Child of Vengeance by David Kirk Read Free Book Online Page A

returned to weaving.

    L eagues away from Miyamoto, the young lord Hayato Nakata could not stop the curl forming on his lip. What was left of Kanno’s castle stood around and above him, a skeletal carcass of charcoal beams interlocking in scorched remnants, framed bleakly against the sky. He stalked about glaring critically upward, hands growing black with soot as he touched what remained.
    “Years, my lord,” said the master builder, hovering to the side with his eyes only on the ground.
    A week had passed since the battle. Hayato had stayed, waiting to see if the castle was salvageable, while his father and Lord Shinmen had already departed. It had been a stubborn hope, he knew, and it had withered day by day as the master builder and his team had swarmed over the remaining structure like beetles picking a corpse clean. Wall by wall and floor by floor they had found irrevocable damage, nibbling away until only what was splayed before them now was left.
    “What does that mean?” Hayato sighed, the final glimmer dying within him.
    “If you will us to proceed, my lord,” the master builder said, sucking air through his teeth as he made predictions he was unsure he could keep, “by the first frost of next winter we could have a roof patched on it. It’s too late to do anything this year. Wood needs to be shaped and dried. But even by then, it’d be no thing of beauty. Habitable, at best. To be what it was …”
    “I meant, what does that mean for me?” said Hayato.
    The master builder hesitated. The question was oblique and Hayato’sdispleasure evident. Nervously he began to wring the handle of his hammer where it hung at his side, but he was spared answering when Hayato’s bodyguard stepped forward.
    “If you would permit me to speak, my lord?” the samurai said as he bowed, and the young lord nodded. “Our most noble Lord Nakata instructed me that were you to judge the situation irredeemable we were to accompany you back to his side. Do you judge it to be so?”
    “Weren’t you listening? How could I possibly stay here?” snapped Hayato.
    “Then we shall return to your father’s castle, my lord,” said the man. He bowed once more, and then gave a gesture at the other samurai to prepare for travel.
    As they busied themselves readying his palanquin, Hayato stalked away. He did not want them to see his anger; they were all sworn to his father above him, and if they saw it then the old lord would see it too. He kicked a stone, listening to it skitter and drop into the cavern of a cellar that had been exposed to the day. It echoed and died, like everything else here had.
    This was supposed to be his escape, his way out from under the watchful yoke of his father, a castle and a frontier entrusted to his management. What did he have now but a monument of ashes and the condescending dotage of a dribbling old fool?
    It felt as though he had been gelded. The young lord spat and sidled back to the palanquin, glowering, giving no more than a perfunctory nod at the men waiting on their knees to bear him aloft. The head samurai held the burgundy drapes open for him, smiling as he passed.
    “That’s it, my lord,” he said, and his voice was cooing. “Let’s go back to dwell in a nice, comfortable city.”
    Hayato stopped in the doorway and looked at the man. The smile was held honestly on his face. Beyond him the palanquin bearers were entirely still. They were not permitted eye contact, their faces looking toward the dirt, and the lord got the sense that they were suddenly grateful for this.
    They were tense, but it was not with fear.
    The young lord looked at them all for a long moment, not surewhat he was searching for. Eventually he went inside without saying anything further. There came a sound that might have just been the swishing of the curtains and bamboo blinds behind him, but as he was borne back toward his father, Hayato became more and more convinced that it had been a snigger.

    R uins stood before