Dragon's King Palace by Laura Joh Rowland Read Free Book Online

that spread dark and wide around him. His mind yearned across the distance toward Reiko.
    Where was she? As anguish gripped him, Sano hoped she was unharmed. He prayed that she and the other women would come home safely and soon, and that fortune combined with hard work would negate the premonition of calamity that chilled him.
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4

    The sound of sobbing aroused Reiko to groggy consciousness. She thought Masahiro must have wakened in the night from a bad dream. Maternal instinct compelled her to go to him—but she couldn’t move.
    A force like bands of steel locked her legs against each other and her arms at her sides. Confusion blinked her eyes open, but thick, rough material covered her face, and all she saw was blackness. She drew a gasp of surprise, then gagged on something coarse and dry that filled her mouth. Now Reiko became aware that she was moving in rapid, jouncing rhythm, carried by hands that gripped her armpits and ankles. The sobbing continued, accompanied by moans. Panic seized Reiko; her heart lurched.
    Where was she? What had happened to her?
    Then memory seeped, hideous and dreadful, through the fog of sleep that clung to her mind. Visions of the ambush, the massacre, and the kidnapping assailed Reiko. The cries she heard must belong to Keisho-in, Midori, or Lady Yanagisawa. They were still captive, somewhere that defied imagination.
    Terror exploded in Reiko. She wanted to thrash and scream, but that would only waste her strength. Reiko forced herself to be still, urged her somnolent brain to rational thought. She must marshal her wits and learn what she could of her circumstances, discover anything that might prove useful for survival, and keep terror at bay.
    Reiko focused her attention first on herself. Ropes tied around her immobilized her body. The material covering her face was the black hood the kidnappers had put on her head. Her tongue tasted the dryness of cotton fabric stuffed in her mouth as a gag. She felt nausea and a throbbing headache that she attributed to the opium the men had poured down her throat, but otherwise she seemed unhurt. Stiffness in her muscles, and a need to urinate, indicated that she’d slept for a time long enough to have traveled a great distance beyond the scene of the abduction and beyond the reach of anyone looking for her.
    But perhaps nobody knew yet what had happened. Perhaps she would die before someone came to the rescue.
    Fresh panic agitated Reiko like wings fluttering inside her chest. She experienced such an intense stab of longing for Sano and Masahiro that she nearly wept. But she willed herself calm. She directed her senses outward.
    Through the thick cloth of the hood, she heard footsteps treading dry leaves. Twigs cracked. Grass rustled. Men’s breaths rasped. Those noises pierced a mesh of sound composed of crickets and cicadas singing and wind rustling through trees. Owls hooted. Ahead of Reiko erupted phlegmy coughs from Lady Keisho-in; behind her, Midori wept. Where Lady Yanagisawa was, Reiko couldn’t tell. She felt branches snag her garments, and cool, damp air; mosquitoes hummed around her. Pine-scented smoke filtered through the hood. Reiko formed a mental picture of the kidnappers carrying her and the other women through a forest at night, their way lit by torches. The commotion signified many more men following. Reiko’s imagination showed her an endless line of hooded, stealthy marching figures.
    Suddenly the footsteps slowed; movement halted. In the brief quiet Reiko heard a heavy door scrape open. Motion then resumed, and the atmosphere changed. The forest sounds were muted; the men’s feet shuffled on a stone surface; echoes reverberated. The air was still, warmer, and suffused with a musty odor: They’d entered a building.
    As the door thudded shut, Reiko’s body tilted, head upward. The abrupt change of position nauseated her so much that she thought she would vomit and choke. She felt herself ascending, borne by the men whose