in town for the month it took for the men to help with the harvest and make the main chunk of money they would live on for the rest of the year was causing all sorts of complications.

Luckily, there had been an incident last year that had made Enishi nearly unemployable so he was free to stay with her. The unkind way to put it was that he might be lynched on sight if he set foot in the village. Apparently he had hired people to work for him. He had hired some shady characters to work for him. In return for vouching for their credibility, they would give him a percentage of their pay. These were rough times, and even manual labor was valued. When the farmers had found out former criminals had been invited into their homes. . . Enishi had come under fire. He was a notorious figure in towns for miles.

"Someday you need to tell us what happened to you." Sano tried to look sympathetic but Kaoru's jaw hardened stubbornly. "Look, a lot of people have done things in the past that they aren't proud of. I doubt you did anything that bad. These are rough times."

"Oh yeah? You tell me what you've done first and then we'll see."

"Um. I think I have a hole to dig." Sano backed out the front door with big steps, forgetting to even grab the snack he'd ventured in for.

Kaoru smiled. "That's what I thought."

There was definitely no way she was staring at Enishi. Absolutely out of the question. She was simply evaluating how well the fit was on the shirt she had made him, and noting that if he was sweating so much he would need to be drinking more water than he was. He had been working at making the shed since before she had woken up this morning, just like she had been working at sewing all morning. Only, Enishi had actually been working on the shed, and Kaoru hadn't quite managed to thread the needle yet. It had only been an hour or so since she sat down.

"Curses." Kaoru blinked and ripped her eyes away from the window. Things had gotten weird in the past week since the boys had left.

Aoshi and Enishi had had a ripping argument before they parted, for one thing. It wasn't loud, but there was a scuffle in the back and both of them had come back bleeding. Aoshi had required stitches on a gash on his arm. Kaoru had swallowed her squeamish nature about blood and had done the job needed, but she complained the whole time about how violence was not the way to solve problems as she tried to talk out her nervousness over the instant nursing. Neither of them were willing to say why they had fought, but it made Kaoru nervous about winter when they would have a harder time being apart from one another.

As if to alleviate his continued aggressive attitude, Enishi had poured himself into building a shed. Aoshi and Sano had been gathering materials ever since Kaoru had been told about her new room. Yahiko had cleared out and prepared an area with Enishi's help so that construction could begin as soon as they all left for town.

That first night everyone had been gone felt oddly lonely for Kaoru. She had done the cleaning upkeep and worked on sewing more things. Her stitching was getting better, she thought, and that was something to take pride in. Some of those old embroidery stitches were coming back to her from those stupid lessons she had taken when she was younger. There were nice details she had added to the sleeves, but nothing too flashy or else she was sure her men would never wear it. It took her a while to realize the reason she was plying her needle with such single minded concentration was because she was anxious.

There was no reason to be anxious. She was just alone with Enishi for the better part of a month. This was not a reason to be fidgeting and glancing around for where he might be. It wasn't that she feared an attack from him, or anything as serious as physical harm. It was simply a strange hyper awareness of him that began to plague her. She knew the cause, and she didn't have to like it.

Just residual loneliness, she told herself when she was feeling particularly stubborn. After all, she had been cooped up in the mountains for a long time with only a few men as company. Most of them were gone and this is the closest she had ever been to living alone in her life. Nothing for miles, no one to talk to except for Enishi. . . .

They had been so desperate to not talk to one another that they had tried to play card games without the seven of hearts. Hours of this passed, many long evenings, and other than owing Enishi more money than the palace took in from tithes in a year (all in fictional gold coins), they hadn't passed a merry day yet. Enishi was too withdrawn and not easily amused. Kaoru was feeling a little shy about being alone with him, and irritated at his constant blasé attitude.

But that didn't account for the tension, the anxiety that twisted in her belly as she watched him hammer together boards and sand down edges. She had only figured out it was Enishi that had caused that and not several days of her cooking because of the incident that happened last night. It was practically insignificant, she told herself, nothing that was out of the ordinary. Telling herself this brought little comfort. She couldn't even lie to herself well.

Last night he had spoken to her a little bit about his sister. That's how it started, anyway.

It was while she was cooking. Enishi was going over papers of some sort. Kaoru was actually beginning to think about sneaking upstairs and finding out where Aoshi and Enishi hid their respective papers. There was no reason, even if they had to manage property other places on the death of their parents, that a little family in the mountains would need so much in the way of correspondence. And then there was the fact that they were terribly well educated and well trained at fighting. Even if she wasn't going to say it, and therefore invite awkward questions about herself, she knew that these men had to be more than they appeared. But so long as she could be a peasant runaway then they could be a poor mountain family if they so wished. Someday she would know the truth.

"Stop stirring the soup so much, you're practically making it a slurry. When Tomo—" He slammed his jaw shut as if he had suddenly been stricken with lockjaw. Color drained from him face as he turned back to his papers.

"Who?" Kaoru asked. He had looked so fazed she had to pursue the subject.

"No one. Just forget I said anything."

She wasn't that easily shaken off from the scent of something so interesting. "No, I think that I need to know who it was that knew how to stir soup just right. Did you say Tammy?"

"I said Tomoe." He snapped, then cringed as if he had done it involuntarily. "This conversation ends here."

Kaoru brandished her wooden spoon menacingly. "No need to get snippy. You're the one who started it. And it's been nearly a day since you spoke to me at all. I would think that any chance to talk would at least make us both feel a little better. And there isn't anyone here to interrupt, so I was hoping maybe you could start acting more like a human being."

Enishi looked at her, unblinking, then seemed to examine something in her face that made him downcast when she smiled softly to encourage him. "Tomoe was my sister. . ."

"So you are adopted." Kaoru sighed.

"What?" Enishi looked nonplussed. "Oh, yes, of course." He sounded somehow insincere.

"I'm so sorry, it just came out."

"Well, it's obvious I'm not related to them. If I were related to Sanosuke I would be seriously considering a murder suicide to end the bloodline."

Kaoru gave a small laugh, and then turned back to the soup which was beginning to burn. "How old were you when you were adopted? Where is your sister now? What sort of person is she?"

"She was beautiful, graceful, perfect. She died when I was very young." Enishi said with something underlying his tone that made her shiver. She didn't want to turn around right then and see the expression on his face. She could practically feel his anger. "This isn't something we need to discuss anymore. The only reason I brought it up is that in a certain light. . . sometimes. . . you share a resemblance to her."

Trying to make light of things to bring them back to equilibrium, Kaoru made a weak joke. "Yeah, 'beautiful, graceful, and perfect' are pretty far off the mark when it comes to me. I guess I won't trouble you much with memories."

"Your false modesty is getting tiresome. We do own mirrors, after all."

"Excuse me?"

Enishi arched an eyebrow and laced his fingers together as he leaned his elbows on the table. "You must know very well you're probably the prettiest thing for miles, even with matted hair and a dirty apron."

If she noticed how he had deflected the topic away from his sister it was buried under a torrent of her patented instant anger. "And you're the most cynical and horrible thing for miles! I've seen rocks with more personable social skills!"

"You flounce around the house, wrapping all of the others around your little finger, but I'm sure it's that pretty face that got you into trouble in the first place."

Kaoru wondered if a wooden spoon could pierce the rib cage if thrust hard enough at a person. "What are you implying?"

"Nothing. You've given me no evidence either way. But I have noticed how much time you've spent around Aoshi and Sanosuke, and if you think marrying into this household is a good idea, then you should forget it." There was something nasty in his tone, bitter, but angry in a way unlike how he had been angry over discussing Tomoe.

Things could have gotten ugly from there, but in fact it had the opposite effect. Kaoru, when faced with the utterly unappealing idea of being married to either Sano (who she regarded as a somewhat daffy jester of an older brother) or Aoshi (who barely registered as male to her on any given day, and sometimes was reaching for automaton rather than human) could do nothing but laugh. It was a deep belly laugh that had her clutching the counter and weeping tears of pure mirth while Enishi made snide remarks in the background.

"You needn't laugh so hard." Then, "I take this to mean you weren't flirting."

"No." Kaoru paused only a moment to choke out the words. "I'll g-get back to stir-ir-iring," she snorted and regained control. "Dinner will be ready soon."

It only occurred to her in the semi-privacy of her living room bed that Enishi might have been jealous. Even more mortifying was the concept that she not only liked his potential jealousy, she enjoyed the idea that he thought her beautiful. Family had been a new enough concept, one that had been more than what she expected and yet aggravating at the same time. If having a family put her off stride, the whole idea of romance put her at odds with her old ideals even more. Enishi was no prince charming. This was much too complex, and she wished they didn't have another two weeks of being solely in one another's company.

She could always assume this was just a logical consequence of being in one another's presence for too long. Once the boys came back everything would go back to exactly the way it had been before. She hinged her hopes on that. Anything that stopped this dangerous anxiety and growing affection for Enishi.

Aoshi, tired from a day of hauling bushels of wheat to carts for shipment, didn't betray an ounce of weariness as he met with the short cloaked traveler. He groaned internally when he noticed the ugly, lumpy hat that the stranger in the inn's bar was wearing. He had an idea what it concealed under the rough cloth. That and the slight frame were enough evidence to come to a conclusion about who this person could be.

Eyes lit up as a squeak was stifled from the person waiting to meet with him. Misao had always been horrible at disguising herself as a man. Boy was the best she could hope for, and in the past few years even that was getting difficult as she put on height and weight. It wasn't even the curves, because she had few enough of those, it was the whole bearing she had.

Misao had never acted like a man, and she never had to since she had always trained under Tokio. Goro's wife had had her own unit in the king's special forces, that's how she had met Goro in the first place. The queen had to be provided with guards and bodyguards who could go everywhere with her. Women were the logical choice. Tokio had been the person who trained with them and arranged the schedule for the women who attended the queen and the princess. After the first queen died, many of Tokio's duties had been reduced and her unit almost disbanded except that no one took any real action after the initial cutbacks. Misao had been a late addition, a hopeful attendant for the princess, but before she could be assigned Shishio had shown up and. . .

"It's been so long!" Misao's enthusiasm shone in her eyes as she drank in the sight of Aoshi. Her affection for Goro's protégé had always been obvious, even a point of humor among the troops. What had been a girlish crush had continued on and now that she was a young woman interacting with her was getting, hm, complicated. Luckily, tonight was about business.

"Why are you here, Misao?" Aoshi sat down and gestured to the barkeep for something to drink so that they could look inconspicuous. "Goro hasn't sent me anything but letters for nearly a year. I was naturally concerned when I—"

Miaso couldn't wait to impart her news and interrupted Aoshi, putting a hand on his arm to emphasize how important it was that he listen to her. "She's alive!"

"What?"

"The princess. They think she's still alive. Turns out, the old man who ran the stables got handed over to some interrogators because a horse disappeared. The nag had gotten out the night before and was sleeping in a field, but but but. . ." Aoshi was listening to Misao's roundabout tale with his usual patience. "When he was being questioned, seems he said something about how it used to be Kaoru's job to keep the staff in line. She was quite the manager. And seeing as there aren't that many girls named Kaoru around. . ." Aoshi made a motion with his hand for her to speed up the story. "I'm getting there!" Misao complained.

"So, they go around looking for this girl, right, but she can't be found. Then they think she ran away, ok? Now they want to know why. And . . . as they were trying to find out where she was and what she looked like they figured out that she bore a rather more than striking resemblance to the old queen. And you know they never found a body for her. . . just that one burned person that might have been her. But rings and things don't make a person."

Aoshi made a shushing gesture and they took their drinks as they arrived to the table. Only Misao smiled as Aoshi passed a few coins over for the drinks. Misao took a deep drink of her ale, much to Aoshi's surprise but he didn't have time to even think of a comment because Misao was talking again.

"Now where was I? Oh, yeah, the stable kid. Yeah." Misao's eyes became big and bright with happiness as she talked. "Turns out that Kaoru had disappeared under some very strange circumstances. And now Shishio is having discreet groups of his elite guard out looking around for her. He's not taking any chances. This is all top secret info, though, just word of mouth at the moment. Saitou has spies all over, he's been working at it this whole time, and he says that the story checks out from different reports."

"Saitou?"

Misao slapped her forehead. "Damn. I wasn't supposed to mention that. Yeah, that's Goro's new name. He's Hajime Saitou now. He's a police officer down in the port city. More of a mercenary, rent a cop, right? Tokio has been teaching traditional dancing. She's not very happy with it. . . I'm her assistant. They're undercover still. Just forget I said anything."

Aoshi hadn't touched his drink. He hadn't planned to, it was just for appearances, but Misao's words had touched him in a way that made him thirsty for the possibilities they offered. "So is Goro moving up the time table? Recruiting for the counterattack has been steady, but with someone like the princess to rally behind—"

"Yes," Misao said, but her happy smile dimmed. "But this is all assuming that the princess isn't dead, and that we can find her before Shishio does. I mean, it would be great to have a legit heir to the throne to prevent a power struggle or civil war assuming we push out Shishio, but how are we going to find her if even a sorcerer can't—"

This time it was Aoshi who interrupted. "That's not a problem. I have a pretty good idea I know where she is. In fact, I'm rather annoyed with myself for not seeing it before." He downed half of his ale in a single drought.